The song Gene Wilder listened to in his final moments
“It is only with the heart that one can see clearly,” Gene Wilder says in his brief but memorable role as the tamed fox in 1974’s The Little Prince. “What is essential is invisible to the eye”.
There aren’t many actors in the history of cinema who could pull off genuine, sustained, child-like sweetness without eventually tipping over into the sentimental or cloying. Chaplin could do it so long as he wasn’t talking. Danny Kaye, maybe? Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks for a minute or two? Gene Wilder, though, was the true master of tugging at the heartstrings with unexpected profundity, and he achieved it largely by refusing to edit out the darkness when he did so.
As the fox in The Little Prince, Wilder starts out fearful and jumpy, cynically assuming that any human around is planning to kill him. As the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, he’s a down-on-his-luck drunk who winds up becoming Sheriff Bart’s friend and ally, and a voice of reason amongst a sea of racist “morons”. And of course, Wilder’s take on Willy Wonka is only more lovable, somehow, because of how his warmth contrasts with his unashamed madness and aloofness. There’s always that darkness with the light, and when it came to the final moments of Gene Wilder’s own life – the ultimate balancing act of lightness and darkness – he carried himself with the same grace he did onscreen.
Wilder died at his Connecticut home on August 29th, 2016, at 83. Playing on the stereo on his bedside, as his family gathered around him, was Ella Fitzgerald’s version of ‘Over the Rainbow’, a song that was cosmically perfect for the moment, even though no one had consciously selected it.
“As our hands clutched and he performed one last breath,” Wilder’s nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman wrote in a family statement later that week, “The music speaker, which was set to random, began to blare out one of his favourites: Ella Fitzgerald. There is a picture of he and Ella meeting at a London Bistro some years ago that are among each of our cherished possessions. She was singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ as he was taken away.”
It’s a strangely comforting image. ‘Over the Rainbow’, which Wilder would have first heard as a young child watching The Wizard of Oz on the big screen, was a sort of inspirational cousin to ‘Pure Imagination’, the memorable tune he would later sing as Willy Wonka in his own most famous screen role. Both are songs eternally tied to dreams of faraway places and impossible hopes, and it makes sense that both either resonated with or resonated through a performer with the unique heart and whimsy of Gene Wilder.
Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s ‘Over the Rainbow’, it’s worth noting, is considerably more reflective and seasoned than Judy Garland’s sad, yearning original. Recorded as part of the Harold Arlen Songbook series, the jazzy rendition feels more like waltzing into Oz and having a well-deserved rest in the sun, rather than just dreaming about it from a great distance.
Despite suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last few years of his life, Wilder remained deeply connected to his family and focused on enjoying life.
“He continued to enjoy art, music, and kissing with his leading lady of the last twenty-five years, Karen,” Walker-Pearlman wrote. “He danced down a church aisle at a wedding as parent of the groom and ring bearer, held countless afternoon movie western marathons and delighted in the company of beloved ones.”
Wilder had followed through, to the end, on the tamed fox’s sage advice: “It is only with the heart that one can see clearly”.
