Millan paid $1.3 million for this land, which is just over the hill from Magic Mountain, and called it "my greatest investment, after dog food." He planned to turn the place into a sanctuary for abandoned dogs, as well as an academy where he'll teach the unconventional training methods he introduced on nine seasons of his hugely successful TV series, 'Dog Whisperer'. "In reality," he said, "it's not about training dogs. It's about training the human to learn from dogs."
So far, not much progress had been made. The only permanent structures were a small office with a wooden desk and some plastic furniture, plus a few dog kennels and a murky above-ground pool. Millan had hoped to rescue 60 dogs that summer – "hardcore, aggressive dogs," he told me. "Dogs on death row." But, he admitted, "I'm not ready."
Earlier that year, in a few awful months at the start of 2010, Millan's life turned upside down. In February, his sidekick Daddy, a giant, gentle red pit bull who frequently assisted Millan on the show and whom he calls "my mentor," died of cancer at age 16. A month later, while he was on tour in Europe, his wife of 16 years, Ilusion, informed him she was filing for divorce. As he was reeling from those blows, Millan discovered that while 'Dog Whisperer' had made him one of America's biggest TV stars, a series of bad business deals had left him with very little in the bank to show for it. "I found out I didn't own anything – just T-shirts and touring," he told me recently. "It was the biggest shock in the world."
Millan remembers walking around in a daze, feeling betrayed and very alone. "I am a pack animal," he said. "Everything I did was to keep the pack together. All of a sudden I had no pack." He slept on his brother's couch, spent time in church, and lost so much weight he dropped four pants sizes. Occasionally, he returned home to visit his family in suburban Santa Clarita, a few miles from the ranch. "We were trying to do the whole thing white people do where they come back and visit," he says now, with a bitter laugh. "But it didn't work for me." Millan's two sons, Andre, then 15, and Calvin, 11, blamed him for the separation and refused to speak to him. "They were brainwashed. . . . They believed their life was better without me," he says. During the worst times, even his dogs kept their distance. "Dogs don't follow an unstable leader," he says. "I was very unstable."
That May, in 2010, Millan hit bottom. "It was a spiral," he says. "All the willpower I had, the desire to motivate myself, my kids, all I had achieved - none of that, nothing, mattered."
One day, at his wife's house, he swallowed a bottle of her Xanax and some other pills and got into bed, hoping to end his life. "I thought, If I do a combination, I can die quicker. So I just took all the pills I could find, poof"
"I had so much rage and sadness," he continues. "I went to the other side of me, which is 'fuck it, I'm a failure.'" Millan woke up in the hospital psychiatric ward, where he remained under observation for 72 hours. "Nothing happened!" he says. "I thought, Well shit, that means I'm not supposed to die. I better get back to work."
I visited Millan at the ranch a few months after his suicide attempt. When I arrived he was lying on a bench in the shade, sweating through a purple polo shirt, with a bottle of Maalox resting on his chest. "I'm still managing the depression, the anger, the insecurity," he told me, "but I am moving forward." A pair of hyperactive huskies belonging to his close friend Jada Pinkett Smith ran through the hills pulling a sled Millan had modified for the rocky terrain. Junior, a sleek, gray three-year-old pit bull he was grooming to take Daddy's place, lay quietly under the bench, watching Millan's every move. "I couldn't have done what I do without Daddy," he said, "and now I can't do it without Junior. There's always a pit bull there supporting me."
Millan is a short, stocky guy – "like a burrito," he says – but he carries himself with a straight back, chest jutted out, a natural alpha. When he arrived in the United States 22 years ago, he knew only a single English word - "OK" - and he still talks in a loose, colloquial SoCal Spanglish, rolling through sentences with mixed-up tenses, calling his dog Blizzard a "Jello Lab," pronouncing buffet with a hard t and sushi as "su-chi." On 'Dog Whisperer,' Millan uses the language deficit to his advantage, putting clients at ease with his always polite, effortlessly funny broken-English banter as he (often painfully) dissects their troubled relationships with their dogs. In person he's just as charming – open, inquisitive, with a quick mind and a slightly rough edge that makes him even more likable. For all his alpha-male poise, Millan also possesses humility, which he says comes with the job. "In my field, working with animals, they detest egotistical people," he says. "Dogs are wise. They don't buy BS. . . . When you are egotistical, you're not grounded. So it's not even an option for me to become disconnected or lose my grounding."
All that summer, Millan spent his days at the ranch, clearing brush, digging roads, and planting trees. "Some people turn to cigarettes and alcohol when they have problems," he said. "I use hard work." When the sadness overwhelmed him, he would hike up the nearly vertical rim of the canyon – rocky, dry scrub thick with rattlesnakes – in heat that reached 115 degrees. If he didn't feel better when he got back down, he'd do it again.
One night, "I was sitting under this tree, right here," he said, pulling up in the Gator next to a giant Buddha statue, "and I was crying. I noticed the dogs started coming over, and they surrounded me. There were, like, 11 dogs all around, and they started to lick my face. Normally I don't like to be licked. I'm afraid of germs, but this was different. I had the sense that these dogs were healing me. From that night, I began to get stronger."
by Jason Fine, Men's Journal | Read more:
Photo via FanPop
