When I started screaming, I would watch my parents recoil as if my words had literally slapped their faces. But they just looked at me with great sympathy and kindness—and the more kindness they showed me, the more enraged I became. I wanted to spar. When you’re on a steroid high, you want confrontation; but my parents were smart and intuitive, and they took it very stoically.
My heart breaks for my parents because they never knew who was going to show up at the table for dinner in those days. Was I going to be the steroid monster and snap and hiss at everything? Was I going to be depressed, or would they get Mr. Sunshine? It was Guess Which Personality Is Coming to Dinner?
“You are making us feel like you don’t want us here, but we’re just here to help you!” my mother would tell me, as I seethed at her and my dad across the table. And when I came down from my drug trip I would realize what I’d done, and feel like the worst son in the world.
CHAPTER 8
Kidney Is the New Black
Dear friends, I’d like to introduce you to Annabelle.
Annabelle is the love child of
Miss Abby Finer and Mr. Steven Cojocaru.
This little bundle of love was born on January 14, 2005,
weighing approximately 5 ounces and
approximately 12 centimeters long.
Her color was a healthy deep pink, and she was in robust
health.
One of the serious, realistic risks for any kidney transplant patient is that their organ might not work. For the first six months to a year, a newly transplanted kidney is very vulnerable to rejection; it’s the most delicate time, a period where you are on pins and needles, and the further out you are from surgery the better your chances are of keeping it long term. After a year, the percentage rate of people whose transplanted kidneys work for the rest of their lives is very high, but there’s never any guarantee. The doctors had drilled this into me, but I decided I had a solution: I was going to name the kidney. How could anything possibly go wrong to a kidney named Annabelle, a name that sounded like the plucky heroine of a children’s book?
Sometimes, I felt like Annabelle had a life of her own. I would read her passages from Pat the Bunny and talk to her: “You’re going to grow up to be a fine, strong kidney, my little Belle! I promise I will never drink tap water, only the finest purified water from the artesian wells in the Yaqara Range of the Nakauvadra Mountains!” I quit the alcohol and cigarettes like the doctors told me to. I would rub her, a lot. Occasionally, I would direct my friends to greet Annabelle, just to keep her happy: “Here’s my beautiful kidney. Say hello to my little apricot!”
So far, Annabelle seemed to be pleased with the attention. By the middle of February, a month after my surgery, I was well on the path to recovery. My twice-weekly visits to the doctor had grown easier and easier, and the results were uniformly positive: The kidney was functioning perfectly. I counted myself lucky. Everything was clicking, even though I was still extremely weak.
My doctor had insisted that I take at least two months off of work to recover, but by week five I was dying to go back. It was the middle of the awards season, and it was killing me that I would watch the red carpet parade from my couch. The People’s Choice Awards, the SAG awards, the Grammy’s—I missed them all. It was physically painful to not be a guest at the party, like having my arm hacked off.
On the morning after my transplant, in Cedars-Sinai, I had pronounced my recovery plans to Shari: “My goal is to work at the Oscars,” I told her. But by mid-February, that still seemed like an unlikely proposition. I could barely walk up the stairs of my house, let alone sashay down the red carpet.
One morning, Linda Bell Blue, the executive producer of Entertainment Tonight and The Insider, called me to check in and see how I was doing. “You take as much time as you need to recover, but know that you are sorely missed,” she said. She paused and added, “The Oscars is your thing. Do you think you could come back for it?”
I was on the phone with my doctor before we’d barely even hung up. “I want to be at the Oscars,” I told him. “Even if I need an oxygen tent, a wheelchair, and a portable heart monitor on the carpet!”
“It’s not going to happen,” he told me. “You’re still too susceptible to germs. You shouldn’t leave your house.”
I was devastated. The Oscars are the center of my universe. When I’m on the Oscars red carpet, I feel like the beaming bride: I have butterflies in my stomach. It’s when I flash my megawatt, full-monty, patented Cojo smile, I mean, all my molars come out and my mouth is stretched to my ears. If you aren’t giddy and excited as you face this night—the night of dreams, globally—and if you just phone it in, just going through the motions, then something is wrong. The Oscars are my yearly ritual, when I check in, ask myself: Am I still excited? Not jaded? Can I still get goose bumps like a wide-eyed kid? It’s my bellwether, my compass. And this was the first time I would miss it in twelve years.
I called Linda back and told her the bad news. Her response was totally unexpected, and really quite magical. “OK, then, let’s bring the red carpet to you,” she said. “We’ll just have you do the Oscars from your house.”
My biorhythms nearly rocketed through my roof. If she’d been in the room, I would have taken off my mask and smooched her and spooned my mother’s famous chocolate-chip cake into her mouth.
On the morning of February 27, a stampede of producers from Entertainment Tonight descended upon my house to turn my living room into an Oscars red carpet. They arrived with generators and satellite trucks, klieg lights, lighting grids, three different cameras, plus cameramen, lighting directors, audio engineers, grips, gaffers, makeup artists, and hair stylists. It was a full scale production: My neighbors probably thought we were making a porno film.
I had promised my doctor a crew of three: there had to be fifty people in my house. By Dr. Jordan’s orders, the entire crew wore surgical masks. My dad became the unpaid production assistant: He was like a little kid, in his glory, bringing people water and coffee, peppering everyone with questions about what was going on. My mother was director of catering, producing mountains of homemade apple-cinnamon muffins from the kitchen.
For my grand return to the carpet, I was dressed to the nines in a vintage tux jacket with hand-painted silver slashes of glitter. I looked like a glamazon rock star—as long as you didn’t look at the tuxedo pants, which had been picked up specially from the Big and Tall Store to accommodate my steroid-bloated stomach.
As the stars began to arrive, my producers patched me in to the Kodak Theater. I had a huge screen in my living room and on it, live, was the red carpet, just a mile south of me on Hollywood Boulevard. As soon as I saw the red carpet come up on the screen, there was no more pain: It just disappeared. The stars paraded by: Leo was soaking up the attention for The Aviator; Cate Blanchett glided past in lemon Valentino; and even though he was nominated for best actor for Finding Neverland, Johnny Depp forgot to wash his hair. The first time I saw Gwyneth Paltrow do a fashion twirl, an electrical current ran through me, all the way to my golden roots.
From my living room, I reported on the very best and worst dressed Oscars stars. I was patched in to Halle Berry. “Cojo! I hope you are doing well. I’m thinking about you,” she said, with great emotion. I teared up. It was a moment with a capital M.
And then: Oprah, herself, came to the camera: Instead of Mohammed coming to the mountain, Mt. Everest had come to me. “You’re in my prayer circle,” she told me. I was floored. I could have floated all the way to the Kodak Theater.
It was the high of highs; glorious; it fed me. After everything I’d been through, the darkness of the steroids and getting fired, I was blinded by so much light. Despite the fact that I had had a transplant, that I was on pills to stay alive, that my life had been ruptured and put on spin cycle, here I was in my own home, with an earpiece in my head, and ten blocks away Oprah was wishing me me well! It was a turning point for me: I knew I was going to be OK no matter
what. No matter what happened, if I was strapped down, if I was bedbound and missing every one of my organs, as long as my mouth worked I knew I would have a voice out there talking about train wrecks on the red carpet and who shouldn’t be wearing a see-through lace slip dress by Dolce & Gabbana. My tongue had not been silenced. Even though stars with bruised egos had wanted to pull it out, step on it, run it over with their SUVs, the barbed tongue was alive and well.
For weeks, I’d barely been upright; but that day I stood before the cameras for eight hours, weak and aching, but so giddy with adrenaline that I barely noticed. What Linda had given me was monumental. She had brought me back into the world, motivated me to get better, to push myself. She was helping me grow beyond my disease. Sometimes it is mind over matter: You’re in so much pain, but you push through it. Linda made me push myself, work, feel like part of the world again. She gave me a bigger gift than she’ll ever know.
The other event that got me out of bed that March was my audience with Oprah. I saw this as a chance to tell my story to millions and hopefully have some kind of real impact. I was really fired up about promoting live kidney donors: There was such a severe kidney shortage in the world, and I didn’t think people knew that the average person had the power to save somebody’s life. It had worked for me in a dire situation. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, galvanize people around the nation to open up their hearts. What better pulpit to shout from than Oprah’s couch?
I’d bumped into Oprah at events for years: In my eyes, she was always larger than life, and her presence on the red carpet was electrifying. I like that she uses her show to inspire and change people. Even in our brief exchanges, she inspired me, too. Not long after I publicly announced that I was ill, I found myself interviewing her at a conference that Maria Shriver had organized. After the interview, Oprah pulled me aside, wanting to express her concern about my disease. It was, unexpectedly, one of the most emotional experiences of my life. She just looked me in the eyes, held my hands, and said two words: “Use it.”
I took that to mean that I should use my illness to help other people; but as I thought about it some more, I also wondered whether she intended something more personal. “Use it”—did that mean that I should use this disease to better myself and grow into a stronger person, to become a more evolved and satisfied human being? In other words, to use it as a positive rather than a negative? As my illness progressed over the following year, I would come back to her words again and again.
By the end of March, I had been given a clean bill of health by Dr. Jordan and granted permission to fly to Chicago. My parents had returned to Montreal in early March, so I flew them, my sister Alisa, and Shari to Chicago. Abby flew in from New York, along with her family.
Being out in the real world for the first time since my surgery was surreal. I’d been in quarantine for so long—I hadn’t had a normal life since October of 2004—that I felt like a different person, almost drunk with the sense of rebirth. Although my initial instincts had been to hide my disease, to keep it close to the hip, I was learning that the more you release it the healthier it is. I hoped that people could be inspired by my story. More and more, I was starting to experience a sense of kinship not just with other kidney patients, but with all people suffering from a major illness. It was like a catastrophe club: When someone came up to me and said “I have leukemia” or “I have breast cancer,” everything seemed to stop for a moment. I would look in their eyes and know what they were going through; and they, too, would know how I felt.
Despite all this excitement, however, I was feeling under the weather. By the time I disembarked from the plane in Chicago, I felt slightly fluish, and my bones were hurting. The gallon of vitamin C–fortified orange juice that I swallowed didn’t help. My family’s plans for a gala celebratory dinner were shot. Instead, it was chicken soup delivered up to my hotel room.
Somehow I found the strength to address my wardrobe. In the week before my appearance, I had tried on every piece of clothing on the racks of Rodeo Drive. I was convinced that my wardrobe would somehow reveal something about this new person, this new one-kidney wonder. (For anyone who is counting, I originally had two “native” kidneys of my own which were covered with cysts. When my new transplant kidney was put in, the doctors didn’t actually remove the native kidneys. Instead, I had three kidneys: two with the wires disconnected, so to speak, and one new, functioning kidney.) Up until that point, I had been working the raffish, rakish rock star look: To me, a suit was skintight jeans, rocker boots, and Jagger-esque scarves. Those binding two-button uniforms with the standard-issue tie and lace-up shoe were repulsive to me: It screamed Establishment. But for an occasion as momentous as going on Oprah, though, I decided I would wear a suit.
After attempting ten thousand shirt and tie and pocket square combinations, I had narrowed my options down to a handful. I took Polaroids of them all, brought the outfits to Chicago with me, and the night before my appearance Shari and I had a fashion show. I tried on each option over and over and over, until my friend cried for mercy. We finally settled on a pinstriped Gucci suit and Prada Chelsea boots, worn with a lavender gingham shirt and gold-lavender swirled tie. I wanted to be fashion forward, very chic and sleek. I was going for bloated James Bond: If 007 had a transplant and had been pumped full of the steroids until he was puffed out to the size of Anguilla, he would have looked like me.
I woke up at the break of dawn to prepare. My flu had grown worse during the night, and I was very very nervous. I’m not usually scared to go on TV, but this seemed larger than life: With my parents, sister, and Abby there, I felt the need to take care of everyone. That kind of stress used to be second nature to me, but I had been so worn down by the previous months, that it suddenly felt like too much. I was glad Shari was there to keep me upright.
As is the normal Canadian-Romanian custom, my family managed to stuff a dozen people in the limousine that took us to the Oprah show along with a deli counter set up with steamed cabbage, cabbage on ice, cabbage a la mode, grilled cabbage and California roll cabbage. We were all in our Sunday best, as if we were going to cotillion. Because we are Jewish, Barbra Streisand has, by default, always been our spiritual leader; but that day, she was forever replaced by Oprah.
Backstage at Oprah is beautiful. I’ve been through many backstages in my life and most look like they are leftover from vaudeville days. Oprah’s backstage was modern, busy, and comfortable. Since I had already done my own hair and makeup, Oprah’s staff put themselves to work on my mother and Shari instead, in case the camera panned over to them. My sister, who is the love child of Estée Lauder and Max Factor, a girl who used crayons as eyeshadow back in kindergarden, was already made up with enough sparkle, glitter, and eyeshadow for a reunion of Destiny’s Child. I’m sure she got up at 1:00 a.m. because her hair was pressed, starched, her makeup immaculate, her nails impeccable, her outfit perfect.
My troop went into the audience, I got a final powder, and I was sent into a green room to wait by myself. While I waited, Oprah aired the pre-taped material her crew had shot of me, the morning of my surgery. A production assistant told me how I would be cued and where I would walk, and then, in those final moments backstage I was overcome with emotion. I survived this! I thought. I’m alive! Seven months ago I was at the precipice of darkness, and here I am. I felt triumphant. My heart was pounding as I walked out on stage. I heard the audience clapping and cheering, felt Oprah hugging me, and I knew that people were pulling for me.
Abby came onstage with me and received the heroes’ welcome, as she should. I felt she deserved a twenty-one gun salute. Nothing is a big enough thank you for the person who has done the ultimate sacrifice and loved you so wholeheartedly that they would give you one of their organs.
As I sat onstage with Oprah, I told her how I was feeling. “I see myself as a better person in so many ways,” I told her. “I found out I am incredibly positive: I’m Pippi Longstocking. Abby gave me life, she saved my lif
e, bottom line. I’ve been bathed in love. I see nothing but good. Friends and family have come together to get me through this, and it’s made me a better person. I call this a gift.”
It was powerful and beautiful, and all too soon, it was all over. And then my family arrived to meet us backstage. Wild-eyed and pumped-up, my family came to worship at the shrine of Oprah. My mother cornered her and began talking to her about the color of a dress she wore to the Emmy’s ten years earlier; my sister was yapping in her ear about Oprah’s gorgeous eyeshadow; my father was snapping photographs; and I was cringing. But Oprah was so kind and warm and gracious, aware of what this meant to my parents. Indeed, in my parents’ house, over the mantel, in the place of honor, now sits the gold-framed photograph of them with Oprah; my graduation portrait has been relegated to the bathroom next to the porcelain tissue box holder.
We were supposed to go out that night to celebrate, but I was still feeling under the weather, so instead, we had a pajama party, with onion rings and spaghetti and meatballs and cake delivered up to my room. We stayed up until two in the morning rehashing the day’s events. That day felt like a resolution, for all of us. I’ve always been a dreamer who believes in happy endings, just like you see in the movies. It’s a sickness I suffer from, a belief in fairy tales with a beginning, middle, and end. This, for me, was my happy ending, with a pretty bow on top. I saw the last seven months as my own personal Bette Davis saga: the strife, then the illness, the soap opera of getting fired, the humiliation and the headlines, and then my miraculous return, he’s alive and kicking, going on Oprah, cut to credits, the end, upbeat music and ride off to Sunset Boulevard. I truly believed that was it, without a doubt.
CHAPTER 9
Requiem for Annabelle
I had returned home to Los Angeles expecting not just to have a good life: I expected a fabulous life. I was going to pick up right where I left off seven months earlier, put my life back on like a perfectly cut French suit. Everything would happen according to my master plan, no restrictions, no change of habits. It was suffer the transplant, go on Oprah, and you’re cured—almost like Oprah was a shaman who had given me the final healing I needed.
Glamour, Interrupted Page 8