Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art Read online

  Praise for Kiss Me Like a Stranger

  “The title came from Gilda Radner, his third wife, and one of the many friends, lovers, and colleagues about whom he writes with striking candor. . . .”

  —The New York Times

  “Wilder tells plenty of entertaining stories about his work with everyone, including Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols, Mel Brooks, and Zero Mostel . . . [it’s] a reflective and well-written meditation on the life of someone who has more on his mind than the next big part or belly laugh.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “I always knew Gene Wilder was a remarkable person, but I didn’t realize how remarkable until I read this brave, riveting book.”

  —Charles Grodin

  “It’s not an autobiography in the usual sense of the word. . . . It’s an honest, affecting look at his life.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Gene Wilder is not just a uniquely talented and lovable performer, he’s a gifted memoirist with a story to tell and a writerly commitment to emotional truth. The real delight lies in the prose—tight, funny, and fast as the breeze—and the insights about accident and fate that lodge in your mind long after the smile has left your lips.”

  —Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of Three Daughters

  “A wonderful addition to the entertainment memoir Gene pool.”

  —Library Journal

  “A book to cherish. Here is the real Gene . . . irrepressibly funny, wise, warmhearted, and honest. In sharing with us the most intimate details of his extraordinary life on-screen and off, Gene shows all of us how to embrace the unexpected, pursue our passion, and seize joy every day. Give this book to someone you want to kiss.”

  —Pat Collins, film critic

  KISS ME LIKE A STRANGER: MY SEARCH FOR LOVE AND ART. Copyright © 2005 by Gene Wilder. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Book design by Jonathan Bennett

  Photographs on pages 73, 79, 119, 157, and 171 courtesy of Photofest. All other photographs and memorabilia are from the collection of Gene Wilder. Photograph on page 163 © Steve Schapiro.

  “After a While,” pages 218 and 219, courtesy of Veronica A. Shoffstall.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilder, Gene, 1935–

  Kiss me like a stranger : my search for love and art / Gene Wilder.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-33706-X (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-33707-8 (pbk)

  EAN 978-0-312-33707-0

  1. Wilder, Gene, 1935– 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.W45888A3 2005

  791.4302'8'092—dc22

  [B]

  2004058475

  First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: March 2006

  1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  contents

  PROLOGUE

  1. FIRST MOVEMENT

  2. CAN A FEW WORDS CHANGE YOUR LIFE?

  3. “TAKE ME.”

  4. THE “DEMON” ARRIVES.

  5. MY HEART IS NOT IN THE HIGHLANDS.

  6. A YANK AT THE OLD VIC

  7. SHADES OF GRAY

  8. DON JUAN IN NEW YORK

  9. THE WORST OF TIMES, THE BEST OF TIMES

  10. MOTHER COURAGE

  11. A TASTE OF FREEDOM

  12. THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING!

  13. “FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST. THANK MARGIE WALLIS, I’M FREE AT LAST.”

  14. “SORRY I CAUGHT YOU WITH THE OLD LADY.”

  15. SECOND MOVEMENT: SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

  16. BLACK IS MY FAVORITE COLOR.

  17. “I HAVE A REASON—I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS.”

  18. NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  19. THE BIRTH OF A MONSTER

  20. LE PETIT PRINCE

  21. SHERLOCK HOLMES HAS A JEWISH BROTHER.

  22. CRISIS IN BLACK AND WHITE

  23. LEO BLOOM HAS HIS PICTURE TAKEN.

  24. SIDNEY POITIER AND I GO STIR–CRAZY.

  25. HANKY–PANKY WITH ROSEANNE ROSEANNADANNA

  26. I DON’T BELIEVE IN FATE.

  27. THIRD MOVEMENT

  28. COMEDIENNE—BALLERINA 1946–1989

  29. IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING.

  30. STOLEN KISSES

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  To Karen,

  without whom I would be

  floating like a cork in the ocean

  kiss me like a stranger

  PROLOGUE

  Suppose you’re walking out of the Plaza Hotel in New York City on a warm spring day. You breathe in the lovely fresh air as you step outside and walk down the red-carpeted stairs, saying a quick, “Hi, again!” to the uniformed doorman.

  You want to go directly across the street to Bergdorf’s Men’s Shop on Fifth Avenue, but the Plaza fountain is directly in your path, with people from all walks of life sitting on the ledge of the fountain, eating sandwiches in what’s left of their lunch hour, talking to their friends from the office, maybe flirting with some new acquaintance and whispering arrangements for a love tryst that night. Perhaps some are taking a short sunbath on this first beautiful day of the year or even sneaking in a quick snooze as they lean their backs against the famous fountain where Zelda Fitzgerald once jumped in fully clothed.

  You can get to the shop on Fifth Avenue by walking around the fountain on the path to your left, or by taking the path to your right. I believe that whichever choice you make could change your life. I’m sure everyone has had these mysterious brushes with irony, perhaps referring to them years later as “almost fate.” Here are a few of mine.

  chapter 1

  FIRST MOVEMENT

  1962—New York

  I walked into Marjorie Wallis’s small office on West Seventy-ninth Street. I was very nervous.

  “What do I call you?” I asked.

  “What do you want to call me?”

  “I heard Dr. Steiner call you Margie on the telephone . . . is that all right?”

  “Margie it is! Sit down.”

  She indicated the plain couch in front of me. There were no pictures on the walls. Margie sat in a comfortable-looking armchair, with an ottoman—which she wasn’t using—resting in front of her. Her face wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t stern, either.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” she asked.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

  “I want to give all my money away.”

  “How much do you have?”

  “. . . I owe three hundred dollars.”

  She looked at me silently for four or five seconds.

  “I see. Well, let’s get to work, and maybe by the time you have some money you’ll be wise enough to know what to do with it. In the meantime tell me about . . .”

  And then she asked me a lot of questions. “Your mother was how old? . . . How did you feel when the doctor said that? . . . Have you ever tried to blah, blah, blah?” I took so many long pauses before I answered each question that I thought she might throw me out, but she just sat there, with her feet up on the ottoman now, and waited. When I did start talking again, she made little notes on a small pad that rested on her lap.

  What I couldn’t understand was this: why on earth was I thinking about a fifteen-year-old girl named Seema Clark during all my long pauses in between Margie’
s questions? Seema kept popping into my head while I was talking about my mother and doctors and heart attacks and my Russian father and masturbation.

  I thought Seema was Eurasian when I met her the first time—she certainly didn’t look Jewish—but when we both came out of the synagogue together I realized that she must be Jewish. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I was only fifteen, but I had seen a lot of movies and I thought she looked like a very thin, teenage Rita Hayworth. I was her date when Seema had her fifteenth birthday party. There were eight or ten other kids at her house that night, all laughing their heads off at some wisenheimer who was “hypnotizing” one of the girls. I thought he was pretty stupid, but I enjoyed watching the cocky little faker who thought he knew how to hypnotize people because he’d read his uncle’s book on hypnosis.

  Seema held my hand while we watched the “hypnotist” go through his fake talk. I knew she really liked me. She looked so pretty that night, with a pink barrette in her hair and wearing a brand-new yellow angora sweater. Her mother served all of us birthday cake and some delicious coffee. When all the other kids had gone home, Mrs. Clark showed me the coffee can, because I had said how good the coffee tasted—it was A&P’s Eight O’clock Coffee—and then her mother said good night and left Seema and me alone.

  We sat on the couch in an almost-dark living room and started kissing. I was shy, but I didn’t want Seema to know how shy I really was, so I put on an act as if I were used to all this kissing in the dark with no one around. I thought that she was probably more experienced than I was and I decided that it was about time for me to feel a girl’s breast. Well, I can’t say, “I decided”—I was just going on what I’d heard from all the other boys my age, especially my cousin Buddy, who was nine months older than me.

  It took me about eight minutes to get my hand near the start of Seema’s breast—the hairs of her new angora sweater kept coming off in my fingers, which certainly didn’t help any. After another three or four minutes, I finally put my hand on about one-third of her breast. As soon as I did, she jerked away. My mouth went dry. She looked at me with such disappointment in her eyes and said, “You’re just like all the other boys, aren’t you?” I flushed so hot I thought I’d burst. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t say anything during all the kissing and creeping up the fake angora. Why didn’t she just say, “No,” or, “I don’t want you to do that,” or anything but what she did say? I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t at all like all the other boys, that I thought she would like what I was doing, that I thought she was waiting for me to do it. But I was too embarrassed to say any of those things. I just said, “I’m sorry, Seema,” and then wished her happy birthday and got out of there as fast as I could.

  Of course, this all happened in little pictures that popped into my head during the long pauses with Margie. The whole memory probably lasted only a few seconds. Margie’s voice suddenly burst in:

  “Where are you?”

  “. . . What do you mean?”

  “Lie down on the couch. You’re not as innocent as you pretend and Dr. Steiner assures me that you’re no dummy. I want you to start talking and tell me everything that crosses your mind—everything—however embarrassing or insignificant you think it is. I don’t know whether or not I can help you and I don’t know how many times you and I will be seeing each other in the future, but whether it’s one more time or several years . . . don’t ever lie to me.”

  chapter 2

  CAN A FEW WORDS CHANGE YOUR LIFE?

  Milwaukee

  I used to be Jerry Silberman. When I was eight years old, my mother had her first heart attack. After my father brought her home from the hospital, her fat heart specialist came to see how she was doing. He visited with her for about ten minutes, and then, on his way out of the house, he grabbed my right arm, leaned his sweaty face against my cheek, and whispered in my ear,

  “Don’t ever argue with your mother—you might kill her.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that, except that I could kill my mother if I got angry with her. The other thing he said was:

  “Try to make her laugh.”

  So I tried. It was the first time I ever consciously tried to make someone laugh. I did Jewish accents and German accents and Danny Kaye songs that I learned from his first album, and I did make my mother laugh. Every once in awhile, if I was a little too successful, she’d run to the bathroom, squealing, “Oh, Jerry, now look what you’ve made me do!”

  * * *

  Some people—when they step into the ring—lead with their left; some lead with their right. I always led with my sister.

  It was a Saturday night. I was eleven. My sister, Corinne, was sixteen and she was giving an acting recital at the Wisconsin College of Music, where her teacher, Herman Gottlieb, had his studio. It was a small auditorium stuffed with about two hundred people. While everyone sat and waited for the show to start, there was so much loud talking that I wondered how Corinne would stand it. When the lights started to fade, everyone talked louder for a few seconds. Then they all whispered. Then . . . darkness!

  A spotlight hit the center of the stage, and there was Corinne, wearing a full-length aqua gown. For the next twenty minutes she performed “The Necklace,” a short story by Guy de Maupassant that she had memorized. All eyes were on Corinne. The audience was listening to every word. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone applauded her at the end. I remember thinking that this must be as close to actually being God as you could get.

  I went up to Mr. Gottlieb and asked if I could study acting with him.

  “How old are you?” he asked. “Eleven.”

  “Wait till you’re thirteen. If you still want to study acting, I’ll take you on.”

  When my mother was in pain, the fat heart specialist came to our house. I say “fat” only because Dr. Rosenthal died of a heart attack a few years later, and even though I was very young, I instinctively associated his death with how many Cokes he drank whenever he came to our house. One day he came because my mother felt a terrible pressure in her chest. Dr. Rosenthal told me to go around the corner, where they were putting up a new house, steal a heavy brick, and then wrap the brick in a washcloth and place it on top of my mother’s chest, over her heart. It sounded crazy. I waited until all the workers had left the new house, at the end of the day, and then I picked up a good-sized brick, tucked it under my sweater, and walked home as fast as I could. I wrapped the brick in a washcloth and placed it on top of my mother’s chest.

  “Oh, honey, that feels so good.”

  In the months that followed I would substitute my head for the brick. I’d push my head down with both hands as hard as I could, and she liked that even more than the brick.

  One Sunday afternoon my dad dropped me off at the Uptown movie theater, so I could see a Sunday matinée. I didn’t tell him that I’d taken his flashlight out of the utility closet and hidden it in my jacket.

  After I paid the cashier and bought my popcorn and Milk Duds, I went into the theater, which was almost full. The picture had already started, but in those days most people were used to coming in after a movie started—they would stay until they saw a familiar scene in the next showing and then leave. This Sunday the movie was Double Indemnity, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. It was in black and white.

  I watched for about twenty minutes, but when it started getting mushy (kissing), I took the flashlight out of my jacket and began shining it onto the screen. When people looked around to see which punk was doing this, I shut the flashlight off, fast. When the audience settled down again, I switched the flashlight back on. I started making circles on the screen—my beam of light competing with the beam from the projector. I got such a feeling of joy from doing this, until the manager came down the aisle with a horrible look on his face and told me to come with him. I followed him into his office.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jerry Silberman. Please don’t tell my father.”

  “Give me t
he flashlight.”

  He took my father’s flashlight and kicked me out of the theater.

  It was drizzling outside. I felt ashamed, standing under the overhang in front of the theater, wondering whether or not to tell my dad about his flashlight and about the manager kicking me out. I decided it would be safer if I waited till my dad noticed the missing flashlight himself . . . and that might not happen for months. He was born in Russia but came to Milwaukee with his family when he was eleven. He wasn’t dumb, but he was very innocent, and I knew what I could get by with if I wanted to evade a situation.

  After I waited in the rain for an hour and ten minutes, my father drove up. I jumped into the car.

  “So—how was the movie?” he asked.

  “It was great, Daddy. It was really good.”

  I started taking acting lessons with Herman Gottlieb the day after my thirteenth birthday.

  * * *

  I was eleven when I learned about sex—from my cousin Buddy, naturally. We were both in a co-ed summer camp. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  “Oh, Buddy, what’re you talking about?”

  “It’s the truth! You put your poopy into her thing—honest to God.”