But there was one instance when I wasn’t so forgiving, and it happened on our show late on the afternoon of July 3, 2001, a couple hours before I was set to drive my ailing wife and my mother to La Jolla for the fireworks show the next day.
I don’t recall to this day what Joe said about me, but I know it was something so demeaning that it enraged me, and I brooded about it the next couple of days in La Jolla.
When I returned to work the following Monday, I met with Joe in his office with the door closed, and I said in the sternest language I had ever used with him that I no longer was in a mood for his constant putdowns, which I had ignored for the most part in the past with a loud laugh and an “Oh, Joe” retort.
“As you know, Joe, my wife is very sick, but as you obviously don’t know, I’ve become very fragile,” I said. “If you disparage me again in your mean-spirited way, I’m out of here. I’m quitting the show immediately, on the spot. I’ll walk and never come back. And I mean it.”
While Joe McDonnell often came off as shrill and bombastic, and even boorish, on the air, there was another side of him away from the microphone when he could be warm, gentle, sentimental and quite charitable.
For years, he privately had lined up many famous athletes for the Make-a-Wish Foundation of Greater Los Angeles, an organization that grants wishes to children with life-threatening conditions.
As Joe listened to my rant, tears flowed from his eyes, and he kept shaking his head and saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I sometimes get carried away and should have shown greater respect for what you’ve been going through. I’m so sorry. It’ll never happen again.”
And, of course, it didn’t, as Joe and I did shows without incident right up to the final week of Gillian’s life.
March 2001 (Brain Surgery)
Gillian continued with chemotherapy, but it wasn’t working, as we would find out in those depressing sit-downs we’d have with Dr. Peter Rosen and his staff. We always were informed that the cancer was spreading instead of abating, as there were now signs it had reached her liver and lymph nodes.
The funereal atmosphere of those consultations was daunting. In the early days, we actually went to them with high expectations, but that was no longer the case. Although neither of us would say anything, we had come to expect the worst—and not once were we pleasantly surprised.
In fact, in late February, Dr. Rosen even asked Gillian if she wanted to continue with the chemo treatments, which I guess in retrospect was the signal that her condition had become irreversible. She said she did.
An ominous development occurred during that time. Gillian had in previous months been experiencing occasional headaches, but she’d take a couple aspirins and they’d go away.
But suddenly, in recent weeks, they had become more frequent and more painful, and the aspirins no longer were providing relief.
Gillian awoke one morning and complained about a terrible pounding in her head.
“Douglas, it hurts so much,” she said in a worried voice. “Something’s wrong.”
I contacted Dr. Rosen, and he said to come to the UCLA Medical Center for a CT scan. When we got there at mid-morning, Gillian was in agony, but the nurses wouldn’t give her any high-powered pain medication until after the imaging test.
Unfortunately, she had to wait over two hours before a CT scan machine was available—and during that time she suffered horribly.
I remember her lying down in a room with her hands pressed against the sides of her head. I felt so helpless, unable to do anything other than to attempt to console her with banal words of encouragement.
“I just can’t believe how much it hurts,” she said on several occasions.
And Gillian was one who never complained.
And to listen to her muffled groans meant that what she now was experiencing had to be torturous.
The results of the CT scan weren’t surprising. There was a cancerous tumor in her brain.
Fortunately, it was operable.
On the morning of the surgery a week later, on March 3, I drove her to the UCLA Medical Center, and Leigh Anne Kelley was with us.
In the pre-surgery room, Gillian was lying on a bed in a curtained cubicle about a half hour before her scheduled operation when she asked for a pen and paper.
“I want to write a will,” she said.
And for a few minutes, in what was indescribably distressing, she scribbled down the names of those whom she wanted to inherit her flat in south London and her wedding ring and a few of her other possessions.
She was crying, and Leigh Anne and I also were crying.
“I know I might not make it this time,” she said between sobs.
“Oh yes you will,” I managed to say.
The withering sadness of that scene still inspires tears. Wills normally are carefully drawn up in the quiet sanctuary of an attorney’s office. Not in a hospital room. Not by a young lady knowing she might not wake up from the anesthesia and that death might be moments away.
Gillian drew her hands to mine as a nurse parted the curtain and said, “We’re ready to go.”
“Douglas, I love you so much,” she said. “I’m so sorry I’ve put you through this. I just wish it didn’t have to finish this way.”
“It won’t be finished,” I said. “You’re going to be fine. This is just a bump in the road.”
She closed her eyes, which continued to leak tears.
I softly kissed her, and Leigh Anne and I left to wait in the downstairs lobby.
Four hours later, she was out of surgery, and the doctor told us, “She’s doing fine. We got the whole tumor out.”
After that, Gillian no longer had headaches.
Unfortunately, as Dr. Peter Rosen informed me, she had a particularly virulent form of colon cancer that treatments weren’t impeding.
Chapter 35
As Gillian’s health worsened even though she had recovered nicely from brain surgery, we decided in desperation to switch to another oncologist on the strong recommendation of Joe McDonnell. His name was Lee Rosen, no relation to Peter Rosen.
This Rosen was the son-in-law of one of McDonnell’s first cousins. Not that we thought Peter Rosen had mishandled Gillian. There is nothing he did that we questioned, and we both felt he had done everything he could under the circumstances. An aggressive cancer that has metastasized in a person long has defied medical remedies no matter how wealthy the person is or how renowned the person’s physician is.
We felt a change was needed, if for nothing else then for the sheer sake of change. Lee Rosen was much younger than Peter Rosen and flush with energetic optimism. His bright personality made Gillian feel more comfortable and contrasted dramatically with that of the more taciturn Peter Rosen.
But Gillian had had Stage 4 cancer ever since a lesion was detected in her lung shortly after her colon surgery the previous spring, and no amount of chemotherapy and radiation, which she underwent after her brain surgery, could dramatically change her status.
She began taking a heavy dosage of steroids to make her feel better, and it slowly began changing the contours of her face; her cheeks broadened, and her face suddenly had a swollen appearance, a different appearance.
When you’re with someone on a daily basis, you seldom notice physical changes, and I didn’t notice the changes in Gillian until one Saturday morning during breakfast at a place called Kinda Lahaina in Seal Beach.
She was wearing a bandana around her head that day, and she was in an uncommonly hyper mood. She spoke rapidly, even frenetically, in making a case for me to buy a condominium in Sun Valley as an investment.
When we had visited the Ketchum resort area in Idaho in August 1999, my sister Ginny had her real estate lady show us just such a piece of property, which we both found interesting but not interesting enough to buy.
But now, suddenly, out of nowhere, Gillian was imploring me to make a real estate purchase, which was so out of character for her since she never before had discussed such matter
s with me.
“That’ll be a great summer place for us to live after you retire,” she said. “You should do it, Douglas. It’ll be something for both of us to look forward to.”
I guess I regarded her with a scrutinizing look because she paused and then quickly added, “Why are you staring at me that way?”
I momentarily remained silent and said, “Oh, no, no, I’m just thinking of what you’ve been saying.”
“No you weren’t,” she said. “You’re looking at me funny.”
And Gillian was right; she was quite perceptive.
I probably regarded her with that scrutinizing look—stare?—because, for the first time, I noticed how much Gillian’s appearance had changed. It was as though a different woman now sat across from me.
Gillian no longer faintly resembled that youthful, smooth-featured, angelic person I remembered emerging with such princess-like majesty from that plane in Nice in late December 1995.
“Why’re you looking at me like that?” she repeated.
“Oh, no…I’m just thinking it’s probably a little late to buy a condo in Ketchum now,” I said, trying vainly to deflect her perception.
She began crying, and I felt awful because I should have been more careful in the way I deported myself.
“Oh, Douglas, look at me. I know I don’t look like myself any longer,” she said. “I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror any longer. I guess I’m talking about Sun Valley because I need something to look forward to. I need something to think about positively, to hang on to, to…”
I wanted to say that she’d be fine, but I knew it would sound too contrived, and I just sat there gloomily and said nothing.
We finished breakfast in silence and strolled slowly over to the Seal Beach pier, where we so often in the past had walked the quarter mile to its end at a brisk pace while gazing at the surfers and fishermen and sun-worshipers.
This time we advanced down it perhaps fifty yards when Gillian turned to me and said, “Douglas, let’s go home. I’m not feeling well.”
When we made it home, Gillian went straight to bed, where she remained for the remainder of the day.
Chapter 36
Because a growing number of the McDonnell-Douglas Shows were originating from the small studio at the ESPN Zone near Disneyland—the bosses at our Disney-owned station understandably wanted us to have a greater presence there—I wound up hiring a retired Long Beach elementary school principal, Ray Adams, to begin driving Gillian to the UCLA Medical Center for her treatments.
Gillian was the one who encouraged me to do it, as she was concerned about the toll my daily schedule was having on me, which, believe me, was trivial and manageable compared to what she was enduring.
Ray Adams turned out to be a savior who routinely engaged Gillian in long conversations and always managed to boost her spirits. He became close to her and her mother, Mary, who accompanied her husband back to Hartlepool in late January when he became well enough to travel after his heart surgery.
But Mary didn’t remain in England long, as she soon returned to be with her daughter. She was a matriarchal bellwether during Gillian’s illness, spending more than a year at our home helping out—cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning, dusting, sweeping, etc.—in any way she could.
Mary displayed the traits that had attracted me to Gillian. She returned to Long Beach in late April alone—long plane flights were now out of the question for her husband—and would be a vital contributor until the end.
Incidentally, despite her condition, Gillian never stopped doting on me or being the good, caring wife.
She continued to encourage me to go out at night with friends, which I refused to do because I wanted to be with her as much as possible.
When she noticed I began fixing myself a few too many screwdrivers when I came home from work, she told me one evening, “Douglas, I think you’ve started to drink a little too much. That’s not good for you.”
She did it in a typically gentle manner, although she was slightly more assertive during the previous winter when I informed her one evening that I had been invited by Dominick “Donnie Shacks” Montemarano, a former capo in the Colombo crime family in New York, to watch a Monday Night Football game at his high-rise dwelling in a Westwood condominium complex.
I had met Montemarano at Phil Trani’s restaurant, which at the time was one of his hangouts because he was dating one of the Trani waitresses, an astonishingly beautiful lady who was at least thirty-five years younger than him.
I found Montemarano to be a friendly, charming guy, and so did others who befriended him, like actress Elizabeth Hurley and producer Stephen Bing and the one-time UCLA All-American quarterback Cade McNown.
Gillian and I actually had dinner with Montemarano one night at Trani’s, and naturally, I asked him about his Mafia background, which he spoke about in vague generalities, albeit he did discuss his relationship with John Gotti.
“Knew John well from the early days,” I recall Montemarano saying. “Not surprised one bit he became the big boss. Smart, ruthless guy.”
“I don’t want you to go to that man’s place and have dinner with him,” said Gillian, and I think that was the only time in our marriage when she proscribed me from doing something.
I informed Montemarano, who had relocated to Southern California a few years earlier after spending more than eleven years in prison, that I couldn’t make it. I think he got the hint. He never tendered such an invitation to me again, thank goodness.
As the spring and summer months of 2001 elapsed, Gillian continued to deteriorate. I became numb with frustration, disappointment and hopelessness. I saw what was unfolding up close but continued to push the reality out of my mind. It was as though I were seated in the front row of a movie theater observing a film of tragedy—only this wasn’t a rehearsed drama orchestrated by actors, directors, producers, cameramen and cinematographers.
Up to that time, my life had been remarkably untouched by traumatic events. Both sets of my grandparents lived into their eighties. My father died a month before his ninetieth birthday. My mother turned ninety that summer and still drove everywhere. Irrespective of the food poisoning I suffered in Syria and its Hepatitis A aftermath, I long had splendid health. And I doubt there was a sportswriter in America who had savored his job more and had more enjoyment than I had since coming into the Los Angeles market, if you add up all the incredible sporting events I covered with all the incredible nocturnal escapades and foreign expeditions I had experienced.
Certainly, there were the usual disappointments—the folding of the Herald Examiner when I was set to replace Melvin Durslag as its lead sports columnist was disheartening, as was the fate of my unpublished novel—but for the most part, I had lived a charmed life free of catastrophic developments like child-support payments, disfiguring car accidents, vengeful ex-boyfriends, enraged creditors and vengeful ex-girlfriends.
I’ve always considered the hoary saying “Things will work themselves out” to be one of the most vacuous on the planet earth, with no basis in fact, but indeed, I must concede that things always seemed to work themselves out in my life until the pendulum of fate swung to the dark side during my marriage to Gillian.
I think the way I coped with what was happening around me was to both accept it and to ignore it, a juggling act that I suspect I did to retain a sense of mental equilibrium. How else could I have continued to go on the air with Joe McDonnell cracking jokes and erupting in laughter and speaking light-heartedly to listeners?
Gillian was still ambulatory during that time, taking daily walks with her mother around the neighborhood. She also would accompany me to El Dorado Park when I went jogging; she either would sit on a bench and wait for me—oftentimes her mother would come along—or go on a short stroll herself.
Her willpower and determination were astounding. She refused to surrender to her illness and even kept exercising. She also was cautious about what she ate, as her diet consisted o
f a lot of fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. But most impressively, this lovely lady never complained about her plight, as I’m certain I would have done.
July 2001 (The Spiritual Supporter)
As we had done every year since she arrived in America, I took Gillian to La Jolla for the July 4 holiday, but this time I brought along Gillian’s mother and mine. This would be Gillian’s final trip outside Long Beach, and obviously, it was a bittersweet experience for all of us.
On the one hand, it was nice to be back in the picturesque resort hamlet near San Diego. But on the other, it was a struggle for Gillian to walk, as her rapidly spreading cancer was sapping her strength and causing her great pain, which she would counteract with the powerful pain medication oxycodone.
But she still hadn’t lost her resolve, and she actually even mentioned an upcoming trip she planned to take to England. We ate the first evening at the Manhattan Restaurant at the Empress Hotel, where, as usual, we stayed. On the second night before we walked down to the La Jolla Village to watch the fireworks, we had dinner at the Marine Room, a venerable local beachfront restaurant.
I do remember Gillian saying to me as we drove back to Long Beach the next day, “I’ve always enjoyed so much the drive to La Jolla. We get such a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean. I’m going to miss it.”
I didn’t respond, acting as though I didn’t hear it.
She had said a day earlier how she had planned to return to England and now was intimating how she never would be returning to La Jolla. A hospice nurse later told me that such contradictions are frequent in those who are terminally ill, as they often alternate between fantasy and reality. “It’s their way of dealing with what’s happening to them,” she said.
Later in the month, Gillian would have a chance meeting one afternoon at the Vons Pavilion supermarket near our home with a lady who would have a dramatic impact in the final seven weeks of Gillian’s life. Her name was Sunni Webber, and how they met only reinforced Webber’s passionate belief in religion.
Between the Bylines Page 20