Sooner or later, all who live must come face to face with their own mortality, but Ann Jillian found hers where she least expected it-in the mirror held by loved ones.
”The only moment I thought of death was when I saw it in other people`s eyes,” she said. ”I saw their fear, and it struck me like a 2-by-4. I had a moment then with God and I begged him, `Please, don`t let me die.”`
Other people`s fear was a palpable reflection of Jillian`s own, 2 1/2 years ago, after her doctors had confirmed the unthinkable. The tiny lump she had discovered in her breast was cancerous, and the cancer was spreading. At 36, at the peak of her career, at the apex of happiness, it was a death sentence with only one, terrible avenue of appeal.
In 1985, Jillian went into the most brutal surgery a woman can face. With no guarantee of survival, she submitted to the removal of both her breasts in a double mastectomy. Her story of the event is not the first to be brought to television as a drama to be shared with thousands of real and potential victims, but Jillian, who will star in ”The Ann Jillian Story” (8 p.m. Monday on NBC-Ch. 5), is the first to reprise her own real-life role. She said it was the toughest script of her career.
”It was the hardest thing I`ve ever had to do in my life,” she said.
”It`s said time heals all wounds, and it does. It healed the emotional things I`d been through; it healed everything. Then, as an actress, I had to dig it all out again. But I had to play the role. I wouldn`t want to put the problem of playing Ann Jillian on any other actress` back. I`m here, and I`m alive.”
”The Ann Jillian story” is a funny, tender, 10-year slice of her life beginning on the day in 1975 when she ”blew into Chicago” as a singer with a traveling troupe doing Sammy Cahn`s ”Words and Music.” It was there, while staying at the Ambassador East hotel for more money than she really could afford on her off-off-off-Broadway salary, that she met Andy Murcia, the Chicago vice cop who was to become her husband, manager, agent, publicist, best friend and staunchest ally in her fight against cancer.
Murcia, portrayed in the film by Tony Lo Bianco, was moonlighting as head of security at the hotel at the time. Seeing Jillian coming in night after night in heavy stage makeup after her show and going straight upstairs, he arrived at the only logical conclusion for a policeman on the vice squad-that a high-class call girl had invaded his domain. One night, when Jillian came alone to the dining room, he decided to test his theory.
”He told the guy at the door, `Seat her at the bar and I`ll hit on her to dance,”` Jillian said, giggling at the memory. ”He didn`t know I heard him, so when the guy came up to me, I said, `I want to sit at a table.` Then I turned to Andy and said, `Then you can hit on me to dance.”`
The dance was the beginning of a lifetime for Jillian and Murcia, who learned that she was a ”canary,” not a hooker, went to her show, heard her sing in her big, bold contralto and fell in love. After a three-month cat-and- mouse game of wits, tears, quarrels and laughter, he married her, and Jillian settled down for a year and a half as the wife of a Chicago cop, adjusting her schedule to his and keeping her hand in show business with various city bookings.
Then she landed a role in the Broadway musical ”Sugar Babies,” and, after some tempestuous soul-searching (”I got a 16-year pension going and I`m up for lieutenant”), Murcia abandoned his own career to devote full time to hers.
In the ensuing years, under Murcia`s increasingly canny guidance, Jillian`s star rose rapidly. From that first Broadway hit, she went on to the mini-series ”Ellis Island” and ”Malibu,” the television movie ”Mae West” and the box-office hit ”Mr. Mom.” Her first regular prime-time series, ”Jennifer Slept Here,” lasted only one season, but her next, ”It`s a Living,” made it for two. She was working on her third mini-series, ”Alice in Wonderland,” when cancer threatened to bring it all to ruin.
Jillian was in the shower when she found the lump during a routine breast examination. The early detection was to save her life, but her initial reaction was denial. She didn`t even tell Murcia about her doctor appointments until it became evident that she was facing the worst.
”I thought at the time it was because I didn`t want to worry him,” she said, ”but now I can look back and say there was a secondary reason. I was afraid of that moment of confrontation because I didn`t know what his reaction would be. When the revelation of that struck me, all of a sudden I felt so compassionate toward him because I realized how universal that feeling is.”
”I started to say, `Why me?”` Jillian said, recalling the trauma of the diagnosis that said ”malignant,” ”but I never got to the `me` part because I realized the key phrase was `Why not me?` There are people who have gone through the same thing, many of them with more obstacles and more challenges. ”So you get on with life. You do what you have to do to get well. That`s your duty, to do the best for yourself in life to preserve the gift of life and at the point where you`ve done everything you can for yourself, you must truthfully surrender to God, trusting that He knows, in His infinite wisdom, that we share a universal suffering and that it all comes to some divine good.”
Jillian fought hard for whatever good could be salvaged from the wreckage. Feeling that her work was the only viable therapy, she begged the producer of ”Alice in Wonderland” not to replace her. Strapped by a shooting schedule involving more than a dozen other top stars, he gave her 11 days from the day of her surgery to be back on the set.
”I couldn`t even raise my arms, but it became the supreme challenge,”
she said. ”I reached and reached, and I finished the film.”
The fear-one she said haunts every woman facing mastectomy-that by losing her breasts, she might lose her husband, was quickly dispelled by Murcia.
”They were loaded pistols pointed at your heart,” he tells her in the film. ”I can live without anything but you.”
Since her recovery, Jillian has worked tirelessly with the American Cancer Society, lecturing and providing personal support and encouragement for women facing the trauma. She said she decided to make the movie as an extension of the effort.
”I hope to save a life with this,” she said. ”I hope to tell thousands of women there is life after cancer. This is a movie for all women and all of the men who love them.”
