When he was a small boy, no more than 8 years old, his mother developed rheumatic fever and she became very ill. Now in those days, a local physician would have been known to leave his office, and travel with a small black bag filled with a handful of general supplies to visit a sick patient at his or her home, as is what happened on this particular occasion. After the doctor had finished examining his mother and was walking back to his car, the small boy followed him out the screen door and stood gazing from the front porch after this man for some hopeful sign, a wink or a nod, that everything would soon be back to normal. Just before the doctor reached his car, he turned back and noticed the boy watching him from the porch steps. “Try and make her laugh,” he called to the boy, and then he got in his car and drove away.
The boy took this charge very seriously, and during the days and weeks that followed, he worked tirelessly to achieve the laughter from his mother that the doctor had challenged him to procure. From immature joke-telling to general clowning-around, the boy used every antic he could possibly think of to induce from his mother the treasured laugh he now so desperately wished to hear. For in his mind he now knew that only that would be the true sign of her returning health. And then one day, through some perfectly realized combination of facial expression and timing, the boy performed, and from across the room, like the discovery of gold in cave, he heard from his bed-ridden mother the ever-so-slightest hint of a chuckle.
Not many days later, the color, as they say, returned to his mother’s face, and she was soon able to get up out of bed and walk about the house again as she used to do. When the doctor returned to examine his mother one last time, the boy overheard him saying that she had reacted very strongly to the medicine he had prescribed. But the boy knew what had really cured his mother. He knew what the real medicine was. And from those early days on, he carried closely with him the idea that if he could make his mother laugh with such profound results, then making everyone else laugh would be a most worthy life goal.
In the years that followed, the boy grew up into a young man, graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Communication and Theater Arts, and was accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in England where he became a champion fencer and a student of classical theater. After a few years, he moved back to the States and was quickly drafted into the army, where he served for a short period of time in the medical corps at Valley Forge Army Hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. He was discharged from the army in 1958, and soon started studying acting full time at HB Studio, a school in New York City that offered, and still does, professional training in the performing arts. He there studied for three years, until a fellow student and friend, Charles Grodin, told him about Lee Strasberg’s method acting classes. After several months, he was officially accepted into the Actors Studio.
It was during his years at the Actors Studio that he famously decided it was time to adopt a stage name. You see, he was moving quickly through the ranks of the acting world, and at the time he simply could not imagine ever seeing on a playbill or theater marquee the words “Jerome Silberman starring as Macbeth.” Therefore, being an avid reader, he turned to literature for his new name. He went over to his bookshelf and pulled from it two books: Our Town by Thornton Wilder and Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. And so, for his last name, he chose Wilder. He thought it looked profound and sounded distinguished...Indeed. For his first name he went to Wolfe’s classic, first novel, and from it adopted the name of the story’s passionate main character, Eugene, or simply Gene.
Years later, recalling a career that has spanned the years from an Academy Award nomination for The Producers and a wonderful performance in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to the splendidly brilliant Young Frankenstein and hilarious partnership with Richard Pryor in Silver Streak, he likes to say now he can’t imagine having ever seen “Gene Wilder starring as Macbeth” either. Well that may be true. It most likely would have been an odd Macbeth. But throughout the years, Gene Wilder has done something much more important. Much more valuable. He’s made us for a time able to forget our troubles, or our worries, or whatever it is that may be bothering us. He’s given us exactly what the doctor ordered. Gene Wilder has made us laugh.
Until next week, here is my hope that we all find out Shangri-La. Good night.
