by Gene Wilder
Later, after rehearsing till 5:00 A.M., I had just gotten into bed when I heard a knock at my door.
“It’s me,” Rita whispered.
I opened the door, and there she was, in her nightgown, looking as beautiful as a fantasy. She got into bed with me, and we started kissing. After about four minutes she said, “What do you think would happen if I touched you . . . here?” pointing to the bulge underneath my pajamas. Before I could answer, we both heard Reginald Goode calling out from somewhere on the lawn, near my bedroom door.
“Rita . . .”
He wasn’t hollering, and he wasn’t whispering. It sounded more like a father calling out to his daughter who had stayed out too late one night, but now it was time for her to come home. I felt that he didn’t know for sure if she was actually with me but that he assumed she was. Rita got under the covers and wiggled down towards the bottom of the bed, so that if Mr. Goode did burst in, he wouldn’t see her. I was scared to death. I do mean death—I imagined a shotgun.
“Rita?” he called again.
But he didn’t knock on my door, which I was terrified he was going to do. He listened for another minute or ninety seconds. While I held my breath, I could hear him breathing—he was that close. And then he walked away. After three or four minutes Rita jumped out of bed, took a quick peek outside, and then ran across the lawn to the big house, just as the sun was coming up. Mr. Goode never brought up this incident to me.
Margie interrupted. (She rarely did, but we were now in our second year together, and I was used to it.)
“Now wait a minute, Mister Wilder. . . .” (She started using that little twist on Mister to emphasize whatever comic irony she was about to “epiphanize” me with.)
“. . . Did you fondle her breasts?”
“No.”
“Did she ever suck you?”
“No.”
“Did you ever fuck her?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t have a reason that makes sense.”
“Then give me a reason that doesn’t make sense.”
“. . . I thought it was wrong. I don’t mean for anyone else, just me. I think I might have enjoyed it too much.”
“Why would it be wrong if you enjoyed it too much?”
I lay motionless for almost a minute, searching for the answer, but I didn’t know the answer.
Margie wrote something in her pad.
NO TIME FOR COMEDY
When the season at the Reginald Goode Theater ended, Corinne and I went to New York and saw Death of a Salesman, starring Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Even after I had started studying acting with Mr. Gottlieb, I didn’t know that acting could be this real—it was as if what I was watching was actually happening. Until that night I had thought often about being a comedian, mostly because I had seen Danny Kaye in Up in Arms and then Jerry Lewis on television and then—for me, the king of them all—Sid Caesar, on Your Show of Shows. But after seeing Death of a Salesman, I had no more thoughts of being a comedian—I wanted to be an actor; perhaps a comic actor, but an actor, not a comedian.
I went back to Milwaukee and made a one-hour adaptation of Death of a Salesman. I played Lee J. Cobb’s part, of course—a sixteen-year-old Willy Loman—and, along with two of my acting friends from school, we performed at churches and women’s clubs all over Milwaukee and then in front of two thousand students at my high school. I also began reading An Actor Prepares, by Constantine Stanislavsky.
One afternoon, while we were performing at some women’s club, I came to the scene where Willy Loman is trying to plant seeds in his backyard at night. I was very relaxed. I don’t think there was any tension in my body or my mind. There was no actual earth, of course, only a wooden floor, but when I started planting . . .
ME (AS WILLY LOMAN): Carrots . . . quarter inch apart . . .
Suddenly I was in a backyard, not an auditorium, planting seeds. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I heard everything that I was saying and what the other actors were saying. I knew I was acting in a play . . . but I also knew that I wasn’t acting.
Corinne had gone to the University of Iowa during my high-school years. It was reputed to have one of the five best theater departments in the country. I drove from Milwaukee to visit Corinne in Iowa City several times. We’d go to a football game together, and then I’d see her in one of the university productions. When I was seventeen, I saw her play the part of Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest. After the show I met her stage director, whom I liked very much. He looked at me for a second and then said, “When are we gonna get this fella?”
Corinne was invited to a party that someone was giving after the show. She told the host that she would like to bring her kid brother along. We walked into an old Victorian house, stuffed with college students. There were all kinds of things to eat and drink. Corinne introduced me to her roommate, Mary Jo, who had the most original lips I had ever seen—except perhaps for those of the French actress Jeanne Moreau, whom I had seen in a movie called The Lovers. She and Jeanne Moreau must have traded lip secrets. I wished that Mary Jo was going to my high school so that I could date her, but since she was a college student and I was what my father would have called “a high-school pisher,” I honestly didn’t think she would give me the time of day after we were introduced. I wasn’t particularly handsome, and I certainly wasn’t very experienced—especially when it came to the opposite sex—but, to my surprise, Mary Jo stayed with me during the whole party.
We sat down on a small sofa and ate hors d’oeuvres and watched everyone else in the room either kissing or drinking beer, or both. I don’t know if I kissed Mary Jo first or if she kissed me—maybe it was both at the same time—but we started kissing. And we kept on kissing. I don’t remember anything we said to each other—I just remember the kissing and the look in her eyes, where a small beam of light was reflected from a street lamp. When the party broke up, we said good-bye.
I slept in my used car that night and drove back to Milwaukee the next morning. The memory of Mary Jo’s eyes stayed in my dreams for a long time.
______
As a high-school graduation present, my mother and father let me go to New York to see plays, provided I stayed at an inexpensive hotel. The old Taft Hotel on Fiftieth and Sixth Avenue fit the bill.
I saw Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Carol Channing. During her performance I was particularly curious how she could keep using her throat to make the guttural sounds she used, in her talking and singing, without going hoarse. After the show I stood at the stage door with a few other people, waiting for her to come out. When she did, she signed some autographs and then came up to me, expecting me to give her a program to sign. I don’t know where I got the nerve to say it: “Miss Channing—does it hurt your throat when you talk and sing in that special way that you do?”
She looked at me as if I were some kind of country bumpkin and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She gave me an autograph. I thanked her, and she left.
One evening, instead of seeing a play, I went to the Paris movie theater and saw Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. 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.
That fall I went straight off to the University of Iowa, acting in the first production of the year, The Winslow Boy, directed by Corinne’s director, whom I liked so much and who had said, “When are we gonna get this fella?”
chapter 4
THE “DEMON” ARRIVES.
I suppose that everyone has had to wrestle with a demon at some time in their life. My Demon came out of hiding on the first day of spring, during my freshman year. It came out without warning, like a sudden eclipse of the sun—not in the disguise of alcohol abuse or drugs or gambling or sexual perversion—nothing like that. My Demon came
out in the form of a horrible compulsion to pray. I say “horrible” because I didn’t want to pray—I had to pray, wherever I was, even though I didn’t know what I was supposed to be praying for.
When the compulsion came upon me, I would pray in front of whichever building I was about to enter for my next class. I would speak to God, out loud, but I tried to move my lips as little as possible when people passed by because I was afraid they’d think I was another one of those poor souls who hadn’t bathed or changed clothes for a week, who usually smelled of urine as they mumbled up and down busy streets, talking to God, or the Devil, oblivious of everyone around them. I was excruciatingly aware of everyone around me, but I thought that if I were truly humble, then the presence of all these passersby shouldn’t bother me. I kept on mumbling softly, trying to find out—as I prayed—what terrible thing I could possibly have done for which I needed God’s forgiveness.
The craziness reached a point where, one morning, I plastered down my curly hair with Vaseline, just to prove how truly humble I was. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a freak. I was so embarrassed I didn’t know how I could leave the house and go to class . . . but I did. I walked into my theater history class and sat next to my lunch pal, Betty Kanzell. She used to make fun of me if I missed breakfast and she heard my stomach gurgling, but on this morning she just kept staring at me.
BETTY: What the hell did you do to your hair?
ME: I’m just trying something. I’ll tell you later.
BETTY: It looks horrible! Why did you do that?
ME: I told you—I’m just trying something. I’ll tell you later.
And then one day—just like that, as if a motor or an electric switch had been turned off—the compulsion stopped. The Demon was gone. I felt as if I had just finished running in a long race, exhausted but exhilarated, and could now be a normal person again.
But three or four days later the Demon returned. The pattern repeated itself so often that I felt as Dr. Jekyll must have felt when he could no longer control the comings and goings of Mr. Hyde. I never knew how long each episode would last. Three days? A week? Two weeks? I never knew what set off the compulsion. The only small clue I had was wondering, every once in awhile, why I should have the right to possess money—if I should ever acquire any—when there were people all over the world who were dying of starvation.
Being on stage was the thing that saved me from myself. When I was in a play, I was safe. I did four plays in a row that first year, and then, for the fifth production, I was cast as Willy Loman’s son, Biff, in Death of a Salesman . . . the play that had changed my life when I was sixteen years old.
On opening night the auditorium was packed. We had rehearsed for four weeks, and now I was lying in my “upstairs bedroom”—onstage—waiting for the cue for my first entrance. I didn’t want to pray. “Not tonight, dear God, please!” Maybe the Demon forced his way in because it was this particular play. As I waited for my cue, I kept thinking that I could shut him out in plenty of time . . . but I couldn’t; the fear of not praying overpowered me, even though it was a matter of seconds before my entrance. I saw both the play and my brain falling apart. Then, somehow, the obligation to the audience and Arthur Miller and my memory of Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock became more important to me than God. I heard my cue, said my first line . . . and I was safe for the remainder of the play. Years after that, I still carried the inexplicable conviction that once I stepped onto the stage, they couldn’t get me (whoever the hell “they” were) and that I was safe . . . so long as the curtain was up.
I drove home for the Easter break. My mother was so happy to see me that I thought she’d burst. She was thrilled that I was going to be home for ten whole days. She laughed so much at my silly jokes that she peed in her pants again. “Now look what you’ve made me do, Jerry.”
After dinner I found her in the living room, sitting on the couch and weeping quietly. I sat beside her. “What, Mama? What’s the matter?” She said, “In nine more days you’ll be gone.”
A little later, at about seven o’clock, I said I was going to take a short walk around the neighborhood. It was still light outside, and I wanted to get some fresh air. After walking several blocks—with the Demon pounding at my consciousness, trying to get in—I found myself at an open field on the outskirts of town—a field I used to play in only a few years before. The Demon knew where he was leading me. I knelt down on the hard earth and started praying.
We were never a particularly religious family when I was growing up, in the sense of prayers at home or rituals, other than going to my grandparents for a meal on Passover and going to the synagogue on the high holidays. Our religion was hugging and kissing each other—a boy being unashamed to kiss his father on the lips and parents who showed affection in front of anyone. Our only doctrine had been “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” So why did the Demon invade my psyche when I was eighteen years old? My only hope, as I prayed in that field, was to get rid of him once and for all. I covered all topics—everything and everyone whom I could possibly have wronged, including God, of course—and I asked for forgiveness. But in another part of my brain, I was screaming, “FORGIVENESS FOR WHAT?” I had no idea, but the strength of that absurdity couldn’t pierce the armor of my compulsion. When I finished praying, I got up and walked home.
My mother, my father, and my pregnant sister, Corinne, were all waiting in the living room, dressed in their robes. From the expression on their faces, I thought that someone had died. My mother started crying. My father spoke first:
“We called the police—they just left here. Do you know what time it is? It’s three o’clock in the morning! Where were you? What in God’s name were you doing?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say, “I was praying, Daddy—I was lying in a field, praying to God to forgive me.” And if he had said, “Forgive you for WHAT?” I would have said, “I don’t know!” and he would have say, “For eight hours? Are you nuts?” . . . and he would have been right. So I mumbled something about having fallen asleep in a field because I was so tired. Then I apologized to all of them and went to my bedroom.
chapter 5
MY HEART IS NOT IN THE HIGHLANDS.
I went to Europe that summer, traveling in whichever was the cheapest class on the Queen Elizabeth (the original one). It was only $360.00 round trip. I thought a change of everything might help me.
We were four men in a very small cabin. One of them—an Englishman who was returning from India—told me about a heavenly place in the Highlands of Scotland, called the Isle of Skye . . . “just goats and sheep, eating their way through the small mountains. Plenty of bed-and-breakfast places to stay in.” After I arrived in London, I decided to go to the Isle of Skye.
The little village of Portree sat at the edge of the water, where small boats came to dock. It was heavenly. Untouched. A simple place of original purity.
Up the cobblestoned street, near the beautiful old post office, stood a small outdoor urinal for travelers who had just arrived. I went in to relieve myself. Scribbled on the wall, in large black letters that faced me as I peed, I saw:
FUCK YOU
On my way back to London, I had to stop overnight in the town of Inverness, which was considered the entrance to the Highlands. After the sun went down, I wandered through the town, eating some fish-and-chips, and then returned to my small hotel room. I got on my knees and prayed for my usual request, which was to be forgiven for something that I didn’t know I did, and then I took out a notepad and wrote my first poem.
Across three thousand miles of sea
and through strange England’s smiling,
and into a wee Scots Highland town
there is a lad who’s crying.
Oh fool the world, he could, he could,
a man at twenty years . . .
but all alone in that Highland town
there is a boy in tears.
In my senior year at Iowa, I played John Proctor in Ar
thur Miller’s The Crucible. During the dress rehearsal, near the end of the play, I was standing in “a prison” and being asked to sign my name to a false document. My subconscious took over again—as it had once before, when I was sixteen, playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. I suddenly burst out with the lines: “BECAUSE IT IS MY NAME! BECAUSE I CANNOT HAVE ANOTHER IN MY LIFE!”
I’m sure every actor who has played John Proctor has burst out with great force—fake or real—when saying those lines, but they came out of me with so much emotion that it startled me and everyone else who was in the theater. Where the emotion came from, I hadn’t a clue. Not at that time, anyway.
My wife in the play was a lovely actress named Joan. We had a date almost every Saturday night, in the home where she baby-sat for the same family. When the baby fell asleep, Joan and I would nestle into an overstuffed chair and watch George Goble on television. We kissed during the commercials. No breasts, no penis. Joan was a good actress and a very good singer. She said she was going to go to New York right after college, to “try her luck.” Each time I kissed her good night, I’d say, “See you in New York!”
chapter 6
A YANK AT THE OLD VIC
After I graduated from Iowa in 1955 I got accepted at the Old Vic Theatre School, in Bristol, England. I wanted to go there because I felt deficient in all the physical techniques and the Old Vic offered courses in singing, movement, voice and speech, ballet exercise, Swedish gymnastics, and fencing. I took my Stanislavsky and my compulsion with me. I’d been acting since I was thirteen and praying compulsively since I was eighteen. I started to wonder if the compulsion would be with me for the rest of my life. Pain, then pleasure; pleasure, then pain.
