ilena

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Sally Kirkland in progress

By Mara Levinsky

DIGEST ONLINE: Tracey is an activist who is pro-solar power
and anti-capital punishment. You, Sally, have a long history of
using your art as a vehicle for political expression. Is it exciting
to find ways to imbue your characters with your real-life
passions and convictions?

SALLY KIRKLAND: Oh, absolutely. A little backstory on Sally:
I am a '60s person, and back in the early '60s, the first people I
acted with were James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson, on the stage.
I met Jimmy when he was doing The Blacks by Genet Off
Broadway. And Cicely I knew through the theater scene. But
Jimmy's father played Othello to my Desdemona in a workshop
production. He was the first actor I ever met, really, when I was
like 17. I didn't go to college; I went right to off Broadway.
Jimmy and I did a play called The Love Nest when I was right
out of school. I've always identified with the African-American
plight because I was brought up by a woman, Louise, who was
black. She taught me about God and she sang gospel and she
was converted to Judaism and she wore a turban. So if you can
figure all that out! (Laughs) But my father fired her during
segregation times and so when I got to star in Heat Wave and
Cicely Tyson played the black woman who took care of my kids,
it was a replay of my own life, with me playing my mother. So
when I was a young kid, in my ****s and twenties, I was all the
time an activist, because I saw what happened: Louise was
devastated when she was fired. So I rallied with Martin Luther
King in the Central Park rallies, and I was the first **** actress
against the Vietnamese War. This was before Hair, before Oh,
Calcutta, in a play called Sweet Eros by Terrence McNally.
When The New York Times called me up and asked, "Why are
you doing this, Ms. Kirkland? You just starred for [legendary
director] Joe Papp, you did Shakespeare and Chekhov...?" I said,
"I'm doing this because I'm against the Vietnam War, and you
can't carry a gun on a ***** body." So that's what my little
20-year-old brain was thinking back then.

I also was a member of the La Mama Troupe, and we did a play
called Tom Paine -- you remember the revolutionary Tom
Paine -- so all the Columbia students would be at the theater
and we'd have open discussions about whether it was valid or
not to be in a war. Then I did a project called Futz! where I
rode a 500-pound sow, pig, ****. And of course, the pigs were
the cops, so we were all the time making these statements
through our art. I did a film called Brand X with Abbie
Hoffman and got to know him, and he brought me with Jerry
Rubin to show me where they'd thrown the money over the
stock market. Brand X was this very revolutionary film that
basically said all a revolutionary would want to say, and
Newsweek called it ten years ahead of its time. Somewhere in
the midst of all that I met Bob Dylan and fell madly in love with
him, and eventually got together with him when he was
separated from his wife and I was divorcing my husband.

So you see, there's this huge backstory to Sally's playing
Tracey. Tracey is nothing if not that; I think they call me an
aging hippie, and that's exactly what I am. In the show, she's an
environmentalist and went solar power. One scene we shot that
I really do believe deserves an Emmy because it's such an
exciting scene is the protest outside the prison. Usually when
Days of Our Lives is shot it's indoors, but for this we were
outside. They turned NBC into a penitentiary, so where you
would see the NBC sign, instead you see a sign saying
Oakbridge Penitentiary or something like that. And then you
pan down, and in the lot itself you've got all these protesters on
the side of pro-capital punishment, and they're doing a "Kill the
Bitch" kind of thing. Then on my side, it's "Let Sami Live" and
"Save Sami Now." And then I get into this incredibly dramatic,
Greek tragedy type of scene where I'm talking to the home
viewers about the kind of person Sami is, with tears streaming
down my face. And then in comes Austin and Will and next
thing you know, I'm saying to someone on the other side of the
protest, "Do you really want this boy's mother to die?" And
then he leaves his protest group and comes over to ours!
(Laughs) Dan Cohen, who is my assistant and a professional
filmmaker, says it's one of the best things he's ever seen me do
or the show do.

DIGEST ONLINE: You recently traveled to Birmingham,
Alabama to protest with the group S.O.B.B., Save Our Breasts
and Bodies. What was that experience like?

SALLY KIRKLAND: It's easy to tie in what I did in Birmingham
with what I did in that scene. I learned about S.O.B.B. through
[friend and activist] Ilena Rosenthal. At first it didn't seem too
practical, going to Alabama. I kept saying [to the event's
organizers], "Why don't you do it here [in Los Angeles]?" But
when I began to read the L.A. Times articles about the science
panel [that would be testifying in Birmingham], I was sort of
enraged. The panel members were saying that there was no
scientific proof that there were problems with implants. Well,
since I went through ten years of not only problems, but
having my bank account wiped out from visiting so many
doctors, I knew that wasn't true. So then I got sort of titillated; I
thought, "Well, maybe I'll go down there to Alabama and sit in
on these meetings." I called Ilena and said, "I'll go if you go." So
we both agreed to go. Ilena is just like me; the only difference
between us is that she's not an actress. If I'm Laverne, she's
Shirley. We're both on a crusade here. The minute I met one
person who had my energy and my vision, I knew that we
were going to buck everybody. I knew that with her
information and my visibility, I knew that we had them beat. I
knew it like I knew my own name.

I used to march with Martin Luther King back in '63 or
whenever the year was, so I had an interest in being in one of
the cities where he was most historically renowned for his work
with segregation. I actually went to the Civil Rights Institute


juice! We had about 10 support group leaders from all over the
country, including the woman, Marlene Miller, who founded
S.OB.B, and a woman who lobbies Congress down in Alabama.

There was a meeting scheduled that day; there were
representatives for the manufacturers [of breast implants] and
then one lawyer for the women [who have gotten implants]. I
spent three hours out on the street, talking nonstop to NBC
News and FOX news and Birmingham newspapers and so forth.
There weren't that many people because we weren't organized
at all; we were organized with the press, but none of us knew
anybody in Alabama because we were all flying in from other
places. But it was very touching; there was one girl who was
maybe 16 or 17 who said to the reporter from NBC that she
was going to get implants until she heard us talk, and then she
decided right on the spot that no way was she going to have
anything to do with it.

We hung a banner from one tree to another that listed every
poisonous chemical related to the implants, be it related to
saline or to silicone. And then I held up a silicone implant and
the glue stuck up and down my arm. And when the
manufacturers ship boxes of implants, they put "Toxic Waste"
on outside of the box. They don't care enough that women are
ultimately going to find out that that's what they put on the
box? "Be careful of damaged toxic waste." That's what it says.
True story.

This man [who works for an implant manufacturer] walked up
to me and said, "My name is Steve, but you don't want to talk to
me; I'm on the other side." I said, "You're exactly who I want to
talk to! Will you listen to me?" I told him my story and I said,
"When I was in the hospital in August, it took me ten years to
get to that decision, that no matter what happened, I had to
gamble on it and have the explantation. And now I feel so great.
But I need you to know something: When I was in the hospital,
a woman got through the security; I wasn't supposed to be
receiving any calls, but she got through and she was sobbing on
the phone. She said, 'My name is Barbara, and I am so grateful
that you are alive and well on the planet and that you've done
what you did today because for years we had nobody in the
public eye to hold a press conference and do this.' And I said,
'Let's talk when I'm better,' because I had just come out of the
anesthesia. She said, 'Well, I hope we do, but if I never get to
talk to you again, I just want you to know that you've opened
my heart so much. I have faith again in my sisters.' It was very
touching, and I started crying, because I honestly didn't know
how women would feel toward me after the surgery. Well, that
woman died six weeks ago. I was meant to hear her voice, and
then I was meant to talk to you her over a period of weeks and
months, and then I was meant to get the word that I was
invited to her funeral." You see, that's what they don't tell you:
they don't tell you that women are dying.

The whole thing was quite an education. When I went upstairs
[in the courthouse], there was a woman testifying who claims
[to be able to] tell if women have any kind of symptoms that
would be derivative of silicone. But I sat in the courtroom for
going on two hours, and everything that came out her mouth
struck me as so obviously uneducated. For instance, the lawyer
would say, "Did you ever really talk to a woman who had been
through illness?" And she had to say no, that she was only
taking her evidence from the Mayo Clinic statistics. They never
actually talked to a human being. I started crying in the
courtroom. It's ironic, because I played St. Joan three times on
the stage as a younger person, and I felt like St. Joan listening to
the inquisition. The truth is the truth, and I think each one of
us has our own truth. I think that if I've learned nothing else in
my life, it's how to be honest. And I was sitting there listening
to very bald lies, and either she's completely uninformed or
there's a lot of money on them maintaining the lie.

DIGEST ONLINE: Let's backtrack a bit: Why did you decide to
get implants in the first place?

KIRKLAND: I wouldn't have gone out and gotten these if I
didn't believe that's what I had to do to get a job in Hollywood. I
lost something like 30 jobs in between 1972, when I came out
to California to do The Sting, and when I eventually got them.
You can't imagine how many jobs I lost! I kept saying, "Don't
you want a serious actor?" And I kept hearing, "Sally, we do,
but the networks or the financiers of the film don't." So many
people said to me, "Sally, if you get your nose bobbed and your
breasts done, you can be a big star." I was an 18-year-old kid
when I first heard that. After a while, you just think, "Well,
OK..." First I had small silicone put in before Anna, the film for
which I got the Oscar nomination, because there was a ****
scene in it. Then a year later I was hired to be the lead in a
movie called High Stakes, which was a precursor to Pretty
Woman. It was about a woman bringing up her daughter, who
ironically was [played by] Sarah Michelle Gellar (ex-Kendall, All
My Children; Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), aged ten. It
was back in 1988 and here was this little ten-year-old that I
got to cry on cue! So for that I had the implants doubled.
Around 1989, I began to notice problems. Silicone ended up in
my neck, in my knee, in all sorts of places in my body. For a
time it was so bad, I thought I was dying. When I decided to
have the implants taken out, I didn't really know whether it
would hurt my career. I didn't know a whole bunch of things. I
just knew I couldn't handle the degree of pain anymore. The
only way I can describe it is that I felt like I was crippled. I
didn't have control over my body. I had constant arthritic pain
throughout my neck, my back, my chest, my arms, down into
my legs; inflammation; inability to sleep because of the pain.

I don't have a husband or rich parents, I don't have a kid or
brothers or sisters, so I wasn't in a position to stop working. I
kept working on top of the pain. Ron Howard was a witness. In
[the Howard-directed] EdTV, which was the last movie I did
with the implants, I had to have three epidurals in my spine in
order to get through the five-week shoot without pain, to be
able to work those long hours.

Connie Chung was the first newscaster to come out with
information [about the possible dangers of breast implants].
Bless her soul, that took a lot of guts. I got scared, like a lot of
people got scared. But people calmed us down, or there was a
cover-up right away. Then in 1995, I went to the doctor and he
told me there was a rupture in my implants, and he showed me
photographs with this glue-like substance going all down my
ribcage. But even then I didn't realize that it was all that
dangerous to have them in me. When I had my silicone
implants taken out and the saline ones put in, within about two
months the implants hardened and encapsulated. What had
happened was, my body just plain had a reaction against the
silicone enca*****t that they put the saline in, so they
hardened. It eventually went all the way up to my neck, so it
was like having a bar in my chest up to my neck. The doctor told
me it hadn't worked this time, so I should do it again. I ended up
[getting new implants] three times over a period of three years.
I had surgery in '95, '96, and '97. Finally by '98, I said, "That's
it. Enough of this." Well, you can't imagine the friends I have --
big stars! -- who looked me straight in the eye and said things
like, "I have lupus but I don't want to get them out." Another
friend of mine said, "Well, so far so good, I haven't had any
problems with the implants." Meanwhile, she's been diagnosed
with symptoms of multiple sclerosis. I could go on and on and
on. I try to say to these people, "I don't want the negative
karma of telling you what to do. But I will say that when [talk
show host] Jenny Jones [who went public several years ago with
her own explantation] told me everything she went through, I
wasn't ready to hear it. But I thought about it for a year. And
thank God she was strong with me, because I needed one
person who was a credible person in my mind, a professional
career woman, who could talk me through her situation. It took
me a full year after she told me that to make the decision for
myself. This was a six****-year process for me, and I'm just
embarrassed that I didn't get to it earlier. But I was in total
denial, you know? I was afraid that no one would love me if I
wasn't this person I created, and little did I know that so much
respect would come forward, from both women and men, [after
I went public].

I am a minister in the Church of the Movement of Inner
Awareness, and in that capacity, I do a lot of assisting the dying.
But by the time it came around to me getting as sick as I was,
everyone in my church was helping me out. [Their support]
was very touching, because I couldn't move, a lot of the time. I
couldn't even get out of bed, and I ended up in the emergency
room a lot. I thought I was going to have my left arm
amputated. My left hand was curled into a carpal tunnel
position. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I had pins and needles
going down my knees, down my back, all the way to my feet.
Parts of my body were completely numb. At one point I went
into the hospital thinking I was having a heart attack, because
the breast implant on the left breast was constricting my actual
heart muscle. (Laughs) You get the picture. I'll tell you another
thing: my memory didn't work for a period of years, so I had to
turn down a lot of plays, and the reason why I did a play at the
Ivy Theater this year called When I Was a Girl I Used to Shout
and Scream, a Scottish play, is that I wanted to see if my
memory would work better now that I've gotten them out.
Sure enough, I memorized 38 pages of Scottish monologue. You
know, I'm not saying this stuff to be dramatic. I'm doing this
because you never could have convinced me before that this
thing called silicone that was supposed to be safe actually
wasn't. I'm doing this because I am a minister and I didn't want
any negative karma; I didn't want to have anyone saying, "Well,
I did it because Sally Kirkland did it." So if anyone was going to
do that, I wanted to be able to say, "Look, as quickly as I knew
what was going on with my body, I tried to stand up and stop
this from going on one second further."

DIGEST ONLINE: How quickly did your health improve after
you had the implants removed?

KIRKLAND: The minute the implants were out -- and I mean
the minute -- I had no pain, no inflammation. I was able to be
myself again almost instantly. Someone from Howard Stern's
show called me minutes after I came out of the anesthesia. ABC
News had a crew downstairs. It was all very dramatic. I didn't
expect that kind of response. I sent out a press release saying
that I was having the surgery and that I thought that
celebrities were used as personal role models for personal
appearance and I for one didn't want to be responsible for one
more woman going out and getting implants and going through
the ten years of suffering I did. That was my quote, and then I
explained a whole bunch of substantial [implant-related]
symptomology, everything from Epstein-Barr virus to being
diagnosed pre-cancer and pre-lupus -- very scary stuff I was
dealing with. I'm out of the woods now, but I still have to pace
myself.

DIGEST ONLINE: You mentioned that a lot of people
encouraged you to get the implants. Was anyone equally
supportive of your decision to remove them?

KIRKLAND: I had to wait for [a project] like EdTV to have the
money and the time to have them removed. So thank you, Ron
Howard. But actually, Babaloo Gans, one of the writers of EdTV,
his wife's best friend was going through this, so he was on the
set saying to me, "Sally, why don't you just have them out?"
Bob Dylan, who has been my friend for years, I happened to get
together with last year, and he said the same thing. He said, "I
don't understand you. I've known you since the '60s. You're a
very pretty woman; why do you feel you have to do this?" So I
began to think, "What is it in me that I'm afraid to remove
these?" Babaloo was the final straw, because here he wrote this
film that was going to put me on the map in a whole new way,
introduce me to younger viewers and so forth. Also, I had the
security of Days, and it was decided early on when I talked
with the producers, Tom Langan and Steve Wyman, that they
didn't care if I was big-breasted or not.

But listen to this: My surgeon, Dr. Randal Hayworth, who was
the only one of six surgeons who did not tell me that I'd come
running back to get saline put in again. They all told me, "You'll
be traumatized, you're an actress, you're known for your big
breasts. You will come running back." And I said, "You don't get
it. I don't want anything foreign in me, I just want to get this
poison out of me." So finally I found Randal Hayworth, who said
to me, "I was in art school before I was in medical school." He
drew exactly what he was going to do to me during the surgery,
and he said, "I think [your bra size] is going to be 36B." I started
out a 36A and then I became 38DD. He said, "I think you're
going to be 36B." And I said, "Sounds good to me!" I was lucky
because they did the reconstruction right there. I'm sure that's
what Pamela Anderson did too.

DIGEST ONLINE: And what was your reaction to Pamela
Anderson's explantation?

KIRKLAND: Let me tell you a story. I went on Howard Stern's
show and I got 22,000 hits on my web site within an hour. A lot
of it was people screaming at me, whatever all that was, but I
also got a lot of people saying, "You didn't deserve getting a
hard time from Howard," and "Can you talk to my wife? Can you
talk to my daughter?" And a lot of women were saying, "Thank
you for standing up, because I had nowhere to turn to with my
pain." I actually went on Howard twice. The second time I gave
him my implants, to kind of make him laugh so that he could
laugh and then get serious, you know? Well, he did get serious,
and he gave out my web address and my hotline number for
the Kirkland Institute for Implant Syndrome Survival, and I
suddenly became in touch with about 200 women. So thank
you, Howard! But also, I turned on the radio the next day, and
there was Pam Anderson, and Howard was saying, "Well, we
have a really good friend, Sally Kirkland, who got really ill [from
her implants]." And basically Pam said, "Well, that's Sally's thing.
I'm fine." And that was last September, and so now here it is,
seven months down the line, and she followed suit. My reaction
is, good for her! You know, I'm kind of an actor's actor and
people who love acting know me, but she gets 8,000,000
letters a day. If she affects that many millions of people, then
anything I can do to inspire that young lady [is wonderful].
Inside Edition showed up at my house at 7:30 in the morning
the day after she went public with her explantation, and I
gladly talked. I said, "Oh, great! You guys will listen to me now
that Pam Anderson has done this." I went to the Los Angeles
Film Festival and ABC news was there, and the first reporter to
get a story out of me when I was at Century City Hospital, he
was there. I said, "Do you mind if I talk to Pam Anderson?" He
said, "Go for it." So I just talked right into the camera, and I
said,
"Thank you for empowering millions of women, because I think
that's what you're doing. And I think you're going to find that
your career is going to be better than ever once you do this."
And for whatever reasons that she took them out, the fact that
she's going public is well worth congratulating. I ran into her
briefly at the O2 bar last week in Los Angeles; she and Bill
Maher and myself were there to support People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals. Although I didn't get to talk talk to her,
we waved across the room, and in a way, I felt like her mom or
a big sister. (Laughs)

When I came back to the show after coming home from
Birmingham, I told Tom Langan that it was just so exciting to
feel like the judge was watching me like a hawk, when I would
nod and when I would cry and when I would clap and when I
would disrupt court. I sent him flowers the next day, the judge.
You know, you try, you do your best. I believe in that song
"What One Man Can Do." I believe that I can buck the system. I
believe that now that the Pam thing happened, and other
women are speaking out too: Loretta Lynn spoke out on Hard
Copy, Stevie Nicks spoke out, Courtney Love. I'm the daughter
of a journalist. My mom, Sally Kirkland, Sr., was fashion editor
of Life for 15 years. She was the first woman Henry Luce made
senior editor of Life and the person we have to thank for the
no-bra look, the miniskirt for women, the sports look on
women. She was an honors student at Vassar, a history major.
She was incredible. I didn't go to college -- I went straight to
Off-Broadway -- but I still try to be a suffragette.

The important thing is, we're at the millennium, or about to be.
And it's always been prophesied that women would have
spiritual power once more. We've been in a patriarchal system
all this time, and it's always been prophesied that women and
the feminine consciousness [will return to power]. I personally
am going to be campaigning for Elizabeth Dole, not because I'm a
Republican but because I have reason to believe that she'll
make sense. I'm on her campaign, myself and Leigh-Taylor
Young (ex-Elaine, Sunset Beach) and my spiritual teacher,
John-Roger, who wrote Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual
Living. The mayor of Taft, California is going to declare an
"Elizabeth Dole/Sally Kirkland Day" sometime in the near future.
And it's time, it's time for women! It's time for women to stand
up for women and to finally stop giving our power away.

Be sure to visit Kirkland's extensive web site,
http://www.sallykirkland.com.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

For information on all aspects of the breast implant issue, please
feel free to visit:

http://www.BreastImplantAwareness.org

ooreroom

Subject: Sally Kirkland and her breast implant experiences ... Soap Digest

http://www.soapdigest.com/featuresinterviews/articlefi1.cfm?id=1575

feedback@soapdigest.com

Sally Kirkland in progress

By Mara Levinsky

DIGEST ONLINE: Tracey is an activist who is pro-solar power
and anti-capital punishment. You, Sally, have a long history of
using your art as a vehicle for political expression. Is it exciting
to find ways to imbue your characters with your real-life
passions and convictions?

SALLY KIRKLAND: Oh, absolutely. A little backstory on Sally:
I am a '60s person, and back in the early '60s, the first people I
acted with were James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson, on the stage.
I met Jimmy when he was doing The Blacks by Genet Off
Broadway. And Cicely I knew through the theater scene. But
Jimmy's father played Othello to my Desdemona in a workshop
production. He was the first actor I ever met, really, when I was
like 17. I didn't go to college; I went right to off Broadway.
Jimmy and I did a play called The Love Nest when I was right
out of school. I've always identified with the African-American
plight because I was brought up by a woman, Louise, who was
black. She taught me about God and she sang gospel and she
was converted to Judaism and she wore a turban. So if you can
figure all that out! (Laughs) But my father fired her during
segregation times and so when I got to star in Heat Wave and
Cicely Tyson played the black woman who took care of my kids,
it was a replay of my own life, with me playing my mother. So
when I was a young kid, in my ****s and twenties, I was all the
time an activist, because I saw what happened: Louise was
devastated when she was fired. So I rallied with Martin Luther
King in the Central Park rallies, and I was the first **** actress
against the Vietnamese War. This was before Hair, before Oh,
Calcutta, in a play called Sweet Eros by Terrence McNally.
When The New York Times called me up and asked, "Why are
you doing this, Ms. Kirkland? You just starred for [legendary
director] Joe Papp, you did Shakespeare and Chekhov...?" I said,
"I'm doing this because I'm against the Vietnam War, and you
can't carry a gun on a ***** body." So that's what my little
20-year-old brain was thinking back then.

I also was a member of the La Mama Troupe, and we did a play
called Tom Paine -- you remember the revolutionary Tom
Paine -- so all the Columbia students would be at the theater
and we'd have open discussions about whether it was valid or
not to be in a war. Then I did a project called Futz! where I
rode a 500-pound sow, pig, ****. And of course, the pigs were
the cops, so we were all the time making these statements
through our art. I did a film called Brand X with Abbie
Hoffman and got to know him, and he brought me with Jerry
Rubin to show me where they'd thrown the money over the
stock market. Brand X was this very revolutionary film that
basically said all a revolutionary would want to say, and
Newsweek called it ten years ahead of its time. Somewhere in
the midst of all that I met Bob Dylan and fell madly in love with
him, and eventually got together with him when he was
separated from his wife and I was divorcing my husband.

So you see, there's this huge backstory to Sally's playing
Tracey. Tracey is nothing if not that; I think they call me an
aging hippie, and that's exactly what I am. In the show, she's an
environmentalist and went solar power. One scene we shot that
I really do believe deserves an Emmy because it's such an
exciting scene is the protest outside the prison. Usually when
Days of Our Lives is shot it's indoors, but for this we were
outside. They turned NBC into a penitentiary, so where you
would see the NBC sign, instead you see a sign saying
Oakbridge Penitentiary or something like that. And then you
pan down, and in the lot itself you've got all these protesters on
the side of pro-capital punishment, and they're doing a "Kill the
Bitch" kind of thing. Then on my side, it's "Let Sami Live" and
"Save Sami Now." And then I get into this incredibly dramatic,
Greek tragedy type of scene where I'm talking to the home
viewers about the kind of person Sami is, with tears streaming
down my face. And then in comes Austin and Will and next
thing you know, I'm saying to someone on the other side of the
protest, "Do you really want this boy's mother to die?" And
then he leaves his protest group and comes over to ours!
(Laughs) Dan Cohen, who is my assistant and a professional
filmmaker, says it's one of the best things he's ever seen me do
or the show do.

DIGEST ONLINE: You recently traveled to Birmingham,
Alabama to protest with the group S.O.B.B., Save Our Breasts
and Bodies. What was that experience like?

SALLY KIRKLAND: It's easy to tie in what I did in Birmingham
with what I did in that scene. I learned about S.O.B.B. through
[friend and activist] Ilena Rosenthal. At first it didn't seem too
practical, going to Alabama. I kept saying [to the event's
organizers], "Why don't you do it here [in Los Angeles]?" But
when I began to read the L.A. Times articles about the science
panel [that would be testifying in Birmingham], I was sort of
enraged. The panel members were saying that there was no
scientific proof that there were problems with implants. Well,
since I went through ten years of not only problems, but
having my bank account wiped out from visiting so many
doctors, I knew that wasn't true. So then I got sort of titillated; I
thought, "Well, maybe I'll go down there to Alabama and sit in
on these meetings." I called Ilena and said, "I'll go if you go." So
we both agreed to go. Ilena is just like me; the only difference
between us is that she's not an actress. If I'm Laverne, she's
Shirley. We're both on a crusade here. The minute I met one
person who had my energy and my vision, I knew that we
were going to buck everybody. I knew that with her
information and my visibility, I knew that we had them beat. I
knew it like I knew my own name.

I used to march with Martin Luther King back in '63 or
whenever the year was, so I had an interest in being in one of
the cities where he was most historically renowned for his work
with segregation. I actually went to the Civil Rights Institute


juice! We had about 10 support group leaders from all over the
country, including the woman, Marlene Miller, who founded
S.OB.B, and a woman who lobbies Congress down in Alabama.

There was a meeting scheduled that day; there were
representatives for the manufacturers [of breast implants] and
then one lawyer for the women [who have gotten implants]. I
spent three hours out on the street, talking nonstop to NBC
News and FOX news and Birmingham newspapers and so forth.
There weren't that many people because we weren't organized
at all; we were organized with the press, but none of us knew
anybody in Alabama because we were all flying in from other
places. But it was very touching; there was one girl who was
maybe 16 or 17 who said to the reporter from NBC that she
was going to get implants until she heard us talk, and then she
decided right on the spot that no way was she going to have
anything to do with it.

We hung a banner from one tree to another that listed every
poisonous chemical related to the implants, be it related to
saline or to silicone. And then I held up a silicone implant and
the glue stuck up and down my arm. And when the
manufacturers ship boxes of implants, they put "Toxic Waste"
on outside of the box. They don't care enough that women are
ultimately going to find out that that's what they put on the
box? "Be careful of damaged toxic waste." That's what it says.
True story.

This man [who works for an implant manufacturer] walked up
to me and said, "My name is Steve, but you don't want to talk to
me; I'm on the other side." I said, "You're exactly who I want to
talk to! Will you listen to me?" I told him my story and I said,
"When I was in the hospital in August, it took me ten years to
get to that decision, that no matter what happened, I had to
gamble on it and have the explantation. And now I feel so great.
But I need you to know something: When I was in the hospital,
a woman got through the security; I wasn't supposed to be
receiving any calls, but she got through and she was sobbing on
the phone. She said, 'My name is Barbara, and I am so grateful
that you are alive and well on the planet and that you've done
what you did today because for years we had nobody in the
public eye to hold a press conference and do this.' And I said,
'Let's talk when I'm better,' because I had just come out of the
anesthesia. She said, 'Well, I hope we do, but if I never get to
talk to you again, I just want you to know that you've opened
my heart so much. I have faith again in my sisters.' It was very
touching, and I started crying, because I honestly didn't know
how women would feel toward me after the surgery. Well, that
woman died six weeks ago. I was meant to hear her voice, and
then I was meant to talk to you her over a period of weeks and
months, and then I was meant to get the word that I was
invited to her funeral." You see, that's what they don't tell you:
they don't tell you that women are dying.

The whole thing was quite an education. When I went upstairs
[in the courthouse], there was a woman testifying who claims
[to be able to] tell if women have any kind of symptoms that
would be derivative of silicone. But I sat in the courtroom for
going on two hours, and everything that came out her mouth
struck me as so obviously uneducated. For instance, the lawyer
would say, "Did you ever really talk to a woman who had been
through illness?" And she had to say no, that she was only
taking her evidence from the Mayo Clinic statistics. They never
actually talked to a human being. I started crying in the
courtroom. It's ironic, because I played St. Joan three times on
the stage as a younger person, and I felt like St. Joan listening to
the inquisition. The truth is the truth, and I think each one of
us has our own truth. I think that if I've learned nothing else in
my life, it's how to be honest. And I was sitting there listening
to very bald lies, and either she's completely uninformed or
there's a lot of money on them maintaining the lie.

DIGEST ONLINE: Let's backtrack a bit: Why did you decide to
get implants in the first place?

KIRKLAND: I wouldn't have gone out and gotten these if I
didn't believe that's what I had to do to get a job in Hollywood. I
lost something like 30 jobs in between 1972, when I came out
to California to do The Sting, and when I eventually got them.
You can't imagine how many jobs I lost! I kept saying, "Don't
you want a serious actor?" And I kept hearing, "Sally, we do,
but the networks or the financiers of the film don't." So many
people said to me, "Sally, if you get your nose bobbed and your
breasts done, you can be a big star." I was an 18-year-old kid
when I first heard that. After a while, you just think, "Well,
OK..." First I had small silicone put in before Anna, the film for
which I got the Oscar nomination, because there was a ****
scene in it. Then a year later I was hired to be the lead in a
movie called High Stakes, which was a precursor to Pretty
Woman. It was about a woman bringing up her daughter, who
ironically was [played by] Sarah Michelle Gellar (ex-Kendall, All
My Children; Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), aged ten. It
was back in 1988 and here was this little ten-year-old that I
got to cry on cue! So for that I had the implants doubled.
Around 1989, I began to notice problems. Silicone ended up in
my neck, in my knee, in all sorts of places in my body. For a
time it was so bad, I thought I was dying. When I decided to
have the implants taken out, I didn't really know whether it
would hurt my career. I didn't know a whole bunch of things. I
just knew I couldn't handle the degree of pain anymore. The
only way I can describe it is that I felt like I was crippled. I
didn't have control over my body. I had constant arthritic pain
throughout my neck, my back, my chest, my arms, down into
my legs; inflammation; inability to sleep because of the pain.

I don't have a husband or rich parents, I don't have a kid or
brothers or sisters, so I wasn't in a position to stop working. I
kept working on top of the pain. Ron Howard was a witness. In
[the Howard-directed] EdTV, which was the last movie I did
with the implants, I had to have three epidurals in my spine in
order to get through the five-week shoot without pain, to be
able to work those long hours.

Connie Chung was the first newscaster to come out with
information [about the possible dangers of breast implants].
Bless her soul, that took a lot of guts. I got scared, like a lot of
people got scared. But people calmed us down, or there was a
cover-up right away. Then in 1995, I went to the doctor and he
told me there was a rupture in my implants, and he showed me
photographs with this glue-like substance going all down my
ribcage. But even then I didn't realize that it was all that
dangerous to have them in me. When I had my silicone
implants taken out and the saline ones put in, within about two
months the implants hardened and encapsulated. What had
happened was, my body just plain had a reaction against the
silicone enca*****t that they put the saline in, so they
hardened. It eventually went all the way up to my neck, so it
was like having a bar in my chest up to my neck. The doctor told
me it hadn't worked this time, so I should do it again. I ended up
[getting new implants] three times over a period of three years.
I had surgery in '95, '96, and '97. Finally by '98, I said, "That's
it. Enough of this." Well, you can't imagine the friends I have --
big stars! -- who looked me straight in the eye and said things
like, "I have lupus but I don't want to get them out." Another
friend of mine said, "Well, so far so good, I haven't had any
problems with the implants." Meanwhile, she's been diagnosed
with symptoms of multiple sclerosis. I could go on and on and
on. I try to say to these people, "I don't want the negative
karma of telling you what to do. But I will say that when [talk
show host] Jenny Jones [who went public several years ago with
her own explantation] told me everything she went through, I
wasn't ready to hear it. But I thought about it for a year. And
thank God she was strong with me, because I needed one
person who was a credible person in my mind, a professional
career woman, who could talk me through her situation. It took
me a full year after she told me that to make the decision for
myself. This was a six****-year process for me, and I'm just
embarrassed that I didn't get to it earlier. But I was in total
denial, you know? I was afraid that no one would love me if I
wasn't this person I created, and little did I know that so much
respect would come forward, from both women and men, [after
I went public].

I am a minister in the Church of the Movement of Inner
Awareness, and in that capacity, I do a lot of assisting the dying.
But by the time it came around to me getting as sick as I was,
everyone in my church was helping me out. [Their support]
was very touching, because I couldn't move, a lot of the time. I
couldn't even get out of bed, and I ended up in the emergency
room a lot. I thought I was going to have my left arm
amputated. My left hand was curled into a carpal tunnel
position. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I had pins and needles
going down my knees, down my back, all the way to my feet.
Parts of my body were completely numb. At one point I went
into the hospital thinking I was having a heart attack, because
the breast implant on the left breast was constricting my actual
heart muscle. (Laughs) You get the picture. I'll tell you another
thing: my memory didn't work for a period of years, so I had to
turn down a lot of plays, and the reason why I did a play at the
Ivy Theater this year called When I Was a Girl I Used to Shout
and Scream, a Scottish play, is that I wanted to see if my
memory would work better now that I've gotten them out.
Sure enough, I memorized 38 pages of Scottish monologue. You
know, I'm not saying this stuff to be dramatic. I'm doing this
because you never could have convinced me before that this
thing called silicone that was supposed to be safe actually
wasn't. I'm doing this because I am a minister and I didn't want
any negative karma; I didn't want to have anyone saying, "Well,
I did it because Sally Kirkland did it." So if anyone was going to
do that, I wanted to be able to say, "Look, as quickly as I knew
what was going on with my body, I tried to stand up and stop
this from going on one second further."

DIGEST ONLINE: How quickly did your health improve after
you had the implants removed?

KIRKLAND: The minute the implants were out -- and I mean
the minute -- I had no pain, no inflammation. I was able to be
myself again almost instantly. Someone from Howard Stern's
show called me minutes after I came out of the anesthesia. ABC
News had a crew downstairs. It was all very dramatic. I didn't
expect that kind of response. I sent out a press release saying
that I was having the surgery and that I thought that
celebrities were used as personal role models for personal
appearance and I for one didn't want to be responsible for one
more woman going out and getting implants and going through
the ten years of suffering I did. That was my quote, and then I
explained a whole bunch of substantial [implant-related]
symptomology, everything from Epstein-Barr virus to being
diagnosed pre-cancer and pre-lupus -- very scary stuff I was
dealing with. I'm out of the woods now, but I still have to pace
myself.

DIGEST ONLINE: You mentioned that a lot of people
encouraged you to get the implants. Was anyone equally
supportive of your decision to remove them?

KIRKLAND: I had to wait for [a project] like EdTV to have the
money and the time to have them removed. So thank you, Ron
Howard. But actually, Babaloo Gans, one of the writers of EdTV,
his wife's best friend was going through this, so he was on the
set saying to me, "Sally, why don't you just have them out?"
Bob Dylan, who has been my friend for years, I happened to get
together with last year, and he said the same thing. He said, "I
don't understand you. I've known you since the '60s. You're a
very pretty woman; why do you feel you have to do this?" So I
began to think, "What is it in me that I'm afraid to remove
these?" Babaloo was the final straw, because here he wrote this
film that was going to put me on the map in a whole new way,
introduce me to younger viewers and so forth. Also, I had the
security of Days, and it was decided early on when I talked
with the producers, Tom Langan and Steve Wyman, that they
didn't care if I was big-breasted or not.

But listen to this: My surgeon, Dr. Randal Hayworth, who was
the only one of six surgeons who did not tell me that I'd come
running back to get saline put in again. They all told me, "You'll
be traumatized, you're an actress, you're known for your big
breasts. You will come running back." And I said, "You don't get
it. I don't want anything foreign in me, I just want to get this
poison out of me." So finally I found Randal Hayworth, who said
to me, "I was in art school before I was in medical school." He
drew exactly what he was going to do to me during the surgery,
and he said, "I think [your bra size] is going to be 36B." I started
out a 36A and then I became 38DD. He said, "I think you're
going to be 36B." And I said, "Sounds good to me!" I was lucky
because they did the reconstruction right there. I'm sure that's
what Pamela Anderson did too.

DIGEST ONLINE: And what was your reaction to Pamela
Anderson's explantation?

KIRKLAND: Let me tell you a story. I went on Howard Stern's
show and I got 22,000 hits on my web site within an hour. A lot
of it was people screaming at me, whatever all that was, but I
also got a lot of people saying, "You didn't deserve getting a
hard time from Howard," and "Can you talk to my wife? Can you
talk to my daughter?" And a lot of women were saying, "Thank
you for standing up, because I had nowhere to turn to with my
pain." I actually went on Howard twice. The second time I gave
him my implants, to kind of make him laugh so that he could
laugh and then get serious, you know? Well, he did get serious,
and he gave out my web address and my hotline number for
the Kirkland Institute for Implant Syndrome Survival, and I
suddenly became in touch with about 200 women. So thank
you, Howard! But also, I turned on the radio the next day, and
there was Pam Anderson, and Howard was saying, "Well, we
have a really good friend, Sally Kirkland, who got really ill [from
her implants]." And basically Pam said, "Well, that's Sally's thing.
I'm fine." And that was last September, and so now here it is,
seven months down the line, and she followed suit. My reaction
is, good for her! You know, I'm kind of an actor's actor and
people who love acting know me, but she gets 8,000,000
letters a day. If she affects that many millions of people, then
anything I can do to inspire that young lady [is wonderful].
Inside Edition showed up at my house at 7:30 in the morning
the day after she went public with her explantation, and I
gladly talked. I said, "Oh, great! You guys will listen to me now
that Pam Anderson has done this." I went to the Los Angeles
Film Festival and ABC news was there, and the first reporter to
get a story out of me when I was at Century City Hospital, he
was there. I said, "Do you mind if I talk to Pam Anderson?" He
said, "Go for it." So I just talked right into the camera, and I
said,
"Thank you for empowering millions of women, because I think
that's what you're doing. And I think you're going to find that
your career is going to be better than ever once you do this."
And for whatever reasons that she took them out, the fact that
she's going public is well worth congratulating. I ran into her
briefly at the O2 bar last week in Los Angeles; she and Bill
Maher and myself were there to support People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals. Although I didn't get to talk talk to her,
we waved across the room, and in a way, I felt like her mom or
a big sister. (Laughs)

When I came back to the show after coming home from
Birmingham, I told Tom Langan that it was just so exciting to
feel like the judge was watching me like a hawk, when I would
nod and when I would cry and when I would clap and when I
would disrupt court. I sent him flowers the next day, the judge.
You know, you try, you do your best. I believe in that song
"What One Man Can Do." I believe that I can buck the system. I
believe that now that the Pam thing happened, and other
women are speaking out too: Loretta Lynn spoke out on Hard
Copy, Stevie Nicks spoke out, Courtney Love. I'm the daughter
of a journalist. My mom, Sally Kirkland, Sr., was fashion editor
of Life for 15 years. She was the first woman Henry Luce made
senior editor of Life and the person we have to thank for the
no-bra look, the miniskirt for women, the sports look on
women. She was an honors student at Vassar, a history major.
She was incredible. I didn't go to college -- I went straight to
Off-Broadway -- but I still try to be a suffragette.

The important thing is, we're at the millennium, or about to be.
And it's always been prophesied that women would have
spiritual power once more. We've been in a patriarchal system
all this time, and it's always been prophesied that women and
the feminine consciousness [will return to power]. I personally
am going to be campaigning for Elizabeth Dole, not because I'm a
Republican but because I have reason to believe that she'll
make sense. I'm on her campaign, myself and Leigh-Taylor
Young (ex-Elaine, Sunset Beach) and my spiritual teacher,
John-Roger, who wrote Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual
Living. The mayor of Taft, California is going to declare an
"Elizabeth Dole/Sally Kirkland Day" sometime in the near future.
And it's time, it's time for women! It's time for women to stand
up for women and to finally stop giving our power away.

Be sure to visit Kirkland's extensive web site,
http://www.sallykirkland.com.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

For information on all aspects of the breast implant issue, please
feel free to visit: http://www.sallykirkland.com.