As her soft Brooklyn accent comes from a taped speech playing over the stereo, Rusty Dennis Mason cocks her head to savor again the appreciative laughter she knows is coming. ”I`m not the world`s most over-protective mom,” she had told her audience of students at a little college in North Dakota a week earlier. Her vivid red hair, black motorcycle boots and biker`s denim vest emblazoned with the skull and crossbones symbol of a motorcycle gang, worn, incongruously, with a dangling gold Star of David and an Egyptian Ankh, would make that statement laughably obvious.
”I may not even be protective,” she had continued, chuckling with them. ”Babies need moms; children need friends.”
As her speech plays, Mason interjects comments, downs her breakfast (a blender full of protein drink), and, between gulps, bemoans the fact that Cher had missed out on an Oscar nomination critics had predicted for her portrayal of the mother of a horribly misshapen boy. In the film, ”Mask,” Cher was playing Rusty Dennis Mason.
Eric Stolz played the role of teenager Rocky Dennis, an ugly duckling who wouldn`t live to become a swan, a boy who suffered a fatal congenital disease so rare that only six other cases have ever been reported.

Doctors told his mother he`d be blind, mentally retarded and dead by the time he was 7. Craniodiaphyseal dysplasia caused his head and face to grow to bizarre size and shape, caused increasingly severe headaches, paralysis and ruptured blood vessels, and did kill him. But he lived until he was almost 17, was a high school honor student, was elected ”Best Buddy” and ”Most Good-Natured,” and ”Friendliest Camper” at the Southern California summer camp for handicapped children he attended, and became a kind of mascot at the University of California/Los Angeles medical school, which documented the slow progression of his deformation and dying.
In the movie, Cher played his red-headed biker mother, who refused to believe the doctors, refused to treat her son as an invalid, and maneuvered her way around hostile school administrators, skeptical doctors and her own overly protective parents to make sure her son had the most normal life possible. In real life, it was virtually the same, with two major exceptions: The events compacted into one year of the dying teen`s life really occurred over 10 or 12 years, and in real life, Rocky Dennis had an older half-brother, Joshua Mason.
Now, Joshua, her first born, her only surviving son, has Karposi`s sarcoma, a deadly skin cancer. It is a result of AIDS. So for the second time, Joshua`s mother finds herself coaxing and coercing a dying child to live. ”He might be gone tomorrow even without AIDS,” she says. She sat with her son and wept with him when his best friend and lover died of the disease last year.
”We all make a choice on some level how we are going to live and die, so when you live your life fully, dying`s no big deal.”
That doesn`t mean she`s not actively battling his death. Mason`s $15,000 take from the movie already has gone for Joshua`s medical care. Biofeedback, massive doses of vitamin C (50 grams a day), a trip to a holistic medical center in New Mexico, and daily exhortations to think healthy thoughts are only part of Mom`s RX. (She took back Joshua`s name, Mason, the name of her first husband, after Rocky`s death.)
”Being sad is not very healing,” Joshua explained in separate conversation. He is a tall, sweet-faced, 30-year-old writer, who in stark contrast to his mother, dresses like a conservative college kid in sport shirts and sweaters. ”When the AIDS thing came,” he said, ”I felt I was ready to fight it philosophically and emotionally.” One reason: ”My background with Rocky set the foundations for this belief.” Another: His mother sat with him, wept with him, and helped him deal with his friend`s death a year ago. ”I can become well,” he said with conviction in his soft voice. ”Even with the odds against me.”
”I thought `Mask` was going to be a movie about Rocky,” says his iconoclastic mother. ”I always thought showing Rocky`s courage would help a lot of disabled kids and the parents of disabled kids–sometimes they are more disabled than their kids. I didn`t realize the movie would be about me, too. Thanks to Cher`s brilliance, I come off a kind of heroine.”
One senses it`s not just Cher`s brilliance, that in fact Cher played Rusty Dennis Mason, nee Steinberg, to a T. Her example challenges accepted notions of what it means to be a good parent. Yet it`s clear that this 49-year-old Jewish mother, former drug addict, go-go girl and Shaklee products distributor, who currently lives with one nephew and three hirsute bikers
(Pelican, Lenny, and Steve) in a Good Housekeeping-neat biker crashpad in San Francisco`s ethnic Mission district, could teach some conventional parents a thing or two, especially about helping one`s children face down tragedy.
”When I was a little girl I believed in fairy tales,” says Mason. ”I had all those little girl dreams about being Wonder Woman or Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.” Instead, she says, she was kicked out of junior high school at 13 for truancy, married a truck driver named Mason when she was 17, was a recovered heroin addict and a mother by 19, a divorcee soon after, and the fairy tales never came. She remarried–a housepainter named Dennis–and, briefly it seems, aspired to the middle-class life.
”I was a Cub Scout,” Joshua recalled. ”She was just a mother then. Just running a house and keeping a family together like anyone else. She was doing drugs then, but she was a good mother. She cooked dinner every night. It wasn`t `Family Ties` or `Ozzie and Harriet,` but then I never knew any real families like that, and probably a lot of American mothers do drugs–they just do the socially approved, doctor-prescribed ones.”
He said his mother ”was always there for me” in his battles with his stepfather, Rocky`s dad. ”Her life with my stepdad was like out of a mold. We were your typically, upwardly mobile, America ideal thing. My mother always wanted to get to that place–the nice middle-class house. Then when she had it, she just let it slip away. Sometimes when we get something we want, we find out it`s not what we thought it would be.”
Joshua left home at 17. Part of it was his running battles with his stepfather. Part of it was because he was different–it wasn`t just his being gay, he was also as concerned about the family`s refined sugar intake as he was over their use of drugs. Part of it was because his mother`s friends, dopers and bikers, increasingly filled the house, and he was uncomfortable with that scene.
”Joshua had left, Rocky was 10 and doing fine; I was dying,” Mason recalls. ”My husband wanted out. I turned my house into a biker commune. My upper middle class neighbors had manicured ivy; I had lawn-to-lawn Harleys out front. My father called it Tobacco Road.”
Her current apartment, with its soft yellow shag carpet, well-cared-for houseplants and uplifting mottoes (”A contented person is one who enjoys the scenery along the detours,” and ”God help me to accept . . .”) on the wall, is clean and neat and orderly, despite Pelican, bearded and beer-bellied reading on the couch, and Lenny and Steve by the big bay window, smoking drowsily. The bookshelves are bulging: ”Gray`s Anatomy,” Peter Wyden`s ”The Bay of Pigs,” college texts on parapsychology and philosophy and novels from Tolkien to Victor Hugo. The albums that line the walls are as eclectic. Abba to Zappa, the latter filed next to ”The Brandenburg Concerto.” A ”Mask”
poster is on one wall; Rocky`s and Joshua`s baby pictures are within reach.
When Rocky was born, Dec. 4, 1961, he was by all external clues a perfectly healthy baby. It wasn`t until an alert X-ray technician picked up a slight cranial anomaly at 18 months, when the baby was being treated for an ear infection, that doctors began to wonder what was happening inside the cute little blond boy`s head.
”The bridge of his nose hadn`t formed,” his mother recalls. ”That happens in a lot of babies,” so no one had worried much. ”But then his head started to grow. I went into shock.”
Her own mother`s family comes from ”a long line of hypochondriacs,” she says, ”but I decided early in my life if you could make yourself sick, you could make yourself well. I told the doctors we didn`t believe in being blind, deaf and sick.”
She started experimenting with vitamins and alfalfa sprouts. True to the movie script, she`d send her son to his room when he complained of a headache with the admonition, ”Don`t come out until you have made yourself well.” And a couple of hours later he`d come out well.
”Once he came in from the playground crying because, `The kids are calling me ugly.` I told him when they laugh at you, you laugh at you. If you act beautiful, you`ll be beautiful and they`ll see that and love you. You see, I believe the universe will support anything you want to believe. I taught both my kids that.
”When he was 7,” she continues,” he saw maybe the 42d eye specialist who said he`d never have enough vision to read. I handed him a book and he read it.” The doctor asked the boy how he did it, and, his mom says, he replied, ”I don`t believe in being blind.”
When he was junior high age and she was dancing in an Azusa go-go joint, the school system tried to put Rocky in a separate school for the handicapped ”because of his appearance.” She raised hell and he graduated at the top of his class. ”And everybody liked him because he was real funny.”
She taught him to be tough. ”I knew he`d have a harder time at life; he needed to be prepared for it.” And she taught him to be honest, in her own street-smart fashion. ”Another kid once asked me, `How come he`s so ugly?`
and I just said, `I`ll bet you never rode in a spaceship!` Rocky was really shocked, `Mommy, you told him I came from outer space!` I said, `No, I didn`t. I just said I`ll bet he never rode in a spaceship.”`
She also taught him to make the most of his opportunities. ”My fondest memory,” his brother Joshua said, ”is coming home one day and finding Rocky selling his toys on the street corner, like at a lemonade stand. I broke mine; he was too clever. And he loved money.”
The story is nearly too Hollywood to believe, yet the proud mother can back up much of it with school honors and Camp Bloomfield trophies. She offers them not as proof–she has no reason to feel anyone might doubt the wonder of Rocky`s life and death–but to share her joy in her son. The saddest proofs are the photocopies of medical journal articles, which show her skinny, vulnerable, grinning, misshapen son, naked before the doctors` cameras, and stripped of flesh by their X-rays, his life and coming death discussed in precise and unemotional detail.
The researchers noted the mother had had previous abortions and that both parents had a history of drug abuse. Nonetheless, craniodiaphyseal dysplasia is a recessive gene. That means it was the luck of the procreative draw. It had nothing to do with the heroin addiction she kicked at 19 (”when I joined a clean and sober biker gang”) or any other drugs she or Rocky`s father had used. As soon as she learned she was pregnant, she swears, ”I didn`t do drugs. I hardly used tobacco. I didn`t use any drugs until after I stopped nursing Rocky.”
Mason has been talking over her recorded speech, anticipating points she wishes she`d made better, enjoying the laughs and applause a second time: ”It was my first paid lecture. I`ll get better,” she says laughing. ”I don`t know how much better because I`m pretty good now.” She says she hopes to support herself with lectures and a planned book based on her life and experiences as a volunteer with the parents of handicapped children and AIDS victims; the word ”job” brings a mock shudder.
She had told her audience how she wouldn`t let her Brooklyn truck driver father spoil Rocky. ”He`d say, `But he might die,` and I`d say, `But he might live, and then he`d be spoiled rotten.”`
”She was the perfect mother for Rocky,” Joshua said. ”A lot of mothers wouldn`t have been so strong, would have coddled him, not given him a sense of himself. The movie wasn`t your fact-filled kind of thing, but they did capture that special thing between Rocky and Rusty.”
The movie is false in its depiction of Rocky`s death. About three weeks before he died, Oct. 4, 1978, Rocky`s headaches intensified and he had to resort to a wheelchair. Mason alerted the hospital that the end was probably near. ”He`d said he didn`t want to be on one of those machines, and I promised him if the hospital did that I`d pull the plug,” she says. ”He wanted to die at home.”
The night Rocky died she and a group of biker friends had a party to cheer him up, just as in the movie. At midnight he awoke with a headache; she comforted him, and as she`d done since the beginning, sent him to his room to make himself well. She didn`t find him the next morning as in the movie; she was at her lawyer`s working out details for beating a drug bust she says was a mistake. Her then-lover and later third husband, Bernie, called her at the lawyer`s office with the news. ”But Rocky died with a real peaceful look on his face,” true to the movie, she says. (She separated from Bernie, the person on whom actor Sam Elliot`s character, Garr, was based, six weeks after they finally married, while both were still grief stricken over Rocky`s death. ”Marriage is another addiction I`ve had to kick,” she says.)
Rocky was not buried, with baseball cards tucked into the flowers on his grave, as in the film`s last scene. ”Rocky was donated to medical science and was finally cremated. We have no use for bodies, so that was okay,” she explains matter-of-factly. ”Dope fiends die. Bikers go off on their bikes and are never heard from again. But it`s been scientifically proven that energy can`t be destroyed–it just takes a another form.”
Despite her bravado, his mother took Rocky`s death very hard, Joshua said. Then she and Bernie (she prefers not to identify him or her other biker friends further) split, and Joshua said, ”she was really having trouble getting her life together, so I sent for her.” They do not live together because he values his privacy, a need his mother simply cannot fathom,” he said. ”She loves being with the down and out. She`ll befriend people no one else will. . . . She cares. She just likes to be there for people. She mothers them.”
Joshua told his mother about his homosexuality when he was still in his teens. ”My mother has always been very supportive. She didn`t want to totally accept it. She wanted me to be bisexual. She wants grandkids. She called me once, a couple of years later. She wanted me to go to a sperm bank. She really wants grandkids. I told her, `No way!”`
Joshua said his prognosis is ”three to five years, but some people survive three, five or seven years. I don`t feel sick. I don`t anticipate getting sick. I think my self-healing process is working.” He has the skin lesions from Karposi`s sarcoma, but, his mother insists, ”He`s healthier than he`s ever been. He`s had it almost two years and he`s in almost perfect health.”
Rusty Dennis Mason`s recorded speech to Dakota college students is winding down. ”Death to Rocky was just another place to go, and he loved going places,” she had said at one point. At another: ”Cher depicted the way I am very well. I always thought I was perfectly normal, that the rest of the world is nuts.” And at yet another point, with unmasked poignancy: ”Joshua doesn`t believe in dying. And neither do I.”

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