It's Always Something (22 page)

I said to Grace, “There was a time at the height of ‘Saturday Night Live’ when I couldn’t even walk down the street in New York because every single person recognized me and wanted to come up and say hello or wanted to stare at me or ask me something. It got so that I didn’t even go out because of that kind of attention. I was so popular. Now I’ve come full circle to ‘Hey you, move!’ in the parking lot of a hospital.”

I wasn’t a celebrity; I was just someone in somebody’s way. That’s how I felt. I wasn’t sad; I was kind of glad for the experience of having gone all the way around life that way.

On December 11, when I went in to have the final radiation treatment, I brought cupcakes for everyone because it was near Christmas. Gene had never gone with me to radiation because it came in the middle of the day, but this day he surprised me and showed up. Everyone was thrilled. He was a movie star and everyone wanted to meet him. Bob got all red in the face and everything, and said, “How do you do, Mr. Wilder? We love you in your films.”

Gene came in and looked over the machines. He was so sweet; I remember he looked at each person he met and let them all be proud of their jobs. He’d heard me talk so much about everyone that it was like he knew them. Then they all left the room and I had my treatment, and Gene watched from the control room. I think I was actually singing while I was getting treated. I knew I was on a small television monitor in the other room and it would make a better show if I was singing. When my treatment was done, that final one, they all came in—all the technicians and the radiologist, the physicist and the nurses. They had flowers for me to hold in my arm, like Miss America. They all applauded because I had completed my thirty treatments. They took out time to honor me. I got off the table holding my flowers, and I made them sing the Miss America song that Bert Parks used to sing.

As I looked at Bob and the other technicians I felt like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz.
These people had taken me through this journey and had been my friends. Bob was the Scarecrow because I remember Dorothy said to him, “I think I’ll miss you most of all.” They had written me a card of congratulations. It was a milestone in my life accomplishing what was necessary to save it. No one stood there and said, “Now you’re cured,” “It’s all over,” “The cancer is gone.” There were no parents or doctors or teachers or professors to say, “You are cured,” “There is no more cancer,” “It’s over.” I knew that nobody could tell me that. I felt that I had had all the best medical treatment I could possibly have and inside me I visualized that my white cells were beaming, functioning perfectly, dancing through my body in the vivid colors of Munchkin Land, singing at the top of their lungs, “Ding dong, the Witch is dead! Which old witch? The Wicked Witch. Ding dong, the Wicked Witch is dead!”

I
t was Christmas 1987, and there I was, done with treatment—no more tortures left. I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. The cancer was behind me and my health was returning. My appetite came back and I ate an entire honey-baked ham over a week at Christmastime. I must have been the only person who for Christmas ’87 had to gain about fifteen pounds. It was glorious. People said, “What do you want for Christmas?” and all I wanted was milk chocolates—a double-layer box. I enjoyed that holiday so much because there was really something to celebrate. New Year’s Eve we all went out to dinner, Grace and Gene and our cousin, Buddy. We toasted 1988; what a year it was going to be after all this hardship. We were in the clear now. We would be free.

Our plan was to stay in L.A. and then go back to Connecticut in March and to stay there through the summer. I began to exercise regularly and to work seriously on my book every day. At The Wellness Community, I tried to be more active as a fund-raiser. In the beginning of January,
Life
magazine asked me to be on the cover for an interview that I had done about The Wellness Community months before. I didn’t want it to be an article about me, but when I spoke to Harold Benjamin, he said that with me on the cover the article would get so much more attention and that would be wonderful and would help so many people. I had to look in the mirror. I looked at my face and thought,
How does my face look? Do I want it on the cover of a magazine?
Then I thought,
Yeah, it’s time. It’s time to do it. Life
magazine was very wonderful about it, although they kept calling up and asking questions like, “Why do you eat tuna fish for lunch all the time?”

I said, “But this article is supposed to be about The Wellness Community.”

But they still were calling up and asking, “Well, what does Gene think about the tuna-fish thing?”

I knew they had to emphasize the celebrity angle, but I also felt they would do The Wellness Community justice. The journalist who was reporting the story had done a lot of research there, and it was a great opportunity to give the Community national recognition. Suddenly I was going from radiation, which ended on December 11, to a photo session in January in downtown L.A. in a big studio with a professional photographer. I brought all my clothes and a makeup person and a PR woman to help me out—all for a March release of the article. I got myself together to do it. I wanted to look great on the cover. I wanted to wear suspenders because the gynecological oncologist had said that if I had radiation, then that would give me a belt and suspenders assurance against the cancer ever coming back. So I wanted everyone to see that my health, like my pants, would hold up.

That was my first photo session in three years (I don’t count X-rays), and out of all the pictures there wasn’t one the publisher wanted because I looked so strained. There was stress in my face. You could see that I was nervous and I pushed too hard. They sent me the only photo they could consider using, and it looked like “coping with cancer” to me. I didn’t want a “coping with cancer” cover because that’s not the way I was dealing with cancer. I wasn’t coping, I was fighting. We agreed to do another photo session to get what
Life
and I both wanted. Less than a week later, I had another session where the photographer came to my house and he was wonderful. He made me feel at ease and less like a celebrity posing for a cover photo. It was more comforting. He took a series of photos that were really wonderful and there were lots of choices. The photo that ultimately became the cover made me proud because I had a confident attitude—and my suspenders.

The magazine came out the third week in February 1988.1 loved seeing it on magazine racks, but I especially loved seeing it on the table in doctors’ waiting rooms. I was very happy with the article although I had a hard time reading beyond the third paragraph where it said that there’s only a thirty-percent chance of surviving ovarian cancer and that I wouldn’t know for at least a year and a half whether I was really in remission. The journalist never discussed those statistics with me. That’s all I could see in the whole wonderful article about The Wellness Community and about me. I remember I said to Gene, “What do they mean? What do
they
know—they don’t know!” I said it to my doctor and he said, “But you
are
the thirty percent, Gilda.” That’s all my other friends with ovarian cancer could see in the article, too—that one little statistic, which, I understand, makes it a better story. There were great pictures of The Wellness Community. It was wonderful to know that so soon I could go back out and help people, that I was already on the cover of
Life
magazine. The Wellness Community was excited about it and the
Life
photographers began going there all the time. They felt like celebrities, and I thanked Harold Benjamin for making me into a star again, too.

February was a grand month in other ways, too. Gene and I took a vacation at a health spa near San Diego. We played tennis and swam and even danced in the nightclub after dinner. I made plans with my friend Alan Zweibel to do a guest appearance on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.” Alan is the producer and Garry is a friend as well. As a matter of fact, sixteen months earlier I’d been on my way to do the show when I got put in the hospital with the original cancer. The show had become a big success and it seemed fitting that I return to television with Zweibel by my side, the writer with whom I created many of my “Saturday Night Live” characters. We would rehearse the show March 2 through March 7 and shoot it on March 8. It had been eight years since I’d been on television and it passed through my mind that I should be scared, but after what I’d been through, that seemed crazy.

On February 22 I was the guest speaker at a fund-raising luncheon for the Friends of The Wellness Community. When I got back home about two-thirty in the afternoon I had a stomachache. I felt funny and weird in my intestine. I called up the Alchemist and he said I’d better come in. He took an X-ray of my bowels and they could see that some air was trapped. There was a little bit of an obstruction. The only way you can get rid of that is to rest the bowel by not eating or by using an NG (nasogastric) tube down the nose, which I’d been through once before. I had to go into the hospital that afternoon, which I hated. I went on intravenous liquids so I could rest my bowel until it cleared up. I stayed for two days—I read, I lay there. I was in a good mood but I had gone straight from giving a lecture to checking into the hospital. Not to mention that I was healthily displayed on the cover of
Life
magazine at the same time. I was diagnosed as having “radiation enteritis,” an inflammation of the bowel that was a common side effect of the radiotherapy I’d had. At least it wasn’t cancer. The only treatment was liquids and soft foods so as not to irritate the lining of the intestine any more.

We taped the Shandling show on March 8, 1988. I wondered what would happen when I made my entrance on the show. My knees were knocking, I didn’t know if my legs would work, I didn’t know if my body would have the energy, I didn’t even know if the audience would know who I was. When Garry opened the door, a calmness came over me like I was suddenly home, back in the TV where I belonged, playing in the brightly lit living room set. I had an amazing amount of energy. I couldn’t believe it. I could be Lucy again trying to get into Desi’s club act. Zweibel said I hadn’t lost a beat. After all I’d been through I had no idea whether I could still be funny. But I
was
funny, I was still really funny, and I was so happy. I thought, I
can still have a career, I could still have a show, it’s not too late.
My manager sent the finished tape to the networks and a couple of the cable stations, and right away I got offers to do my own situation comedy without even doing a pilot because they felt that this show was good enough to be the pilot. It showed I still had it. I looked good with my short hair and I could still do physical stuff. When a friend saw the show months later, he said, “I never saw anyone so happy to be alive.” I had been on the outside of everything, painfully jealous and wondering if I would ever get back again, and now my career was blooming again.

Three days after we shot the Shandling show, my intestine got more and more uncomfortable and I had to go into the hospital and have that tube with the mercury bag put down my nose again. This time, though, they got the mercury bag out—the right way. But I had to spend eight days in the hospital. They gave me sleeping pills and sedatives because having that tube down my nose made me crazy. They figured, “We’ll just drug her up so she doesn’t suffer.” Gene would come every day but some days I wouldn’t even know he was there because I was so drowsy. I couldn’t read. I didn’t feel like watching television. It was a horrible, horrible time, but it wasn’t cancer—I kept saying that to myself. I would come out of it. The doctors said, “This is from the radiation, an inflammation that will clear up.”

At home I had to stay on a liquid diet with high-calorie liquid supplements. I accepted my eating handicaps. I didn’t make food the center of my world. If we went out to dinner, I had soups and talked a lot while everyone else ate. As a matter of fact, a few weeks later I was the guest speaker at a two-hundred-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner for The Wellness Community. We sat down to the dinner and while everyone had the first course, some exotic salad with tropical vegetables in it (none of which I could eat), I had a Lipton Cup-a-Soup packet. They brought me hot water, which was not hot enough for two hundred dollars a plate. When everyone else had the main course, I brought out my can of 330-calorie liquid nutritional supplement from my purse and asked for a glass of crushed ice. I got special enjoyment from the fact that I was sitting next to an oncologist, who could see what food options the cancer treatment had left me.

I made my plane reservation for Connecticut for Saturday, April 9, just for me and Sparkle. Gene would join us later. I would meet my girlfriends Judy and Pam in Connecticut where we could all be nine years old again and laugh and rent movies and pretend we were at camp. Spring would be just beginning and Grace would be there ahead of us to open the house and make it shine.

Five days before I left L.A. to meet my friends, I lost my friend Linda from The Wellness Community—a beautiful woman, forty-six years old and the mother of four children. We had had many Friday lunches together. She’d had everything, chemo, radiation, but the cancer still grew. I was visiting her in the hospital when she died. With all my bravado and all my fight, I could never deal with death—the fact that people do die of cancer. I blocked it out of my mind. I saw cancer as a battle, as a hell, as tortures, whatever, but you didn’t die from it. Now here was this beautiful, exquisite young mother who was a real warrior, who fought to the end, who had her knitting beside her bed when she died. She was making an afghan, and I remembered that a month before we’d gone shopping and she had showed me a magazine with a picture of the afghan in it. She still embodied the fighting spirit of The Wellness Community—right before she died, she’d been in Houston investigating bone marrow transplants. The disease raged in her, and it took over, but her will to live made every day of her life grand. She fought against all odds and kept herself beautiful. When she died, she had mascara on and her hair was growing back again after her radiation treatments. I remembered that once she had written me that she hoped we’d grow old together, that we’d have lunch or tea as old women.