Marilu Henner admits she wasn’t above playing the “Taxi” card if it meant getting her boyfriend a date with a top cancer surgeon.
But the surgeon barely glanced at Michael Brown’s chart before announcing his plan: He’d remove Brown’s bladder and prostate, and — to prevent the erectile dysfunction such surgery often entails — would run a hose up his penis that the couple would have to pump up before sex.
“It was shocking,” Henner tells The Post of that 2003 encounter.
“I thought, ‘There had to be another way,’ ” Brown adds. Happily, there was: After all, Brown had Henner, the actress and best-selling nutrition and health guru, in his corner.
So began their journey from sickness to health — and their book, “Changing Normal: How I Helped My Husband Beat Cancer” (Gallery Books, out now). Part medical memoir, part love story, the book comes 13 years after Brown’s cancer was diagnosed, 12 years since it’s been in remission and a decade after they finally wed.
Their love story alone, so full of twists, could fill a book. Now both 64, they met in 1970 at the University of Chicago, when she was a chubby redhead and he was dating her best friend. For years they lost touch, until a chance meeting a decade later at New Orleans’ City Hall, where Henner was getting her marriage license (for a short-lived union with actor Frederic Forrest) and Brown was just passing through.
In 1997, Henner was kicking up her heels in Broadway’s “Chicago” when a college classmate dropped by to see her. He mentioned Brown’s name, and Henner’s heart fluttered: She’d long nursed a crush. But it wasn’t until 2003 — both of them by then divorced, with children — that they finally got together.
Barely two months after their first date, they were vacationing together when Henner noticed the toilet was streaked with blood. That’s when Brown told her: He’d been urinating blood for two years — something his elderly urologist told him was “nothing.” Henner assured him it was indeed something.
“Thank God he called me when he did,” she says now of her and Brown’s reunion. “I really thought I could help him. It wasn’t grandiose — I’m just connected to these incredible doctors.”
In fact, since her parents’ deaths — her father of a heart attack at 52, her mother from complications of rheumatoid arthritis at 58 — Henner became “an obsessed student of health.” She saw nutritionists, took anatomy classes and radically overhauled her diet, losing 54 pounds along the way. A veteran vegan whose two sons never had a glass of milk, let alone a hamburger, she saw Brown — a hard-drinking, meat-eating merchant mariner when they reconnected — as someone with “makeover potential.”
Besides, after meeting practitioners of both Western and Eastern medicine, she had a Rolodex of experts at her fingertips. She wasted no time playing “Doctor Concierge” to her new love, and steering him to a “new normal” — one that included eliminating certain foods (meat, sugar, dairy), exercising and managing stress.
Soon after they left that surgeon’s office, they saw a new urologist, who started Brown on immunotherapy — a treatment then considered experimental for his kind of cancer, but since acknowledged as an alternative to chemo and radiation, as evidenced by an immunotherapy institute that opened at Johns Hopkins in March.
For six weeks, Brown was given doses, through a catheter, of BCG, a tuberculosis strain used to fight bladder cancer by stimulating the immune system. He says the treatment felt even worse than it sounds: “You have a catheter inserted in the penis, and [afterward] you’re basically p - - sing razor blades.”
Even so, they enjoyed unprotected sex only days later, much to the horror of Brown’s doctor, who was thinking of the dangers the potentially toxic liquid tuberculosis could have on Henner. “If you two can’t stay away from each other, use condoms,” he told them. So they decided to make it an adventure, trying every kind of “fun” condom they could find.
“We were always making lemonade out of lemons,” Henner muses. “It was always, ‘We’re in this together.’”
‘We were always making lemonade out of lemons. It was always, “We’re in this together.”’
- Marilu Henner
Soon after the treatment started, spots were detected on Brown’s lung. When Henner heard that, she was frantic.
“I was thinking, ‘Please let it just be lung cancer!’ ” she says. “Lung cancer would be better than metastasized bladder cancer.”
Lung cancer it was: stage 1. This time, they did opt for surgery, which removed part of Brown’s lower lobe and some lymph nodes.
Henner remembers seeing her lover right after surgery. Though lying unconscious in a recovery room that was “right out of ‘Coma’ ” — full of blinking machines and ghastly quiet — “he looked gorgeous. I sat around watching him breathe.” When Brown came to, she told him what the surgeon told her: “I hope you like this guy, because he’s gonna be around for 30 years.”
Brown slid his hand out, amid tubes and wires, and asked Henner to marry him. Which she did, happily, in 2006, two years after doctors gave him the “all clear.” They’ve since celebrated more than 12 years of remission.
To hear them tell it — speaking over separate extensions on a hotel phone, hoarse from talking so passionately about what they’d been through — theirs is a blissful marriage. Don’t they ever fight?
Henner laughs. “You didn’t see us when we were writing this book,” she says. “I kept saying, ‘Writing this book with you is harder than beating cancer!’”