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.’ ”

After an analysis of the tumor’s genetic structure was reviewed, Mayo offered an alternative. Forego surgery and attempt to “hold” the tumor with a specific radiation/chemo treatment generally reserved for only the very worst level of tumor—a grade four. Mondale’s was grade three.

Mondale jumped at the ray of hope and began a grueling, physically depleting treatment regimen. Every weekday for seven weeks friends or family drove her from the farm to Rochester, waited through her treatment, and drove her back.

Concurrently, as if the sheer specter of mortality hadn’t already buried the needle on the drama meter (or maybe, she concedes, because it had), Mondale and her fiancée, legendary Twin Cities musician Chan Poling, decided to telescope their planned fall wedding to June 15, two weeks after the biopsy.

“When they told us it was brain cancer,” Poling remembers, “I told them we were planning to get married in September. One of the doctors looked at me and just said, ‘Uh, that might be difficult.’ ”

For the next three months, close friends and family gathered to celebrate what little might be left of Eleanor and Chan’s life together.

Poling describes the weeks immediately after the biopsy as a “time of great existential sadness, knowing this was something you were going to have to live with for an unknown length of time.”

“There were moments of utter terror,” says Poling. “To get through it, we would just lie in bed at night and hold each other. Eventually, what kicked in was this belief that everything is going to be all right.” 

Every holiday season in the very early 1990s a party was held at a sprawling, rented Kenwood duplex. It was a standard “must-attend” for the Cities’ rockers, writers, and self-acclaimed cognoscenti. It was one of those wall-to-wall, dense-smoke-on-black scenes where, for the most part, attitude and pose trumped raw glamour.

Until Eleanor blew in.

If the sudden blast of frigid air stirring the pall of smoke didn’t catch your attention, the English bulldog (Bam Bam) did. Or if not that, the full-length fur coat. (“Fake fur! But very long.”) Or, after the fur was tossed off, your head snapped back at the, uh, visually arresting, let-your-imagination-run-wild minidress.

Sixteen years later, nestled into her overstuffed couch after giving a tour of the grounds, showing off her menagerie of “rescue animals”—including, “nine and a half” American miniature horses—Mondale emits a disarming gasp at my recollection of La Grande Entrance and the dress. There’s even the hint of a blush.

“I remember the dog and the party,” she says. “But the dress was just what you wore to parties in Los Angeles. You know? It was what you wore.”

Exactly.

You might like to think that progressive-minded Minnesotans would take the attitude that we all grab whatever gusto we’ve been given—brains, brawn, a famous name, good looks, a killer figure—and use it to make our move in the world. But some assets are more equal than others.

Drop a scene-stealing-party-dress mentality into Minnesota, particularly into a bastion of conventional propriety, such as WCCO–TV, where Mondale was then working as an entertainment reporter, and you had the equivalent of an asteroid impact in the kiddie pool.

C. J., the Star Tribune’s then-freshly minted gossip columnist, was stalking and chronicling Mondale’s every move like a panther tracking a flamingo. Entire forests died in service to C. J.’s coverage of Eleanor at lunch . . . Eleanor shopping . . . Eleanor clubbing . . .  Eleanor schmoozing . . . . You’d have thought there had never been a statuesque blond cursed with unapologetic joie de vivre in the Twin Cities.

“God,” Mondale remembers, “it was so insane.”   

Friends, family, and acquaintances universally regard Eleanor as one of the world’s happy people, an incurable optimist. The kind of person who springs out of bed every morning cheery and forward-looking. That probably explains why they also don’t think of her as particularly reflective. Regular personal reflection requires a propensity for remorse and regret: a morbidity gene that she doesn’t seem to have.

But there’s no question that her experience with WCCO–TV in 1989 and 1990 cemented a reputation that still dogs her in her hometown.

The unmistakable inference of the picture—painted primarily by the Star Tribune, but also by this publication, which applied the phrase Wild Child to a cover feature on Mondale around the same time—was of a spoiled party girl, living off a famous name, running amok. Or, in today’s pop vernacular, Kate Moss by way of Paris Hilton. And if what was printed wasn’t bad enough, the rumors spawned by the published stories applied another oppressive outer layer to her persona.

“As crazy as it was,” Mondale says now, “what hurt most were the rumors that weren’t true. I mean, I had people telling me they’d heard stories of me swimming naked at parties. You can imagine how a conservative TV station like WCCO reacted to stuff like that.”

For the record, WCCO grunts at the time—producers and photographers who actually worked with Mondale, shooting nightclub acts, interviewing touring rock stars, and such—insist she was not only fun to work with, but was a hard-working professional.

The way WCCO photojournalist Brad Earley remembers it, “They brought her in to be this personality covering the kinds of things younger viewers wanted to know about. Every station always wants younger viewers, and management at the time loved the name and the hometown angle. They loved the whole premise of someone who looked like Eleanor being out there doing those kinds of stories.

“But what actually happened was they pretty much tossed her a rock and said, ‘Swim.’ She was supposed to have a producer assigned to her full-time. They never gave her one. The feeling you got was that if it worked out, management would take all the credit. And if it didn’t, it’d be her fault.”

Kevin Smith, now executive director of public affairs for the Minnesota Twins, was a producer at WCCO at the time. He was assigned to a couple of Mondale’s early stories, but then shifted to other work.

“She was fine to work with,” says Smith. “Sure, she was inexperienced. But she freely admitted it and worked hard at learning the game. There was never a problem with her being late, playing the diva, or trying to be Miss Know-It-All. I remember she was a lot of fun.”

“The basic problem,” Earley says, “is that management just got more than they bargained for. I mean, we all know TV is a very conservative environment. It didn’t help that C. J. made a living off of her, writing stories in bars and all that. But that was the whole idea. Eleanor was just being herself and doing what she thought they wanted her to do.

“She got a bad deal. She got a lot of mixed messages about what management wanted. It’s a whole different monster, doing a story about some band playing at a club and reporting what the governor did today.”

He adds ruefully, “This town is so desperate for celebrities.”

Smith jokes: “Yeah, it wasn’t like C. J. was going to get anywhere writing about Dave Moore.”

Eleanor remembers the episode as a “brushfire” with a lunatic level of attention roaring up around her. It reached its climax as the “Wild Child” story was about to hit the stands, nine short months into her WCCO career. The station got wind of it, and twitchy management decided they had had enough. Mondale was told they’d they’d pay her for three more months, but that her services were no longer required. Her response was, basically, “Keep your money. I’m out of here.”

Leaving aside the familiar (and usually farcical) tale of yet another mainstream news organization making a clueless stab at “edgy,” “with-it” content for the “hip crowd,” only to be horrified that “edgy”—at least as practiced by the general population—bears no resemblance to an accordian act at a Presbyterian church dinner, the question for Mondale is, “Shouldn’t you have known better?” Or, metaphorically, “What did you expect, wearing a dress like that in Minnesota?”

As the daughter of a former U.S. senator/vice president/presidential nominee, how could she not understand, or have been told, about the double-edged sword of media attention? As the limelight giveth, it also burneth away.

“What did I tell her during all that?” Joan Mondale asks. “I don’t remember exactly. But it was along the lines of ‘It isn’t true. So just let it go.’ But there’s no question it had a powerful effect and it did hurt her. Things like that are so easily said.”

In Joan’s eyes, her daughter’s life “has always been complex, but Eleanor has always surmounted it, and has always rebounded from adversity. “As for being a center of attention,” she says. “It’s always been that way for her. When she walks into a room, all heads turn. But I really believe it’s not because she is trying to be Miss Celebrity.”

Mondale’s closest friend is possibly Joe Weldon. He was Eleanor’s roommate and, according to the two of them, nearly inseparable companion during the eight years she lived in LA in the nineties. She also shared a New York apartment with him for two of those years.

“If you’re wondering, I’m not Joey’s type,” she says, winking.

Weldon, raised in Brainerd, confirms that Eleanor, despite the political family, the glamour, and outward ease with pop trends, is actually guileless. If plotting the ruination of others and savoring schadenfreude isn’t a key asset and a practiced talent, you don’t have much radar for when it’s being done to you.

“Eleanor is really a very positive person and a liberating force in my life,” says Weldon. “She’s an optimist, which means, I think, that you don’t go out expecting to hurt people or, on the other hand, expecting to get hurt yourself. Because of her family and the way she was raised, she believes it’s possible to do lots of different things. She’s a very brave person in that way.”

Weldon says that despite their years together, and all the private thoughts they’ve shared, never at any point in the brain cancer siege, not even on the rides back and forth to Mayo for chemotherapy, did the topic of “If I die” ever come up.

“It was too negative,” he says.

“I always admired that and envied her. You know, a lot of people live their lives within the rules of how somebody else thinks you are supposed to act and be, just so they don’t make waves. That isn’t Eleanor. Me, I usually lean to the thing that wouldn’t draw attention. But Eleanor is more likely to ask, ‘Whose rules are you breaking?’ Maybe those differences are one reason why we’re such good friends.”

Mondale herself offers little or no comment on the distant past and the year with WCCO–TV. She discusses it, but only after you bring it up. And she seems to hold no palpable animosity toward anyone involved, with the exception of the Star Tribune’s principal antagonist.

If you need proof of her “good sport” credo, she now regards Neal Karlen, writer of the “Wild Child” piece, as a friend, and has happily visited his University of Minnesota writing class to talk about being the subject of stories like these. (“And to remind those young journalist types that they have a responsibility to be truthful.”) When Karlen, who had broken his leg, came to LA for a wedding, she put him up and schlepped him around.

“The girl’s a mensch,” says Karlen.

At the very least, a politician’s kid develops thick skin. Mondale understands the lingering image, especially as she opens a new phase of her life with WCCO–AM.

Her cohost, veteran broadcaster Susie Jones, says, “From what I had read about her in the media, I was expecting this rock star, someone just full of herself. But she’s nothing like that. We went out to lunch at Lucia’s and shared a lot of our lives. She’s really very down to earth.”

Over coffee at the Minnesota State Fair last summer, Mondale walked me through a fast timeline of her life so far. What was supposed to be a tidy list of dates, jobs, lovers, and other major events very quickly looked like the diagram of a trick football play, with crisscrossing arrows, Xs, spirals, reverses, and elaborate blocking maneuvers (the latter necessitated by a handful of bad boyfriends).

The condensed version goes something like this: DC boarding school, (after “truancy issues” at a previous school), college at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York (including a semester in Kenya, “the greatest experience of my life”), followed fairly soon thereafter by a first shot at Hollywood.

“I wanted to be an actress. I think it had a lot to do with being a kid and watching how every time my dad would stand up to talk people would applaud. I thought that was pretty cool. I was always in school plays. I loved it.”

That first spin through LA netted, most notably, one episode of Three’s Company playing a medical intern, a TV movie with John Ritter, a bit part as a TV anchor on Dynasty, a Yoplait commercial, another for Molson Light beer, and a flirtation with a show called The Rock ’n Roll Evening News for syndication giant King World.

This period runs concurrent with her father’s run for the White House in 1984 and her relocation to Chicago, where she did stints with three different radio stations and a TV affiliate—and met and married her first husband, Keith Van Horne, of the Chicago Bears, in 1988.

“I loved him for all the wrong reasons,” she says now. “But I loved him.”

The marriage foundered through her WCCO–TV stint, but Mondale put on a brave face. (“You know, keep smiling, pretend nothing’s wrong, even when you’re just torn up on the inside.”)

She spent an interlude in Australia licking her wounds from the “brushfire” and her disintegrating marriage. Soon came an offer to sign on with WLOL–FM back in the Twin Cities, where she met her second husband, DJ Greg Thunder. Both eventually lost their jobs when Minnesota Public Radio bought WLOL. With ironic fatefulness, the two migrated to a radio station in Chicago.

Mondale concedes the relationship with Thunder never had a chance. “Greg is a really sweet, decent guy. But I hadn’t finished grieving for my first marriage. Yet here I was. Here we were, Greg and I, back in Chicago, going to some of the same restaurants I used to go to with Keith, running into other players. It was doomed. It was over in eleven months, start to finish, and I blame myself.”

A couple of years later, she piled her stuff and three dogs into the car and moved to LA. Soon thereafter, she met Weldon. The two set up house in the funky Los Feliz neighborhood, below Griffith Park, and began what for Weldon, at least, was “an adventure in exploration.”

Jobs came and went with E! Entertainment TV, Discovery Channel, Today Show Weekend, and Lifetime (“Or was that while I was at WLOL?”). She put an end to one short-lived bit, as a correspondent for something called Sex on the Champs Elysees (part of the Sex on . . .  series for E!), when, as she stood on a street in Paris, a producer told her to hand-off to porn actress Jenna Jameson, who was working a different segment for the same show back in Cannes. Mondale rolls her eyes. “Working with a porn star was the last thing I needed.”

A three-year contract as an entertainment reporter with CBS was ending, but she picked up a pilot for the  syndicated talk show Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. A pilot was shot, and everyone was jazzed by the possibilities. Mondale remembers finding herself floating on the usual Hollywood blandishments, flattery, babble, and BS. She was their girl, their star. Right up to the point when the producers dumped her for Cybill Shepherd.

Mondale was now living with a physician in New York, at the end of 5th Avenue on Washington Square, and in her own apartment she shared with Weldon. She started a company  (now defunct) making food treats for horses and dogs, but when things with the New York doctor “who shall remain nameless, please,” ended badly—with “him telling me he was going to kill my animals”—Mondale headed back to Minnesota for good in 2002. She bought the farm and picked up work covering thoroughbred horses for ESPN, the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association for ESPN2, and did stories on auto shows around the world for the Speed Channel. She ran into Poling, who was divorced and had apparently admired her from a distance, as she had him over the years.

“So what’s the question? ‘How has my perspective changed after all this? What do I do differently?’ ” She shifts on the couch in her quiet farmhouse. Owen, her lovable lunk of a dog lolls on the cool wood floor, while Ursula, a calico, perches on the back of a chair, purring in the visitor’s ear.

“I’m thankful for all the experiences I’ve had. But the TV business and the whole Los Angeles culture, if you can call it that, is no place to try to develop meaningful relationships. With everyone you meet, it’s always all about what you can do for them. It is so hard on people. You never know who your friends are. That’s why I loved and needed Joey [Weldon].

“But I met a million people. I got through a long checklist of ‘things to do in life.’ Swimming with dolphins in Australia, swimming with stingrays, standing on the Great Barrier Reef, being on the set of a movie, seeing how special effects are done. It’s interesting, it’s cool, and it’s fun.”

She ticks off more: “I climbed a mountain, rode the Concorde, raced an elephant down Hollywood Boulevard, had brunch with Elizabeth Taylor.

“But I’m also thankful for the events in my life,” some of them difficult, “that helped me figure out what I wanted to do, like finding someone to truly love.”

Both Weldon and Mondale talk about her finally reaching a point in life—whether it’s because of the cancer or simply being forty-six, they can’t say—where she’s more cautious about the kinds of people she “takes in,” a bit like the once-abandoned and homeless animals that populate her farm today.

She has finally come to understand her relationship with what might euphemistically be called “bad boyfriends.” Mention the recently deceased and legendarily troubled singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, who met Mondale on a tour stop in Minneapolis when she was working for WCCO–TV and pursued her obsessively for months afterward, and you get a flash of a politician’s well-practiced deflection technique. “That was someone I knew a long time ago,” she says. “Someone who took maybe too much of an interest in me, and that’s it. Why do you ask?”

Her bottom line now, in the context of her marriage to Poling, is that she believes she devoted too much time, too much energy, to a type of needy man who, instead of returning the favor, “wanted to squish me because I was happy. I think a lot of women can relate to that.”

They were men, she says, “who needed fixing, and I thought I could do that. I had the energy. But it took me a long time to realize I can’t. But I had to go through all of that to finally open my eyes to what really makes me happy. And that’s one of the things I like about Chan. He doesn’t need fixing. He’s a real person. He’s had his own experiences and he isn’t threatened by mine.”

Mondale seems genuinely regretful about never having children. “If Chan and I were younger, he’d be the one I’d want to have a family with. But after Keith, the timing and the kind of guys I was with—other than Greg, which was over before it ever started—were never right.

“If I had kids now, after all this radiation,” she quips, “I’d worry they’d be born with two heads.”

Mayo continues to regularly monitor both her tumors. To her doctor’s amazement and delight, the larger tumor has disappeared under the radiation/chemo treatment. Mayo concluded that a critical chromosome originally thought to be missing (which at first made her an unlikely candidate for the radiation/chemo treatment) is in place but fused to another chromosome. The current prognosis is remarkably good. But there are no guarantees with cancer.

“It worries me,” says Mondale, “the thought of this whole thing coming back. I’ve been lucky. But you don’t get another pass like I did.” 

Brian Lambert is a longtime Twin Cities journalist and former TV/radio critic for the Pioneer Press.