Deep Throat in spotlight

The Felt living room in Santa Rosa has a new rug left behind by the Larry King crew. It and some desktop figurines were gifts from the show's producers, who did a hurried interior redesign before Mark Felt and the CNN talk show host sat down earlier this month in front of the cameras.

"They took out all our furniture," said Felt's daughter, Joan Felt . "I think they wanted it to look more like Deep Throat's study."

The taped interview - the first given by the reclusive, 92-year-old Felt - is to air Tuesday. Appearing live will be Joan Felt, her son Nick Jones and John O'Connor, the family lawyer and co-author of the new memoir-cum- biography of the secret Watergate source.

"A G-Man's Life: The FBI, 'Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington" is due in bookstores Monday.

The Felt family became overnight celebrities in May, when world media packed their front lawn to meet the mystery man who was the key government source in the Washington Post's Watergate investigation, helping to bring down President Richard M. Nixon.

The hoopla begins anew when they jet first to New York for "Good Morning America" on Monday, and then land Tuesday in Los Angeles for "Larry King Live." Mark Felt will remain at home with his full-time caregiver, recovering from a bout with pneumonia that sent him to Santa Rosa's Memorial Hospital last week.

When a photographer arrived at his hospital bed, Felt mugged for the camera and said he was proud of the book, although he has not read it. Asked if he was happy that the world knows him as Deep Throat, he said, "Yes, I approve."

His family said he has good and bad days, not untypical for a person his age with health problems.

"I don't want to delude myself," Joan Felt said. "No one lives forever. But I want him to have this book experience. To enjoy his legacy."

The cover of "A G-Man's Life" lists the authors as Mark Felt and John O'Connor. O'Connor, who lives in Marin County and works for a San Francisco law firm, also is the writer who convinced Felt to finally admit to being Deep Throat in a Vanity Fair magazine article last spring.

The new book, published by PublicAffairs in New York with a $26.95 price, is based on earlier writings by Felt, including a 1979 memoir and an unpublished manuscript written with his son, Mark Felt Jr., an airline pilot in Florida. The book also has updated information on the family and Felt's memories gleaned by O'Connor.

"It's almost like a period piece of a vivid era in history," said Nick Jones, after reading an advance copy sent to the family.

The cover sports a 50-year-old photo of Mark Felt, going into a crouch, gun ready, dressed in classic G-man attire - suit, tie and fedora.

"He was so handsome and powerful," said his daughter, holding the book. "Practically perfect."

Readers will learn he was also driven, stern, somewhat anti-social, the classic workaholic man of his era, leaving home duties and child-rearing to his wife, Audrey Felt, who had to uproot the family every couple of years for new FBI assignments.

The book discloses that Audrey Felt killed herself with her husband's revolver in the bathroom of their Washington, D.C., home one day in 1984 when Mark Felt was out doing errands. Joan Felt was living in California at the time and was estranged from her mother, who disapproved of her flower-child, single -mother, communal lifestyle. Joan's father told her that her mother died of heart failure in her sleep. Only a few years ago did she learn the true cause of death.

"My father was a major secret keeper," she said.

The man who came to the front door and smiled for cameras last May has had two strokes, two angioplasty procedures, kidney failure, some broken bones and now two bouts with pneumonia.

But he does not have Alzheimer's disease or dementia, insists his daughter, no matter what the media infers, including Bob Woodward, the Washington Post editor whose reporting career was launched by his and Carl Bernstein's Watergate storie s. In his own Deep Throat memoir, "Secret Man," rushed into print after the Vanity Fair story, Woodward questions Felt's mental competency and has said he believes he has dementia.

"My father's memory is impaired, but mostly he's just an old man," said Joan Felt, taking a quiet moment last week to chat in her kitchen, the family Rottweiler doing sentry duty on the back deck.

Of watching her father interviewed by Larry King, "He did a great job," she said. "I thought, wow, that's my dad from 30 years ago."

She's taken her time in the spotlight to champion the elderly and the need to find alternatives to nursing homes. When her father had a stroke in 2001, she went against doctor's orders and signed him out of a convalescent facility.

"This is the best way," she said of her arrangement, which includes an attached apartment for her father, although she admits it would be impossible without her father's 24-hour caregiver.

During the media onslaught a year ago, "it was like an amusement park here for days and nights," she recalled. "We'd wake up in the middle of the night and there'd be more TV people arriving with equipment."

"It was somewhat of a roller coaster," agreed Nick Jones, a 24-year-old law student, who along with brothers Robbie Jones, 26, and Will Felt, 32, became rotating spokesman for the family.

"Most of it was fun, a couple of moments not so good," he said.

"It was wonderful for my sons to live with him, to see that old age isn't to be feared," Joan Felt said. "They saw him as someone to be proud of long before they knew he was Deep Throat." More than anything that's been said about her father, she takes greatest offense at reporters' describing him in a pitying way.

"Someone called him sad," she said. "Does that mean it's sad to get old? Of course it's sad to go through diminishment , but like John (O'Connor) says, there is a beatitude at old age which has to do with the wisdom of the elders.

"Dad has a capacity to be present, something we all strive for. Like we used to say: 'Be here now.'"

She and his grandsons call Mark Felt a happy man and believe that his coming out with his 33-year-old secret last year was a relief. He openly tells visitors, "I'm the guy they called Deep Throat."

"When he was young, he was more of an aloof man," Joan Felt said, adding with a smile, "I guess he had a lot of things on his mind. Secrets and conflicts. He's more emotionally accessible now." He takes pleasure in going on drives with his caregiver, Fereimi Boladau, having family dinners when the grandsons come home, watching TV news shows and having a nightly glass of organic red wine.

Father and daughter developed a close relationship after Audrey Felt died and Joan Felt was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987.

Mark Felt eventually moved from Washington to Santa Rosa and in 1992 purchased the home on Redford Place to live with his daughter and the grandkids, becoming the family man that he couldn't be as a young father, Joan Felt said .

Will Felt, a special events DJ in Santa Rosa, is happy his grandfather told his secret. "He had all that hidden inside, worried back then for so long about keeping his family safe. I think now he's proud that people have reassured him that it was an excellent thing to do, to put himself on the line for the rest of the country."

There's been disappointing feedback, too. Will Felt said his mother "was really stressed out for a while" because of unflattering media portraits of both her and her father. Mark Felt was called vindictive and "a snitch." Joan Felt recalled, "One person called and said, 'You brought down the best president we've ever had.'"

A Washington Post story on Joan Felt played up her affiliation with the controversial religious fringe group called Adidam. Others made her sound like she was exploiting her father, counting on book sales and movie possibilities to help pay off her kids' student loans.

She declines to discuss religion or money now, saying she's learned "to play her cards close to the vest" with the media.

It's pretty clear that any "big money" talk is speculative. There was a $75,000 book advance and a chunk of that went to two literary agents and taxes, she said. Future royalties will be shared with her father, her brother and O'Connor's law firm.

For now, the family continues to live on her father's pension, which covers his caregiver's salary but not all expenses, and Joan's salary from teaching Spanish at Sonoma State University, Santa Rosa Junior College and two elementary schools in Santa Rosa. She also rents out two bedrooms in her house to college students.

Last week, the only things crawling through the front yard were two cats.

"It could get hectic again" now that the book is coming out, Joan Felt said. "But I feel that we have more control than before. It won't be like being assaulted the last time."