Live From New York - James H. Miller [187]
STEVE MARTIN, Host:
It’s one of those things that come over you. You’re introducing something and suddenly you just feel kind of emotional. I remember what it’s like to have an honest lump in your throat on television. Because most lumps on television are phony.
I wasn’t expecting it but, you know, I was just of that period. When we first did the dance, that was another period in our careers, where we were so young, so confident. It just felt like what we were doing was really funny to us and therefore it was going to be funny to “them.”
Gilda was so lovable in person as a person. And so it was easy to get sentimental about her, because in looking back over her life, I know she had trials and tribulations, but knowing her, it was never expressed. It was just joy and happiness and funniness and comedy.
MIKE MYERS:
Gilda Radner had played my mother in a television commercial for British Columbia Hydro when I was ten years old. It was a four-day shoot, and before it was over I had fallen in love with Gilda. I thought she was awesome, funny and cool and beautiful. I cried on the last day of the commercial, because I had so fallen in love with her. My brothers used to taunt me mercilessly about it.
And then one day my brother Peter said, “Hey, Mikey, your girl-friend’s going to be on this TV show called Saturday Night Live.” And I saw her, and I thought she was brilliant, and at that point I did turn to someone in my house and say, “Someday, I’ll be on this show.” Everyone laughed at me. I just really wanted to be on that show, and eventually I was. I got hired in February of 1989. I think it was May of 1989 when Gilda passed away, because it was on a Saturday, the last show of my first half-season. Somebody said to me as I was walking to work, “What’s your feeling about Gilda?” And I didn’t know she had passed away, so I said, “Well, you know, I think she’s amazing.” And they said, “Did you know she died?” And my blood ran cold.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER, Writer:
I would occasionally go up to visit Gilda in Connecticut. One time she was very sick. We had lunch with Gene, but Gilda said she couldn’t really eat. What I didn’t know is that her intestines were closed off. She’d chew the food and spit it out just to get the taste of it. She couldn’t ingest it. Then she took me around the house to see some stuff that had been redone. She showed me this couch she had covered outside the bathroom. Then some friends of hers came over. She was like pumping me for everybody’s love life — who’s going with whom, who’s dating that one, all the gossip, always. And her friends were really nice. So we just sat with them and chatted, and then finally I said, “Okay, I have to go. It’s getting dark,” and I don’t like to drive in the dark. We go outside and Gilda gets in the driver’s seat of my car so I can’t leave.
I said, “Gilda, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go.” And she said, “Oh, everyone’s working and having so much fun and I’m not working.” And I said, “Not everyone’s having so much fun, they don’t like what they’re doing,” and so on. A lot of people were doing those bad boy-comedy movies at the time. Finally I said, “You must get out of the driver’s seat so I can drive home.” And finally she did. That was the last time I saw her.
And when she died, I read in her book that those people at the house were not friends. Those were nurses she had hired to give her chemo at home. She had set up a whole hospital in her house that she didn’t tell me about. Because by that time they had told her there was no hope. So she was on this chemo that was some other option that some other doctor came up with, administered by nurses at home. All those people were nurses — acting and calling each other by their first names because she had made it clear that no one was to know how sick she was, and no one was to know that she