Carrying the Ball

It’s been a long and intense day with Lilly Tartikoff. On the patio of the Peninsula Hotel, we have talked about life and love and heartache. It was Lilly’s idea to escape the ringing telephones of her home. (She can’t bear not to answer a phone.) After midmorning Pellegrino, a Cobb salad lunch and late-afternoon herbal tea (Lilly’s tastes are basic Westside ascetic), she leaves me with a raft of images from her life. * There is Lilly in a red bikini at a tennis and pool party in L.A., meeting, for the first time, Brandon Tartikoff, the programming prodigy who would become head of NBC Entertainment at 31. They flirt shamelessly. * There is Lilly, pregnant, watching her new husband retch from the chemotherapy he must endure to treat a recurrence of Hodgkin’s disease in 1982. Each week, she soaks, in alcohol, the wig he uses to cover his treatment-induced baldness. * There is Lilly in an Isaac Mizrahi velvet gown, struggling to stifle a sob, mortified that she can’t, at last year’s Fire & Ice Ball, the fund-raiser she has turned into the city’s most prestigious charity event. She speaks lovingly of the husband she lost three months before. * There is Lilly in 1989, in one of her Armani suits, in the office of the dean of the School of Medicine at UCLA, telling him she will not raise one dime for any amorphous endowment.

She wants the money to go directly to UCLA oncologist Dennis Slamon and his research on breast and ovarian cancers.

There is Lilly, clashing with a doctor over her daughter Calla’s prognosis after a devastating brain injury in 1991. The doctor tells Lilly that she is the most difficult mother she has ever encountered. However, the doctor adds, Calla wouldn’t be upright if it weren’t for Lilly’s effort.

Now we’re back in front of her house in Beverly Hills, done for the day--or so I think--but Lilly is creating another image for me.

Here’s Lilly, leaning against her shiny black Lexus, pulling a notebook from her handbag, poring over her scribblings, the indefatigable master of her own image.

“I wrote this down in the middle of the night,” she says, checking her notes. “I have this indulgence.” She smiles, amused at herself. “I treat myself to parking tickets.”

It seems that in the years of trekking over to UCLA to talk to Slamon, she parked wherever she pleased, amassing a wad of parking tickets. Finally, this year, after raising $17 million for Slamon, UCLA rewarded her--with an unlimited parking pass.

“I won the booby prize,” she says, laughing, “no pun intended.”

It’s hardly brazen to accumulate parking tickets, but it is echt Lilly to wisecrack a term for the part of the body she’s raised millions to protect and heal. Then again, she is famous for saying whatever she wants whenever it pleases her.

When Lilly started making phone calls to recruit patrons to the first Fire & Ice Ball in 1990, before breast and ovarian cancers were discussed openly, she would jab waffling male entertainment executives with, “Your wife and daughters have breasts and ovaries, don’t they?”

“I was totally inappropriate on the phone,” she says now, contrite. Sort of.

It’s not just that Lilly can be disarming and funny on first meeting, and it’s not just that she was the wife of a powerful Hollywood figure--although those qualities have been indispensable in her fund-raising. Her most defining characteristic is her determination to control her life and the world in which she lives it, and toward that end, she will do or say anything. She will cajole, plead or threaten--”what I do best” she likes to say with a delicious laugh--to accomplish her mission.

Nowhere has her need for control been so evident as in her oversight of Calla’s excruciating recuperation. For Lilly, though, the results have been both stunning and disappointing. They offer evidence of the painful limits of even her control. She will never be able to will Calla, 15, completely healed--and she knows she must face that reality.

And as much as she loved and cared for Brandon, she could not make him slow down after his last bout of Hodgkin’s. He died in August 1997, his body racked by infections.

Now, at the age of 45, the widowed mother of two girls, Lilly must figure out how to weave all the strands of her old life into a new one: the Fire & Ice Ball and the other fund-raising events that she has conceived; her husband’s production company that she now helps run; a new house; a social life without Brandon.

“What’s next?” she asks out loud. “I don’t know where this is all leading. I’m able to do this networking. Do I stop? Do I keep going? Are people sick of me?” She puts away her notebook and walks inside to have dinner with her children.

“no one should feel sorry for me,” lilly says repeatedly over the course of several days.

She is slender and pretty. Her thick hair falls perfectly to her shoulders. She has a habit of periodically smoothing a lock of it behind an ear. When she discusses her daughter’s problems, she looks like a tired mother. When she grins mischievously, relishing a tale of her own outrageousness, she looks like a teenager.

Despite powerful men always figuring in her life, she is a girl’s girl. She has women friends dating back to junior high; she can spend hours on the phone; she will compare handbags as well as neuroses. Ask her if she gets a mammogram each year, she tells you she gets everything: “I get mammograms, I get sonograms, I get aspirated. They’re always, ‘She’s back! She’s back!’ ” Lilly can’t bear to do a monthly breast self-exam. “I go every six months or three months. I let them feel my breasts. I cannot do it myself. I’m too scared.”

Her life has all the extremes of soap opera. In some ways, it’s the life of your dreams. She lives in a Beverly Hills home behind a towering row of hedges and a locked entranceway. She keeps three cars--Lexus, Lexus, Range Rover--and arrives home to dinner prepared by a cook whom her younger daughter has dubbed “Cooker Carrie.” There are two housekeepers with staggered schedules. Clothes are sent from Neiman Marcus, leather goods from Hermes, for her browsing.

In other ways, this is the life of your worst nightmare: a husband dead at 48; a daughter who will always have vision problems, walk a little differently and never have complete use of her left arm.

Lilly grew up not far from where she lives now. The daughter of a clothing accessories manufacturer, she was raised in a middle-class Beverlywood home with two sisters. Her parents were Holocaust survivors who spent their adolescence in the camps.

Lilly spent much of her childhood in dance studios. After high school, she attended the School of American Ballet at Julliard in New York City on a scholarship. She hoped to earn a spot in the New York City Ballet. She did. By the age of 18, she was a member of one of the world’s best dance companies.

Without subjugating her own formidable personality, Lilly has been influenced by four men who have been giant presences in four different fields. In the time line of her life, they overlap, yet each has taken her in a radically new direction.

At the New York City Ballet, she met the first of those men--the great and forbidding choreographer George Balanchine, who both taught her and terrorized her. Because of him, she had the discipline to survive dancing to Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 2, which she and her colleagues referred to as “the throw-up” ballet, because that’s what you’d want to do when you were finished. She danced with the company for eight years, traveling the world, once spurning the advances of ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov. “I figured the fantasy,” she says, “would be better than the reality.”

Then one day she quit--”I realized I couldn’t do ‘The Nutcracker’ one more time”--and returned to Los Angeles.

By this time, her courtship with Brandon was underway on two coasts. She lived briefly at home and then moved in with him. Before she left ballet, she had insisted that Brandon see her dance in Europe. “It was really important to me that he see my world, because I knew that if I got involved with him, his world was going to take over like The Blob.”

And so it did, making Brandon the second--and most important--of the men with whom her life became intertwined.

Brandon had already beaten back Hodgkin’s once when, shortly before their marriage in 1982, he found a lump on his neck. Two doctors said it wasn’t a recurrence, but he sought a third opinion from Dennis Slamon, an oncologist just starting a career in research at UCLA. Slamon discovered that Brandon was indeed suffering from cancer.

At that moment, the connection between the Tartikoffs and Slamon--known as Denny--began. Shepherding Brandon through chemotherapy, he became a good friend, something he rarely has allowed himself to do with patients. He became the third prominent man in Lilly’s life--the scientist who could cure breast and ovarian cancer, she decided, if she could just raise enough money for him.

Slamon put her off for six years. “I just didn’t want to use their friendship and Brandon’s connections,” he says. She was determined, though.

Not that life with Brandon was unengaging. It was a big romantic comedy. President of NBC Entertainment for 11 years, he was a “boy-man,” in Lilly’s words, a workaholic, a baseball fanatic and a ham. Lilly laughed at his goofball tendencies--he once gave her a talking scale for her birthday--and understood his passion. When he brought home boxes of scripts to read, he wanted her to study them, too.

For years, when the Tartikoffs went out and someone asked her what she did for a living, she would say she “used to” dance with the New York City Ballet. Brandon would crack, “That was a long time ago.”

She knew he was right. Still, it annoyed her to be asked at parties to account for herself.

“I felt like saying, ‘I just took care of someone who had cancer . . . .’ I’d think to myself, ‘I danced at the Kremlin. I danced on the same stage as Baryshnikov. What have you done, you pretend-actress?’ But I wouldn’t say that. I would say, ‘I’m a mother.’

“It started to wear me down, but that’s not why I created the program,” she says of the Fire & Ice Ball. “But I have to say it did solve a problem for me. Nobody ever asks me what I do now.”

In 1989, Lilly finally persuaded Slamon to let her raise funds for him by threatening to do it instead for the eccentric billionaire Armand Hammer. She threw herself into the project, getting Slamon to tutor her on his work on the Her-2/neu gene, which regulates cell growth. Slamon discovered a link between an alteration of the gene and rapid tumor growth in 30% of breast cancers and 20% of ovarian cancers.

She then went to Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman. Like a number of Hollywood wives, she sat on an advisory board for Max Factor, at that time a division of Revlon, and she had made several suggestions for advertising that caught Perelman’s eye. When she landed a meeting with him in New York to discuss Slamon’s research, Perelman was curious but unsure.

“Part of it was getting a fix on what Denny was about and what he was doing,” Perelman says. “And I think part of it was getting to understand Lilly a little better and find out how committed she was. It was kind of out of the blue. It was neither a close friend coming to me with a project that I didn’t know about nor a stranger with an existing project that you could evaluate.”

Lilly made the case for directly funding a project like Slamon’s: The money would have an immediate effect on the speed at which the work was being done.

While Perelman was considering his decision, he made a recommendation to Lilly over lunch. Why not raise funds for other causes? Crestfallen, she burst into tears.

“I was nearly obsessed about this one issue,” Lilly says. “I was just so frustrated because he was talking to me about other areas, other issues. And so he said, ‘Lilly, don’t cry. We’ll talk about it. You’ll come to New York again, and we will talk about it.’ Then my next trip to New York was when he said yes. I literally jumped on the sofa. I was like a maniac.”

Perelman agreed to give $2.4 million over three years to Slamon and create the Revlon/UCLA Women’s Cancer Research Program. Perelman had one condition--he wanted Lilly to give a gala that would prompt Los Angeles society into raising money along with him. Thus was born the Fire & Ice Ball, named after Revlon’s famous 1952 ad campaign for Fire & Ice lipstick. With that, Perelman became the fourth man to bring a focus to Lilly’s life.

From the beginning, she worked Brandon’s Rolodex, aware that people were taking her calls and enduring her pleas because she was the wife of Brandon Tartikoff. “That never bothered me,” she says. “That was the only reason I was able to pull it off. Brandon would say, ‘Stop using my name; use your name.’ ” She laughs. “I said, ‘I’ll use your name, my name, Ron Perelman’s name--anything to do this.’ ”

It worked. The gala--”my ball,” Lilly loves to call it--gathered the Hollywood aristocracy. The Fire & Ice Ball quickly joined, even surpassed in glamor, the city’s most glittery fund-raisers: the AIDS Project Los Angeles event and the Carousel of Hope Ball in support of juvenile diabetes. This is not the ticket you give away to your personal assistant or your trainer. These days, the only difficult phone calls Lilly has to field are from those who can’t get in.

Tickets are $1,000 a person, and tables go for up to $50,000. The exceptions are the many celebrities who are invited free. “They’re doing me a favor,” Lilly explains. She also pays the way of the scientists who work with Slamon. With political deftness, Lilly arranges all the tables, deciding which executives will sit where. She places her table, where Perelman sits, not in the front row but closer toward the middle, thereby casting some A-list chic to more parts of the room.

The ball, which moves from venue to venue, usually a studio sound stage, features a fashion show. Lilly and her organizers pride themselves on putting on a more elaborate gala than the previous year’s. For the ninth Fire & Ice Ball, which will take place this Wednesday at Universal Studios, Donatella Versace will stage the fashion show. Jerry Seinfeld will host.

Last year the ball grossed $2.98 million. The affair, though is an expensive undertaking. Lilly’s event planners filed financial reports stating that the 1997 dinner cost $1.1 million. That still left $1.88 million to distribute, mostly to Slamon’s program, with a portion going to other women’s health programs at UCLA. Lilly included in this net figure the $1.2 million that Perelman gives. Over the years, the balls have netted $13 million.

Barely a month after Lilly’s first triumphant ball, the tragedy that would test her fortitude, her marriage and her will occurred. On Jan. 1, 1991, near Lake Tahoe, Nev., Brandon pulled his car onto U.S. Highway 50 and was hit by another vehicle. (No charges were filed.) Brandon suffered a broken pelvis and several other fractures. Calla sustained cataclysmic injuries.

For the next six months, Lilly stripped her life bare of anything other than her daughter’s care. She wouldn’t let her mother, her sisters or her friends visit her in the hospital in Nevada or Childrens Hospital in L.A.

“I felt that if I spent one minute speaking to someone, walking them to the elevator door or explaining what was going on, that was time away from stretching Calla, talking to her, working with her.”

She and Brandon, though, were incapable of comforting each other. “I said to Brandon, ‘You need someone to take care of you, and I need someone to take care of me.’ It was nearly impossible for us to take care of each other. We were two broken people.

“I always said it was a testament to Brandon’s and my friendship that we survived, because 99% of people don’t survive tragedies like that.”

After Calla left Childrens Hospital and after Lilly had dismissed more than 14 different therapists in Los Angeles, Lilly heard about a therapist in New Orleans. She put herself and her daughter on a private jet and flew to Louisiana. She met the therapist and called Brandon, informing him that she would not be “leaving until this woman tells me to go home.” A couple of months later, Brandon quit as chairman of Paramount and joined his family for what would be a five-year stay.

The one thing Lilly allowed herself to do during that period was plan the Fire & Ice Ball. It was a lifeline--the same way that Brandon had work and softball games. Gradually they began to rebuild a life in New Orleans. Brandon started his own production company and commuted to L.A. regularly. They adopted an infant--after attempts to conceive failed--and named her Elizabeth.

Today, according to Lilly, Calla has made enormous progress but still has substantial problems. “The way she puts things together, her thought processes are not yours or mine,” Lilly says. She attends ninth grade, assisted by a “shadow teacher.”

Anticipating a return to Los Angeles, the Tartikoffs bought a new house in Bel-Air, but the family hadn’t even moved back before another crisis struck. After 15 years free of Hodgkin’s, Brandon faced another recurrence in the fall of 1996. They moved into their old house, and in April 1997, he was given a stem cell transplant, a grueling procedure that left his body fatigued and his immune system vulnerable.

Despite the admonitions of his doctor, Brandon couldn’t slow down. He would go to UCLA for a doctor’s visit and then slip over to multiple meetings he had scheduled, blaming his late return home on traffic. “I was crying and screaming and begging and pleading,” Lilly says. “As much as I tried to control everything, Brandon was out of my control.”

“He got infection after infection after infection,” says Slamon, who was among the doctors treating him. Brandon died at UCLA on Aug. 27, 1997.

In the commissary on the Warner Bros. lot, Lilly contemplates her future. Since the inception of Fire & Ice, she has organized several other cancer fund-raisers. Most notably, in 1993, she co-founded the Revlon Run/Walk, which has netted $4 million.

Meanwhile, she has been running Brandon’s production company with former television executive Kim Fleary. The one TV movie project that went into production fizzled in the ratings. It’s not clear that her heart is in this. It may be a way to continue Brandon’s legacy, but television doesn’t appear to captivate her the way it did her late husband.

Then there are the heartbreaking questions about Calla. Can Lilly accept that her daughter may never be what she was before the accident. “She’s the bravest child you will ever meet, and I would like everything to be fine. And things aren’t. And I have to deal with that.”

Then there is the question of a personal life. More than a year has passed since Brandon’s death. She has just begun to go to dinner parties, but she stays only for cocktails, still uncomfortable being alone. She has not dated since her husband’s death.

“I would love to have a grown-up dinner and be able to be out with a man and talk about interesting things,” she says. “Is that a date?”

As we stroll the Warners lot, I tell her it sounds like one.

“It’s just been recently that people have said to me ‘I’ve got to think of someone for you. I’ve got to set you up.’ ”

So you’re ready to go out on a date?

“I think I could go out to dinner, right? OK. All right.” She sounds resolved.

She thinks of something. “I don’t have dating clothes,” she says, laughing hard.