My Mother Was Nuts (38 page)

The radiation cleared my head of cancer—and of everything else around it. My memory was gone. Then I had to deal with the cancer in my lungs. They told me it was a little spot; fine. I knew that was better than a big spot or a lot of spots. Since I wasn’t fond of my “death with dignity” oncologist at UCLA, I changed to one at Cedars-Sinai. He headed the lung program. He and my surgeon knew that I was allergic to opiates, and they said I should have it zapped.

They felt radiation and chemotherapy could be as effective as surgery. I went for treatments several times a week, and after six months the tumor disappeared. They were right. Zapping was better than cutting. Afterward, I went for monthly scans where they injected me with so many radioactive isotopes I could have lived in Japan. Each time I got good news.

But there were side effects. I gained sixty pounds. Everyone else in the world on chemo and radiation loses weight. Somehow I got fat. Better fat than dead. At the Lakers and Clippers games, players on both teams and their opponents said they had me in their prayers. I had to constantly tell them that I wasn’t dying—except when they
put me up on the JumboTron.
Then
I died of embarrassment. I looked like a big, fat
South Park
kid. I complained to my oncologist.

“I’m depressed,” I said.

“The reason you’re depressed is that you gained weight,” he said.

“Well, how do I lose weight?” I asked.

“How should I know?” he said. “I’m a lung doctor.”

Great.

Fortunately, Carrie Fisher was the new celebrity spokeswoman for Jenny Craig. I called her and asked for some meals. Thirty years earlier we had dropped acid. Now we were microwaving our Jenny meals. What had we become?

Fat!

Food wasn’t the only thing I gave up. I quit smoking cigarettes, too. A smoker since junior high school, I had read the warnings, heard the news reports, and knew the dangers. I had tried to quit numerous times before, including once while I was married to Rob (he begged me to start again), another time with Artie in Australia (we bet $10,000), and again in the early ’80s when I visited director Miloš Forman in London—and he asked that question worth repeating, “Why don’t you visit someone you hate?” I was a better smoker than not.

I knew I couldn’t get off the nicotine alone. I brought in a guy from the Allen Carr’s Easyway center. Allen Carr was a British guy who was a chain smoker like me and quit after coming up with a theory that smoking was connected to the fears and anxieties of not being able to smoke. They even let you smoke while they explained the rationale behind their program.

Kooky? Maybe. But it worked. I put out my last cigarette and didn’t light up again, didn’t miss it, didn’t have any withdrawal, and stayed that way for eight months. Then, on November 1, 2010, my friend Monica Johnson died of esophageal cancer. She was at Cedars-Sinai, the same place I had been getting my treatments. She had spent the
past few years living in Palm Springs. A few weeks before her death she posted her own obit on her website:

She went to the desert to find her health, her spiritual needs, herself, and to write a book. She wound up in Palm Springs across the street from the Spa Casino. The spiritual aspect of the desert renewal faded like everything else left in the sun.

Monica’s sister-in-law, JoAnn Belson, hosted a memorial for her. I was among those who spoke. I was very emotional and thought a cocktail might help me through a tough afternoon, but I wasn’t a drinker. I didn’t like it. What I did like were cigarettes, and as I chatted with people afterward I said to myself, “I’ll just have one.” But I couldn’t smoke just one. I can’t have just one of anything. Lamps. Tomato plants. Hummingbird feeders. Autographed baseballs. And most certainly cigarettes. Within a day I was back to my same habit.

Fuck.

There went my chance at achieving perfection.

I still smoke. I know I should quit. I think the reason I haven’t tried to quit again is that I’m bad at prioritizing my problems. Take today: I asked myself, should I quit smoking or try to finally figure out how to use my DVR?

I feel like I have a better chance with the TV, but I don’t know. I’ve been struggling with the fucking remote for two years. The frustration might kill me before the cigarettes.

Penny on Santa’s lap in 1948
Marshall personal collection

Penny with her daughter, Tracy; Tracy’s husband, Matt; and their children, Spencer, Bella, and Viva, in 2011
Marshall personal collection

S
O THEN WHAT
? Like anyone, after hearing the words
cancer, malignant
, and
metastasized
all in one sentence, I wondered not only how much time I had left but what I was going to do with that time. (As you know, I sent for White Castle burgers.) A year later, after I began to hear the words
remission
and
cure
and
we’ll check you once a year
, I found myself asking similar questions. What was I going to do with the rest of my life?

Bucket list time, right?

Wrong.

I had every kind of list you can imagine—to-do lists, lists of calls I needed to return, lists of thank-you notes I needed to write, lists of books I wanted to read and movies I wanted to watch, lists of invitations requiring a response, lists of things in the garage I wanted to get rid of. I had lists coming out of my ass. But none of them were bucket lists.

Were you supposed to have one? Apparently that memo never got to me. My bucket list, if you can call it that, had started and stopped fifty-seven years earlier when I got my own bedroom. Mission accomplished. Everything that came afterward had been gravy. My
own phone? Check. Marriage? Double check. Motherhood? Check. Grandmotherhood? Check. Three times over. Good, lasting friendships? Check. Work I love? Check. Floor seats at Lakers and Clippers games? Check. Motorcycle through Europe? Check. Giving back to others less fortunate? Check. Losing weight? I was down thirty pounds, so mostly a check. Jumping out of an airplane? No thanks, I don’t like heights so much.

I worked a day on my brother’s movie,
New Year’s Eve
, and then guested on the IFC comedy
Portlandia
with Portland Trailblazer LaMarcus Aldridge playing my boyfriend. I hosted Thanksgiving dinner for Garry’s, Ronny’s, and my family. Joe Pesci arrived late, as always, and played guitar and sang. I read movie scripts, watched TV series that inquired about me either directing or acting, and cheered the Lakers and Clippers through disappointing efforts in the 2012 playoffs. There’s always next year, guys.

I’ve also enjoyed being a grandmother to my three grandchildren, who range in ages from 20 to 6. Surprisingly, it’s a role I like. Not surprisingly, I go about it in my own way. I’m not blind like my grandmother was, but their school performances usually start a little early for me. They send videotapes, we talk on the phone, and Tracy brings them to see me. They’re good kids, and Tracy is a terrific mother—much better than I ever was.

But I would ask myself, is this enough? Should I be doing more with my life?

I didn’t know. One day I got on my computer and searched for “What do people do with their lives after surviving cancer?” Nothing came up. Apparently people didn’t do anything. I guessed they either dropped dead from trying to pay their medical bills or they went back to whatever they had been doing before, because what the fuck else is there to do when, as in my case, you like your life?

Indeed, one day Dennis Rodman called and asked me to make a documentary about his life. He said I could talk to all of his family, friends, ex-wives, girlfriends, teammates, and opponents. No door
would be closed, he insisted. He had already written three books, though, and given God knows how many interviews. What was there left to say?

Well, we had a long talk about what he was doing and why he wanted me to undertake such a project and it boiled down to him knowing that he was fucked up. He drank and had money problems. I think he was scared. He wanted to have his story told. He wanted others to tell it. I think he knew it would come out sounding like the character he had created if he told it himself, while others would talk about the real Dennis. That Dennis had been in the NBA for years before he had his first drink, was pathologically shy, worked incredibly hard, did many nice things for people without needing to publicize them, and ended up in the Hall of Fame.

Dennis came to my house, where I sat him in front of a camera and did the first of three in-depth interviews. In between, I interviewed his family, his former teammates, opponents, coaches, referees, announcers, and writers. I interviewed everyone, and along the way Dennis would check in. I came to realize that he had enlisted me to help him figure out his life.

It was ingenious of him. Somewhere along the way, we all want to—or at least try to—figure out why we’re here and what all the fuck it means, you know? I was doing it for him, but also confirming a few things for myself, starting with the fact that I didn’t have to figure out what to do with my life.

I was doing it.

When my mother was little, her mother showered her with praise and told her she was incredible. She hated it. It made her nuts. She swore that she wouldn’t make the same mistake with her children. Well, it worked. I thought being rag monitor in eleventh grade was pretty good, so I guess I surpassed expectations, hers and mine. When I look back, I see that I did it by sticking to the rules I learned when I was a kid and trying to make each day a good one, whether
I was sneaking off to the Parkway to be with friends or directing a movie. People call me a trailblazer, but as far as I’m concerned, the only Trailblazers I know play basketball in Portland. I don’t think about the awards I haven’t won or been nominated for. I don’t get that stuff. Neither does my brother. We aren’t that kind of family. We just do our best to entertain people.

My mother knew that was important. Maybe she wasn’t as nuts as we thought. I don’t know. What I do know after living sixty-eight years is that one way or another everything works out. How else does a girl whose life was about hating dancing school and hanging out on the Parkway fence end up with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Or even better. Jermaine, the paralyzed kid I met a few years ago in New York and helped out, recently came to my apartment and fixed my Wi-Fi. In a small way, that’s also an example of things working out.

Oh, I also know something else to be true.

Perky is overrated.

A few years ago I did a
Vanity Fair
magazine “Proust Questionnaire.” Among the questions they asked was what I disliked most about my appearance. “You name it, I hate it,” I said. They asked what my greatest regret was. “That when I was a size 0 there was no 0,” I said. They also asked what or who was the greatest love of my life. “Pizza and my daughter,” I said.

As you can see, I haven’t changed much over the years. My friends are still my most treasured possessions, just as they were when I was a kid. If you were to ask my greatest accomplishment, I would start naming names—and it would take a long time, too, because I keep up with everyone from NBA players to the kids I grew up with in my building in the Bronx. The only thing that has changed about me is that I don’t worry as much about getting asked to the dances.

I’ve been given my five minutes … and then some.

M
y brother, sister and I are 110 years old, but we still refer to our parents as Mommy and Daddy, and I want to put them at the front of the thank-you portion of this book. Although I was an accident, it worked out good for me, and so to my mother, who was nuts, and my father, who was my father, thank you. I also want to thank my brother, Garry, my sister, Ronny, and my extended family, all twenty-four of them, especially my daughter Tracy, my son-in-law Matt, and their three children, Spencer, Bella, and Viva, who have given me immense pleasure in life while having to put up with … well, I don’t want to know. There are probably more times than I want to know about when Tracy has sounded like me and said, “My mother is nuts.” Like my mother, though, I choose to ignore it. At least we’ve had a lot of laughs, and continue to have a lot of laughs.