Jaclyn Smith, the actress best known for playing Kelly Garrett in the television series Charlie's Angels, has revealed in a new memoir that a routine mammogram in June 2002 led to a breast cancer diagnosis that changed her life in an instant.
Smith, who was 56 at the time, writes in her memoir, "I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie," that her doctor found a few small findings during the scan and asked her to come back the next day for further testing. Over the following 48 hours she underwent a series of biopsies to rule out breast cancer, though she says she was not especially worried at the time, since there was no history of any form of cancer in her family.
Charlie's Angels, which ran on American television in the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed three private detectives working for an unseen boss named Charlie, and made Smith one of the best known actresses of the era.
The diagnosis
When she returned to the clinic the next day for her results, Smith writes that she was caught off guard when the assistant asked whether she had come alone. She says she should have understood the question as a sign that something was wrong, but she did not.
In his office, she recalls, her doctor, Dr. Giuliano, told her he had some good news and some bad news, and asked which she wanted to hear first. She writes that she did not know how to answer such a question.
The bad news was that she had breast cancer. The good news was that the small tumor had been caught early. Smith describes how her entire world changed in that moment, writing that hearing the word cancer makes it impossible to see anything clearly, that it is a small word and nothing more, yet it opened up something impossible to manage: fear. She adds that everything briefly seemed to lose its meaning, and that she did not know what to think.
Fear for her children
One question came to her immediately: would she be there for her children? Her doctor told her yes, though Smith writes that she was so overwhelmed in that moment that she could barely process what she was hearing, and that once he said the word cancer, fear was all that remained in her mind.
Smith thought of her daughter, Spencer-Margaret, who was 16 at the time and whom she was due to accompany to New York for a summer dance program. She insisted that she needed to deal with the situation immediately, telling her doctor to simply remove her breast. After further discussion with her doctor and her husband, cardiothoracic surgeon Brad Allen, she opted instead for a lumpectomy, which was carried out four days later.
Spencer-Margaret refused to go to the dance program in New York and stayed by her mother's side throughout, as did Smith's son, Gaston, who was 20 at the time. Smith writes that Spencer-Margaret pinned a heart-shaped note to her sleeve, and that she was allowed to keep it on her arm during the operation.
Two surgeries and radiation
Dr. Giuliano performed the operation, followed by a second procedure two days later after the first attempt failed to achieve clear surgical margins, Smith writes. Her lymph nodes tested negative, which meant her cancer was at Stage 1.
She then underwent six weeks of radiation therapy, five days a week, while continuing to film the CBS police drama "The District." She writes that the three-inch scar faded quickly and became almost invisible.
The mark the cancer left on her mind, however, has stayed with her, she writes. She compares the memory of her breast cancer to an eccentric editor she keeps returning to in her thoughts, though not as often as she used to, adding that she does not want to live constantly looking over her shoulder.
