by Gene Wilder
When we got back to my room, Gilda gave the dog a bowl of water and set some newspaper down in the bathroom for her to pee on. After that was taken care of, I ordered the cheesecake and coffee that Gilda said she had a yen for, and then we continued talking. Sparkle didn’t make a sound—no barking or whining or heavy breathing—she just sat on the floor and looked at the two of us. It must have been strange for her. She was a year old and had been taken from a farm by a stranger, put on an airplane, driven in a limousine, and then hugged and kissed by another stranger. Even when the doorbell rang, she didn’t bark. I thought perhaps she wasn’t able to bark. The waiter brought in the cheesecake and poured out some coffee for us. When Gilda and I started eating the cheesecake, we heard a little peep from Sparkle. She sounded more like a bird than a dog—a very polite bird—but it was obvious that she wanted her share of cheesecake, which Gilda gave her. So the three of us polished off the cheesecake—“One piece, three forks, please.”
When we finished our dessert, I took Gilda down to the lobby and escorted her and Sparkle into the waiting limousine. We had a short kiss, and then I closed the door. We waved good-bye through the car window, and they drove off. Seeing Gilda looking strong and healthy and so happy with her little dog, I thought, Maybe things between us can work.
When I returned to Los Angeles, I went to see Gilda’s psychiatrist, whom she used to see once a week. I wanted to talk to him about Gilda and marriage and my fears about living with her for the rest of my life, even though I loved her. He was kind and very understanding, but I sensed him pushing me gently towards marrying Gilda. I think he just wanted her to be happy.
During the fifty minutes I spent with him, the word “neurotic” came up a few times, and I asked him what that word meant to him. He said, “Trying to correct a wrong.” I saw him again a week later, and we talked about Gilda a little more. Towards the end of that meeting, I said, “By the way, I like your definition of neurotic very much, but I would add one thing to it.” “What’s that?” he asked. I said, “Spending too much time trying to correct a wrong.” He said, “I would accept that.”
* * *
My daughter attended the University of Arizona for part of a year, until she got into a terrible accident. Before the accident, I met the young man she was attached to. I assumed they were living together, and my most generous opinion of him was that he was a dumb punk. I said to myself, Be tolerant. They’re just kids—she’ll grow out of this stage. A few months later she rode up a steep hill, sitting on the back end of the punk’s motorcycle. They were sideswiped by a big Buick, and Katie’s knee was smashed.
Gilda had a close friend who was a doctor at Toronto General Hospital, in Canada. When she told him what happened to Katie, he recommended a great knee specialist in Toronto. I passed the information on to Jo, who made an appointment with the specialist and then took Katie to Toronto.
Gilda wanted me to meet Dibby—of noisy bran muffin chewing fame—who lived about an hour outside of Toronto. I met Dibby and thought she was wonderful. The next day Gilda and I went to visit Katie in the hospital. I was a little taken aback at the glow in Katie’s eyes when she saw Roseanne Roseannadanna walk into her hospital room. I had only seen Gilda a few times on Saturday Night Live, but Katie had probably watched her every week. Gilda jabbered away and made Katie laugh, and then she gave Katie a pair of grotesque black-and-pink panties that she’d picked out in a porno shop.
The operation on Katie’s knee was technically successful, but Katie had to walk with a cane for a long time after. That terrible accident changed her life in many good ways. She moved back to New York, got a job at Good Morning America, enrolled at Hunter College . . . and never wanted to see the dumb punk again.
THE DOG WHO TRIED TO COMMIT SUICIDE
You may have heard that Gilda and I were married by a dog. That’s just silly. How could a dog possibly marry us? Sparkle didn’t even have a license. It was probably just a rumor that Cousin Buddy was spreading around, although what actually happened is not really that much different.
We were living in Los Angeles, having just finished filming The Woman in Red. Gilda and Sparkle and I got ready for a grand vacation in the South of France. It was also going to be my birthday celebration. Then I received a call informing me that my sister had just found out she had breast cancer. Corinne lived in New York with her family. Gilda and I decided to take an early-morning flight to New York, see Corinne, and then fly to France the following day.
We got to Los Angeles airport early, and because we had Sparkle with us, the airline kindly put us in a private passenger lounge to wait for our flight to New York. We had the whole lounge to ourselves. Gilda took Sparkle out of her carrier case and set her on the floor, so she could bounce around and check things out before being cooped up on the plane. Gilda saw Sparkle sniff at something in a corner. When she went over and knelt down, she saw little blue pellets that had spilled out of a box that had RAT POISON clearly printed on the front. I said, trying to sound like a vet, “Now stop worrying! Sparkle would never eat that stuff. She’s so finicky about everything she eats—why on earth would she want to eat some blue shit that she sees lying on a dirty floor?” The travel agent who was with us called the poison center and gave them the number on the box and the name of the poison. “Get her to a vet immediately,” said the voice on the other end. Gilda grabbed Sparkle and said, “I’m going to the vet. I’ll meet you in New York later.” She kissed me good-bye and ran off with the travel agent. Gilda jumped into a limo that had just dropped someone off, and she screamed at the driver, “Take us to the nearest vet!”
In the meantime, my plane went out on the runway, had mechanical difficulty, and had to come back. Someone from the travel agency handed me a telephone number where I could call Gilda. When I reached her, she said, “The vet just gave Sparkle an injection that caused her to throw up a blue pellet. She did eat rat poison! She’s shaking and scared and has to go on a program of vitamin K for two weeks. I have to take her back to the vet every day for the injections.”
Well, so much for the straight line. Now here’s the punch line. Before hanging up—after her sobbing and my apologizing for being so stupid—Gilda said, “Go see Corinne and then go to France. You’re so tired, and you need a rest. I know you love me. You know I love you. I’ll be fine. There’s a little birthday present for you in the green suitcase. And don’t worry about me—I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t worry about me—I’ll be fine.” It may seem like small potatoes, but I had waited so long for her to say something like that.
I got to France, and on the morning of my birthday, I opened the green suitcase and found a small package wrapped in multicolored paper. Inside the package was a block of watercolor paper and a little palette with eight watercolor pots and two brushes, along with a note: “Happy Birthday, darling.” That afternoon I painted my first watercolor. I’ve been painting watercolors ever since.
When I returned to Los Angeles, I proposed to Gilda. We were married on September 18, 1984. The irony is—and you have to believe me—if the dog hadn’t eaten the rat poison, I honestly don’t think that Gilda and I would ever have gotten married.
GILDA WANTS A BABY.
Gilda was making great progress with her bulimia—seeing a specialist who came to my home every week—and slowly, slowly, she was adjusting what she ate so that she wouldn’t have to throw it up. She was thirty-eight years old.
Now she wanted a baby—“desperately,” of course. I never had a strong desire to have children. Katie was enough for me, and I wasn’t one of those men who felt that having your “own” baby was the important thing. But Gilda wanted a baby, and, as the song goes, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”
After seeing her gynecologist, Gilda found out that her tubes were closed and that the only way she could ever have a child was by having a major operation, or by trying the in vitro fertilization procedure. I said that our relationship was more important than having a baby, but most
of the decision was hers. I was against the major operation.
So every evening at six I gave Gilda hormone injections. I had learned how to give injections when I was in the medical corps, but I thought I’d better practice on a few oranges and grapefruits—the way I had been trained—before sticking needles into Gilda’s buttocks. Actually, the skin of a grapefruit and the skin of buttocks are not that different, as far as toughness is concerned.
On the day that her ultrasound showed that she had matured enough eggs, I gave Gilda another injection to induce ovulation. The next morning I drove her to the hospital and watched the attendants wheel her into surgery to aspirate her eggs.
Then, as Gilda put it, my foreplay began. I was sent to the basement and put in a washroom, which had a scrub bucket, a mop, and five or six Playboy and Penthouse magazines to help me masturbate into a sterile plastic container. The pictures in the magazines almost put me off my job completely. I’ve always hated those color photographs of naked women in those stupid positions that are supposed to turn men on. I never felt that there was anything sexy about them. Alfred Hitchcock believed that what was really sexy was a woman in a long Victorian dress bending down to pick up a hanky and showing just a little bit of ankle and leg. I don’t know about the long Victorian dress part, but otherwise I feel the same as Hitch.
For nineteen days after that I had to keep giving Gilda progesterone injections. On the twentieth day they gave her a blood test. It was negative. No baby. In February she booked herself for major surgery to have her tubes opened. She had the operation and recovered in a week. Her tubes were open, and she could now have a baby. All we had to do was have sex at just the right time of the month—exactly at the time she was ovulating.
Meanwhile, I had an idea for a film. I used to love watching Creature Features on television, with Katie and Jo, when Katie was afraid to watch those old horror films by herself. We all laughed at the scary parts. When I was a kid, I loved comedy/mysteries—especially Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary and Ghost Breakers. The movie idea I had was to make my own comedy/horror film, but using the same techniques for visual effects that they used in the 1930s—where every visual effect was done in the camera, not at some visual effects plant, which cost a fortune and would ruin the concept.
One evening, Dom DeLuise came to my house for dinner and did his imitation of Ethel Barrymore, which made me laugh so much—because it was funny, of course, but also because it was so accurate. I asked Dom if he would play my aunt, doing his Ethel Barrymore, if I ever made a 1930s comedy/horror film. He said he would. The title I gave to the idea was Haunted Honeymoon.
Terry Marsh had recently written a film with Ronny Graham, and I wanted him to write Haunted Honeymoon with me, not only because I loved his humor but also because so much depended on what could and could not be done visually—an area in which he was an expert and I was almost ignorant. Orion Pictures said that they would give it a “go” if we did the film in England, because of the weakness of the English pound at the time.
Gilda dwelled on the fact that if I traveled without her, she would miss an ovulation cycle. She swore that I was the only person she ever slept with to get a part in a movie, and even though she wasn’t right for the part in Haunted Honeymoon—whatever Lola wants she usually gets. Besides, Paulette Goddard was too old for the part.
Gilda did get pregnant while we were in England—for a week—and then had a miscarriage. But now she knew that she could get pregnant, and that made her happy. We finished filming in November of 1985 and came back to Los Angeles in time for Christmas. On January 6 she had her first symptom of ovarian cancer.
Gilda went to more internists, gynecologists, holistic doctors, and gastroenterologists than Carter has Little Liver Pills. She always asked the same questions: “Is it cancer?” The answer from all of them was the same: “No, no no . . . she just a highly strung woman.” “She has Epstein-Barr virus.” “Not serious—it’s just mittelschmerz.” “She’s a very nervous girl” “Depression, stress, anxiety.”
After ten months of no diagnoses or incorrect diagnoses—with her tummy distended as if she were hiding a small balloon under her dress—she finally heard it: “You have stage four ovarian cancer.”
Gilda grabbed my face in her hands and sobbed, “No more bad news, no more bad news. I don’t want any more bad news.”
chapter 26
I DON’T BELIEVE IN FATE.
While Gilda was receiving chemotherapy, I received a script called See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Wonderful concept—terrible script. I turned it down.
Six months later, when Gilda was almost finished with her nine sessions of chemo, my agent sent me See No Evil, Hear No Evil again. “Are you crazy?” I asked. “I turned this script down six months ago.”
A few months later, my new agent, Marty Baum, called: “I want you to meet the people at Tri Star about a script called See No Evil, Hear No Evil.”
I started to laugh. “Marty, I’ve turned this script down twice already. It’s a great idea for a film, but it’s a rotten script.”
“I don’t care—I want you to meet the people at Tri Star.”
I went to Tri Star and told them exactly what I thought, including the fact that the script was pissing on the blind and the deaf, because whoever wrote it didn’t know anything about either. They said, “We agree with you. We thought you might like to write it for yourself and Richard Pryor.”
I told Tri Star that I would write twenty pages—starting over, but using the same concept. If they didn’t like what I wrote, we would part friends and they wouldn’t owe me a penny. If they did like what I wrote, I’d continue writing. Everyone agreed. Arthur Hiller was hired to direct.
* * *
Between her chemotherapy treatments, in the hospital in California, Gilda would come home and try to lead as normal a life as possible, but the first few days were always exhausting because she was so hyped up from steroids. Sparkle would spend day and night lying in bed at Gilda’s feet, except when she was let out in the backyard to relieve herself. Occasionally she would whimper for Gilda to play with her, and if Gilda didn’t respond, Sparkle would continue whimpering, until, going crazy from the steroids and rage at her condition, Gilda would sit up and pound the bed with her fists—as if she were pounding the cancer—and scream at Sparkle, “STOP IT! STOP IT!” At those times the little dog couldn’t understand what was happening and she’d run to me to hold her. Gilda couldn’t understand it either. I often felt the way that I imagined Sparkle felt—wanting to touch her, to smell her, and know that she was there, alive, and that she still loved us. Every once in awhile, when she was ready to go to sleep, she would pull the covers up around her head, like a little girl, and look at me with those huge brown eyes, and plead—as if I were her father—“Help me. . . . Please help me. . . . I don’t know what to do.”
I rarely got angry with Gilda, but when the kettle started to boil, I had to let some steam out, or I would have burst. At those times I was the one who was pleading with her for help: “Gilda, for God’s sake, try to think about something besides yourself. You’re not a baby! You pretend to be—when you go to bed at night and you’re frightened and I ask what’s the matter and you say, ‘What if I forget to breathe when I fall asleep?’—but you’re not a baby—you’re a grown woman! Think about Sparkle, think about me, think about all of the friends you have who love you—just get off of yourself! I don’t know how to help you anymore than I’m doing. You treat me like shit all day, no matter how hard I try to please you, and then at night you want me to make everything all right . . . but I can’t! I want to, but I can’t!”
The odd part is that when I did have such an outburst, it made her feel better. She’d kiss me and point her finger at me like a schoolteacher and say, “I know you. . . . You wouldn’t get angry with me if you thought I was going to die. Thank you, darling.”
Then, when I calmed down, I’d say, “Gilda, you treat every stranger in the world with respect, no matter
how much pain you’re in. All I want is for you to treat me the way you would a stranger.”
“But you’re my husband—don’t you understand? You’re the only one I can yell at.”
I heard through my sister that Katie had been in a hospital in New York with a terrible case of endometriosis and had just had an operation. I was so engrossed with Gilda’s illness that I let contact with Katie go by the wayside. When I called Jo, I was told that the operation had been a nightmare, but that Katie was at her own apartment now. I tried to call Katie several times, but no answer. I wrote to her, but she didn’t respond. After a week I called again . . . still no answer. Then I wrote again, hoping that she might actually read my letter: “If I’ve done something that hurt you, just tell me what it was, honey, please. If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I can’t fix it.” She never answered.
My nephew, Jordan—who was a few years younger than Katie but had always been close to her—let me know how serious my problem with Katie was. He said that the last time he saw her, she told him he would have to choose: “Either your uncle or me.”
Jordan, who has always been like a son to me, told Katie that he couldn’t make that kind of choice. He’s never seen her or talked with her since. I called Jo and asked her if she knew why Katie wouldn’t talk to me. Jo said, “You mean you don’t know?” I said, “No, that’s why I’m asking you.” “Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you,” she said. Within those few words, I thought, was the kernel of why I left Jo and Katie years before. The only clue to Katie’s behavior is something she said to Jordan . . . that when she was ill, she wanted me to take care of her the way I was taking care of Gilda. That may or may not be true—I have no idea, but if it is I can understand it.
