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R E C E N T L Y

Arianna upstaged by "Baywatch" babe
By Carol Lloyd
Arianna Huffington's L.A. book party featured Hollywood schlock, political hobnobbing and celebrity humiliation
(06/05/98)

Are men better writers than women?
By Laura Miller
A Harper's essay takes up the touchy question of whether size in literature matters
(06/03/98)

Why do Jewish cartoonists get away with it?
By Eric Alterman
When Woody Allen exposes his neuroses, he's a self-hating Jew; when Art Spiegelman does it, he's a genius
(06/01/98)

Feasting on Frank
By Sara Nelson
The body wasn't cold when booksellers and other media purveyors got busy selling Sinatra tributes
(05/29/98)

The rise and fall of Paul "Spanker" Johnson
By Christopher Hitchens
The right-wing historian's longtime mistress deals him the unkindest whack of all
(05/28/98)

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BROWSE THE
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__________ making M A G I C

Magic Johnson is beating AIDS-- now he wants to beat Leno & Letterman. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BY FRANK SANELLO

HOLLYWOOD -- I never thought I'd be trading T-cell counts with Magic Johnson. For those who don't know the crucial trivia of AIDS research, T cells fight the virus and reflect the strength of your immune system. If these white blood cells fall below 200, you start to get AIDS-related illnesses like pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma, a purplish skin cancer. For a healthy, noninfected person, the normal range of these virus busters is 500 to 1,200.

During an interview at his office at Paramount Studios, where he's taping his new late-night talk show that's debuting Monday, Magic Johnson, perhaps the most famous HIV-positive person in the world, told me that his T cells currently hover around 800. Mine are 200 points lower. Is there such a thing as T-cell envy?

He added that his viral load, which measures the presence of the virus in the bloodstream, is undetectable. But there's undetectable and then there's undetectable. The older, less sophisticated test for viral load could only tell if you had more than 400 copies of the virus per milliliter of blood. The newer test goes all the way down to 20 copies per ml. At either marker, AIDS experts consider the virus outta here. If it's present at all, HIV is harmless at such low numbers, although 20 is of course better than 400. Both Johnson and I are lucky beneficiaries of the new generation of AIDS drugs called protease inhibitors, truly miraculous meds that have been responsible for the 70 percent plummet in deaths from the disease since their introduction two years ago.

After I shared all the details of my immune status and asked if Johnson's viral load was undetectable at the 400 or the newer, 20 benchmark, he suddenly clammed up. "I don't talk about numbers," he said genially. "I like to have my private life."

Lesley Stahl had no qualms about invading the beloved sports figure's private life when she interviewed him in May on "60 Minutes." After Johnson's wife, Cookie, fatuously declared her husband "cured" in an Ebony magazine article, Stahl said Johnson stopped taking the drugs that had restored his immune system. Cut to Dr. David Ho, Magic's doctor and the man most responsible for bringing protease inhibitors to the forefront in the fight against AIDS. There on prime time was Time magazine's Man of the Year apparently divulging privileged information about his patient. Ho: "Previously he had not followed his meds as religiously as he ought to, and we've seen the virus pop up a year ago." Stahl suggested Johnson was running some "sort of test" to see if he had been cured, to use his wife's term.

Magic's explanation ended up on the cutting room floor, but came up during my chat with him. Like me, Johnson has to gulp down fistfuls of the drugs at eight-hour intervals, day and night. My doctor, whose partner is President Clinton's advisor on AIDS, has made it clear that if I stop gulping, I will die. Even so, and though I don't have a death wish, sometimes I forget to take the 30-plus pills -- most often at 2 in the morning, when I sleep in. I remember the sickening feeling on one business trip as the plane left the runway and I realized I'd left the drugs at home.

That's almost exactly what happened to Johnson. He wasn't, as Stahl suggested, conducting a test of his immortality. He went on an ocean cruise with his wife and forgot to pack the protease. Fortunately, my business trip was so short that the deadly holiday from pill popping didn't cause a rise in my viral load. Johnson spent more time shipboard and found to his horror when he returned to dry land that the virus was once again doing the backstroke in his bloodstream. Almost immediately, the drugs restored his immune system, he told me.

"Dr. Ho detected the virus in my blood and said, 'Have you been taking your medicine?' I told him about the cruise and said I forgot. He told me to go back on them, and sure enough, they couldn't find the virus after that. I tried to tell Lesley [Stahl] that. So did Dr. Ho." But their explanation got cut from the segment that aired on May 10.