Promise Me (26 page)

O
h, how I wish Suzy could have been with me for Sunday afternoons at the Willow Bend Polo and Hunt Club. The place was set on a beautiful tract of land north of Dallas—an old turkey farm originally. Tired of playing on ill-kempt, open-ended fields out in the hinterlands, Norman had approached the landowner with an offer to purchase half the tract back in 1976. His plan was to build a polo field and eventually an upscale clubhouse. The landowner was so taken with the idea that he proposed they go in on it together. Five years later, thousands of spectators were coming out every weekend to see the exciting matches.

Sprinkled in with the standard Western wear, there was a lot of fabulously tasteless early eighties fashion—men in
Miami Vice
blazers with the sleeves pushed up, women in hibiscus print skirts and jewel-tone blouses equipped with shoulder pads in which we could have played Friday night football. Debutantes in Dior and Chanel mixed with modern-day cowboys in Levis and nouveau riche oilmen in Ralph Lauren. Children wheeled around on their bicycles in the parking lot, learning early to keep their balance, work up their nerve, and hit the ball. The scrappy, up-and-coming spirit of Dallas was as pervasive as the scent of fresh-cut grass and Shalimar. Suzy would have loved it.

My first several months as Mrs. Norman Brinker, I embraced and bought into everything there was to love about the lifestyle to which I instantly became accustomed. I took Mommy to the spa, shopped for clothes, and gave money to the charities I’d always supported, but mostly with elbow grease and good wishes. I relished the freedom to spend time with Eric, and while he was at school, I threw myself into learning everything about the skill and strategy of polo, starting with the basic ability
to close in and hit the ball without falling off the pony. Susie Welker, the wife of the club manager, played with me. It was more fun than anything I’d done since I was a kid, a return to the childlike ability to
play
, which I didn’t even know I could do anymore.

Norman was a “three-goal poloist”—rated in the top 5 percent of amateur players nationwide—and he took on every match with serious passion. He was out there to win. There was always a team of paramedics standing by; not a match was played without a concussion or a broken wrist and a few dislocated fingers. I knew if I didn’t understand polo, I’d never truly understand what made Norman tick, so in the beginning, it was a way for me to learn his language. But the game quickly pulled me in. Flying up and down the field on my favorite mount, I was ahead of myself at last. I was outside myself, elated, in love, and for a few glorious moments not thinking at all about cancer. Of all the gifts Norman gave me over the years, those honeymoon months of newlywed joy are among the most precious, and in many ways, the honeymoon lasted for twelve years.

That summer, Norman and I christened five private air-conditioned boxes above the polo field, which were pretty rustic compared with the private boxes in other sports stadiums but suited the sport and our personal tastes just fine. The boxes weren’t closed in; you could chat with your neighbors across the hip-high wooden divider. They were outfitted with simple cane chairs and painted plank floors. It was a safe place for Eric to play and a pleasant spot to drink iced tea with Brenda and Cindy and Norman’s administrative assistant, the remarkable, irreplaceable, indispensible Margaret Valentine.

Our box was built to seat fourteen, and it was always chock-full of Norman’s old buddies and new business associates, who quickly became his friends, and their wives, who quickly became my friends. A lot of these women were doing important charity work, and I was eager to volunteer to help wherever, whenever, and however possible. I also invited people I’d met through my own work in PR, media, and various charities. It was a high-powered group of people doing big and interesting things. Animated conversation echoed off the paneled walls: politics, wheeling and dealing, society gossip, and almost universally good humor. Usually,
a jolly group of a dozen or so migrated over to the big Victorian clubhouse for dinner at dusk, after a pleasant afternoon watching Norman tear up and down the field with his team.

Susie Welker and I put together a women’s team with Susie as captain, and we made our debut on a gloriously sunny Saturday at the Women’s Polo Classic. We rode out all spiffed up in white jeans and sky-blue uniform shirts designed by Milo and wowed the crowd by playing just as hard as the guys.

That night, I lay in bed with Norm, cherishing the day in every aching muscle, and thinking,
Suzy should have been here
.

The promise I made weighed heavily on my heart. Many nights I lay awake for hours, thinking,
How the hell can I do this?
I had access to a certain amount of money now, but that was only part of the equation, arguably the least important component. It took a while to dawn on me: What I really had now was a platform. Just like the days when Boppie got me in the door with my Girl Scout cookies. The question was how to make the most of this opportunity, and quite honestly, the loveliness of the life I was living made it very easy to tuck that question into the back of my mind for a while.

Despite his resources, Norman and I both wanted our home life to be relatively simple and centered on family. Norman, Eric, and I sat down to dinner together every night. Cindy and Brenda were busy with their own lives, but whenever they were with us, the kitchen was alive with laughter and conversation. They took Eric under big-sister wings, and he loved them with worshipful little-brother love. I relished doing the deliciously domestic things a wife and mother does, caring for my husband and son, doing little things for my blossoming stepdaughters. But even with home, ponies, and charity activities, I was getting restless. Other than that brief period when Eric was born, I’d always worked. It was never my intention not to have a career.

Mommy sent me a wooden box in which she’d collected all the letters Suzy and I wrote home from Europe, and I felt a little guilty when I read what I wrote on our arrival in London. We’d laid hands on an American newspaper as soon as we could, hoping for news of the space flight, but finding news of the Watts riots—six days of violence that left thirty-four
dead and over a thousand injured—and the body count from a bloody summer in Vietnam. Suzy and I were both distraught.

“Where did all my outrage go?” I wondered when I read that. “Where did
everybody’s
outrage go?”

Mulling the numbers in those headlines—thirty-four dead, a thousand injured—and remembering how it affected me, I did some digging on one of my regular excursions to the library and came up with a startling frame of reference.

“During the ten years of the Vietnam War, about 58,000 American men and women died,” I told Norman the next morning at breakfast. “During that same ten years, 339,000 American women died of breast cancer.”

“Wow. If that’s correct, …” He glanced up from his newspaper, gauging his response the way most people do when they first hear those numbers, trying to decide if it could possibly be right. Norman knew me well enough to know that it was. “That’s a powerful number.”

“Isn’t it? It’s unthinkable. Why aren’t we out on the streets with anger and protest signs and T-shirts? Where are the monuments and marches? How is it that so few people care about this cause when so many are directly affected by it?”

“You know how,” said Norman. “You’ve done enough PR to know people don’t care about a cause, they care about other people.”

“Agreed. There has to be a face on it.”

“And they have to know about it.”

“So you think it starts with awareness?”

“It starts where everything else starts,” he said. “Money.”

“Funding,” I nodded. “That’s what Blumenschein said.”

“That’s going to be the easy part,” said Norm. “I’ve seen you in action. Nobody’s better at fundraising than you are.”

“I do know how to raise money. What I don’t know is how to spend it. It’s not enough to fund research; we need awareness, advocacy, support services. There’s a million components to each of those, and somehow it all has to be integrated.”

Norman made a flat gesture with the palm of his hand and said, “Focus, focus, focus. Begin with the end in mind.”

“Well, the end would be to cure breast cancer. And to keep as many women as possible alive while we do it.”

“Okay. You’ve defined the vision. If you were building a business, your next step would be to set goals, then seek out people with the expertise to help you get there.”

“That’s the way to do it. Build it like a business.” I toyed with my coffee cup, carefully considering my timing. “Norman, I’ve been thinking about starting a foundation in Suzy’s memory. Specifically for breast cancer. To keep my promise to her and realize some of the things she talked about while she was sick. Little things in some cases, but I think if it was done right, … Mommy always said, ‘Go where people aren’t and do what’s not being done.’ God knows, there’s a lot of
not
being done in the area of breast cancer.”

“It’s a big undertaking,” said Norman.

“It is.”

“But it sounds like something you really have to do.”

I put my arms around his neck and kissed him. “Thank you for knowing that.”

“Do me one favor,” said Norman.

“Anything.”

“Please, don’t call my friends.”

“Of course not,” I said.

I’d already collected all their names and numbers and had them neatly organized in a shoebox.

B
efore Suzy died, Dr. Blumenschein had asked me to participate in a study tracking the sisters and other female relatives of cancer patients. Every six months, I went to his office for an exam and took advantage of the opportunity to pepper him with questions about conferences and clinical trials.

“I’ve decided to start a foundation,” I told him. “I was wondering if you’d help me figure out where we can most effectively make research grants.”

“Sure,” he said. “There’s some very exciting stuff happening on the scientific front.”

“Like what?”

“One big thing on the horizon right now is monoclonal antibody therapy.”

“Monoclonal antibody therapy.” I repeated it carefully, digging in my purse for a pen and notepad so I could write it down. “How does that work?”

“It doesn’t. Yet. It’s just a theory. But we know that a certain type of B-cell found in multiple myeloma produces a certain type of antibody, and the hypothesis is, if a compound could be made that would deliver a toxin to a particular type of tumor in a very targeted way, we could manufacture a sort of magic bullet for that specific type of cancer, and the side effects of treatment would be minimal.”

“
Magic bullet?
That’s perfect! Wonderful. So we’ll raise the money to fund that. That’ll take—what—a year? Maybe three?”

Knowing what I know now, I have to give George Blumenschein credit for not laughing out loud.

“It’s going to take a while,” he said. “Ten to fifteen years.”

“Ten to fifteen …,” I echoed. It sounded like a prison sentence.

The meagerly built group of women in Blumenschein’s waiting room didn’t look like they could have scraped together fifteen years among the lot of them.

“FDA approval is even further off,” he said. “That’s just to get viable clinical trials in place. It’s going to take time. And significant funding.”

“How can I learn more about what’s going on in the field?”

“I’ll make you a list of seminars and symposiums. The presentations tend to be pretty academic, not really intended for the general public, but you’ll be able to get the gist and make some interesting connections.”

I gratefully accepted the list and dutifully went to the conferences, and yes, many of the presentations were mind numbing, but I did meet people, and a nebulous plan started forming in the back of my brain. Mommy always said about this sort of thing, “You might not get all the answers, but you usually come away knowing what the questions are.” I followed up every dry presentation with phone calls, lunches if they’d meet me, and many trips to the library. I spent my afternoons on a wooden chair with a stack of books on my left and a yellow legal pad on my right and hardly looked up until it was time for Eric to get home from school. I called the National Institutes of Health and said, “Send me everything you have on breast cancer.” I had enough knowledge to make myself dangerous now; possibilities were blossoming inside my head.

Armed with my binder and legal pads, I attended a breast cancer seminar at Baylor Hospital in the spring of 1982 and was pleased to see a senior officer from the American Cancer Society. I cornered him during the first coffee break and introduced myself, eager to tell him about my plans for Suzy’s foundation.

“We’re having an organizational tea at my home next month,” I told him.

He nodded and said that was nice.

“I want to firm up plans ahead of time so these ladies know what we’re raising this money for. People know and trust the American Cancer Society. Believe me, I know. They feel very comfortable giving money to you. It’s the perfect umbrella for us to come in and do a major project specifically dedicated to breast cancer, encompassing the key elements—awareness, advocacy, and research funding—really setting things in motion.”