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

by Gene Wilder

  Katie became even more critical of herself and the way she looked. She wasn’t fat—she was just “ten years old chubby.” So was I at her age, and I was ridiculed by a few snotnose kids in grade school who used to call me Fatso. The scar remains.

  Katie would ask if I thought she was going to be a fat pig when she grew up. I told her—and meant it—that I wasn’t worried about her being too heavy; I was worried about her becoming too thin when she grew up. She had no idea what I was talking about. I kept remembering the little love note she handed me on the day we moved into our first home together: “I love Gene. He is thin. He is handsome.” That was when she was only seven and a half. I was a good prophet because when Katie grew up, she was thin and beautiful.

  Another pattern started to become a habit. The night before a big exam at school, Katie would beg for help. I tried to reason with her.

  “Honey, you can’t cram all this into your head overnight. This is something you needed to study two or three weeks ago, when they told you about the exam.”

  “What good is that going to do me now? The test is tomorrow morning.”

  “But what about the next time this happens?”

  “I don’t care about the next time—I need your help now.”

  “But what if the same thing happens next month?”

  Then she would start to cry.

  “WILL YOU STOP TALKING ABOUT THE NEXT TIME? ARE YOU GOING TO HELP ME OR NOT?”

  So, Jo and I would take turns helping her—enough for her to get a passing grade, and to quiet her growing anger.

  I’m not a disciplinarian. I understand the need for discipline, of course, but I’m just not good at it. I’m not talking about hitting—I don’t think any parent should ever hit a child—but about setting the rules and sticking by them. How to punish without taking away love—that’s the great art. I wished that I could do it, but I was trapped by the most ironic dichotomy: I was afraid that if I set rules and drew lines and enforced discipline, Katie would take her love away from me.

  MY EPITAPH

  Although I liked Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play Willy Wonka. The script was good, but there was something that was bothering me. Mel Stuart, the man who was going to direct the movie, came to my home to talk about it.

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself . . . but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.”

  “. . . Why do you want to do that?”

  “Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”

  Mel Stuart looked a little puzzled. I knew he wanted to please me, but he wasn’t quite sure about this change.

  “You mean—if you can’t do what you just said, you won’t do the part?”

  “That’s right,” I answered.

  Mel mumbled to himself, “. . . comes out of the door, has a cane, cane gets stuck in a cobblestone, falls forward, does a somersault, and bounces back up . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “Okay!”

  When I got to Munich—where the filming had already begun—Mr. Stuart showed me the entranceway to “Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.” I had practiced my forward somersault on a gym mat for three weeks before coming to Munich. The Scenic Department had made three Styrofoam bricks that looked just like cobblestones, which they laid into my entrance walk. That way I wouldn’t have to hit the exact same brick with my pointed cane every time we did the scene. On the day they filmed my entrance, I did the scene four times, in just the way that we had planned. Then Mr. Stuart asked me to do just one without the cane. I took a deep breath, swallowed my better instincts, and did the scene without the cane. The next day, David Wolper—the head of the studio—watched the rushes of my entrance. As I was coming out of the commissary after finishing my lunch, Mel Stuart ran up to me.

  “He loved it! David loved it!”

  “What if he hadn’t loved it?” I asked.

  “Well, I would have used that take without the cane.”

  It’s not that David Wolper doesn’t have good artistic judgment—he does, and he loved what he saw. But if it had been Joe Levine who was bankrolling the film, I think he probably would have said, “What the hell’s that guy doing with a cane? Where the fuck does it say that Willy What’s-His-Name is a cripple?” I understood better why artistic control is so important to directors.

  By the end of November I was glad to get back to New York, but, like most actors, the glow of having just completed a big job wore off quickly and I wondered if I would ever be asked to do another film. I began writing my second screenplay, Tough Guy. It was about a B picture movie actor who plays a very cool tough guy, fighting against crooks, but when he comes up against some actual crooks offscreen, it’s a little different. That script was never produced.

  KOSHER PORK

  I was asked to do publicity in Chicago for the release of Willy Wonka. Chicago was only ninety miles from Milwaukee, so I went home to see my father and his new wife, Belle. She and her husband had been good friends with my mother and father before her husband died. After my mother died, my father couldn’t even raise his arm high enough to comb his hair—bursitis, he said—but when he started dating Belle, you’d think he was doing commercials for a hairbrush company.

  The night I arrived in Milwaukee, Belle cooked a delicious brisket of beef. The next morning a huge limousine drove up in front of my father’s small house. All the homes in this quiet neighborhood were small, but attractive, middle-class homes. My father couldn’t believe the size of the automobile that was parked in front of his house. He got in, and we were driven to Chicago. He had never ridden in a limousine before.

  Paramount Pictures was distributing Willy Wonka, and they provided a beautiful suite at the Ambassador East Hotel—home of the famous restaurant, the Pump Room. We weren’t staying in Chicago overnight—the beautiful suite was just for interviews with the journalists. When work was finished, I took my father to dinner at the Pump Room. My stepmother’s daughter and her husband lived in Chicago, so I invited them to join us. It was a beautiful dinner, ending with a flaming dessert—everything paid for by Paramount Pictures. My father couldn’t believe all of this splendor.

  I held my father’s hand on the ride home that night. After about half an hour of cheerful bantering back and forth, he got quiet. Then he said, “I always told you not to put all your eggs in one basket. Since you were a little boy, I warned you not to put all your eggs in one basket. Now I’m glad you did.” What I didn’t have the heart to tell him was that Start the Revolution Without Me and Quackser Fortune had both failed at the box office, and if Willy Wonka also failed, I didn’t know where my next job would come from, or even if there would be a next job.

  I took the opportunity of this sweet ride home to ask my father one question that had always bothered me.

  “Daddy, you remember when I was sixteen and had just come back from the Reginald Goode Summer Theater and wanted to buy some ham when you stopped at a delicatessen? Why did you put up such a fuss over buying a little piece of ham?”

  He took a long pause.

  “I was only eleven years old when we came over from Russia. When we settled in Milwaukee my mother used to tell all of us kids that if we ate pork we’d get sick and vomit.”

  “But you did eat pork.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Whenever we went to Mammy’s Restaurant . . . you and I would always have the spareribs.”

  “So?”

  “So where do you think spareribs come
from?”

  “A cow.”

  “Daddy, it said on the front of the menu, ‘Pig on the Cob—our specialty.’ ”

  “Well—that doesn’t count.”

  “Well what about when you made bacon for us on Sunday mornings?”

  “Well bacon is different. That’s not really pork.”

  “What do you think it is, Daddy?”

  He grew silent for awhile; then he said, “Jerry . . . my mother didn’t know from ‘spareribs’ and ‘bacon’—she didn’t even know how to speak English—she only knew about pork chops and ham. I never thought about getting sick from eating spareribs or bacon because she never said those words.”

  I squeezed his hand a little tighter and wished that I had asked my question a little earlier.

  The next day I got a call from Woody Allen, at my father’s home in Milwaukee.

  “I want to do a remake of Sister Carrie,” he said. “I’m thinking of either you or Laurence Olivier in the man’s part, but instead of a woman in Jennifer Jones’s part, I want to use a sheep.”

  He had my number—both my father’s phone number and my acting number. I knew before reading the script why he wanted me—an actor who could believably fall in love with a sheep and play it straight.

  Before I left for Los Angeles to do Woody’s film, I found out that Willy Wonka had failed at the box office. It seems strange now to think that Roald Dahl’s morality story wasn’t embraced. I was told that many mothers thought the lessons in the movie were too cruel for children to understand. As the years since have proven, children don’t have any trouble understanding the movie—they crave to know what the boundaries are. It was the mothers who had a little difficulty.

  By now I had three commercial flops in a row. Four, actually—The Producers suffered because of a bad review from a reviewer named Renata Adler, who wrote for the New York Times, so Joe Levine sold the movie to television to get more money to advertise his other movie, The Graduate. Renata Adler called Mel Brooks’s movie “black college humor.” She left the Times after a short stint, but it was too late. She did go on to an illustrious career at the New Yorker, but I wish she had left the Times a year earlier.

  Struggling to be a genius is endemic to young artists who are starting their careers, but after being bloodied a few times, they just hope that they won’t be ridiculed in the press or on television by those few who have the power to coronate them or tear them down.

  I remembered a quote from Gary Cooper: “I need one movie out of three to be a hit.” I was leaving for California to do Woody’s film in hopes of resurrecting my career.

  EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO

  KNOW ABOUT SEX

  Apart from “Good morning” and “Good night,” Woody said only three things to me during all of the filming of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

  1. “Did anyone offer you tea or coffee, Gene?”

  2. “Do you know where to go for lunch?”

  3. “By the way—if you don’t like any of these lines, just change them to what you’d like to say.”

  It seemed an extraordinary thing to say. As we worked, I realized that Woody’s great confidence was not that he knew he’d chosen the right actor, but that the event he’d written was more important than the particular words the actor used to bring that event to life.

  THE DEMON IS DEAD.

  After Woody’s film I came back to New York and made appointments to see Margie on what used to be our regular Tuesdays and Thursdays. The afternoon before our first appointment, she called me at home, which was rare, to say that she needed to change our appointment to a later date. I said, “Well, I’ll try to hold out that long.” She answered with something like, “Well, it’ll give me a break from having to listen to you when you get boring.”

  I thought about that sentence for the rest of the day. Her remark irritated me so much that I decided I wasn’t going to go back to her—and then my good sense told me that if I had learned anything from Margie in the last seven years, it was to deal with a problem at the time it happens, not to hide it away in the corner of my mind, to noodle over for weeks and months.

  I walked into her office on the morning she requested.

  “I didn’t think you’d show up today—after what I said to you on the phone.”

  “I didn’t intend to come back, but I thought that not showing up wasn’t a very healthy way to end a relationship. I came to tell you in person that I’m not coming back.”

  “Sit down, Gene . . . please.”

  I sat down, facing her.

  “I asked myself why on earth I said that to you. After I hung up I felt sure you wouldn’t come back. Then I realized that it was my way of letting go of you.”

  “You were letting go of me?”

  “That’s right. The therapist has to let go, too, you know—not just the patient. It was time . . . but I didn’t realize it until I insulted you that way. You don’t need me anymore, Gene.”

  I was very touched. We talked for the rest of the hour. I asked some questions that I had put off for a long time, concerning my marriage and a growing sadness I was experiencing.

  “Gene . . . when you told me how much you loved Mary Jo, I said, ‘I think she’s a terrific woman, but are you sure you want to get married?’ ”

  “I still don’t know what that means.”

  “It means that you were a twenty-three-year-old semivirgin who got into a hopeless marriage with Mary because some friend of yours got his girlfriend pregnant. Yes?”

  “. . . Yes.”

  “And a few minutes after you got your divorce from Mary you fall in love with Mary Jo, who may or may not be the right person for you—I don’t know—but you immediately start to feel guilty if you don’t ask Jo to marry you because her daughter starts calling you ‘Daddy.’ Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What you do about your marriage is your business—now tell me about your Demon.”

  “My Demon is dead. I drove a stake through his heart—he’ll never come back. I don’t question my own goodness anymore.”

  “Do you know why the Demon came in the first place?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What right did I have to be happy—sexually or any other way—if my mother was suffering every day of her life? I think the Demon timed his arrival very cleverly, just when my hormones were screaming to be free. I prayed my guts out instead of letting my sex out. And my anger.”

  Margie was silent for a few moments. Then she gave me a soft smile.

  “You know, Gene . . . just because you’re leaving doesn’t mean you can’t call me or write, or come to see me if you ever need help with something.”

  I looked at my watch.

  “Time’s up, Margie.”

  I got up, and we hugged each other. I whispered, “Thank you.”

  “BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE”

  Westhampton Beach, Long Island, is deserted in the winter and spring. I thought it would be nice to go there in the off-season, on weekends and during school vacations, so I rented a small cottage.

  The day before Valentine’s Day Katie and I had just gotten back from grocery shopping and were about to get out of the car, but she looked so sad and just sat still. I asked her what she’d like for Valentine’s Day, knowing that the answer would be some kind of chocolate.

  “I want a five-pound box of chocolates.”

  I started to laugh, until I saw that she was deadly serious.

  “Five pounds! Honey, five pounds would be enough for—”

  “If it isn’t five pounds, don’t bother. I don’t want any!”

  “You mean, if I got you a one pound box of beautiful chocolates you’d throw it away?”

  “Yes. Or two pounds, or three pounds, or four pounds.” Her eyes started tearing.

  “I WANT FIVE POUNDS—or else don’t get me anything!”

  Katie got out of her car and headed for the front door. I caught up with her an
d hugged her. I tried to kiss her, but she pulled her face away.

  “I can’t give you five pounds of chocolate, Katie—I wouldn’t be a good father if I did that.”

  “You’re not my real father anyway.”

  She knew exactly where to place the dagger. I just stared at her. She burst into tears and cried out, “Hit me! For God’s sake, hit me—before it’s too late.”

  The next day I bought two heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, one for Jo and one for Katie—one pound each. Katie ate her chocolates as if we had never had that horrific conversation, but the phrase “before it’s too late” stayed with me. It was a cry for help; I understood that. But I was afraid it was also a cry of anger that could take her away from me.

  chapter 19

  THE BIRTH OF A MONSTER

  During Katie’s Easter vacation we went to Westhampton Beach for several days. The memory of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex was so happy that it was making me sad—wondering if I would ever be asked to work in something wonderful again.

  After lunch one afternoon I walked up to my bedroom with a yellow legal pad and a blue felt pen. At the top of the page, I wrote, Young Frankenstein, and then wrote two pages of what might happen to me if I were the great grandson of Beaufort von Frankenstein and was called to Transylvania because I had just inherited the Frankenstein estate.

  Why the word “Young” before the name “Frankenstein”? It came out almost unconsciously, but when I asked myself, later, where that thought came from, I remembered Mickey Rooney in the film Young Edison, which I saw when I was a boy. Then I remembered a more recent clue: Anne Bancroft had made a film called Young Winston.