It's Always Something (26 page)

W
hen Gene and I got married in the south of France in September of 1984, we spent the week before our wedding at our favorite château. We liked to play tennis at ten or eleven in the morning before the sun got too hot. One morning we looked out from our little villa and there was a couple on the only tennis court, playing singles at the time we most liked to play. We stood there in shock—Well, who are they? Did they sign up for the court? What right do they have to play at our favorite time? We called the concierge. He said these people had signed up every day for the next four or five days for that time on the tennis court. We spent that day being angry about it and playing our tennis in the scorching hot sun. The next day we took a chance. We put on our tennis clothes, walked down there and asked the other couple if they’d be interested in playing doubles. They said sure.

They were an older couple. The man had a slight limp and couldn’t move a lot, but his shots were great. His wife was an excellent player, quite a bit taller than he was and very athletic. The four of us made for a good game. The fact that I’m such a bad player made up for the fact that the man couldn’t move fast. We had a great time and decided we’d play every day. Every morning at ten o’clock, we were out there in a heated game of doubles. After the fourth day, because they were going to leave, we actually sat down to talk. The man would call Gene and me Jim and Gail. He just never heard our names right, and we never corrected him. We all sat down to have some water after playing. They asked us, what did we do? Gene said, “I’m in movies,” and I said, “I’m in television.”

They had never seen either of us. We were Jim and Gail, until we said that we were Gene and Gilda. Then the woman spoke up and said, “My husband and I aren’t in the kind of work where we get to see a lot of entertainment.”

She owned an antique store and traveled a lot.

“The reason we’re here is that my husband is being honored next week in Paris for his work in chemotherapy.”

They introduced themselves, Dr. and Mrs. Ezra Greenspan. In the sixties, Dr. Greenspan developed many of the protocols of multiple chemotherapy used today. Back then, doctors would give one-drug chemotherapy, but Greenspan experimented with multiple-drug therapy. They said he was nuts, but he pursued his research, and now it is standard treatment for breast cancer. You don’t get one drug, you get a mixture of drugs. He is called “the father of chemotherapy.” We asked Dr. Greenspan about Gene’s sister, who was going through chemotherapy and radiation therapy for breast cancer, and he said to tell her to make sure she finished her year of chemotherapy. “It’s very important she finishes the course, the modality of treatment.” Then they left and went on to Paris. I remember we told Gene’s sister about it, but I didn’t think much about Dr. Ezra Greenspan until I got cancer myself.

•  •  •

After I was almost finished with my treatments in California, friends of ours who knew the Greenspans in New York told me Dr. Greenspan had heard that I had cancer and had said to these people, “If Gilda ever wants to call me, please let her know that I’d be glad to talk to her.” At the time, I had so many doctors and I was on the West Coast and he was in New York. I didn’t call him but I had his number. It remained on my list of things to do for months and months. But he didn’t come up again until the
Life
magazine article came out. About a week after it was on the stands, he wrote to me and sent me a copy of
Cope
magazine because he was on the cover of it. In it was an article about his work with breast cancer and his interest in the field of immunology. He said in his letter, “We are doing great work in the control and management of ovarian cancer and when you’re back East, if you’re feeling up to it, my wife and I would love to play tennis again.”

I wrote him back and said, “I want you to know that after all this treatment I’ve been through, I still play tennis as badly as I did before and we’d love to meet with you sometime.”

That was the extent of our correspondence. I remember showing the letter to Gene and saying to him, “Why did he say ‘control and management of ovarian cancer,’ why didn’t he say ‘curing ovarian cancer’?”

Gene said, “Well, you know, doctors don’t want to stick their necks out and say that they can absolutely cure something.”

That appeased me. Poor Gene spends half his life responding to the meanings I make up for things. I still kept Ezra Greenspan’s name and phone number on my list of things to do.

By mid-June, in beautiful Connecticut, I was heavily into the macrobiotic way of life. I had to learn a whole new language of food—
umeboshi plum
was a condiment,
gomashio
were ground sesame seeds and
nori
was a kind of seaweed. There was a drink called
sweet kuzu.
It filled my brain. I’d have days when I was depressed and couldn’t get out of bed or I wouldn’t feel good. Anthony would come up and stand by my bed and give me health lectures about what I needed in terms of food and attitude. Gene was happy to have some of the responsibility lifted off his shoulders. It’s a pain in the neck to have somebody who’s worried about dying around—the whole house gets gloomy. In the weeks after my recurrence, before my macrobiotics, we would try to go out to dinner with people, but I couldn’t eat because of the lump of fear in my throat. I would just stare off and the other people would be eating. Because my delight was gone, I kept thinking,
Why are they talking, how can they be enjoying themselves and drinking and ordering this food?
I was in the black, deep, dark hole, really depressed. But it wasn’t even depression, it was just tremendous fear and anger. So the compulsiveness of macrobiotics was soothing. I needed it so badly, and I was glad to find someone like Anthony to be with me, willing to talk about it day and night.

I was sitting at my desk one day, I think it was a Monday, and Gene came in and said, “I just spoke to the All-New, Improved Connecticut Oncologist and he says he really would like to see you.”

I said, “Well, I’m not going to see him, but since you’re so busy making phone calls everywhere, why don’t you call this number?” I handed him the paper with Ezra Greenspan’s name and number on it.

He said, “All right, I will,” and he disappeared into his office while I went outside to walk on pebbles in my bare feet.

A little later Gene called to me. He was excited. “Come in here, come in here. I want you to talk to Dr. Greenspan, he’s on the phone.”

I said, “I don’t want to.”

“Just talk to him, Gilda. Just get on the phone and listen.”

I got on and he said, “Gilda.” He has a gruff voice and sounds like Mel Brooks, a real fast New York accent. “Gilda, listen to me, listen to me. You’re doing the wrong thing, you’re on the wrong thing. You shouldn’t be on carboplatin. You’ve had enough of that, you don’t need it. You’re going to be fine, you’re going to be okay. You have to get on a mixture of drugs. You have to get on methotrexate, Adriamycin, 5-FU. We put you on a mixture of drugs, we build you up a little bit with testosterone, get the bone marrow cooking. You’re going to be fine. We’ll get the CA-125 down to a little smidgen of a thing, then build you up. You’ll be playing tennis in no time.”

He fast-talked like a car salesman.

“It’s no problem. I got fifteen women now with the same thing as you—the recurrence and everything—and they’re doing great.”

I said, “I don’t want to be sick from chemo.”

He said, “You’ve already had the worst. Just come into the office, would you please just come into the office this Thursday or Friday? Just come in.”

He caught me up.

I said, “Thursday?”

He said, “That’s terrific. Three o’clock, three o’clock,” and he hung up the phone.

Gene came in and his eyes were all wide as though he was thinking my whole personality would now change. He was excited, but I just turned around and walked out.

I said, “I’m supposed to go in Thursday, I have an appointment with him.”

Gene held back everything he was thinking and just said, “Okay.”

I said to him, “I’m not going on chemo again, I’m done with chemo. He’s just listing a whole lot of other poisons for me to take and it’s going to be hell.”

All I could think of was losing my hair again, and becoming debilitated and so on and so forth.

“But what did you think about what he said? That the carboplatin was wrong, and everything?”

I said, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

On Thursday, when Gene and I went in to see Greenspan, I weighed about ninety-five pounds. I had lost so much weight and I was very weak because of the macrobiotic diet and the effects of the carboplatin on my bone marrow. Dr. Greenspan’s office was on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It was crammed with people. I looked at them all real closely to see what they looked like and who had on wigs. A lady went by in a wheelchair who had real short hair and she was blown up like a balloon, obviously on steroids. I just shuddered at everything. I wanted to go back to my macrobiotic life. We went in and there was Dr. Greenspan, whom I hadn’t seen in four years. His face was open and sweet. He
still
had trouble remembering Gene’s name. We brought all my medical records for him to look at. He went over them, real fast—he does everything real fast.

Then he said, “I want to examine you. Let me see, first I’ve got to see what kind of cell it was.”

We brought my CAT scan and X-rays. He had a radiotherapist and X-ray machine right in his office. There was nothing fancy about the office. It was crowded and laid out horribly, piled with books and with all his awards on the wall. If I asked him something, he would say, “Look at that document on the wall, it says my research on yadah, yadah shows this.”

He’s a bit of an egomaniac, but also very specific. He looked at my records and said, “Okay, we’re in luck. It’s the right kind of cell. I’ll tell you, you get on this program. You’re going to start off with one drug and you’re going to have chemo every week. Once a week or every ten days starting with 5-FU, then with 5-FU and methotrexate, then every third week with 5-FU, methotrexate and Adriamycin.”

I said, “I don’t want to take Adriamycin because of the heart damage.”

He said, “You’re going to take Adriamycin, you’re going to take it. I’m not going to give you that much, I’m going to watch it. I got a lady eighty years old, she’s the only one who’s had a little heart damage from it. I’m going to monitor it, I’m going to watch it, I’m not going to give you more than you can take.”

He was such a character that it was like going to see Mel Brooks or Willy Wonka for a medical opinion. He sounded like the Wizard of Oz did when he was selling himself. Gene was pleased; he was suppressing a smile.

Gene and I had been living with my fifteen-percent chance of survival on carboplatin. So suddenly Gene said to Greenspan, “What are the chances that this will work?”

Greenspan immediately answered, “Eighty-five percent, with a little luck. Let me examine you.”

He took me in the examining room, gave me an overall exam, a pelvic and a rectal exam and felt around my lymph nodes.

“You’re too thin, you’ve got to eat more.”

I told him about my bowel problem and he said, “Well, eat anyway. Eat soup, eat juice from meat.”

He wanted me to build myself up. He didn’t tell me to stop the macrobiotics, but he said I had to add more protein to my diet. Before I knew it his nurse, Heather, was giving me a shot of testosterone, the male hormone, which helps to build the bone marrow, and a B
₁₂
shot to build up my red blood cells. Heather is an eleven-year survivor of leukemia. She still gets chemo once every four months. She’s Australian and a ball of fire.

“We’ll have you bouncin’ aroun’ in no time.”

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 without being on macrobiotics, that I could laugh again, and that I could eat vanilla cake with vanilla icing and maybe have a cheeseburger or do something with my girlfriend Judy. I didn’t have to be isolated anymore. The comedienne inside me peeked through the little door and thought about making people laugh again. Ezra Greenspan was pulling on that door from the other side saying, “If you just come through here, if you’ll have this chemotherapy, everything can be okay.”

He was so positive, he was offering me hope. He said, “I’m going to treat you like my own daughter.”

Well, there were the magic words. Somebody who once saw Dr. Greenspan said he had a mashed-potato face—a face you want to kiss. He said, “This will work,” and then he talked about building up my immune system with certain medications in order to fight the cancer.

I asked, “How long do I have to be on the chemo?” and he said, “Two months, three months every week, then once every three weeks, and then maybe maintenance doses for a few years.”

“Will I lose my hair?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, then made a face as if to say, “What are you talking about your hair for when we’re talking about your life?”

I said, “I don’t want to be nauseous.”

“What is being nauseous if you get your life at the end?”

His replies reminded me of a cantankerous rabbi. I said I wanted to do my television show and he said, “By January you’ll be okay to do it. You hair might not be exactly what you want it to be.”

I said, “When I had this CAT scan in Connecticut, the Connecticut oncologist said to me, ‘You have these nodules in your abdomen, there’s a shadow on your lung, there are spots on your liver.’ He said he could give me chemo and it was treatable, but he implied that I only had a few years.”

Dr. Greenspan just laughed. He laughed as if to say, “What a crock of shit!” He made me retake the chest X-ray—there was
no
shadow on my lung. He said the cells were
on
my liver, not
in
my liver—and there was a big difference. He was talking about restoring my future, not just prolonging my life. He was giving me an eighty-five-percent chance at the whole potatoes, at life.