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The Last Day I(subjeck) Spent With Gilda Radner

In 1975, at the brand-new “Saturday Night Live,” Lorne Michaels, with a tiny budget, hired three superb women to join the cast — Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner. Sketch comedy requires performers who can shed their(possessive adj) personalities instantly. With characteristic prescience, Lorne saw this ability in those three. (Today, female comedians are often stand-ups — Ellen DeGeneres, Samantha Bee — who don’t morph into someone else in the middle of their shows.)

Gilda Radner was a gifted, ebullient, wildly physical performer who disappeared into her characters right down to their souls. Tragically, she died at 42, in 1989. A documentary about her(object) will have its premiere Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival. News of the film zinged my memory of our last day together, one summer in the late ’80s.

Gilda had a big, antique, rich person’s house near Stamford, Conn., where you could find fun, cool, opulent relief in sizzling heat if the person you were visiting wasn’t dying, as Gilda was. Still, the custom-made accouterments she’d had designed for the house lifted you up. On the un-air-conditioned fourth floor, for instance, was a couch outside the bathroom, upholstered entirely in terry cloth so that you could just roll around on it instead of grabbing a towel; it had matching terry-cloth flip-flops, robe and night cap. She so hilariously acted out the bathtub dry-off on the couch-towel under a wobbly, hovering ceiling fan, it(subject) was an escape from brutal summer and her wobbly, hovering death.

She was very short on air climbing stairs. Still, Gilda calmly described the bibelots that decorated her house and those that decorated her person (i.e., her labored breaths) in a poised, gracious way, like Jackie Kennedy giving that TV tour of the White House. She understood what was wrong with her and knew the big, hard medical words to describe it. This seemed to put her in control of her symptoms.

Next, she dragged me to the sunroom, with some effort, so much the opposite of the physically articulate Gilda from before. Example: In a University of Michigan production of “Lysistrata” (we were both undergrads at the school), I saw her will her body to appear to defy gravity for a laugh — walking a 90-degree angle partway up the stage’s proscenium arch, body virtually parallel to the floor.

On “Saturday Night Live,” she smashed into closet doors and walls, bruised her ribs during a dress rehearsal of a “Judy Miller Show” sketch, and then insisted on doing the sketch immediately after, live on the air.

She also played Candy Slice, an endlessly high-as-a-kite punk rocker. For that, she wrote (with Paul Shaffer) and performed a song called “Gimme Mick,” which Candy danced to, diagonally, vertically and lying down, flaunting double-Brillo-size hairy armpits. In the song, she called herself Mick Jagger’s “biggest funked-up fan,” but she also had objections — she accused him of things like being English, dating models and getting an incredible amount of publicity. Then, with a mix of vituperative scorn and adoration, she really let him have it with the line, “You, Mick Jagger, don’t keep regular hours!” To finish, Candy burped into the mic and passed out on the floor, and was carried off.

The sunroom had a round table set for lunch. There, I met Gilda’s husband, Gene Wilder (we’d spoken only on the phone). Everyone was served a different lunch. I remember only Gilda’s, which had no real food, just little crushed-up wads of carrots, something green, something yellow, something red, which she chewed vigorously without swallowing, to get the flavor, spit out, then went on to chew the next color. (Doc’s orders.)

Still, we(subject) chatted: about the drive from New York, Bel Air versus Stamford, how great Gene was in “The Producers” when he called Zero Mostel “Fat! … Fat! Fat! Fat!” — a proper lunchtime tête-à-tête, just with someone spitting.

Next, Gilda sped me(object) to a sitting room/kitchen, where there were a bunch of girls our age in jeans and T-shirts — nice neighbors, I assumed, who came to visit and laze around. There was an open back door to the swimming pool, surrounded by stereo speakers loudly playing something like “Some Enchanted Evening.” Gilda pulled on a swimsuit and introduced her two old girlfriends from Detroit, with whom she’d performed fake water ballet for years. Now, with her being ill, they visited Stamford, and as it was fake water ballet season again, they executed Balanchine-like moves, pointing toes and breast-stroking — while walking on the pool floor — to the music blaring from the speakers for all Stamford to enjoy.

Gilda changed, we walked her dog, and she told me about a recent party in Los Angeles at Laraine Newman’s (Gilda was there, I think, to see some doctor). Her party plan: stay five minutes. But Billy (Murray) and Danny (Aykroyd) carried her up and down the stairs by her arms and legs, and from room to room, so she couldn’t leave.

It got dark. Next topic: my love life (re: marriage). I said, it’s shocking, but living together, which should be the Big Segue, was making it harder! Marriage was both of our goals — Gilda (when single) even asked Jane Curtin (married) if she and her husband, Patrick, would let Gilda drop by to watch them be married one evening, just to see what it was like.

Gilda grabbed my car keys and jumped in my driver’s seat so that I couldn’t leave. In the house, the neighbors turned an upholstered bench into a big bed. It got darker.

“Remember when you and I took tap-dancing lessons?” Gilda asked. I remembered this and more: like the time some suave guy invited her to his(possessive) house in Brazil for Christmas. She flew 14 hours, went in, hugs, kisses, then he pointed to a girl and said, “Gilda, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Joan.” Gilda said: “Hello. May I use your phone?” then called the airline, jumped back in his limo and flew 14 hours home.

I remembered she truly wanted to weigh zero, and invented her famous drink, the Vodka Tab. I remembered she said all the women at her family’s weddings had zero to one breast — only she had two.

In the house, a sheet fluttered up onto the bed, and it suddenly struck me: These girls weren’t neighbors. They(subject) were nurses, there to give Gilda some treatment, or do something, at home; she(subject) hated hospitals and could afford this. Her(object) dog pulled her(object) from my driver’s seat. We hugged and promised we’d talk soon. Sadly, we didn’t.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/opinion/the-last-day-i-spent-with-gilda-radner.html?action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront