Anthology

A N T HOLOGY

A N T HOLOGY

Copyright Š Samantha Evans 2016 This publication was designed by Samantha Evans and printed at University of Nebraska– Lincoln by Print, Copy & Mail Distribution Services, October 2016.

It is set in Avenir and Didot.

All articles were originally published by the New York Times, August 2016. This is an anthology of loneliness, solitude and withdrawal.

Edition ___ of 3.

cover : pierre soulages

inside : neil adam smith

INDEX I...........................................9 II........................................15 III.......................................23 IV........................................31 V........................................43

vintage printables

9 I

LIGHTNING STRIKE KILLS MORE THAN 300 REINDEER IN NORWAY b y

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SLO — Hardangervidda, a mountain plateau in southern Norway that is popular among tourists and hikers, is known for its natural beauty. As the seasons

change, thousands of reindeer migrate across the plateau, moving between drier lands in the east, where they graze on lichens, and wetter lands in the west, where they breed.

But on Friday, a storm transformed the plateau into a grisly scene. Lightning appeared to have killed an entire herd: 323 reindeer at last count, including 70 calves and five reindeer that had to be put down because they were severely injured in the storm.

“We are not familiar with any previous happening on such a scale,” Kjartan Knutsen, an official at the Nature Inspectorate, part of the Norwegian Environment Agency, said in a phone interview on Monday. “Individual animals do from time to time get killed by lightning, and there are incidents where sheep have been killed in groups of 10 or even 20, but we have never seen anything like this.”

Officials surmised that an extremely high discharge of electricity from the storm on Friday afternoon — and the interaction of the lightning with the earth and water — had electrocuted the animals.

“Reindeer often huddle together in groups during thunderstorms,” Mr. Knutsen said.

“It is a strategy they have to survive, but in this case their survival strategy might have cost them their life. The corpses are all lying in one big group, piled together.”

An employee of the agency found the corpses while conducting a count in connection with the culling of the herd, through a controlled hunt. The hunt, which began on Aug. 20 and is scheduled to last through the end of September, is intended to destroy about 2,000 to 3,000 of the roughly 11,000 to 15,000 reindeer, and plans for the hunt are continuing.

Olav Strand, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, inspected the site on Sunday, and said the animals appeared to have died “as if someone just turned off a switch.” The air was

lightning appeared to have killed an entire herd as if someone just turned off a switch.

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the corpses are all lying in one big group

left : dr . roy winkelman

right : bgfons . com

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filled with a smell that seemed both sweet and sour, he said.

“The lightning was fierce, the amount of water pouring down that day was incredible, and the whole group was found dead at the scene, placed as they usually are, huddled into a group, with some standing in two lines on the side and a larger congregation in the middle,” he said. “They were standing on a hill, moving up that hill. They seem to have fallen dead on the ground, exactly where they stood.”

He said the only comparable event he could recall in Norway involved 280 or so deer dying in an avalanche at Snohetta, a mountain peak in central Norway, in 2005.

“Reindeer are herd animals, unlike elks,” he said. “They gather in groups, and that is how accidents like this one can happen.”

Mr. Strand said it was appropriate for the hunt to continue. “We hope this year’s hunt will bring the amount down by 2,000 to 3,000 animals, to get a balance between population and resources in the areas,” he said. “However, had this incident happened to a smaller population than the one in Hardangervidda,

we might have had to take measures.”

Anton Krag, a zoologist and the chief executive of the Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance, said he hoped the publicity surrounding the reindeer deaths would lead to greater awareness of the dangers reindeer face.

“We are shocked by the extent of this tragedy,” he said. “However, this freak event had unavoidable natural causes and is overshadowed by the animal suffering inflicted on reindeer by human activity. Each year, hundreds of reindeer are killed by trains because the Norwegian government is not willing to invest in preventive measures like fences.

Hundreds of reindeer are also wounded by trophy hunters for the sake of recreation.”

Mr. Knutsen and Mr. Strand pointed to one upside: the deaths of the 323 reindeer offer an opportunity to increase the sample size for a project to map the prevalence of chronic wasting disease, a contagious neurological disorder that is related to mad cow disease and that was detected in reindeer in southern Norway in March.

The authorities had previously asked hunt-

ers to submit the heads of up to 4,200 animals as they worked to contain the disease, which attacks the brains of deer, caribou, elk and moose.

Mr. Knutsen said that officials would use most of the animals killed in the storm to add to the sample.

“The test results for the herd killed by lightning can give crucial answers in understanding how much the disease has spread,” he said. As for the rest of the reindeer corpses, he said, “That remains to be decided upon within the next couple of days. The normal routine in such cases is to let nature take its course.”

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ello . co

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15 II

IN ‘GOOD VIBRATIONS,’ SUMMER FUN SOURED

BY MIKE LOVE’S SCORE SETTLING b

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bragging is something he knows a lot about

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“G

ood Vibrations” is the inevitable feel-good title for an autobiography by Mike Love, who has spent 55 of his 75 years as the frontman of the Beach

Boys. But it runs counter to the competitive, score-settling spirit of this frequently bilious book. If Mr. Love’s public persona is that of a peace-loving perpetuator of summer fun, his private side is much angrier.

And although he writes extensively about the role that Transcendental Meditation has played in his life, it hasn’t kept him from remembering all the bitterness of the Beach Boys’ history. It has kept him, he says, from killing people.

This fall will bring a gold rush of books by and about musicians, with Bruce Springsteen’s memoir as the big kahuna. But the ripe Americana of surf music will be well represented too, as it was in the superb indie film “Love and Mercy.” Mr. Love’s book ranks high in gossip and readability, even if it’s stuffed with tedious chart positions for Beach Boys records. Brian Wilson has “I Am Brian Wilson”

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coming out in October. (Mr. Wilson, with his brothers Carl and Dennis, their cousin Mr. Love and their friend Al Jardine, constitute the core group of Beach Boys; there have been many personnel changes.)

Dean Torrence’s “Surf City: The Jan & Dean Story” arrives next week. And last year “Long Promised Road,” a full biography of the enormously talented and most overlooked Wilson brother, Carl, was published.

Mr. Love goes out of his way to diss Carl and ignore his contributions to the group, both musical and diplomatic, whenever he can.

But his biggest beef is with Brian Wilson, who has been called a genius for most of Mr. Love’s lifetime. In “Good Vibrations,” Mr. Love would like to correct that impression, although in a peace-loving, roundabout way.

Though he writes, “I’ve never been competitive with Brian,” he also tosses in zingers like, “I’m a Pisces, and Brian, a Gemini; and it is said that a Pisces writes out of inspiration while a Gemini writes out of desperation.” The biggest bone of contention in the book is Mr. Love’s claim that he wrote many of the lyrics credited to Mr. Wilson and was

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knowingly cheated out of credit and royalties by him and by Murry Wilson, the Wilson boys’ famously abusive father.

I will admit to knowing and loving them: “When some loud braggart tries to put me down/ and says his school is great.”

Mr. Love, who cherry picks his facts carefully, devotes a lot of space to a lawsuit he filed, seeking to regain the credit and money he lost. He leaves out a later, more specious suit he brought in 2005, just as he is very careful to give only a fleeting, cautiously worded mention of his political affiliations. He is above that sort of thing, he maintains — any savvy performer knows that partisanship is bad for business — and would gladly perform for non-Republican presidents if they ever invited him. His personal views don’t matter. His dodginess, here and throughout the book, does.

Now we have Mr. Love’s explanation for his word choice. “‘Braggart, to my ears, is more formal than ‘bragger,’ so I thought our more erudite fans would appreciate the subtlety,” he says. In any case, bragging is something he knows a lot about. And you’ll find a lot of it in these pages.

“Good Vibrations” takes a Love’s-eye view of just about everything that ever happened to the Beach Boys. This makes for an interesting new perspective, since it presents Mr. Love as the innovator who came up with most of the band’s best ideas and lyrics. He can be inadvertently hilarious when he explains those lyrics word by word, as in the first lines of “Be True to Your School.”

“Good Vibrations” makes a big point about Mr. Love’s disinterest in drugs at a time when many of his bandmates were destroying themselves with them. He writes, with a distinct air of superiority, that he got more out of meditation than they could possibly have been getting from all that substance abuse. And yet his Eastern wisdom (he was a direct disciple of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the only Beach Boy to go on that famous visit to the maharishi’s ashram in India with the Beatles and Mia Farrow) and highly evolved attitudes did little to keep him from messing up his life.

He had a bad habit of impregnating women at home, then marrying them, having con-

stant affairs on the road, watching the marriages break up with very young children involved, and then repeating the whole process. His cousin Dennis, the group’s drummer, had the even worse habit of sneaking around with Mr. Love’s women and, in one case, impregnating Mr. Love’s daughter.

Even more egregious, was Dennis Wilson’s bringing home the Manson family and involving the Beach Boys with the Mansons professionally. That is recalled here at length and with cold fury. Among the many things for which he blames Dennis Wilson, who died in 1983, is leaving two young Love children with Susan Atkins, who helped kill Sharon Tate, as their babysitter.

“Good Vibrations” is written with James S. Hirsch, and it has a ghostly voice that does not sound especially like Mr. Love’s. Still, its boasts and grudges overpower the writing style. And more than a half-century’s worth of inside information about the Beach Boys, who were all the rage until they were ancient history, has undeniable appeal, especially from a new perspective. The group has managed to resurrect itself; it played

air of superiority

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louis niesten

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175 concerts last year, even if Mr. Love is the only link to the Beach Boys of memory.

The screaming teenage girls are long gone, but Mr. Love claims the group has fans from 9 to 90. The Beach Boys also have corporate sponsors, purists be damned, and once got free Corvettes when Chevrolet sponsored their tour. “Even Bob Dylan did a Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler,” writes the older, wiser Mr. Love. “I hope they gave him a new car.”

napa valley college

23 III

ANTHONY WEINER AND HUMA ABEDIN TO SEPARATE AFTER HIS LATEST SEXTING SCANDAL b

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A

fter two earlier sexting scandals, Mr. Weiner did not vanish from public life. This time, his wife, Ms. Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s top aide, is separating from him.

It was supposed to be a quiet, late-summer weekend on the exclusive shores of the Hamptons. But on Sunday, Huma Abedin, the closest aide to Hillary Clinton, received devastating news.

After accompanying Mrs. Clinton to fund-raisers, Ms. Abedin learned from her husband, Anthony D. Weiner, that The New York Post was about to report that he had again exchanged lewd messages with a woman on social media: the sort of behavior that destroyed his congressional career and 2013 mayoral campaign.

Only this time, the online indiscretions included an image of Mr. Weiner’s crotch as he lay next to the couple’s 4-year-old son.

Now, Mr. Weiner’s tawdry activities may have claimed his marriage — Ms. Abedin told him that she wanted to separate —

and have cast another shadow on the adviser and confidante who has been by Mrs. Clinton’s side for the past two decades.

Ms. Abedin was already a major figure this summer in controversies over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information as secretary of state and over ties between the Clinton family foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.

Mr. Weiner’s extramarital behavior also threatens to remind voters about the troubles in the Clintons’ own marriage over the decades, including Mrs. Clinton’s much-debated decision to remain with then-President Bill Clinton after revelations of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ms. Abedin’s choice to separate from her husband evokes the debates that erupted over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Lewinsky affair, a scandal her campaign wants left in the past.

Clinton advisers expressed only sympathy for Ms. Abedin on Monday and said they were confident Mr. Weiner’s actions would not hurt Mrs. Clinton, who learned about them from Ms. Abedin and offered support.

But Mr. Weiner’s behavior quickly became

fodder for Donald J. Trump, Mrs. Clinton’s Republican opponent in the presidential race.

“Huma is making a very wise decision,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “I know Anthony Weiner well, and she will be far better off without him.”

He then went further, claiming that the marriage’s breakdown was a matter of national security. Mrs. Clinton received her first intelligence briefing as the Democratic presidential nominee on Saturday at the F.B.I. field office in White Plains. No aides accompanied her to the briefing, according to a campaign official.

“I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information,” Mr. Trump said, using language that echoed criticism of Mrs. Clinton this summer by the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr. “Who knows what he learned and who he told? It’s just another example of Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment.

It is possible that our country and its security have been greatly compromised by this.”

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she will be far better off without him top : life magazine ; hotpoint appliances bottom : excrucis

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A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s remarks.

The spotlight on Ms. Abedin and her proximity to Mrs. Clinton has been an increasing distraction for the campaign.

Several of Ms. Abedin’s emails on Mrs. Clinton’s private server have drawn scrutiny amid accusations that donors to the Clinton Foundation received special access to the State Department.

And political opponents, including Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have questioned Ms. Abedin’s arrangement to earn income privately while she worked for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department. In addition to being on Mrs. Clinton’s personal payroll, Ms. Abedin received money from the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a consulting firm founded in part by Douglas J. Band, previously a senior aide to Mr. Clinton.

Ms. Abedin, 40, has been at Mrs. Clinton’s side since she was an intern to the first lady in the 1990s. Now vice chairwoman of the Clinton campaign, Ms. Abedin, often de-

scribed as a surrogate daughter, occupies an almost singular role as a trusted, and visible, confidante to Mrs. Clinton.

Their lives took similar tracks, as both women, citing their religious beliefs, seemed determined to remain married despite their husbands’ sexual proclivities.

Mrs. Clinton strongly supported Ms. Abedin when Mr. Weiner’s sexually charged text messages came to light in 2011, a year into their marriage, and again in 2013, when Mr. Weiner was running for mayor of New York.

Friends of Mrs. Clinton said that she had spoken to Ms. Abedin at length about the marriage and that she supported Ms. Abedin’s decision to remain with Mr. Weiner and work on their relationship.

The couple’s marital problems have been a subject of years of tabloid mockery and humiliation since Mr. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 amid revelations that he had sent sexual images of himself to women on social media. His 2013 campaign for mayor was damaged, too, when Mr. Weiner admitted that he had continued flirting with women online.

By Monday morning, when the Post cover showing Mr. Weiner and his son, Jordan, hit newsstands, Mr. Weiner had left the Hamptons for New York City aware that Ms. Abedin planned to announce their separation, said two people close to the couple who discussed private conversations on the condition of anonymity.

“After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband,” Ms. Abedin said in a statement. “Anthony and I remain devoted to doing what is best for our son, who is the light of our life. During this difficult time, I ask for respect for our privacy.”

In the latest issue of Vogue, Ms. Abedin portrayed Mr. Weiner as a devoted father and their marriage as a true partnership.

“Many working moms feel this way — there is a lot of guilt,” she said. “I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t have the full support system I have, if Anthony wasn’t willing to be, essentially, a full-time dad.”

But the two people close to the couple said Ms. Abedin and Mr. Weiner had been growing apart for some time, with Ms. Abedin

bad judgment destroyed the marriage

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often on the campaign trail with Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Weiner at home with Jordan.

They said the Post article had not caused a sudden and unexpected rupture to a happy marriage, but rather was the final catalyst for Ms. Abedin to move for a separation.

Campaign officials had braced for new revelations about Mr. Weiner after The Post reported this month that a Republican had baited Mr. Weiner into a flirtatious online chat. Asked by The New York Times this month whether he was still engaging in the behavior that had foiled his political career, Mr. Weiner said, “I’m not going to go down the path of talking about any of that.”

Mrs. Clinton had hoped to ride out the final week of August with limited distractions as she seeks to maintain her solid lead in national polls. On Monday, she attended three fund-raisers in the Hamptons, without Ms. Abedin, and spoke briefly on a conference call with policy experts and medical providers to unveil her proposals on mental health.

“We’ve got to make clear mental health is not a personal failing,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Aides said that Ms. Abedin’s marriage was a private matter and that her decision to announce the separation meant the frenetic news cycle would soon move on.

She appeared in various bikinis, and Mr. Weiner was half-dressed, showing off his stomach or his groin — and they talked about sex.

“The best way to get rid of a problem is to

In one message, Mr. Weiner abruptly

get rid of a problem,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant. “The end of that marriage publicly announced makes it impossible for Anthony Weiner to have anything to do with the campaign.”

changed the discussion from massage parlors and reportedly wrote, “Someone just climbed into my bed.”

But unlike many political aides, Ms. Abedin has become a public figure in her own right, posing for Vogue, snapping selfies with voters on the rope line at Mrs. Clinton’s campaign events and hosting her own fund-raisers on her boss’s behalf.

Hours after Ms. Abedin released her statement, Showtime blasted out a news release announcing the October television debut of “Weiner,” an unfettered documentary about the implosion of Mr. Weiner’s mayoral campaign and the couple’s interactions after his second scandal.

In the messages reported by The Post, Mr. Weiner exchanged photos with a woman.

“Really?” the woman replied.

His response, in a screen shot dated July 31, 2015, showed a child curled up next to Mr. Weiner, who was wearing only white briefs.

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yves klein

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GENE WILDER DIES AT 83; STAR OF ‘WILLY WONKA’ AND ‘YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN’ b

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G

ene Wilder, who established himself as one of America’s foremost comic actors with his delightfully neurotic performances in three films directed by Mel Brooks; his eccentric star turn in the family classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”; and his winning chemistry with Richard Pryor in the box-office smash “Stir Crazy,” died early Monday morning at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 83.

then sad, then both at the same time.”

Mr. Wilder was an accomplished stage actor as well as a screenwriter, a novelist and the director of four movies in which he starred.

(He directed, he once said, “in order to protect what I wrote, which I wrote in order to act.”) But he was best known for playing roles on the big screen that might have been ripped from the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Mr. Wilder’s rule for comedy was simple: Don’t try to make it funny; try to make it real. “I’m an actor, not a clown,” he said more than once.

He made his movie debut in 1967 in Arthur Penn’s celebrated crime drama, “Bonnie and Clyde,” in which he was memorably hysterical as an undertaker kidnapped by the notorious Depression-era bank robbers played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. He was even more hysterical, and even more memorable, a year later in “The Producers,” the first film by Mr. Brooks, who later turned it into a Broadway hit.

With his haunted blue eyes and an empathy born of his own history of psychic distress, he aspired to touch audiences much as Charlie Chaplin had. The Chaplin film “City Lights,” he said, had “made the biggest impression on me as an actor; it was funny,

Mr. Wilder played the security-blanket-clutching accountant Leo Bloom, who discovers how to make more money on a bad Broadway show than on a good one: Find rich backers, stage a production that’s guaranteed to fold fast, then flee the coun-

A nephew, the filmmaker Jordan Walker-Pearlman, confirmed his death in a statement, saying the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

try with the leftover cash. Unhappily for Bloom and his fellow schemer, Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, their outrageously tasteless musical, “Springtime for Hitler,” is a sensation.

The part earned Mr. Wilder an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. Within a few years, the anxious, frizzyhaired, popeyed Mr. Wilder had become an unlikely movie star.

He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as the wizardly title character in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971). The film was a box-office disappointment, partly because of parental concern that the moral of Roald Dahl’s story — that greedy, gluttonous children should not go unpunished — was too dark in the telling. But it went on to gain a devoted following, and Willy Wonka remains one of the roles with which Mr. Wilder is most closely identified.

His next role was more adult but equally strange: an otherwise normal doctor who falls in love with a sheep named Daisy in a segment of Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but

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delightfully neurotic performances

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Were Afraid to Ask,” in 1972. Two years later, he reunited with Mr. Brooks for perhaps the two best-known entries in either man’s filmography.

In “Blazing Saddles,” a raunchy, no-holdsbarred spoof of Hollywood westerns, Mr. Wilder had the relatively quiet role of the Waco Kid, a boozy ex-gunfighter who helps an improbable black sheriff (Cleavon Little) save a town from railroad barons and venal politicians. The film’s once-daring humor may have lost some of its edge over the years, but Mr. Wilder’s next Brooks film, “Young Frankenstein,” has never grown old.

Mr. Wilder himself hatched the idea, envisioning a black-and-white film faithful to the look of the Boris Karloff “Frankenstein,” down to the laboratory equipment, but played for laughs rather than for horror. He would portray an American man of science, the grandson of the infamous Dr. Frankenstein, who tries to turn his back on his heritage (“that’s Frahn-kahn-STEEN”) but finds himself irresistibly drawn to Transylvania to duplicate his grandfather’s creation of a monster in a spooky mountaintop laboratory.

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Mr. Brooks’s original reaction to the idea, Mr. Wilder recalled, was noncommittal: “Cute. That’s cute.” But he eventually came aboard as director and co-writer, and the two garnered an Oscar nomination for their screenplay.

Serendipity played a role in the casting. Mr. Wilder’s agent asked him to help find work for two new clients, and thus Marty Feldman became Frankenstein’s assistant, Igor (“that’s EYE-gor”), and Peter Boyle the monster. Madeline Kahn, whose performance as the chanteuse Lili Von Shtupp had been a highlight of “Blazing Saddles,” played the doctor’s socialite fiancée. Cloris Leachman was Frau Blücher, the sound of whose name caused horses to whinny in fear.

The name Blücher, Mr. Wilder said in a 2008 interview with The San Jose Mercury News, came from a book of letters to and from Sigmund Freud: “I saw someone named Blücher had written to him, and I said, ‘Well, that’s the name.’” And Mr. Wilder certainly knew a lot about Freud.

His first of many visits to a psychotherapist is the opening scene in the memoir he pub-

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i think to be believed is the one hope that all share

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lished in 2005, “Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art.” “What seems to be the trouble?” the therapist asks.

“I want to give all my money away,” he says.

“How much do you have?”

“I owe three hundred dollars.”

Soon the jokes and evasions gave way to the torments of sexual repression, guilt feelings and his “demon,” a compulsion, lasting several years, to pray out loud to God at the most embarrassing times and in the most embarrassing places. But never onstage or onscreen, where he felt free to be someone else.

Gene Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee on June 11, 1933. His father, William, a manufacturer and salesman of novelty items, was an immigrant from Russia. His mother, the former Jeanne Baer, suffered from rheumatic heart disease and a temperament that sometimes led her to punish young Jerry angrily and then smother him with regretful kisses.

He spent one semester at the Black-Foxe Military Institute in Hollywood. His mother saw it as a great opportunity; in reality, it was a catch basin for boys from broken families, where he was regularly beaten up for being Jewish.

Safely back home after that misadventure, he played minor roles in community theater productions and then followed his older sister, Corinne, into the theater program at the University of Iowa. After Iowa, he studied Shakespeare at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England, where he was the first freshman to win the school fencing championship.

He next enrolled part time at the HB Studio in New York, while also serving a two-year Army hitch as an aide in the psychiatric unit of the Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania — an assignment he requested because, he said, “I imagined the things I would see there might relate more to acting than any of the other choices.” He added, “I wasn’t wrong.”

After his discharge, he won a coveted spot at the Actors Studio, and it was then that he adopted the name Gene Wilder: Gene

for Eugene Gant, the protagonist of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” and Wilder for the playwright Thornton Wilder.

In his first major role on Broadway, Mr. Wilder played the chaplain in a 1963 production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” The production ran for less than two months, and he came to believe that he had been miscast. The good news was that he met the boyfriend of the star, Anne Bancroft: Mel Brooks, who wore a pea coat the night he met Mr. Wilder backstage and told him, “You know, they used to call these urine jackets, but they didn’t sell.”

So began the conversation that ultimately led to “The Producers.”

Mr. Wilder’s association with Mr. Brooks led, in turn, to one with Richard Pryor, who was one of the writers of “Blazing Saddles” (and Mr. Brooks’s original choice for the part ultimately played by Mr. Little). In 1976, Mr. Pryor was third-billed behind Mr. Wilder and Jill Clayburgh in “Silver Streak,” a comic thriller about murder on a transcontinental train. The two men went on to star in the 1980 hit “Stir Crazy,” in which they played

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a hapless pair jailed for a crime they didn’t commit, as well as “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” (1989) and “Another You” (1991).

Mr. Wilder’s first two marriages, to Mary Mercier and Mary Joan Schutz, ended in divorce. In 1982, he met the “Saturday Night Live” comedian Gilda Radner when they were both cast in the suspense comedy “Hanky Panky.”

One evening, he recalled in “Kiss Me Like a Stranger,” he and Ms. Radner innocently ended up at his hotel to review some script changes. The time came for her to go; instead, she shoved him down on the bed, jumped on top of him and announced, “I have a plan for fun!” He sent her home anyway — she was married to another man — but before long, they began a relationship.

By his account, Ms. Radner was needy, obsessed with getting married and, once they married in 1984, obsessed with having a child, a project that ended in miscarriage just months before she learned she had ovarian cancer in 1986.

Of their first year of living together, he

wrote: “We didn’t get along well, and that’s a fact. We just loved each other, and that’s a fact.” He left, only to find that he needed to go back.

Ms. Radner died in 1989. “I had one great blessing: I was so dumb,” Mr. Wilder once said of her last years. “I believed even three weeks before she died she would make it.”

In memory of Ms. Radner, he helped to found an ovarian cancer detection center in her name, in Los Angeles, and Gilda’s Club, a network of support centers for people with cancer. He also contributed to a book, “Gilda’s Disease” (1998), with Dr. M. Steven Piver.

Mr. Wilder himself developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1999. With chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant, he was in remission by 2005.

In 1991 Mr. Wilder married Karen Boyer, a hearing specialist who had coached him in the filming of “See No Evil, Hear No Evil,” in which his character was deaf and Mr. Pryor’s was blind.

She survives him, as does a daughter from an earlier marriage. His sister died in January.

he left only to find that he needed to go back

Even before he became ill, Mr. Wilder had begun slowing down. He made his first and last attempt at a television series, the short-lived and little-remembered comedy “Something Wilder,” in 1994.

He returned to the theater in 1997 in a London production of Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” In 1999 he was a writer for two TV movies in which he starred, “Murder in a Small Town” and “The Lady in Question,” playing a theater director turned amateur sleuth. In 2001 he appeared at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut in a program of one-act farces. Shortly after appearing in an episode of “Will & Grace” in 2003 — he won an Emmy for that role — he declared that he had retired from acting for good.

“I don’t like show business, I realized,” he said in 2008. “I like show, but I don’t like the business.”

He was by then enjoying a new career as a novelist. His “My French Whore,” published in 2007, was the story of a naïve young American who impersonates a German spy in World War I. (“Just fluff, but

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sweet fluff,” the novelist Carolyn See wrote in her review in The Washington Post.) It was followed by two more novels, “The Woman Who Wouldn’t” and “Something to Remember You By,” and a story collection, “What Is This Thing Called Love?”

But it was, of course, as an actor that Mr. Wilder left his most lasting mark. In his memoir, he posed a question about his life’s work, then answered it: “What do actors really want? To be great actors? Yes, but you can’t buy talent, so it’s best to leave the word ‘great’ out of it. I think to be believed, onstage or onscreen, is the one hope that all actors share.”

Correction: August 29, 2016 An earlier version of this obituary misstated the day of Mr. Wilder’s death. He died early Monday morning, not late Sunday night.

The error was repeated in a capsule summary and in a slide show.

Correction: August 30, 2016 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a capsule summary for this obituary erroneously included one movie among

Mr. Wilder’s credits. He did not appear in “High Anxiety.”

Correction: August 31, 2016 An obituary on Tuesday about the actor Gene Wilder referred incorrectly to the organization Gilda’s Club, which he helped found. It is a network of support centers for people with cancer, not just women with cancer.

Correction: August 30, 2016 An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year of the film “Stir Crazy,” in which Mr. Wilder starred with Richard Pryor. It was 1980, not 1982.

vintage printables

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DOCTORS WILL PLAY A CRITICAL ROLE IN THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC b y

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bout half of opioid overdose deaths involve prescription drugs. With that stark fact in mind, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, sent an unusually

of their lives, opioids are often the only effective medicine. But doctors have many more options for treating back pain, migraines and pain related to surgery — physical therapy, anti-inflammatory drugs, acupuncture, exercise and so on. Some doctors overlook these

ing a few precautions. They can write prescriptions for low doses and relatively short time periods. They should pay attention to monitoring programs that most states have set up to make sure a person is not getting multiple prescriptions from different doc-

direct plea last week to 2.3 million doctors and other health care workers to help fight the opioid epidemic by treating pain “safely and effectively.” A website for his “Turn the Tide” campaign highlights alternative, nonaddictive treatments for pain. Not only doctors but also policy makers, insurance companies and other players in the health care system should pay attention.

alternatives because opioids are easy to prescribe or because patients demand them.

tors. And doctors can steer to treatment patients who are obviously addicted.

A further problem is that some insurance plans do not cover alternative treatments like physical therapy and acupuncture, or they impose so many limits and high copays on them that in many cases both doctors and patients find opioids a less expensive option. In some rural areas, the nearest physical therapist may be many miles away.

Doctors are not the only ones responsible for the opioid epidemic, but as Dr. Murthy makes clear, they’ll have to play a leading role in the fight against it.

Prescriptions for opioids such as oxycodone and methadone have quadrupled since 1999, as have opioid overdose deaths — more than 28,000 in 2014, up 14 percent from the year before. While prescriptions for opioids peaked in 2012, their use remains high by historical standards. And many people who were prescribed opioids have gone on to use illegal opioids like heroin and fentanyl.

For cancer patients or people near the end

One fix here seems obvious: Federal and state lawmakers can require insurers to cover these services, a cheaper option over the long term than addiction treatment. And they should also find ways to expand access to health services by subsidizing doctors, therapists and other health care workers to make periodic visits to remote areas.

Even when opioids are necessary, doctors can minimize the risk of addiction by tak-

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overdose deaths

top and bottom : ben ouaniche

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