It's Always Something (9 page)

M
y father, Herman, was a tremendously powerful businessman who had an extraordinary personality. When he walked into a room the energy in the room changed. He had a zip in his step and a twinkle in his eye and although he had never set foot on a stage in his life, he had the presence of somebody in show business.

My father had a huge family that he was the star of . . . eleven brothers and sisters. He grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and never went past fifth grade in school. He could barely write, but he knew about money and business and property, and he was one of those American success stories that proved you could make it on sheer ingenuity. When he was a teenager in the early 1900s, his family moved from New York to Detroit, Michigan. He hung out in a local pool hall and hustled until he got enough money together with friends to buy the pool hall. By the 1920s he was able to buy a brewery in Windsor, Canada, just across the river from Detroit. It was called the Walkerville Brewery and it made whiskey and beer. This was the era of Prohibition. No one in the family talks about it very much and they won’t tell me for sure, but it’s obvious to me that you were allowed to make and export beer in Canada during Prohibition. I know my father came out of the 1930s with a lot of money, and there is a story about how some people tried to kidnap him once in a dark alley and he was shot in the leg getting away. Now I don’t know if we are talking organized crime or what, but he was a pretty happening guy. In his heyday, Herman Radner had a scrapbook full of newspaper articles about himself. He turned his brewery into a free lunchroom during the Depression and fed thousands of people, and there were stories about that everywhere. However he made his money, he spent the rest of his life giving back. He was very active in Jewish affairs and the Jewish old folks’ home in Detroit. I remember my father was listed in a book called
Who’s Who in American Jewry,
which called him a Detroit philanthropist. It also mentioned that he had changed the family name to Radner from Ratkowsky.

On November 29, 1937, Herman Radner married a beautiful legal secretary named Henrietta Dworkin. Four years later, Henrietta gave birth to a son, Michael. Five years after that they produced me. I came around late in my father’s life. I wasn’t born until he was fifty-three.

When I was twelve years old, my father went into the hospital for some routine tests. He had been having terrible headaches for a couple of years. He had his glasses changed a hundred times and tried different medications, but the headaches didn’t go away. He was in the hospital only two nights, but as far as I was concerned, I never saw him again. They opened him up, found a malignant brain tumor that was too far gone to remove and closed him up again. Besides having brain surgery, he had a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. Two days later I was taken to see my father: the bubbly, slightly overweight, middle-aged man who called me “his heart.” What I saw was a severely ill old man. He was sixty-five, but he seemed to have aged twenty years. His head had been shaved and the stroke had weakened and confused him. My family said, “That’s your father.” “That’s your father.” I was frozen in fear and confusion. He looked like my father. He spoke to me, and I stood there, and I held his hand beside his bed, but it had happened too suddenly. It was too great and sudden a loss of a person whom I adored, and who adored me. I know about the sudden loss of someone who just drops dead of a heart attack, but there was something even weirder about this. The person disappeared but the shell was still there. The brain surgery and the stroke changed his personality, his attitudes and his moods forever.

The doctors put him on a program of radiation therapy because that is how they were treating brain tumors. It must have been 1958 because I was twelve. I don’t believe there was chemotherapy at that time, and even today doctors don’t use chemotherapy to treat all brain tumors. He did recover from the surgery to the extent that he relearned to use the left side of his body through exercise and concentration. He was very ill from the radiation, very nauseous and sick all the time, but after recuperating in the hospital for a few months, he did come home. I remember going to visit him in the hospital and everyone pretended he was all right. It was like “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Nobody ever said the word
cancer.

My father owned and operated an apartment hotel in downtown Detroit called the Seville. It was his pride and joy. It had a restaurant and a drugstore and a barbershop. When he got sick, he never went to the hotel anymore and his brothers sold it. It disappeared just like he did.

For two years my father was home. During that time he was very ill. It was not unusual in the middle of the night for me to hear the ambulance coming down our street. I would be in my room and would hear the men coming up the stairs with the stretcher. I’d hear them talk to my father like he was a little boy, “Come on, fella—get on the stretcher—that’s a good boy.” I’d lie in my bed with feelings of anger and resentment, not understanding what was going on and never really getting a clear explanation from anybody. Even today when there is cancer in the family, everybody lies about what is going on. Children especially don’t get clear answers.

After my father came home, it seemed like there was something about me in particular that would upset him. I was so young and I think he knew he wasn’t going to be around long. Every time he saw me he would become emotional and well up with tears, I imagine because he had had me so late in life and he knew he wasn’t going to see me grow up. I only wondered,
Why is he so weak? Why is he crying all the time?
I was angry instead of compassionate, as an older person probably would have been. I know that I have to forgive myself for being ashamed of him because he looked so old and not wanting my friends to see him. I went to camp the summer after he came home and my mother brought him to visit. All the kids said, “Is that your grandfather?”

I said, “It’s my father.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Well, he was very sick—he had an operation.”

“Is he going to get better?”

“I don’t know.”

In his last six months, my father went into a coma. He was in the hospital just barely alive; only his heart was still beating. I didn’t want to go visit him, but periodically I would go. It was just his body lying there—attached to machines, his heart beating.

I was back at camp the next summer. It was August. I was sound asleep when someone tapped me. I woke up with the owner of the camp looking at me. It was early in the morning, and he said, “Gilda, your mother called, and your father has taken a turn for the worse. Your mother would like you to come home.” I got up out of my bed. All of my camp friends were in their bunks. I got dressed, packed, and they all were sitting up staring at me. I kissed everyone goodbye and then went to the camp kitchen and waited. My counselor went with me so I wouldn’t be alone. A small plane flew me back to Detroit where my brother was waiting for me at the airport. I was fourteen, my brother almost nineteen. I knew my father was dead. I knew there could be no turn for the worse. My brother took my hand in the car, which brothers and sisters don’t usually do, and we didn’t talk very much while he drove.

Our house felt like it had just taken a sigh of relief. There had been illness in it for so long and uncertainty and a sense of death. The house was finally relaxed. The windows were open and there was a breeze coming through. My mother seemed relieved. She had been through a hard time. She had been wonderful through it all because my father took a lot out on her during the illness. He was irrationally angry at her a lot. But she stayed right in there, and when he could go out, she went out, and was proud to have him by her side. There was a funeral and in the Jewish religion you sit
shiva
for a week, which I did. Then I went back to camp because I wanted to. I was young and it was a very difficult time. I never got an appropriate mourning period. I spent years trying to mourn my father’s death properly through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It was a very hard thing for me to understand. I was only a child.

Twelve years old is the age when sexuality is just coming into your life—puberty and getting your period, and all kinds of things happening to your body that seem out of control. It’s such a strange time. To be losing a parent at that age as well can make you feel helpless. My family could have probably used some help in living with the illness. Now, almost thirty years later, my mother, my brother and I are still suffering from that illness, that cancer that killed my father.

As far as I know, no one else in my father’s large family died of cancer. His mother, Molly, died of a heart attack before I was born. Her husband, George, my grandfather, died of a heart attack in his late eighties. My mother’s father, Alfred, lived long into his nineties and died of old age. But cancer is very much a part of my mother’s maternal family.

My mother’s mother, Golda, died in her early sixties of stomach cancer while my mother was pregnant with me. I was named after my grandmother whose name began with
G,
but “Gilda” came directly from the movie with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth.

Then in 1974, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time it seemed that not so many women had breast cancer. But this was pre-Betty Ford, and I now realize that a lot of women had breast cancer but they didn’t talk about it. It was devastating to my mother. She had not dated much since my father died, but had just started seeing a man she liked. She was feeling very happy and good about herself, and then she discovered the lump. At that time they did radical mastectomies right away. There was no other choice. I don’t believe she had any chemotherapy, but a few years later in a checkup they found that some of that breast cancer had metastasized to her lung. It was operable, and they took out a lot of her lung and put her on a pill form of chemotherapy for a while. Today my mother is eighty-four years old and she has never had any recurrence of cancer. She never had reconstructive breast surgery, but in between the two cancer operations she had a face-lift. I think that may be the reason she is still around, that drive to look good and be well. When Betty Ford came out and spoke publicly about her mastectomy, it definitely helped people like my mother adjust. My mother handled cancer well. She went right on with her life.

Ten years before my mother’s bout with breast cancer, I had a suspicious lump removed from my right breast. I was eighteen years old and it was the summer before my freshman year in college. The doctor drew with a pencil on my breast where the lump was. I came home and my mother cried and her two sisters cried, and I didn’t know why they were crying. The doctors kept feeling the lump and sending me to other doctors to feel the lump and then decided to do surgery. I checked into a Detroit hospital. When they wheeled me into surgery, my mother was crying, but I wasn’t. I guess I didn’t really understand what was happening. I thought they were going to go in and take this lump out, that’s all. After the surgery, I woke up and there was a big bandage over my right breast. A lady came into my room when I was just waking up and said, “I am so happy for you. I wasn’t so lucky—I lost my breast.” I thought,
What is she talking about? What’s going on here?
I just didn’t understand the possible consequences of breast cancer.

The lump turned out to be a benign cyst. It was almost unheard of to have breast cancer at age eighteen. I recuperated very quickly. Later I found out that the particular doctor who had done my surgery lost his license for doing unnecessary surgery on women. Whether I was a victim of that or not, I don’t know. I also found out I was very cystic and around my period I would get fibroid breast cysts all the time. That may have been what my lump was. The surgeon made an incision that left an ugly scar. That scar kept the fear of cancer marked on my body and my mind.

A few years after my mother’s breast cancer, her sister, Elsie, died of stomach cancer just like their mother, Golda. Elsie was also in her early sixties and got minimal benefit from the chemotherapy that was then available. She left a son and two daughters. The younger daughter, Lenore, has battled cancer three times since her mother’s death, beginning when she was forty years old—in both breasts, and then, ten years later, in her ovaries. She is in her fifties now and has fought like a commando and conquered it all three times. She has been a shining example to me, especially being in my family and probably having the same genes—the ones that make us prone to getting the disesase and the ones that make us prone to getting well again. Lenore told me to hang on to the fact that I would be well again, that my illness was temporary. All through her treatments she had continued her aerobics classes and kept herself beautiful. She encouraged me to keep living a healthy life.

In 1976, after completing my first year on “Saturday Night Live,” after we knew the show was a success, I had a routine exam with my gynecologist. He felt a cyst in my ovary and put me in the hospital immediately. I had major surgery again. It all happened so quickly that there wasn’t even time to think about cancer. I was fifteen pounds lighter when I began my second season on “Saturday Night Live.” The fact that later the cancer I got turned out to be ovarian didn’t come as a total surprise to me. I was always cystic there and had had problems with that.

Medical experts—scientists and researchers—claim that even though our genetics can predispose us to cancer, it takes the addition of other variables like environment, including what we eat and drink and breathe, to generate the disease. I had thought that I was neurotically afraid of “the big C.” It certainly was always around in my family. Even my astrological sign is Cancer. But I would walk out of my way to avoid passing a sign in a building that had the word
cancer
on it. The word jumped into my face from newspapers and magazines—and kept ringing in my ears after it was said. I may have been genetically predisposed to cancer, but I wonder what the variables were in my life that added to this predisposition. Why me? Since cancer is an illness in which your body is out of control, your natural instinct is to want to control it. It runs through my mind constantly:
Why did I get this?
I go from being realistic to being absurd. I wonder,
What did I do wrong? What did I do in my life that would cause this?