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A Date with a Movie Star

One is never above being star struck I have discovered. Here I was, a seemingly sophisticated, worldly journalist with a reasonable reputation, working freelance for several prestige publications when I was suddenly and surprisingly star struck by Gene Wilder in his role as  “Willy Wonker”.  I found his slightly mad blue eyes mesmerizing and decided there and then that I would interview him and perhaps with a little bit of luck attract him. As though such things happened between journalists and movie stars in Hollywood!!  One thing I knew for certain.  Being a journalist made me more desirable to his press agent.

My first letter to his agent was short and to the point. Was Gene available for interview for an Australian magazine?

Much to my surprise I received a letter from the man himself.  Why yes of course he would be available, and he was humbled by my wanting to interview him and flattered by my comments.  I was half in love with him already. How do they cope, these poor misunderstood movie stars when star struck female journalists set their sights on them?

He lived in BelAir, a verdant and affluent suburb in the hills above LA.  The winding road twisted up the mountainside past high walls hiding massive houses on acres of gardens. My heart was racing as I got out of the taxi and walked up the crazy paved drive clutching my recorder in one hand.  The house was rustic, built from a type of sandstone. Gene greeted me personally.  There was no one else in sight, no secretary or PA, just your average movie star offering me a cup of tea.  I picked my tea bag from a variety.  The large sitting room ran off a functional kitchen and opened out onto a pool area, visible through sliding glass walls. My tape recorder was down on battery. How stupid could I get! My host scrambled around on the floor and plugged in my recorder while I sipped tea to stop my tongue from sticking to the roof of my mouth.

The settee was a trap of down-filled cushions into which I sunk uncontrollably. Even if a fire broke out I would have been unable to get up out of it.

Gene was taller than I thought he would be; his eyes less vibrant blue in real life, a little bloodshot even.  From how he was dressed I guessed he was a man of good taste, European even.  He wore casual linen trousers and a lightweight cashmere sweater and his shoes looked hand-made.  Unlike a lot of my American friends, he drank tea and not coffee, well when I was there at least.

I launched into a bunch of questions to set the ball rolling. He sunk into the cushions beside me and answered the questions easily in his lain-back voice, which lulled me into a semi-conscious fog. Going back over the tape of that interview I like to think it sounded like pillow talk.  But – how deluded was I? – the interview concluded and nothing happened! No hint of interest on his part; no arm on the settee draped tantalizingly close to my shoulder! But if nothing else I am tenacious.  I needed photographs didn’t I? I had to return with a photographer to complete my assignment.

A week or so later we did the photography. I worked with a local photographer.  The session was so much more relaxed then my interview the week before had been.  After photography we retired to the kitchen where I dunked my tea bag as Gene poured.  We chatted easily and before I took off down the mountain, I gave Gene my telephone number just in case he thought of other things to mention in the article, which would after all promote his films.

It could have been a fortnight later and my interview with Gene had sunk in priority under a mound of assignments coming in from home.  I’m a simple girl at heart and unused to gadgets of any description so when the phone started ringing on a Saturday morning I was busy burning toast and wondering why the small apartment that I rented had suddenly become filled with a loud clanging noise.  I lifted the receiver and recognized his laid-back voice; a tad alarmed “What is that!” Needless to say I felt a fool because I didn’t have a clue what it was.  The Building could have been on fire for all I knew.  “ Is that your smoke alarm? His voice verged on hysteria, he was sounding a little like Leo Bloom in The Producers. “What are you burning”?

I had no idea that the round flat disc on my ceiling was a smoke alarm.  I rescued my smouldering blackened toast from the smoking toaster, grabbed the telephone and asked, “What should I do?”  My movie star handyman issued instructions which I followed to the letter.  When finally I climbed down off the chair and grabbed the phone once again I could not believe it when he asked me if I was free for dinner that night. I could not believe he would ask such an idiot out for dinner.

I learned a lot about Gene Wilder on that memorable date.  We ate Japanese in an indoor-outdoor restaurant. In the courtyard where we were seated a couple beside us were feeling the cold but the radiator above their table had a loose connection and wasn’t working.  To my amazement, my handyman movie star date climbed up onto a chair and fixed their radiator for them.  No, we were not a love match; in fact we didn’t even develop a lasting friendship.  I wish we could have done because apart from being a Hollywood movie star I had the good fortune of having dinner with an amazing human being of astounding humility and one of nature’s true gentle men.

I never saw Gene again. The following week he flew to New York to film The Lady In Red.  On the set he met Gilda Radnor whom he later married —  and the rest is history.

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Travels in an Extraordinary Past

I was new to Beverley Hills. In fact I was new to Los Angeles.  I was on six month sabbatical from my job with an Australian magazine and was fortunate enough to be hired by The Hollywood Reporter to help put out their edition of the Reporter “Blu Book”.

I was a stranger in town and armed only with a few names and telephone numbers of friends of friends.  I was fearful but within six months I came to love The City of Angels.

And   — In The Beginning:

We followed the music, Rosalyn and I.   It was a balmy smoggy afternoon on Rodeo Drive.  A mandolin was playing Dixie to a crowd trickling inside a smoke-filled bar.  The poster outside read “ The Beverley Hills Unlisted Jazz Band” with photographs of the players, one of whom I recognised as the actor George Segal, smiling his toothy smile.

I had chummed up with a physiotherapist named Roslyn, a friend of an Australian friend, and what she lacked in beauty she made up for in Chutzpah.  She was a nuggetty-framed girl with a mane of long thick hair tied back and a swagger.  We knew the Jazz group played every other Saturday on Rodeo and featured a duo of movie stars one on mandolin, Conrad Janis on Sax. What I was later to discover much to my advantage was that the lure of seeing stars in the flesh led me to the finest friend I was to make in the USA.

Luckily we found a table in clear view of the band, across a small round dance floor. The band played with enthusiasm. It was here, through a haze of smoke that first I glimpsed the friendly round moustachioed face of Sheldon Keller whom I was later to learn was one of the finest comedy writers in America. He had a shock of wiry grey hair and moustache to match.  He was solidly built verging on plumpness and was dressed in jeans and a black blazer over a chequered shirt. He wore heavily tinted glasses. He strummed on a double bass like his life depended on it.  In front, strumming the mandolin in frantic accompaniment was George Segal – his handsome face flushed with excitement.  Conrad Janis was on Trombone. Conrad’s smooth baby face billowed like a balloon as he blew that horn. They were playing “Sister Kate”; I was later to learn this was Sheldon’s signature song.  I was about to enter a friendship that I treasure to this day, even though Sheldon has long gone to that place over the rainbow to make the angels laugh and the world is emptier for it.

Roslyn was bouncing in time to the music while I enjoyed my star-struck moment. After all I was new to Beverley Hills. I kept repeating to myself – be calm, they are only people!!!

When the band stopped for a break Roslyn headed for the bar and Sheldon headed for me.  He sat down beside me and introduced himself in gravel voice. When he heard I was from Australia, then heard I was Jewish, and single that fixed it for him. He had served in the Pacific Theatre in the US Army Signal Core and had been stationed in New Guinea with Australian troops. Meeting Sheldon and him taking me under his wing played a major part in my life over the two years following and the adventure that was yet to happen.

I was Jewish, I was single and I had nowhere to go for Shabbat dinner. That was not to be, Sheldon saw to that.

He asked me for lunch for the next. I was to meet him at the Studio where he was working with Steve Allan on a comedy series.  Sheldon wrote comedy for and with an amazing array of stars.  Mel Books, Allan Sherman, Joan Rivers, Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar to name just a few and the list seemed endless.

At the appointed time I arrived at the studio and asked for Sheldon. Sheldon was on a lunch break, which only allowed us to grab a bagel at a nearby deli and arrange to have dinner Friday night with Sheldon’s friends Bernice and Howard Albrecht. Somehow it seemed important to him that I get to meet them. He gave me his address in iconic Hollywood Hills where we were all to meet for drinks before dinner. His house, a clone from an English country garden, complete with ivy-covered walls, was called “Break Winds” He lived there with what seemed like a dozen dogs of various shapes and sizes.  We were all to become firm friends, Sheldon, myself, the canines and Bernice and Howard Albrecht.  Bernice and I eventually collaborated, together with Jim Menzies (who was a far more experienced screenwriter than we were) on the writing of a screenplay, which like many screenplays I have since written, landed unproduced in my bottom drawer.