Eleanor Mondale’s Long, Strange Journey

As Midwestern farms go, there’s nothing particularly baronial or imposing about Eleanor Mondale’s. Tucked off a county road, the main house appears after a twist and a dip in the gravel driveway. A solitary contented horse in its paddock eyes a tree full of ripe apples. The homestead is standard-issue prairie gothic. Two and a half stories square and tall, speckled with box elder bugs in the late summer heat, and in need of a fresh coat of paint.

The lack of Southfork–style pretension pretty well fits the Mondale “brand” established by dad Walter, the former U.S. vice president, and his wife Joan, who may have been called many things in their years in the public eye, but never “plutocratic” or “pretentious.” But if all you know about Eleanor, now forty-six, is what you’ve read in gossip columns over the years, the placid farm on a cloistered knoll comes as bit of a surprise. A disappointment, even. Somewhere, there must be a heated, heart-shaped swimming pool with tattooed cabana boys and black swans, or a fifteen-person hot tub, or a grotto worthy of the Playboy mansion. Something scandalous, an affront to every true Minnesotan.

There is a disco ball. It hangs, forlornly, twenty-five feet above in the rafters of Mondale’s horse barn. “Just in case,” she explains, “my horses ever want to party.”

As has been heavily reported by the local media, Eleanor Mondale is lucky to be alive at all, much less settling into something of a second act in Minnesota life as a radio personality on WCCO, replacing that other blond  icon, Pat Miles.

An avid-to-obsessive horsewoman, Mondale and six friends had spent all of May 15, 2005, trail-riding in Fort Ridgely State Park, near Fairfax. Five of her pals split off at the end of the day and headed back to town, leaving Mondale and her friend Susan Duitch Sloane (AKA “Diech”) bagged out in a small camper.

Somewhere around 2 a.m., Mondale remembers waking up to Diech sitting next to her, a grave look on her face, saying, “Honey, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

“I remember just being baffled, like she was joking or something,” says Mondale.

“She said, ‘Eleanor, you just had a grand mal seizure.’

“All I could say was, ‘What? I don’t have seizures.’ I didn’t feel anything.’ But her first husband was epileptic, and she knew a seizure when she saw it.”

Because it was so dark and because Diech didn’t know how to back out the horse trailer, they decided to wait until dawn before attempting a move to the nearest hospital, in New Ulm. As they waited, Mondale suffered a second seizure. When they finally made it to New Ulm, Mondale had a CT scan and they were told, “We see something in your brain.”

The first stop after leaving New Ulm was a Minneapolis hospital, where a misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis was made. The ensuing two months became an exhausting blur of clinics, specialists, surgeons, and radiologists. When told there was a “75 percent certainty” the MS diagnosis was accurate, Eleanor and her father were skeptical. She went to the Mayo Clinic, where, on May 31, under local anesthesia, surgeons bored a hole in her head to biopsy a 5.25-centimeter tumor, and also found a much smaller tumor tucked deeper in her brain.

When the biopsy came back, Eleanor learned, inadvertently from a resident, that she would need a highly invasive surgery that had a roughly one in five chance of permanent paralysis. In technical terms, she  was diagnosed with a “glioma with astrocytoma cells.”

“Overall, everyone at Mayo was great,” she says now. “But for a while, it was like every new doctor we’d talk to was more depressing than the last. Finally, I just told them, ‘Look, you gotta give me some hope here. I need some hope. I mean, I need something a little better than ‘You’re going to be paralyzed and then you’ll die.’ ”