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

by Gene Wilder

  I wrote to Gilda’s New York gynecologist and asked her if she had ever thought to give Gilda a CA-125.

  Dear Mr. Wilder:

  Gilda was a wonderful woman with a great spirit. We’ll all miss her. CA-125 is a blood test used after a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

  I talked with the coinventors of CA-125—Dr. Robert Knapp and Dr. Robert Bast. Both said that they were trying to change the conventional wisdom, so that gynecologists would use CA-125 to help determine whether or not a woman had ovarian cancer. Both men also cautioned that CA-125 wasn’t foolproof—there could be false positives and false negatives—but it was the best available test until new ones were perfected.

  Ezra Greenspan, the oncologist who gave Gilda hamburgers and a burst of hope to live on, for a while, said that if she had had a CA-125 when she felt her first symptoms, they would have found out that she was in stage three instead of stage four ovarian cancer, which would have given her a 20–25 percent better chance of survival.

  With the help of my friend Bob Marty, who had his own video studio in downtown Manhattan, I made a Public Service Announcement that was directed to women over thirty-five, who had a family history of ovarian cancer. It was broadcast on all three major networks in the United States and reached ninety-three million women. Today, there isn’t a gynecologist in America who doesn’t know about CA-125 and its antecedents.

  Of course, if any of the famous actresses had accepted the woman’s part in Hanky Panky before Sidney Poitier finally offered it to Gilda, I would never have met Sparkle, who wouldn’t have eaten the rat poison, which would have meant that Gilda and I wouldn’t have gotten married . . . and all of the Gilda’s Clubs in the United States, Canada, and England wouldn’t exist.

  chapter 28

  COMEDIENNE—BALLERINA 1946–1989

  I didn’t know that Gilda was going to leave her beautiful 1734 home to me. It sounds stupid, but we never talked about such things. I also never believed that she was going to die of cancer—not until three weeks before she did die. I was a fool, and I’m grateful for that. My sublime ignorance gave her hope for a long while, and I know now that hope is the thing that keeps us going—allows us to laugh even in the worst of times.

  After Gilda died, I thought that if I went back to Los Angeles, I would never return to Connecticut. So I wandered through the bedrooms and staircases and closets of Gilda’s colonial house, late at night, in the dark, hoping to get rid of any ghosts that might be lurking in the corners. I yelled out loud to Gilda, on the off chance that she wasn’t too absorbed with herself to listen. After a few weeks, roots started to grow, and I realized that I didn’t want to live anywhere else for the rest of my life.

  THE DRESS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

  In September of 1989 I got a call from the receptionist at the New York League for the Hard of Hearing, saying that a Ms. Webb wanted to speak to me. “Please put her on,” I said.

  While I was waiting for Karen to come to the phone, the image of the dress she wore on the day we met flashed through my mind—lavender and pink, with a touch of blue, swaying back and forth just below her knees as she walked towards me.

  When Karen came to the phone, we talked about Gilda, and then she wanted to know how I was. I said I was doing well. “And how’s little Sparkle?” she asked. I told her that although I had lost a wife, I gained a daughter—a tiny one—who wouldn’t leave my side and who barks when strangers come to the door. Karen told me that she finally got the grant she was hoping for and that she wanted to know if I was still willing to help her make the video she had talked about. I said I’d be more than happy to help her.

  Karen sent me the script she had written, with all the notes and statistics. Quoting Zero Mostel in The Producers, I told her, “This script will close on page four. Everyone will be asleep by then.” We arranged to meet at my favorite Italian restaurant in Manhattan—favorite not just because the food was good, but because it only had eleven tables and was always quiet.

  When we got to the restaurant, she set a tape recorder between us, on the table, and while we ate, Karen posed common problems for the hearing-impaired, such as trying to read the lips of someone who is chewing gum, or who has a bushy mustache, or who is standing in a shadow—and then I would improvise. She divided everything into short comedy sketches, which I thought was a brilliant idea.

  The second time we met—at the same restaurant—we worked on improving the actual language that the characters in each sketch would use.

  The third time we were going to meet, I asked her to leave the tape recorder at home. We had our first “actual” date on a beautiful fall evening, in the same restaurant, at the same corner table.

  After we became lovers, Karen would drive to Stamford on most Fridays after work and stay with me for the weekend. She loved getting away from the city for a few days, and even though I lived on the edge of town, it was very much like being in the country: trees, deer, birds of all colors flying in and out of the bird feeders . . .and no tall buildings.

  At dusk, when the deer came out to munch on the flowers in my backyard, Karen and I would watch Sparkle trying to chase the deer away from the rhododendron bushes. But the deer weren’t at all intimidated by this little pipsqueak—they just kept eating the luscious white-and-lavender blossoms. Occasionally one of the deer would even try to play with Sparkle—or so it seemed—and Sparkle would look at us as if to say, “Aren’t they supposed to run away?” Then she’d walk slowly back to us—obviously embarrassed—and the three of us would go in for dinner.

  On those Indian summer evenings we ate on the screened-in porch at the back of the house. After dinner, when we were sipping our wine, I’d hold Karen’s hand while we traded stories about our families and our childhoods. As I listened to her talk, my brain was split in two—part of me wanting to interrupt her to say, “I love you,” and the other part warning me that once those magic words are spoken you can’t go home again . . . not without pain.

  When Karen asked me about Gilda, I told her funny stories, and a few sad ones. Karen told me about being on her own since her divorce sixteen years earlier, and about her father, Ira, who loved flyfishing and liked his steak very rare, and her son, Kevin, who loved fly-fishing with his grandpa and liked his steak very rare, and her mother, Elsie, who never went fly-fishing—even though she loved to eat the fresh trout that her husband brought home—and who would never eat a steak if it wasn’t cooked well-done.

  As Karen talked, I kept flashing back to the first time she invited me to dinner in her apartment. Short phrases of the poem that she had tacked onto the cupboard in her kitchen kept popping into my head: “. . . the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul . . . you begin to understand that kisses aren’t contracts.” I thought, Why would she put those beautiful thoughts on her cupboard door if they weren’t part of her own philosophy? But my brilliant rationale didn’t stop me from hearing Gilda yelling in my ear, “Hey! Don’t you hurt this woman,” or my heart from answering, “Don’t lose her. . . . Please, don’t lose her!”

  LONG TIME NO SEE

  March 1990

  I walked into Margie Wallis’s new office, on the first floor of her brownstone on the Lower West Side. She was sitting in her same comfy chair, but both of her legs were raised, resting on the ottoman. She told me on the phone that she’d had a hip replacement. I leaned over and gave her a little kiss.

  ME: Long time no see.

  MARGIE: I keep track of you, Gene.

  ME: How are you doing, Margie?

  MARGIE: I’m doing fine. Talk to me.

  ME: I didn’t think I’d ever get married again. I’ve been seeing a woman who isn’t putting any pressure on me to get married—but I’m in love. Not just in love—I love who she is. Just saying, “I love you” isn’t enough anymore—not for me. I want her to know that I love her so much that I want to spend the rest of my life with her, and I don’t know how to say that in a better way than, “Will you marry me?”
<
br />   MARGIE: But?

  ME: If the tabloids start printing stories like, COULDN’T WAIT: GENE’S HOT NEW LOVE AFFAIR!—and they will—I’ll feel terrible. I don’t want to soil Gilda’s name, and I don’t want to soil Karen’s name with that garbage. It’s been almost a year since Gilda died, but everyone—on the street, in supermarkets, in cabs—still asks me about Gilda and my life with her. They keep saying, “Poor Gene—we love you both” I’m not poor Gene; I’m lucky Gene—to have found someone at this stage of my life.

  MARGIE: Mister Sensitivity . . . did it ever occur to you that just because you ask a woman to marry you doesn’t mean you have to get married the next day? If she knows and you know—you can tell Aunt Tillie and Uncle Harry and the rest of the world whenever you’re ready to tell them.

  ME: . . . I knew there was a reason why I came to you years ago—apart from your good looks and your total lack of sarcasm.

  That night I stopped off at a tiny Russian restaurant, called Kalinika, on Eighty-second and Madison. It only had five or six tables, but if you called ahead, you could order most of their tasty dishes for takeout. I bought some cold beet borscht, Russian hors d’oeuvres, and a ginger chicken and took them to Karen’s apartment.

  When she answered the door, she was wearing a lavender caftan. I had told her that I was bringing dinner. After she closed the door, we had a lovely kiss, and then I said I wanted to talk to her for a minute before we ate. I think she was a little worried by the seriousness in my voice. I sat down on one of the three chairs in her small living room. She sat on my lap. I tried to breathe quietly for a moment and finally said, “Will you marry me?” Karen stared at me for the longest time, with a Mona Lisa smile that neither I nor Leonardo could have deciphered at that moment. Then she said, “You want to marry me?” I said, “I love you and want to be with you for the rest of my life.” She broke into a full smile and said, “Yes . . . I will marry you,” and hugged me.

  On September 8, 1991, Karen and I were married in the backyard of the home in Connecticut that Gilda had left me. Seven people and a Yorkshire terrier were in attendance. Judge Gerald Fox—who had never performed a marriage service before—came to the house, wearing a heavy suit on this swelteringly hot, but beautiful day. He performed the short ceremony with sweat dripping off his happy face while his wife snapped pictures. Karen and I wrote, and spoke, the following:

  UPON OUR MARRIAGE

  We both believe in music and painting

  and the truth that we can see all around us in nature.

  We also believe that something, some fate,

  brought us together at this exact point in both of our lives.

  With appreciation for these exquisite insights,

  and with the love and respect we both feel for each other,

  we think we have the foundation for a happy life . . .

  so long as we keep laughing.

  I had turned down the script of See No Evil, Hear No Evil three times, and if my agent, Marty Baum, hadn’t said, “I don’t care what you think of the script, I want you to meet these people at Tri Star,” I would never have met Ms. Webb at the League for the Hard of Hearing. And now I’m married to that cranky old New England biddy with the arrogant, raspy voice . . . but, boy, is she beautiful.

  chapter 29

  IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING.

  Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant insect—in Kafka’s short story, “Metamorphosis.” In 1999 I awoke one morning to discover that I had a problem not so different from old Gregor’s . . .a sharp pain on my left side that turned out to be non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I don’t like talking about cancer—and I don’t intend to do much of it now—but there are a few ironies that can’t be overlooked. It’s not a sad story.

  A very kind hematological oncologist whose office was only twenty minutes away, arranged for me to have nine chemotherapies, one every three weeks. I had my first chemo in the doctor’s office while Karen read to me from She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb. I had supposed—because of my experiences with Gilda—that I would be either extremely anxious or not anxious at all. I was not anxious; I don’t know about the “at all” part—you’d have to ask Karen—but I was very calm and, to my great surprise, because of a wonderful new drug that Nurse Mary Harvey infused into my bloodstream while she dripped in the chemo, I didn’t get sick or nauseous, not even for a minute.

  After I did that first chemo, I went to New York in the afternoon to do publicity videos for Murderin a Small Town, a murder mystery that I had done for Arts and Entertainment a few months earlier. I told the crew to hurry up, because my hair was going to start falling out any minute. When my hair did fall out, after two-and-a-half weeks, my doctor kindly agreed to let Mary Harvey come over and give me the chemo in my living room. After two treatments my spleen had returned to normal size, and I was told that I wouldn’t need nine treatments, just six.

  During my third treatment, while I joked with Mary Harvey as she was dripping in the chemo, Karen handed me our portable phone. It was Mel Brooks.

  MEL: How ya doing?

  ME: Great.

  MEL: When do you get your chemo?

  ME: Now.

  MEL: Whaddya mean?

  ME: I’m getting it now, while we’re talking.

  MEL: Where?

  ME: In my living room.

  MEL: Well—how do you feel?

  ME: Great.

  MEL: When do they think you’ll be able to eat again?

  ME: In about fifteen minutes. We’re having veal chops, linguini, a little salad, and some red wine.

  MEL: How can that be?

  ME: A new drug called Zofran. They didn’t have it in time for Gilda.

  MEL: It’s a miracle. Which wine?

  ME: Larose Trintadon.

  After we hung up and I walked Nurse Harvey to her car, Karen and I sat down at the kitchen table and had our lovely meal.

  When I finished my fifth chemo, my doctor said that he would give me one more and then something called rituxan for four weeks, and that would be it. All done! Apart from losing my hair, which I knew would come back, I felt fine—playing tennis with a pro, indoors, twice a week, and playing in a hard men’s doubles game each Saturday.

  I decided to call my dear friend Ed Feldman—the gastroenterologist in Los Angeles who had looked after Gilda so lovingly. I wanted to share the good news with him. When he heard the news, he said, “I’m very happy for you, Gene, but I’m not content . . . not until you see Carol Portlock at Sloan-Kettering.”

  I had my medical history and tissue samples sent to Dr. Portlock’s office and made an appointment. Karen and I went to see her a few days later.

  Carol Portlock was tall, very blond, and quite thin. She was cordial, but reserved. I was expecting some cheery news, but from the subtle hints in her face, I suddenly wasn’t sure.

  “You’re very healthy,” she said, “very chemo-responsive. But it’s going to come back.”

  I was stunned. Karen’s face froze.

  “When?” I asked.

  “In six months,” she said, so assuredly that I didn’t question it. After a long pause to catch my breath, I asked her what I could do.

  “Stem-cell transplant.”

  I asked what that meant. She made an appointment for me to see Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, who was the head of hematological oncology at Sloan-Kettering.

  Karen and I went to Dr. Nimer’s office the next day. I took to him like a fish to water. Over two-and-a-half hours, he took us through every phase of what would happen to me and how I might feel—if I decided to have the stem-cell transplant. He pulled no punches. Every discomfort was described in detail by Nancy, the nurse practitioner who worked with Dr. Nimer. I was told that I would be in the hospital from four to six weeks, depending on how things went, but that I should count on six weeks. When Dr. Nimer was finished, he asked if I had any questions.

  “When can I act again?”

  “When do you want to
act again?”

  “In six months. I’m supposed to do another one of my murder mysteries in May.”

  He looked at me with such a beneficent smile and said, “You’re a painter, aren’t you?”

  This shocked me. I didn’t remember telling him anything about painting. I suppose I must have mentioned it in passing, but the question seemed like a non sequitur, given what we had been talking about.

  “Yes . . .Karen and I paint watercolors.”

  “How would you feel if—just as you were about to finish a painting—someone came along and mucked it all up?”

  I stared at him a long while. What was he getting at?

  “You and I are going to paint a beautiful picture together. In six months you’re going to feel pretty normal—but your immune system will only be about 80 percent of what it should be. Why don’t you give it another two months? We don’t want anyone to ruin our painting, do we?”

  “SOLD!”

  I went to Greenwich Hospital for an overnight stay on two occasions, two weeks apart, and they dripped in heavy chemo while I slept. No nausea. I would get up the next morning and go out and play or write or do anything I wanted. The heavy chemo encouraged the production of baby stem cells in my bloodstream. They weren’t red or white cells yet—it was almost as if they wouldn’t decide which color they wanted to be until they grew up. When my blood test shouted, “This guy is ready,” I rushed to Sloan-Kettering, as an outpatient, and—while I was watching television—the doctor in charge extracted stem cells from my blood. It doesn’t hurt; you don’t feel anything. The machine takes your blood while you’re reading or watching television, extracts the stem cells, and then sends the rest of your blood back into your body. The whole thing takes about an hour and a half. You go home, come back the next day, and do it again. After three days they had extracted seven million stem cells, which they put into a small plastic bag and froze.