“Except for the breast-cancer part,” she said with a rueful laugh. She looked down at her breasts. “They definitely betrayed me. It was like, I thought I knew these.”
After each round of chemotherapy, Louis-Dreyfus had debilitating nausea and diarrhea and could not keep food down. She suffered from excruciating neuropathy in her hands and feet. She got sores all over her face and on the inside of her mouth. “What we went through last year was horrific,” her mother said. “Her strength, just now, is coming back. It takes about a year.”
Initially, Louis-Dreyfus imagined that she would continue working on “Veep” throughout her treatment. “She was, like, ‘I’ll do chemo on Thursday, we’ll shoot Friday,’” Mandel told me. “And we were, like, ‘We’ll let her figure out that that’s not right.’”
Once she consulted with an oncologist, it became clear that the show would need to go on hiatus. This gave Mandel and the writers time to rethink the season they’d written, to address the radically changing political reality: Trump had been sworn in seven months before Louis-Dreyfus’s diagnosis, and his Presidency was taking shape. “Whatever side you’re on, I think we can agree that Trump, post his State of the Union speech, last January, has amped up the Trumpness,” Mandel said. “Had we shot the show we had written—which I thought was good at the time—and then aired it this past April or May, I believe it would have seemed out of touch.” He paused, and said dryly, “What I’m saying is the cancer was a good thing.”
Louis-Dreyfus would come in for table reads just before a chemo session, when she had recovered most fully from the previous treatment. It was a welcome distraction. “I’ve always just wanted to work,” she said. “It has its challenges. But when it’s singing? It’s like if you’re skiing or something—you’re just thinking about getting down the hill. You look up and it’s four hours later.”
One afternoon at the Mayflower Club, a gathering place for British expats in the San Fernando Valley, Timothy Simons, who plays the ignorant, foulmouthed intern-turned-politician Jonah Ryan, stood at a lectern and gave his stump speech to the actors playing his audience. “I just found out that Muslims created math!” he said indignantly. “If you elect me, I will protect our children from this Sharia math!” Louis-Dreyfus sat in comfortable clothes in a chair embroidered with “The Veep.” Mandel was next to her, behind a row of monitors at the back of the hall. They both laughed as Simons led the crowd in a chant: “No more math! No more math!”
Then they filmed the reaction of his political operatives: his workaholic campaign manager, Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), and his financial backer, Sherman Tanz, a Sheldon Adelson-like prison magnate. After shooting the basic architecture of the scene, Mandel called out alternate lines for the actors to try, as Ryan encouraged the crowd to turn on his own staff, who don’t think he’s fit for office. (Louis-Dreyfus has said, “Our show started out as a political satire, but it now feels more like a sobering documentary.”)
“O.K.!” Mandel yelled. “Now try ‘That is Amy Brookheimer. She recently had an abortion!’” Laughter and gasps came from the cast and crew, and Chlumsky mouthed “Holy sh*t,” as she tried to figure out what her character’s face ought to do in response.
“Uh, no,” Louis-Dreyfus said, from behind the monitors.
“It’s an alternate!” Mandel protested.
“Yeah,” she said, “an alternate which I want you to enjoy right now.”
The midterms were coming up, and Louis-Dreyfus had been doing a series of public-service announcements for the group Multiply Your Vote. She went outside with her assistant, Rachel Leavitt, who took out her cell phone to record Louis-Dreyfus in front of a brick wall. Leavitt noticed that the headphones Louis-Dreyfus had used to listen to the actors were still draped around her neck, and asked if she wanted those in the shot. “I think not,” Louis-Dreyfus replied, handing them off. “A little too liberal-Hollywood.” Then she switched into a drastically peppier tone for the taping: “Believe it or not, over five thousand of you have joined in the past few days, which is blowing my mind!” The clip, which Leavitt posted on Louis-Dreyfus’s Instagram, got more than a hundred and fifty thousand likes.
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Louis-Dreyfus is active on social media, posting her (liberal-Hollywood) support for candidates and causes: Sally Yates, Stacey Abrams, her fellow Holton-Arms alumna Christine Blasey Ford. She also used it to keep her fans up to date on her cancer treatments. “There were people with long lenses trying to get pictures of me looking ill, and I think I kind of burst the bubble on a lot of it because of my social-media presence,” Louis-Dreyfus said, with satisfaction.
I asked if she had ever succumbed to fear or self-pity during her illness. She thought for a minute and then replied, “‘Am I gonna be dead tomorrow’ kind of thing? I didn’t let myself go there.” She paused. “Don’t misunderstand: I was to-my-bones terrified. But I didn’t let myself—except for a couple of moments—go to a really dark place. I didn’t allow it.”
Mandel, who has known Louis-Dreyfus for some thirty years, described his own reaction when he heard that she had cancer: “I had the sense of the walls closing in on me, and I was racked with guilt and other weird Jewishness, and I was a goddam wreck. She seemed great. Then we watched her go through the chemo and you could see its effects on her. She got thinner and thinner. We couldn’t hug her, because we were afraid to get her sick. It was the first time that—all of a sudden—she looked her age and seemed human and vulnerable.”
There are so many celebrities in Santa Barbara, it feels like Madame Tussaud’s by the Sea. There’s Natalie Portman at the farmer’s market! There’s Katy Perry drinking a skinny margarita at the bar of the vegan restaurant with Orlando Bloom! “That’s all new,” Brad Hall, who grew up there with five siblings, said. It was a few weeks after the Mark Twain Awards, and he was sitting with Louis-Dreyfus on the beach in Montecito, in front of the house they bought two decades ago. The walls inside were lined with baby pictures of their sons, and photos of Hall’s parents on the beach; his mother still lives nearby, and they were going over to her house for dinner that night. “I f*cking love it here,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “We came here for vacation when I was fourteen. I remember I smelled orange blossom—you know how there’s nothing like the smell of an orange blossom? I thought, This is it for me. And who knew that I would come back?” She and Hall were married at a church nearby, where his father was the minister. When Louis-Dreyfus walked down the aisle, she had Daddy Tom on one side and Daddy William on the other.
All the women she has played have been bad at love, but Louis-Dreyfus has stayed married to Hall for thirty-one years. “The lucky thing,” Hall said, “is that Julia’s never been that interested in...”
“Other men?” she finished for him, laughing.
“In other men,” he deadpanned. “She’s cheated so little.... I mean, comparatively.” He pulled his baseball hat sideways to block the glare.
“B., do you have sunscreen on?” Louis-Dreyfus asked him.
Hall, who is as fair and blond as the sisters Louis-Dreyfus grew up with, pulled a bottle of lotion out from behind his beach chair to prove it. Then he returned to his point, about the durability of their marriage. “She’s never been interested in the trappings,” he said. “The Mark Twain thing is the kind of thing Julia might very well pass on a lot of the time.” The bit in her speech about her initial horror when she received the e-mail was true. “Verbatim,” Hall continued. “I don’t know if it was subliminal, but I think part of the reason you did it was to collect yourself as you’re going back into the fight of life again, after this year, this annus horribilis. So it was kind of a lucky thing that happened for Jules—don’t you think, honey? That you got to kind of take stock?”
There was a certain loftiness to that evening at the Kennedy Center, when Louis-Dreyfus, a slender glamour-puss in a navy-and-black lace Oscar de la Renta dress, was honored. Several female comedians spoke about her as a pioneer. “Elaine Benes was sex positive before we had a term for it: hoarding birth control and realistically failing to remain master of her domain,” Tina Fey said, citing Louis-Dreyfus as a role model. “Her ability to appear completely effortless and natural on the surface, while being a stone-cold machine of timing underneath it—Julia is a Terminator robot of comedy. That’s why she doesn’t age: metal bones, rubber eyes.”
Abbi Jacobson, of “Broad City,” declared, “Without J.L.D. there’d be no us.” Her co-star, Ilana Glazer, said, “The shove changed my life!” They described Louis-Dreyfus’s work as deliberately feminist in spirit. “Julia has always shaken off the stiff and limiting postures of ladylike behavior, not only to make us laugh but to make us free,” Jacobson said.
Larry David broke up the reverence—it was, after all, a prize for humor. “The lengths that she went through to get it! I mean, come on. That whole cancer thing? Cancer?” he said, in a taped bit. “What a scam. It’s diabolical. I’m a little jealous that I didn’t think of it, because that is right up my alley.”
The televised program was edited to ninety minutes, but the event itself stretched on for hours, as collaborators—Seinfeld, Barrosse, Lisa Kudrow, Bryan Cranston—told stories about working with Louis-Dreyfus. “It’s a compilation of your whole life, which is somewhat overwhelming,” Judith Bowles said. “It’s almost like you’re witness to too much.”
When the ceremony was finally over, Bowles, who is eighty-four, stood by the bar at the Four Seasons, wearing a black dress and red lipstick, chatting with two of Hall’s sisters. Louis-Dreyfus was at a table next to her, having a glass of wine with Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Lisa Kudrow, Tony Hale, and Kumail Nanjiani, who had all been on-stage that night. Everyone was hungry, but the staff at the Four Seasons—which the Louis Dreyfus Group built, in 1979—said that the kitchen was closed for the night. Finally, someone thought to order pizza.
After all her fretting over the Twain Prize, Louis-Dreyfus was pleased. “I was so shocked by the magnitude—I was overcome,” she said. “I was in such a frenzied froth about my speech!” She laughed. “And, oh, my God, I was hysterical!” She had found the whole experience gratifying, though she admitted that listening to so many people talk about her had felt a bit like sitting in the wings at her own memorial. “I said to Brad at one point, ‘Am I dead?’”♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Pierre Louis-Dreyfus’s wartime affiliation.
