We then moved over to the chichi stretch on Sunset Boulevard known as Sunset Plaza. It is a collection of outdoor cafes and boutiques where celebrities love to shop and eat. First stop was the popular Billy Martin’s, which sells high-end Western wear. A pair of alligator boots topping the price scale of well over $1,500 were my suggestion as the perfect gift for Arnold Schwarzenegger to give his wife, Maria Shriver. I never saw her wearing them at the private beach club they belong to, but then who wears Western boots at the beach? I’m positive Arnold took my suggestion.
The hot new bath shop Waterworks had just opened on the Sunset Plaza, featuring everything from designer tubs to luxurious bathrobes. I had planned ahead and brought along a replica of Kobe Bryant’s Laker jersey to place under one of their robes. Untying the thick white robe, I revealed the jersey to the camera, telling what a nice combination it would be under Kobe’s Christmas tree. The director loved it, and had me do several close-ups of removing the tie on the robe for the reveal. Luckily my meds were working, and my hands weren’t swollen and red. Even my feet, although outfitted in some cool-looking sneakers that the camera didn’t catch, were cooperating. I was having one of my better days, and I was so appreciative.
Our last stop was Neil Lane, one of the most talented and desired jewelers in town. His jewels adorned the necks of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars at the awards shows. Celebrities clamored to wear his diamonds on the red carpet. His engagement rings were every woman’s dream. Jason Patric was dating Julia Roberts after he actually stole her right from under her fiancé Kiefer Sutherland’s nose. So who better to recommend buying a Neil Lane holiday diamond for than Jason for Julia? I know it seemed a bit rushed, but in Hollywood engagements are made and broken in hours. The director smiled, knowing the audience would love it. A little insider gossip, for the queen of gossip shows.
After a few bridges, where I walk down the street toward the camera, or move in and out of stores as I’m talking, we wrapped in the late afternoon. Bridges are used by the editors to move from one place to another. By now I was experienced and could walk and talk at the same time. But I remember when I first did bridges for KABC Eyewitness News in Los Angeles as their fashion reporter. I was new and totally green and it would take many takes to get one good walking/talking bridge. There’s something about putting one foot in front of the other while trying to “sparkle” in front of a camera moving backward in front of you that takes time to adjust to. It’s anything but natural in person, but on the screen it looks as if you’re taking the viewer shopping with you. Then we shot some more close-ups of gift ideas, long shots of storefronts, and casual shots of shoppers at work.
Now the segment was out of my hands. The director took the tapes to the studio, and the editor took over. The following week, there I was on ET with dancing Christmas trees and shiny ornaments on the screen while the talent introduced my segment. They added cash registers with the over-the-top prices. Nobody edits and puts a segment together like ET. It was perfect for the holidays. Because it has a huge viewing audience, ET always made my phone ring with compliments. And then came the lovely note from Bonnie. A television Christmas doesn’t get any better.
11
Stable Until Ready
FEBRUARY 1993
My life, three years after my diagnosis, was now totally defined by my chronic rheumatoid arthritis. My secret was still safe even though my health was not. Over the last year I had been on Azulfidine, Imuran, Plaquenil, Epogen shots for anemia, and Cytoxan, gold Shots, and of course lots of Zantac to coat my stomach for the drug onslaught. After reading the information on Cytoxan, a drug used in cancer chemotherapy, I stopped reading. It was too depressing to learn all the side effects when I didn’t have a choice. Without medication I wouldn’t be able to walk. Still Dr. Kalunian kept holding out hope.
“There’s some really good drugs in testing programs, we just need to keep you stable until they’re ready,” he told me. Stable was something I couldn’t relate to. Up to now he would start me on a new combination of drugs and even if they helped my RA, it was only a matter of time before my lab work came back with issues. We had to constantly change medications because my system wouldn’t tolerate the side effects. Or my hair started falling out in tufts, or my hearing was affected. It was always something.
“Christine, I think you need to get your hearing checked. I’ve noticed that you don’t seem to hear a lot of what I say,”
Shelly said to me one morning as he called me to the phone and I didn’t respond. “It seems to be getting worse.”
I barely noticed. I was consumed with medications and doctors’ appointments. My work schedule now revolved around my time at UCLA. My social life revolved around my medical life. I felt like a revolving door running in circles out of control.
I also felt like a supersleuth, always padding the lies. If I slipped and let anyone know the state of my health my career could be in jeopardy. Television was a small world.
“Sorry, I can’t join you for lunch. I have a meeting with my literary agent,” I lied to my girlfriends.
“I hate to cancel at the last minute but Shelly and I have to go out of town,” I said to our couple friends so I could cancel dinner plans that my queasy, overmedicated stomach wouldn’t allow me to attend.
I had come up with other excuses at work. “Just going to pick up a few things,” I told my New York assistants as I rushed into a doctor’s office at Eighty-ninth and Park for the weekly gold Shots Dr. Kalunian had arranged for me to get when I was in New York. Travel didn’t matter, the continuity of the medicine was mandatory. I’d run into the doctor’s office, climb up on the exam table, and lay on my stomach as they pumped what was called gold into my tush. It might have been gold, but it was thick and it hurt as it was plunged in with a big needle, and no, I didn’t turn a golden bronze tan color, nor set the security alarms off at the airports. Gold Shots had been around for years and so far they weren’t doing much for my RA. I decided I’d rather have my gold in a pair of hoop earrings or a new charm for my bracelet. Today gold has been replaced by newer treatments with superior benefits and less risk. It’s considered an old treatment that is hardly used now, but a few patients were put in remission with gold, and although it’s harder to obtain, they still have the injections.
“Trying to grow out my bangs,” I answered when asked about my latest hairpiece to cover up my thinning hair from the toxic Cytoxan medication. My desk had a stack of blue lined note cards that I used on television segments to keep all of the designer and store names organized. The blue color was for TV because it wasn’t as noticeable as white on camera. I was beginning to feel I needed blue note cards to juggle the various lies I told friends and colleagues. Would my cover be blown if I overlapped my stories?
I was good at fabricating the truth. My childhood fantasies enabled me to escape my foster-home sadness. Now that same daydream world worked for me almost to the point of believing I didn’t have a disease until the pain brought me back to reality. My childhood didn’t prepare me for the lies and deceits I now needed to keep my secret. I asked myself what choice I had. I had worked my entire life to get where I was, and now my own body was fighting to take it all away. The career in television that made me feel needed and successful, the marriage that made me feel as complete as I was capable of and more loved than I had ever experienced. The exciting lifestyle that once was only in my imagination and now was in my daily schedule. I couldn’t let it all go. I had to fight to hold on. With each day, week, month, and year the fight became more complicated.
“I would normally love to do that segment, but I’m booked to work in LA,” I lied when I knew I couldn’t add anything else to my workload. My days of running from one job to another, from meeting to meeting, and always being able to squeeze in something else were finished. I now had to monitor my days and my evenings. With Shelly’s social commitments a necessity, I had to cut mine way back. Most of my days now consisted of medical appointments, a little w
ork, resting, and medicating so I could get through the evening’s obligations.
By the end of the month Dr. Kalunian prescribed Epogen shots for the anemia that sapped my energy. The good news was that I was now off the prednisone. The bad news was that the hyped-up steroid energy disappeared with the drug. In only a few weeks we learned the Epogen shots would not give me the boost we hoped. I was exhausted most of the time, and now my camouflaging pain pills seemed to wear off earlier and earlier during the social evenings.
I needed a second opinion. I needed something, anything, to help. Dr. Wallace was the chief of rheumatology at Cedars-Sinai. His reputation in the medical community was stellar. Dr. Kalunian recommended him and understood why I needed another opinion. I couldn’t get my head around Dr. Kalunian’s hope for drugs that were currently only in research. I had lost my patience waiting. I needed to deal better with the moment. I needed to keep up with my husband. How much longer would he sit home watching TV with me when we were supposed to be at a political fund-raiser? How many excuses could we get away with for leaving events early because my pain was too intense to sit any longer with a smile on my face? I felt threatened emotionally and physically.
On a beautiful spring day in early March, I walked into the Beverly Hills Medical Clinic on Beverly Boulevard. I felt optimistic for the first time in ages. There had to be something that could work. The office waiting room was filled with older people. I recognized the ravages of RA on their bodies. Some had distorted hands. Others wore orthopedic shoes. One woman walked with a cane, another man with a walker. The room’s decor matched. The walls were a drab beige. The lined-up chairs were worn and tired. The magazines all outdated. Not a single window allowed the spring day inside.
Dr. Wallace’s nurse handed me a form to list the drugs I had taken. I used small print that extended into the margins in order to fit them all in. “Thanks, Dr. Wallace will be with you shortly,” the nurse behind the frosted glass window said, a lie told so well she could easily get a job in entertainment. Based on the number of people in the waiting room, I knew it would not be shortly.
Dr. Wallace was not a man who smiled. When he entered a room he sucked any possibility of lightness right out of it. His face was set in a down-turned, sad expression when he greeted me. It didn’t bode well for someone in desperate search of hope.
“Well, Christine, seems like you’ve tried a lot of medications,” he said, looking over my newly filled-out chart. After checking my tender, inflamed joints, he sat down on the swivel stool and continued to stare at my chart as if waiting for answers to pop out at him. “I think we should try to rechallenge you with low doses of methotrexate. Just because you had a reaction to it once doesn’t mean you will again,” he finally said, looking me sternly in the eyes.
Rechallange me? METHOTREXATE? The drug that put me in the hospital for more than a week and almost killed me? The drug that forced me to take steroids for a year just to clear up my lungs? Was he kidding? My body had been challenged enough trying to survive the side effects of methotrexate.
Trying to keep my voice from screeching, I answered, “I really don’t want to go on methotrexate again after my last experience.”
“Well, you only have a few choices,” he said as he peered over his smudged half glasses, giving me the “so you choose to disagree with the doctor” tone of voice. “There’s some experimental work being done in San Francisco where they drain your blood, clean it, and then replace it. Not much data, but you might want to check it out.”
Drain my blood and clean it? I thought I read about that being done once to heroin addicts. It sounded like some weird vampire carnival game.
“Then there’s the new TNF-alpha drug they’re testing in London,” he continued, never missing a beat, now looking at my chart so he didn’t have to look at me. “If I were you I would beg, borrow, or steal to try to get in one of the testing programs in London. These drugs are a totally new approach to immune diseases. They actually block the body’s system from attacking itself.”
“How would I even begin?” I asked, the sophisticated city of London sounding far better than draining my blood in San Francisco.
“I really can’t advise you. The drug is manufactured by a company called Immunex, and I think they’re headquartered in Seattle. That’s about all I know except for the testing in London. Depending on how the tests in London go, they could be in the United States in a few years.”
I didn’t think my emotional state had a few years. I doubted that my career could hold up a few more years, and my marriage? Would my husband finally realize that he didn’t get what he bargained for?
I guess, in hindsight, my mom didn’t get what she bargained for, either. She lost her mom at eight and when her dad remarried quickly, she and my aunt were really not very welcome in the new household. An aunt took them in for a while, but basically the twins were on their own at fifteen, moving from Arkansas to California, where jobs for beautiful young girls were touted. My aunt, being the stronger one, was my mom’s only mother figure.
And then my dad, the handsome policeman who swept my eighteen-year-old mother off her feet and got her pregnant, turned out to not be the man she fell in love with. Now with him out of the picture, she was once again on her own with my aunt, only now they had me, a needy, confused little girl. When I asked her one day where my daddy was, because I really didn’t remember him before he went away, she replied with another question: “What made you ask that, Chrissie?” I guess I told her all the kids at school had daddies and I wanted one too, or something that a five-year-old would say. My mom’s reply was to ask me if I wanted to go to Clifton’s Cafeteria for dinner, my favorite. It took my mind off of my question, thinking of the flag with the red tip that would be in my food, enabling me to visit the treasure chest of gifts. Looking back, this might have been my first experience with the denial that would become such an important part of my life both as a child and as a chronically ill adult.
Dr. Wallace’s voice brought me back to reality. “Sorry I can’t be more help. There are still other combinations of the drugs you have been on that we can try. I’ll call Dr. Kalunian and talk with him about some alternatives.” And he stood and walked out the door, leaving me more frustrated than before.
That evening, Shelly and I walked around the corner from our condo to our favorite Chinese restaurant, Xi’an on Canon, for a relaxed dinner. No black ties, no business meetings, just the two of us at a small table by the window with delicious tofu and chicken in black bean sauce and healthy brown rice.
“Looks like the Kitty Kelley talk show is not going to go,” Shelly told me, trying to hide his frustration by mixing the apricot sauce with the hot mustard. “We sold it in all the major markets until the word came from upstairs that it was over. No official reason was given.” The Wassermans and the Reagans were good friends so the speculation was that Reagan might have put in a call to Wasserman and killed the show. Some people felt that Reagan never got over the book Kelley wrote on Nancy, saying she had an affair with Sinatra.
I knew how disappointed he was because of the hours and money that went into a pilot that created great buzz in the industry. Kitty Kelley, the best-selling author, was even better on camera than in print.
“Christine, are you listening?” Shelly’s sharp tone woke me out of my daydreaming.
“Sorry, I was thinking of the treatment alternatives Dr. Wallace gave me today.”
“Can’t we talk about something else besides your health while we’re eating?” Shelly responded with a new edge I hadn’t heard in his voice before.
My twenty-five year association with Regis continued with the delightful Kelly Ripa.
12
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
JANUARY, 1994
In my business I am always looking at what’s next. A new, different show to add to my list of shows. For me it’s two reasons. First, I need to always feel I am growing and improving—it’s the “need for approval” gene from
my childhood. Second, I know how vulnerable television is. A new producer takes over (and this happens all the time—as a show’s ratings fall you can count the days until the executive producer will be replaced) and you can be out of a job as the new producer brings in all his own talent. Cleaning house; it happens in most businesses.
Currently I am a regular on Live, which is a great gig. I do some special assignments for Entertainment Tonight, which is exciting and different. I have done three Oprah shows, which is the brass ring. I do Fox Network News on most of my visits to New York, which is quick, easy, newsy; no models, fewer props, an in-and-out gig. And then sometimes, especially around the holidays, I will add a New York or Los Angeles local morning show for a gift segment, accessory segment, or tabletop segment. A tabletop segment is where you make a display and go down the table showing the best shoes, bags, or gift items for the season. Sometimes the phone will ring with something different and unique on a network show that is a nice change of pace, and sometimes you have to pitch and plan and make something new happen for yourself. One of my long-term goals had always been to be a regular on The Today Show. It’s more of a major news, reported-segment type of show. The show wouldn’t conflict with my work on Live. Michael, Live’s executive producer, is very possessive of his talents and doesn’t want them appearing on any show that is on any station at the same time as his, which makes it hard on the talents, because Live is a syndicated show, meaning that it’s on different stations at different times across the country. This is a deal breaker with Michael, and so those of us who worked at Live, even without written contracts, played by the rules. When I checked with Michael, he said he didn’t have any problem with me adding Today to my freelance list because the shows were not in competition with each other. Permission granted, now it was up to me to set my sights and go to work on the television dating game, because in many ways it is like pursuing a date with someone you have been dreaming about for a long time. It takes patience and persistence. And even with my arthritis moving in and out of my body on a whim based on medicines either working or not working, I liked the chase. I liked the dating game. I may have arthritis, but my determination not to let arthritis rule my life still remained strong, at least on most days.
Take Me Home From the Oscars: Arthritis, Television, Fashion, and Me Page 11