Lucky Lady TV’s Linda Ellerbee Counts Her Blessings After An Apparent Victory Over Breast Cancer

To understand Linda Ellerbee and her life today, you have to understand Lucky Duck.

Lucky Duck is a petite - and let’s face it, by now somewhat mangy - stuffed yellow duck sporting a red bow tie, orange bill and a big red button that says “TV Made Me What I Am Today.”

He has adorned Ellerbee’s life - and her various television sets - since she bought him in the early 1980s at a hospital gift shop after what proved to be an unfounded cancer scare.

Ellerbee, who in 1986 formed her own television production company with partner Rolfe Tessem, even called it Lucky Duck Productions.

But in 1992 Lucky Duck’s powers seemed to have expired. Ellerbee was diagnosed with breast cancer, had a double mastectomy and underwent exhausting chemotherapy.

Now, three years later, she appears to be cancerfree and is enmeshed in a non-stop schedule as executive producer, writer and host of Nickelodeon’s Nick News as well as riding herd on Lucky Duck Productions.

But after coming face to face with cancer, does she still feel lucky?

“Yeah, sure,” she says as she sits in a studio chair while a makeup artist readies her for a morning of television taping.

“I’m alive. I’m here. Nobody said you get to go through life without bad things happening, and I consider myself a very lucky woman.

“I’m cancer-free by all available tests. I’m in a long-term, loving relationship with Rolfe. Both my children are healthy, and we like one another.

“I have work I love and am passionate about, and it pays well. I have time for myself. What’s not to feel lucky about?”

For Ellerbee, 50, it has been a long road to this state of even semitranquility.

Born and raised in Texas, she managed to marry four times between the ages of 20 and 30, give birth to two children (Vanessa, now 25, and Josh, 24), carve out a reputation as a feisty, irreverent television newswoman at five different networks, write two books and check into the Betty Ford Clinic to battle alcoholism.

Today she is long sober, has given up smoking, lost 50 pounds (but gained 20 back after she injured her knee in a skiing accident last year) and is more than eight years into a solid relationship with Tessem.

She wears her hair very short after deciding she liked it that way when it grew back after chemotherapy and has taken up wilderness hiking with a passion.

Having cancer, she says, has changed her life “in all the corny ways.

“I do stop and smell the roses more. I’m not the workaholic I was. I make time in my life for things I don’t want to miss, like visiting with my family.

“I also discovered you don’t have to do it all; you can let other people do some of it. When I was sick with the chemotherapy, it was a real learning experience. Lucky Duck didn’t fall apart.”

She has chosen not to have reconstructive surgery because “I can’t come up with a swell enough reason why (to do it).

“It’s a different choice for every woman. If I were single and alone, I might, but I’m in a stable relationship. … I feel pretty good about myself,” she says.

“Rolfe’s happy with me, I’m happy, so I can’t come up with a good reason why. But I’m not advocating (for other women) not to have the surgery.”

And even in breast cancer, Ellerbee manages to find humor.

In one oft-told tale that she is quick to confirm, Ellerbee reported that her greatest learning experience came when she was playing catch with her golden retriever, Bo. She bent over to pick up the ball and her prosthesis fell out.

Bo, figuring this was part of the game, raced off with it, and Ellerbee says she found herself chasing him down the road and yelling, “Hey, come back with my breast.”

Would she change anything in her past?

“Yes, sure, but I have to tell myself I did the best I could with the information I had at the time,” she says.

“I was one of the women who came into the (television news) business in the early 1970s, and it was made clear that you had to do everything the guys did and more. So we were afraid to stay home with the kids.

“I often traded time with the kids for work, and I regret that.”

As for where she expects to be in 10 years, Ellerbee says with a laugh: “I never had so much as a five-year plan. If I’m doing what I’m doing right now, I’d be a happy woman. My fondest hope is to be here in 10 years.”

Ellerbee tries to balance her frenetic work schedule in the city with weekends at a country house she and Tessem own in Massachusetts. There she teaches Bo such tricks as diving off the board into the swimming pool, communes with her Shetland pony, Laser, and hikes through the surrounding countryside.

Her spare time is given to watching movies, reading, “and I still love traveling. I still get a kick getting off a plane in a different city.”

Not that all this new-found serenity has mellowed her political views.

“Ah, Newt,” she muses at one point, “was anybody so aptly named?”

She also hopes to press forward with some television projects for and involving women.

“One of the things that’s hardest to sell,” she says, “is non-fiction stories (for women). Gloria Steinem and I have been trying to interest someone in doing a news magazine directed at women for about a year now.”

Ellerbee also is trying to elicit interest in a show, to be tentatively titled “Power Table,” that would involve “female experts sitting around and talking about things going on in the world.

“It’s kind of sad that in 1995 there’s not more interest at the networks in programs directed primarily at women. The networks are quick to assume women watch soap operas, but there’s still some sort of assumption that women won’t watch a show about politics.”

Ellerbee and Tessem formed Lucky Duck with their life savings and with one other employee. Now there about 25 employees, headquartered in office space in Greenwich Village.

Asked her title at the company, Ellerbee laughs and says: “Rolfe and I don’t have titles. We own the company. We’re the bosses. …

“We’re sort of a boutique company,” she explains. “We do non-fiction projects. We don’t do trash. I’m not interested in doing a (Joey) Buttafuoco story.

“Outside of the networks, there’s not a lot of people you can turn to if you need a news magazine and need it done right. We’re a place you can go to and know the rules of good journalism are not going to be broken. And it’s going to be on time and on budget.”

On this particular day, Ellerbee is taping introductions to several Nick News pieces.

One involves an attempt by children in Los Alamos, N.M., where the A-bomb was developed, to build a peace statue. Another explores segregation and Brown vs. the Board of Education.

Earlier topics have included everything from Bosnia to domestic violence to sexual harassment.

Lucky Duck also produces four specials a year on Nickelodeon that feature a single topic, probably the best known being “A Conversation With Magic” about AIDS.

“We never talk down to the kids,” she says. “We treat the kids as if they have intelligence.”

The core audience is children roughly 9 to 11, Ellerbee says, “but I know it skews down to 5 or 6 and up to 80; we also have an adult cult.”

As Ellerbee tapes her pieces, Lucky Duck hovers, as usual, unobtrusively in the background. At one point, just before the cameras start to roll, she strokes his furry little head.

“Cute little duck,” she croons.