WILD ABOUT GENE
American actor who brilliantly conveyed “neurotic anxiety” in cinema classics
IN JUNE 2013, the actor Gene Wilder, who died this week aged 83, talked about his career in front of an audience at a Jewish cultural centre in New York. He seemed quite frail and perhaps had the beginnings of the Alzheimer’s disease that killed him but it was a fascinating talk. Asked what was the greatest misconception people had about him he said: “People think I’m a funny guy and I’m really not, except in films.” He wasn’t funny that evening but he was amusing and wry. He came across as very lovable, which felt right, not because he was old but because that is what captivated us about him on screen.
Wilder often quoted his friend and collaborator Mel Brooks, who said of him: “You’re a perfect victim. The wolves are around because they smell the sheep and you’re the sheep.” They were a marvellously contrasting cohesive couple — two dimensions of Jewish comedy: Brooks, the outrageous abrasive genius, Wilder, funny and vulnerable and never offensive. In Blazing
Saddles, the hysterical western full of sexual and racist jokes and Indian chiefs speaking Yiddish, written and directed by Brooks, Wilder is the Waco Kid, an alcoholic former gunslinger who gave up his guns when a six-year-old kid shot him in the backside. Soft-faced, soft-spoken, a broken man still miraculously quick on the draw, he alone in the film is a real character rather than a foulmouthed caricature.
In The Producers, that Everest of hysterical bad taste, Wilder’s Leo Bloom, the hyperneurotic account- ant, is reduced to nervous collapse by dancing Hitlers and the rampaging Zero Mostel. Even as Young Frank
enstein — Wilder’s concept, directed by Brooks — he was vulnerable and sympathetic with a decent supply of human emotions, though surrounded by grotesques (for example Marty Feldman). These films were made over 40 years ago and still look great today. Whoever decided to remake The Producers in 2005 was a
meshuggener. There will certainly not be a remake of The Frisco Kid, a film from 1979 — Wilder plays a rabbi who rides into trouble in the Wild West. Don’t go there!
If Danny Kaye had been younger he would probably have played Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka, as Wilder did in 1971. There is much about Gene Wilder that is reminiscent of Kaye — blondness, a certain tone of voice, even some facial expressions. As you would expect, Kaye was a hero of young Gene and his mother.
When he was eight years old his mother had a heart attack and when she came home from hospital the doctor told Gene not to get angry with her because it might kill her.
He also told him to make her laugh. Gene used to do Danny Kaye imitations for her and sing his songs, alongside his own imitations of European immigrants recently arrived at their local synagogue in Milwaukee. It was a good apprenticeship. Certainly it’s true that, in him, humour and sadness, fun and vulnerability always seem layered together.
He served two years in the army as an aide at a psychiatric unit in Pennsylvania because, “I imagined the things I would see there might relate more to acting than any of the other choices. I wasn’t wrong.” He always regarded himself as an actor not a comedian. In almost all his most successful films he has been acting alongside comics or aggressively comic performers — twice with the riotously manic Richard Pryor, in Sil
ver Streak and Stir Crazy. He disliked show business — “I like the show but not the business.” A private man, he tried to steer clear of interviews though he did become highly visible after the death from ovarian cancer of his third wife, the
Saturday Night Live comedian Gilda Radner, whose condition had been misdiagnosed and allowed to develop untreated. Hers was a long, painful and widely reported ordeal and he became a campaigner for cancer research.
In 2005, he spoke to the writer Isabel Pogrebin about religion. “Gilda was as Jewish as they come,” he said, “she was quite young but she kvetched like an old Jew. I had a barmitzvah, I don’t know why or to please whom. I feel very Jewish and I’m grateful to be Jewish but I don’t believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion.
He had no offspring and is outlived by his fourth wife. When the family announced his death they added an explanation as to why he had kept his Alzheimer’s secret: “so that countless young children who would smile and call out to him: ‘There’s Willy Wonka,’ would not have to be exposed to worry, disappointment or confusion. He simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world.”
THE DEATH of actor Gene Wilder at the age of 83 i n Connecticut on Monday brought forth a global outpouring of love and sadness. No surprise. Wilder starred in half a dozen acknowledged cinema classics. Classic movies become cultural touchstones for people. When film-goers remember the first time they saw a classic, they don’t just remember the movie. They remember how old they were, who they were with, what the world was like.
Several generations of film-goers have been having those memories this week when they think about Young
Frankenstein or Willy Wonka or Stir Crazy. Wilder disliked being thought of as a “comic” actor but his genius was for comedy of a very particular kind. He was part of a gifted generation of American Jewish performers and writers who became prominent in the late 1950s. Wilder was born on June 11, 1933. Joan Rivers was born three days earlier, Philip Roth three months before them, Woody Allen two years later.
All crossed the metaphorical ghetto into the wider world. They acknowledged their Jewishness but not their separateness from the rest of society and they found an audience in America at large.
Their anxieties about changing identity, assimilation, and the catastrophe of the Holocaust fuelled a manic, occasionally surreal, often scabrous form of humour. It was Jewish but wholly shaped by the American experience.
Wilder was always very clear about this. “I feel very Jewish and I feel very grateful to be Jewish. But I don’t believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion,” he told author Abigail Pogrebin in her book Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish.
The actor was born Jerry Silberman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father William manufactured novelty items. His mother Jeanne was a housewife. Wilder was formed by mid-20th century Jewish influences.
Shortly after his barmitzvah he was sent 2,000 miles away to Black-Foxe Military Institute in Los Angeles. He was beaten up and verbally abused daily for being Jewish. His parents took him out of the school and he went to a local school in Milwaukee, but he continued to endure regular antisemitic harassment.
Wilder acknowledged the importance of the therapy developed by the ultimate secular Jewish sage, Sigmund Freud, in getting him through psychological crises. There were many. His first two marriages, to actress and playwright Mary Mercier, in 1960, and Mary Joan Schutz, in 1967, ended in divorce. His third, to Gilda Radner ended in tragedy when she succumbed to ovarian cancer aged 42. Later came his own diagnosis with non-Hodgkins lymphoma which he survived via a stem cell transplant.
He studied acting privately with Lee Strasberg at the exclusive Actor’s Studio. Strasberg had been a founder of the Group Theatre in the 1930’s – wellspring of America’s mid 20th-century theatrical greatness — whose members were overwhelmingly secular Jews. He was highly selective in his choice of private students at the Actor’s Studio. Upon becoming a Studio member, Jerry Silberman changed his name. He chose Wilder to honour Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town, his favourite play. Gene was the name of the title character in his favourite novel, Look
Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe. Wilder became a jobbing New York actor in the early sixties. Neil Simon and Murray Schisgal were writing hugely successful comedies about being neurotic and anxious. The comedy clubs were full of Jewish stand-ups doing routines about being neurotic and anxious.
Wilder was brilliant at conveying neurotic anxiety but he was a serious actor, not a stand-up. He exemplified something Heinrich Heine, the great German Jewish poet, once said: “I try to tell my grief, and it all becomes comic.”
Watch him hyperventilating and clutching his blue blanket in The Produc
ers. It’s funny but his psychological pain is very real and very, very disturbing.
The Producers, made in 1968, was his first co-starring role in a film. Mel Brooks cast Wilder as Leo Bloom opposite Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystok.
The actor recalled for author Pogrebin, that filming The Producers was the moment in his life when he felt most Jewish. “Not while the camera was rolling, but while they [Brooks and Mostel] were talking. I identified with something that was Jewish. They weren’t talking about Jewish subjects. But I said to myself, ‘Yes, I’m part of that; I’m part of what they’re doing, and how they sound, and how they’re thinking. That’s in me.’”
The Producers was nominated for two Oscars and won one. Wilder’s film career benefited, however, from the historical moment.
The film business reflected the wider changes in society. Ethnic was in. Natural was in. People didn’t have to surgically alter their looks if they wanted leading roles. Dustin Hoffman and Woody Allen became unlikely film stars. There was plenty of leading man work for Wilder including Willy Wonka and the Chocolate
Factory. Just like The Producers, that film also became a classic but on release did poorly at the box office.
Wilder hooked up again with Brooks to co-write Young Frankenstein (“It’s pronounced, Fronken-steen”). The pair were nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film made money and then they made Blazing Sad
dles which made even more money. It also began Wilder’s relationship with Richard Pryor, who was a writer on the film. The pair made four films together including another classic: Stir Crazy.
In the last decades of his life, Wilder retreated to Stamford Connecticut where he lived with his fourth wife, Karen (née Boyer). He wrote several novels but his life’s work was long finished when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease three years ago. It is a body of work that will continue to be watched with pleasure and shape people’s memories of a particular moment in American and Jewish history for many decades to come. His fourth wife, Karen, survives him.
Gene Wilder: born June 11, 1933. Died August 29