Valerie Harper Opens Up About Cancer Fight in New Memoir

[Zoneboy]

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Valerie Harper's best-known roles have included wisecracking, weight-conscious Rhoda Gerard (nee Morgenstern), frazzled suburban mom Valerie Hogan and throaty, over-the-top Broadway legend Tallulah Bankhead. But at the end of her new memoir, "I, Rhoda" (Gallery Books, $26, in stores today), Harper shares another alter-ego she's never talked about before.
Valerie Harper as Tallulah Bankhead in Looped at Arena Stage.

In March 2009, as "Valerie McConnell" — the surname belonged to her mother, Canadian-born Iva Mildred McConnell — Harper checked into the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after an X-ray and subsequent PET scan detected a cancerous tumor on her lung.

Lung cancer?

The news stunned the actress, her husband Tony Cacciotti and the handful of loved ones with whom they shared her diagnosis.

Days later, Harper, who described herself in an interview last week as "a lifelong non-smoker," underwent a minimally invasive procedure called VATS — video-assisted thorascopic surgery — that involved the removal of the top right lobe of the lung. Within weeks, she went back to work rehearsing "Looped," the play about Bankhead that toured the country before taking Harper to Broadway and a Tony nomination.

She said that in sharing her cancer story now — something she wasn't prepared to do four years ago — she is also beating the drum for early detection, noting that lung cancer is killing "more women ... than breast, ovarian and colon cancer combined." (And, like Harper, about 20 percent of those women have never smoked at all.)

"Let's face it, I was very lucky," said Harper, who, at 73, looks so fit it may be hard to believe that she began her theater career in the mid-1950s, appearing in such fondly remembered shows as "Li'l Abner," Jackie Gleason's "Take Me Along," the Comden and Green musical "Subways Are for Sleeping" and the 1960 musical "Wildcat," which starred her sitcom idol, Lucille Ball.

"I still can't believe it," Harper said of her early Broadway career, and of her months working with the legendary "Lucy," whom she described as "stunning, wonderful and warm."

At the time, Harper could never have imagined that, 15 years later, she and her good friend and co-star Mary Tyler Moore would be proclaimed television's "new queens of comedy." Or that Moore's production company, MTM Enterprises, would become as successful as Ball's Desilu Productions had been, on the strength of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," its many spinoffs and more than two dozen other comedies and dramas, including "The Bob Newhart Show," "Hill Street Blues" and "St. Elsewhere."

As for Harper: As Rhoda Morgenstern, the brash upstairs neighbor of Moore's reserved and often painfully sincere Mary Richards, the actress struck career gold, emerging as one of the most beloved sitcom characters ever.

Harper received eight Emmy nominations for playing Rhoda and won four times, three in the supporting actress category and once as outstanding lead actress in a comedy series in 1975, after the character was spun off into her own series.

Even today, Harper says, "people respond to me as Rhoda, they see me as their friend. And that's great. I think the character just clicked with people because there was something real about her. She was Mary's pal and she always told the truth. Mary had this politeness and squareness about her. But Rhoda was Rhoda. She was a kick in the butt."



Instant chemistry with Moore



As Harper details it in her book, she was called in to audition for the role after a casting agent saw her in a theater showcase playing two characters, including a comic Eva Braun.

"The next day," Harper said, "the casting office contacted the director of our show and asked, 'Who's that girl playing Hitler's girlfriend?' "

Harper had an instant chemistry with Moore, impressing the show's producers and, ultimately, fans of the classic series who tuned into "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" every week for the interplay between its sparkling leads and the seemingly endless stream of hilarious Rhoda-isms about life, love and, especially, food.

"I don't know why I should even bother to eat this," Harper-as-Rhoda once said of a piece of candy. "I should just apply it directly to my hips."

According to Harper, that observation, which became a mantra for dieters in the '70s, came not from the show's writers, but from actress Mary Frann, who said it to Harper one night when the two actresses were having dinner.

As viewers eventually learned, Rhoda hailed from the Bronx. But Harper, who was born in Suffern, N.Y., spent her early years in South Orange, Jersey City and Glen Rock — where her sister still lives and where, Harper insists, "the Bergen Record was on the table every day."

Her mother Iva was a nurse. And her father Howard was a hockey player turned lighting salesman. "One of the several companies he worked for," Harper said, "did the lighting for the Holland Tunnel — a fact we were reminded of every time we drove into the city from New Jersey."

Such gems from her childhood, her early stage career and her success on television are all recalled in the book, along with buoyant recollections of co-stars Moore, Betty White, Julie Kavner and dozens of others.

Harper also discusses the ups and downs of the "Rhoda" series, the controversial decision for Rhoda and Joe's small-screen breakup, and the legal mess over "Valerie," her 1980s series that became "The Hogan Family" after Harper's departure.

The actress closes the book with amusing truisms said by friends and family members, including one from her late mother: "It's not what happens to you in life, it's how you handle it."

It's as good a way as any to put the book's first 300 pages — and Harper's extraordinary life — into perspective.

[AB]

This sounds like a pretty interesting book to read.

[OH Nuts!]

Originally Posted by AB

This sounds like a pretty interesting book to read.

It sure does and I thought it was very generous of her to open up so much about her cancer. It was an altruistic act that may help save many lives.

[catlover79]

I put a hold on this from the library and it just came in. I can't wait to get started on it!!