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

by Gene Wilder

  On my way to England, on the Queen Elizabeth again, I met a young Indian girl named Romy who had been studying in New York and was returning to London. We hit it off very well, and I began questioning her about the philosophy of desirelessness.

  “Well,” she said, “in my religion we believe that life is full of suffering, and it’s all caused by desire. And the only way to stop this suffering is through enlightenment, so that we can end this sort of endless cycle of births and deaths.”

  “And do you really want to stop desiring?”

  “Well,” she said, “I wish I could, but—” and she started to giggle “—but I’m not strong enough to do that, because I’m enjoying myself too much.” And she giggled again.

  When I got to Bristol, I stayed at the YMCA for a few days and then found a very reasonable boardinghouse, run by a warm and friendly Austrian lady. She was divorced and had her three children living with her. The cost to me was £11 per week—breakfast, dinner, and lodging included—which came to $31.24 per week. If you were lucky enough to find such a place today, it would cost $324 per week. School was a fifteen-minute walk from the house.

  The Old Vic school was located in three Victorian houses, all stuck together, and offered a two-year course. I was one of two Americans at the school; the other students were English.

  Whenever I did a scene from Shakespeare in my acting class, the principal of the school, Duncan Ross, would say, “You’re breaking the back of the meter, dear boy.”

  “I’m what?”

  “Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, and you’re not paying any attention to it.”

  “Mr. Ross, I want my acting to come from a real human being. . . . I don’t want to sound like a poetry professor.”

  “But you can’t break the back of the meter, dear boy. You’re acting some of the greatest lines every written, and they’re written in iambic pentameter . . . a long followed by a short, or a short followed by a long. . . . ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ . . . Do you see, dear boy?”

  I liked Mr. Ross, but I wanted to punch him every time he said, “Dear boy.”

  Victor Shargai—the other American student—got tickets for the two of us to see Sir John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing, at Stratford-upon-Avon. Victor had written a note to Sir John, requesting a short meeting after the show, which Sir John graciously allowed. We went backstage when the play ended, and, after saying how wonderful we thought he was, I took a deep breath.

  “Sir John, my acting teacher at the Old Vic school keeps telling me that I’m breaking the back of the meter whenever I do a scene from Shakespeare. Do you think about meter and iambic pentameter when you’re on stage, acting those beautiful lines?”

  “No, I don’t think about such things when I’m acting. Shakespeare takes care of most of the work. . . . If you have a good ear, the poetry will come out. If you don’t have a good ear, it won’t much matter what you do.”

  When Victor and I got back to school the next day, the principal was waiting for me.

  “Well, what did the Master have to say?”

  I told him what the Master had to say.

  As long as I was with the other students in class, I felt safe. They all loved it when I took on the principal and argued with him, for hours, even after the school day was over. But when I was alone, I was vulnerable. The Demon would arrive and prod me until I bled from guilt—as if I had killed someone and left him to die alone. I no longer thought of my praying as holy . . . I hated it.

  Of all the courses, fencing was my favorite. I won the All School Fencing Championship after only six months. No first-year student had ever done that before. All my years of “pretend sword fighting,” and all the Errol Flynn movies I’d seen, had paid off. But when the principal got around to teaching more advanced acting—for example, how to laugh onstage by letting all the air out of your gut and creating a gagging effect, or how to find a chair onstage without looking down, by feeling for it with your toe or heel—I decided to leave. I knew I would be drafted shortly after I got back to the States (this was near the end of Compulsory Military Training), and I wanted to study where they taught Stanislavsky.

  My sister had started acting classes at the HB Studio in New York, which was run by Herbert Berghof and his wife, Uta Hagen. Corinne invited me to come to New York and live with her and her family in Queens, so I drove from Milwaukee and enrolled at the HB Studio that summer.

  chapter 7

  SHADES OF GRAY

  I was drafted into the army on September 10, 1956. All I took with me were some underwear, a few pair of socks, and Dear Theo—the letters of van Gogh to his brother Theo. At the end of Basic Training, I was assigned to the medical corps and sent to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, for eight weeks of medical training.

  While I was at Fort Sam, I helped the officers’ wives stage-manage a variety show that they had written. The wife in charge of the production was married to a colonel, who just happened to be the commanding officer of Fort Sam Houston. At the end of my eight weeks—when I was about to be given the orders that would station me somewhere in the world for the next year and eight months—a letter from the commanding officer instructed the office in charge of issuing orders to allow me to pick any post that was open, anywhere in the country. I was glad I had helped the commanding officer’s wife. I chose Valley Forge Army Hospital, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania which was the closest post to New York City.

  When I arrived at Valley Forge, I was given a choice of work: sterilization of equipment, tubercular ward, etc. I chose the Neuropsychiatric hospital, which was across the road. I imagined that the things I would see there might relate more to acting than any of the other choices. I wasn’t wrong.

  On my first day at work, I was shown a short film called Shades of Gray, which showed the mental health of all of us as being at some stage of gray—none of us being completely white or black. If stress is too great, the gray becomes darker. If the gray becomes too dark, that person needs to be institutionalized. Watching the film, I felt a sense of relief that I really didn’t understand.

  I was assigned to a “locked ward,” which meant that the patients were locked in, with bars on the windows, to protect them and to keep them from escaping. All the young soldiers, and some older ones, had had psychotic breakdowns, not from war stress—this was peacetime—but from other kinds of stress. Every patient arrived in an ambulance, wearing a straitjacket—that was regulation—because some of these men had become violent when their emotional dam broke.

  One twenty-year-old boy who had lived on a farm for the first nineteen-and-a-half years of his life had a psychotic breakdown on his first day in the army when some burly sergeant yelled, “Hey, farm boy—lift your fucking duffel bag and get in the fucking line!” By the time they brought him to us, he was catatonic.

  My main job on the day shift was to help administer electroshock therapy, which meant holding the patient down while the doctor induced a grand mal seizure. I had a terrible time emotionally for three or four weeks, until I started to see the good that often came from it—perhaps only temporarily. The analogy the doctors gave us was that it was like lifting up a car that was stuck in the snow because its wheels kept spinning, digging the car in deeper. When the troubled mind is no longer in the same rut, maybe it will take a new path.

  The evening shift was my favorite. I helped escort the patients from the locked ward to a Red Cross dance, three times a week. It was held in a reception hall on the ground floor. No bars on the windows. A busload of young girls—all volunteers—came in from town, which was two miles away, to dance with the patients. The other corpsmen and I were not allowed to dance with these young girls. The Teamsters always provided a small band, which played popular standards. I was tempted to break the rules and ask one of the young ladies to dance. I thought of what might happen if a nurse came in and started reprimanding me:

  “Silberman, don’t you know the rules?”

  “Mam, I was d
ancing with this young lady to show this patient that there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”

  But I was too chicken to ever try it. There was one young patient who played bridge with me at these dances, when we could find two other bridge players. He was so normal that I couldn’t understand why on earth he was put into a mental hospital, let alone into a locked ward.

  “Dick,” I asked, “what the hell are you doing here? You’re saner than I am.”

  “When I was attending class at Officers’ Training,” he said, “it took me 5 minutes to straighten all the books on my desk. They had to be stacked properly, all facing in the same direction and with all the edges touching each other in a correct way. The next day it took me 15 minutes to straighten my books, then 30 minutes, then 45 . . . and by that time the class was over.”

  Another young man, named Roger, was terrified of stepping on cracks. He was also terrified of dancing with any of the girls. The few times he did ask a girl to dance, he got a horrible headache and begged me to take him back to his bed. Once, while we were walking along the wooden corridor, on the way back to the ward—with him zigzagging all over the place to avoid stepping on cracks—I said, “Tell me something, Roger: what do you think is going to happen to you if you do—just accidentally—step on a crack?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But please don’t make me do it.”

  Another patient would go into the latrine every night and wrap a thin white string around his penis. That fellow I stayed clear of. Sure, I wanted to ask him, “Why the hell are you wrapping string around your penis?” But he was so sick I was afraid my question might set him off.

  Of all these young men, the one who got to me the most was the patient who knelt down each morning in front of the television set—blocking the view of all the other patients who were watching Amos and Andy—and began praying . . . to the monitor? Or Amos? Or Kingfisher? Or God? ( Hold on here, I thought. You’re getting into my territory. )

  That’s when the heavenly thought first occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t called on by God to do some special and sacrificial thing. . . . Maybe I was just sick.

  We were given two days off each week. The other soldiers wanted Saturdays and Sundays; I wanted Mondays and Tuesdays, because New York was an hour-and-a-half train ride away and that meant I could attend acting class at the HB Studio every Monday night. Corinne and her husband, Gil, said that I could stay with them and their baby, in their small apartment in Queens, on my two days off. All my friends at Valley Forge loved me for never putting in for weekends.

  The following November—while I was in Queens on my two days off—I got a phone call from my uncle Irv, in Milwaukee, telling me that my mother had just died. I wasn’t surprised, because she had been so ill. They had discovered that she had breast cancer the year before, but they couldn’t treat her because her heart wasn’t strong enough. She died of heart failure.

  I called my sergeant at Valley Forge Hospital and told him about my mother. He was usually pretty gruff or stoic, but on this occasion he was very kind and said that I could go to Milwaukee for the funeral and that I should just come back when I was ready. So I flew to Milwaukee, and at the cemetery I got into an argument with two of my uncles, who told me that—according to the Jewish religion—I couldn’t be a pallbearer for my own mother. I grabbed one of the handles that held up the casket, and I walked along, with five other men. We set her down in her grave.

  Now here’s a strange thing: about a month later I bought my first condom. I didn’t know quite how to use it; it seemed tricky to me. I mean, exactly when do you put it on and do you ask the woman for help and when do you take it off? Of course, a more important question would have been, “Who the hell is this woman you’re talking to who’s going to help you put a piece of rubber over your penis?”

  By the way, I wasn’t praying as much anymore.

  chapter 8

  DON JUAN IN NEW YORK

  “See you in New York!”

  I said that to Joan so many times when we had our baby-sitting dates on Saturday nights, watching George Goble, kissing during the commercials, standing in the doorway for a last good-night kiss, and then . . . “See you in New York!”

  Joan had written to me once while I was in the army, just to let me know that she was studying singing at the Ansonia Hotel and that I could see her in New York. She gave me her address.

  I hadn’t seen Joan for over a year, and now I’m riding on a train from North Philadelphia to New York with a condom packed as carefully as I could place it in my wallet, and it was burning a hole in my brain because I kept thinking, What if there’s a tiny hole in the condom because I inserted it next to my plastic driver’s license and the train is jostling back and forth and side to side and up and down? Jesus, it sounds like the condom is making love already. On its own! I wish it could—then I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do it. Twenty-two years old and still a virgin? Why? Could it be that if I made love—not hugging and kissing, but actually putting my penis inside a woman’s vagina—I would somehow be betraying my mother? That’s crazy. Or is it because God has more important things for me to do than to fuck around with pleasure? Oh, excuse me—that’s not crazy? I feel like I’m talking to one of the patients on the locked ward. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy. Maybe I should be on the locked ward with them. But if I can say that—then I’m not crazy. That much I learned at the hospital. Acting seems so much easier than life. When I’m on stage, I feel safe. “They’ can’t get me.” (Careful, son . . . you’re talking crazy again.) But onstage, everyone listens to me and watches me and—if I’m any good—applauds me. And when I’m taking my bow, I have the belief that I’ve earned my feeling of grace—as if God were saying, “You did something worthwhile, so I won’t punish you . . . for a few days.

  Then I heard the conductor shout, “NEW YORK NEXT! LAST STOP—NEW YORK CITY!”

  * * *

  ME: Do you know who Katharine Cornell was?

  MARGIE: Never mind who Katharine Cornell was—did you make love to Joan?

  ME: I don’t know.

  MARGIE: What does that mean?

  ME: No kissing, no hugging—

  MARGIE: Wait a minute, Mister Wilder—kissing is what you majored in. Don’t tell me there was no kissing.

  ME: Yes, we did a little mitsy-bitsy “Hello, how are you?” kind of kissing, but there wasn’t any real kissing. No touching. NO LAUGHING! I think that was the biggest problem. I’m guessing Joan was also a virgin—I don’t know. I thought I was the only virgin in New York. But I think she was just as afraid of messing up the “ideal” as I was: “If you’re too aggressive, what will she/he think of me?”

  MARGIE: What happened?

  ME: We got into her bedroom. She turned off the lights and took off her clothes and lay down on this little narrow bed. No talking. I think she must have been as nervous as I was. Then I took off my clothes, trying to hide the condom from her because I thought it wasn’t romantic. I held the condom in one hand while I tried to get out of my pants and underwear. Then I put the condom on my penis and got into bed with her. All I could think was, If I lose my erection, will the condom fall off? When I felt her naked body against my legs, I figured that I had better put my penis into her vagina while I still had the erection. I got halfway in and . . . boom!

  MARGIE: You shot your wad.

  ME: Thanks for putting it so delicately.

  MARGIE: You’re welcome. And after “boom”?

  ME: I’manactor. . . . I acted a migraine headache. I told her I should never have tried making love under the circumstances, but I didn’t want to disappoint her, and how sorry I was, but I just felt as if my head were going to burst, and that I’d better go. I remembered thinking of poor Roger at Valley Forge—the patient who got those terrible headaches every time he danced with a girl. I had much more compassion for him now. Joan was very sympathetic. Maybe she was relieved, I don’t know. We sort of kissed good night, and then I left, feeling li
ke a fool. That was five years ago, and I still feel like a fool. So, how do you think I did?

  MARGIE: Well, I wouldn’t call you Don Juan, but . . . not bad, for the first time. So what about Katharine Cornell?

  ME: I’ve heard that she used to be so nervous before a performance that she had to throw up . . . then she’d step out on stage and be brilliant.

  STEPPING INTO LIFE

  I got out of the army two years to the day after I was drafted and went to New York. My time in the army qualified me for unemployment insurance—thirty-five dollars a week. That was to pay for rent, food, and entertainment. Not much, but it helped, and I had saved a little from my monthly salary at Valley Forge. I found a tiny loft in the artificial flower district on Thirtieth Street, near Lord and Taylor’s department store, for one hundred dollars a month.

  I got a scholarship to the HB Studio, so I was able to study acting full-time: Monday nights with Herbert Berghof and Thursday afternoons with Uta Hagen. I’d rehearse for two or three weeks with one acting partner during the day, and a different scene with a different acting partner during the evenings.

  The odd thing is, I never did comedy scenes in class. I knew that comedy was my talent, but I wanted to learn “Stanislavsky”—real acting—so I always chose dramatic scenes. Of course, my thinking was schoolboy logic. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t have learned just as much by doing comedy scenes—which are all the funnier if done by actors who are playing them for real. I just didn’t know that yet.