How a ‘Sex and the City’ Star Taught Me to Laugh at Death

“Hi Sugar! Wanna meet up for pandemic lunches on Zoom?” Willie wrote in an email in the spring of 2021. I accepted the invite immediately. No one said no to an invitation from Willie Garson. To the world at large, he was a beloved actor who’d portrayed Stanford Blatch, Carrie Bradshaw’s best gay bud on Sex and the City. In the industry, he was widely known as the unofficial mayor of show business, a die-hard poker player, a game night impresario and a complete original. What I didn’t know when that email landed was that he had late-stage pancreatic cancer and that he was seeking me out for cancer camaraderie because I’d gone public with a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer in a New York Times op-ed.

Willie and I were acquaintances, actors who traveled in the same circles, since our early 20s. We were not close friends, though I relished his company and thought we had a special connection. Everyone who ever crossed paths with Willie felt that way, including Elvis Costello. Willie had chatted him up in a chance meeting that led to an intimate friendship. Willie had a seemingly boundless zest for life, an acid-tongued wit offset by an irresistible sweetness. He was a wielder of nicknames and endearments; I got “sugar,” sometimes, “dearie.”

His was one of many outreaches I’d received after publishing my diagnosis. I’d come forward to encourage people to return to regular checkups, something urgently needed a year into COVID, but I wasn’t entirely prepared for the attention it brought. Friends sent cushy bathrobes and fuzzy slippers. I awoke one day to a vat of matzo ball soup on my doorstep left by a childhood summer camp bunkmate. I received propositions and proposals of marriage. A Times reader who claimed to be a nurse with a generous health insurance plan offered to marry me. I saved her contact info. A man who’d made a killing at a tech startup since we’d last seen each other 20 years prior flooded my phone with videos of his extensive art collection. I took this to be a wealthy man’s version of dick pics. A platonic pal who’d long held a torch jumped on my declining health as an opportune moment for something adjacent to a mercy fuck, more of a rehabilitative fuck, offering to be “my penis in the storm.” A college flame going through a messy divorce sent flirty condolences on my impending death and wanted confirmation that “we’d once been in love, hadn’t we?” I reminded him that he’d cheated on me with my best friend.

The op-ed ushered my new identity as a cancer whisperer. An independent film producer who hadn’t shared her own diagnosis news with anyone outside of her immediate family DM’d me on Facebook to talk about how isolated she felt. Another friend, whose performance anchors a popular TV series, confided that she’d had cancer and surgery during COVID without telling a soul except her longtime agent. My pal Richard Lewis had reached out just before announcing that he had Parkinson’s.

A producer I was working with at the time had cautioned me, “You can’t untell people,” but I had been given such a poor prognosis, I thought it was worth the good it might do. Willie had taken a different tack. He’d told no one except his brother, son and one or two trusted friends. Shooting was about to commence for the Sex and the City reboot. A fabulous role, acting opposite good friends (as I understand it, Sarah Jessica Parker and he were even closer IRL than they were on the show) and on a highly rated program? As close as he was with the producers, cast and network, he didn’t want to take the chance that he’d be deemed uninsurable and written out of the season.

“Really, is that what you’re having?” was Willie’s assessment of the processed turkey slices and raw carrots I’d laid out for myself during our first lunch. Willie co-owned two restaurants and maintained that life was too short to have a single meal that wasn’t festive. He had several courses prepared, including soup. In addition to his critique of my sad fare, he shared this shocking news. “Could we be cancer buddies?” Yes, we could. “Could you promise to keep my condition quiet?” Yes, I would.

We Zoomed for two months of what I thought of as our secret society of cancer soirees. These were lunches, for sure, but when I get dressed up and put on makeup, that’s a soiree. We chatted about our health; he was working on getting back into shape between COVID and the cancer treatments, and I was adjusting to a new dosage of meds. We gabbed about our kids — his son, Nathen, was in college; my kid, Ezra, had just graduated. Willie had a home in New Orleans but was considering moving back to New York City. I’d had similar thoughts and got maybe a little too carried away with the idea that we might buy a place together. I emailed listings on the regular. Did I have the fantasy that we’d kick cancer to the curb, become roomies and live happily ever after, featured in a Curbed online profile? Absolutely.

As the production start date grew closer, Willie’s cancer markers were increasing, but actors are sure they can defy odds, which explains why we become actors in the first place. If you considered how ridiculous your odds are, you wouldn’t do it.

And just like that, he flew off to New York and I stopped hearing from him. This wasn’t unexpected. I assumed he was swamped and trolled the tabloids for candids of location shoots. I was elated to see a shot of him sporting an electric blue suit outside the Met and thought I spotted that familiar mischievous glint in his eyes as he planted a kiss on SJP’s cheek. I couldn’t wait for the season to air, even though I’d never been a die-hard fan of the show.

SATC had hit a little too close to home. Like Carrie at one time, I resided on a charming street in the West Village. Only, my studio didn’t have a closet or even a kitchen sink; it did have a slanted floor and an alcoholic neighbor fond of wrapping her soiled panties around my front doorknob. I’d also rocked those Rapunzel locks, only mine were perfumed with the scent of the chili fries cooking downstairs at the Corner Bistro. My salad days (there might have been an occasional chili fry) of scrimping and saving made Carrie’s pricey shoe addiction a less than sympathetic attribute. I’d never addressed a pair of heels with “Hello, lover,” though I whispered it once to a particularly fetching panna cotta.

In a too-close-to-home plot twist, I’d also had a romantic entanglement with Mr. Big, aka Chris Noth, albeit IRL. In the late 1980s, we’d met at an audition and he’d followed me home. We were both just starting out in our careers, but Noth was always Mr. Big. Once, during our short-lived whatever-it-was-that-we-were-doing, he asked me to come over and wash his clothes because he was rehearsing for a production and “Hamlet doesn’t do laundry.” He was pitch-perfect in that role, and while I wasn’t cheering for the Carrie/Big storyline, Carrie and Stanford’s friendship was so winning that I had to root for the series.

Willie made it through the filming of the first episode, but as the second episode was commencing, word got to me that Willie had returned to Los Angeles and the end was near. Stanford Blatch, never not nattily attired, was written off in a storyline in which he sent word that he’d become a Buddhist monk, presumably at a retreat center that featured four-star meals and vestments with flattering cuts. In real life, 500 of Willie’s close friends and family members gathered for a memorial at which a New Orleans jazz band second line formed. Jambalaya, beignets and champagne were served. There was dancing, drinking, festive recounting of adventures and a trivia game led by Camryn Manheim, the entire affair carefully planned by Willie himself. Elvis Costello performed, natch.

Then, almost a year after his death, I found myself living out a storyline from And Just Like That. Carrie, desperate for closure after a year of mourning the death of her husband, John, aka Big, jets to the City of Love for healing. The season-ender finds her on Paris’ Pont des Arts bridge.

Moonlit, swathed in oodles of organza, she pauses, unlatches the catch on her $4,500 (I looked it up) handbag and unburdens herself of John’s ashes. Dumping ashes in the Seine happens to be illegal, but whatev, she’s the widow of Mr. Big and can afford the fine. To move forward, she must leave something behind and do so in the most fabulous outfit, in the most fabulously over-the-top gesture, in the most fabulous location. And just like that, we can see that she’s ready to move on.

I also jetted off to Paris, if you can call flying economy in a middle seat “jetting off.” I’d finagled my way there by tagging along on the low-rent European van tour with a heavy metal band managed by a man I’d just begun dating. I’d agreed to be their merch girl, and by the time I made it to the Pont des Arts, I was in the same sweat-stained tee I’d sold merch in the night before, grimy jeans, mud-caked loafers and carrying a tote made from a recycled tarp. But just like that, on my last day on the continent, on what might be my last day in Paris, ever, I decided to chuck my list of “things to do in Paris before you die.” If only I could, like Carrie, with one distinct gesture, achieve closure to this chapter of my life. This is where our storylines diverged. I embraced the ordinary instead of the operatic. I frittered away a day, a most obscene extravagance for someone facing mortality, and I didn’t do anything illegal. I did stop for a festive meal —Willie Garson wouldn’t have accepted anything less.

When I look back at my last email exchanges with Willie, they contain jokes with references I don’t remember and lines from documentaries about people who keep lions and tigers, something of an obsession for both of us. Some emails are just funny lines back and forth. I’d put money on it, if I were a betting person, that many people have such emails from him.

What I never had the opportunity to ask is: Do you regret your choice, or are you glad that you kept your illness close? Had Willie come forward, he would have been showered with love and probably never would have reached out to me. I understand the need to keep the state of your health a secret. Especially freelancers in the industry. Employees with serious medical conditions are a protected class, but the law isn’t easily enforced and has many exclusions. Willie was also spared the burden of knowing that you are adding to the list of worries of the people who love you and that you are now a constant reminder of their own mortality. Practically speaking, I can’t imagine how he managed to keep his medical odyssey a secret from his many, many close friends, but he’d been able to remain entirely himself, an emissary of delight, charmingly barbed wit and all until the end, and there’s something to be said for that.

This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.