The Lucky One

by Krystal Barter

  ‘Oh my god, that’s Joan Rivers!’ I squealed to Lindsay, clutching her arm as the acerbic octogenarian tottered past the catwalk. ‘I love Joan Rivers!’

  ‘And look! Argh! There’s the E! News team!’ (E! News was—still is—my sole source of daily news and current affairs so to see them filming in the same room as me was like watching Live from the Red Carpet being enacted for my benefit.)

  Later in the week, the two of us headed west to Chicago where I stayed with Lindsay at her home and visited the Bright Pink offices. My time spent at Bright Pink was invaluable and I learnt loads about how Lindsay and the girls created public awareness around the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations and how they ran their various programs. I sat in on meetings and took copious notes and spent hours talking to Bright Pink’s programs coordinator, Mary-Kate. And, most important of all, during my five days in Chicago, Lindsay and I came up with plenty of ideas for strengthening our pink global alliance.

  And so, on the final night of my trip, we went out for a celebratory drink (or two). Now, this was no ordinary drink (or two). No, we celebrated that night at RPM Italian restaurant Illinois, part-owned by E! News co-anchor Giuliana Rancic. Not only is Giuliana a journalist of some repute, she’s also a breast cancer survivor and an ambassador for Bright Pink and to say I’m something of an obsessive fan is putting it lightly. I adore her to a point that’s probably not healthy for a grown woman to adore another woman she’s never met. Total girl crush. And as Lindsay and I sat at the bar of this achingly hip River North hotspot, all chrome and black and silver and fabulousness, I only wished I had my childhood autograph book with me.

  ‘You know the menu includes a bunch of dishes inspired by Giuliana’s mum, Mama DePandi?’ Lindsay said casually, sipping her mojito.

  ‘No! Which ones? Do you know? We’ll have to order one in case Giuliana is in the restaurant tonight and she reads our order in the kitchen. Or, imagine if she came over to talk to you about Bright Pink or something and saw us eating one of her mum’s own recipes …’

  ‘Oh. My. God. Could you be any more of a stalker?’ Lindsay teased me and laughed.

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ I said haughtily. ‘Just because you and Giuliana Rancic are BFFs.’ We were both talking too loudly now, as we were several mojitos in, and the other patrons at the bar turned and looked at me when I made this last pronouncement.

  ‘Shhh.’ Lindsay laughed again. And then: ‘Oh, hey!’ she said, and waved as she spied someone she knew at the end of the bar. ‘Hey Mama DePandi! Hey Papa DePandi!’

  It was my turn to laugh now. ‘Hey Papa DePandi!’ I mimicked, and then I turned to see who she was really waving to.

  Oh. My. God. It was Papa DePandi! And his wife! My idol’s parents wandered out of the kitchen as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to be here. (Which, on reflection, I guess it was, given it was their daughter’s restaurant and all, and they were involved in planning the menu. At the time, however, I would have been less surprised to see Santa Clause saunter into the bar.) Lindsay grabbed my hand and dragged me over to meet them.

  ‘Mama DePandi, Papa DePandi, this is Krystal Barter. From Australia. Krystal’s here in the States to do some work for her cancer charity, Pink Hope.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ Giuliana’s parents smiled warmly. I grinned like a maniac and shook their arms off.

  ‘What an amazing coincidence that you’re in the restaurant tonight,’ I enthused. ‘I can’t believe my luck!’

  Giuliana’s parents smiled politely.

  ‘I’m such a huge fan of your daughter; I can’t begin to tell you …’ I began but Papa DePandi cut me short.

  ‘Oh, of course. You should meet her,’ he said, and with that he casually motioned to a nearby table where Giuliana and her husband, Bill, were sat as if placed there like guests on her E! News set.

  ‘Wow! Oh, wow!’ I gushed. ‘Giuliana! Bill! It’s such a pleasure to meet you!’ I was so star-struck that entire solar systems were hurtling by. I was meeting Giuliana Rancic! And her family!

  ‘I don’t suppose I could get a photo, could I?’ I asked shyly. The girls back in the Pink Hope office had to see this. And so Giuliana and her family generously posed as Lindsay took several photos of me with Giuliana and Bill.

  When it was all over, and Giuliana and her family had gone back to the business of running a restaurant (and after I had run to the bathroom and phoned my assistant, Rebecca, back in Sydney and excitedly reported that I’d just met Giuliana Rancic, which resulted in Rebecca bursting into tears and wishing she was with me), I turned to Lindsay to try and explain what this trip to visit her meant to me, but I didn’t know where to start. I had to thank her for tonight; to thank her for the last ten days; and to thank her for everything she’d ever done to inspire me and help me and set me on my journey towards Pink Hope. I had to thank her, in short, for helping me to see that being BRCA positive could also be empowering. I owed her a helluva lot. And then when I thought she could surprise me no more, Lindsay had just brought a little Hollywood glamour to my life.

  Only, I never expected some of it to follow me home.

  CHAPTER 22

  Is there anything less fabulous than the afternoon school run? You know the drill. There’s the blasting car horns, the scramble for parking, the minibus-sized piece of ‘art’ that Child A has created and wants you to hold-slash-admire or, even worse, wear as you struggle under the weight of two schoolbags and—who owns this sports kit?—all the while frantically trying to shepherd Child A, Child B and Toddler C back to your vehicle. Invariably it will rain. Or you’ll run into that mother from reading groups, that father from the canteen committee, or that child from your son’s soccer team and somehow you’ll find yourself railroaded into helping out with the charity sausage sizzle, the canteen fundraising sausage sizzle or the end-of-season gala day sausage sizzle this Saturday morning. (Again, probably in the rain.) The whole school pick-up thing couldn’t be further from the Hollywood Hills you were sneakily reading about in OK Magazine in the car only five minutes ago. And yet, on this day, a little glimmer of Hollywood glamour reached out from the pages of my glossy mag and tapped me on the shoulder.

  A little glamour in the (very shapely) form of Angelina Jolie.

  ‘Riley! Can you grab Mummy’s phone—quick, it’s ringing!’ I leaned sideways so that Riley could pull my vibrating mobile from out of my jeans pocket for me. As I did, the two schoolbags and one child balanced in my arms wobbled precariously. The words ‘blocked number’ flashed on the screen of my phone. I love a blocked number. There’s always a few precious seconds there where I wonder if it’s some wildly wealthy benefactor calling up to donate squillions to Pink Hope.

  ‘Thanks, darling,’ I said to Riley, bending down further so that he could hold the phone up to my ear. We staggered along like this as Riley hit ‘answer’ for me. Then I bellowed, ‘Jye, don’t run too far ahead!’ at the same time as Riley got the phone close enough to my mouth for me to deafen the person on the other end.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ I said. ‘I wasn’t talking to you … my son … school run,’ I finished lamely.

  The voice on the other end of the line laughed. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, and then she got straight down to business. ‘Krystal, it’s Kasey, producer, Mornings. We need you in-studio first thing tomorrow morning. Wear pink. Can you do it?’

  Could I appear on Network Nine’s Mornings, one of the highest-rating morning shows in the country? And, no doubt, in relation to Pink Hope and hereditary cancer? Hell, I could! Money couldn’t buy that sort of publicity for our cause. Plus, I’d been on Mornings with Sonia Kruger and David Campbell before and it was always a hoot. But first thing? In morning-television parlance that meant I-should-still-be-sleeping-o’clock no matter which way you sliced it.

  Still, I was about to tell the producer I would be there whatever-the-hell time she wanted, when what she said next floored me: ‘We had an alert come through on the newswire sev
en minutes ago. Angelina Jolie is BRCA1 mutation positive.’

  ‘What?’ I said loudly, stopping dead in my tracks, causing my camel-train of children to come to a jerky halt. Angelina Jolie was BRCA1 mutation positive? This was huge.

  ‘Yeah, BRCA1. That’s your gene, isn’t it?’ asked the producer, unintentionally gifting the human race’s BRCA1 cancer gene to me. ‘Well, Ange’s positive, too, and she’s written an op-ed piece for the New York Times revealing she’s had a preventative double mastectomy. Although, god knows how she kept that quiet …’ She said this a little wistfully, no doubt thinking about the missed scoop, but I was busy feeling for Angelina. Sure, she might live a million, trillion light-years away from the rest of us, in her ivory tower with Brad Pitt (Brad Pitt!) and all those gorgeous children. Yeah, she was beautiful and successful and wealthy and perfect, but she would have gone through hell with her BRCA1 diagnosis and mastectomy. Just like the rest of us Pink Hopers. Suddenly, life from the pages of OK Magazine didn’t look so glossy after all.

  I agreed to the details of tomorrow morning’s interview with Kasey and hung up the phone promising to look out for the ‘script’ she would email me that evening. (Most morning television shows are scripted to avoid anything too offensive or contentious going to air; anything that might leave viewers choking into their Earl Grey at morning tea. While I would have scope to share my opinions on hereditary cancer, the questions, and even the general direction I should take my answers, would be drafted in advance.)

  As the kids and I made our way back to the car that afternoon, media outlets around the globe were already running wild with the news that Angelina Jolie was BRCA1 mutation positive. Hers were arguably the most lauded pair of breasts in the world so the fact they had now been lost to a preventative mastectomy was headline-making. So, too, was the BRCA gene. Or the ‘Jolie Gene’ as it instantly became known.

  Angelina Jolie’s opinion piece in the Times was published on 14 May 2013 and the world of hereditary cancer has never been the same since. No amount of education or funding or charity work or research dollars could ever have thrust the BRCA gene into the global spotlight the way that one woman did. Of course, since finding out she was BRCA1 positive, Angelina’s world would never be the same, either, and I really felt for her and for her young family. Even though her surgery was a success, and even though she may well have avoided breast cancer, I understood what a traumatic decision a preventative mastectomy must have been for her and her family. Going public was an incredibly brave thing for her to do, not to mention an incredibly generous one, and I only hope she realises what a positive impact she’s had. Angelina’s decision to ‘bare all’ about her battle with the breast cancer gene had ramifications far greater than anyone could ever have expected and so, following her announcement, the next 48 hours became the busiest of my life.

  ‘You know, you’ve always reminded me a little of Ange,’ Chris said, as he sat on the couch, mobile phone in one hand, landline phone in the other and a Pink Hope clipboard balanced in his lap.

  Angelina Jolie? Well, sure, I thought, surveying the lounge room which was littered with half-empty cereal bowls and video game consoles and small children draped across various pieces of well-worn furniture. My gaze ended at my own, ugg-booted feet. There was a toothpaste stain on one of the boots. Me and Angelina did have alarmingly similar lives, it was true.

  ‘We’re both humans,’ I conceded. Then I turned back to the run-sheet in front of me. The A4 page of scrawl detailed the radio interviews I had scheduled—at five-minute intervals—for the coming two days. Then there were the TV appearances, the interviews with the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald newspapers, plus the various bits and pieces requested by online media outlets, too. Since Angelina’s revelations about her breasts, my own boobs had become big news locally and I was working around the clock in the hope of drumming up some publicity for Pink Hope.

  ‘No, really,’ Chris persisted. ‘You and Ange were both “wild childs”, weren’t you? And then you both transformed yourselves from teen delinquents into crusading charity queens. And now you’re both BRCA1 mutation positive.’

  ‘Oh, and here I was thinking you meant we’re both incredibly good looking,’ I joked (but not pausing to look up from my schedule, all the while flicking through emails on my mobile at the same time). ‘But if you’re strictly talking charity,’ I added, ‘I’m not sure my work with Pink Hope is quite on par with Ange’s role as Special Envoy for the UN High Commissioner …’

  Chris threw a cushion at me in disgust. ‘Don’t belittle what you’ve achieved with Pink Hope,’ he admonished, as the pillow bounced off the side of my unsuspecting head.

  ‘Fine. But how about a little less of the teenage delinquent, thanks!’ I threw the cushion back at him. ‘I may have, um—’ Here, I stopped and glanced at the kids who were, thankfully, glued to the TV and ignoring our conversation. ‘I may have had a little fun in my time. But I never wore a vial of anyone’s blood around my neck!’

  Chris laughed and dropped the cushion to the ground. ‘A little fun, Krystal? I don’t think even Ange and Brad, with their Hollywood lifestyles, have ever had as much “fun” as you did! I’m just glad you found other ways to enjoy yourself.’

  We were interrupted by a striking figure walking into the room brandishing a mobile phone and a tube of pink lipstick: ‘Krystal, ABC’s 7.30 phoned to say they’ll be here in ten minutes. Oh, and I found your lipstick—it was in Bonnie’s Dora the Explorer lunchbox. Is cleaning out Bonnie’s lunchbox part of my job description?’

  I smiled gratefully. It was Kim and cleaning out Bonnie’s lunchbox was definitely not part of her job description. In fact, nothing was. Kim Lockyer was a Pink Hope ambassador, a breast-cancer survivor and a generous volunteer who dropped by the Pink Hope office from time to time to give us a hand filing or answering emails or whatever else we happened to be snowed under with at the time. Now (in addition to being Bonnie’s kitchenhand) Kim had very kindly offered to help coordinate the media mayhem in the wake of Angelina’s bombshell. Given our house had been turned into Pink Hope media HQ, and given Pink Hope had neither a publicist nor an agent nor a media adviser of any description at that point, Kim was a godsend. As were, as always, Chris and Mum, both of whom had been glued to their phones helping out from the instant this thing kicked off.

  ‘And after 7.30 has left,’ Kim continued, ‘you’ve got crews from Seven News and Ten News at Five swinging by. Plus, that guy from SBS World News. Here, wanna see the full list?’

  I glanced at Kim’s outstretched phone and saw it was true; somehow my quaint Californian bungalow was to become a makeshift media hub for all the major networks that day. I suddenly felt overwhelmed.

  ‘And did you get that message from The Project?’ Chris asked. ‘It came through when you were at the Channel Nine studios this morning …’

  ‘Uh, no … I think I wrote down the number here for—wait …’ I began rifling through papers in front of me when my mobile sprang to life in my hand. ‘Hello, Krystal Barter speaking …’ I shrugged at Chris to indicate I couldn’t find the message he was talking about but he was already absorbed in his own notes, no doubt making sure I was prepped for the next media interview. Who knew the ‘Jolie Gene’ would be so very contagious?

  Forty minutes later we’d cleared the lounge room of children (and their associated breakfast cereal bowls) and I was being interviewed for ABC television’s flagship current affairs program, 7.30. The reporter, Adam Harvey, had a deep baritone voice that was not unlike that of his late father, respected journalist Peter Harvey. Adam began his report by saying: ‘If anyone can raise awareness about a difficult subject, it’s Angelina Jolie.’ I couldn’t have agreed more.

  ‘You know, the scary thing is,’ I said to Adam, ‘about a week or so ago I was feeling frustrated by the difficulties faced by my charity, Pink Hope. And I commented to my husband: “It’s just so hard to get funding. What we need is a major celebrity, someone lik
e, I don’t know, Angelina Jolie, to get onboard and get involved. She could make our gene fault famous and for all the right reasons …” ’

  It was true I’d had this exact conversation with Chris only a week or so earlier. I’d actually mentioned Angelina Jolie and all that. But what I didn’t say to Adam, while the cameras were rolling, was that I had this conversation with Chris every week.

  Because, while business was booming insofar as we had more women than ever visiting the Pink Hope website and becoming active members of the ‘Pink’ community, the truth was, we were broke. Almost five months earlier to the day, at Christmas 2012, I was ready to close the doors on Pink Hope because of insufficient funding. We could barely cover our (modest) costs. Charity donations in general were down, but Pink Hope had suffered near-fatally that Christmas as we’d parted ways with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF). The NBCF was a much larger, much more powerful organisation than ours. It had millions (and deservedly so). By comparison, we were turning over just $100 000 at that point. Pink Hope had been under the auspices of the NBCF since our inception in 2008 but a change of management at the NBCF meant that it no longer wished to be affiliated with us and we, in return, could no longer retain our sponsorship with it. It was an amicable parting, but brutal all the same (our family had raised thousands for the NBCF during our four years together). But more than hurt feelings, the separation hurt our hip pocket and ever since then Pink Hope had been battling to survive.