entire medical record. Within two seconds of meeting us, she “got” Don, gave him a strict low-food chain diet, and prescribed several herbs and homeopathic remedies to balance out the effects of the chemicals he was receiving.
Through the seven weeks of treatment, the oncology doctors at Cedars kept telling us what an amazing patient Don was and how well he had done with this aggressive treatment (combining chemotherapy and radiation). With his usual upbeat attitude and steady stream of witty comments and jokes, Don kept everyone at the hospital laughing. No matter the situation, Don would find some way to ease any tension with a quip or a good-hearted tease. He quickly traded insults with the doctors and nurses, commenting on everything from their “sensible shoes” to calling someone on a fart. He in no way behaved like the King of Hollywood that he was. The Geico commercial Don appeared in made him recognizable after twenty years of relative anonymity. In it, a woman says something and Don, wearing earphones, repeats her words in his highly dramatic “voice-over” voice.
“In a world where both of our cars are totally underwater,” he intoned in his famous announcer’s voice. “In a world” is a phrase familiar to millions of moviegoers—one Don created more than thirty-five years ago, when he was a writer and editor in the movie trailer business. He’d voiced it in thousands of movie trailers from The Godfather to Fatal Attraction; Shrek and The Simpsons, and it’s been parodied by comedians from Pablo Francisco to Janeane Garofolo. But Don never made a big deal of it. Don was the same in the hospital as he was in our living room.
***
Off-the-wall humor was just part of life in our household. Skye and Liisi grew up with a Dad whose daily comments put us all in stitches. It wasn’t unusual for them to see me drop to the living room floor rolling with laughter. Don would think nothing of dancing into a room with a new hip-hop routine (at which he was awful), playing it for the laugh. At bedtime, he’d make up stories to tell the girls, including hilarious character voices that made them both squeal with delight.
I admit to bursting into song at all kinds of inappropriate moments, like belting out “You can’t touch this” by MC Hammer (complete with the dance) for no apparent reason. Sometimes I made my daughters sing for their supper—literally, no song, no food. Some mornings, I’d be boogying them off to school and as the garage door closed in front me I’d hear Don call out, “Look at your wonderful mommy,” as he smiled with pride.
And throughout treatment Don kept his life as normal as possible. He continued to drive the morning carpool: Skye two days a week, Liisi one. He always pulled energy from somewhere when his children were concerned. When he returned home we would get back in the car, and I’d drive us to Cedars, sometimes listening to Eckert Tolle’s The New Earth. Don loved what Tolle had to say, but listening to his voice, Don said, was like taking a Nembutal. The drive there and the quick radiation treatment (all of two minutes) would take about an hour. When we got home by late morning, Don headed downstairs to his studio to work.
Don loved his work with a passion, and he wanted to keep doing it as long as he could. But he only wanted to give his best, so on a day when his voice wasn’t producing the sound that was up to his standards he would not do a job. Those days were few and far between. “My clients pay me a lot of money for my sound,” he’d say, “and I’m not going to put anything but my best out there.”
That’s Donnie.
Don had a phenomenal career voicing more than five thousand movie trailers. In the year 2000, when the Cannes Film Festival held a tribute to him in France, he experienced for the first time the impact his voice had in the world of movies. As we walked into a huge, flower-decked room filled with eight hundred people, Don turned to me and asked, “Are all these people here for me?”
In addition to movies Don did close to seven hundred fifty thousand TV and radio commercials. And then there was his announcing: everything including CBS News, Family Guy, America’s Most Wanted, and the 2007 Academy Awards. He’d had many stellar days during our marriage where he’d record twenty-six separate spots in one day. He was known in the business for his capacity to work. And his voice never failed him. Even as he battled cancer, Don was Don through it all. He kept his trademark attitude: “Let’s fix this thing and keep it moving. I’ve got some more living to do!”
A man of impeccable integrity and standards, Don’s energy was deep as an ocean and as powerful as his voice. And even facing the biggest challenge of his life, Donnie never flagged. I could hear him say, “Early morning carpool? Chemo? Radiation? What else ya’ got!?” His faith and motivation spurred him on to maintain a sense of normalcy in his life.
That was Donnie.
In a world where love rules, Don LaFontaine would be immortal.
During Don’s treatment we held a true belief that he would fully recover over the seven weeks of radiation and intermittent chemotherapy. And through it all we held fast to our faith, our family, and our love: we continued to be one voice united.
CHAPTER 2 - KISS ME IN THE RAIN
“Kiss me in the rain, make me feel like a child again.”
—Barbara Streisand
In June, two months after Don’s treatments were completed and a mere five months before that fateful day when he woke up gasping for air, we thought we had won. Don’s PET scan—a CAT scan with an intravenous iodine dye to highlight any abnormalities—looked clean despite a lot of lung swelling. We felt we had beaten it—and the odds. We prayed, praised God, and celebrated with tears of joy. Later we learned Don’s doctors believed they had only a twenty-five percent chance of eradicating the cancer. We considered the clean scan the miracle we all prayed for. Little did we know this terrific high would be short-lived.
Even though the radiation treatments were completed in March, chemotherapy continued until early April because it is given only once every three to four weeks. At one time, Don’s blood count was too low and he couldn’t receive chemo until he was given a blood transfusion. Once his prescribed number of treatments were fulfilled, we traveled to New York to celebrate and see a couple of plays; we had close friends in two Broadway shows and wanted to support them. Don had been a New Yorker for twenty years and I think he wanted to go there as a special trip for the two of us. He wasn’t a hundred percent yet but we went anyway, taking some portable oxygen in case he needed it. It was great not being tethered five days a week to the hospital, and to have chemo treatments behind him.
But at the end of May, Don’s labored breathing returned. Tests showed this was just a normal side effect of his treatment, a condition called pnuemonitis: inflammation of the lung. Don was prescribed steroids to decrease the swelling. A month later, when he showed no improvement, the dosage was increased. Then came more side effects, including tachycardia (accelerated heart rate) and steroid- induced diabetes. We were not deterred; we believed if we could get the dosage of steroids right, get the inflammation down, and balance his diabetes.
Through it all, Don stayed strong and looked well, continuing to work as much as he could. But by early August, even climbing the eighteen stairs from his studio became difficult. Then he landed in the hospital.
***
When Don arrived at the Cedars emergency room on August 22, he was awake and alert, but with a blood oxygen level dangerously below normal. The private ambulance I called had arrived with two female paramedics to take Don to the ER. They had a heck of a time because their gurney didn’t fold and they couldn’t carry him down eighteen steps to the front door. Suffice it to say it was quite an ordeal; each time they tried to lift my two hundred-pound boy by wrapping their arms around his chest, it would throw
