Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  Chapter 14

  Two Surgeries and One Kiss

  A few days before Christmas, 1990, two months before my 50th birthday, I took my nurse practitioner’s advice and got a mammogram. Not fun getting your girls squished but there it is. It’s got to be done. After that I flew up to spend the holiday with my sister Barbara Jean and her kids in Marin County.

  When I arrived back home to Sherman Oaks the red light on my answering machine was blinking and when I hit play I heard the voice of my nurse practitioner say, “Hi Charlotte, listen, something’s come up on your mammogram, I’ve sent it in for review…”

  The feelings that electrified through me are hard to describe but anxiety and nervousness just about cover it. She instructed me to drive to an oncologist’s office nearby where I was simply handed a sealed envelope to take back to my nurse practitioner. Back in my car the first thing I did was open up the envelope. I wanted to know what was going on. Now. Inside nested among the medical-ese was news that made my stomach fill with acid — the physician who reviewed the mammogram had written that I appeared to have a malignancy in my right breast.

  “I have cancer,” I thought. “I. Have. Cancer.”

  Cancer was a thing other people had.

  My mother had cancer. Victor French had cancer. I’d had a cousin who had breast cancer. Cancer of varying types, yes, but still cancer.

  And they had all died.

  I started my car and commanded myself to drive like a sane, non-trembling person, and dutifully took the envelope to my nurse practitioner. Once she read through the analysis she set me up for surgery, a lumpectomy, for the next day.

  She was both appropriately encouraging and at the same time struck a tone of “we’ll hope for the best.”

  I went back to my house and the thought rolled around and around in my head like a marble in a spray paint can, “I have cancer.”

  I was living alone in the Sherman Oaks house these days as Jack had moved in with Kelly Van Dyke so I had no one to talk to.

  Even if I’d had a roommate this had all happened so fast, I don’t know what I would’ve said. I’d gone from nearly 50 years of not having cancer to having cancer in one day.

  Over a span of that kind of time you get used to not having cancer. Not having cancer is your normal. You wake up without cancer, you brush your teeth without cancer, you eat, drive, hang out with friends, do your laundry, run a brush through your hair, pick out a new pair of sunglasses, fall in love, fall out of love, do your taxes — all while not having cancer.

  You’re the sort of person who doesn’t have cancer.

  In the space of 24 hours that had changed. I was now the sort of person who had cancer. And tomorrow I was going to be the sort of person who has cancer surgery.

  And what then?

  Would I be fine? Would I lose a breast? Would my hair fall out? Would I die?

  Would I have to wear one of those crappy little gowns with my rear end hanging out the back?

  Would I be cold?

  Would it hurt?

  My mind couldn’t crunch through it all.

  I just wanted it to go away.

  Crisis takes us to our earliest influences. And this was no exception. When things get tough, I often channel my mother’s stoicism. You remember Alice Stewart, the force of nature, who’d had six months to live and refused to acknowledge it and went about her daily life as though nothing had changed? I simply decided that I was going to be fine. And with that I went to bed.

  Here’s the thing about deciding that you’re going to live. You’re only wrong once. So, really, statistics were on my side.

  The following morning I got a ride from a friend to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where I checked myself in, filled out all the forms, changed into the ridiculous little gown they give you and was wheeled into x-ray. Here they had to pinpoint the location of the tumor, which involved a procedure that, if it weren’t for pain meds, would sound like something they did to people in medieval dungeons. They stuck a needle into the front of my breast and stuck another one through the side in order to help the x-ray — which apparently isn’t good at picking out soft tissue like this — identify the location of the malignancy. Then the tech left the needles in me and trotted off for what seemed like hours. While away he ran the x-rays by an oncologist who confirmed the location.

  Finally the needles came out and I was wheeled into a waiting area that was like an assembly line. There were women in four or five beds ahead of me waiting for similar procedures. When it was my turn I was given a shot of something to knock me out and not long afterward I was again wide awake, hearing that everything had gone well.

  The only thing I had to show for all of this was a Band-Aid over a small incision. It was quick, I felt perfectly fine and later that same day I was at home as though nothing happened.

  There was some discomfort but I had my hair, all my parts, and I wasn’t dying. My hope was that they’d gotten everything.

  A few days later I received a call from the oncologist and this time the news was a bit more unsettling. They needed to go back in and “take out the margins,” in other words there was still a possibility that there was cancer tissue present. This time besides taking out more breast tissue, they would also need to take out the lymph nodes under my arms and I was being recommended for radiation.

  Again, I hitched a ride to Cedars-Sinai, again checked myself in, and all the rest. However this was no Band-Aid surgery. When I awoke my body was well aware that it had been cut up. This time I opened my eyes in the recovery room feeling sick, woozy and disconnected from reality, attached to an IV and monitors. I was all bandaged up and even with all the pain medication was in a fair amount of discomfort.

  For reasons I couldn’t quite put together, my hairdresser was looming over me. Had I missed an appointment?

  That didn’t make sense.

  I guess I’d told him about the surgery? I couldn’t remember.

  I recuperated at Cedars-Sinai for the next three days and because I hadn’t told anyone — other than my hairdresser — about the surgery, I didn’t have a single visitor. Well, that was on me, wasn’t it?

  Once I was home though I started telling people about my cancer and the surgeries. Dana Ashbrook brought me flowers, what a sweetheart, the best TV son a TV mother could ask for. So many people wanted to bring me food, I created a system that I thought would be fun. You know how you have lots of people from lots of different parts of your life and many of them never meet each other? Well, I thought this might be a way to fix that. I created a schedule and invited two women over each night, who didn’t know each other. The result was a series of evenings most of which were a lot of fun, some were quiet, and some were frankly a little awkward but totally worth it.

  It was awfully generous of all those friends to bring food and company to the house. The truth is having chunks and bits of you surgically removed does a number on you. I had to do exercises in the shower to be able to lift my arm again. Having those lymph nodes out was no picnic. I was still in a lot of pain and was nervous about going out and about; getting bumped or jostled was a nightmare.

  Meanwhile, as someone in alcohol recovery, I was being cautious about taking pain medication. There are plenty of stories of people such as myself who’ve discovered a new life away from alcohol only to find themselves hurled back into a dark, addicted place with pain medication following surgery or an accident.

  I didn’t want to be in pain but even more than that, I didn’t ever want to be in the grips of addiction.

  With all of this going on, I did return to work at Lantana — very gingerly — and at the same time started a six-week course of radiation. This meant going in five mornings a week, which I scheduled at 8 a.m., since my day at Lantana started at 9:30 am.

  The first thing they do in prepping you for radiation therapy is to tattoo a blue dot on the spot where they want to aim the rays. I still have my blue dot; I had no idea at the time that it was permanent.

>   Each morning started in the waiting area with the same group of people. We’d all scheduled our radiation at the same time and were all doing it over the course of six weeks or more. Over that time you get very friendly, all being in the same boat, and I found radiation to be surprisingly social.

  Once in the treatment room I’d lie on a table and they’d lower this long, cone-like object over me, pointing at the blue dot. And then without my feeling anything, they’d blast the tumor area with radiation.

  Overall it was piece of cake, I told my nurse practitioner, when she checked in on me. She let me know that, yes, there’s nothing to it until about the fifth week, when people tend to start feeling tired. And as always she was right. At about week five, right on schedule, I remember being at work one afternoon and just having to lay my head on my desk. It was as though in a single moment someone had tugged all the stuffing out of me.

  With cancer eating at my thoughts, the ongoing pain of the incisions, and being in and out of medical offices, I wanted to fight the bleak urge to feel sorry for myself. I didn’t want to just wait around for another phone call from an oncologist, or for the results of another text. I wanted to have some fun. So I began to draw up plans for my 50th birthday party.

  I let everyone know that it would be a “bad taste” party and for the invitation I used copies of the ad I’d modeled for back in the late 1950s for a product called “Wate-On,” a magic pill that would give skinny girls curves.

  The bad taste of my friends and family was on full display on March 1 (a few days after my actual birthday) at the Sons of Norway Lodge in North Hollywood. It was a sea of tackiness and tastelessness. I’d dressed for the occasion in an old blue sequined dress with a purple condom tucked into my bra strap. Jack Nance came with Kelley and he wore a jacket and tie but no pants. Jeanne picked her nose throughout the evening and dropped F-bombs. Russ Tamblyn was one of several winners of the bad taste contest — dressing only a bit more outré than his Twin Peaks character. A lot of the cast from Twin Peaks was there, including Don Davis, along with friends from throughout my life stretching back to the good old Pasadena Playhouse days.

  Among the guests was David Banks, whom I’d known since those Pasadena days. David came with his ex-wife Lydia, who’d been my roommate at the Playhouse. Though divorced David and Lydia remained friends and had been great parents to their son Jason, who also came to the party. David, who was six foot, three inches of Southern gentleman, is someone I’d seen many times over the years since the Playhouse days — at his wedding with Lydia, at various birthday parties, and even at Jason’s birth (I was honored to be his godmother). But David had been out of town a lot over the years. At the Playhouse, while he had studied acting, he’d realized that his take-charge nature was much more suited to managing the chaos backstage.

  He’d taken both Rocky Horror Picture Show and Jesus Christ Superstar from initial runs in Los Angeles to Broadway, a massive undertaking as a stage manager. Later he was road manager for a string of great talents including Bette Midler, the legendary Josephine Baker, and the group Manhattan Transfer.

  I’d been surprised to run into him about a month or so prior to my birthday party at an alcohol recovery meeting. I’d not realized that had been something he’d needed nor that sobriety was a step he’d taken. This guy was full of surprises.

  At the party David and I danced together — a bit delicate given the pain I was still in. But even so I was surprised at how dancing with him felt. He was a friend — a good friend, an old friend. But something about being this close to him felt warmer than that, more intimate. Which was obviously silly though I couldn’t attribute such feelings to alcohol, as all I was drinking that night was bubbly water.

  What if I liked David Banks as more than a friend? Okay, stop. Just stop, I thought. I needed to blame these thoughts on something, so I chalked it up to cancer. And the lingering effects of pain medication and radiation. Oh, and menopause. You can blame a lot of things on menopause.

  A few minutes later another guy cut in and my dance with David was done. So — that had been weird and I tried to shake it off. But then I looked across the dance floor and there was Jeanne and John Binder. They’d been good friends for years, each having marriages and relationships, their own romantic and sexual ups and downs. And now look at them. Married. And happy.

  Okay. So sometimes things happen between friends. Fine. It wasn’t going to happen to me. I had other things to focus on.

  My contract with the Lodge stipulated that we had to be out by midnight so toward the end a lot of people pitched in to clean up and one of the most fun evenings of my life came to a close.

  I got home to Sherman Oaks and at about 1 a.m. my phone rang. It was David Lynch. He was at the Sons of Norway Lodge and the lights were off, the parking lot was empty, the doors were locked, and he was wondering where everyone was. Ha.

  A few days the other David called — David Banks — and said he’d been thinking about me (or at least my situation) and asked if there was anything he could do, anything I needed. As a matter of fact there was. The following week there was going to be a conference in the San Fernando Valley for those in alcohol recovery and featured some speakers who had been 50 years sober, an achievement I greatly admired. I really wanted to go but the thing stopping me was that I was still afraid of getting bumped into at such a large conference. It had happened a couple of times now and the pain was pretty bad.

  David said he’d be happy to drive me to the conference; he’d wanted to go as well and we both made a joke about it being a date.

  The morning of the event he showed up at my door dressed handsomely wearing a straw Panama hat, the second David in my life to have a predilection for such hats. If you’ll recall, a Panama hat with a broken brim is what David Lynch wore when he first came to my house in Topanga Canyon. I would learn that this David rarely went anywhere without his.

  As we drove to the conference, I had to admit to myself that there was something new between us. What exactly? There was the old comfort of a friendship that goes back for decades, the people such as Stuart Margolin whom we’d both known, the ability at this age to compare aches and pains me with my cancer surgery, him with his back surgeries (he’d had five of them). But that thing that was shimmering invisibly in the air between us didn’t really come together for me until we got to the conference and found our seats. When we sat down David simply put his arm around me.

  That one gesture was everything.

  A wave of relief and comfort passed through me. I had gone through rehab by myself. I’d gone through cancer by myself. I’d faced down all the thoughts of age and mortality that come with a 50th birthday.

  And now someone had put an arm around me. Protecting me. Caring for me. Caring about me. It was like I’d been walking around this whole time carrying a Buick on my back and hadn’t even know it. And now I felt it slip away.

  For my entire life, I had splashed into my relationships through the doorway of sex and alcohol and now, for the first time, I found myself entering through friendship. And it felt…scary.

  That night David drove me home and walked me to the front steps of my house and I kept telling myself that he was simply being nice, simply being that Southern gentleman that he was down to his bones. (He’d been born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, but claimed New Orleans, where he’d also lived, as his spiritual home.) On the porch seconds before it happened, I knew it was going to happen and my heart nearly broke my ribs. And then it did happen. I kissed him. Really kissed him. With the blood pounding in my neck so hard, I thought my neighbors would hear it. It was one of those kisses that comes along maybe once — a kiss that puts everything on the line. A kiss that terrifies you because it matters.

  Something in David’s face changed. It couldn’t read it but it may have been shock…or fear or dislike or…well, I didn’t know. He left quickly and I went inside and locked the door and felt like crying. Which was ridiculous, right? It was only a moment. We’d had our
clothes on.

  After all the sex I’d had with all the men in all the ways possible, how was it possible for a kiss to feel like a moon launch?

  But I knew why. I knew exactly why.

  Most of that sex had meant very little.

  I’d crossed a line tonight. In the time that David and I had been friends people had been born, grown up, and had kids of their own. Real friends are much harder to come by than friends-with-benefits. And now I’d blown it. I’d spoiled it. In a moment of weakness and vulnerability and stupid, stupid, stupid emotion I’d wrecked a friendship.

  It was a long night.

  The next day David drove over. He came to make sure everything was okay between us. He’d rushed off last night feeling like he destroyed a friendship that was precious to him. His night had been identical to mine — berating himself, sure that a curtain had come down between us, sure that he’d screwed up.

  Well, that sounded familiar.

  What a relief. That kiss had not been the end of something; it had been the start. We both now realized that we were ready, both wanted something more than friendship. I asked him if he wanted to stay the night. He did and he never really left. Not long after that we let our family and friends know that we’d moved in together. As I told Jeanne, “If a guy waits to fall for you after rehab, breast cancer, and menopause, he’s the one.”

  My final day of radiation was scheduled on April 1. I was wheeled in to have the invisible ray blasted into me and the tech looked at a clipboard and announced that things had changed and that I’d need to come in for another three weeks.

  What?

  Then he smiled. April Fools. It was indeed my last day and after a series of mammograms over the following months, I was declared cancer free. It was news I was thrilled to share with David.

  While my personal life was becoming full of joy and love, friends of mine were going through tough times.

  My Little House family took a hard blow on May 9, 1991, when Michael Landon went on The Tonight Show and talked with Johnny Carson about his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. What a shock to see him looking so good and apparently feeling fine while the clock on his life was ticking. It took me right back to my mother, who had the same diagnosis in 1972. She had felt well enough to drive herself to the hospital from Yuba City to San Francisco and back. On July 1 Mike died. It was hard to absorb the news that he was gone. Someone like Mike seems so alive that the idea of him being gone doesn’t make sense. It’s like the idea that the sun isn’t going to come up tomorrow. Added to that was the speed at which the cancer took him. It gave you very little time to process it. I was glad to hear that Melissa Gilbert had been able to see him before he passed. They’d had a long and important relationship. I was simply left with a feeling of gratitude — so grateful for everything Mike done for me, for the entire cast and crew and really for a whole generation of kids who grew up watching the kind, loving, strong version of fatherhood he modeled through Charles Ingalls.