A Day in the Life of Emmanuelle Gattuso

A private express elevator glides to the 20th storey of a Cumberland Street condo, opening up to Emmanuelle Gattuso’s immaculate oasis in the sky. The stark white walls of wonder act as blank canvases for contemporary artists like Tim Whiten and Barbara Steinman, leading the way to a self-fulfilling great room. It’s 10 a.m. on a mid-January morning and a thick billow of morning fog is dampening the impact of 11 foot-high floor-to-ceiling windows, which on any given Sunday would offer an unrivalled Yorkvillian view.

What starts to feel like trespassing after-hours at an art gallery is quickly curtailed by the raucous voices of Gattuso’s poodles, which protectively ensure that not a single soul slips by. “This is James and this is Stewart,” she says, stepping out of her office. It’s not what you think. While she may have a wonderful life, the pups are actually named after magician Stewart James, whom her husband, broadcast baron Allan Slaight, deeply admires. The youthful 64-year-old is dressed in her signature print of leopard and knee-high camel boots designed by Rocco P., her favourite Italian boot maker. Her fiery hair and thick-framed Vue dc glasses reveal shades of her eccentric personality.

Her sweet smile and contagious laugh hit you like a train on a track. This rose-coloured composition, however, paints a much different picture than a decade ago, when Gattuso received a freight of bad news. “My father died in 2001, and a year later in October 2002, my best friend died of ovarian cancer. Three weeks later my mother died, and then I get word that there’s something wrong with my mammogram,” she says, adding that her sister was being treated for breast cancer at the time. The six-week long wait to find out her test results fell over the family like a dark cloud. By the time Princess Margaret Hospital oncologist Dr. David McCready called her into his office to discuss the news, she managed to convince herself that everything was fine. It wasn’t. Gattuso was told, like more than 23,000 Canadians every year, that she had breast cancer. “I was so stunned. Then [Dr. McCready] explained to me what was going to happen and the surgery and so on, and I think I was in kind of a daze, and then we got into the car and my sister called me and I said, ‘I … I …’ then I started to cry.”

That was late 2002. Luckily her cancer was detected in stage one, and her treatment plan was highly effective. Today, the grandmother of five has a slate of reasons to be happy. Reasons that go far beyond her personal health. “I feel good, I feel privileged that I can help people go through this situation in a much better way,” she says, referring to her recent philanthropic milestone. Driven to diminish the stress of patients who worriedly have to wait for breast cancer results (average of 33 days in Canada), Gattuso jumped on-board with Dr. McCready’s precedent-setting vision to create a centre that would give individuals their assessment, diagnosis and treatment recommendations in just one day. “He explained to me what he was thinking and that, you know, we have to run a pilot program first to see if it really would work and so I was excited. I thought, ‘this is incredible.’”

Over dinner one night, she informed her husband about the multi-phase project and how it would significantly change the lives of women by lessening the anxiety that coincides with not knowing. “My husband said, ‘Well what can I do to help?’ So I said, ‘Maybe you can get the ball rolling and make a donation?’ And he said, ‘Well OK, how about if I gave half?’ I said, ‘that would work!’” In addition to donating $12.5 million in 2009, the Gattuso-Slaight family began matching public donations, rallying support from friends and family and organizing events. “She’s been intimately involved with all aspects … She doesn’t do it for any personal accolades, she does it for the fact that she’s been through it and she knows people that have been through it and she thinks, ‘why can’t we do it quicker and better?’” says Dr. McCready. Her dogged efforts to meet an ambitious fundraising goal of $25 million came to a happy ending on Dec. 24, 2011, when her husband topped off the campaign with a final donation for the remaining amount. “That Christmas gift, of course, was the greatest Christmas gift ever,” she says, beaming with Stewart in her lap. The Gattuso Rapid Diagnostic Centre at Princess Margaret Hospital is working to increase its volume to see 3,000 women and men annually in its final phase this year or next. “I feel very privileged that I can do this, and also that my husband is such a generous benefactor to many, many causes.”

Benevolence is one of the qualities that attracted Gattuso to Slaight more than two decades ago. In a circumstance of serendipity, she was introduced to him by a mutual friend, the late senator Finlay MacDonald, while working as a communications director for the Commissioner of Official Languages in Ottawa. At the time, Slaight had just acquired Standard Broadcasting Corporation Ltd., and was in Canada’s capital overseeing a television station. He possessed the entrepreneurial spirit of her father and the humanitarian heart of her mother, but it was his reaction to her independence that solidified her interest. Gattuso recalls a particular instance in the early dating stages where she had agreed to attend an event with Slaight in Toronto and had to cancel last minute due to a national project that fell on her lap. “He said ‘that’s fine, not a problem. Why don’t I come to Ottawa and you can work, and you know, we will go out to dinner or we will order in, whatever you feel like.’ He was always so easy and he always said to me, ‘I totally respect you, you have lots of responsibilities in your career and I know what it’s like.’ So that was a big thing for me.” The pair married in Martha’s Vineyard 18 years ago.

Only when asked what an average day is like is Gattuso lost for words. The packed suitcase sitting in her bedroom from a cancelled trip to Florida is tangible evidence of life’s unpredictability. Aside from waking up early, enjoying a café latte and poring through the pages of seven newspapers that get delivered to her every morning, the closest thing to pattern in her life is a Douglas Coupland piece in her hallway that features rows of coloured pencil crayons. “I don’t think there is an average day,” she says. For now, reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and exploring personalized cancer treatments are two items on her to-do-list. “It’s one day at a time. One hour at a time.”

www.onedaypmh.ca