Eleanor Mondale's Brain Cancer Returns; Makes Film About Her Father

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: Eleanor Mondale celebrates dad's life, fights for her own : Documentary about VP hits screen 2 weeks after she learns brain cancer has returned : : BY GAIL ROSENBLUM : When she was in the media in Chicago, Eleanor Mondale was known as a party-loving wild child who regularly made the gossip columns. : Riding the fame she developed as the daughter of former Vice President Walter Mondale, she held a number of fairly high-profile roles on several Chicago radio stations in the late 1980s and early '90s, among them as a morning co-host on the "Murphy in the Morning" show at WKQX-FM (101.1) and a feature reporter/contributor on WGN-AM (720). : Her marriage to then-Chicago Bear Keith Van Horne in 1988 was news -- as was the divorce a year and half later. : Today, Eleanor Mondale is 50, working as a radio host in Minnesota -- and battling brain cancer. : This weekend, a film she narrates about her father's life, "Fritz: The Walter Mondale Story," is being shown at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. : "I learned so much about what my dad had done, and that was so exciting," Mondale said two days after starting new chemotherapy for a brain tumor first diagnosed a month before her June 2005 wedding to musician Chan Poling. : That tumor disappeared with radiation and chemotherapy but has returned three times since 2008, most recently two weeks ago. : Mondale is still lovely, all sky-blue eyes and cheekbones, though with close-cropped blond hair. But she frets about feeling exhausted all the time. : "My dad and Chan have a committee to get me out of bed," she jokes, seated with Poling in the cozy sun room of the secluded Prior Lake, Minn., farmhouse on five acres they share with a Mollucan cockatoo, a 200-pound mastiff, three chickens, an Irish wolfhound/poodle, two barn cats, five mini-horses and one mini-donkey. : The couple is still planning a trip to Mexico in April, before a brain scan will determine "if this [treatment] is working," she said. "It's always an is-it-working? kind of game." : Mondale has said that the four years she spent as second daughter "changed my life forever." In 1977, then 17, she attended President Jimmy Carter's inauguration in a tuxedo, the first of many head-turning events to come. In Mondale's early years, her latest beau, work gig or up-to-here hemline was gossip fodder not only in Chicago but in New York and back in Minnesota, too. Photos of her in later years jogging with President Bill Clinton had tongues wagging. : "I like to get wild," she once said. "But it's not murder, and I don't do drugs." : Now, she's happy to step back and let Dad enjoy his star status. If only he could. : "He wasn't very keen on it," she said of the movie about his life. : "When he knew I'd be involved, that made it better," she said. "He's happy with it, but he's a Minnesotan, so you'll never hear him say, 'Isn't that great?' " : Mondale had hoped to make the documentary herself, but the size of the job, coupled with health setbacks, knocked her off track. Around that time, filmmaker Melody Gilbert was heading weekly to the University of Minnesota to film the former vice president's first semester lecturing to 18 awestruck students about the Carter-Mondale administration. One five-minute documentary later, Gilbert felt she was just warming up. : Walter Mondale rebuffed her, politely. "I'm done with public life," he told her. "I don't need TV cameras." : After Gilbert interviewed Carter, "Mr. Mondale realized I'm not going away." : Eleanor Mondale heard about Gilbert's efforts and "forced myself on Melody," she said. : She gave Gilbert a shopping bag stuffed with family photographs, home movies, news clips. She recruited her brothers, Ted and William, to be interviewed, and mom, Joan, too. : Poling, Mondale's third husband, who played in the new-wave band the Suburbs, composed the score to the 60-minute documentary. : Poling says with his wife's illness, the couple is "living for the moment" these days. "I really, really enjoy playing music, reading a book in bed with Eleanor. We relish every little thing." : Recently, at the farmhouse the couple shares, matriarch Joan described her daughter as "the model child." : Eleanor Mondale glanced at her father. "You forgot, too?" she asked. : "Not much," he deadpanned. : Then, quickly, he added, "Dads are always proud of their daughters, and we've got a special one here."

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