I Still Have It. . . I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It by Rita Rudner Page B

all complaining about their princes. We didn’t get the job, but Marjorie soon was hired to write on a television show in Los Angeles, and I began performing on the David Letterman show and HBO.
    I received a call from Marjorie a few weeks after she moved to L.A. She had pitched our divorced princesses idea to a major studio and they wanted to commission her to write it…with somebody else. Of course I wanted to write it with her, but I had no credits and the woman she was working with had written movies. Looking back, I had a point and so did she. The conversation did not go well and we lost contact.
    When I moved to L.A. a few years later, I ran into Marjorie at a comedy club and we immediately began laughing about the whole thing. She had written the movie, it had gotten stalled in development the way 99 percent of projects do, and she had always regretted our argument, as did I.
    Our careers blossomed in different directions, hers as a writer and mine as a comedian. We remained good friends for years. One day I received a call from Marge. She was in New York writing on a new television show.
    “Reetee,” she said, “this television show I’m working on is so bad, I think it’s given me cancer.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I had this terrible pain in my stomach and I went to the gyno. She said it’s not good.”
    The ovarian cancer that had invaded Marjorie’s mother had shown up in Marge. She went back to Canada to have the operation. My heart sank when I talked to her dad on the phone and he told me, “They did their best, but they couldn’t get all of it.”
    Marjorie came to stay with us while going through her first round of chemotherapy. It was challenging, but strangely always funny.
    I’d be on my way out to the grocery store and would ask, “What can I get for you? Anything special?”
    “Nah.”
    I’d return home with a full complement of food for the week, and Marge would wander into the kitchen. “Did you get any matzo?”
    “No.”
    “I’m really in the mood for matzo. I’ll call one of my friends. They’ll bring it over.”
    We had a constant stream of people we didn’t know wandering in and out of our house as well as the scent of marijuana regularly wafting up the stairs. I have never had anything to do with drugs, but to me, legalizing marijuana for people who are going through the agony of chemo is as easy a decision as letting nearsighted people wear glasses.
    Marjorie was not happy with our collection of movies and demanded we obtain Oscar review copies from some of our friends who were members of the Academy. Once I heard strange noises coming from her bedroom. I peeked inside and Marjorie was listening to strangers’ cell phone calls on a police radio.
    “You’ve gotta hear this agent negotiating this contract. He is such a pig!”
    “Marjorie, is this right? Listening to people’s private calls?”
    “Rita, I have cancer. What are they going to do to me that’s worse than this?” she replied.
    It was comforting knowing that Marjorie was just downstairs and we could be there in seconds if she really needed us. I loved sitting on the side of her bed as we ranted about the injustices of show business and commented on the current state of various celebrities’ love lives.
    After going into remission, Marge started working on Seinfeld and wrote a memorably funny episode starring Bette Midler. Always full of surprises, she called me one day from Donatella Versace’s villa in Italy, where she had just been flown on Madonna’s private jet.
    “I’m here at the pool overlooking the manicured gardens. Madonna and Donatella thought it would be good for me to have a little vacation,” she explained.
    The cancer returned a few more times before taking her life. To her credit—or perhaps detriment—Marjorie never accepted the fact that she was going to die. The day before she passed away, she begged her doctor for one more round of chemo and was on the phone with