Gilda’s Final Gift: A Tale of Courage

At first, the public came to know her as the comedienne from “Saturday Night Live” whose transformations into the run-on-at-the-mouth reporter Roseanne Roseannadanna, the speech-impeded interviewer Baba Wawa and the befuddled editorialist Emily Litella provided some of television’s funniest moments in the 1970s.

Then the public began to see her as the comedienne with ovarian cancer after she told how she had overcome her life-threatening illness in a cover story for the March 1988 issue of Life magazine. But she had done the story more to focus attention on a Santa Monica cancer support group, The Wellness Community, than to grab the spotlight for herself.

Less than four months later, Radner’s cancer had recurred. But her fans never found out about it because the devastated comedienne chose to keep quiet about this new phase of her disease. As she explains in her forthcoming autobiography, “It’s Always Something,” after being “a model cancer patient completely active in my own therapy, now I felt like a living example that it didn’t work. I’m just a fraud, I thought.”

Radner’s death on Saturday was unexpected except to a close circle of family and friends who had known that she was losing this last, desperate battle against her illness. But while she didn’t have the strength to talk publicly about the events of the past year, she somehow managed to complete her own bittersweet account of the courage, determination and sometimes even despair with which she approached her final ordeal.

Though she started the book with the intention of writing about a cancer victim who gets well, by last May she had to confront a different reality. And by bringing her fear and frustration into the open, Radner knew she could become an even greater inspiration.

“I wanted a perfect ending, so I sat down to write the book with the ending in place before there even was an ending,” she writes. “Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Like my life, this book has ambiguity. Like my life, this book is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.”

Originally, Radner had planned to publicize her autobiography quite extensively. An eight-city author tour was scheduled as well as an interview with Barbara Walters.

Swirling Rumors

But as the publication date of June neared, Radner’s publicist, Rachel McAllister, told reporters that the comedienne had come down with hepatitis and was too sick to be interviewed. While rumors swirled that Radner’s cancer had returned, McAllister as late as last week held out the hope that Radner soon would be well enough to meet with reporters.

At the same time, Radner’s husband, Gene Wilder, who had taken a hiatus from movie-making in order to see his wife through her illness, launched an extensive publicity campaign for his new movie “See No Evil, Hear No Evil”--one of the few he made without a part played by Radner--lending credence to the notion that Radner was getting better. Now, however, sources say that Wilder left their Bel Air home only because of his wife’s strong urging.

In and out of the hospital over the past year, Radner had undergone surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center as recently as February to “correct complications” which had arisen because of her continuing chemotherapy treatment. Then she re-entered the hospital on Wednesday. When she died in her sleep at about 6:20 a.m. Saturday, Wilder was at her bedside.

On the set of “Saturday Night Live” that night, host Steve Martin, his voice thick with emotion, fought back tears as he showed a 1978 clip in which he and Radner satirized a dance routine by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. “When I look at that tape, I can’t help but think how great she was and how young I looked,” Martin told the audience.

“Gilda,” he added, “we miss you.”

As it happens, Radner writes in her autobiography that after she went into remission in early 1988 she thought about resuming her career, which had stalled because of several failed movie roles and her subsequent illness. After becoming skin and bones, she had begun to gain weight. Her hair, which had fallen out from the chemotherapy treatments, was growing back. And after she made a March 1988 guest appearance on “The Garry Shandling Show” (which earned her an Emmy nomination), she immediately received offers to do her own sitcom.

“I can still have a career, I could still have a show, it’s not too late,” Radner writes. “I got a little cocky. I always had a twinkle in my eye as though I’d touched the face of God, because that’s what I felt like I’d done. I was plenty full of myself. I’d go to bed at night bursting with plans, and I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning.”

As part of her remission, she had regular blood tests to check for cancer. On May 3, 1988, after visiting an oncologist near her Stamford, Conn., home, she was told that the cancer had returned--two nodules on the left side of her upper abdomen, cells on her liver and a shadow on her lung.

“You mean I’m going to die?” she screeched to the doctor.

“Once you have cancer you live on a tightrope, you live from day to day,” Radner writes. “You talk about how something could happen, something could go wrong. Here on May 3 at eleven o’clock in the morning, my whole world collapsed again.”

She withdrew into herself. It fell to her husband to tell people what had happened. “My manager was calling about the plans for the TV show, and my editor was calling about my book,” she writes. “My life faded to black. I didn’t talk to anybody.”

The reason, she explains, was that she was “nauseous with fear.”

“Until this point, I had been so sure that cancer was behind me. I’d been through a year of treatment. I had beaten it. I’d been on the cover of Life magazine. I had become a symbol of conquering cancer . . . but it was in these days in May that I suddenly realized I had a life-threatening cancer. Somehow my story of cancer began for real at this point.”

Stare at Ceiling

At her lowest ebb, she would lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling because “I didn’t know what else to do,” she writes. She stopped taking phone calls because “I felt they were calling only to find out whether I’d died.”

As the pain worsened, she pretended she was in a coffin at her own funeral. Or she’d wake up in the night screaming, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die! I’m petrified, I’m going to die!”

Only Wilder could comfort her. “Gene would say, ‘You’re not, you’re not.’ He kept saying this will work, this treatment will work. ‘You’ve done it before, you’ll do it again. I believe in you.’ ”

Then she remembered what her year as part of The Wellness Community program had been about. “There are no guarantees,” she writes. “There are no promises, but there is you , and strength inside to fight for recovery. And always there is hope.”

She began to hold support meetings for cancer victims in her Connecticut house. And her sense of humor returned. When she went into a local beauty salon to have her hair cut short in preparation for the new round of chemotherapy, she told the stylist, “I’m doing a ‘Star Wars’ movie.”

Image of Herself

And when it was raining one day and she was sopping wet and splashed with mud, she started thinking of herself as a superhero who couldn’t be destroyed.

“The next thing you know, I’m kind of running down the street with my arms spread out in this raincoat yelling in a Captain Midnight voice, ‘Cancer Woman, look at her go!’ ”

Soon, she began to explore alternative cancer therapies. She started chemotherapy treatments with a drug, Carboplatin, so new that it hadn’t yet been approved by the FDA. She had a “huge fight” with Wilder over her intention to go to Mexico to have laetrile treatments, which are banned in the United States. (She never went.)

And she listened with fascination while some cancer victims described their experimentation with macrobiotic diets. “They were so peaceful and they looked good and I thought, gee, food has always been a problem with me, maybe food is the answer to getting well. Maybe that’s the variable that has been destructive in my life.” After all, she reasons, during her “Saturday Night Live” days, she had been bulimic and then anorexic.

Soon she “went bonko, completely nutty” about reading macrobiotic books and buying whole grains, seaweed and tofu. In her zeal, she threw out any clothes that weren’t cotton, took off all her jewelry, stopped wearing nail polish and changed all her cosmetics to natural products. She even switched from Crest to seaweed toothpaste.

Loss of Weight

But because there was no fat in her diet, she began losing weight, going from 116 pounds down to just 93 in one month and getting weak and malnourished.

Nevertheless, she found that her belief in the diet was “soothing” and kept her fear at bay.

She decided not to have any more chemotherapy, she stopped seeing her oncologist and she began attending psychic healing sessions. Wilder became alarmed. “He still believed in the medical community. But I wasn’t interested,” Radner writes. “I was in outer space--feeling pure, chewing my food, blessed by God, sure that I had cancer under control, and that it was disappearing from my body.”

What she didn’t know was that the cancer was worse than ever. Finally, Wilder persuaded her to see a New York oncologist, Dr. Ezra Greenspan, who in the 1960s had developed many of the protocols of multiple chemotherapy used today. He put her on a chemotherapy schedule again with the assurance that it had an 85 percent chance of working “with a little luck.”

But it was his positive attitude that caused Radner’s hope to return. “Suddenly a little door opened inside me. I had been closed in a room of anger and fear. I’d shut myself off from the real world, buried myself in magic thinking. Now, a little door just cracked open, and once again there was a chance that I could live . . . “

At the end of June, she celebrated her 42nd birthday with friends who convinced her to eat a hamburger. “It tasted delicious,” she writes. Then she ate some birthday cake, and “that was the end of macrobiotics.”

But she was severely underweight and dehydrated and “almost at a point of starvation,” all of which complicated the intensive chemotherapy she needed every week. When doctors wanted to put her in the hospital last summer for intravenous feedings to build up her strength and allay a persistent bowel problem, she objected. “To me, that seemed like the beginning of the end.”

Instead, she convinced them to treat her at her Connecticut home with four nurses in attendance.

Meanwhile, Wilder, relieved that his wife was back in a doctor’s care, committed to start shooting “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” with Richard Pryor in the New York area that August. “He hadn’t worked during all of my illness, and we both knew it was important he take this job,” Radner writes. Before it started, he went to the south of France for 10 days.

Blood Transfusions

During his vacation, Radner began throwing up food, her bowel became obstructed, and she couldn’t eat. She had to have four blood transfusions. “Only the intravenous feeding and fluids at night kept me alive.” she writes. “It was the most frightening episode in my entire illness, and I thought I wasn’t going to make it.”

Even so, she didn’t lose hope. “During the worst of it, I remember sitting up and saying, ‘I’m not going to give up. I’m going to fight.’ ”

By the time Wilder returned, she was stronger though she was still receiving nighttime feedings and vomiting during the day. That September, she looked for something to occupy her instead of food. She became obsessed first with catalogues and then with Bingo. And she continued writing her book.

“An amazing thing happened--I realized one day that I had my joy back. Even with all that was happening to me, I was dancing in the kitchen, I was staying up until three in the morning, I was laughing again, I was making jokes. I was enjoying my glorious life.”

Last Oct. 3, she had surgery to repair a bowel blockage. But the best news was that the biopses revealed no evidence of new tumors.

An Upbeat Note

Her book ends on an upbeat note as she reviews the lessons that her illness taught her. In return for the suffering, she accepted that “my reward is my life and the value I now put on it.” She also grew to understand that cancer is “a continuing process, like controlling diabetes or any chronic disease. My eating habits, my life style, my attitude, continuing to get treatment, building my immune system--I have to keep fighting and I can’t ever stop. I can’t let down and say, ‘I beat it. I licked it. I’m finished.’ ”

But, mostly, she writes, she overcame her fear of the Big C.

“What I’ve learned the hard way is that there’s always something you can do. It may not be an easy thing to do. In some cases, death seems more desirable. But there is always something you can do.”

GILDA RADNER: An Appreciation, Part VI, Page 1