It's Always Something (17 page)

In Toronto, Canada, I began my professional career. My homemaking fantasy and my romance lasted about a year and four months. We never got to the getting married part. There was no farm or children or print dresses. I learned to cook and helped him with his art shows, but I sublimated my performing ego and became very depressed. I went to night school at the University of Toronto and University of Wisconsin correspondence school to try to finish my college degree. I took art classes and craft classes. I had a big psychological breakdown at that time because of the relationship and what I was allowing it to shut off in me. We fought all the time. I went on this horrible progression, from thinking I was going to die to thinking there was going to be a nuclear war, and then settled on a fear of going on airplanes that lasted for six years. There was a huge part of me that wasn’t being used. The breakup left me and Snuffy, my Yorkshire terrier, alone in Toronto, but I loved Canada and decided to stay.

Months later, a girlfriend and I went to a small avant-garde theater to see a musical. Suddenly I knew where I belonged—not to mention the fact that I fell in love with the guy who was taking the tickets. Within no time I got a job at the box office of that theater and began to work in their children’s play productions. I made sixty dollars a week doing pantomime stories for elementary-school children in Toronto. There were four of us in the company and we drove from school to school in my car. I was back in “show business,” in love, and very happy. In the evenings I got hooked on going to play bingo. The early-bird games began at 6:30
P.M
. and I would stay till 11:00 at night, five nights a week. I would play sixteen cards at once (the more cards, the better your chances were). I had plastic chips that I carried in a pink and blue bag I crocheted myself. The whole room was filled with smoke. Everybody smoked one cigarette after another and ate potato chips. They would sell hot dogs too, and once I was so into the game that instead of reaching into my bag of chips, I put my hand in the mustard. Like everything else in my life, I got compulsive about the bingo. The most money I ever won was 250 dollars. I probably spent much more than that.

In 1972, a production of the play
Godspell
was going to cast a company in Toronto and there were open auditions. The notice said you had to act out a parable and sing a song you loved to sing. I worked hard on my audition and mastered my favorite song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” I was one of the first people chosen for the Toronto company. It was my first professional job in the theater. I was admitted to the Actors’ Equity union for stage performers and I joined an amazing company of talented people who continue to weave their careers into the 1980s, including Paul Shaffer, Martin Short, Victor Garber, Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin.

Godspell
was a way of telling the Gospel according to Saint Matthew through song and dance and humor. All of us were clowns learning and acting out the teachings of Jesus. I was always fascinated with Jesus, having studied him through art history, through the Christmas and Easter music I sang at Liggett, and through living in a Catholic neighborhood in Detroit and going to an Episcopalian church with Dibby. I was intrigued by the idea that he did all the suffering, that he took the rap for everyone. I was brought up Jewish, went to Sunday school, learned Hebrew, but along with it I was interested in Jesus and his influence on the world.

For a whole year, eight times a week, Jesus died in
Godspell
and we all suffered with him. I suppose that’s why I sometimes wondered about getting cancer. Why do I have to be Jesus? Why all this suffering in my life? Why chemo and losing my hair? Why am I marked for some kind of suffering that I see others aren’t going through? To make the connection to Jesus was not so farfetched because he certainly, as I hear tell, didn’t deserve to die in such a gruesome way. So I identified strongly going through the treatments. Once I even joked to people that I would give them a picture of me to hang over their bed, that I suffered for their sins and for whatever they did. Jesus, too, screamed a lot and said, “Why me? Don’t let me go through this. Can I get out of this please, Father?” He broke down a bunch of times.

Somehow I felt that I was being put through cancer so I could be an expert on it and I could teach about it. I decided I was meant to help other people who had cancer. As a public figure I could go back out into the world like Jesus and say, “I am still here. I went through this, and I am still here.”

My career continued in Canada, and I established myself as a comedienne. I was cast in the Toronto company of Second City, an improvisational comedy troupe based in Chicago, along with Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy and Valri Bromfield. All the material for our show came from improvisation. We wrote our sketches on our feet in front of the audience, and rewrote them by repeating performances. We had no costumes or sets, just a few chairs, and hats and glasses to suggest characters. We got our premises from audience suggestions and the emphasis was always on being funny. I was a wreck. I used to have to drink a beer and eat a bag of potato chips not to be nervous. We were just frantic behind stage. Someone was always yelling, “Will you work with me? Let’s do this.” Somebody would have an idea and say, “Gilda, be in this with me,” or “Gilda, don’t be in this with me.” It was the most stressful thing you could ever imagine. But there’s no other training ground like it for comedy writers and performers. Some of the greatest names in comedy today began their careers in Second City. My imagination was taxed to the fullest.

During the many months of chemo, I drew on my improvisational training in my visualizations. I would stand inside my body and take suggestions from my brain. I’d imagine the chemicals as these Russian dancers—Cossack dancers—with big black boots and they’d fold their arms and stomp through my body and kick out any cancer cells that they saw. Or my whole body would be a beautifully appointed restaurant with pink tablecloths and flowers at every table. And then suddenly these big trucks of Cytoxan and cisplatin would come and knock over the tables and make a total mess. But if there were any cancer cells eating at the restaurant, hanging around there, they would be totally wiped out. Then it would take about ten days to set the restaurant back up again. Sometimes my white blood cells, or leukocytes, the ones that are the immune system, would be beautiful California kids, blond and suntanned, healthy and strong. They’d walk along the beach inside my body and if they saw some vagrant, scrungy cancer cell drinking and messing up the beach, they’d smash him on the head and kick him out to sea.

In the early 1970s I was becoming a professional, making a living in show business. It was amazing to me. I never dreamt it would happen. I had a review from a Second City show with a big picture of me on the front page of the entertainment section of the newspaper. The reviewer said that I would be the toast of London and New York in comedy. He projected an amazing future for me. I have seven hundred copies of the article at home if you want one. I was so proud of that article.

Through Second City I met John Belushi and Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. When I went to New York to do
The National Lampoon Show
and we were in rehearsal, I went to a store on the weekend that sold all this weird stuff—crystals and incense and books about astrology and spiritualism. I used to love to shop there because it had weird clothes and in
The Lampoon Show
I needed some weird kind of show-business clothes to wear. The guy who worked there was an expert in astrology and had gone to the University of Michigan, so I struck up a conversation with him. He told me that the people I was involved with and I would become huge stars—energy points or cosmic forces in the universe. It absolutely came true—we became stars.

All during my career in Toronto, a certain young man named Lorne Michaels had his eye on me. In 1969, when I was hooking rugs and trying to be a housewife, I had seen him on television in a comedy show called “The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour.” When NBC gave him the okay for a late-night comedy-variety show in 1975, I was one of the first people he hired. He didn’t even know exactly what the show was going to be. There were Muppets, and musical guests, and filmed segments and a celebrity host and a repertory company that came to be called “The Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” of which I was one. We were television underdogs, nobodies, bad kids, but we made history. Our names became household words. Lorne used to say we were the Beatles of comedy. Alan Zweibel and I created characters like Emily Litella and Roseanne Roseannadanna, and “Never mind” and “It’s always something” became common expressions through the power of television. Our lives were totally altered. Talk around the set changed from “What kind of dog did you have when you were a kid?” to “What are you naming your corporation?” Suddenly I needed a manager and a lawyer and a secretary and an accountant. Bernie Brillstein became my manager and helped me organize my new life.

The most interesting thing to me as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players became famous was how our modes of transportation changed. In the first year of “Saturday Night Live,” we all came to work any way we could—subway, cab, bus. When it was time to go home after a show at 1:30 or 2:00
A.M
., we would hail cabs and go to the party and hopefully then get cabs to go home. After the second show, I remember I couldn’t get a cab so I walked to the hotel I was staying in till I found an apartment. I went straight from appearing on national television to walking alone on Sixth Avenue at 2:00
A.M.

The second year of “SNL,” NBC hired a cab company, and we could call and order cabs—one that would go to the West Side and one that would go downtown—based on where we lived. Jane and Belushi and I all lived downtown so we shared a cab downtown. Laraine and some of the others lived on the West Side and they went there. The third year, we each got our own cab account. Seven cabs were always lined up outside Rockefeller Plaza on a Saturday night. By year four, the producers provided each of us with a limousine. I remember riding downtown on Fifth Avenue with my limousine next to Belushi’s limo, and Jane’s limo next to that, and all of us would rather have been together, talking. We were waving to each other in the limos. We went from nobody caring how we got home, to each being tucked in a little Tiffany’s box to go home. That was how life changed.

After the fourth year, I had enough characters to do a comedy album and a Broadway show. Lorne Michaels produced and directed
Gilda Live
at the Winter Garden Theater in New York. I appeared for seven weeks and then did a week’s run in Boston and in Chicago. My name stood out huge and bright on theatrical marquees. I was thrilled. Warner Bros, filmed
Gilda Live
as a movie, and some magazine even referred to me as “America’s Sweetheart.”

In 1980, I married G. E. Smith, the lead guitarist in the band for
Gilda Live,
and the leader of the “Saturday Night Live” band today. The brilliant musician and the spirited comedienne had a civil ceremony in downtown Manhattan. I wore a crinoline on my head and carried a bouquet of lollipops. G. E. wore his best jeans. We lived in the legendary Dakota apartment building and held each other tight on the night John Lennon was killed.

Throughout my career I felt like the girl in “Rumpelstiltskin,” spinning straw into gold. My whole career, whether with the guys or not, I was shut in a room taking any situation and making it funny. Second City was about making anything funny, and in
Godspell
the concept was to take the gospel according to Saint Matthew and teach it through humor. On “Saturday Night Live” we satirized everything—the news, behavior, television. Throughout my career my job was to find what was funny about whatever was going on.

So I began to think that I should do the same thing with cancer. It needed me badly because it has such a terrible reputation. I decided,
Well, if I’m gonna have it, I’ve gotta find out what could be funny about it. I’m a comedienne.
My life had made me funny and cancer wasn’t going to change that. Cancer, I decided, needed a comedienne to come in there and lighten it up.

I
decided I wanted to videotape my ninth and last chemotherapy. My plan was to have Gene videotape the whole experience—going into my room at the hospital and getting in my bed, getting hooked to IV machines, the whole thing. I thought it would add a little show business to this chemotherapy thing. I also wanted to be photographed while I was asleep getting the treatment because I’d never seen myself. I wanted to see what it looked like—me missing thirty-six hours. I was also having more anxiety before number nine than usual. The eighth treatment had left me with considerable numbness in my hands and feet and now they were going to put more chemicals in and that would mean more side effects. I knew there was no way to get out of it, but I kept hoping, like a criminal, that I would get some reprieve—the governor would call at the last minute or something would intervene. But the Alchemist took my blood and all signs were go.

I’d been counting down my chemos after number five. Four to go, three to go, two to go. Now one. I felt wonderful in between—almost cocky with my good health and weight gain. I loved telling my stories at The Wellness Community every Friday: “The Adventures of the Independent, Baldheaded Chemo Patient.” I told them about the day I had just been to my internist for my weekly checkup and blood work. Trips to doctors’ offices took up half my life. I had driven myself because I was feeling so good. I pulled up to an intersection and I stopped at the red light. I was wondering why I was having these certain side effects and what would happen with my next treatment. Way in the distance I heard this voice saying, “Why are you waiting?” I went on thinking about my future and handling whatever life dealt out, and I could still hear the voice in the background saying, “Why are you waiting?”