Madeline Kahn (22 page)

While watching, one wonders for whom this picture was intended. Between the sometimes racy content and scenes depicting the dog’s suicide attempts (noose, oven, etc.),
Won Ton Ton
is inappropriate for the younger audiences that typically enjoy dog movies, even as the hasty cameos and unfunny dialogue alienate grownups who care about classic films. Perhaps most astonishing is Winner’s inept handling of slapstick gags. Short takes, jumpy cuts, bad lighting, bungled set-ups, and obscured payoffs make it difficult to tell what’s going on, and thus make it impossible to laugh. Winner puts Madeline at the center of a particularly audacious rip-off of a gag from Buster Keaton’s
Steamboat Bill, Jr
. (1928), in which a building’s façade collapses on her without touching
her, thanks to a fortuitously placed open doorway. Though the original could have been studied, or copied frame for frame, Winner doesn’t appear to have taken the trouble to do so. His timing is off, and while it’s not so far off as to risk Madeline’s safety, the gag, like the façade, falls flat.

Through it all, Madeline “was just funny,” Dern writes in his memoir. “And sexy and nasty but without ever advertising it or broadcasting it. She had a fabulous figure. She was as pretty as she wanted to be. She could be a mess if she wanted to be. She was a wonderful, wonderful actress.” But, he adds, she “had no confidence in [her] ability at all.”
⁹⁰
In her notebook, Madeline wryly compared her acting with that of Gus, the dog in the title role. For example, while she had “to conjure up feelings,” Gus could stare at a piece of liver off-camera. “He has his technique, I have mine,” she wrote. “But there are certain things he wouldn’t do (he’s not a complete robot)—he wouldn’t pee on Art [Carney]’s leg (neither would I do anything in poor taste).”
⁹¹

She was spared the worst reviews, and in the
New York Times
, under the headline “Miss Kahn Lifts ‘Won Ton Ton,’” Richard Eder lavished extraordinary praise on her, setting her alongside Keaton, Chaplin, and W. C. Fields by dint of her “unwavering purpose at right angles to reality, a concentration that she bears, Magoolike, through all kinds of unreasonable events. . . . The dog is all right. But Miss Kahn upstages him.”
⁹²

Won Ton Ton
was Paula Kahn’s big break in Hollywood: she worked as an extra during a sequence at a movie screening and can be seen prominently seated behind Teri Garr and Billy Barty. But the box office verdict seemed clear. Madeline’s name on the marquee couldn’t save the picture, and even the superior returns for
Smarter Brother
indicated that, with or without her buddies from the Brooks movies, she was the kind of star audiences enjoyed but didn’t go out of their way to see.

Saturday Night Live
(1976)

AFTER
ADAM’S RIB
, MADELINE TURNED DOWN OFFERS TO APPEAR ON
sitcoms. She never again guest-starred on one. She reasoned that if she became too regular a presence on television, she’d diminish her value in movies. Talk shows, on the other hand, could enhance that value by permitting her to promote her latest film projects, and she did gravitate to TV specials. In 1976, for example, she guest-starred on
The George Burns Special
, successfully taking the Gracie part in an old Burns-and-Allen routine. Treating the script as a score, she finds Allen’s peculiar music and timing— to Burns’s evident delight. The next year, she reunited with her
Comedy Tonight
friends Robert Klein and Peter Boyle for
Klein Time
for CBS. One sketch, “How Rembrandt Got Started,” suggested that the artist debuted by painting cigar boxes. Madeline and Boyle played adulterous lovers, whom Rembrandt (Klein) painted
in flagrante
. By now, Madeline and Boyle were established stars who got star salaries, Klein says, but working together was still as “beautifully copacetic and fun” as ever. Madeline remained extremely judicious about other programs, but in 1976, she accepted invitations that resulted in two of the most important appearances of her career:
Saturday Night Live
and
The Carol Burnett Show
.

On May 8, two weeks before the premiere of
Won Ton Ton
, Madeline guest-hosted
Saturday Night Live
. This was near the end of the show’s fabled first season, and several sketches are among Madeline’s best-remembered work. In “Not for Ladies Only,” Baba Wawa (Gilda Radner, doing Barbara Walters) finds herself flummoxed by interviewee Marlene Deutschland (Madeline, doing Dietrich again): Both “wadies” are unable to pronounce their
R
’s. This is, as the sketch’s writer, Rosie Shuster, describes it, “a beautiful meeting of nonsense and wordplay and incredibly gifted actresses.” Another sketch, by Marilyn Suzanne Miller, “Slumber
Party,” concerns a know-it-all little girl named Madeline and her attempt to instruct her friends (Radner, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman) in the truth about sex. They refuse to believe her. Madeline also plays a drunken, embittered Pat Nixon in a Watergate satire written by Al Franken and Tom Davis.

Given the course that
SNL
would later take, the amount of musical material given to Madeline is remarkable. Today, the writers and producers seldom shape the show in a host’s image to such a degree, especially when someone else (in this case, singer–songwriter Carly Simon) is officially the musical guest. But Madeline sings several numbers, and one sketch, a
Chinatown
parody with John Belushi, is entirely constructed around songs. Most strikingly, Madeline sings Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” as a solo, with discreet accompaniment, in a tight spotlight, and “I Feel Pretty” from Bernstein’s
West Side Story
, in costume as the Bride of Frankenstein—all the while mimicking Elsa Lanchester’s lurching and hissing in the eponymous monster movie.
⁹³

Hosts would arrive at 30 Rockefeller Center on a Monday to meet with the show’s staff and to discuss ideas for material. The writers would work—often through the night—until Friday, when sketches would be culled, reshaped, and rewritten. “On that show, you’re rehearsing all the time,” frequent host Buck Henry told an interviewer. “Even when you’re just sitting around, you’re rehearsing.”
⁹⁴
Though he seldom contributed much to the sketches, Henry is himself a writer; Madeline was not. For her first meeting with the
SNL
team, Madeline “came to the set with these incredibly big clown shoes,” Shuster remembers. “She thought they were funny. It took delicacy to get her to give them up.” That awkward moment aside, Shuster says, “She played it straight, beautifully. She was great. But that one moment, it was like—
oh, dear
.” Madeline “was able to do feminine stuff and yet project funny without coming across like Martha Raye and Jo Anne Worley on
Laugh-In
,” Shuster says. “She had a dynamic tension of opposites, a female thing and a lot of power at the same time. It was a beautiful weave, and it came out funny.”

Airing the night before Mother’s Day, Madeline’s first hosting gig marked the first time she worked with Gilda Radner. Their rapport shines in another highlight of the show, when the two women perform their impressions of a baby eating ice cream (Madeline) and a parrot (Gilda). Two of America’s best-loved comics became, for those few minutes, a team, though they would have few subsequent opportunities to work together.
⁹⁵
Close friends behind the scenes, they’d met sometime earlier—though not later than January 11, 1976, when Paula Kahn beat
Madeline to Studio 8H. Elliott Gould was the host of
SNL
that night, and in a recurring sketch, Radner’s infatuation with him escalates to the point where they marry at the end of the show. But first Radner introduces Gould to her mother, played by Paula with few lines but warmly maternal grace. The sketch would remain the most significant credit on Paula’s résumé, and the combination of her brief appearances in
Won Ton Ton
and
SNL
triggered her ambitions. For the next few years, she pursued her acting career more aggressively, with no qualms about trading on her daughter’s fame.

The Carol Burnett Show
(1976)

IN AUGUST, MADELINE FLEW TO LOS ANGELES FOR HER OTHER SIGNIFI
cant television appearance of the decade, an episode of the most popular prime-time comedy-variety program of the day and the capper on CBS’s classic Saturday night lineup. Through
The Carol Burnett Show
, Madeline could reach a bigger audience in a single night (as many as twenty million, Burnett says) than she could during the entire run of most of her movies. The process was launched in the most flattering way possible, with a fan letter from Burnett herself, handwritten on January 10, 1975, shortly after Madeline appeared on
The Tonight Show
to promote
Young Frankenstein
.

“Well, I meant every word!” Burnett says now. Madeline kept the letter in her desk until the time of her death, and she and Burnett refer to it during her episode on
The Carol Burnett Show
, explaining how they know each other before joining in a duet, “Friend.” The two did in fact hit it off, though theirs was the sort of show-business friendship that lasts as long as the run of a show—in this case, a single week. Afterward, their mutual fondness endured without much follow-up. Still, the episode stands out in Burnett’s memory. Though it was merely one of dozens she taped over the course of eleven years four decades ago, she can still quote the dialogue verbatim. “It’s one of my favorites,” she explains. She’d wanted to book Madeline at least since seeing
Paper Moon
, and she admired the Brooks films, too. “My God, the talent is just enormous, and she’s beautiful. And she sang up a storm.”

Madeline’s episode is almost a time capsule, containing elements that represent the essence of
The Carol Burnett Show
: a question-and-answer session with Burnett and the audience; a “Family” sketch about Eunice (Burnett) and her soul-crushing mama (Vicki Lawrence); a song for the
guest (in this case, the duet with Burnett); a Mr. Tudball sketch featuring Tim Conway’s relentless attempts to crack up Harvey Korman; and a spoof of old movies. By the show’s tenth season, the production team, led by Burnett’s then-husband, Joe Hamilton, had perfected the formula for presenting guest stars advantageously, astutely combining their well-known talents with others that had been otherwise untapped. And so, in addition to her celebrated comedic skill, Madeline’s episode exploited her operetta background, of which few in the audience would have been aware (though Korman had heard her trilling between takes of
Blazing Saddles
).

Ordinarily, Burnett says, guests were booked three or four weeks in advance, giving the writers time to develop material. (In this case, Burnett and Hamilton probably knew
months
ahead of time, since Madeline attended a rehearsal and the taping of
Sills & Burnett at the Met
in March 1976.) Burnett doesn’t remember whether she or the writers Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon came up with the idea, but somebody said, “Let’s put her in with Eunice.” The result was among the most substantial, significant roles Madeline ever played.

In the “Family” sketch, Madeline plays Mavis Danton, a hugely pretentious actress who has fled inhospitable Hollywood to direct and star in a community-theater production of
Mary, Queen of Scotland
. Eunice plays her lady-in-waiting. Dissatisfied with Eunice’s work, Mavis comes to her home for a private rehearsal and coaching session. Eunice proves an eager but unpromising pupil, and of course her husband, Ed (Korman), and Mama distract and criticize her. Mavis loses her patience—and her hoity-toity accent—before storming out of the house. Burnett can’t confirm that Madeline based Mavis Danton on Miriam Tulin, the Hofstra theater professor, but she says the character’s look and voice came from Madeline. She encouraged Madeline to work with the show’s designer, Bob Mackie, to create her costume, a fluttering dress in burgundy chiffon, always in movement—and thus always upstaging any other actors. Throughout the scene, Madeline explores the musicality of her voice, from queenly soprano to Queens-ly braying, and she sweeps and glides around the room in a parody of grace. Mavis’s exalted goals for Eunice’s scene work (“numb despair combined with a kind of doomed frivolity,” “an urgent weakness”) betray a profound familiarity with acting teachers, and her repeated exhortations to concentrate (“In our circles, in our circles!”) became, at least for a while, a catchphrase among real-life actors.

Madeline sings with Burnett, as well as in one of four brief sketches that contrast the great stars of yore with their present-day decrepitude. According to a title card, this is the eighty-sixth installment of the popular
That’s Entertainment!
movies, and by now MGM is scraping the barrel. Alongside Lawrence’s ebullient Ann Miller, Conway’s inept Fred Astaire, and Burnett’s unsinkable Esther Williams, Madeline appears as Jeanette MacDonald in a spoof of
Rose-Marie
. As Nelson Eddy, Korman joins her at the climax of a parody of Friml’s “Indian Love Call,” here rendered as “We always used to oooh.” Madeline clearly enjoys mocking the music on which she’d overdosed at the Hofbräuhaus, and vocally, she holds nothing back. Finally, the entire cast assembles in their “modernday incarnations” for the finale. Madeline’s Jeanette is frail and barely upright.
⁹⁶

The episode grants Madeline more screen time than many of her movies did, and in accordance with the show’s traditions, it concludes with Burnett’s theme song, “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” and her ear-tugging tribute to her late grandmother. Madeline signed Burnett’s autograph book, and received a copy of that week’s script. (Bound in velveteen, it remained one of her personal treasures.) There was one final tradition: “Every Friday night, my husband and I would take the guest out to dinner after the show, at Chasen’s,” Burnett says.