Madeline Kahn (17 page)

Though Gene Wilder shares the screen only fleetingly with Madeline in
Blazing Saddles
, he made sure to be on the set during the filming of “I’m Tired.” “I told Mel that if the movie were just her one number, it would be worth the price of admission,” he says. With
Young Frankenstein
already in the planning stages, Wilder—that movie’s co-writer, as well as its star—began to consider casting Madeline in a key role.

Ultimately
Blazing Saddles
was the first of three pictures with Wilder and four with Brooks. Madeline found herself working again with Liam Dunn and met Dom DeLuise and Harvey Korman for the first time. She’d co-star with each of them again. She was now a valued player not only in Bogdanovich’s de facto repertory company, but also in Brooks’s, and in
Blazing Saddles
she’s not just the leading lady, she’s virtually the
only
female.

Though she never worked with him again, Madeline established a remarkable rapport with Cleavon Little. In few other pictures does one sense a comparable ease between Madeline and her leading man. Much
of this comes from Little. Handsome, silky-smooth, and affable, he makes the movie’s message of racial awareness not merely palatable (as the studio executives hoped he would when they rejected Brooks’s first choice, Richard Pryor, who co-wrote the screenplay) but delicious. During Bart’s tryst with Lili, Madeline participates in one of many penis jokes Brooks would throw her way: “Tell me, Schatzi, is it twue what they say about the way your people are
gifted
?” At the studio’s request, the next line (“I hate to disappoint you, ma’am, but you’re sucking on my arm”) was cut, a concession Brooks regrets. Madeline’s exclamation, “It’s twue! It’s twue!” becomes the punch line to the scene.

Off-camera, she wasn’t comfortable with Brooks’s bawdy humor. “The language is absolutely filthy,” she told a reporter several months before
Blazing Saddles
opened. “They say things like, ‘Up—.’ Oh, my God! Why am I telling
you
this? Everyone will think
I
am dirty. Please, can we talk about something else—something my mother can show her friends?”
⁴⁸

Premiering on February 7, 1974,
Blazing Saddles
was the top-grossing picture of the year, besting the disaster epics
The Towering Inferno
and
Earthquake, The Godfather II
, and a little picture called
Young Frankenstein
. Madeline earned excellent reviews for her “marvelously unkind takeoff on Marlene Dietrich”
⁴⁹
and her second Oscar nomination in two years. She lost the Academy Award for best actress in a supporting role to Ingrid Bergman for
Murder on the Orient Express
, but nevertheless, she was on a winning streak. She’d made three hits, and all of Hollywood knew who she was.

Her performance in
Blazing Saddles
is still so powerful that one forgets she has only a few scenes and all but disappears at the end of the movie. (She turns up briefly in drag, another Dietrich homage, though she says nothing). A great deal of her training came together at once: her mimicry, her facility in sketches and in comic songs, her portrayals of saucy wenches—and yes, her extensive knowledge of Weimar culture. This background explains why she’s funny even to people who have no idea who Dietrich was, just as “Das Chicago Song” is funny to people who never heard Lenya. She knew exactly how to put across this material. And true to form, she even managed to supply Lili with a bit of depth. After a night of love, she closes the door on Bart and exclaims, with rapturous purity, “Vot a nice guy!”—signaling that other guys in Lili’s life haven’t been nice, and letting us know how she wound up where she is. “She was so bright,” Brooks says. “Not only did she get jokes, she got
nuance
.”

Boom Boom Room
(1973)

BOTH
ADAM’S RIB
AND
FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES
PREMIERED IN THE
fall of 1973, a few weeks before Joseph Papp launched his first season as producer of the New York Shakespeare Theater at Lincoln Center with a new play by David Rabe, whose work he had championed at the Public Theater downtown. Unlike Rabe’s other plays to that point (notably
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel
and
Sticks and Bones
),
Boom Boom Room
centered on a woman. A go-go dancer in the eponymous Philadelphia club, Chrissy is barely intelligent enough to realize that everyone she knows exploits her. When at last she achieves her dream of a career in New York, it’s as a stripper—a step down.

The part was such a stretch for Madeline that some, seeing her name listed in the published script, wonder whether another actress named Madeline Kahn was working in New York in the early 1970s. Theater critic Michael Feingold, who saw her performance, says, “She didn’t come across as a go-go girl, but remember that the character is a person who has long, emotional scenes and speeches, and who is to a certain extent a reactive element to all the other people.” Madeline didn’t play Chrissy as stupid, he says, but as confused or uncomprehending; she didn’t condescend to the character. “Chrissy is a person who makes mistakes in her life, and it’s easy to believe Madeline as that,” he says. “She was very moving in it.” Her rehearsal script contains two additions that give one a sense of Madeline’s approach to
Boom Boom Room
. One is a photograph of a Playboy bunny, alongside a note in her handwriting on the first page: “[S]o trapped in the half-vision of what I might be . . . while having to wallow around in what I actually am . . . that anyone who can make my half-visions alive [and] breathing has a power over
me.” It’s as good a description of Chrissy as anyone (arguably including Rabe) ever managed.

As the production started, Rabe felt that his script wasn’t ready, but as he told Papp’s biographer, “You’d have to be an idiot to turn down a chance at Lincoln Center, and I was not prepared to deal with Joe’s kind of argument and force.”
⁵⁰
The rehearsal period was even more difficult than might have been predicted. Believing that a woman should direct, Papp hired Julie Bovasso, a distinguished actress, teacher, and director of experimental theater. He didn’t know her and wasn’t familiar with her work. She lacked experience in commercial theater, and the material she usually directed was comparatively outré. However, Rabe’s sensibility appealed to her, and she envisioned a surreal production that would take advantage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater’s expansive stage, with simultaneous action on multiple playing areas, and Papp and Rabe approved.

Bovasso disagreed with Papp on casting the lead role. “I really did not ever like Madeline Kahn,” Bovasso said. “She was imposed on me. She is charming and she can be funny, but she doesn’t have that kind of power. When it comes to wailing, she cannot wail. It ain’t there.” But as a newcomer to Papp’s fiefdom, Bovasso didn’t feel she could veto his choice, and she sensed that Papp wanted stars—like Madeline and her co-star, Julie Newmar—to lend glamour to his inaugural production, regardless of their abilities. Madeline “played everything straight out front, wouldn’t relate, she was concerned with her own self-survival,” Bovasso remembered. “This has nothing to do with acting.”
⁵¹

Yet during rehearsal, Bovasso began to believe she could coax the performance she wanted from Madeline, and Madeline later recalled Bovasso as “very helpful to me. She was a woman and she seemed to have a real ability to portray rage, while my fear would have been that I couldn’t be really believable portraying rage. I hadn’t come from a family background where everyone was really yelling at everyone else, and maybe she did, so I had courage with her leading me along a bit.”
⁵²
But the actress who couldn’t say “tits” in
Paper Moon
was scarcely able to dance topless, as the script required in the final scene when Chrissy’s degradation is complete. At a dress rehearsal, Madeline kept her breasts veiled, a choice that lacked the impact Rabe sought. In frustration, Bovasso suggested another rewrite. Instead, Papp fired her. But she didn’t give up without a fight, returning a few days later to confront him in front of Rabe and the cast. Papp ordered her out of the theater. Characteristically,
Madeline disengaged herself from the unpleasantness. Bovasso’s firing, she later said, “just kind of happened.”
⁵³

With only days before opening and no time to hire anyone else, Papp directed
Boom Boom Room
himself. He must have been a whirlwind. When Madeline balked, he called her understudy onstage. According to Mary Woronov—the Warhol superstar who replaced Newmar during rehearsals—it took about fifteen minutes of watching another actor do her job to persuade Madeline to cooperate. She even found the nerve to flash her breasts at the end of the play as the stage went dark. “I was so full of what I had to do yet,” Madeline said. “I can’t explain the feeling, except to say it’s like you’re out there in the ocean swimming, and you’ve got to get to shore. You can see the shore, and you simply have to keep going. God, it’s great when you’re working that hard, I have to say.”
⁵⁴

Though Rabe later conceded that Papp was responsible for much of what went right with
Boom Boom Room
, their relationship crumbled. The coup de grâce came on opening night, when Papp humiliated Rabe by phoning critic Clive Barnes and haranguing him for his negative review—all under the watchful eye of a
Times
reporter invited by Papp to cover the play’s preparation. Unaware that many people on both ends of the conversation could hear them, the two men heaped invectives on each other. A sanitized account of the conversation appeared in the
Times
reporter’s article shortly thereafter, helping to deflect attention from Rabe’s work and toward Papp’s outsized personality.
⁵⁵
Indeed, the producer got more press than the play, Rabe felt,
⁵⁶
and
Boom Boom Room
’s sordid subject matter and (at the time) graphic sexuality and language found little favor with some audiences.

Despite all the turbulence in the background, Madeline gave what she would long consider her finest performance, earning a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for best actress in a play.
Time
critic T. E. Kalem praised her “performance in depth of an intrinsically shallow soul.”
⁵⁷
In the
New Yorker
, Brendan Gill wrote, “Madeline Kahn is superb as Chrissy; with the wary stance of a boxer accustomed to being clipped from behind and with a child’s voice of mingled hope and doubt, she is a true heroine, indomitable in her pursuit of who she was, and is, and can be.”
⁵⁸

But Barnes was no more persuaded by Madeline’s performance than by Rabe’s play. “Madeline Kahn, a gifted performer, has been allowed to mug the play as if she were doing a series of blackout sketches for a
revue,” he wrote in the
Times
. “It is the kind of acting more suitable for Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
than Lincoln Center.” Given Madeline’s desire to move beyond revues and her longstanding ambivalence about talk shows, Barnes could hardly have found a more wounding description of her work.
⁵⁹
The next year, in a profile in the
Times
, she alluded to Barnes’s review, then suggested that people who didn’t understand the play were people with whom she simply couldn’t communicate.
⁶⁰

Whenever Madeline spoke of her frustration with parts that were “just sketches” or “bits,” and of her desire to play something with greater range, she had Chrissy in mind. Chrissy was the most complex character Madeline ever portrayed, and the last role she would play that wasn’t primarily comedic. (Years later, she was approached to play Chrissy’s mother in a film adaptation, never realized, to have been directed by Barbara Kopple.) “At heart, no one thinks of himself as a comic,” Madeline told the
Washington Post
in 1997.

Speaking of Chrissy, she said, “I was never the same after that role. I felt validated as an actress. For the first time in my career, I felt known. So much of the time I don’t. That’s not to say unappreciated, but rather not properly perceived. Most of the roles I get are not close to me in essence, and I have to retrieve those elements in my experience that are useable. [With]
In the Boom Boom Room
, I had an unexpected connection. And Joe Papp had the courage of his conviction to cast me in something no one else would have.”
⁶¹

Young Frankenstein
(1974)

COMING OFF A WINNING STREAK OF FOUR HIT MOVIES RELEASED BE
tween 1972 and 1974, “I was spoiled,” Madeline told her friend George Bettinger in a radio interview. “I thought they were all going to be like that.”
⁶²
In 1975, syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner called her “the biggest thing in pictures since talking popcorn,” and compared her with Marilyn Monroe and Carol Burnett. Even so, she told Kleiner, she felt pigeonholed, much as she had at Hofstra. But, he wrote, “[S]he says now she’d like to try some serious roles.”
⁶³
They weren’t forthcoming. As ever, Madeline’s work was determined by other people. Writers, directors, and casting agents more than ever now saw her as a comic. The means to control her career—holding out for serious parts, writing or producing her own material—were unavailable to Madeline and to almost any other woman in Hollywood and New York at the time.

Men had more options, and Gene Wilder’s desire to shape his career inspired him to write a screenplay. Wanting to create not only a juicy role for himself, but also to guarantee himself a good time making the picture, he’d already begun writing the script for
Young Frankenstein
(and Mel Brooks had agreed to direct it) before
Blazing Saddles
started shooting. Wilder wrote the first draft; Brooks advised him, then helped to polish the final script; they shared co-author credit onscreen.
⁶⁴
Once they heard Madeline sing “I’m Tired,” they determined to find a role for her in their new movie. But which role? Wilder thought Madeline would prefer to play the sexy lab assistant, Inga, while Brooks wanted her to play Elizabeth, Frederick Frankenstein’s fiancée. “She was Park Avenue,” he says. But he left the choice to her. Madeline knew what
she
wanted: Taffeta beats a lab coat any day, and as photographed by Gerald Hirschfeld,
she glitters like starlight. Ultimately, Wilder succeeded in both his goals for the picture: Frederick is one of the best parts he ever got, and as he wrote in his memoir, “Making
Young Frankenstein
was the happiest I’d ever been on a film. . . . It was like taking a small breath of Heaven each day.”
⁶⁵
With a cast that included Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, and Teri Garr, Madeline found herself among friends old and new, and whenever she was on the set, Brooks made a point of eating lunch with the actors—something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, he says.