Eleanor Mondale’s Long, Strange Journey

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.