Gilda Radner with Miss Piggy.
When it comes to the audience for the new documentary Love, Gilda, there are two kinds of people: folks like me, old enough to remember and love the luminous Gilda Radner. And people too young to know the comedian, who died in 1989 at age 43.
For those of us who stayed up past our bedtimes in the ’70s watching the very first cast of Saturday Night Live, the film will serve as a flashback. The humor was often sophomoric, and the actors used to crack each other up on a regular basis. That was always my favorite part.
Gilda was funny, she was fearless, she lit up the room — and the screen. And, like many others who died too young, she also wrestled with fame and faced down demons — in her case it was an eating disorder. In the end, it was ovarian cancer (“the fucker,” as one friend recalls her naming cancer).
Modern comedy fans will recognize many faces in the film: Rachel Dratch, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy. They comment on the significance of her work, and they read from her diaries. Director Lisa Dapolito also makes ample use of archival video and clips from movies, Gilda’s one-woman show, and Saturday Night Live. As far as documentaries go, it’s really nothing special. But Gilda was so special, it hardly matters.
Love, Gilda travels back to Detroit, Michigan, where Gilda grew up in a loving upper-middle class family, frolicking and hamming it up for home videos. She was obsessed with Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball. But she was teased for being overweight, and her mom put her on diet pills at age 10. Her family’s beloved housekeeper, Dibby, provided key advice: “When I would come home crying because someone called me fat at school, she would tell me, ‘If they call you fat, just make a joke about it and laugh,’” Gilda says. “I made them laugh before they could hurt me.”
She launched a career in Toronto and was cast in a production of Godspell with Eugene Levy, Martin Short and Paul Shaffer. From there, she was drafted into the Second City troupe, and got a call from John Belushi, who asked “Do you want to be the girl in the show?” The show was The National Lampoon Radio Hour, broadcasting out of New York City, and that’s where she fell in with Belushi, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis. She volunteered to be the typist in the writing room, slipping her ideas in that way. There was partying, and then the 1975 launch of NBC’s Saturday Night (later renamed SNL). More partying. And fame.
She excelled at nerdiness. She probably made the world a little safer for young nerds (Lisa Loopner — “Oh, Todd…”) and elderly, hard-of-hearing ones (Emily Litella — “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing…?”). My personal favorite was Roseanne RoseannaDanna.
Celebrity was hard for Gilda. But she loved an audience. “When I think back on my life I always felt that my comedy was just to make things be all right,” she wrote. “I love the naivete that the soul can believe what it wants to believe. I could be prettier than I was. I could be people that I really wasn’t. I would use comedy to be in control of my situation.”
The end of her life was defined by a loving marriage with actor and film director Gene Wilder. They met on the set of Hanky Panky, and Gilda is often quoted as saying “life went from black and white to Technicolor.” In footage of their time together, she is always smiling, even in the hospital, and holding a small dog, Sparkle.
Sparkle is a great word to describe Gilda, too.
Love, Gilda is expected to have a run in Madison theaters. For now, it’s available to rent on Amazon.com.
