“I don’t think so. You need to go without me.” Actually I wanted to be by myself, I didn’t even feel like talking. Usually I could rally enough spirit to put on the smiling Sparkle Plenty face my family had come to count on. But not tonight. Tonight I couldn’t even pretend.
“No, it’s out of the question, I’ll stay with you,” Shelly said. “No, you should go. This is a business trip.”
Shelly was in his business mode—define the problem and solve it. I was in my pain mode; all I needed was empathy. I wanted to be alone in the dark, quiet room. I didn’t even want to see the doctor. How was I going to get this disease under control when the medications seemed to be as harsh as the pain? I felt as if the insides of my body were taken over in some sort of revenge. Rheumatoid arthritis was eating at my joints and attacking my stomach in a mysterious and circuitous way. My orange plastic pill jars sat clustered together in the hotel bathroom, their names a blur, waiting to help me, hurt me, or blur the pain. I was beginning to think even the doctors didn’t know which direction to take.
“Ohhh, that hurts,” I complained as the doctor pressed on my queasy stomach.
“There doesn’t seem to be internal bleeding, but I think you better stop taking your medications until you get back home and can see your doctor.”
“But how can I function?” I asked, knowing that without any medications my joints would flare even more.
“The medications will stay in your body for a few days. Do you have anything for the pain?”
“Percocet.”
“That should get you through. Keep your stomach coated with Maalox,” the doctor said, packing up his little black bag. As he was leaving, he told Shelly, “She’ll be fine. This is not unusual for patients on high dosages of anti-inflammatories.”
The two of us alone again, I told Shelly, “Go, please, go to your party.”
“Why don’t you try to come just for a short time, make an appearance, and then we’ll leave early?”
I understood how important it was to Shelly, how in his own way he was in as much denial as I was. I encouraged this denial by keeping some symptoms from him. Against all common sense, I decided to go. I couldn’t bear for people to look at me as if I were sick, especially the man I loved. I gulped down Maalox and dressed. But the limo ride to the stadium was reality and way too much movement.
“Please, stop the car, I’m sick,” I yelled to the driver, realizing I didn’t have much time. And there on the side of the road, in my glamorous Calvin Klein outfit and black patent flat dancing shoes, I lost what little lunch of crackers and cheese I ate on the plane.
“Back to the hotel,” my husband said to the driver as I climbed back into the car, embarrassed, humiliated, and slightly green. My stomach was rocking, but it wasn’t to the Pointer Sisters.
I spent the rest of the convention in my room at the Windsor Court, eating boiled white rice and dry wheat toast. It was as bland as I felt. I watched the in-house convention news and tried to read. I realized I had turned fifty pages without absorbing a thing as I unconsciously tried to figure out this new life. The few people who noticed I was not around at the convention activities were satisfied with Shelly’s brief “She’s on deadline for ET” explanation. Amazing, the power of the words “Entertainment Tonight.” I saved all my energy to greet Shelly at the hotel when he came home late from a day on the convention floor and a business dinner, exhausted and exhilarated, ready to tell me of his productive day. This role-playing on my part made me feel like I had at least some control of my life. My generation was the Donna Reed, I Love Lucy, and Father Knows Best happy housewife face. Problems were meant to be swept under the carpet. And sweep them I did. All safely tucked under the carpet of the Windsor Court Hotel. By the time I left New Orleans and headed home to get ready for my upcoming trip to New York, I gave off the impression of being the picture of health. In reality I was fighting for relief from a disease that was fighting for control. I often felt that the only reason I was able to survive was because of my ability to create a fantasy world. The same fantasy world that I used every time my mom took me back to my “boarded-out home.” Without my ability to pretend, I doubt if I could have survived her constant leavings.
“Chrissie, promise me you won’t cry when I take you back to Margie and Bill’s today. I hate to think of you being so sad all week,” my mom said as she picked up all my toys and put them back in the closet, returning her beautiful apartment to its childless, pristine state. I looked around. Not one sign of me was left. Erased. All packed away, like my little Cinderella suitcase standing ready by the front door. Our mother-daughter weekend was over until the next time.
Does the camera capture my sadness or am I the only one who sees it?
Later on I would learn how to put a happy face before any camera.
6
Losing Control
DECEMBER 1991
This past year was a blur. My life was now built around my appointments at UCLA and juggling the necessary lies to keep my career going. My medications were anti-inflammatories and pain pills. One to take down the inflammation and pain, the other to mask the pain when it refused to go away. The goal of my doctor was to come up with the right combination of medications to halt my disease. So far, we had not found that combination. If a drug worked to take down inflammation it seemed only a matter of time before my blood work would show warning signs that it was affecting my liver. Seems everything you take into your body is processed by the liver, and some things, especially medicines, can be very toxic. Dr. Kalunian would call and say stop the drugs immediately and switch me to another one. Luckily there were many anti-inflammatories on the market.
The trips to New York continued, the work continued, but it was all different. Everything in my life was now connected to my health. Only nobody knew it.
“Hey, how are you? I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Shelly asked. I could picture him sitting at his desk in his eighth-floor all-glass office in what’s known as the Black Tower at Universal Studios.
“Crazy, that’s how my day has been,” I answered, slipping off my sneakers without untying the laces and flopping back on the bed at the Essex House hotel in New York. “I have almost all the items pulled for my fashion segment. Spent the entire day running from showroom to showroom and then back to the hotel to meet with my assistants and take stock of where we are,” I said.
“You sound tired.”
“I’m doing fine,” I lied, rubbing the bottoms of my red, puffy feet as I talked. “Of course the producer decided about thirty minutes ago to change the direction. Seems he doesn’t want holiday fashionable gifts after all, he now wants outfits to wear to holiday events, so tomorrow we start from zero.”
“Remember, Christine, this isn’t about you. This is about him. It’s control. He needs to feel in control of the segment. Don’t take it personally,” my wise husband advised.
“You’re right,” I answered, convincing Shelly but not myself. I knew it was about control, but I couldn’t get past the thought that he was just trying to make my life more difficult, or maybe it was just that my life was more difficult now a days. “What about your day?” I asked, changing the focus.
“Great, except you’re not here. I have to go to the cancer fund-raiser at the Beverly Hills Hotel tonight, and I dread going without you.”
I was actually relieved that I would miss having to get dressed up and take pain pills to get through another black-tie party. Whereas I once looked forward to these events, they now demanded too much of my body. The thought of a hot bath, room service, and crawling into bed early sounded delicious. The addition of even more medications plus pain pills to try to control my flaring RA still played havoc with my stomach, but I had no other options. I wasn’t sure what was worse, the nausea or the joint pain. As much as I missed Shelly, I didn’t miss concealing from him how sick I really felt. Married twenty months. Five great ones and fifteen pain-filled ones, still a better percentage than a lot of m
arriages I knew. Even though I tried to hide my pain, I often felt as if Shelly was cheated. He didn’t get what he thought he was getting. But then, neither did I. In our business, deals are not always what they seem.
The phone woke me at seven o’clock, New York time, fifteen minutes before the alarm.
“Michael wants you to bring the outfits to the studio this afternoon so he can take a look at them,” my segment producer Mary Ann said. Michael was the new executive producer. When I started at Live he was an intern, then a production assistant, referred to as a PA, but being very ambitious and close to Regis, he quickly moved up. When the executive producer, Steve Ober—the one who started me doing makeovers for ABC in San Francisco—got the New York job with Regis he quickly brought me to New York to work. Now Steve, frustrated at Live still being a local morning show when ABC kept promising him year after year that it was going national, had moved on to produce the new, national Joan Rivers Show in Los Angeles and the New York local Live top job went to Michael.
Bring the clothes to the studio? I never brought the clothes to the studio until the morning of the show, and I’d been working the Live with Regis and Kathie Lee show for more than eight years. Anxiety overwhelmed me as I tried to reply, “But he just changed the direction of my segment last night, and I need the full day to pull new merchandise.”
“I know, Christine, but you know how it is; he’s decided he wants to see the clothes and make sure he likes them.”
Since when did he become a fashion stylist? I silently screamed. What the hell is this about? Make sure he likes them?
“Just bring what you can and be here by four o’clock. I’m sorry, but you know there’s nothing I can do.” I knew it was true; there was nothing she could do. When Michael spoke, everyone jumped. Michael was into control, it was a game we all had to play and only he got to win.
Reaching for my Maalox, I rummaged through my tote to find my assistant list. An assistant list is the names and contact numbers for stylists, gofers, anyone who works to help make a segment go together. There are senior assistants, the ones who become your right arm. After working with them for a while they begin to think like you do and anticipate your every need. They know how to handle makeovers to keep them focused and calm and how to pump up models to get them to perform on a “bad image” day when they were squeezing their cellulite in the dressing room mirror and deciding they were too fat to wear a swimsuit on television, after they had been hired as a “swimsuit model.” As my disease progressed I was using more assistants to take some of the workload off my aching shoulders. They are expensive, but a good assistant makes all the difference when it comes to a smooth, calm, and organized segment. Smooth and calm were desperately needed in my life these days. Then there are the gofers, the ones who steam, iron, hem, and make temporary alterations at the last minute, tape the bottoms of shoes so they don’t get scuffed when models walk in them, and take off price tags before the show, label them lightly with pencil, and organize them into envelopes so they can easily be identified and reapplied after the show. Every good assistant has a tagger, a little instrument that puts the tags on to look like they have never been removed. We borrow most clothes from manufacturers or major department stores, but many of the stores have a policy where a stylist can borrow as long as a percentage—usually twenty percent of everything borrowed—is purchased. Although this can add to your wardrobe, it also adds to your bottom line of costs. Then there are the last-minute grab-and-buy purchases: the fill-in method when you’re desperate for items you need and there’s no time to go through the corporate channels and all the paperwork to borrow. By using different credit cards, different stores, and different assistants to do the buying and returning you can get away with it, most of the time. If there are lots of returns we will send an assistant’s mother. They never question the mothers; it’s the stylish young assistants who often look like they have “stylist” tattooed on their foreheads. Or in a hurry they buy ten necklaces, all from one store, just so I will have a choice, when all I need is one for the model. It always sets off an alarm in the head of the salesperson and they know right away that the customer is a stylist. If the salesperson is cool they will go ahead with the purchase. If they are trying to move up to a management job in the store, they will push the little hidden security button, and a strict enforcer will tell you that you can only buy one or two of the same item. They know what you’re up to, and their job is to call you on it. I have never known a stylist to be thrown out of a store or go to jail for over-shopping or returning a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes, but the fear is always in the back of our heads.
Today I was desperate to find Amy, my senior assistant, and the only one who could help me though this last-minute Michael emergency without stressing out.
“I know it’s last minute but can you work with me today? Change in direction for my segment, and I’m going to need an extra pair of experienced hands. There’s no way I can pull this together with two junior assistants.” I neglected to say that I was working at about one third of my normal capacity. I probably needed to tell her about my disease, because we had worked closely for seven years, but every time I thought I was ready my gut told me to keep it to myself. One slip, and my career could be over. Plus, Amy is twenty-three. How could she relate to arthritis?
“Sure, Christine, I’ll be at your hotel by ten o’clock.”
“Perfect.” This would allow me to get my other assistants organized and out into the field before she arrived. They had no idea that everything we worked on for the past few days had been canned.
“I’d like a protein shake and one order of plain wheat toast, dry. Yes, Schwab, room 1608, as soon as possible.” I hoped the shake would coat my queasy stomach. I hadn’t taken my daily pills yet, and already my insides were agitated.
For the first time I dropped the phone’s receiver as I tried to place it back in the cradle, my hands cramping up, twisted and frozen in pain. I slumped to the floor, frustrated tears streaming down my face. As much as I tried, I couldn’t ignore that the disease was spreading to my hands. Once only sensitive, now my hands were unable to do many of the necessities of my work. Carrying large groups of hanging garments, picking up small items, opening packages—once-simple tasks were now difficult, sometimes impossible. How could I get through this day? This segment?
The ringing phone startled me back to the moment.
“Good morning, gorgeous,” Shelly said in that sleepy, sexy morning voice of his.
Quickly masking my tears, I replied, “Good morning.”
“I’m lying here in bed thinking of your great body and wishing you were here to wake me up the right way,” he whispered.
“Me too, but I’ll be home soon.”
“So what’s on your agenda today?”
“Work, just waiting for my assistants so we can get started. Michael wants me to bring the clothes to the studio this afternoon so he can make sure he likes them.”
“Don’t get caught up in this game playing, Christine. This is not about you. Why make it more stressful for yourself? Do you think all Michael does all day is try to figure out how to make your work more difficult? You know the protocol. You have to adjust to him, he doesn’t have to adjust to you.”
“He was an intern when I started, Shelly. Now all of a sudden he has the big job, and I have to prove myself all over again.”
“It’s just television. Try to keep it in perspective and hurry home. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. I know you’re right, but I’m dealing with so much frustration doing my work right now and then this? I don’t deserve this power-play treatment after all the successful segments I’ve done for the show. Ah, hold on, room service is trying to deliver my breakfast.”
“No, you go and eat, you haven’t been eating well lately, and I don’t want you to get scrawny on me. Love ya, talk tonight.” And he was gone, ready to start his busy, long day. Never complaining. I needed to get myself back on track. Negative thought
s were filling my once-positive head.
Flashbacks of past Christmases with my mom, some good and some sad, loomed before me as I looked out my hotel window at Central Park below. Even the horses and carriages taking tourists up and down the streets were decorated with holiday garland. As an adult I always went overboard at Christmas—too many gifts, too many parties, too much food. I had to make it perfect. As a child I didn’t have any control over making the holidays perfect. Christmas was a time of feeling left out at my “boarded-out” homes. There were trees and gifts under their trees, but as I snooped at the tags, none of them were ever for me. My mom would have a little tree in her apartment and many gifts under it that were for me, but our Christmastimes were always short, and my gifts needed to stay at her apartment so the other “boarded-out” kids wouldn’t take them. I had two lives, the one with my mom that I loved and the one with the families who saw me as a monthly check. One was glamorous and loving, the other cold and unknown. Now as an adult I was once again living two lives, one glamorous and loving with Shelly and the other medically unknown. So much had changed from my childhood and yet, recently, at times it seemed as if nothing had changed.
The holiday outfits passed Michael’s “inspection,” mostly because he was distracted by a last-minute booking cancellation for the next day’s show. Easier than I anticipated.
“If you change the white tuxedo shirt for a black-and-white striped one it’ll look better on camera, otherwise I guess it’s fine,” Michael told me, rushing through the rack of eight holiday outfits.
“I GUESS it’s fine . . . I GUESS.” Keep your mouth shut, Christine, you’ve got the okay, change the shirt and get out of here. This is not about you. Just get back to the hotel and get some rest so you don’t look as haggard as you feel on TV tomorrow morning.
Take Me Home From the Oscars: Arthritis, Television, Fashion, and Me Page 6
