Madeline Kahn (10 page)

Later in her career, she had to make appearances, like it or not, to promote her latest projects. Although the hosts treated her more respectfully once she attained stardom, her anxiety didn’t subside. Promoting
Clue
on
The Tonight Show
in 1986, she told Carson toward the end of the interview segment, “I’ve been anticipating being on for a couple of weeks now. I have known I was going to be on. And you know, I mean, it’s scary. It does feel like surgery to me, coming on this program. Although I have never had surgery. But. . . .”

Carson, who had been low-key and even gentle throughout the interview, and who appeared quite fond of Madeline, interrupted: “I enjoyed this, talking like this.” “Yes,” Madeline said, “it isn’t bad when you actually do it. But the anticipation is so scary. And then it’s over! And you leave, and you just feel. . . .” “And then the depression,” Carson said, alluding to their earlier conversation about how actors feel after completing a movie. “That’s life, I guess,” Madeline said.
³⁷

Two of Madeline’s final talk show appearances, promoting the show
Cosby
, provide an illuminating contrast. Talking to David Letterman on CBS (January 13, 1997) would set off her anxieties. Typically, producers for the show contacted guests about a day in advance, discussed at length any stories that might appeal to Letterman, and wrote out notes and questions for him on little blue cards—which he ignored. He might even pursue questions despite her repeated requests to change the subject, as he did on his NBC show in 1989.
³⁸

But Charlie Rose (December 16, 1996), with his quieter, more thoughtful program and long segments devoted to each guest, filmed in a studio without an audience, afforded Madeline something like the serious treatment she’d wanted for so long. Talking about typecasting, Rose asked, “How would you define the perception of you, do you think, by audiences?” The question prompted a revealing response from Madeline: “I’m always asking that question. I’m always curious to know. I don’t know what people—I’m happy to find that many people do see that I’m an actress and that I’m not a kook. It’s not just, ‘Oh, that’s her. You know, that character, that kooky person, is her.’”

Even so, Rose moved on without acknowledging Madeline’s question, “I wish you would answer that. How am I perceived?” We’ll never know how she might have reacted had he responded.
³⁹

Promenade
and
Show Boat
(1969)

MADELINE EXPECTED TO ROUND OUT THE 1960S WITH A ROLE IN
PROMENADE
, a music-theater piece with book and lyrics by the avant-garde playwright María Irene Fornés and a score by the Rev. Al Carmines. Though Madeline and the production won favorable reviews, “None of us knew what the hell was going on, and I remember I was actually booed in that show,” she told the
New York Times
in 1974. “Now that’s a feeling to remember!”
⁴⁰

Much of the trouble lay with Fornés’s script, which the critics lambasted even while praising the music and staging so highly that the show became a hit. George S. Irving, who played the Mayor in
Promenade
, gives an idea what they were up against. He remembers turning to the playwright and asking, “‘Irene, what does this line mean?’ She replied, ‘Whatever you want it to be!’ That’s great direction for a poor fucking actor!” A curious mixture of expressionism and absurdism,
Promenade
is set in motion by two Prisoners, who escape from under the nose of the Jailer, then crash a society party. There, they meet the Servant (Madeline), with whom they rob the socialites before taking off in pursuit of more misadventures, with the Jailer in pursuit. Fornés and Carmines first staged the play in 1965, at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. The same year,
Promenade
, along with another play,
The Successful Life of Three
, earned Fornés the first of her nine Obie Awards. Revised and expanded from one act to two,
Promenade
reopened on June 4, 1969, re-inaugurating an Upper West Side theater that, until it closed in 2008, continued to bear the play’s name.

In the
New York Daily News
, James Davis denounced “a book that is simply dreadful” and complained of “an aimlessness that made for lack of interest in the incredible dialogue.”
⁴¹
Even while describing the play as “a
joy from start to finish,” the
New York Times
’s Clive Barnes allowed that there was “no book in any conventional sense . . . close to no book in any unconventional sense.”
⁴²
But Walter Kerr devoted one of his long Sunday essays in the
Times
to praise for Carmines’s score. Under the headline “Hooray! He Gives Us Back Our Past,” Kerr compared the composer to Sigmund Romberg. He also singled out Madeline’s performance:

Madeline Kahn announces, with jazz bravura, that she has discovered what life is all about. It’s all about the glory of walking down the street with a mean look on your face, a cigarette in your right hand, a toothpick in your left. Miss Kahn is contented, gay, nearly ecstatic, as she alternates cigarette and toothpick, right foot and left, syncopated bass notes and riffed treble. . . . And the longer we watch Madeline Kahn’s waitress, skirt starchily flared, hair ready to dance in the breeze, the more we are convinced that she is really Marilyn Miller gone tough-minded.
⁴³

Madeline received favorable mention in most of the reviews, as did George S. Irving and Alice Playten. Madeline also landed her first personality profile, in
Newsday
, on July 10, 1969. But
Promenade
was an ensemble piece, not a star-making vehicle. Even when referring to Madeline as one of “the bewitching trio of honest delinquents,” Barnes professed himself reluctant to identify any standouts in the cast. There was little reason for Madeline to stay.

And then came the booing. The incident—or one of the incidents—provoked an extraordinary, long letter to the
Times
, the sort of amateur criticism that nowadays would circulate on the Internet. The writer, Don Dunn of Queens Village, NY, reports that “Madeline Kahn’s eyes—mischievous, sparkling as a rule—glazed over for just an instant when the single shout, ‘Booooo!,’ rumbled foghorn-like from a male member of the audience.” Insisting that “a musical should say
something
,” Dunn complains that Carmines’s forgettable melodies and Fornés’s “incomprehensible” lyrics were at fault. He also blames the critics, whose reviews led audiences to expect a different kind of show. The fellow who booed, he says, stormed out with several friends. And Dunn isn’t done:

Is it possible to boo or jeer something onstage without meaning any disrespect toward the hardworking performers? Miss Kahn is a lovely, talented actress with a magnificent voice, but she was standing onstage singing gibberish. She was singing it well, full-throated
and proudly—but she was singing gibberish. . . . Now, if a patron realizes he has paid $10 to listen to well-trained voices sing gibberish, may he express his displeasure toward the writers—not the performers, who are only trying to earn a paycheck—or must he wait until they answer the call of “Author!” and appear onstage?

Dunn even suggests “that someone was seriously thinking of attacking Miss Kahn in blind fury—or of storming the box office. I know that it would not have taken much to set me in hot support, and I wonder how many other theatergoers would have joined in.”
⁴⁴

Getting booed is tough for any performer, but for a sensitive artist like Madeline, it was unbearable. Around this time, she came to feel that those in charge didn’t appreciate her, either. Producer Joseph Beruh came to the cast with contracts to record the cast album. He offered only a session fee, with no residuals, and the actors unanimously refused to sign, Irving says. They later relented, but by then both Madeline and Irving were gone, and their replacements recorded the parts.

Virtually all that Madeline took away from
Promenade
was a copy of that cast album and a number written for another character, Miss O. “The Moment Has Passed” entered Madeline’s standing repertoire. A world-weary, Weill-tinted comic number that may be seen as a kind of steppingstone between “Das Chicago Song” and “I’m Tired,” “The Moment Has Passed” was included in most of her sketches for her unrealized nightclub act, “Kahn-Cepts.” She also sang it on
The Tonight Show
in 1986.

Madeline fled first to Philadelphia, for one more
Candide
concert (almost certainly her last), and then, for the first time in her life, made her way to California. In Sacramento, she played Magnolia in Jerome Kern’s
Show Boat
, produced by the Sacramento Light Opera Association at the Music Circus, an enormous tent venue. Magnolia’s sweetly lyrical lines have proven congenial to other classically trained sopranos, notably Irene Dunne and Kathryn Grayson in two film adaptations of the show. Opposite Madeline, baritone Richard Fredericks sang Gaylord Ravenal. Immediately before coming to Sacramento, he’d sung Lescaut in Massenet’s
Manon
, opposite Beverly Sills. Magnolia’s first number is a duet with Ravenal, “Make-Believe”—Madeline would have to work to keep up with her co-star.

She didn’t, quite. “The first couple of days, she was so insecure,” Fredericks remembers. Magnolia was unlike other roles Madeline had played, and he suspects that she’d never kissed a man onstage except for laughs. When it came time to rehearse the kiss, he had to ask her to remove her
chewing gum first. (She stuck it behind her ear, but at the end of the scene, she stuck the gum back in her mouth.) In rehearsals, the rest of the cast worked “at performance level,” but Madeline didn’t. In dialogue scenes, he could barely hear her. He confronted Russell Lewis, one of the Music Circus’s founding producers, who admitted he’d gotten the idea to hire Madeline when he heard her sing on a talk show.

Yet Madeline’s apparent diffidence wasn’t, as Fredericks believed, the fault of bad habits brought on by television cameras and microphones, which do encourage smaller-scale work. Instead, she was finding the character according to her own internalized method, which most opera singers in those days would have found alien. However, Fredericks says, after a couple of performances, “she started coming on like a herd of turtles.
Then
we started to have a show.” He found Madeline “too sophisticated and too old” for Magnolia, and she lacked period style. But “[t]o her credit, there was a performer in there. She did her job.” Fredericks disputes reports (“horse pucky”) that Madeline played Magnolia for laughs. She played the character as written, he says, and when she got laughs, it was “because the lines are funny. She did nothing to distract from that.”
⁴⁵
As a singer, Madeline felt—and to an extent, Fredericks agreed—“she had no business being there” in an operetta among professionals. In 1969, he knew she’d done sketch comedy, but he didn’t believe she’d ever done a book show—much less that she’d sung Cunegonde for Bernstein.

Conducted and directed by Milton Lyon,
Show Boat
ran the week of August 4–10, 1969. The heat was over one hundred degrees during the daytime, and it was still sweltering in the tent by evening—“And then they’d turn the lights on,” Fredericks says. Reflecting on the production, Madeline later told the
New York Times
that it was “so hot, my makeup fell off.”
⁴⁶
She got terrific press for
Show Boat
, not only reviews, but also a personality profile in the
Sacramento Union
, in which she revealed the kind of ambivalence that Fredericks sensed in her, not only about opera but also about old-fashioned musical comedies like
Oklahoma!
or the one in which she was about to star.
⁴⁷
Her best review came from Richard Simon in the
Union
, who called her “a rising star on the musical horizon” and “a real find.” He added, “She possesses both a winsome charm and an absolute sincerity that makes irresistible her portrayal of the riverboat captain’s daughter. Allied to a very nice lyric soprano voice, it is evident that Miss Kahn will be up, up and away in her beautiful career.”
⁴⁸

In the
Show Boat
program, Madeline mentions one upcoming engagement. Having dabbled in operetta, at last she was ready to try the real
thing: opera.
Candide
’s conductor, Maurice Peress, had hired her to sing one of the leading roles in Puccini’s
La Bohème
in Washington, DC.
⁴⁹
If not committing entirely to the fulfillment of her mother’s dreams, at least Madeline would give it a try. But as far as Fredericks could see, “She was so self-conscious, God love her. She knew, for all intents and purposes, she really shouldn’t be there—her own self-evaluation.”

Ahead on the horizon was an even bigger challenge, the biggest thus far in her career. She would have to survive
Two by Two
.

IN THE 1960S, MADELINE DEMONSTRATED REMARKABLE PRECOCITY
, refining her talents and revealing an already-recognizable performing persona. In the 1970s, she truly matured as an artist. At the beginning of the decade, she was still seeking direction, yet in the space of three years, she secured stardom, a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk award (1974), back-to-back Oscar nominations (1973, 1974), and the movie roles for which she’s best remembered. Then, her biggest failures followed with comparable swiftness: the movies
At Long Last Love
(1975) and
Won Ton Ton
(1976), and the Broadway musical
On the Twentieth Century
(1978). After those stumbles, she didn’t truly regain her footing until 1992.

Only twenty-seven as the decade began, she could boast of a clutch of great reviews and a couple of recordings. She’d made good contacts with talented peers, and she’d caught the notice of Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodgers, two of the most influential men in America. “She was a known quantity,” says lyricist Martin Charnin. “But I don’t think she had really reached full throttle, if you will. Nobody really knew all of the gifts that she had as a comedian”—least of all Madeline herself. She was still challenged by the kinds of typecasting she’d rebelled against at Hofstra, and in her two most prominent acting jobs in the 1960s she played the wanton (in
Candide
) and the servant (in
Promenade
) yet again. At the time, New York didn’t seem to know what to make of her, any more than the music and theater departments at Hofstra had. She didn’t have the luxury of choice.