“I’ve really just gotten to know Sam personally over the last few months, when we started working out together,” Pamela Anderson, also an animal-rights crusader, tells me later. “To be able to be so generous at this time in his life is so inspiring. I feel honored to know him.” Sam has already told me about the exercises he now does, taught to him by a trainer Pam brought over to his house. They allowed him to keep walking after neuropathy hit so hard that he became unable to feel his legs below the knees.

Jennifer Tilly is Sam’s ex-wife and now one of his best friends. She has accompanied him to all of his chemo sessions since the cancer hit, even making sure she got one day a week off to fly to Los Angeles written into her contract while she was performing in a play in New York.

As the plane taxis down the runway, Sam opens up a briefcase full of medical-marijuana-laced snacks. “Mention I have a vegan pot chef,” he calls to me. He holds up a container of strawberry cannabis lemonade and laughs. Sam punctuates most of his sentences with a distinct laugh. It starts out a big deep rumbling guffaw, which longtime Simpsons writer and producer George Meyer describes as “startling, like the squawk of a macaw,” except that it keeps on going, longer than you’d expect, “until it fades into a whoosh, like the last squeeze of a Sriracha bottle.” The laugh happens whenever Sam says something he knows is funny, which is often. And also when he says something that is dark and horribly unfunny. Like when he’s talking about an undercover PETA operation that recorded one of the roadside-bear-attraction owners talking about his bears.

“If they got a cub, they would kill the adult,” Sam tells me. “The cubs make more money—they’re cuter.” Then they’d eat the adult. “They said, ‘There’s nothing tastier than a bear raised on white bread and soda pop.’”

Sam laughs.

Sanctuary##

‘I’ve got sun bears, moon bears, grizzly bears, Syrian bears, brown bears,” Sam tells me as we approach the Wild Animal Sanctuary a few hours later. “I have 11 bears in Dallas and 23 in Colorado—but they just had six cubs.” There are also two rescued chimps at a sanctuary in Florida, a racehorse in Virginia, and some 500 chinchillas rescued from a chinchilla ranch in California. If all goes well, an elephant will soon join the roster.

The last time Sam visited the sanctuary was when the newly rescued bears had just arrived. He insisted on being the one who opened the cage door to welcome one of the 500-pound grizzlies to a life of freedom.

“Why was I doing shit like that?” he asks me, now slack-jawed as he views the CNN footage of himself, from January, standing an inch from the uncaged grizzly bear. “I don’t understand. It’s extremely dangerous. Dying young, you learn that life is precious, and you think, Why the fuck did I almost kill myself?” He laughs.

Unfortunately, when we arrive at the Wild Animal Sanctuary, the cubs are off in their dens with their mothers, choosing not to make an appearance. None of us, including their benefactor, gets so much as a glimpse of them. We do, however, pay an extended visit to the hospitalized Marley, who doctors say is recovering nicely from her successful antibiotic implants. As she roams around a cage full of bear toys at the sanctuary’s medical facility, her still-crooked front legs and the places where the hair hasn’t yet grown back make her look like an enormous man in a bad bear suit.