Odds & Ends Around the Valley

Blind Ambition

In 1973, actor Charlton Heston received a letter from a Woodland Hills woman saying she wanted his help to start an organization to fight retinitis pigmentosa.

“I wrote that most people didn’t even know how to pronounce the name much less anything about this genetic disease that causes degeneration of vision and finally blindness,” the woman, Helen Harris, now recalls.

“But I said that Saks Fifth Avenue--which was just opening a store in the Promenade Mall in Woodland Hills--had offered to have a benefit to help raise funds for my new organization, which I was starting from the table in my kitchen, and that while people might not come to a benefit fashion show for a disease they didn’t know, everyone knew Charlton Heston.”

Harris told Heston that she wanted to provide information to health care professionals, to people who might have the disease and to the public. She also wanted to set up skills enhancement programs for those whose sight was failing. And she wanted to provide financial help to hospitals that were trying to find a cure for this disease.

It was an outrageously bold set of goals for one woman, who herself had the disease and who was raising three young sons, two of whom also had it. But Heston and his wife, Lydia, agreed to lend their names, support and presence to the first event, which raised $20,000 to give the organization a start.

Today, there are 350 chapters with more than 20,000 members of Retinitis Pigmentosa International, administrated from the RP facility Vision House in Van Nuys.

Two of those members are David Doyle, the Encino character actor who played, among a multitude of other roles, Bosley on “Charlie’s Angels,” and his wife, Anne, a former actress and dancer who has had RP for almost 30 years.

The Doyles fell in love 24 years ago when they were in a Lincoln Center production of “South Pacific.”

“She told me she had retinitis pigmentosa and that she was facing the loss of her vision,” David Doyle recalls. “I told her that whatever she was facing, she would be doing it with me at her side.”

The Doyles, after marriage and a move to the West Coast, met up with Helen Harris at that same 1973 Saks benefit. The Doyles were amazed that anyone even knew about retinitis pigmentosa, much less was starting an organization to fund research and help those who had the disease.

“Helen was a dynamo then and, even though her sight is almost gone, she is a dynamo today,” Anne Doyle said.

Of the Doyles, Harris now says they were ardent supporters from the minute they were introduced to her by the Hestons.

So it is fitting that the Promenade Mall is celebrating its new face lift with a gala coming-out benefit party from 6:30 p.m. to midnight April 4, that Retinitis Pigmentosa International is the financial beneficiary of the social, that Anne and David Doyle are the honored guests and that Saks is one of the major event sponsors.

The event is open to the public for $100 a ticket, all of which will go for support and retraining programs for those afflicted, as well as for research on the disease, for which there is no known cure.

“It’s going to be one gigantic party,” the Promenade Mall’s Elizabeth Pedersen-Knapp said. “There will be fashion shows, wine tasting, fabulous food and something going on everywhere.”

In honor of its place in RPI’s history, Saks will throw a VIP benefit celebrity party that evening to which the public may come for a $250 donation, which also allows the donor to attend the general event.

Let Costner Be Costner

Just when you think that you’ve heard the last of the Kevin Costner being a nice guy sightings, along comes another.

This one’s from North Hollywood’s Patti Van Patten, who most recently was seen with husband Dick (“Eight Is Enough”) on the Easter Seal telethon for the third year.

Patti, who met Dick when she was a dancer and actress and he an actor on Broadway, has resumed her acting career now that her three sons are grown. That’s why she was trying out for producer-actor Kevin Costner for a small part in his upcoming Warner Bros. release, “The Bodyguard.”

“I gave three different readings for the part and Kevin, who was one of the people at the audition, kept nodding encouragingly. I thought to myself that he really is a nice man, which is what the Hollywood party line on him is,” Van Patten said.

She was even more pleasantly pleased when, after she had been thanked for coming in, Costner followed her out from the reading to tell her how much he had liked what she had done and to have a friendly chat.

The cap came, Van Patten says with a laugh, when she said it was really nice of him to be so encouraging to an absolute stranger. Costner shook his head and told her that they were old friends.

“He reminded me that we had met about 10 years ago in an acting class and then proceeded to repeat almost verbatim a conversation we had had.”

Uniform Support

For Kevin Finch of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, there was nothing much going on that night two weeks ago when he responded to a possible suicide call in Lost Hills.

A woman had called her boyfriend and said she had taken enough of a prescription pain killer to kill herself because there was no other way to erase the past year’s pain.

Finch went to the woman’s home but could not find her. He finally talked to her, after he had hooked up with her boyfriend, when she called her boyfriend’s car phone.

“She was scared and desperate and didn’t have much hope of ever being happy again,” Finch said. He talked the woman into telling him her location and got her to Westlake Community Hospital in time for her life to be saved.

This wasn’t the end of the story for Finch. Later, he went to the hospital to visit the woman, who was then receiving psychiatric counseling. He learned that her depression started when she was involved in an accident in November.

It seems that after a man had been knocked off his motorcycle on the Ventura Freeway by someone else, she ran over his body, Finch said the woman told him. It was a devastating experience for her that she just couldn’t get over.

Said Finch: “Police work is not all about chasing the bad guys.”

Junior Seniors

Dee Call, head of the Burbank Retired Senior Volunteer Program, said the economy is providing her with some additional recruits.

Call provides volunteers who are retired and want to be useful to their community to such organizations as the Red Cross, Burbank Unified School District and Cancer Society.

But lately, with so many people out of work, she’s finding that many folks who don’t qualify as senior citizens are asking to be placed.

“We’ve had many people who are thirtysomething come in to see if we could use their services,” Call said. “They don’t have anything to do with their time between jobs and we are happy to put them to work.”

Call said most of the “kids” don’t last long, however.

“It’s become a joke around here that as soon as we place one of the young ones, they get a good job offer,” she said.

Overheard

“Now Dr. (Cecil) Jacobson’s a guy who can really say he gave at the office.”--North Hollywood woman talking on the phone about infertility doctor convicted of using his own sperm to artificially inseminate patients