Gene Wilder does not believe in fate. “I always thought that when people talked about fate, they actually meant they created their own life and then called it fate,” he says. “I think that’s a cop-out.”
To Wilder, a life is defined by a series of simple actions and decisions. That a choice can later be considered life-altering is immaterial to the sometimes accidental nature of its original circumstance.
The Stamford, Conn., resident calls these choices “the ironies in my life,” and describes many of them in his autobiographical “Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search For Love and Art” (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95).
Among them is a chance meeting with Mel Brooks. At the time, it was brief, apparently inconsequential. But with the benefit of hindsight, the scene described assumes greater meaning. Readers know that the comic films produced by their eventual collaboration, considered outstanding and inimitable, make this one of many interesting little accidents.
“Think about it,” he says. “If I hadn’t been miscast in (the dramatic play) ‘Mother Courage,’ I wouldn’t have met Anne Bancroft, and she wouldn’t have introduced me to her boyfriend, Mel Brooks.
“If I hadn’t turned down ‘See no Evil, Hear no Evil’ three times, I wouldn’t have tried to rewrite it, gone to the New York League for the Hard of Hearing and met my future wife.”
Wilder might have to forgive some reader circumspection. After all, a comic icon’s accidental choices are the stuff that sells books, not to mention the long list of names he can drop with authority.
But there is a lot more here than what is already known.
It is an account that is moving and introspective, a portrait that reveals much of the private Wilder, the man behind the movie star.
He writes intimately, at once clever, sad and angry. His candor is unmistakable but subtle, giving his voice prompt presence in a reader’s mind, like an old friend sharing a confidence.
“I had been asked to write a book four or five times over the past 15 years,” he says. “I had a feeling for what I wanted to write, which was my search for lasting love and my search to understand the art of acting. But I did not know how to structure it.” Personal sadness led to a public opportunity.
“Two years ago, someone close to me got ill so I started writing down the accidental things that happened in the course of my life. After a little while, I realized I had found a structure. It started to pour out. I wrote for a year and eight months. I’m very happy with it because I found a way in presenting it.” His way was to tell the truth as he sees it.
Born Jerry Silberman, he describes his childhood in Milwaukee, his mother’s illness and death at a young age, the abuse he suffered at military school, the compulsions he battled as a student actor, the difficulties of his early marriages and the wrenching truths he learns about himself with the help of a psychoanalyst.
Readers learn, for the first time, of the profound and sometimes angry sadness that defined his marriage to Gilda Radner and the ovarian cancer that took her life.
Mixed with tales of personal struggle, Wilder calmly tells little-known stories about his popular work, describes his studies in acting and discloses his early ambition to become a dramatic actor, first at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, England, and later in New York, under Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof.
“When I got to the Actors Studio and studied with Lee Strasberg, a lot of the things that were confusing to me cleared up. I can’t tell you that everything is clear now, but enough that I can go deep into the acting.” In his book, Wilder also highlights contrast, sometimes using recalled dialogue for informal, almost entrusting effect.
“I like opposites,” he says, the kind that gently underscore, through sometimes bittersweet humor, his honest perceptions of what is shared in love and loss, success and failure, health and sickness, good fortune and tragedy.
“It makes it more palatable for people to accept the saddest parts by not making them so sad they can’t get a laugh, too. At the height of the pain that Gilda was going through, there were funny things, too,” he says. How Wilder searches to understand the work behind his famed humor makes up an essential component to his questions about the craft of comedy acting.
“I wanted to understand how to make my performances more real, even though I was doing comedy,” Wilder explains. “I mention this because of Charlie Chaplin, who said the more realistic the comedy, the funnier it would be.”
In his book, Wilder recalls seeing Chaplin’s “City Lights” not long after graduating from high school. “More than any other movie I’ve ever seen, ‘City Lights’ made the biggest impression on me as an actor. It was funny, then sad, then both at the same time.” We know it works.
On the page, Wilder also is as laugh-out-loud funny as hoped and expected, sharing tales with an almost imperceptible wink, an inside joke of sorts that is true to his public persona and his hilarious turns as Leo Bloom, The Waco Kid, Willy Wonka, Dr. Frederick Frankenstein and George Caldwell to Richard Pryor’s Grover Muldoon in “Silver Streak.” “It’s about letting the humor come out naturally,” he says. “When I write, I do it with some sense of humor involved. The humor is a constant part of me. I don’t think of it beforehand. I let it come out.”
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