My Mother Was Nuts

  At the end of the gathering, the memorial, whatever you want to call it, everyone sat still for a few moments. No one moved. We had been ushered into a special place. For many of us, it was a trip back to a special time. We didn’t want to be reminded that it had ended. We wanted to hear Jerry pick up the phone one more time and say, as he always did, “Hey, babe.” We wanted his advice one more time, even though he always said the same thing: “Make it funny, honey.”

  We tried. He succeeded. As we testified that afternoon, the many laughs he had created lived on, and would live on, continuing to do their job, providing people a temporary timeout from the harshness and hardship of life. For that grown-up kid from El Centro who had given me so much professionally and personally, that was very cool.

  CHAPTER 45

  Get Me Some White Castles

  Garry, Penny, and Ronny at the 1992 American Comedy Awards, where Penny received the Creative Achievement Award

  Barbara Marshall / Tracy Reiner

  GARRY AND I WERE at an event for AARP in Las Vegas. He was telling old jokes to an old audience, and I was trying to keep up with him, apparently cracking a few funny lines of my own. Actors John Amos and George Takei were also on the panel with us. In sport coats and ties, they looked appropriate for a discussion on the Golden Age of television, as opposed to me, in a navy sweatshirt and baseball cap. I seemed ready for a pickup ballgame at the park.

  Garry said that I was hilarious, but I can’t remember what I said. It was the end of October 2009, and something was wrong with me. I walked off the stage in a daze. Garry was concerned about me. Sensing something was wrong, he asked how I felt and suggested I go back to L.A. with him. It was only a forty-five-minute flight, he said, and maybe I should see my doctor. He should have been more insistent.

  Assuring him that I was tired and would sleep on the plane, I gave him a hug at the airport before we went off to different terminals. I wanted to get to New York. God forbid I miss any fun. My friend Joanne worked for the New York Giants and had given me passes to the season’s first home game and I was attending a fund-raiser for the Brain Injury Association of New York State. But my never-ending quest for five more minutes of fun hit a snag at airport security. I couldn’t find my ID and they wouldn’t let me through.

  Annoyed, I snapped, “Obviously it’s me.” The TSA folks did not respond well to my testiness. They escorted me to a private room where I waited a few moments until the head officer came in. He looked at me and declared, “She’s Laverne. Let her go through.”

  After reaching New York, I spent the night in my apartment and woke up ready for the football game. My friend Diana picked me up. We spent the pre-game on the field, enjoying a close-up view of the festivities, celebrating the team’s Super Bowl victory the previous season. A lot of former players came back for the game, and Michael Strahan was pushed onto the field in a fake trophy. I was enjoying myself when it was time to make our way toward the owner’s seats. That required a walk up the stadium, halfway around, then back down to the front row on the 50-yard line.

  After getting up the first set of stairs, I began to have difficulty. A security guy from the Nets basketball games recognized me and offered to get a cart. Diana sat me down. “You’re walking funny,” she said. I looked down at my feet. “I don’t have on the right sneakers,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s that,” she said.

  One thing I did know was that I was feeling off, different, and suddenly that frightened me.

  “Let’s go home and watch on TV,” I said.

  A surgeon friend named Rula, who worked for Ronald Perelman, came over and said I seemed okay and maybe needed some rest. I called a masseuse I had used on several movies, and she came over and gave me a massage. Then I must have taken a Xanax to put me to sleep because the rest of the night is a blur. Apparently I called a number of people, including my brother, my assistant, Terry in L.A., and Chris Mullin’s wife, Liz. Later, they all told me the same story—that I had called but didn’t make any sense.

  I woke up in the morning in a semifog to find that Diana and my former assistant, Bonnie, had called Ronald, who had a car waiting downstairs to take me to the hospital. I must have been more out of it than I remember to have let them take me to the hospital without putting up a struggle. I’m too stubborn normally. After an exam and various tests in the emergency room, I was taken in a wheelchair back to the ER where Rula, Bonnie, and Diana were waiting for me.

  “See, I’m fine,” I said.

  But I wasn’t. Soon a sober-looking doctor came into the room holding my file with what I assume were the results of the preliminary tests. With a minimum of bedside manner, he got right to the point. I had lung cancer and a brain tumor. Bonnie ran out and threw up in the bushes. Rula and Diane, holding back tears, looked at me. I took a deep breath and let the news sink in. I was strangely, eerily calm, as I get in a crisis situation. It’s the way I imagine Michael Jordon must have felt in the final seconds of a game. Maybe it has to do with being a pragmatist and problem solver, and accepting life for what it is, rather than dwelling on what it isn’t. In any event, time slowed and my thinking grew sharper and clearer.

  “All right,” I said.

  “All right what?” Diana said.

  “Is the driver still here?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Diana said.

  “Good,” I said. “Can you send him to get me some White Castles?”

  They rolled me into the biggest private room I’d ever seen in my life. Ronald called my brother, my sister, and my daughter and told them to come to New York. The next day everyone arrived. They were all flipping out; I stayed calm. I treated the news like everything else that popped up unexpectedly on my agenda. As Carrie Fisher later observed, I don’t have a high enough voice to get crazy like everyone else. I was also impressed that there was a private chef on the floor. However, he only had a microwave oven, so he couldn’t even make an English muffin. But I learned his mother had taken dancing lessons from my mother.

  “Your mother was the Marjorie of Marjorie Marshall’s Dance School?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  “I grew up hearing all about it.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  It all came back to dance school.

  The room kept filling up with people. I don’t know how word spread, but family and friends came. My firemen friends came. Ronald was there, telling me to look at the view. The window looked out on New York. It was a stunning view, something you’d see in a Woody Allen movie. Just gorgeous. I couldn’t have cared less. I am not a hospital person.

  I had a benefit that night, the Brain Injury Association dinner. Lorraine Bracco and I, the honorary chairpersons for the event, got involved with the organization after a dear friend named Steve Green was injured in a hit-and-run accident in 2007. While visiting him at the hospital, we met Joanne Miller, who was heading the dinner. Her son, also named Steve, had been injured in a construction accident at the World Trade Center site. We all promised to support BIANYS. Once involved, I also learned about all the soldiers returning from the Gulf and Afghanistan with brain injuries of one kind or another. What I realized following 9/11 is that you can’t just lie in bed and wait for other people to do something. It’s up to you.

  “No, you’re not going,” Ronald said, looking around the room for support from my brother and the doctors he’d brought in.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “Lorraine is going with me. We’re the goddamn chairpersons. I have Otis Anderson from the Giants going. He’s a big guy. He has good hands. He’ll catch me if I fall.”

  “That’s not funny,” Ronald said.

  “I’m not in any pain,” I said. “I’m going.”

  As Jim Brooks once said, there’s no stopping me once I put my mind to something—even if my mind has a tumor. That night I got ready at my apartment and went to the event in a hydrogen-powered car that I had been asked to promote. I met Lorraine and Ronald and his wife, Anna, t
here. The event honored ABC reporter Bob Woodruff and Trisha Meili, the Central Park jogger, both of whom had overcome traumatic brain injuries. As the evening progressed, I went outside every once in a while for a cigarette. Each time, Ronald gave me a dirty look.

  “What? I already have the cancer,” I said.

  I returned to my palatial hospital room—feeling fine, I might add—where my brain surgery was scheduled for Friday. I met the surgeon, who said he was in the midst of getting a shotgun divorce and would then head to Florida to hunt and fish. So he was in a wonderful mood. Just the guy I wanted drilling into my skull. I spent all day Thursday filling out forms. Each one seemed the same. I must have written out all my allergies to opiates, latex, rubber, etc. a thousand times. The surgeon explained they would put me out with propofol, which I love, and also give me a little morphine. I heard that and went ballistic.

  “Do you not read the fucking forms?” I said. “I spent six hours writing down that I was allergic to opiates.”

  Ronald bent down and whispered in my ear: “You can’t yell at him. He’s doing me a favor.”

  “You yell at people,” I said.

  “That’s different.”

  “But I’m allergic,” I said.

  “How about Dilantin?” the doctor said.

  “Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  I ended up having Tylenol and feeling no pain. It was explained to me that there are no nerve endings up there. But I woke up with eighty-two IVs in one hand, which swelled to the size of a baseball mitt. Several nurses came in one after another and told me about the procedure I had just had and then they asked me to repeat it back to them. When the second nurse asked the same question, I snapped, “I already did that. I have it.” I’m not a great patient.

  “Just don’t yell at everyone,” Ronald said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I get frustrated.”

  After three or four more hours in the recovery room, I began insisting on a change. I had woken up in the fetal position because they didn’t know how to make the bed longer. The incompetence drove me nuts. Finally, they put me back in the big room, where my doctor visited me and said good-bye at the same time. He was on his way to Florida. That pissed me off, too. Later that night, I reached for my purse to light up a cigarette. My fireman friend Mikey, who was visiting, jumped out of his chair and grabbed the cigarette out of my hand.

  “Holy mother of—,” he said. “There are about to be eighty-five fire trucks here. Did you look behind you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m too busy looking at the beautiful view.”

  “Well, look behind you,” he said.

  I did. There was a row of oxygen tanks.

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, you could’ve blown up the hospital—or at least this floor.”

  So I was back in my apartment on Saturday.

  Ronald, bless him, had a twenty-four-hour driver and round-the-clock nurses for me. Friends brought groceries and sat in the kitchen while I dozed on and off. I kept my television on and set the air-conditioning so that my room was the temperature of a meat locker. Every four hours the poor nurses came into my bedroom to give me Tylenol and check my blood pressure. They dressed like they were braving a winter storm. The phone rang nonstop. There were fifty-two people in my apartment and everyone waited for me to answer.

  “Can’t someone pick up the fucking phone?” I growled at one nurse.

  “No, Miss Penny,” she said sweetly. “It’s for you.”

  I hated answering the phone. My throat was irritated from the tube they had put down it during surgery. I sounded like I was at death’s door. And everyone asked the same question: “Are you alive? I read you’re dying.” All the tabloids and gossip websites reported that I had liver cancer and only months to live. Pray for her, they said.

  “I’m not fucking dying,” I yelled into the phone countless times. “They make up shit.”

  After eight weeks, the stitches came out of my head, and I had the most enjoyable shower and shampoo of my life. Tracy took wonderful care of me—as did Ronald and the medical team he had arranged. Doctors, nurses, security, White Castles, and bagels … I was fortunate. I had the best care (and food) available. Did that make me the best patient? Probably not. One nurse kept trying to give me a Valium and take me for a walk. I thought she had it backward, and I wasn’t shy about telling her so.

  “Why don’t we walk and then I’ll take a Valium? Better yet, why don’t you take a Valium and I’ll keep watching TV? I can get to the kitchen just fine.”

  Now able to travel, I returned home, met with doctors, and set up a treatment plan. My surgeon was at Cedars-Sinai; I liked him. My radiologist was at UCLA; I liked him, too. My oncologist was also at UCLA; I didn’t like him. We had a run-in at the end of my first exam. He wanted to put a “smart port” in my chest. He said my veins wouldn’t be able to handle all the IVs I would need. That wasn’t the problem.

  The problem arose when he also said the port would be convenient at the end.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Death with dignity,” he said.

  Obviously he had never seen Laverne & Shirley. Otherwise he would’ve known I was not concerned about dignity.

  “You’ll be able to have a morphine drip,” he continued.

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “Didn’t you read the forms I filled out? I’m allergic to morphine. That’s not dignity. That’s me throwing up all over.”

  I didn’t plan on dying—not yet. As far as I was concerned, cancer was like my mother telling me it was getting dark outside and it was time to come in. But I could still see the ball. I wanted five more minutes—at least. I had 18 days of radiation for my head at UCLA. My friends Carlene Watkins Weinberger, Wendi Lasky, and my assistant Terry Trahan drove me every day. They made sure I didn’t get lost and were nice to the nurses. I got a pass to use the handicapped parking spaces; that made me happy. I also liked seeing Ronald Perelman’s name on the side of the hospital. It gave me a sense of comfort as I went through treatments. And as long as I was there, I saw a dentist at the David Geffen School of Dentistry.

  The radiation cleared my head of cancer—and of everything else around it. My memory was gone. Then I had to deal with the cancer in my lungs. They told me it was a little spot; fine. I knew that was better than a big spot or a lot of spots. Since I wasn’t fond of my “death with dignity” oncologist at UCLA, I changed to one at Cedars-Sinai. He headed the lung program. He and my surgeon knew that I was allergic to opiates, and they said I should have it zapped.

  They felt radiation and chemotherapy could be as effective as surgery. I went for treatments several times a week, and after six months the tumor disappeared. They were right. Zapping was better than cutting. Afterward, I went for monthly scans where they injected me with so many radioactive isotopes I could have lived in Japan. Each time I got good news.

  But there were side effects. I gained sixty pounds. Everyone else in the world on chemo and radiation loses weight. Somehow I got fat. Better fat than dead. At the Lakers and Clippers games, players on both teams and their opponents said they had me in their prayers. I had to constantly tell them that I wasn’t dying—except when they put me up on the JumboTron. Then I died of embarrassment. I looked like a big, fat South Park kid. I complained to my oncologist.

  “I’m depressed,” I said.

  “The reason you’re depressed is that you gained weight,” he said.

  “Well, how do I lose weight?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” he said. “I’m a lung doctor.”

  Great.

  Fortunately, Carrie Fisher was the new celebrity spokeswoman for Jenny Craig. I called her and asked for some meals. Thirty years earlier we had dropped acid. Now we were microwaving our Jenny meals. What had we become?

  Fat!

  Food wasn’t the only thing I gave up. I quit smoking cigarettes, too. A smoker since j
unior high school, I had read the warnings, heard the news reports, and knew the dangers. I had tried to quit numerous times before, including once while I was married to Rob (he begged me to start again), another time with Artie in Australia (we bet $10,000), and again in the early ’80s when I visited director Miloš Forman in London—and he asked that question worth repeating, “Why don’t you visit someone you hate?” I was a better smoker than not.

  I knew I couldn’t get off the nicotine alone. I brought in a guy from the Allen Carr’s Easyway center. Allen Carr was a British guy who was a chain smoker like me and quit after coming up with a theory that smoking was connected to the fears and anxieties of not being able to smoke. They even let you smoke while they explained the rationale behind their program.

  Kooky? Maybe. But it worked. I put out my last cigarette and didn’t light up again, didn’t miss it, didn’t have any withdrawal, and stayed that way for eight months. Then, on November 1, 2010, my friend Monica Johnson died of esophageal cancer. She was at Cedars-Sinai, the same place I had been getting my treatments. She had spent the past few years living in Palm Springs. A few weeks before her death she posted her own obit on her website:

  She went to the desert to find her health, her spiritual needs, herself, and to write a book. She wound up in Palm Springs across the street from the Spa Casino. The spiritual aspect of the desert renewal faded like everything else left in the sun.

  Monica’s sister-in-law, JoAnn Belson, hosted a memorial for her. I was among those who spoke. I was very emotional and thought a cocktail might help me through a tough afternoon, but I wasn’t a drinker. I didn’t like it. What I did like were cigarettes, and as I chatted with people afterward I said to myself, “I’ll just have one.” But I couldn’t smoke just one. I can’t have just one of anything. Lamps. Tomato plants. Hummingbird feeders. Autographed baseballs. And most certainly cigarettes. Within a day I was back to my same habit.