Eleanor Mondale’s Long, Strange Journey

“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.