The Last Day I Spent With Gilda Radner

'In 1975, at the brand-new “Saturday Night Live,” Lorne Michaels, with a tiny budget, hired three superb women to join the cast — Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner. Sketch comedy requires performers who can shed their personalities instantly. With characteristic prescience, Lorne saw this ability in those three. (Today, female comedians are often stand-ups — Ellen DeGeneres, Samantha Bee — who don’t morph into someone else in the middle of their shows.)

Gilda Radner was a gifted, ebullient, wildly physical performer who disappeared into her characters right down to their souls. Tragically, she died at 42, in 1989. A documentary about her will have its premiere Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival. News of the film zinged my memory of our last day together, one summer in the late ’80s.

Gilda had a big, antique, rich person’s house near Stamford, Conn., where you could find fun, cool, opulent relief in sizzling heat if the person you were visiting wasn’t dying, as Gilda was. Still, the custom-made accouterments she’d had designed for the house lifted you up. On the un-air-conditioned fourth floor, for instance, was a couch outside the bathroom, upholstered entirely in terry cloth so that you could just roll around on it instead of grabbing a towel; it had matching terry-cloth flip-flops, robe and night cap. She so hilariously acted out the bathtub dry-off on the couch-towel under a wobbly, hovering ceiling fan, it was an escape from brutal summer and her wobbly, hovering death.

She was very short on air climbing stairs. Still, Gilda calmly described the bibelots that decorated her house and those that decorated her person (i.e., her labored breaths) in a poised, gracious way, like Jackie Kennedy giving that TV tour of the White House. She understood what was wrong with her and knew the big, hard medical words to describe it. This seemed to put her in control of her symptoms.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/opinion/the-last-day-i-spent-with-gilda-radner.html?