Goodbye, Gilda Radner
You saw the snood first: the small head, wrapped in a chic little turban with a few strands of downy hair showing at the crown. She kept her back to the room, always taking the last booth by the ladies’ room. Often, she had been sitting alone for half an hour or an hour, gathering her thoughts, making notes in a small notebook, shaping the senseless events of her life into a story that frequently assumed the power of allegory. She was never late. Over a period of five months, not a soul recognized her, except Jon Voight, and even he was thrown off — uncertain, seemingly frozen in midstride and at a loss for words, as he gathered her in with his eyes and grasped the essence of her struggle.
Our meeting place was a health-food restaurant in Westwood, the Disneyland-tidy province of UCLA students. Gilda liked the Good Earth. She liked the curiously flavored decaffeinated tea; she liked the tuna salad that arrived in a large bowl shedding alfalfa sprouts. When she ate, she ate with gusto; often she didn’t eat. Probably, she liked the fact that the management let her sit and talk deep into the afternoon, interrupted only rarely by obsequious help, many of whom were barely past toddling by the time she was a star. Invariably, she was kind to them. Occasionally, there was conversation about trying someplace new, but there is much to be said for predictability when one’s life is, at bottom, hopelessly out of control.
By the time Gilda decided to write a book about her experience with cancer, she had been ill for almost two years. One year had been spent in a malaise of fatigue and confusion that began near the end of the London filming of Haunted Honeymoon, in which she started with her husband, Gene Wilder. When she returned to the U.S., she sought help from a multitude of doctors. Some of them were so surprised to discover Gilda Radner in their examining room they grew tongue-tied and fidgety; she sensed they were waiting for her to say something funny. Others were as ignorant of her identity as they were of the source of her complaints. A few indicated to her that she was imagining her problems. For a while, she accepted their judgment, having suspected herself of being a world-class neurotic for some time. Then one doctor proposed she was suffering from the newly named “chronic-fatigue syndrome,” a debilitating malady that is, so far, without a known cause or cure. She went east, where an expert confirmed the diagnosis. When his explanation failed to calm her, the gentle Boston doctor looked at her squarely and asked her just what it was she feared. “I am afraid I have cancer,” she told him. He tried to reassure her but advised her to continue having blood tests and to remain in contact with a doctor.
The specter refused to vanish. For Gilda, the disease had assumed the proportion of a family curse. Her grandmother died of stomach cancer shortly before Gilda’s birth. When she was twelve, her father, the prosperous owner of a Detroit hotel, developed brain cancer and died two years later. Then the disease claimed her aunt. Her mother was stricken much later with breast cancer, although she recovered. But it was her father, not her mother, to whom Gilda was closest. His lugubrious, unfathomable death haunted her adulthood. Although she occasionally suspected she had outwitted cancer — by talent, by stardom, by goodness, by hilarity — her confidence was always temporary.
“I’ve been having cancer premonitions since I was twelve,” she said.
When the high-tech doctors failed her, she turned to the holistic ones. She had pains in her legs so intense she could barely sit still; like the doomed child in the Hans Christian Andersen fable “The Red Shoes,” she had to keep moving. The fog, as she described the strange fatigue ailment, continued to roll in and out intermittently. She found herself envying people who were without pain, without fatigue. Her stomach began to swell. A concerned vitamin purveyor recommended coffee enemas when his protein powders, herbs and roots and “bags of seeds and leaves,” as Gilda described them, failed. Gilda passed on the enemas, but she was deeply touched by the fact that he called her once a day. Escalating his protocol, he prescribed colonic irrigation. He gave her a fancy address in Beverly Hills; she was so exhausted his assistant had to drive her there. The procedure yielded a bean sprout. Gilda saw the lonely vegetable splash by in the plastic tube.
The sight of that bean sprout unnerved all involved. Perfectly intact, it was all her body would give up, more a rebuke than a clue. Later, when she had survived what she thought would be the worst of her ordeal, she fashioned the event into a vignette that was funnier than anything Roseanne Roseannadanna had ever pulled from her unsavory mailbag. Here was Gilda, live, without the crude accent and the absurd wig, an innocent foundering in a reprobate world, her body so out of tune it identified the health faddists’ favorite garnish as a foreign object.
Inadvertently, one of the high-tech practitioners interrupted the holistic goings-on when he called Gilda to report an unusual blood-test result. “Relax,” he told her. “It’s probably nothing.” Nevertheless, he wanted to see her. She canceled her next appointment with the herb-and-root man. At last a real doctor, impressed by her ballooning abdomen, was moved to action. The same day, technicians in a Century City hospital abandoned her to the joyless interior of a CAT scanner. Film was rapidly available. Her diagnosis was ovarian cancer, a form of cancer that is hard to detect before its progress is nearly unstoppable. Gilda didn’t leave the gleaming towers of Century City for some time.
Goodbye, Gilda Radner, Page 1 of 6