Before the Pink Ribbon, talking about breast cancer was taboo. In this episode, we uncover the shocking and inspiring history of breast cancer awareness and the three women who defied a dismissive medical establishment to save millions of lives. Author Judith L. Pearson joins us to discuss her groundbreaking book, “Radical Sisters,” revealing how Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, and Evelyn Lauder launched a revolution from their hospital beds and boardrooms. How did a child star, a determined journalist, and a cosmetics mogul tear down the wall of silence and change medicine forever?
This deep dive into the evolution of breast cancer advocacy explores the dark ages of treatment and the courageous fight for patient rights. Judith L. Pearson details the brutal radical mastectomy history, specifically the disfiguring Halstead radical mastectomy, a procedure that persisted long after it was proven ineffective. We revisit the pivotal moment of Shirley Temple Black breast cancer advocacy when the beloved star held an unprecedented 1972 press conference from her hospital room, urging women not to be afraid and to perform self-exams. The episode then follows the tenacious activist Rose Kushner and the one-step procedure, a barbaric practice where women went in for a biopsy and woke up with their breasts removed without their consent. Kushner’s relentless research and in-your-face advocacy, including a daring appearance on the Donahue show, forced the medical community to confront its paternalism. Finally, we explore the origins of the Evelyn Lauder Pink Ribbon Campaign and her “department store” concept for cancer care at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which was born from the frustrating and fragmented patient experience. This interview sheds light on the complete history of breast cancer awareness, from comparing the fight for funding to the AIDS movement to the discovery of the BRCA gene mutation, revealing a story of courage, tragedy, and ultimate triumph.
Introduction
Blaine DeSantis: Welcome to Books and Looks, where we do a deep dive with authors to help you discover your next great read. In the shadow of a disease shrouded in silence and fear, three remarkable women, Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, and Evelyn Lauder, transformed the landscape of breast cancer awareness through their personal battles and unwavering advocacy. Their revolutionary action spanning from Shirley’s groundbreaking 1972 press conference about her own mastectomy, to Evelyn’s creation of the Pink Ribbon Campaign.
They challenged medical orthodoxy. They empowered millions of women to speak openly about a disease that had been whispered about for centuries. And through their courage, tenacity, and vision, these radical sisters not only changed how breast cancer was discussed, diagnosed, and treated, they also pioneered a movement that continues to save countless lives today.
You and I know this. Breast cancer is a killer. Breast cancer is an equal opportunity killer. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, Hispanic, Asian, mulatto. It does not matter. It does not matter your religion. It does not matter your country of birth. Breast cancer is out there, and it’s affecting women each and every day. So this book is so very, very opportune as we come into Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Blaine DeSantis: I’m Blaine DeSantis. This is Books and Looks. And today we’re interviewing Judith L. Pearson about her new book, Radical Sisters. Judy Pearson, welcome to Books and Looks.
Judith L. Pearson: I love it. I like the look of it already.
Blaine DeSantis: I’m very happy to have you here today talking about such a very important and timely topic. I’m glad we could get you in here right after your publication date, if I’m not mistaken.
Judith L. Pearson: Absolutely. Yes, sir. It’s now three days old.
Blaine DeSantis: Wow. Three days old when we’re recording with us. That’s pretty darn great in my opinion. I rarely get people that close to publication date. So, wow. Great. Anyway, this book, which wait a minute, wait a minute, this book here, Radical Sisters, Radical Sisters, there they are. Okay. This book features three women who are involved in the change with regard to breast cancer awareness. Who are the three women, and the research you’re required by you to be able to put together a book such as this.
Introducing the “Radical Sisters”: Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, and Evelyn Lauder
Judith L. Pearson: So let me tell you a little bit how the sausage is made in publishing. I learned about Rose Kushner, one of the three, two books ago, and thought she was just amazing. My previous book to this one was already in the works, so I continued with that. But when that was done, went to my agent and editor and said, okay, I want to write a book about Rose Kushner. She was amazing. And they said, she sounds great, but why don’t we add some known names to the title or the subtitle? Because that’ll pull people in. And I was, oh, I don’t think so. I don’t want to do that. And they were kind of insistent. Of course, their business is to sell books. And so they convinced me and they were absolutely right.
So the other two women, Shirley Temple Black, who of course was the famous child star, but went on to have a very impressive career in diplomacy in the late sixties and through the seventies. She was one of the first, she was the first celebrity to talk about her breast cancer. So she was diagnosed in 1972. Rose, my middle sister, she was diagnosed in 1974. And then Evelyn Lauder was the third. She was diagnosed in 1988. They never met. I’m sure they were well aware of one another, but they never met. But what makes the book so beautiful is that their diagnoses and their work just flow one into the other. And it makes this beautiful arc for the beginnings of the breast cancer movement.
Blaine DeSantis: Lots of research I’m assuming you had to do for this.
Judith L. Pearson: Yes, sir. I’m a familiar face at the National Archives. Rose’s papers are actually at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, which is actually on the Harvard campus. And I had the great advantage of working with both, with all three of Rose’s children, grown children, and then also Gary Lauder, who is Evelyn Lauder’s younger child, son, also a grown man.
Shirley Temple’s family was cute. I talked to her son at length. He said, look, my mother published her autobiography before she died. She wrote a second one and it was not published and we’re trying to publish it. We just don’t want to do any more interviews that will take away from the information but good luck. And I said okay. And fortunately there was enough about Shirley both in books and then I use a newspaper database that the story was filled out.
Blaine DeSantis: It’s interesting you say that because as the book goes on it begins heavy on Shirley and then we lose her.
Judith L. Pearson: That was.
Blaine DeSantis: Fascinating. That’s interesting why. That explains why we can only get so much if no one’s going to give you anything.
Judith L. Pearson: Well there’s that and there’s the fact that although she was the first celebrity to talk about it and she was very insistent about self-breast exams which were hardly heard of in 1972. Her last really discussion publicly of her breast cancer was in March of 1973 on the Mike Douglas show. And then she was done. She was ready to go back into diplomacy. And that was perfect because Rose picked up there a year later.
Blaine DeSantis: There you go. Wow. Great. Now, you opened this book with Rose Kushner on Donahue back in 1985. This was considered daring. It was considered controversial. Why was that? And why did you start with that at that episode instead of being at the very beginning? Why did you start writing Donahue?
Setting the Scene: Rose Kushner’s Daring 1985 Donahue Appearance
Judith L. Pearson: I love doing prologues. I suppose some readers find them annoying. But for me, especially writing a biography, the beginning of most biographies has to include backstory. And if there’s nothing to intrigue readers, you might lose them at the beginning of a book. So all of my biographies begin in the middle with some poignant story that really is almost exactly in the middle of the time frame. And I never know what that’s going to be until I’ve done some research.
But when I was at the National Library of Medicine on the National Institutes of Health campus and going through their catalog, I found this Donahue show on a CD or a DVD, which they trotted a player out for me. I used to watch Phil Donahue. My mother watched Phil Donahue. It was really fun to see. And the funny part about this particular show, the whole show was on breast cancer. It took place in March because this was before there was a National Breast Cancer Month, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
And he introduces first Dr. Marc Lippman, who went on to become a very well-known, I think he might have even been head of the National Cancer Institute at one point in time. And then Donahue says, and of all things, a woman, let me introduce Rose Kushner, because why would there be a woman in a discussion of breast cancer?
Blaine DeSantis: And surprising. Yeah.
Judith L. Pearson: Yeah, and Rose was, although Shirley had talked about her cancer in her press conference, Rose was truly the first woman to sit down and go through the whole thing and talk about her surgery and talk about her reconstruction and all the parts of it, as well as the newly emerging lumpectomies, which women were terrified of because they thought, oh my gosh, if you’re just taking a little bit of my breasts, how do you know you’ve got it all? So that’s why I thought it was an important middle ground to begin. And it’s really funny because Donahue gets so dramatic. And in the middle of it, there’s an audience member who gets upset. And I thought it was good. Did you like it?
Blaine DeSantis: Very good. I liked it. Yeah, very good. Wow. Well, now, one of the things that’s interesting is in your chapter one, which I think is called, let me get this correct here. Something else to do in the world. All these women had near death experiences. And if they don’t have if they have those we don’t have what we have now so what are these near-death experiences and certain examples is amazing i never heard this story.
Spared for a Purpose: The Near-Death Experiences That Shaped Three Lives
Judith L. Pearson: It was absolutely astounding. I also use a genealogy website that helps me not only define where my subjects are in their lives, where they lived because there’s census documents and that kind of thing, but it also helps me find family members who might be able to add to the building of the story. And so that’s exactly what happened. I found a person who would have been like a third cousin to Evelyn’s children, and he talked about them leaving Austria, about Evelyn and her parents leaving Austria, literally running ahead of the Nazis.
The Nazis actually had already moved in. Kristallnacht had already happened. The Nazis really wanted to get the Jews out of their conquered territories, which would have made it much easier and much cleaner for them. So they were happy to help facilitate that. But that door was about to close. And so not only then do they escape from the Nazis, they get to Belgium, who says at the border, oh, no, you can’t come here. We don’t want you here. Belgium was still not yet conquered. And Belgium tried to send them back. And I can’t even imagine as a parent, as a mother, desperately trying to save my five-year-old child from all the horror that’s sure to come. So that was a shocker.
Then, in reading Shirley’s own autobiography, she describes this crazy near assassination where a woman who clearly has mental health issues finds her, gets into—it was the only live performance Shirley ever did to promote—she was about 12—to promote a movie that failed miserably. She’s standing all alone on stage with nothing but a microphone on a stand and this woman has a ticket to the show, stands up with a gun in her hand and for whatever reason never pulled the trigger. No matter how bad a shot she might have been, she surely would have killed Shirley.
And thirdly Rose was coming home from visiting her brother and post World War II was going to fly home. She’d taken a ship over. She was going to fly home. Her brother said, oh, no, don’t do that. Let me, I have a friend. I’ll get you another passage on the Queen Mary or whatever it was. And the plane she was going to get on crashed in the Azores and no one survived.
Blaine DeSantis: Wow.
Judith L. Pearson: So the quote that I really, I loved it for a long time, but it is exactly that. If you were spared, it’s because you have something else in the world to do. And these women surely did.
Blaine DeSantis: Wow. Wow. That’s really something. Then you take us, you take us to one of our favorite shows, Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey pops up in this book and good old Lord Grantham. How does Lord Grantham fit into the whole issue of women’s health? Tell us about that.
“From the Waist Up, Women Were Just Small Men”: The Historical Taboo of Breast Cancer
Judith L. Pearson: Okay. Truth be told, I’m a Downton Abbey junkie. I rewatch it a gazillion times. I’m excited to see the new movie. But it struck me when I first saw this episode long before I ever conceived of this book, his quotes that I use in this book are so emblematic of women’s health at that time. So this would have been in the early part of the 20th century, somewhere between 1915 and 1920, let’s say.
And it was a time when from the waist up, women were just thought of as small men and we’ll just treat them as if they were small men. From the waist down, men were either confused, disinterested, or terrified. And so Lord Grantham makes a comment first about his daughter’s childbirth, impending childbirth, and then about Lady Grantham’s, or maybe Lady Grantham’s comes first, Lady Grantham’s pregnancy at the onset of menopause. And in both cases, he doesn’t want to hear from the doctor what’s happening in these women’s lives, but it was exactly how women’s health was treated at the time.
Blaine DeSantis: I don’t think the doctor wanted to talk about it either. He was a very, very, very gentle soul. I don’t need to go into all this with you. Oh yeah, that’s something. Well, there you go. We got Phil Donahue and Lord Grantham in this book. And I think that while it’s very serious, it provided a little bit of levity, I thought, with them having to put Lord Grantham in there, and it’s a character we know. Now, we go back to Shirley Temple back in 1972 when she holds this press conference in her hospital room, and she invites the press in and she tells them she just had breast cancer and a mastectomy. How hard was that for her to do and how did that start the ball rolling in changing attitudes?
Shirley Temple Black’s Groundbreaking 1972 Press Conference
Judith L. Pearson: It was truly remarkable. And there is a video that lives online. And if you Google Shirley Temple Press Conference, everybody can see it. It was really crazy. At the time, all procedures, all medical procedures that required hospitalization required much longer hospitalization than we do today. People go home the day they have a baby.
Quite honestly, I spent the night after my mastectomy, because it was at noon. If it had been first thing in the morning, they would have sent me home that day. It’s really pretty crazy. So day three after her surgery, she gets this idea that she kept thinking about, I need to help my sisters, other women. I can’t be alone. There must be other women. She knew that she had this very powerful platform as a celebrity.
And she called her family in and said, this is what I’m going to do. She called a newspaper publisher and said, I want you to write a press release. And this is what we’re going to do. And they were all shocked, but the press came. The other remarkable thing, Blaine, is that cancer was still considered to be contagious at this time. So here’s this little assemblage of press people with potential cancer germs floating around in Shirley’s room.
She looked lovely. She had a gardenia pinned at her ear and makeup on and a very demure nightgown which she pulled up. But she just said, I want you to listen to me. Do not be afraid. If you think there’s something wrong with you, go. Because the longer you wait, the worse it’s going to be, which is still true 50 plus years later.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah, it’s really something. And it was funny because the press always discarded her and disparaged her once she got into diplomacy. A little miss so-and-so, a little miss diplomat, blah, blah, blah. After that, they didn’t say that anymore, did they?
Judith L. Pearson: No, they looked at her as the woman she was, smart, courageous, and really with a big heart for the people. She not only entertained on screen, but she visited troops during World War II. She was very much interested in helping others. And the other thing that she did, which was also unprecedented after the press release, when she got home, she began writing what became a seven-page article for McCall’s magazine. They turned it around in short order because it was November and she’s writing this article and it made the January publication.
And that article as well changed women’s lives. Either they had been hiding in the closet because they were breast cancer survivors. Some did self-exams and said, they found, I found a lump. It’s all because of you. I’m still alive. It was a really big deal. Really. She didn’t work in breast cancer advocacy long, but her four months worth, five months worth really did a lot.
Blaine DeSantis: Wow. That’s really, that’s a great story. That really, really is something. And how did the Hollywood celebrities take to her once this whole breast cancer interview came out? Did she get support from the Hollywood community at all?
Judith L. Pearson: There’s no yes and no. So there’s no record that I found of any celebrity, a woman, for example, directly contacting her and saying, wow, this happened to be X years ago or my mother or whomever. But there were tons of letters that came forth and that was talked about. And she talked about that in her McCall’s magazine article, including one from president Nixon, which says, Pat and I are so sorry to hear about your surgery. He couldn’t even write the word cancer in his note.
Blaine DeSantis: And that’s something. Well, the title of this book, radical sisters, now it’s not only a, deals with the women and the approach these three women had, but it also deals with the type of breast surgery. And could we talk a little bit about the Halstead method and that type of breast surgery that was being used back at that time period?
The Brutal History of the Halstead Radical Mastectomy
Judith L. Pearson: Of course, of course. So the term radical, as we frequently know it, is it’s used in describing something that’s unconventional or really out there. And that’s what most people think. And most people also think that when you hear the word radical mastectomy, that it’s because it’s so out there. But the fact of the matter was, in about 1898, a doctor called William Halstead decided that in order to really make sure breast cancer didn’t spread, he had to get to the root.
Radical is the Latin word for root. And so he not only amputated women’s breasts, he took all of their lymph nodes. He took both pectoral major and minor muscles. In some cases he and some of his understudies took rib cages and clavicles. They just kept digging to try and prevent cancer spread.
Now granted, he had a heart. He was trying to do the right thing. The wrong thing was that even into the 1970s when we knew very well that that’s not how cancer spread, that it traveled through the lymph system, it had nothing to do. You could get clean margins. Doctors continued to perform this and refused in some cases to listen to anything different. So it was called a Halstead mastectomy or a radical mastectomy. And even in the Rose Kushner, Phil Donahue episode, she says in 1985, half the mastectomies performed today are still the radical mastectomies.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah, and as I’ve told you, my mom had that before I was born and explained a lot. And I learned a lot more about her difficulties as I read your book. And so it was common. And what was interesting was the same time, I think this was developed around, didn’t you bring out something at the same time they decide not to use leeches anymore? It’s something to do with the lead you tied in radical mastectomy with leeches, and it’s like that’s how long ago.
Judith L. Pearson: That was Rose Kushner had quite a sense of humor, and she said that radical mastectomies deserve to be put on a shelf just like leeches had been in terms of best practices for cancer surgery.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah and I’m sorry friends, I’m going to say this, it’s going to be a little bit graphic, but they removed a woman’s breast, as you heard. They removed the clavicle, they removed muscles. In the old days, they removed it without anesthetic. They catheterized it without anesthetic. Do you know the pain, the difficulty these women had to go through? I can’t even imagine something like that. And if you were of the lower classes, they weren’t going to do it to you. The only one who might have it would be somebody up there. So it was an extremely difficult, difficult procedure that they had to go through. And things start to change slowly.
But surely now we get to Rose Kushner, who’s the she’s the pusher. She is the given information to everybody pushing about this, talking to everybody. Wow. She got hers in what? Did you say 74 she developed her cancer?
Judith L. Pearson: 74, yep.
Blaine DeSantis: And had she started that advocacy before that time or was it after her cancer?
Judith L. Pearson: No. Like most women, unless you had a family member or have a family member who’s been diagnosed, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah.
Judith L. Pearson: And Rose didn’t know anything about it.
Blaine DeSantis: She knew nothing about it. Okay. So, and so she’s so completely different from Shirley Temple and even Evelyn Lauder in the fact that she’s out front and she’s stubborn and she’s really, she’s in your face with the whole thing. I mean, you got to give it to this woman.
Rose Kushner’s Fight Against the “One-Step Procedure”
Judith L. Pearson: You got to give it to this woman. She says she had a stubborn streak and a loud voice and she used both. Absolutely.
Blaine DeSantis: Yeah that just got me that she was the one who had to go in and almost have to get in arguments with these doctors about surgeons and everything. I had to go do all this, had to go do all the research for them almost. It was amazing.
Judith L. Pearson: Her first shock that she had was what was called the one-step procedure that was still going on at the time. So a woman would discover a lump or a doctor would discover a lump. They’d go for a biopsy, which at that point in time was an inpatient hospital procedure. They would be terrified. The doctors would be trying to soothe them, saying, I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. Sign here. They’d sign a paper. They’d go in for their biopsy.
And while they were unconscious the tissue would be analyzed. And if cancer was found, their breasts were completely cut off then with all the rest of it, as I just described. And so they would wake up and be shocked to know that they no longer had a breast or maybe either breast. It was a horrific and barbaric thing to do and there was zero medical reason. We can explain away the radical mastectomy, but the one step, there was zero reason unless the small percentage of people who couldn’t go under anesthesia again. But otherwise it was just a really awful thing.
So the first thing, and Shirley actually also said, the doctor can make the incision, but I’ll make the decision. So she said to her surgeon, please do a biopsy and then we’ll have a discussion. But as you so wisely pointed out, Shirley and Evelyn were different because I think they had position and they had money and they were more, I hate to say respected, but at least more people were more, the doctors were more tolerant of them.
Rose was just an everyday woman, just like me. And for her to say, you signed this paper swearing that you’re not going to take off my breast. And her doctor laughed and said, you don’t even need this. And then as she came out of anesthesia, he said, you just killed yourself, which again was wrong. So she had to travel from Baltimore to Buffalo to the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center to find a doctor for the surgery.
Blaine DeSantis: Tried everywhere in between, couldn’t get out of Baltimore, Washington, New York. Finally Buffalo, found a doctor, a Chinese gentleman if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t he Chinese the doctor? Yes, yeah they found him. He was the one doing this. Yeah, so that was, that just is amazing that this, but there’s also another aspect of this whole thing. Who’s going to pay the bill for two surgeries? The insurance company will pay for a surgery, that’s pointed out.
Judith L. Pearson: If you even have insurance. We still weren’t at a time in the 70s where that was a done deal. If you were in some kind of a union, I started teaching high school in 1975. And we had great insurance because I lived in Michigan and whatever the auto industry settled on, the teacher’s union then got. So we had great insurance, but that was a rarity.
Blaine DeSantis: It was. That was. You tell one story about Rose, which was, I thought, fascinating. Because she goes to all these conferences. She’s almost considered the expert. She testifies before Congress. She goes to conferences. She either challenges people or she testifies. And she’s at one conference, and a newspaper reporter is covering this. And then that night, there’s a fire, or a fire alarm’s pulled at the same hotel. And the reporter’s there. And he notices and he goes up to her. He said, why are you the only person dressed? Tell us a little about that story.
Judith L. Pearson: So, Rose, as I said, had her surgery in 1974, and it wasn’t too long after that that reconstruction, breast reconstruction, was becoming more commonplace. And she felt that she was well-adjusted. She fully supported women who wanted to have reconstruction, but she felt that she was very well-adjusted, just having one breast. She had a prosthetic, and she was okay with it.
So, yes, she’s at a conference in Jacksonville, Florida. The fire alarm goes off. She gets her clothes on, sticks her head out and marches into the hallway and marches down with the rest of the rest of the guests. And as she looked around after this reporter sent this to her, she realized two things. She was indeed the only person fully clothed with her fake boob. And maybe she wasn’t as well adjusted as she thought she was. She did not want to ever appear in public without her prosthetic breast and so she examined those feelings and then had reconstruction done.
Blaine DeSantis: Isn’t that so? And how many years was that again between the surgery and that conference?
Judith L. Pearson: From 74 to about, I want to say like 83, I think.
Blaine DeSantis: Okay so almost 10 years somewhere in that time period and it’s fascinating because she’s such an out front person you would not think this but there, oh my, isn’t that something, wow. Yeah, very interesting. One is I gotta talk a little bit about Evelyn Lauder now. Evelyn Lauder is a fascinating person. She is Estée Lauder’s daughter-in-law, if I’m not mistaken.
Evelyn Lauder: A Philanthropic Vision Before and After Diagnosis
Judith L. Pearson: Correct.
Blaine DeSantis: Okay, which I found out that Estée was not Estée’s real name, Estée Lauder. That’s another little tidbit, folks.
Judith L. Pearson: No.
Blaine DeSantis: No, we find that out, but she married Estée Lauder’s son. And fascinating what she starts doing with philanthropy, and she does stuff that begins with playgrounds, and then she starts gravitating and gradually more and more and more. Was this her beginning? Did she start the philanthropy work before she had breast surgery?
Judith L. Pearson: Yes, there was. The Lauder Family Foundation had begun in the early 80s. And it was that that funded this playground. And that was actually Leonard’s brainchild because he had his two sons at a playground in New York City where they lived. But he was so disappointed with the way the playground looked. And so he just went home to Evelyn and said, this is awful. We need to do something about this.
And the idea was that not only did they change that particular park and put in grass and trees, but more importantly, child proof and child appropriate things to climb on, things to dig in, water to play in, all the things that kids do. Why take kids to a park and just keep saying, no, don’t do that. No, don’t do that. And so their idea was that they would replicate that, and they did several more times in New York City. But then she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Blaine DeSantis: Yep, then. Right, right. And in case you didn’t know this, folks, thanks to Evelyn Lauder, you have compacts, correct? She’s the one who pushed the compact. Well, didn’t she out in California? Yeah. Well, the powder and the mirror and everything put the powder on.
Judith L. Pearson: That wasn’t the first compact, but it showed at Leonard. They were actually on their honeymoon in California, but he diverted to go to a Bullock’s on Rodeo Drive and had to step out for a second. And when he came back, he was shocked to find his wife behind the counter explaining to women how to use the different kinds of compacts and different kinds of makeup. And so that was when he realized that she could be every bit as good a salesman, saleswoman, as he was a salesman.
Blaine DeSantis: And she was. She was a great salesman.
Judith L. Pearson: Absolutely.
Blaine DeSantis: And she was a great philanthropist. We’ll get to that. One of the things that was shocking was this parallel between the AIDS movement and breast cancer. And how, thanks to Rock Hudson, the AIDS movement got all this money. Tell us about that and why would it be like that?
Lessons from the AIDS Movement: The Fight for Funding and Awareness
Judith L. Pearson: Well, and I have to preface my answer with stating clearly and categorically that one disease is never and should never be pitted against another. AIDS is a horrible disease, just like breast cancer is. And the people who were involved in both diseases at the time felt the same way. But the fact of the matter was that AIDS was a brand new disease in 1982 and 83 when it was first discussed. And breast cancer, of course, had been going on for millennia.
And two things had happened that really caught the breast cancer activists’ attention. The first was, as you say, the amount of money that poured in because Rock Hudson spoke up. Shirley was every bit as much loved as Rock, but no money went to breast cancer research with her disclosure. It was awareness, but no money. Because cancer was just considered uncurable.
With regard to AIDS and Rock Hudson, there was still hope that maybe it could be cured just with more money. And so millions of dollars were thrown at it. But at the same time, there were non-celebrities who were being very vocal about the disease, begging for research money, making lots of noise. And as it happened, they took a page from the yellow ribbon that had been plastered everywhere in the hopes that the hostages that had been taken at the Iranian embassy would be released. So they created the red ribbon. They were handing them out at the Tony awards. Jeremy Irons the actor was hosting the awards and put one on his lapel and that was all it took and all of a sudden AIDS ribbons and AIDS discussions and AIDS research money flowed. So the breast cancer advocates said okay, we need to rethink, we need to regroup.
Blaine DeSantis: And that’s what they learned you need to have advocates you needed to have money to found this to do the research and it was not flowing. And again, this is Rose. Rose is fighting every tooth and nail for this stuff. She is out there. And I think they said, quote, somebody with a statement, if I’m not mistaken, that they hit. 100,000 people had died of AIDS over a period of time. I forget what that was. But they said, we have 110,000 people who die from breast cancer every year. And no one’s saying anything about that. No one’s giving us any money.
Judith L. Pearson: And the AIDS figures were actually much lower than that. It was a quarter of the number, not even a quarter, the total AIDS deaths as compared to the breast cancer deaths. And that’s why Evelyn’s work became so important, because her first idea was realized because she had, you want me to tell this part now?
Blaine DeSantis: Go ahead. Feel free.
Evelyn Lauder’s Legacy: The “Department Store” Concept and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation
Judith L. Pearson: Okay. So after her own surgery, and of course, this is a woman who has all the money in the world for whatever she needs, but still she had to go from the hospital to the doctor’s office, to the wig shop, to the maybe the nutritionist. And these were all just in separate parts of the city of New York city. So she was having to traipse from one end of the city to the next. And so she enlisted the help of her surgeon, Dr. Larry Norton, who is still a breast surgeon, breast oncologist rather, and surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City.
And she said, look, I envision, I think this is so smart. I envision a department store concept. A woman can walk into a department store and buy cosmetics and shoes and children’s clothing and housewares. So let’s do the same thing for breast cancer. And they created what ultimately was called the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering. They raised the money. She used her social contacts, but it needed to be publicly funded, not Lauder money funded because she wanted the public buy-in.
Then she came back with the idea that there were institutions that made grants to researchers, but in order to receive those grants, you had to be pretty far along in your research. And so they, she and Dr. Norton, conceived of a research foundation that would accept researchers who were thinking outside the box, who had maybe some not terrifically accepted ideas. Give them money and let them run with it. And so the Breast Cancer Research Foundation was born, and it has produced so much research. It funded, in fact, Dr. Mary Claire King’s research. She was the discoverer of the BRCA gene mutation, the breast cancer gene mutation.
Blaine DeSantis: And.
Judith L. Pearson: She had funding also from the American Cancer Society but it was funded in a large part by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
Blaine DeSantis: Okay that this was very well done the organization. I love that idea of the department store. It was funny I was talking to our friend I was playing Catan last night, our friend Christine and Gene were over here and Gene was telling me that she said, I had to go to the cardiologist and he goes, now I got to go to a have a stress test. Where’s that? Well, that’s in another building. And there’s something else in another building. I said, ah, you see, why don’t they have it all in one facility? Why is it exactly? And that’s where and the thing is no one’s thought of this until Evelyn Lauder conceived this idea. It’s amazing.
Judith L. Pearson: Even though more women die of heart disease each year than all cancers combined, the word cancer is still so terrifying. Breast cancer does not only mean potentially an attack on your life at worst, but it’s also an attack on your femininity. Breasts are so adored and so ignored. And so losing a breast to many women, at least in the latter part of the last century, meant losing your womanhood, losing your femininity, motherhood, all the things that women embrace that goes right away with your breast. So imagine traipsing all over the city with that hanging over your head.
Blaine DeSantis: No doubt about it. I want to talk one minute about a lady by Nancy Brinker. Now, Nancy Brinker, not one of the radical ladies, but she had a big part to do in what’s coming up and what’s been going on with breast cancer awareness. Who is Nancy Brinker? Tell us how she got involved with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
The Origin of the Pink Ribbon: How Nancy Brinker and Evelyn Lauder Created a Symbol
Judith L. Pearson: Nancy has actually become a friend, I’m happy to say. She’s just a lovely, lovely woman who interviewed me. She has a television show. She interviewed me for my previous book about a wonderful cancer hero and philanthropist, Mary Lasker.
So Nancy’s sister, Susan G. Komen, developed breast cancer in the 1970s. And the doctor performed the mastectomy, proudly marched out to the waiting room where the family all sat and said, I got it all. And 18 months later she had a recurrence. It had metastasized everywhere and Susan eventually died. But before she did, she said to Nancy, promise me that no other woman will have to go through this. And this was all of it, just every part of the indignity that she’d gone through. So Nancy was married to a very successful businessman, and she had the social contacts and the wherewithal to create an organization which she dedicated to her sister, Susan G. Komen, which also raised money for breast cancer research, for mammograms for women who can’t afford them, and for a number of other things.
And at the time, in the 1980s, awareness is a word we use a lot now. It’s all about awareness. And I remember 14 years ago when I was going through this and I thought, that’s stupid. Who’s not aware of breast cancer? Well, I know different now. In the 20th century, there was not a lot of awareness.
And so Nancy worked very hard to bring awareness to the disease. Her favorite color was pink. She saw the pink ribbons or the red ribbons and thought, I’ll have my designer make a pink ribbon for as the logo to go on a hat for some of their 5Ks and 10Ks. At the same time, Evelyn Lauder and her friend who was the editor of Self Magazine at the time, decided the same thing. We need more awareness. And they came up with the idea of a pink ribbon.
And in the chapter where I talk about the pink ribbon, I liken it to several generals who are all attacking the same enemy, coming at it from different points in a battle and maybe even using land and air and water to attack this enemy with the joint goal of destroying the enemy. And that’s how these women went about it. Who was first? Does it matter who was first? At the end of the day, we have a pink ribbon.
Pink has become synonymous with October. The National Breast Cancer Awareness Month wasn’t officially declared until the 1990s. And so while it’s overdone now, I just hope listeners, your listeners and my readers will give it a little bit of a pass because it took a long time to get to the point where it would be so saturated. And I know sometimes it’s hard for women who’ve been told they must live with their disease to sort of face all that pink. But I just want you to hear me. You have an extended life because of those women creating the awareness they did.
Blaine DeSantis: That’s right. That’s right. And the day they launched that, they had a big whoop-dee-doo planned. I think it was a polo club or something in Dallas. And it started to rain.
Judith L. Pearson: Well, that was when Nancy pulled together Susan G. Komen. Yes.
Blaine DeSantis: Yep.
Judith L. Pearson: Yep. And they came anyway. I have an almost 16-year-old grandson. He’ll be 16 a week from today. And last year he was a freshman in high school and was playing on the freshman football team and he was so excited because he had bought, he talked his dad into buying, my son didn’t need talking into it, but he asked his dad to buy him pink arm sleeves for the month of October.
Blaine DeSantis: Good.
Judith L. Pearson: And he told everybody he was wearing those in honor of his Gigi. That would be me.
Blaine DeSantis: There you go. See, that’s what we like. Well, now, one thing I want to get out here, people are going to buy this book. They can get it anywhere now. Where are all the proceeds going for this?
From Survivor to Author: A Call to Action and Healing Through Helping
Judith L. Pearson: Well, this is a commercially published book. So, of course, the publishers make money. Hopefully, the author will make money. but what I hope readers will do, is sort of use this book as a mirror and reflect on what they would do if they were ever faced with such a great life challenge. And then do whatever their heart leads them to do. I want this to be an impetus for them.
When on the other side of my own cancer, I started meeting women who were survivors of all cancers, who were doing amazing things. And I realized that there is a great deal of healing in helping. I call it a second act. And so that’s what I’d like the book to do. I’d like for readers to just do whatever their heart guides them to do, but give back because you will heal yourself in remarkable ways.
Blaine DeSantis: Exactly. Absolutely. Well, now this is done. It is out. Is there another book? What’s coming next?
What’s Next for Judith L. Pearson?
Judith L. Pearson: Of course there is. In fact, that same grandson told me, Gigi, you could write until you die because all you need is a brain and fingers. And I said, that’s true. I’m going to write till I die. So I’m leading medicine. This is actually the third in an accidental trilogy about cancer heroes written all out of order, like George Lucas, except I don’t have his money. And so my next book is about a remarkable woman who changed the course of women’s lives when it comes to working outside the home. The book takes place in the 1950s, which is a forgotten decade of women. We hear about Rosie the Riveter in the 40s, and we hear about the marching women of the streets burning their bras in the 60s, but no one talks about the fifties. So stay tuned. There’ll be an announcement soon.
Blaine DeSantis: An announcement soon. That’s what we like to hear. We like announcements. So great. Wonderful. Okay. Friends, there’s this and so much more, this and so much more in this book. It is outstanding. It is a book I beg you to go out, read, buy it, read it, recommend it to friends because it’s a great book and it opened up my eyes to all that was going on to get this breast cancer awareness month going. All this happened with all these wonderful people who are working, doctors, the celebrities, the influencers, the philanthropists. It’s all out there and you do your part by reading it, buying it. With that, I want to say thank you so much Judy Pearson for being on Books and Looks.
Judith L. Pearson: Thank you so much. You can read the prologue at judithlpearson.com and you can even click a little button there and I’ll send you a book plate with my signature on it. It won’t increase the value of the book, but at least you’ll have it.
Blaine DeSantis: That’s right. There you go. Judy, thank you so much for appearing with us today here on Books and Looks. Folks, I can’t think of a better book to have discussed as we approach Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This is a wonderful effort by Judy in which she tells us about these three women who in their own way were the leaders, were the radical sisters who helped transform breast cancer awareness.
Shirley Temple, Rose Kushner, Evelyn Lauder. Names you might not be familiar with. Oh, you probably know Shirley Temple, but the others you might not be aware of. And so these are people who, through their actions, started pushing this awareness campaign, something that was unheard of back in the 1970s.
I’m glad you took the time to listen to us today. I’m going to ask you this, in all sincerity, I want you to go out and tell others about this interview. Have them listen to this. And then do one more thing, friends. Buy the book. Buy the book because this is a wonderful book. It’s a great book. It’s a great book about a very important topic. I’m asking you all to do that. Would you do that for me, please?
This is Blaine DeSantis for Books and Looks as well as for our partner at BookTrib.com. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with our next edition of Books and Looks.
