Radner, Gilda (1946–1989)

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Radner, Gilda (1946–1989)

Popular comic actress and original cast member of NBC's "Saturday Night Live," which, in its early years, transformed television comedy. Pronunciation: RAD-ner. Born on June 28, 1946, in Detroit, Michigan; died of ovarian cancer on May 20, 1989, in Los Angeles, California; daughter of Herman Radner (a prominent Detroit businessman) and Henrietta (Dworkin) Radner; studied drama and education at University of Michigan, 1964–69; married G.E. Smith (a musician), in 1980 (divorced 1982); married Gene Wilder (an actor), on September 18, 1984; no children.

Received Emmy for "Saturday Night Live" (1977–78); received Antoinette Perry (Tony) nomination for Lunch Hour (1980).

Television:

"Saturday Night Live" (1975–80). Theater: Gilda Radner–Live From New York (1979); Lunch Hour (1980). Film: Gilda Live (1980); Hanky Panky (1982); The Woman in Red (1984). Memoir: It's Always Something (1989).

When NBC's "Saturday Night Live" premiered on October 18, 1975, the generation who had come of age during the Vietnam War and Watergate had not quite learned to make fun of itself. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players, the young renegade group that comprised the original cast, changed all that. Their first show featured an ad with activist-turned-entrepreneur Jerry Rubin selling graffiti wallpaper from the 1960s. The show was hip, relevant, and an instant smash. Suddenly, sitting in front of the television on Saturday night was the place to be.

Gilda Radner was one of the reasons. Her eccentric, endearing characters were unlike any her audience had ever seen and at the same time instantly recognizable. Everyone who had ever made a fool of themselves felt a rapport with these characters, and with Gilda.

Radner was born on June 28, 1946, to prosperous Jewish parents who lived in an uppermiddle-class suburb of Detroit, Michigan; she had one older brother. Her father Herman Radner had been reared with his ten siblings on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where his father had immigrated from Lithuania. In 1906, when he was 13, his family moved to Detroit. Having dropped out of school in the fifth grade, Herman became a pool hustler until he won enough money to buy a pool hall. In the 1920s, he bought a Canadian brewery, and by the Depression he was so prosperous that he became known as a philanthropist, turning his brewery into a free lunchroom.

In 1937, when Herman was 44, he married Henrietta Dworkin , and their son Michael was born in 1941. Gilda, who arrived five years later, once described herself as an "unhappy, fat and mediocre" child. The roots of those feelings seemed to lie in her relationship with her mother, next to whom Gilda felt inadequate. Henrietta had been a beautiful young woman, a legal secretary and frustrated ballet dancer, and had become, according to Gilda and several of her friends, cold and critical.

"If you can decide to be funny, I decided it at age ten," Radner told Amy Gross of Mademoiselle. "I said to myself, 'You're not going to make it on looks.' … I just knew if people said I was fat, I'd laugh and make jokes about it and that would be my world." She was encouraged to be funny by her father and her nanny, the two adults she held most dear. Elizabeth Clementine Gillies , Gilda's beloved nanny and mother figure, whom she called Dibby, came to work for the Radners when Gilda was four months old and stayed for eighteen years. A widow with three children, she was warm and totally accepting of Gilda, two things Henrietta Radner was not, and she became not only a close confidant throughout Gilda's entire life, but also an inspiration for much of her most successful comic material.

Her father, who had become the wealthy owner of the Saville, one of Detroit's best hotels, loved show business and the show people who stayed at his hotel. It was Herman who taught Gilda to sing and dance and had her perform for relatives. They loved to go to the theater together, and always sat in the third row of the Riviera for road shows of Broadway productions. According to Gilda, Herman always wanted to be a songand-dance man: "Some of his spunk must have come out in me, because he used to love to perform…. He did magic tricks. He loved to sing, and he could tap dance, and he couldn't carry a

tray of food to the table without tripping to make us kids laugh and make my mother nervous. In the years that I've been performing I feel that some part of my father is back alive in me, back doing what he always wanted to do," she told her friend David Saltman as recorded in his book Gilda.

But when Radner was 12, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer which soon made him quite ill. He was never really himself again and died two years later, when she was away at summer camp. Herman Radner's illness and death foreshadowed that of his daughter, and broke her heart.

By her high school years, Radner had made a concerted, successful effort to slim down, and she stayed thin for the rest of her life. Eating and dieting remained an obsession, and she always said that she felt as if she were fat; during the most creative, frenetic "Saturday Night Live" period, she began binge eating and was, for a time, bulimic.

Gilda Radner thought she wasn't beautiful. She was wrong about that.
—Tom Shales

After graduating from the Liggett School in 1964, Radner moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan, where she stayed for six years without earning a college degree. Her years in Ann Arbor were fertile, however. College is often a heady experience, and it was perhaps more so in the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War divided the United States, and college students were often at the forefront of social change. Instead of frequenting demonstrations and sit-ins, however, Gilda found herself more at home in the theater. She had comic roles in the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor Civic Theater productions of The Magic Horn, Lysistrata, and Hotel Paradiso, and leading roles in The Taming of the Shrew and She Stoops to Conquer.

In 1969, Radner moved to Toronto with a boyfriend, with whom she soon broke up, but she stayed in Canada and took a job at a small, avant-garde theater doing pantomime stories for elementary school children. At 23, she realized that she could actually make a living by being funny (although, as the beneficiary of a trust from her father, she did not need to work at all). After seeing Hair and the television series "Monty Python's Flying Circus," says Saltman, she "suddenly understood there could be a whole new direction for clowning and performance comedy, something along the lines of what National Lampoon was doing in print." Her first professional role came in 1972, when she was chosen for a Toronto production of Godspell; among her cast mates were Paul Shaffer, Martin Short, Andrea Martin and others who would go on to become well-known entertainers.

After Godspell, Radner joined the Toronto company of Second City, the groundbreaking, Chicago-based comedy revue. It was a tough way to learn, for all acts were improvised, and there were few props. Radner rose to the occasion and began to perfect her comedic characterizations. She was meeting and working with people who were to loom large in her life and career: John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and, in the audience, a Canadian producer named Lorne Michaels.

In 1974, after six years in Toronto, Radner moved to New York to work with Belushi on "The National Lampoon Radio Hour." It was a chance for her not only to work with Belushi, whom she considered her mentor and a comedic genius, but also to build on her years in Ann Arbor, where she had done some comic bits on the college radio station. One of her best-known characters, Babwa Wawa, a parody of television journalist Barbara Walters , made her first appearance on "Radio Hour." The radio show was followed by The National Lampoon Show, a road show that became a hit with college students in Canada and the Northeastern United States. Its producers garnered the courage to open the show in New York, and that run also proved successful. Radner's signature character was Rhoda Tyler Moore, a spoof on the popular television comedy, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

Lorne Michaels saw Radner's act again, and she was the first person he asked to join the cast of a new show he was attempting at NBC. She hesitated, having received a much more secure offer to work on a syndicated comedy talk show in Calgary. After polling her friends, as was her habit, Radner decided to risk disaster on a national network rather than safety in syndication. She soon began trying to talk Michaels into signing her favorite performing partners, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, and she succeeded.

Thus were born the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. In addition to Radner, Belushi, Aykroyd and Murray, the charter members were Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman , and Garrett Morris. The live, 90-minute comedy show, NBC's "Saturday Night Live," was an immediate hit. At its peak, it attracted an audience estimated at 10 million.

By 1979, after the departures from the show of Chevy Chase and John Belushi, Radner was the first among equals. Her generosity and innocence, as well as her eccentric characters, set her apart. She respected her audience and was loved in return. Her stable of characters had become household names, particularly her group of silly newscasters: in addition to Babwa Wawa, there was Roseanne Roseanadanna, who could elaborate at length on such subjects as nose hair, and Emily Litella, whose hearing problem caused her to expound on "Soviet jewelry" and "violins on television." There was Judy Miller, the self-absorbed Brownie; Lisa Loopner, the high school "nerd"; Rhonda Weiss, the Long Island "Jewish princess"; and they were all a part of Gilda Radner. She was gawky, grinning, often childlike and vulnerable, and she was a star. In 1978, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Radner an Emmy for "outstanding continuing performance by a supporting actress in music or comedy."

The show had an impact on teenagers and young adults far beyond that of any network television show before it. "Saturday Night Live," as Saltman describes it, "was a freewheeling blend of the sacred, the brilliant, and the profane, an international salon of the highest caliber as well as a sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll empire that redefined art, culture, fashion and especially humor." To young Americans, "Saturday Night Live" was the one television program not to be missed. Several of its catch phrases were Gilda's, including "It's always something" and "Never mind."

Radner's exit from "Saturday Night Live" was not particularly pleasant. The success of the Blues Brothers, Belushi and Aykroyd's independent act, had fueled her own ambition, and rightly so; she was every bit as popular as they were. NBC executives, who envisioned her as the Lucy Ricardo of the 1980s, wanted Gilda to have her own show, but she was ambivalent. With Lorne Michaels as her advisor, she decided instead to do a Broadway revue. Gilda Radner: Live From New York, which opened in 1979, strained old friendships and was a critical failure. Her talent was unquestioned, but many reviewers found the material too slight. The show closed after four weeks, and the accompanying album and film (called Gilda Live) both bombed.

"Saturday Night Live" launched its sixth season in the fall of 1980 with a completely new cast, a new executive producer, and terrible reviews. The show was never as funny and fresh again. Radner, however, had found a measure of personal and professional happiness. She married G.E. Smith, leader of the Gilda Live band (and later the band leader on "Saturday Night Live"). She appeared on Broadway once more, with Sam Waterson in Lunch Hour. This time, reviews were good.

Radner also began to take film roles. She played the president's daughter in First Family in 1980, followed by two films with Gene Wilder, Hanky Panky (1982) and The Woman in Red (1984). Radner said later that she never felt at home in front of the movie camera; indeed, the most significant result of these roles was a personal one. As she recounted in her memoir, It's Always Something: "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." Six months later, she divorced Smith and in 1984 a wildly happy Radner married Wilder in the south of France. The next year, the newlyweds filmed Haunted Honeymoon in London. But there were problems: Gilda had two miscarriages and spells of fatigue. In 1986, after months of increasingly poor health, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

The next two-and-a-half years were a roller coaster of hospitals and treatments, sickness and health. She brightened up gatherings at the Wellness Community, a cancer-support group in Santa Monica, California, where she delighted in making other people laugh. In 1991, the Santa Monica Wellness Community started a similar group in New York; they called it Gilda's Club. Today, it is an international organization with ten clubs in the United States, one in Canada, one in England, with plans for many more. In March 1988, after an eight-year absence from television, Radner appeared on the "Garry Shandling Show" and told cancer jokes.

Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer on May 20, 1989, at age 42. That night, hosting the final show of the 14th season of "Saturday Night Live," comedian Steve Martin showed a clip of Gilda romping through a spoof of romantic musicals with him. Afterward, he said, "When I look at this tape, I can't help but think how great she was, and how young I looked. Gilda, we miss you."