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

by Gene Wilder

  In Uta’s class I did a scene from a Kafka short story with a lovely girl named Jessie. The work was good, but Jessie was better. She became my first actual girlfriend. I suppose it happened because we got to know each other before there was any physical intimacy. She worked as a freelance fashion designer, so we would rehearse at all hours, and then have either lunch or dinner together—something very inexpensive. We also laughed a lot. I couldn’t afford my tiny loft any longer—cheap as it was—so Jessie asked me to move in with her.

  Physically, it was “Heaven on a stick”—for me, since I was the stick. But I didn’t know how to make her as happy as she was making me—how to touch her, where to touch her, with my finger, with my tongue. Eventually her frustration drove us apart. I felt like an imbecile again.

  The compulsion came and went, but not so often anymore, and not in the same way. Now it would take something special to set it off, and it was always something I’d read or a picture I’d seen—someone who was doing something noble and unselfish to help others, and usually the noble person was making a sacrifice. Compulsion is doing; obsession is thinking. Instead of compulsive praying, the Demon—when he did come—took the form of obsessive thinking.

  BEING A PROFESSIONAL MEANS YOU GET PAID.

  I got my first professional acting job playing the Second Officer in Herbert Berghof’s production of Twelfth Night, at the Cambridge Drama Festival. We performed in a huge tent alongside the Charles River. Herbert wanted me, I’m sure, because he needed a good fencing choreographer for the comic duel. And I was a good one.

  Then the famous Cuban director José Quintero asked me to stay on and do the fencing choreography for Macbeth, with Jason Robards, Jr., and Siobhan McKenna. During rehearsals—when Mr. Robards was exhausted after a heavy emotional scene—he’d sit in the theater and watch the other actors rehearse scenes he wasn’t in, while he tried to catch his breath. It was during those short rest periods that I would go over the choreography of his sword fights, each of us holding a pencil instead of a sword, and going through all the movements in miniature.

  chapter 9

  THE WORST OF TIMES, THE BEST OF TIMES

  When I returned to New York, I got a job teaching fencing at the Circle in the Square Theater . . . forty dollars a week, under the table.

  I also got a job working for “Chauffeurs Unlimited: We Drive Your Car.” I earned two dollars an hour, plus tips. The owner of the company had polio and conducted all business from his apartment. He knew I was studying or rehearsing almost every day, and he told me that I could refuse any job, anytime, if it interfered with my “real” work. More than that I couldn’t ask. The clients would usually want to go to the theater and then to some restaurant for dinner afterwards, so after I left them at their theater I drove to the HB Studio and watched an acting class for a couple of hours. I met Mary at one of these classes.

  Mary was English. I’m always drawn to English people, man or woman—I suppose because of my days at the Bristol Old Vic. Besides being English, Mary was also beautiful—in classical terms. I don’t mean sexy—I wasn’t at all physically attracted. Her beauty was fragile, in the way that Greta Garbo was fragile and beautiful. She was also a wonderful actress. To top it off, she was also a painter, so the cards were stacked against me.

  After we had seen each other several times at the HB Studio, she heard that I had to get out of my temporary apartment. Mary said that I could stay with her for a few days, until I found something I could afford. What fools these mortals be. I moved in with Mary.

  She had twin beds, at right angles to each other. One night, after all the lights were out, I heard a gentle invitation to join her in bed. I thought that she would think that I didn’t find her attractive, which of course was the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings in that way. So I joined her. I wouldn’t say the rest was history . . . although in a way it was.

  Several days later I saw an ad for a studio apartment that sounded very reasonable. I told Mary that I was going to look at it. Tears came to her eyes.

  “Why do you have to go?”

  “Well . . . what do you mean? You said I could stay with you for a few days, till I could find something else. . . . Don’t you remember?”

  “But why leave?”

  “But I have to find my own place, Mary.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think it’s healthy this way—I mean, emotionally—for either of us.”

  “Don’t you like me?”

  “Of course I like you. . . . What are you talking about?”

  The tears flowed from her eyes like raindrops.

  “So why do you have to go?”

  I did look at that apartment; it was terrible. Sunlight got lost trying to find its way in. No wonder it was so cheap.

  Several days later, while Mary and I were having dinner, I got a phone call from a friend of mine from class. He told me that his girlfriend was pregnant.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’m going to marry her,” he said. “I think I have to.”

  After I hung up, I told Mary about the call, and she said, “You’d be out of here faster than a speeding bullet if that ever happened to us.” What possessed me, I don’t know—some kind of idiotic gallantry, I suppose—but I answered, “No I wouldn’t.” Mary stared at me for several seconds. I held her gaze. Then she came over and kissed me. We were engaged that night.

  Mary worked at the British Information Service in Rockefeller Center. I would meet her during her tea break in the afternoons, and we’d have a quick kiss. I thought, perhaps, married life could be wonderful.

  We were married that July. I borrowed a friend’s old Buick, and we drove to a justice of the peace in Suffern County, New York.

  After the four-minute ceremony—a policeman and a postal worker were our witnesses—we drove to Mystic, Connecticut, for our honeymoon. We were no sooner out of the justice’s driveway than the battles began: which route to take—inland or the coast, which diner to stop at for breakfast, which music to listen to, which motel to stop at that night, which restaurant to have dinner in. It wasn’t a romantic honeymoon; it never was romantic from that time on.

  WHAT DO ACTORS WANT?

  Apart from fame and fortune and all the whipped cream that goes with them, which very few actors ever achieve—what do actors really want, artistically? To be great actors? Yes, but you can’t buy talent, so it’s best to leave the word “great” out of it—it just gets you into trouble. I think to be believed—onstage or on-screen—is the one hope that all actors share. Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn’t yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?

  I’d been studying with Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen for three years now—two of them while I was still in the army—but I felt that there was something basic missing, something less intellectual than what they offered. I wanted to know how to reach that area of the subconscious that I had reached, by accident, in Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.

  Stanislavsky called two of his main tools Actions and Objectives, and that’s what I was being taught—that the character you’re playing must want something (an Objective) and then he needed Actions to accomplish his Objective. Just as an example, let’s suppose that I’m really smitten with the beautiful Frenchwoman who lives upstairs and that I desperately want her to love me. To achieve my Objective, I might:

  1. Try to nonchalantly hold her hand when we meet on the street.

  2. Say something in French as we pass each other on the stairs.

  3. Affect a limp as we meet on the sidewalk, in hopes that she’ll now look at me in a special way.

  4. Invite her to dinner in my apartment, but before she arrives, arrange piles of her favorite flower in every place where she might sit.

  I was exhausting myself with Actions and Objectives, and I didn’t know if the problem lay in my shortcomings or the process itself. Twenty seconds before I was about to do a scene in class, I would still
be searching for my Objective, thinking that if only I could find the right one, it would solve all my acting problems. I even started thinking that the greater my Objective, the greater my acting would be.

  One of my closest friends was—and still is—Charles Grodin. He had recently started studying with Lee Strasberg. When we were both on unemployment, Chuck and I used to meet on summer evenings, drink our Pepsis, and walk along the East River, talking about life and love—but mostly about acting. One night I asked Chuck what Strasberg said about Actions and Objectives. He said he’d never heard him mention those words. A month later I began studying with Lee Strasberg in his private class.

  STRASBERG’S CLASS

  Each class started in the same way, with “sense memory” exercises, in which you tried to recall one of your sharpest memories of smell, hearing, taste, sight, or touch.

  Every Thursday afternoon six students, out of thirty in the class, would sit in chairs onstage and try to get into a relaxed position—a position in which you could possibly fall asleep—while the remainder of the class was watching. In the first weeks we all started out with an exercise that was very simple, such as holding a cup of hot coffee or tea, trying to feel the weight of the cup, and then actually taking a drink . . . except of course that there was no cup, only the imaginary one you were holding, which was filled with imaginary hot coffee or tea that you were trying to taste.

  Then we advanced to recalling some physical pain. I sat on my chair, and after I felt relaxed, I imagined that I was sitting in a dentist’s chair, trying to recall having my tooth drilled. In this exercise I was more successful than any of the others, perhaps because I had had so much experience in the dentist’s chair. After three or four minutes of recalling that drill—how it looked and how it smelled and even how it tasted as it bore its way into my tooth—I felt the pain so sharply that tears came to my eyes. Now I understood what a sense memory was.

  Of course, the whole idea of the thing was not to be able to recall hot tea or a dentist’s drill, but rather to recall something that could be used on stage in other ways. For example: You’re in a play, on the witness stand, accused of a murder that you didn’t commit. The prosecuting attorney is grilling you. You’re in the hot seat, so to speak. If the actual situation and the author’s words don’t start your emotional motor going, you might try a sense memory of being in a steam bath—feeling the heat and tasting the salt as the sweat pours out of you—so long as you avoid any giveaway physical actions that are strictly steam bath behavior. Hopefully, the audience will see someone who seems to be sweating bullets because of the questions the prosecuting attorney is asking.

  During these months in Strasberg’s classes, I used to sneak into the balcony of The Actors Studio and watch him give critiques to members. A very talented actor named Gerald Hiken had just done his first scene for Lee Strasberg. After the scene was over, Strasberg said, “Tell us what you were working on.” Gerald said, “I just wanted to show you how I normally work—using Actions, Objectives, Conditions, Obstacles . . . all the things I was taught in classes with Uta Hagen.”

  Then Strasberg illuminated the mystery I had been wrestling with for many years. He said, “You did very well, Gerald, because we got it. We could see everything you worked on—all the Actions and Objectives and all the rest of it. But at the Studio we believe that if you have a relaxed body and a relaxed mind, and if you can believe that the situation the character is in is actually happening to you, then all those other things you were talking about are going to happen by themselves, only not in an intellectual way, but in a more natural, organic way. And if they don’t, then we have certain tools we use that might help you. But they’re not intellectual tools.”

  These critiques that I snuck in to hear were for professional, working actors. Now more than ever, I wanted to get into the Studio.

  THE ACTORS STUDIO

  To get into the Studio you had to pass a final audition, judged by Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and Elia Kazan. At least two out of those three had to vote yes. No discussion. In those days, it was very difficult to become a member.

  Mary got into the Studio in the May finals. Six months later she did a scene with me for the January finals. I didn’t do a comedy scene, of course—I was too stupid to realize my strengths. Instead, I did a dramatic scene from a short story. But there was a certain innocence about the way I played the scene, and I think it was that quality that won the jury over. I passed the audition. Only two people out of twelve hundred got into the Studio that January.

  A few days later I became curious to find out how the three judges voted. One evening after I finished rehearsing a scene at the Studio, I peeked into the secretary’s unlocked desk: Cheryl Crawford and Elia Kazan voted yes . . . but not Strasberg.

  I had to choose a name, fast, before being introduced to all the members of the Studio. I didn’t think “Jerry Silberman in Macbeth” had the right ring to it.

  I went to my sister and brother-in-law’s apartment for dinner. With them was a screenwriter friend of theirs by the name of David Zelag Goodman. He talked so fast that, as I listened to him, I had the urge to gently wipe the foam from his mouth with a hanky. When David heard that I needed a stage name, he started with A and worked his way through the alphabet, ripping off names faster than I thought anyone could think and speak at the same time. When he got to W and said, “Wilder,” the bell went off . . . Thornton Wilder . . . Our Town. I wanted to be “Wilder.”

  After settling on the last name, I knew that I wanted only one syllable for my first name. “Gene” came from Look Homeward Angel, by Thomas Wolfe. The hero’s name was Eugene, but everyone who loved him called him Gene.

  There was another reason I chose Gene as a first name. When I was a little boy, during World War II, there was a big family dinner for a distant relative who had just flown in from Europe on a three-week leave after flying thirty-three missions over Germany. He was wearing his tattered leather flight jacket, and he was very handsome, and his name was Gene. I had never heard Gene used as a man’s name before.

  Margie made her usual timely interruption.

  “By the way, what was your mother’s name?”

  I felt like the biggest dummy in New York. After an embarrassed pause I finally said, “Jeanne.”

  On my first morning as a member of The Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg addressed the audience of actors: “The second actor who passed, and who is now a member of The Actors Studio, is—”

  Strasberg was used to calling me Jerry Silberman in his private class. He looked down at the white index card he was holding and then said.

  “Gene Wilder!”

  As everyone applauded, I lifted myself halfway off my seat and gave a little nod.

  “NO SIR!” Strasberg bellowed. “Here, if we’re going to take a bow, we take a bow! I’ll start again.” He repeated, “Gene Wilder!”

  I stood up, tall, and acknowledged the applause from an audience made up of so many actors I had seen in movies and on television.

  My first scene at The Actors Studio was from a short story by J. D. Salinger called “For Esmé, with Love and Squalor.” When the scene was over, Strasberg said a few words that stuck in the artistic half of my brain:

  “We know you’re sensitive. You’re always sensitive. You’re too goddamn sensitive! So you don’t have to show us that you’re sensitive. Show us some other colors—something we don’t know.”

  Then he said, “When you were standing at the refrigerator in your scene, trying to decide whether you should pick up the telephone . . . something very interesting was starting to happen . . . and then you just let it drop. Why’d you do that?”

  “I knew I could act that part of the scene, Lee. That’s my kind of stuff, so I didn’t work on it. I thought I should concentrate on what I didn’t know how to do.”

  He said, “I got news for you: If you don’t know how you’re going to act some part of the script—work on what you do know. Build up your confidence a
little bit. That will help you find what you don’t know.”

  ROOTS

  Mary had auditioned for an English play called Roots, by Arnold Wesker, which was going to be done off Broadway and directed by a first-time director named Mark Rydell. (After Roots Mark went to Hollywood and began making beautiful films. On Golden Pond was one of them.)

  Mark was very impressed by Mary. He was also looking for someone to play her character’s husband, Frankie Bryant. I asked Mary if she could get me an audition. She asked, and they said yes.

  Mary helped me with my North Country English accent. She also suggested little touches of authenticity, like sticking a handkerchief up the sleeve of my borrowed costume jacket, since I was supposed to be something of a country bumpkin. From that time on, whenever I did an audition, I always wore some suggestion of a costume that fitted the character.

  I did my audition for Mark Rydell. He liked it, and Mary and I were cast in the play as husband and wife.

  The opening night was filled with dignitaries, including Mark’s agent, a magnificent lady named Lily Veidt. She was the Jewish widow of the famous German actor Conrad Veidt, who had left Germany with Lily to escape Hitler. He brought Lily to Hollywood, where he was cast as the Nazi colonel in Casablanca. When Conrad Veidt died in 1950, Louis B. Mayer talked Lily into becoming a theatrical agent. The morning after Roots opened, I got a call from Lily’s secretary, asking if I had representation. When I went to her office, she asked if I would like her to represent me in New York. She became my first agent and a second mother to me.

  The executive producer of a television program called The Play of the Week had seen me in Roots and offered me the part of a cockney Englishman in Maxwell Anderson’s Wingless Victory, starring Eartha Kitt and Hugh O’Brian.