Original Publication – New York Magazine, August 6, 1979
Gilda Radner is prancing around a Broadway rehearsal hall just a few blocks from the NBC studios where she usually rehearses for TV’s Saturday Night. She turns a cartwheel, lands, and gives a little bow. “I’m cute when I do this,” she announces. Gilda, 33, has suddenly become Nadia Comaneci, the perfect seventeen-year-old gymnast. The piano plays the Rumanian national anthem. “Of course, 1980 will be my last Olympics,” she says. “We women in Eastern Europe don’t age gracefully. Soon I will become a fat Rumanian lady with a black mustache just like my mother.”
Although she’s been TV’s darling for several seasons, this week Gilda opens as the star of her own show at the Winter Garden: Gilda Radner – Live from New York. “These days I go to my closet,” says Gilda, “and look for ‘an actress rehearsing on Broadway,’ and I try to think, what would they wear?” Gilda is wearing green Bermudas, sneakers, a sushi rag tied around her head, and is looking less anorectic than usual – but nowhere near her old Weight Watcher days. She immediately goes into her “Saccharine” song, singing “Guys prefer skinny girls with cancer more than healthy ones with bulging thighs.”
On the bill with Gilda at the Winter Garden are disco singers called Rouge and Don Novello playing Father Guido Sarducci, the ersatz Vatican gossip columnist. But mostly the show, produced and directed by Saturday Night producer Lorne Michaels, consists of Gilda doing her favorite TV characters: la gross-out grande Roseanne Rosannadana, notable nerd Lisa Loopner, and baby Brownie Judy Miller. For the finale, Gilda sings her own composition, one of five songs she has co-written for the show – “Honey”, “Kiss me with my lips closed/Touch me with my clothes on.”
In “real life,” Gilda, who comes from a well-to-do Detroit family, is the consummate professional posing as the baby Brownie. “She works from this neurotic self-image,” says writer Harold Ramis, who started with Gilda back in her improvisation days with the Canadian Second City. “Then, as soon as you start believing she’s neurotic or screwed up, she comes out onstage and is perfect.”
“She works harder than anyone on her lines,” says Saturday Night’s Bill Murray, who plays Lisa Loopner’s wimpy boyfriend Todd on TV and was her real-life boyfriend last year. “Gilda is an entertainer as opposed to a movie star or an actress’s actress.”
But Gilda is most revealing when she plays real-life “Let’s Pretend.” Living in Toronto, for example, Gilda became a bingo fanatic, going out six nights a week to play sixteen or eighteen cards simultaneously at Catholic bingo halls. “I became addicted to it,” says Gilda. “It was gambling, you know, and the little thrill I’d get in my heart when I’d win was great. It was the same when I sold Chinese tchotchkes at a China souvenir store. I thought it would be so much fun to be a salesgirl until I realized you had to dust. I love to pretend. Like when I make dinner for people, I wear an apron. If I’m cleaning, I wrap my hair. I put on cleaning-lady clothes. I get more and more confused, though, about who your supposed to be on a date. That’s what I always want to say when someone calls – who do you want to go out with tonight?”
Down deep, there is a lot of little girl left in Gilda, and onstage she often works that vulnerability for all it’s worth. It’s most noticeable on Saturday Night when she plays Judy Miller, who stays alone in her room, making up imaginary games and characters. “Judy Miller isn’t anybody else except me,” says Gilda. “She’s not a character I do – she’s me, a part of me that’s still going on all the time. Being a little girl is still something that is very much alive in me, and I sometimes get worried that my body will betray me on that level. That’s why I wanted to do this Broadway show now – because I have a feeling I’ll get too old to play Judy Miller.”
Gilda also has special empathy for loser Lisa Loopner. “In fifth grade, I remember raising my hand and saying, ‘Excuse me, Miss Cord, could you write darker on the board?’ My eyes were going and I was getting nearsighted. At ten years old, I was wearing wing glasses with thick lenses.” Today Lisa wears the same glasses but with chains on them. Gilda identifies less with Roseanne Rosannadana, the TV commentator who just as soon discuss hemorrhoids and “boogers.” “I hate it that people now think it’s funny to come up the me and pick their nose in front of me,” Gilda says indignantly. “Roseanne never picks her nose – she just talks about it.”
For Gilda nothing equals the instant gratification of a live audience. For her Warner Bros. LP, to be released in September she brought an audience into the recording studio. Unlike the male stars of Saturday Night – John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray – all of whom are making movies, Gilda so far has resisted Hollywood, though some say she could name her price for playing Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in Paramount’s new production of Popeye.
With Hollywood drooling, Gilda is the hottest female on Saturday Night, but so far she has not given into the sudden-fame syndrome of cocaine, craziness, and temperament. Surrounded by protective friends and claiming to want a real “relationship,” she is first and foremost committed to her career. “What else is there,” she asks, “except to have a place to go to every day, to use my body, and to have this goal?” In a moment of candor, she confesses, “As I go farther in this, the bigger it gets, the more isolation I feel. The more I’m that little girl again playing myself.”
She walks over to Judy Miller’s bed in the rehearsal hall. “Sometimes when I crawl into bed at night,” Gilda Radner says disbelievingly, “I think of how many people wish they were getting in there with me.”
This article is typed from the original material. Please excuse any errors that have escaped final proofreading.
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