It's Always Something (3 page)

It was without a doubt a brilliant way of getting married. A perfect wedding day; symbolically, the three couples who were able to come all had working marriages based on love. We invited everyone who was eating in the dining room to have some of our wedding cake and to get up and dance and celebrate with us. For something old, Gene’s sister gave me a bracelet that had belonged to their mother. I borrowed every bobby pin she had to hold my hat on that evening. I wore a dress I had bought in Paris just that week for something new, and someone sent me a lace garter from Los Angeles and Sparkle wore it around her neck—it was blue.

The French are not noted for their comediennes. It is rare that you hear of a French woman in comedy. They called me
“Charlot”
in the subsequent articles about our marriage: “Gene Wilder Marries a
Charlot”
—their word for “Charlie Chaplin.” When the journalists asked Gene, “Why didn’t you marry the beautiful girl in
The Woman in Red?”
he would always reply, “I did!”

We really had our honeymoon in Rome between press conferences and interviews. Like I said, it was all very romantic. I loved Rome and so did Sparkle. She went everywhere in my purse with just her head sticking out. She was so quiet and well-behaved that she slipped by the guards and saw Michelangelo’s
Moses.
We spent hours traipsing through the Vatican. When we got to the Sistine Chapel, she was very busy smelling the crowds of people, but I made sure she looked up at the ceiling.

Gene flew on to London and Copenhagen to do more publicity for the movie, and I flew home to Connecticut because Sparkle couldn’t go into those countries without going into quarantine. It was a nine-hour flight from Rome to New York. We ate four times and Sparkle stayed in her doggie travel case underneath the seat in front of me during the meal service. The rest of the flight she snuggled beside me in the seat and ate snacks. Ten days later Gene flew home to us in Connecticut, and we began our married life.

The mayor had given me a French family book along with our marriage certificate. It was funny—it was all in French, but it had our names in it: Gilda Radner from Detroit, Michigan, and Gene Wilder from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We were supposed to write in the names of our children as they came.

When I got home, I ordered stationery that said “Gilda Wilder” and “Mr. and Mrs. G. Wilder.” I was uneasy for a while trying to figure out when to be Gilda Radner, the TV star, when to be Gilda Wilder, a brand-new person, when to be Mrs. Gene Wilder, the wife of the international movie star, and when to be Mrs. G. Wilder, just another blushing bride.

I decided I could be them all.

A
fter being Mrs. Wilder for a week, I drove into New York City from Connecticut to see a radiologist whom my gynecologist had recommended. I had to have a hysterosalpingogram. This is an X-ray technique that involves injecting a radiopaque dye in the uterus. The dye outlines the cavity of the uterus and the fallopian tubes to show whether the tubes are open or blocked.

For almost a year before my marriage I had stopped using any form of birth control. I figured my pregnancy was another surefire way to get Gene . . . but pregnancy hadn’t come.

I saw the dye running through my reproductive system on a closed-circuit screen in the examining room. There I was lying on a table with my legs spread apart watching the worst show I’d ever seen on television. The show was called “My Tubes Were Closed.” It was about a thirty-eight-year-old newlywed who finds out she’s infertile. Those tubes have to be open for an egg to get fertilized and slide into the uterus. I remember the attending nurse looking at the screen with a long, sad face and me asking, “What’s wrong?” and her saying:

“Your gynecologist will explain it to you—we really can’t give you all the information.”

Then her face dropped even longer. I mean, what could be lovelier than Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder having a baby? The hair alone would make people squeal with delight. But my tubes were definitely closed.

My gynecologist told me that there were a couple of routes that I could take. One was in vitro fertilization—a procedure in which an egg is removed from a ripe follicle in an ovary and fertilized by a sperm cell outside the human body, then reinserted into the uterus. The other was that I could have major surgery to open the tubes. Or we could adopt.

Gene and I talked about our options. We both wanted a family, but Gene made it clear to me that our relationship was the most important thing to him—that a baby was best off coming into the world to two people who were happy together. He said most of the decision was mine, but he was willing to help me and to do whatever we needed to do, but not to do anything that would jeopardize our marriage. I saw motherhood as the next logical step in my life; I refused to accept the infertility sentence that was handed out to me.

I found it very difficult to literally make the decision to have a baby. When it comes to you, when it just happens easily, it is still the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force . . . what’s meant to be—but really to create a human being is a huge thing. It’s huge and scary—it’s an act of infinite optimism. Suddenly, when it’s not going to be a natural event and it’s put into your hands with experimental procedures and elective surgeries, the decision becomes an obsession. For me the issue became less whether I wanted a baby or not and more my inability to accept not being able to have one.

I had been pregnant in the sixties, and at nineteen years old had had an illegal abortion that probably influenced the messy state of my reproductive organs. For the next nineteen years my priority was to finish my education and pursue my career. Now I couldn’t take my fate: You’ll never have a baby. That was the sentence handed to me. I began to beat my fists against a door that maybe I had locked on the other side.

Gene and I flew back to California in October of 1984. He was already working on a new screenplay called
Haunted Honeymoon.
It took place in America in 1934 and was about a radio performer whose family tries to scare him to death. It was supposed to be a “comedy chiller.” Gene was to be the radio performer and I wanted to be (what else?) his wife. Gene worked every day at his office. Meanwhile I started a screenplay with a friend. You cannot live in Los Angeles for any period of time without eventually trying to write a screenplay. It’s like a flu bug that you catch . . . even the plumber has a screenplay in his truck.

In the meantime, I found out everything about the in vitro fertilization program at UCLA. I found a doctor who would let me into the program. In simple terms, it begins with a surgical procedure called a laparoscopy—that’s where the doctors look at the condition and placement of your reproductive organs by putting an instrument through an incision in your belly button. It is an outpatient procedure, but it is a minor surgery that requires general anesthesia. If everything checks out, you can proceed with the program.

What happens next, in even simpler terms, is that certain hormones are injected into you daily that make your ovaries release more eggs than usual. The doctors watch your ovaries through ultrasound readings, and when you have matured enough eggs they put you under general anesthesia again to aspirate, or remove, the eggs. They are then mixed with your husband’s sperm in a dish or test tube after which the fertilized eggs are put back inside you in a procedure much like a regular gynecological exam. This is followed by more hormone injections daily to ensure that these eggs will implant onto the uterine wall. The process has to be done at a certain time in your menstrual cycle and the whole thing can stop at any time if something goes wrong—like your ovaries don’t respond properly to the hormones, or whatever.

The in vitro team at UCLA were very excited about their results. I got caught up in their enthusiasm and convinced Gene to do the same.

During the procedure, the woman can go to the hospital to get her daily hormone injections, but the doctors prefer that the husband give the shots so that he can feel more involved. Gene had been in the medical corps in the army and had given shots before, but I still made him practice on an orange and a grapefruit about a hundred times. He gave me my first injection in an examining room at UCLA with a nurse and doctor in the room. He was great. From then on, Gene gave me two shots a day at home.

As we moved toward conception, foreplay for me consisted of filling myself with liquids every morning to make my bladder large enough to move it out of the way for the ultrasound picture to show my ovaries. Then I’d drive over mountains and bumpy roads to UCLA to sit on my leg in a waiting room filled with women who all had to pee so desperately that they would rip each other’s eyes out to have their ultrasound first.

On the day my ultrasound showed I had matured enough eggs, Gene’s foreplay began. That evening, he gave me an injection to induce ovulation and the next morning he drove me to the hospital for my second laparoscope While they wheeled me into surgery to aspirate the eggs, they put Gene in a little utility room by himself. He was right next door to the laboratory where a technician would wash his sperm and join it in a test tube with my surgically removed eggs. He described the room to me later. There was a washbasin with a wooden shelf above it that held a small plastic container and a piece of paper with instructions for keeping the sperm sterile. There was no chair or window in the room, but there were a mop and a bucket and a stack of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
magazines with a note that said, “If you require help,” Gene said the instructions were rather vague about when to wash and how to dry your hands. He said the pressure was overwhelming—him sitting on the floor with his pants around his ankles in the gray cement room. He was supposed to knock on the door when he had the sperm. He told me he thought he was going to go crazy. It wasn’t exactly romantic. He kept thinking,
My wife’s going to have surgery and what if I can’t do this?

Miraculously, everything worked. My ovaries matured eight eggs, and Gene knocked on the door. Seven of the eggs fertilized in the dish. The happy Wilders went home and returned the next day to have four of the fertilized eggs put into my uterus. We had to sign a paper allowing them to throw three of the fertilized eggs away. They didn’t have freezing equipment at UCLA at the time, and there was too great a risk of multiple births and danger to the mother if seven or more eggs were returned to the uterus.

On the morning that was to be the moment of conception, I was lying on the examining table while Gene sat close to my head and held my hand. As I looked between my legs, I could see my three doctors—one a sandy-haired Protestant, the other a young Chinese-American, and the third a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew. The room was quiet and the lights were dim as the Protestant doctor placed the fertilized eggs into my uterus, the other two watching intently. I was reminded of the World War II memorial statue where all the different nationalities are putting the American flag in the ground at Iwo Jima.

I spent the next six hours in a dark hospital room. I wasn’t allowed to read or watch TV or talk to anyone. I was to stay calm and lie with the bed tilted at a certain angle. This was to help ensure that the eggs would attach to the uterine wall. I got very anxious and very hungry, and they ended up having to give me a tranquilizer and two slices of whole-wheat toast.

For nineteen days after that, Gene had to keep giving me progesterone shots. That is the hormone you produce naturally in your body before you get your period. It made me irritable and moody. I was told to stay at home and do quiet activities, but a week later I started to bleed. The doctors told me to lie down, but I wasn’t just spotting. To me it looked like someone shot a deer. I bled heavily for a few days and then continued to spot. They wouldn’t let me quit taking the progesterone—I knew that I was miscarrying but they wouldn’t let me quit because this was an experimental procedure and they had to follow their protocol. They made me keep taking the progesterone the whole nineteen days because they said a woman could bleed and still be pregnant. On the twentieth day, they did a blood test and it was negative—there was no pregnancy.

As horrible as it was, I would have repeated the procedure, but Gene said to me, “I will never do that again.” I couldn’t do it without Gene. But at this point, I’d lost interest in everything else. I was desperate not to
not
have a baby.

I cried right through Christmas and into 1985. By February I had booked myself for major surgery to have my tubes opened. This is a serious operation—it can involve six to eight hours of microsurgery, but I was determined. Gene could only say, “If that’s what you want.” I had the operation and I completely recuperated in a week’s time.

My tubes were open and I was elated. All we had to do now was to have sex at just the right time of the month—at exactly the moment I was ovulating. Well, I’ll tell you, that was the worst pressure in the world. It was as consuming as the in vitro program and I drove Gene nuts. It was the kind of obsession they show in the movies, made worse by my age. I was thirty-eight years old and my biological time clock was breaking the sound barrier.

I bought one of those new ovulation kits where you are the scientist. You have to catch your first urine of the morning in a cup, mix it with some powder, wait ten minutes, mix something else, wait ten minutes, mix it with another thing, wait a half hour, dip a stick into the mixture and match it up with a color chart to see whether it is blue or green or yellow. The kit costs about eighty dollars for one cycle. I didn’t tell Gene I was doing this. He was already wondering about my sanity.

One morning I couldn’t unscrew the lid with the mixing stuff in it. I was going crazy because if you don’t do it in exactly ten minutes, the whole test is ruined. So I had to run into the bedroom where Gene was still asleep. I poked him and said, “Don’t ask me any questions, just take the lid off this vial.” He did it and never asked me about it. He was sound asleep.