The women of the original cast of Saturday Night Live—Jane Curtin, Larraine Newman, and Gilda Radner—were very close, Curtin shared, which allowed her intimate insight into Radner’s relationship with husband Gene Wilder.
Curtin, 78, told host (and fellow SNL alum) Julia Louis-Dreyfus on a new episode of the Wiser Than Me podcast that before Radner met Wilder, she would come over to observe Curtin and her husband, TV producer and art director Patrick Lynch, who died earlier this year at 79.
“For Patrick and me, there were no games,” Curtin said, “and she was used to a different kind of treatment, and it wasn’t necessarily a good way of being treated. But she allowed herself to be treated that way because she wanted a relationship so desperately,” she added of Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989.
“But when she saw the way we treated each other with respect, she wanted to study it because it was foreign to her,” Curtin added. When Radner met the Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory star and began dating him, Curtin noticed something odd about their dynamic. “I wanted her desperately to be happy, but she kept going in the wrong direction,” Curtin said. “She wanted me to meet Gene Wilder… we had dinner with them, and I saw how they interacted, and I realized that that’s not what—she doesn’t want what I had. She wanted something very different. She wanted a dad.”
“That was the dynamic I saw the first time I met them,” Curtin explained. “She deferred to him. And he clearly thought he was the better of the two, which I found very interesting.”
When Louis-Dreyfus questioned whether Wilder was “respectful” toward Radner, Curtin replied, “Yes, but as a dad would be, that was my impression.”
Wilder was 50 years old and Radner was 38 at the time they married in 1984. “I could be totally wrong,” Curtin said of the pair, who would become a Hollywood power couple before Radner’s death, “but they had a wonderful relationship. They had a wonderful marriage. So whatever it did, it worked.”
The 2018 documentary Love, Gilda explored the star’s posthumous thoughts on how her father’s death from a brain tumor when she was 14 years old may have affected her romantic relationships. One diary passage of Radner’s used in the film reads, “Can this affect every relationship I have with men?”
Despite Radner’s at-times tumultuous love life, she had good friends in Curtin and Newman, who kept her memory alive at the SNL50: The Anniversary Special in February. The pair were spotted holding a framed photo of Radner to represent the actress during the show’s good nights segment.
Curtin told Louis-Dreyfus that the women bonded in SNL’s first days to deal with the “sexism” and “competitiveness” they experienced on the show. “I was incredibly disillusioned by certain men’s behavior,” Curtin said Wednesday. “And on the other hand, there were men that were just lovely. Couldn’t have been nicer, couldn’t have been more appreciative of everything that you do. But that overwhelming, aggressive misogyny was a little hard to deal with.”
“I was totally shocked at the attitude that I discovered when I entered the 8H studio. I had never experienced anything like that in my life. I mean, my brothers could be a--holes, and sure, they did not respect my sister and me,” she continued. “But that was the culture. And they still, I think, would’ve protected us at all costs. But the contempt for women that I felt from some of the men there was stunning.”
Curtin also felt the cast members were pitted against one another by show boss Lorne Michaels.
“Lorne loved this competition and he thought everyone should be competing with everybody else. I don’t believe in that. I believe in cooperation. And that’s what Laraine and Gilda believed in as well,” she said. “So he was thwarted on that aspect, because we proved that you don’t need to compete, and everybody is not on the same plane—everybody is not destined to do the same things... we were lucky we had each other.”
