It's Always Something (10 page)

In my case, I know I used a lot of saccharin and cyclamates in my life. I would put those tablets in my coffee in the morning to make it really sweet. I had some kind of artificial sweetener that I got from Canada when they took it off the market in the U.S. because it was a suspected carcinogen. My father smuggled beer into the United States; I smuggled cyclamates. I used them in cooking and I was drinking Tab besides. I was heavy into saccharin and cyclamates for over twenty years.

I smoked. I started smoking when I was fourteen. I thought it was the coolest thing anyone could possibly do. I remember going on an airplane to New York with my girlfriend Ellen, the summer before high school. We both smoked, and I said to her, “If we’re going to smoke, don’t let us both smoke at the same time. It’ll look more mature if only one person smokes at a time.” I’m sure it must have looked disgusting to see two little girls sitting on an airplane smoking cigarettes. My girlfriends tell me when I first smoked, I went cross-eyed when I inhaled because I was trying to see the cigarette and see how good I looked smoking. I loved to smoke. It gave me an identity. It was a way to end a meal, a conversation, an event. It was an exclamation point in my life that I thought could just keep going. (I managed to cut down on my smoking later, but I didn’t quit completely until my cancer diagnosis.)

I have always loved red candies. I was like a Red Dye #2 junkie. Red licorice, jelly beans, lollipops—you name it. If there was a choice, I always ate the red candies. I was packing them away all those years. Even when I heard that Red Dye #2 was carcinogenic I still would go for them.

For me, the cancer-causing list continues. I have always been a compulsive consumer. I chewed a tremendous amount of gum—sugarless bubble gum by the case. I consumed boxes of chocolate-covered peanuts—not the small bags, but the boxes. I ate an apple a day—even the ones that were thick-skinned with shiny wax. I have eaten tuna for lunch almost every day of my life since I could chew. Could it have been the tuna?

I have lived in New York and I have even lived in Los Angeles, so I have breathed infinite quantities of unhealthy air. I barbecued every Memorial Day weekend in my life, every Fourth of July, every Labor Day and every Sunday in the summer. Gene loves to barbecue too. I have heard you aren’t supposed to eat burnt food—anything burnt is carcinogenic—and I love burnt stuff. These are the things that run through my head, from the sensible to the ridiculous. I ate red meat. I used hairspray.

Whatever the American Cancer Society says causes cancer, I have undoubtedly done it. I know the key to a healthy life is moderation, and I have never been moderate. For example, I coped with stress by having every possible eating disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine diet pills when I was ten years old. They caused me to have tremendous mood swings and I had to discontinue using them. Throughout my teenage years stress caused me to overeat and the fear of being fat put me on tedious and endless diets. I have read every diet book ever written and I know the caloric content of any food by heart. Any emotion could drive me into binge eating that would be followed by days of rigorous dieting.

With fame and the constant display of my image on television came anorexia. I became almost afraid to eat. I wanted desperately to be as thin as Laraine Newman on “Saturday Night Live,” but New York streets were filled with things to eat—hot dogs and falafels, pizzas, ice cream, pretzels, charbroiled steak with smells that steamed out of street vendors’ stalls. Food was a comfort amidst all the stress in my life.

Around the second year of “Saturday Night Live” I taught myself to throw up. I became bulimic before medical science had even given it that name. I got to be just as thin as I wanted, but the bingeing and purging overwhelmed my life. I was a total professional about my work, but my private life was all obsessive eating and throwing up. I wasn’t interested in drugs because I had food. Like any addiction, the eating disorder took charge and left little time for life.

In the three years before my cancer diagnosis, I had begun to change. Through therapy and with Gene’s help, I had overcome my eating disorders. I had retaught myself to eat, and left bulimia far behind me. Gene introduced me to people like Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and Carl Reiner—people who survived their careers and their successes with good health. I cut down to six cigarettes a day and gave up drinking entirely. I began exercising daily—tennis lessons and swimming. I even stopped chewing gum. I was following a rigorous anticancer diet and even had an apron from the American Cancer Society that had a big chart on it with foods you are supposed to eat and foods you aren’t supposed to eat. I thought I could counteract my genetic predisposition to cancer through proper nutrition. I suppose what was happening was that I was beginning to care about my life.

I learned much later that we do things in life that are considered “towards life” and things that are “against life.” I filled many years with “against-life” behavior. I was so defiant and so funny that I thought I could smoke and say, “Fuck you—fuck you, cancer.” I remember, when someone said to me, “Why do you smoke?,” I’d flap back with “At least I have a say in my own death. At least I’m causing it, instead of having it sneak up on me.” I could stay up all night and roam the streets of New York looking for food, alone at two or three in the morning, not feeling that there was any danger. Nothing could touch me. I let stress and pressure run my precious life, and then when I caught on and began to change, cancer came along and said, “Remember how you tempted death? Well, here’s your opportunity.”

I always felt that the point of my comedy was to say what the other person was thinking before he said it so I could catch him off guard. I always thought that my comedy grew from my neurotic way of life—the way that I would think
The plane is going to crash
before it took off, so then it wouldn’t ever happen. I never leave the house without thinking the house will blow up or catch fire or whatever, because it’s all like a magic way of making it not happen. I thought I was controlling my chances of getting cancer by thinking I might get it and being neurotic and funny about it. But it doesn’t work. I realize now that it doesn’t work.

There was a time in my life on “Saturday Night Live” when all of life was there only for me to find out what was funny about it. The news never meant anything to us on “SNL” because we always looked at it just to see how to satirize it. Nothing in our personal lives was sacred. We used all of it for material on the show. The most important thing was those ninety minutes live on Saturday night. So what if your whole world was falling apart as long as you could find a joke in it and make up a scene. Millions of Americans saw what we did, and it was a charmed time. We thought we were immortal, at least for five years. But that doesn’t exist anymore. Now real stuff happens. Once we did a sketch about cancer and I played a woman being diagnosed as having breast cancer. I thought it was so funny because I carried my purse—actually a big clutch bag—over my chest for the whole scene. I sang a song once called “Goodbye Saccharin.” I sang that I had to have saccharin because sugar would make me fat and I’d rather be thin and get cancer than have bulging thighs. It came back to haunt me.

But it
was
a charmed life—until Belushi died. In those five years nobody ever died and nobody ever got horribly sick. Belushi made me laugh like you couldn’t imagine. I adored him. He was the one who gave me my first job in New York. In 1974 he called me up in Toronto where I was doing Second City. He was working with “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and
National Lampoon
magazine because he had done the show
Lemmings
for them in 1973 and it had been a huge success Off-Broadway and then on a national tour. The
Lampoon
people wanted him to do another show, and they were letting him direct it. He could choose the cast. He asked me to be “the girl” in a show that would include himself, Joe Flaherty, Harold Ramis and Brian Doyle-Murray.

In August of 1974, I took a train to New York City to work on the show. It was a very lonely, hard time for me because New York was so big and so weird and I was always wandering around looking for the sky like a country bumpkin. Belushi and his girlfriend, Judy Jacklin (later his wife), looked out for me and all the guys in the cast. They were like the mama and papa. They’d lived in the city the longest and knew the ropes.

Belushi was a mentor to me. We had worked together at Second City so he knew my work. But I think the reason he hired me was that I was a good audience. All the guys liked to have me around because I would laugh at them till I peed in my pants and tears rolled out of my eyes. We worked together for a couple of years creating
The National Lampoon Show,
writing “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and even working on stuff for the magazine. Bill Murray joined the show and Richard Belzer; Dan Aykroyd was around and Christopher Guest and Paul Shaffer. But Belushi was the driving force.
Force
is the right word to use for Belushi. Everything he did was suicidal—the way he ate, the way he drank, even the way he walked and moved. He would throw himself up in the air and splash down on the ground. His characters were suicidal. He was the master of kamikaze comedy. When he died, it didn’t seem so strange. But I knew I didn’t want to be the second one to go.

It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It’s really crazy, isn’t it? We get to live, then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we have. You can drug yourself to death or you can smoke yourself to death or eat yourself to death, or you can do everything right and be healthy and then get hit by a car. Life is so great, such a neat thing, and yet all during it we have to face death, which can make you nuts and depressed. It’s such an act of optimism to get up every day and get through a day and enjoy it and laugh and do all that without thinking about death. What spirit human beings have! It
is
a pretty cheesy deal—all the pleasures of life, and then death. I think some people just can’t take the variables; they just can’t take the deal—that is why they drink themselves silly or hide away or become afraid of everything. Sometimes I feel like I couldn’t take the deal—it was just too much. Cancer brought life and death up close.

What made it all even worse was that I’m a comedienne who does Roseanne Roseannadanna and all this stupid stuff, and then gets the most unfunny thing in the world. It wasn’t as if I was a dramatic actress associated with great tragic roles. I kept thinking there must be a purpose to this somewhere. There had to be. How could Gilda Radner, whose name was synonymous with comedy, now become synonymous with cancer? What good is that going to do? How am I going to make cancer funny? How am I going to get people to laugh about it?

I just didn’t want to be in tragedy. I didn’t want to be tragic even for a moment, not to any nurse who came into my room, not to anyone I knew in the world. I wanted only to be what I am—a comedienne, a jester. Everything was working against me, but I wasn’t going to accept that fate. I would be funny again. Each day in the hospital following my operation I just tackled what had to be done. If it meant having the strength to walk around the hospital floor twice or to go in and have surgery to have a Port-A-Cath put in, I ignited my spirit to do it.

A couple of years before I got cancer I read a book called
Disturbances in the Field.
I told Gene about it because it was one of the most horrifying and intelligent books I ever read. It was about a woman my age and her circle of friends. She was highly educated, a philosophy major and a musician. She played the violin and lived in New York and married a wonderful man, unlike some of her friends, who had troubled marriages or were in and out of relationships with no sense of continuity. They had four children right away—and she continued to do her music. The children were aged sixteen, eleven, seven and five. One afternoon, the two youngest children were coming home from a skiing trip that they had gone on with their school and their bus was in an accident. The two children were killed. She had explained before that there are “disturbances in the field” when something happens that you don’t expect—for instance, this accident—and that changes everything. In one moment she lost her two beautiful youngest children. The book follows her and her husband through their mourning. She remembers that when she was a little girl, her parents had a house on the beach in Long Island, a summer place where they took her and her sister when they were about the age of her children who died. They’d go down to the beach and there were always lots of people there, and everybody had umbrellas that looked alike. She and her sister would go and play by the sand dunes, but it was hard to tell where their parents were. So her father began to tie a pair of tennis shoes on one of the spokes of their umbrella so when the two little girls looked over, they could see right away where their parents were. She longed for that time when you could believe your parents were protecting you.

I remember riding in the backseat of my father’s car and thinking I was really safe. He would take me to school and I used to play this game where instead of sitting with him in the front, I would ride in the backseat and pretend he was chauffeuring me to school. He could truly protect me then. If my parents were home, I was safe, and things didn’t happen—cancer, bus accidents, plane crashes or wars. As long as my parents were home, everything was all right. The woman in the book couldn’t change what happened to her children. She couldn’t protect them the way her father had when he had tied the shoes to the umbrella so she and her sister could know where their parents were. In the hospital I remembered that book, thinking inside,
Please, someone protect me from this cancer. Make me feel safe again.