Anyone who’s read Gene Wilder’s 1970 letter about the costume suggestions for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to the movie’s director, Mel Stuart, let alone seen his performance in the film, knows that he was no slouch when it came to creating wise and confident solo performances.
“I don’t think of Willy as an eccentric who holds onto his 1912 Daddy’s Sunday suit and wears it in 1970,” he wrote, “but rather as just an eccentric – where there’s no telling what he’ll do or where he ever found his get-up – except that it strangely fits him … Jodhpurs to me belong more to the dancing master. But once elegant now almost baggy trousers – baggy through preoccupation with more important things – is character … The hat is terrific, but making it two inches shorter would make it more special … To match the shoes with the jacket is fey. To match the shoes with the hat is taste.”
He describes Wonka, perfectly, as “part of this world, part of another … Something mysterious, yet undefined”.
However, it was in Wilder’s collaborations that the shrewdness and generosity of this famously kind man really shone through. Willy Wonka aside, Wilder will forever be best known for his long relationships with three of the best-loved American comedians to have emerged in the 1960s and 70s: Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor and Gilda Radner. Wilder’s work with Brooks produced arguably both of their best work: The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. As a writer-director combination, they were as natural and well-matched as Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. In a PBS documentary about Brooks, Wilder was asked if he thought his initial meeting with Brooks was significant. Wilder burst out laughing: “When God spoke to Moses the first time, would you ask him, ‘Was that significant in your life?’” he replied, still chortling. “I would say it had some minor importance, yes.”
For his part, Brooks put it like this: “Everything Gene did for me was angelic and supreme.” When news of Wilder’s death broke, Brooks, now 90, tweeted: “Gene Wilder – One of the truly great talents of our time. He blessed every film we did with his magic & he blessed me with his friendship.”
Wilder and Pryor seemed, on the surface, a more unlikely pair – the older, gentle Wilder and the more tempestuous and tortured Pryor – but together they found an improvisational style that came so easily it surprised even them. Wilder recalled in an interview about the making of Silver Streak: “He said his first line, I said my first line, and then this other line comes out of him. I had no idea where it came from, but I didn’t question it. I just responded naturally … Then he went back to the script and then he came away, and everything we did together was like that.”
The two originally met on Blazing Saddles, which Pryor co-wrote with Brooks, and Pryor was originally supposed to co-star, although that part eventually went to Cleavon Little. But Wilder and Pryor eventually formed one of the all-time great on-screen odd-couple partnerships, making together Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, See No Evil Hear No Evil and, finally, Another You.
Pryor was never the easiest man to work with, as he admits in his extraordinary autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, turning up on set later and later having been up all night freebasing.
“We did Stir Crazy and Richard was a bad boy,” Wilder later recalled. “He would come to the set 15 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half late and it would bug all of us. I didn’t want to say anything because I wanted it to go on.”
It was typical of Wilder’s sweetness that he claimed Pryor’s lateness was limited to just 90 minutes – according to Pryor it could easily be more than half a day. But the two, while not exactly friends offset – their recreational lives were far too different for that – had a profound respect for one another, and interviews of the two of them together, such as one they gave Roger Ebert in 1976, show how much they loved to make one another laugh:
‘“What are you doing next?” Wilder asked [Pryor].
“It’s a movie called Which Way is Up?” Pryor said. “This, uh, Italian director, Lina Wertmuller.”
“No!” said Wilder. “Oh my God! I’ll kill myself!”
“What are you moaning about, man?”
“You’re going to work with Lina Wertmuller? She passed right by me and saw you and said, ‘I must have that young man’?”
“You didn’t let me finish,” Pryor said. “She made this movie called The Seduction of Mimi, and this will be a remake, set among the grape pickers of California. Somebody else is directing.”
“I would have killed myself out of envy,” Wilder said.
“And then,” said Pryor, “I’m in a remake of Arsenic and Old Lace.”
“My favourite play next to Hamlet,” Wilder said. “All black cast, I suppose, nothing for me.”
“And then,” said Pryor, “I’m doing Hamlet.”’
Wilder always fondly referred to Pryor as “Richie” and Pryor, according to his daughter Rain, considered him “a genius and a good man”. The only other artist who Pryor would accord similar respect was Lily Tomlin. Another You, their last work together, was also the last film either starred in. It was during the filming of that 1991 comedy that Pryor realised the MS, which he’d been trying to ignore, was no longer ignorable.
Wilder was also suffering profoundly during the making of that movie, but in a different way. Two years earlier, his wife, the comedian Gilda Radner, one of the original stars of Saturday Night Live, had died from ovarian cancer. The two had met while making a movie, Hanky Panky, in 1982 and married in 1984.
“I had been a fan of Gene Wilder’s for many years, but the first time I saw him my heart fluttered – I was hooked. It felt like my life went from black and white to Technicolor. Gene was funny and athletic and handsome, and he smelled good. I was bitten with love,” she wrote in her extremely moving autobiography, It’s Always Something, which she completed shortly before she died.
Wilder was equally devoted and the two were deeply in love. The years they were together, making two more movies – The Woman in Red and Haunted Honeymoon – were, Wilder often later said, “the best years of my life”. Certainly the photos of them in It’s Always Something show two people shining with happiness, laughing together, kissing, and almost invariably holding their beloved Yorkshire terrier, Sparkle.
But Sparkle wasn’t quite enough and Radner desperately wanted them to have a baby. But she had trouble conceiving, and then she heartbreakingly miscarried. She also started to suffer mysterious maladies. It took 10 months for doctors to realise she had stage IV ovarian cancer. One of Radner’s favourite books was Disturbances in the Dark by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, in which a father ties tennis shoes to the umbrella on the beach so his daughters will be able to find him. The night before Radner underwent her first chemotherapy treatment, Wilder came into the hospital room with an umbrella to which he’d tied some shoes. But neither the shoes nor chemotherapy could save her, and Radner died in 1989, at the age of 42.
“For weeks after Gilda died, I was shouting at the walls. I kept thinking to myself, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ The fact is, Gilda didn’t have to die. But I was ignorant, Gilda was ignorant – the doctors were ignorant,” Wilder later wrote.
In an attempt to give Radner’s death some kind of logic, Wilder tried to transform his grief into proactivity, helping to found the Gilda Radner Ovarian Cancer Detection Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre and testifying before a congressional subcommittee about the need for more money for research into the disease. His testimony helped allocate a further $30m. When asked how he felt about that, Wilder simply said, with characteristic understatement: “I feel relieved now, and I sleep better at night … I think I was one spoke in a wheel that started to turn at this time. Actually Gilda was the main horsepower behind the whole thing.”
Wilder often liked to suggest he was the mere straight man, the one off whom true genius – Brooks, Pryor, Radner – bounced. But as all three of them knew, Wilder gave them not just the support but the bounce and also the love. Something mysterious, yet undefined. Part of this world, part of another.
