Cathy's Crusade

Cathy Moriarty-Gentile's search for a diagnosis for her daughter has connected her to an embracing community

By Cris Italia/Photos by Robert Milazzo

The first time any of us laid eyes on Cathy Moriarty-Gentile we were instantly mesmerized by her beauty. We saw her in black in white, but we didn’t need color to appreciate her golden blonde hair, silky smooth skin, full lips and her high cheekbones which made her statuesque looks impossible to ignore. She was 19 years old when she played Vickie LaMotta in the Martin Scrosese classic Raging Bull, her first role in a movie. It was a performance many critics say was one of the finest to ever work alongside legendary actor Robert DeNiro. How many teenagers can go toe to toe with DeNiro and say they were able to contribute to an instant classic?
Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Cathy hailed from a strong Irish family and used her roots to channel the strength to play the role of a battered wife. The movie thrusted her into the world of film and earned her an Oscar nomination. Through the years she would turn in strong performance after strong performance in some of our favorite movies: Mambo Kings, Matinee, Another Stakeout, Soapdish, Casper, Cop Land and Analyze That.
“Raging Bull was over 25 years ago,” Cathy says. “That went so fast, the time, but not as fast as the last few years.”
On September 11, 2000, Cathy became a mother for the first time, giving birth to twins Joseph and Catherine. “The last seven years have gone by so fast,” she says. “It’s the best job I ever had though. Nothing I’ve ever done in my career could ever come close to my job as a mother.”
The following year Cathy and her husband, Joseph Gentile, had their third child, Annabella. It was during her pregnancy that they started noticing some strange behavior from Catherine. The twins were six weeks premature, and at three months Cathy felt that her daughter wasn’t focusing like her son was. The couple chalked it up to her earlier birth.
“At 3 months old doctors told me that maybe she could use some therapy,” Cathy says. “I actually thought at one point she was blind, because she couldn’t find me sometimes.”
She wasn’t blind. Cathy was told that her eyes were just premature and she was farsighted, but she couldn’t get glasses on her daughter until she was 2 years old. By the time Catherine reached that age, her mother also felt something was wrong with her arms. “I always thought there was something awkward with the way she moved her arms, and they felt really boney to me,” she says. An x-ray would show that not only was there something wrong with her arms, but they had been dislocated since birth. “All that time went by and none of her doctors could figure out that something was wrong with her arms.”
Even with the physical diagnosis, Cathy kept feeling that something was wrong. Doctors insisted that the only therapy she needed was physical therapy. Evaluations and check ups weren’t showing a need for any further treatment. Being an actress and owning a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles called Mulberry Street, she was summoned to the West Coast frequently and she decided to take her daughter to different doctors.
“I got her evaluated over there and she qualified for everything,” Cathy remembers. “She needed everything! She was delayed. She hadn’t made progress on a lot of things. Compared to her brother she hadn’t reached the same milestones that he had. She needed vision, occupational, physical—all kinds of therapy.”
Even with the acknowledgement of her delays and the treatment she would need, there still wasn’t a clear diagnosis. Cathy and her husband decided to take her for an MRI, to find out if she might have cerebral palsy, but tests revealed no bleeding in the brain. Countless visits to different neurologists came up empty on a diagnosis. There was a time that Cathy thought maybe it was autism. She had a nephew who had been diagnosed with PDD/NOS, but Catherine’s symptoms weren’t as consistent. “She was a whole different child,” Cathy says. “My brother’s child was different. He had been a normal child, but at 28 months he shut down. He stopped talking completely. They had been going to the same doctor all those years and no one ever said anything to them. How many kids are falling through the cracks, and how many patients are doctors taking on that they can’t realize there is something wrong?”
“We’ve never received that autism diagnosis,” she says. “Not one doctor ever said she was, and no one seemed to commit to one diagnosis. As of today, she has a global delay with sensory modulation.”
Cathy is frustrated. Frustrated by the lack of knowledge some pediatricians have about autism and developmental disabilities. She’s frustrated that there are still cases like her daughter’s that can go on that long without knowing what she is going through. “We’re fortunate,” says Joseph Gentile. “We can keep fighting for our kids and finding the right doctors. We have the means to do it, but there are so many other families that can’t.”
Equally motivated, Cathy and her husband bought and restored Utopia’s Paradise Theater, located in the Bronx. The theater serves as a studio and soundstage where Cathy says she will begin working on projects that will benefit and bring awareness to the autism and developmental disabilities community. “I’m writing a film called Alphabet Kids, which is about all these children,” Cathy explains.
The film will feature four separate stories, each taking viewers into the lives of different families, each presenting a different situation. “Autism is a horrible thing, you must be prepared for it,” she says. “If you can’t deal with it, you have to step away and learn how to deal with it.”
Cathy doesn’t give too much away, but says that her screenplay will draw from real life. She talks about a father who committed suicide because he couldn’t deal with his child’s disability. How a simple trip on an airplane could turn into a nightmare. How a new mom who has her whole life planned out is suddenly forced to realize that her life will have to be put on hold to understand her child’s disorder. “Each story will definitely be told separately. None of it will come together at the end; this isn’t Cinderella,” she says. “This is real life.”
Gentile says that Utopia’a Paradise Theater will also serve as a fundraising tool. He says that concerts and events that are held in the historic Bronx theater will benefit several charitable organizations. “We take the proceeds from our end we and donate them to different organizations,” he explains. “What we want to do is have specific fundraising concerts and we will be planning them in the very immediate future. A lot of what we will do will subliminally be for American families dealing with children who have disabilities.”
Cathy and Gentile have also set out to work on television programming for children. Several pilots have been scheduled to begin filming this year including Kidsorama, a educational show celebrating children and music in front of a live studio audience and a talk show featuring Cathy as a host, called Tea With You. “It’s a lot like The View, but a lot more grounded,” Gentile jokes. “It’s a really fun show, very real and a lot of diversity. It’s five girls who talk about women and family issues.”
Despite the couples’ continuing work in television they have dedicated themselves to helping autism and developmental disabilities. Their work hasn’t gone unnoticed. In November, the Association for the Help of Retarded Children (AHRC) will honor Cathy for her efforts and in September she was named as the national spokesperson for newly formed Autism United (AU). On September 12, she was on hand to announce AU’s first initiative, the Harvey Weisenberg Center, which bears the name of the New York State Assemblyman from Long Beach. Weisenberg has dedicated his life to helping parents advocate for children who are disabled. “The center will empower parents to speak for themselves and their children,” Cathy proclaimed at the press conference. “With the support of the larger community represented by the people gathered here we will create an important new asset for people with special needs.”
“I just want to give back now,” Cathy says. “Doing all this is a win-win situation for me. It’s something I always did before I even had children. It was my elective in 8th grade, to help children. I love working with children, and if I wasn’t an actor I’d be a teacher.”
Cathy also works at her children’s school, teaching different classes like music. She finds it hard pulling away from her children. Rarely do they want to be away too long and says that her kids look at her as a character. “My son calls me a mix between a cartoon and a comic strip, and I kind of like hearing that.” Cathy says her acting ability has gotten her through many rough days and whenever there is a moment where she can’t get through to her children she breaks into character. “It comes in quite handy, because I can do some great voices, like the witch form Hansel and Gretel. I’m a great storyteller, and my kids call me a ‘cool’ mom. I know I’m very entertaining and it shows, because my kids never want to leave my house and most of the time their friends are always over my house. I got aggravated once, but then I realized what a compliment it was that they always want to be here.”
What Cathy finds most amazing is watching her children deal with each other and how they pull for one another. Her son Joseph was always protective of Catherine in school. Knowing that she was different from other kids, Joseph would always worry about her and it got to be a distraction. “It got so bad we had to start worrying about his production,” Cathy explains. “He was constantly worried about where she was and how she was feeling and if someone was handling her the right way. When we finally realized that Catherine had to be in another school that would suit her needs better, we didn’t know how he would react, but he’s fine now.”
In 1998, Cathy co-starred in the movie Digging to China, which featured actor Kevin Bacon as a person with cerebral palsy. “He was so incredible in that,” Cathy says of Bacon. “It was Timothy Hutton’s first time directing and it was a wonderful script. It showed how one child can communicate with another child, who was in a grown up body. I see that now because of how my children gravitate towards any child and it doesn’t matter if they have a special need. Whether it’s autism, someone in a wheelchair, they understand to always wait before someone can have a chance to answer.
“The translation of a disability in a movie, at least in that one showed that children can all get along,” she adds. “It showed you that if you look at the innocence of a child, they will show you the right way to live in this world, their intuition and instincts on a person is usually right.”
Cathy says that there should be more movies that feature disabilities and believes that the industry will see more of it coming soon. “Look at the popularity of I am Sam with Sean Penn. That was a great movie,” she says. “I look for movies like that, I want to make movies like that. Some people are afraid to make movies like that.”
Movies are one way to bring awareness and she says that teaming up with organizations like Autism United will help her get more attention to what the autism community needs. “There are so many needs for this community,” she says. “Early intervention being one of the most important. We need people to know about programs that are out there to get their children diagnosed earlier. We have to fight to continue to make the medical community more aware of what we need from them. It’s up to the parent and its up to the doctors.”
Can this be accomplished?
“I hope so,” she says. “I hope we can make it happen. I hope I can enlist some friends in this effort and help as many people as we can and then some.
“Hopefully we’d like to help the world … is that big enough?”