Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 14, 1994 TAG: 9405140066
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Patricia Brennan The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
What you might not expect is a story about breast cancer that has a lot of wit and very few tears, a rocky romance and a reasonably happy ending.
In retrospect, Joyce Wadler, a funny and hip and somewhat irreverent New Yorker, calls it "my little adventure."
The movie about her experiences airs Sunday night on CBS (at 9 on WDBJ-Channel 7), starring Meredith Baxter as Wadler, Jamey Sheridan as Nick DiStefano and James Sutorius as her pal Herb.
Wadler adapted the teleplay from her own book. As the story opens, Wadler, 43, a writer for People magazine, is involved in a relationship with DiStefano, a newspaperman she's known since they worked at the New York Post.
They've had some good times. They love '40s and '50s show tunes. They can repeat dialogue from favorite old black-and-white movies. They run away for romantic weekends and go dancing in the posh Rainbow Room. She feels comfortable with his big Italian family.
But he can't quite break off from a romance that lingers on, and he never mentions marriage.
Fortunately for Wadler, there is another pal from the Post, Herb, a humor writer and former boyfriend who appears to live part of his life on Wadler's sofa.
Herb (Wadler changed his name for the story) proves to be the best of friends: He is there, through doctors' appointments, out-patient and surgery and hospitalization. He and another writer-friend, Eva (Sara Botsford), help Wadler gather information so that she knows what her options are.
Wadler has been praised for her zeal in informing herself about her cancer and the medical procedures proposed to deal with it. But she sees nothing unusual about that. "Any person can do this," she said. "You just have to have the attitude that you have the right to do this."
"My Breast" has two story lines: One is Wadler's discovery in 1991 that she has a lump the size of a robin's egg in her breast, despite having had a recent mammogram that indicated nothing awry. The other is her ongoing relationship with DiStefano.
In the film Baxter, like Wadler a full-breasted woman, does not use a body double for the scenes involving breast examination. Actors play the doctors, but the close-up of a surgeon's hand examining Baxter's breast is that of a real physician.
"We all thought that was best," said Baxter, who is the movie's co-executive producer with Diana Kerew. "There's nothing sexual about this.
"When I read the script, I never visualized it any other way except with me and my breast. We decided this well ahead of time, when we started talking about the approach (to Wadler's story). I didn't want to cut to some body double - this was about the whole woman. Breasts have achieved this dubious stature of being this symbol of femininity, and it's very important this story is about the whole woman."
The movie was filmed in Toronto, where Betty Thomas ("Hill Street Blues") directed.
Wadler visited the set and had a look at the prop tumor, to see if it looked like the real one.
"The prop guys were talking about a guy who makes his living making body parts," she said. "They said to make the tumor, he'd gone to the medical books. I was very pleased with his work."
Wadler's tumor was a gray-looking mass, larger than she had expected. "It's called medullary cancer because it looks like medullary brain tissue," she said.
Even though she had written the script, Wadler said the first time she saw the film was a bit unsettling. "I watched it first alone," she said, "and it made me nervous. I was surprised that I was crying. I didn't think that I was upset."
Wadler's account appeared first as a two-part article in New York Magazine, then as a book published in 1992 and recently reissued in paperback.
Wadler said that before she decided to write, she had some decisions to make.
"There was the ethical thing," she said. "I don't do undercover stuff, but this was about my personal life, so I first had to go to everybody involved and say, `How do you feel about this?' People were basically good about it. My first doctor was not crazy about it, so I changed his name. When I went to Nick and said, `I want to write about this,' he said, `Whether I'm an angel or (not), I'll never tell you what to do.' "
Her nagging worry - "Did I want everybody in New York to know I was involved in a neurotic relationship?" - gave way to the pragmatic: She would tell the story.
She wrote while undergoing chemotherapy.
"The book came out a few months later, in the fall. We had an amazing response. We got hundreds of letters. They said they liked it because it was funny; it had a happy ending."
by CNB