It's Always Something (14 page)

The chemo lowered my white blood count so I was more susceptible to infections, colds, flus and viruses. I wore woolen scarves and coats in the California sun. But after chemo number five, my blood work began to show that the chemotherapy was working. A test that indicated tumor activity, called a CA-125, was returning to a normal level. My internist’s eyes were twinkling. The Alchemist was proud, so I tried to barter with him like the true merchant that I was.

“Get me out of some of those chemos.”

He wouldn’t let me out. I started complaining to Gene, but Gene told me the truth about how precarious my situation had been. He used the scary word
metastasized.
I was glad that until then I hadn’t known the truth. I stopped fighting the Alchemist over the chemos.

These months of recovery were also hard on Gene. My moods swung from here to China, and I had a raging anger at my situation. I felt irritable and isolated and often didn’t want to be touched. Our sex life was nil. At night, I would sleep stiffly on my edge of the bed, whimpering and fearful. I can only imagine Gene’s loneliness—a loneliness that increased through a sense of helplessness in the situation.

When I turned on the television set, I was angry and jealous of everyone. Unlike most people, I see people I know on TV, my whole peer group, people I grew up with. Every time I turned on the television or opened the newspaper to the entertainment section, I found out about everybody I knew. Meanwhile, what was I doing? I imagined being interviewed on television.

“Gilda, what are you doing now?”

“I’m very busy. I’m battling cancer.”

They don’t write that on the second page of the
L.A. Times
Calendar section. They say things like, “Woody Allen and Mia Farrow are having a baby.” They don’t say, “Gilda Radner is having treatment for cancer and Gene Wilder is driving her to the hospital.” In
TV Guide
they say, “As Jane Curtin moves into her fourth successful season of ‘Kate & Allie’ . . .” They don’t say, “Gilda Radner just had her seventh chemotherapy, and we feel she is going to be successful in her war against cancer.” I go to the movie theater, and there are coming attractions for Dan Aykroyd in
Dragnet.
There are no coming attractions for
Gilda Radner’s Hair Grows Back.

For a performer like myself, it was a depressing situation to be in. I could only feel envious and jealous of people whose lives were going on. I was the only person who cried hysterically at “The Tracey Ullman Show.” Her career was taking off, while mine was stalled. I tried to pretend that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar shaved his head to look like me. One day, I was standing in Bullock’s department store. I had bought a skirt and was waiting for the salesperson to take my credit card while the two salesgirls were trying to figure out who this celebrity was who had just come into the store. She used to be on the television show, “Gimme a Break.” They were going on and on about it—who was she? They couldn’t remember, so I was actually getting in the conversation, trying to help them think of who it was. I said, “Was she a regular on ‘Gimme a Break’ or a guest on the show?”

No one recognized me at all. I began to introduce myself as, “I used to be Gilda Radner.” That was how I felt. I used to be her, but now I was someone else.

Another day I was on an elevator. I used to have to hide on elevators because people would recognize me, but nobody recognized me anymore. A couple got on the elevator. The girl had a full head of this new kind of hair that they have now, where it’s so curled and kinked out—huge hair, like my hair used to be. She had on a beige suede outfit with a tight, tight skirt. She had a beautiful body. She looked terrific. She got on the elevator with a man whom she didn’t know that well because she said to him, “I want to go to lunch somewhere close where they take American Express.”

He was tall and handsome and had on a blue suit with pinstripes in it. He was nervous talking to her. He said something like, “But I don’t know if I can give you all the information you need because my contacts aren’t as good in Los Angeles as they are on the East Coast.”

I knew from that conversation that they didn’t know each other that well. When they got off the elevator, I started to follow them. I don’t know why except that I was curious. I felt they were attracted to each other. I could feel something electric in the air. I felt like I didn’t exist. I was just a total voyeur. I felt that I could follow them and I would never be noticed at all. So I did.

I followed them a couple of blocks to a restaurant, but I didn’t go in. I noticed he had a wedding ring on his hand because he kept nervously scratching his head. He kept scratching his head and mumbling things.

I made up a whole story about them. At lunch, maybe they would have a drink, relax and start to talk of having an affair. I made up a life for them that would go on—what he would tell his wife, what his life was like and how he must have been confident with women when he was younger because he was very handsome, but maybe he had been married a long time and had lost his touch. I took it the whole way until I couldn’t go any further with them. To me it was another example of me wanting to get out of my life. My future was more chemotherapy, then an operation to see if I had any more cancer.

Before I became a celebrity, I used to follow people, watch them, listen to conversations. So many of my characters came from that voyeurism. Then becoming famous took it away. Now cancer was giving it back. I was afraid that cancer was going to give it back for good, all the way back to where it used to be. Only this time I would be left shell-shocked and lonely.

One night I dreamt that I had come to host “Saturday Night Live.” They put me in the green room. I watched the show on a monitor there. They never got to me. They went through the whole show and never got to me. At the end someone whom I didn’t even know, she must have been a production assistant or something, came up to me and said, “We are so sorry, Gilda, but there just wasn’t time for you.”

And I said to her, “Oh, well, could you just have someone take me home? I don’t have a way to get home.”

A
t one of our regular weekly sessions at my house, Joanna was listening to me drone on about my feelings of isolation, my anger, my hair loss, when she suddenly said, “Everything you’re saying I’ve heard before.”

“Am I boring you?” I said defensively.

“No, I just want you to know you are not alone, that other people are going through this. I wish you could have been at this meeting the other night at The Wellness Community. There was a bunch of ladies with no hair, and they were talking about it, talking about how they would take off their wigs and take off their scarves and walk proudly on the beach in Santa Monica, brave warriors battling cancer. I wish you could have been there.”

Joanna had brought me literature on The Wellness Community, where she worked, and their newsletter, so I had read about their activities. They have something they call joke fests—meetings where everyone comes with a joke, just because they know laughing is good for you. I read everything she brought me. But I was afraid to be around people who had cancer, I guess because I wanted to pretend that I didn’t have it. And I didn’t want to get depressed, more depressed than I already was, something that I was sure would happen if I went to The Wellness Community. I was in conflict about this for a couple of months. Even Grace and Gene said, “Maybe you shouldn’t go. Why upset yourself? We know how emotional you are and how you sponge up other people’s problems—you probably shouldn’t go.”

Even my psychiatrist said, “You probably shouldn’t go. You probably will get upset.”

But I was curious. Every time I saw Joanna I’d ask her about The Wellness Community. What were the events that week? What did it look like? Where exactly was it in Santa Monica? Where do you park? Do you need quarters for the meters? Joanna was encouraging me to come to a sharing group that met every Friday between 11:00
A.M.
and 1:00
P.M
. Anyone could come on a drop-in basis to share their present experiences with cancer and hear what The Wellness Community had to offer.

In January 1987, after I was over the nausea days of chemo number three, I asked Jodi if she would drive me to The Wellness Community. It was about a half hour from my house. I was so nervous that I would park in the wrong place or I wouldn’t be able to find the building or I would be late. I think what I was really nervous about was what this community of cancer patients would be. Jodi and I found the parking lot easily. We were a half hour early, but we went inside. We were the first ones there.

It was a cute little yellow house with a plaque on the front that said, “The Wellness Community.” We walked into what looked like a living room in anybody’s home. There were two women there with pink sweatshirts on that said “The Wellness Community” and big buttons that said “
VICTOR
” on them. There was a sweet woman named Joyce who gave us flyers and information and made us comfortable. There were three couches and a rug on the floor and phones ringing in other rooms. There was the cozy smell of food because lunch was being made for us in the kitchen. The chairs were set up in a circle in the main room. Jodi and I sat down, and on a clipboard I signed my name and address and phone number. The form asked what kind of cancer you had or whether you were there as a support person or family member. I wrote my name in an absolutely unreadable scrawling handwriting—and under “Type of Cancer” I printed neatly, “Ovarian.”

At about quarter to eleven more people started to come in—all different types of people. They were mostly couples, young and old mixed together. You didn’t know who had cancer and who didn’t. There was a woman and her daughter. The woman was recently out of surgery and the eighteen-year-old daughter was holding her mother as if she was a little girl. This was their first time at The Wellness Community too. There were lots of women, more women than men. Most of the men came by themselves. One was a real dapper-looking guy in a maroon sport coat and gray pants. There wasn’t the feeling that these were sick people, just a lot of different kinds of people, all different socioeconomic levels and ages.

At about ten after eleven the room was pretty much filled with maybe forty people. The two group leaders, Flo and Betty, both eleven-year survivors of cancer (Betty of an advanced case of lymphoma and Flo of a double mastectomy), told their stories of cancer. They explained what The Wellness Community was and what it had to offer every person there. Amazingly, everything was free. There were group therapy sessions that met for two hours a week, available at many different times during the week, called “participant groups.” These groups were the only Wellness Community activities that required a commitment. They were facilitated by licensed therapists. Everything else was on a drop-in basis, including instruction in guided imagery and visualization and relaxation three nights a week (like what I had learned from Joanna). There were group sessions for spouses or family members of cancer patients, nutrition and cooking discussions, lectures by doctors—oncologists and psychiatrists—workshops on anger management, potluck dinners and parties, therapy through painting, vocalizing, improvising—all techniques that would help in stress management and improve the quality of someone’s life.

I learned why people go to AA meetings or Overeaters Anonymous or other self-help groups, and love them and say, “I have to get back there.” If indeed God created the world and then left us on our own to work things out, then getting together with other people to communicate is what we should be doing. I learned at The Wellness Community that that is the most magic thing we have, our ability to open our mouths and communicate with each other.

There was a beautiful woman at the meeting, dressed perfectly in fashion. She said she had breast cancer that had metastasized and was now in her lung and liver, and she was facing a difficult prognosis and a lot of treatments. She was angry and frightened, and she cried. Everyone in the room cried. Then people started to yell advice from their own experience. They told her what had happened to them, how they had had the same prognosis and turned it around through a particular kind of therapy. They traded information. Have you seen this doctor, or tried this hospital? What was happening in the group was that everyone was saying,
“Don’t give up.”
One man stood up and said that he had had a cancer that had begun with a huge tumor in his stomach. The doctors didn’t want to operate on it because they felt he was terminal. He had one doctor who said, “Let’s do it anyway.” They did, and then he had to have many radiation treatments. His parents told him to be positive and to visualize being well. He was told by his doctors he had maybe two or three months because his cancer was so advanced. Then he said, “That was thirty years ago.”

A chill went up my spine.

Betty, one of the group leaders, said that if the statistics say that only eight percent survive a particular cancer, nobody knows who the eight percent are. “Every one of us has just as much right to be in that eight percent as anybody else. If you have cancer,” she said, “do everything possible to fight it—do any activity, any event, but participate in your recovery.” She was given only a twenty-percent chance—eleven years before. It seemed like the room began to stir with hope.

About forty-five minutes into the meeting, Dr. Harold Benjamin appeared in the doorway. He is the founder and director of The Wellness Community. He is a Beverly Hills lawyer who started The Community with $250,000 of his own money in order to help cancer patients. He had always been interested in the dynamics of group therapy and had a five-year involvement as a “square” (non-drug user) in the controversial Synanon drug rehabilitation program. His wife is a long-term survivor of breast cancer and a sharing group leader active in The Wellness Community. He has written a book called
From Victim to Victor
that explains his philosophy about health, the principles of The Wellness Community. Harold is very charismatic. When he speaks, he does it with great humor and honesty.