Gene Wilder - Kiss Me Like a Stranger - My Search for Love and Art

I never went back to Black/Foxe.

When I was fifteen, I went to a downtown movie theater to see Great Expectations , but before the movie started, they showed a short subject called:

I had no idea who Vincent van Gogh was – I’d never even heard of him. Twenty-three of his oil paintings flooded the screen, one after the other, in full color. I don’t know why they call it “dumbfounded” – I think they should call it “dumblosted,” because after seeing the paintings, I was lost. When I walked out of the movie theater I started thinking about my second-grade teacher, Miss Bernard, who used to put up paintings from almost all of the other boys and girls in my class on the classroom walls – paintings that she considered worthy – but she never put up one of mine. She never told me why or gave me an encouraging word, but I got the message: “You’re no good at art, Jerry.”

The following Saturday I took an early train to Chicago to see the van Gogh exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute. I could only stay for an hour because I had tickets for the two o’clock matinée to see Judith Anderson in Medea. My critical judgment wasn’t fine-tuned yet; I thought the play was just okay. Then I walked to a theater about a half a mile away to see the five o’clock showing of Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet. That was okay, too. Hamlet let out at 8:10 P.M. so I ran – as fast as I could eat my hot dog – to see the 8:30 P.M. stage performance of A Streetcar Named Desire , starring Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn. That was more than okay.

I think what I did was dumb – crowding all those great things into one day – but Milwaukee was a big “small town” in those days, and it would never have had a van Gogh exhibit or Medea or A Streetcar Named Desire with Uta Hagen. Today perhaps, but not in 1948.

My mother had wanted to be a pianist before she got married. When I told her about the van Gogh exhibit and how much I loved him, she gave me a little money to buy some paints. I took the bus to an art supply shop downtown and bought eight tubes of oil paint and two frames of stretched canvas, 18 × 24 inches apiece. The owner of the store helped me pick out a couple of brushes and advised me to take a small bottle of linseed oil. I also bought a print of a van Gogh painting for $3.50. It was called Lady in a Cornfield. When I got home, I set up shop in our basement, mounted the van Gogh print on a chair, and painted Lady in a Cornfield. My mother liked it so much that she had it framed and hung it on our living room wall, next to her piano. I’ve been painting ever since. So you didn’t win, Miss Bernard. You didn’t win.

When I was still fifteen, I auditioned for the Milwaukee Players, which was a very good community theater that put on big productions of classics and also gave lessons in makeup. I passed my audition, and the first play I acted in – in front of a paying audience – was Romeo and Juliet. I played Balthasar, Romeo’s manservant, and I had only two lines, but I also had a fencing scene, which I loved. It wasn’t real fencing, of course; it was just sort of “try to make it look real” fencing.

My next part was the Messenger in Much Ado About Nothing. One evening, while we were in production, I got to the theater early and had just started putting on my makeup when one of the male dancers came in, very bouncy and cheerful. He had always been very friendly, but when he saw that we were alone, he started behaving strangely. I had never met a homosexual before – I had only heard Corinne talk about what were then called fairies – but this handsome dancer, who must have been at least ten years older than I was – started chasing me around the children’s classroom that we used as a makeup room. I dodged in and out of the rows of little desks, trying my best to make the dancer believe that I believed that he was just playing a game. Just as I was getting frightened, two other actors came in, said, “Hi,” and started putting on their makeup. I sat down at my desk and started putting on makeup again. I didn’t look at the dancer until he knelt down next to me.

“You know I was just joking around, don’t you?” he whispered.

“Of course! Are you kidding?”

I wish I had acted in Much Ado About Nothing as well as I did for the dancer.

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