Elegant Tribute for Fightin’ Irish

The guest of honor cut a striking figure as she circulated among her admirers in the Knollwood Country Club’s Granada Room. A tall, slender woman with pointed features, Jeannette Sharar resembled an Ertesculpture--elegantand angular.

She wore a floor-length, black dress with broadly cut shoulders. Silver-beaded cuffs extended halfway to the elbow, like pieces of armor, and strands of rhinestones dangled from her ears. Carefully applied black eye liner highlighted intelligent blue eyes, and she seemed to maneuver effortlessly atop stiletto heels, greeting well-wishers with busses and hugs like the sophisticated operator she clearly is.

The only ostensible evidence of What Was Wrong With Jeannette--the issue on everyone’s mind and indeed, the very reason for the dinner--was the thin layer of white fuzz on her head.

The guest of honor was practically bald, a result of treatments for inoperable cancer and stark reminder of the grim prognosis that galvanized her friends into hastily organizing what could well be their goodby tribute.

As Hester Prynne defiantly wore the letter A , so Jeannette Sharar refused a wig.

And, as if savoring the last bottle of a rare wine, the movers and shakers of Santa Clarita Valley had gathered this night “to feast in the glory of a woman who has given so much,” as one of Sharar’s colleagues on the Santa Clarita Planning Commission put it.

Sharar’s prominence in the valley and her formidable reputation--as a real estate broker, city planning commissioner, chamber of commerce vice president and hospital fund-raiser--drew almost 400 guests to Granada Hills on the rainy Friday night.

“I feel very bad as I look around the room to see one person who can look beautiful with no hair,” journalist Ruth Newhall said bluntly during one of 10 tributes.

“We’re all here to support you, Jeannette,” she continued. Some guests wiped their eyes; others lowered them self-consciously to their plates of chicken piccata. “We all know she has a fight on her hands and the reason we’re here is to help her in that fight.

“ Illegitimi non carborundum ,” Newhall intoned, citing the mock-Latin motto of her defunct newspaper, The Citizen: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Sharar’s cancer was diagnosed in mid-December--eight months after she met the love of her life on a cruise and eight months before her 50th birthday. Most patients in her condition live about a year, said her oncologist and friend Dr. John Barstis. As word of her illness spread, colleagues on the board of the Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Health Foundation, fund-raising arm of Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital, decided there was no better way to honor Sharar than to throw her a party.

It was an event that promised to be unbearably maudlin, as some privately confessed they feared, but instead proved to be relaxed and pleasant.

Straightforward, tasteful, at times even funny--not unlike the guest of honor herself--the “Special Evening with Jeannette Sharar” began at 6 p.m. with cocktails and included a series of earthy tributes that painted Sharar, not as a potential candidate for sainthood, but mercifully human.

Barstis complained that Jeannette had so many visitors and callers in the hospital that he had to make an appointment to see his own patient.

Tom Veloz, an executive with Newhall Land and Farming Co., recounted the 7:30 a.m. hospital-board meetings at which Jeannette needed three cups of coffee “before she could remember her own name.”

Jeannette, missing keys, climbing over fences to show a house for sale. Jeannette’s taste for Champagne. Jeannette giving all $10,000 she won in a charity raffle back to charity. Jeannette’s fear of flying. Jeannette’s knack for twisting arms and raising money.

The stories continued, their subject occasionally laughing, occasionally blowing her nose, and very often staring stonily into a glass of white wine.

Sharar sat at a large round table surrounded by her family--flanked on one side by her estranged husband, on the other by the man her daughter Kathy described as her “Significant Other.” Her four glamorous daughters, ages 15 through 20, could have just stepped off the set of “Dynasty.” Twenty-seven other relatives, including the two sisters with whom she grew up in Beverly Hills, when they were the M’Closkey girls, sat nearby.

The tension in the ballroom was tangible as Sharar herself assumed the podium, leaving her pumps behind. Barstis, who had worried she might be too weak to attend the event, hovered protectively.

“I’m OK, John,” she said, taking the microphone.

“I don’t understand why, with all the talent in this community, I’d be singled out in this manner,” Sharar began. But in her brief remarks, she seemed to answer her own question.

Touching her head before the roomful of spectators, she attributed her lack of hair to cramming three to six weeks’ of radiation treatments into one so she could attend a California League of Cities convention in San Francisco. Then she joked that a gift of a green woolen cap, emblazoned with Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish motto, would at least keep her head warm.

Unexpectedly, someone carried the cap to the podium. Sharar pulled it over her fuzz.

“Some are USC, some are UCLA, and some are Fightin’ Irish,” she began, as the crowd rose to its feet with a roar of applause.

“I am strictly Fightin’ Irish,” said Sharar, nee M’Closkey. Without missing a beat, she flashed a thumbs-up sign.

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