Madeline Kahn (15 page)

The last we see of Trixie, she’s in her peignoir, inviting a hotel clerk (Burton Gilliam) into her room, and thus falling into the trap that Addie and Imogene set for her. We hear her briefly though a closed door, but what Moze finds when he walks in on Trixie and the clerk we understand from the expression on Moze’s face. He’s been betrayed, and he and Addie leave Trixie behind. The last image, however, is of Imogene, tiny and alone in the hallway as the camera recedes.

While Trixie is over-the-top, Madeline’s performance isn’t. Ever on the hunt for what she called “classics” on which to base her interpretations, she pegged Trixie as “a Tennessee Williams character, if Williams had written a comedy.” “Trixie was such a good part. She had a shine all her own,” Madeline said. “Personally, I’ve never known anyone like her, but I had similar feelings to situations, and if you use them you can bring the part home. She reminded me a lot of Blanche in
Streetcar
—trying to be genteel and clinging to airs when she was down on her luck. I don’t know if Trixie was from the South . . . but some of those lines I couldn’t say
without
using a Southern accent.”
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Indeed, Trixie is the last vestige of the Deep South, the original setting of Brown’s novel (Bogdanovich transported the story to Kansas). Madeline had hardly set foot in the South, though she’d worked with Fannie Flagg, whose Alabama accent was strong to begin with and became stronger in some of her Upstairs sketches. “The fact that I’m good at mimicry and imitating voices surprises me every time I do it,” Madeline told Rex Reed. “The Southern accent in
Paper Moon
just came out of me like a ghost. I don’t know where it came from. I just do these voices.”
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Refusing to mock the character, Madeline invests Trixie with a tender vulnerability, a clear sense that she’s never been quite tough or pretty enough to rise above life’s hardships. She chatters to stave off more
serious, unpleasant kinds of conversation, and her every flutter seems to be calculated (by Trixie, not by Madeline) for maximum effect. Ultimately, though Trixie sees her downfall coming, she can’t prevent it. An undercurrent of seriousness resonates throughout her characterization, most especially in the hillside speech. “I always have in mind a complete picture when I do a role,” Madeline told syndicated writer Dick Kleiner in 1975, “and it’s not my fault the picture comes out with only one facet showing. The character I played in
Paper Moon
was a very serious lady, although the picture only showed her comedy aspect.”
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“Madeline got things very quickly with Trixie,” Bogdanovich says. “She was a real natural. That was the main thing about Madeline. She wasn’t like a Method actor, or any of that kind of stuff. I don’t know how she worked; we didn’t get into that.” In reality, Madeline did much of the work without him. Before shooting started, she found Trixie’s “complete person” by coaching privately with Michael Karm and also, separately, with Larry Moss, her co-star from
Mixed Doubles
. These sessions were so private that Ryan O’Neal had no idea that anybody coached Madeline, and he refers to Karm as Madeline’s “secret boyfriend,” who never came to the set. “You’re gonna win an award for that,” Karm remembers telling her. “[J]ust keep doing what you’re doing, and you’re gonna eat up the screen.” In the finished film, he says, “I saw everything, everything that we’d worked on.”

With
Paper Moon
, Madeline joined the unofficial troupe of actors that Bogdanovich had been developing in several pictures, in conscious imitation of directors like John Ford and Preston Sturges. John Hillerman, for example, appeared in
The Last Picture Show
. Though he shares no scenes with Madeline in
What’s Up, Doc?
or
Paper Moon
, he would co-star with her in
At Long Last Love
. Offering insight into the advantages of Bogdanovich’s rep-company approach, he told a columnist, “The time that is wasted on getting to know each other is automatically out of the way. There’s no time wasted on ego play. Actors, you know, have delicate egos. It takes time to prove themselves to each other.” Because Bogdanovich used the same crew, too, “It’s a marvelous atmosphere and I think it’s conducive to good work.”
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But shooting the movie entailed hardships large and small. During the rehearsal period, Madeline was still wearing a cast on her leg, and O’Neal had to carry her to her hotel room each night. The weather in and around Hays, Kansas, made exterior shoots, including the hillside scene, uncomfortable. “My part was shot in November, and the locals were saying, ‘Aw, it never gets this cold out here usually at this time of
year.’ But it snowed,” Madeline remembered. “It was supposed to be spring in the movie and it was just freezing. I mean we were in pain!”
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Under her frilly dresses, Madeline wore thermal underwear and, whenever she wasn’t on camera, a heavy jacket, while she huddled by a stove. “I was afraid the picture was about this girl who was cold,” she told the
Village Voice
. “I’d whip my coat off, they’d take a shot of me in my flimsies, then throw the coat back on to defrost me.”
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Inexperienced as Madeline was in film work, Ryan O’Neal was the only other professional actor in the Trixie sequence. He doesn’t recall that the differing levels of experience of the cast members posed particular problems, and Bogdanovich elicited marvelous performances from Tatum, Johnson, and Gilliam. But the long takes required extensive rehearsals and multiple shoots whenever any actor flubbed his lines. “I never heard her complain about Tatum, who took forty takes to get anything right,” O’Neal remembers, adding that he sometimes lost patience with his daughter. At one point, he snapped at her, and Tatum replied, “I’ve only been acting for three weeks.” “She thought if you could
see
a movie in two hours, you could
make
a movie in two hours,” O’Neal says.

“Working with a child can be delightful and interesting,” Madeline told the
New York Times
. “It can also be very trying.”
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But experience as a student teacher had taught her how to get along with children, and she genuinely liked her little co-star. On the set, O’Neal says, Madeline and Tatum “worked quietly together and never had a problem with each other. They were kin. Their characters had a problem, but they loved each other. We all did.” Madeline sang between takes, usually Dietrich or Piaf numbers, O’Neal says, adding with a laugh, “I wish I had some dark stories. She was sunshine, always a pleasure to see, warm and engaging and down to earth when it came to the work.”

Bogdanovich shot
Paper Moon
in black-and-white not because he conceived of it as a companion piece to
The Last Picture Show
or an homage to John Ford, but because both O’Neals had suntans that were wrong for Moze and Addie. After some 16-millimeter tests in color, Ryan O’Neal remembers, Bogdanovich exclaimed, “You look so healthy! We’re gonna have to do this in black-and-white. You both look so sun-kissed!” Madeline worried that Laszlo Kovacs’s photography was unflattering to her. Her post-
What’s Up, Doc?
weight loss was a work in progress, and in profile shots, she has a slight double chin. Her first costume is not only jiggly on top but also tight across the hips, and she had to suffer the indignity of it more than once—first with an ordinary brassiere and again with Platt’s special creation. Madeline found the costume so awful that she
shut herself in her dressing room. O’Neal found her crying. Pointing to his own costume, which had been pulled from the Paramount wardrobe, he told her, “I’m wearing George Raft’s pants and Bing Crosby’s jacket. They look right. It’s okay, it doesn’t have an effect on who you are.”

As a precaution, Bogdanovich didn’t let his actors watch the dailies—a wise choice in Madeline’s case. “When she saw the picture, she hated the way she looked,” he says. Conceding that black-and-white “isn’t flattering, particularly,” he says he wasn’t trying to make her look good or bad. “She was supposed to be a kind of cheap stripper; she wasn’t supposed to be glamorous. And then she liked Mel Brooks, because Mel made her look good. In
Blazing Saddles
and
Young Frankenstein
, she looked much better than she did in my pictures.” Off-camera, Madeline looked so attractive that Ursula Andress, the first Bond Girl, whom O’Neal was dating at the time, grew jealous—not least when she saw O’Neal carrying Madeline to her hotel room. “She was convinced that we were having something,” O’Neal says. “Beauties are so insecure!”

Michael Karm’s prediction proved correct: Madeline received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations in 1974. Also up for the best supporting actress Oscar that year were Sylvia Sidney (
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams
), Candy Clark (
American Graffiti
), Linda Blair (
The Exorcist
), and Tatum O’Neal. “I think just being nominated is very important,” Madeline told the
New York Times
. “It’s lovely and very moving to be chosen by other actors. But I don’t see how you can compare what a child does, however remarkable, to what an experienced actress like Sylvia Sidney does. She’s also a nominee . . . and I’d probably vote for her. Anyway, I don’t expect to win.”
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Oscar buffs still grumble that because Addie appears in almost every frame of
Paper Moon
, Tatum should have been nominated in the best actress category. But on April 2, 1974, at age ten, she won the award; she still holds the record as the youngest person ever to win an Oscar in a competitive category.

Among film critics,
Paper Moon
found a champion in Judith Crist at
New York Magazine
, who praised Madeline as a “sheer delight as the whorish and pathetic Trixie.” Jay Cocks, writing in
Time
, found that Madeline “makes a smashingly dippy Trixie,” even as he lambasted the rest of the picture. Madeline’s star was in the ascendant. “At least when I go out there [to Hollywood] they know who I am now, so I feel like I’ve got a right to be there,” she told a reporter. In her personal notebook, however, she wrote, “[M]y fantasies, and the opportunity to make them alive [and] real is what turns me on—the stardom is something else and
I must deal with it as I don’t really feel at home with fame altho’ I like starring in a project.”
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Paper Moon
was the tenth-highest grossing picture in a year that also saw release of
The Sting, The Exorcist, American Graffiti
, and
The Way We Were
. For Bogdanovich, the movie marked the end of an era: It was his final collaboration with Polly Platt. Their marriage had ended in 1971, after the director began an affair with Cybill Shepherd, the star of
The Last Picture Show
. His next film,
Daisy Miller
(1974), would provide another vehicle for Shepherd, and she would also star in his
At Long Last Love
(1975), alongside Madeline. By coincidence, in the scene in which Addie plots Trixie’s downfall, she’s listening to a Cole Porter song, “A Picture of Me Without You,” on the radio. The song returns in
At Long Last Love
—but in that movie, Madeline sings it.

Mame
and Other Curiosities (1972–73)

PAPER MOON
WAS SHOT IN NOVEMBER
1972.
STILL IN THE PLANNING
stages at the time,
Mame
, a big-screen adaptation of Jerry Herman’s Broadway musical, was slated to star Lucille Ball, a beloved entertainer under considerable pressure. She was—and still is—a controversial choice for a part created by Angela Lansbury, and both Herman and Patrick Dennis, author of the source novel,
Auntie Mame
, expressed reservations about Lucy’s casting.
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At age sixty-one, she was old for the part, and her dubious singing ability was an oft-mined vein of comedy in her sitcoms. Her movies had never achieved the kind of widespread success she’d found in television, and even on the small screen, her career was winding down. To top off her problems, she’d injured her leg in a skiing accident. Now she was on a collision course with the young actress hired to play Mame’s assistant, Agnes Gooch. How Madeline won and lost the part is a mini-
Rashomon
. Which version you believe seems to depend on whether—or how much—you love Lucy.

One pro-Lucy account is predicated on a tale of artistic differences and Madeline’s lack of diplomacy. The star disapproved of Madeline’s interpretation, as screenwriter Paul Zindel confirmed. Madeline was cast “without clearing it with Lucy, or not listening to her grumbling,” Zindel said, and before the first rehearsal, they’d never met. When Madeline began to read, Ball interrupted: “Listen, what kind of voice are you going to use in this? . . . [Y]ou’ve got to use a trick voice here, why don’t you start using it right now? Let me hear the voice.” Zindel remembers, “There was silence in the rehearsal room as Madeline coldly stated, ‘I will arrive at the voice
after
some rehearsal and building of the character.’ Lucille Ball affirmed, ‘Oh, no. You use the voice
now
!’”
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In an interview in 1973, Madeline suggested that the clash was not only artistic but also generational, an analysis that squares with Zindel’s account. Madeline’s approach to a role was typical of younger artists with a theater background, but it might have been foreign to Lucy, who honed her craft in a different era and who tended to work from the outside in—on those occasions when she delved at all. Madeline told
After Dark
that the producers “wanted to go with something different for Agnes . . . a more contemporary approach, and then Lucy got wind of what they were doing. She didn’t want some young, fresh interpretation. She wanted what Jane Connell did [as Gooch on Broadway]. Well, I don’t look like Jane and I don’t act like Jane, so they got Jane.”
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A variant account, repeated by Madeline in an interview with Rex Reed, holds that Lucy had seen
What’s Up, Doc?
and expected Madeline to resemble Eunice Burns. Eunice might indeed have been a good fit for the frumpy Agnes Gooch, whom Auntie Mame transforms into a sadder-but-wiser party girl. But Eunice “was just a part,” Madeline said. “I mean, you can see I don’t look like that in real life. But I thought that was what the movies were about. Hey, nobody walks around Hollywood looking the way they really look.” Even without fancy makeup or a costume change, she said, “I can look like forty different people. . . .”
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