Miami Herald - Monday, November 27, 1995
Elinor J. Brecher, Herald Staff Writer

"Do I have to be serious?" she asks, feigning a scowl. "All the pictures make me look like I'm suffering."

That's the way we expect people with HIV to look, of course: Wasted. Haunted. Shadowed by doom. Nothing like Elena Monica, who could hop right back into the Levis commercials or the Home Box Office movies she used to make, and no one would be the wiser.

Still, the question can't be avoided.

"I'm not suffering," she replies. A half-second elapses. "Today."

She'd had her share already, and is realistic enough to anticipate more in the future.

But today is all about IFARA -- the International Foundation for Alternative Research in AIDS she founded last year -- and the high-glam auction fund-raiser she's planning on its behalf Tuesday, sday at China Grill on South Beach.

Her father, the durable comic Corbett Monica, who used to guest-host for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, will emcee. Jack Nicholson, Gregory Peck, Michael Caine, Steven Bauer and Shari Belafonte are expected.

IFARA is a nonprofit organization that Monica says will support research into alternative and conventional HIV/AIDS therapies. The money raised Tuesday, sday should fund IFARA's first grant, to be made in early 1996. Grants will help investigate Chinese medicine, visualization and traditional treatments that may be federally approved for conditions other than AIDS.

Monica, 30, moved from Southern California to Miami Beach last year because "there are a lot of philanthropic dollars here that could go to the cause. And (the) Miami (metropolitan area) has the third largest incidence of AIDS in the country.

"Then there's my quality of life . . . L.A. has become very oppressed. I was very aware of the smog."

Learned she was infected Monica learned four years ago that she was infected with HIV. It was clear who'd given it to her, even though he swore he couldn't have: Ray Sharkey, the Wiseguy star whose AIDS death in 1993 shocked nearly everyone in Hollywood . . . except Elena Monica.

Five months into their seven-month relationship, she fell critically ill with aseptic meningitis. During a month's hospitalization, she was attacked by hepatitis, pancreatitis and gastroenteritis. Blood tests revealed HIV.

"I'd been tested a few months earlier and was negative," she says. "By process of elimination, it had to be him." Dr. Eric Daar, head of the AIDS research program at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, who diagnosed Monica, supports that assessment. Unlike many HIV patients, Monica got hit hard early by an AIDS-related catastrophic disease. Many patients manifest only a flu-like primary infection that subsides. "Nobody knows why some people get sicker," says Daar, who's on IFARA's medical advisory board. "That's one of our areas of research."

(Medical and lay board members will determine where IFARA's money goes. Other members include Kevin Clark, clinical supervisor of the University of Miami's acupuncture program; Kaiya Montaocean, codirector of the Center for Natural and Traditional Medicines in Washington, D.C., and IFARA codirector Fred Schaik, a Pompano Beach AIDS activist.)

Daar says that doctors give the average HIV patient 10 years between onset and death. Whether the margin of error favors optimism or pessimism for Monica, she whips through her days as if every second counts.

Powered by natural medicines, vitamins, healthy food and endorphins -- thanks to running, tae kwon do, tennis and golf -- the former California State/Los Angeles nutrition major is genial and polite, but wastes little time on distractions from her mission, which evolved from what she calls a near-death experience.

"I was dying . . ." she says, of her hospitalization with meningitis. "On some level, I knew I was being clued into the fact that I could stay or go . . . I wanted to stay there, but didn't get to, and here I am."

Global breakdown

Here, to confront not only the weakness of her own immune system and the wrong turns in her past, but the "breakdown in our global immune system," manifested in so much human misery, and the contributions she wants to make toward solutions.

Her temporary digs, on the 14th floor of an oceanfront Collins Avenue high-rise, contains a lot of beige carpet, very little furniture, and myriad phones.

Her mother, Helen Monica, moved from New Jersey into the building last week, to be closer.

Monica's bedside reading is testimony to a quest for spiritual growth and healing: the Koran, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Book of Mormon, the Bible, the works of Marianne Williamson. She regularly visits a spiritual leader called Ma at an ashram in Sebastian, Fla.

"She taught me to deal with death, life, silence, compassion, laughter, HIV," says Monica. "How did I deal with the anger? A lot of therapy, and by applying spiritual principles."

She says she began her "spiritual path" 10 years ago, when she got clean and sober at 20, after a wild adolescence. Her diagnosis "changed every breath I take. It deepened my zest for life and love of people. But I was striving before that." Mother Teresa gazes from a framed portrait in the bedroom. So do Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, locked in their legendary embrace. Gone With The Wind has been Monica's obsession since adolescence. She's seen it at least once a year since, and named her puppy Olivia, for GWTW actress Olivia de Havilland.

She loves Scarlett's "passion and her tenacity," and ever since her first glimpse of the suave Rhett Butler, she's thought: "That's my guy."

Met Sharkey

For awhile, she thought Ray Sharkey was, too. They met at a party in February 1991. He was still married, but a notorious philanderer. Also a drug abuser and recovering drunk.

"He was wild," says Monica. "What attracted me was his tremendous talent. He was deep, very deep . . ." What she didn't know was that he also was very sick. Diagnosed with HIV in 1987, Sharkey convinced himself he harbored a strain that never would endanger himself or anyone else. He lied to Monica and other women about his condition, infecting her and at least one other she knows. And destroying her sense of trust.

In 1992, Details magazine quoted a member of the 12-step group Sharkey attended: "He is the Johnny Appleseed of AIDS."

"We used condoms in the beginning," says Monica, "but I kept asking him if he had been tested and he stated adamantly he was fine. . . .

"The most difficult thing for me is to accept that I didn't take responsibility for making him get tested."

And so she has spent much of her time talking to college audiences, spreading a simple message: Use condoms. Get tested. Demand that your partner get tested. Remember that even though you may be a heterosexual who doesn't shoot dope, you're still at risk.

"Elena's diagnosis was originally missed for exactly that reason," says Eric Daar. "She was not in one of the high-risk groups."

Sued him In 1992, she sued Sharkey for $52 million. Sharkey declined to challenge the suit, which she won in a default judgment after his death. But Sharkey died broke, so there is no money for Monica.

She went to see him at the Palm Springs home he shared with his mother about a month before he died, seeking "closure" -- an admission and an apology.

She got neither.

"He was 98 pounds, skin and bones," she recalls. " He moved like an old man . . . Here he's got 17 bottles of pills next to him, (but) he was in so much denial, how could he think he would infect someone else? By going there, I got something better than an apology. I knew his infecting me wasn't malicious or intentional."

Broke the news It took Monica a year to gather the emotional strength to tell her family.

"I knew it was going to be on the 5 p.m. news that I'd filed suit," she recalls.

Her father said, "My poor baby; what can I do?" I said, "Just love me. Support me."

And this he has done.

Corbett and his second wife, Ann, longtime snowbirds, two years ago moved near the Aventura Mall, where he plans to open a restaurant. He still tours with Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme..

He calls his daughter's situation "frustrating and devastating . . . "The only thing that keeps me sane is that she is so courageous, and the work she's pursuing is so valuable. . . . But you forget; she's so healthy and vital."

Indeed, Elena Monica figures that if her belief is correct, that HIV is evolving into a "manageable" chronic condition -- a view Eric Daar supports -- she'll be a better person for having dealt with disease.

"I like myself much better now, and I've given the people who like me more to like."

Alternative treatment As soon as the fund-raiser is over, Monica will prepare for a week of alternative treatment planned for December.

"It's FDA-approved for certain types of cancer, but not AIDS," she explains. "I don't want to say what it is because I don't want a million people calling me with the pros and cons."

She has not taken AZT but doesn't disparage conventional treatments.

"Whatever you're putting into your body should be treated with respect," she says.

She and her boyfriend, a South Florida marketer/developer, have talked about adopting a child.

"People adopt babies every day," she says, "and they're as apt to get run over by a bagel truck as I am" to die of AIDS. She remains resolute about planning for the future.

Not that she doesn't endure "moments of tremendous fear and trepidation."

She's afraid of suffering, says Monica, but not afraid of death.

"I've been there."

CUTLINES

C.W. GRIFFIN/Herald Staff

SMILE: Elena Monica likes to look happy for the camera, saying photographers always expect her to look like she's suffering.

COMEDY ACT: Corbett Monica entertained on The Joey Bishop Show in the 1970s.

ELENA'S PARTNER: The late actor Ray Sharkey denied he had AIDS.

Photos by C.W. GRIFFIN/Herald Staff

THE FORCE: Elena Monica, driven in part by her own HIV-positive diagnosis, has coordinated the gala to raise money for alternative AIDS research.

IN CHARGE: Elena's father, comedian Corbett Monica, will be fund-raiser's emcee.

CAPTION: PHOTO Elena Monica (a), Corbett Monica (a), Elena Monica (a), Ray Sharkey (a), Corbett Monica (a)
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