Madeline Kahn (35 page)

For one early episode of the series in which Madeline attends a costume party, a network executive suggested that she wear a sleek, sexy tiger outfit, replete with an immense, S-curved tail. (Naturally, the tail gets caught in a door.) Just before dress rehearsal, with the studio audience waiting, Lobue received a call: Madeline wouldn’t come out of her dressing room. He went to her, and found her wearing the costume and in tears. “I thought I was on a cruise to the Caribbean,” she said, “and now I find out I’m on a banana boat to Nicaragua.”

It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which
Oh Madeline
ignored breakthroughs in the sitcom genre made by contemporary shows such as
Taxi
and
Cheers
, to say nothing of
All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, and
M*A*S*H
. Sitcoms had come a long way, but Madeline Wayne lived closer to Debbie Thompson in
The Debbie Reynolds Show
(1969), another Lucy-esque, redheaded housewife married to a writer. That show lasted one season.

Ostensibly, the new premise of the series was that, instead of adultery, Madeline tried every new fad and activity to stave off boredom after ten years of marriage. Madeline Wayne might wink at the possibility of an affair (notably, in an episode where she flirts with a younger man), but at heart she had no interest in such a thing. Actually going out and pursuing a fulfilling career didn’t seem to occur to her (she tried aerobics instead) until halfway through the season, when “Monday Night Madeline” showed her briefly landing a job as a sportscaster and winding up in the ring during a wrestling match. Nevertheless, the show did include situations in which the star could show off her versatility, and in various episodes she sang everything from “Poor Wand’ring One” to the theme from
Shaft
, from Rossini’s aria “Bel raggio lusinghier” to “Ah! Sweet Mystery,” and, in a scene in which she does her patented little-girl act, the Norwegian national anthem. Even in physical comedy, she’s surprisingly effective. Not a natural like Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, or John Ritter, Madeline nonetheless found ways to merge physical comedy with her vocal gifts. For example, in “To Ski or Not to Ski,” Madeline sprains her ankle on the slopes and tries to keep Charlie from finding out. To her hobbling and wincing she adds a variety of wails that begin as cries of pain and become a spontaneous rendition of “Oh, Susannah”—or,
in a very funny square dance scene, whoops and hollers that are
almost
appropriate.

For the most part, whenever an opportunity arose to stand out or surprise, the team behind
Oh Madeline
rejected it. There was no question of, and perhaps no time for innovation. Even Madeline’s character’s name—Wayne, née Vernon—is relatively bland and signifies a neutral, largely unexplored background. This leaves the only hints of ethnicity to Bobby and Doris, whose last name is Leone—never mind that the Waynes are played by actors named Kahn and Sloyan. The Waynes live in a spacious home that could be situated anywhere in the upper-middle-class American suburbs, in a town sometimes referred to as Eastfield, with occasional suggestions that they’re near Chicago. By contrast,
Cheers
, which premiered the previous season, couldn’t have taken place anywhere but Boston.

Moreover, none of Madeline’s co-stars was a household name—to say nothing of “the world’s funniest lady,” as a season preview article described her.
²⁵
Other such articles mentioned her in the same breath as another actress who would be launching her first weekly TV series: Bette Davis, slated to star in the prime-time soap opera
Hotel
, also on ABC.
²⁶
As Madeline understood perfectly well, she was the first and perhaps only reason viewers would tune in. Her status in television and in Hollywood generally was at risk.

“The show premiered with a number which would be a megahit by today’s standards,” Lobue says, and it ranked twenty-first for the week, promising to shore up the Tuesday-night lineup, which depended heavily on
Oh Madeline
’s lead-in,
Three’s Company
, then starting its final season. Soon, however, Madeline felt misgivings about the show and expressed them openly in the press. She tried to make a run-of-the-mill sitcom sound like something that would satisfy her as an actor—or else she was making a direct appeal to the network to let the producers add more depth to her show. After just one month on the air, she chafed at comparisons to
I Love Lucy
and told the Associated Press, “Yes, I’m a housewife, but that’s just a start. The show has to do with the complexities of human behavior. The way people can be grown-up and children at the same time. She has a certain restlessness, not having to do per se with her marriage. Maybe she feels she’s missing something.”
²⁷

Madeline wasn’t the only one dissatisfied with her show, and she may have felt something like peer pressure. “I got very unhappy when she was settling for minor parts on TV,” Mel Brooks remembers. “But she
said things like, ‘It’s a job, it pays more a week than you paid me for the whole movie.’ I said, ‘Well, salaries are different.’” If she felt the temptation to tell Brooks he could solve her problem by writing more parts for her in his movies, she resisted it.

It’s a measure of Madeline’s insecurity that she rented, rather than buying a house in Los Angeles, where
Oh Madeline
was produced. Much of her life was still in New York, and she shuttled back and forth every few weeks to enjoy her well-established routines, such as a play or an opera with Gail Jacobs. And on November 1, 1983, at the behest of Matthew Epstein, she narrated a concert performance of Offenbach’s
La Périchole
at Carnegie Hall, where Epstein was an artistic consultant. The performance starred Frederica Von Stade and Neil Rosenshein, under Bliss Hebert’s direction.

Hebert wrote Madeline’s narration, with the premise that she was Périchole’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter. “She walked out after the entr’acte with this giant book,” remembers Darren Keith Woods, who sang the role of the Notary, “and in her Madeline Kahn way, she blew the dust off of it, and a cloud of dust went flying into the first two rows at Carnegie Hall—and the laughter never stopped.” Conductor Mario Bernardi evidently agreed with some of the concert’s critics that
Périchole
didn’t require narration.
²⁸
At rehearsals, Woods remembers, every time Madeline was supposed to say her lines, Bernardi would insist, “No, no, we go on with music!” Things got to the point that, each time they came to one of her lines, “she’d open her mouth and look at him and say, ‘I won’t say anything,’” Woods says. “Only at dress rehearsal did we get through the narration.”

Before the performance, Madeline spoke to the
New York Times
for a preview article that constitutes one of the more accurate public accounts of her musical background. It duly notes both
Candide
and
Bohème
, as well as describing Madeline as a coloratura soprano. “I never thought about singing in Carnegie Hall when I was studying,” she said. “If anything, it was the Met. At the beginning, I was surprised to discover I could sing at all, and before my life began to take the direction it has, I kept on studying music. When I wasn’t working, an opera role was something I could learn and store up for the future. Then one day people discovered I was funny, and things went in a different direction. . . . Comedy is hard, but it comes naturally for me. Singing never did. If I had to sing opera again,
I’d have to spend all my time offstage preparing for it. I’d have to stop speaking to people. I couldn’t even laugh.”
²⁹

Returning to Hollywood, Madeline didn’t socialize much. Throughout the run of
Oh Madeline
, her appointment book shows almost nothing but rehearsals and tapings, plus a few professional commitments, such as the Emmy Awards ceremony, guest appearances on talk shows, and parties hosted by the network. She also saw Paula from time to time, and they spoke often by telephone, though Madeline tried to keep at least some distance between them while they lived in the same city. Early in the run, she made an effort to get to know her colleagues, attending a party at Giambalvo’s home and going to lunch with Tacker, for example. With Caryn Mandabach, she formed a friendship that prefigures those she established with other young women in later years, notably her co-starring “nieces” from
Mr. President
and
The Sisters Rosensweig
, Maddie Corman and Julie Dretzin. Mandabach says Madeline “just wanted people to understand her, like most people who are talented. . . . I understood her. I felt she had this really rare gift, and it was impossible to put it in a kind of simple place.”

Week to week, Madeline bore the brunt of responsibility for getting laughs. Charlie displays flashes of wit, and Bobby’s vulgarity is meant to be funny, as are Doris’s waspish tongue and her lingering attraction to her ex-husband, but virtually all the sight gags and most of the dialogue depend on Madeline. Again and again, a viewer is reminded of the appraisals of collaborators like Lobue, Tomlin, and Bogdanovich: Madeline could be funny no matter the material given to her. From the live studio audience, she consistently gets big laughs on fundamentally flat lines, simply with an inflection, a pause, a modulation of tone, a gesture. “Her line readings were sort of classically wrong,” Tom Shales says today, “but because it was her and part of her persona and her shtick, it was just perfect. It was quixotic and appropriate and right. Her timing was so wonderful.”

One can’t help wondering what she might have done with sharper material and stronger artistic support from her co-stars.
Oh Madeline
is a show in which, as Mandabach puts it, “She’s doing one movie and they’re doing another.” In their subsequent sitcoms, Carsey and Werner demonstrated a phenomenal ability to surround a star with a top-notch supporting cast—notably in
Roseanne
, where theater actors John
Goodman and Laurie Metcalf compensated for the star’s limited acting experience. In
A Different World
, the supporting cast was so strong that it carried the show for five more seasons after the lead, Lisa Bonet, left. In
Oh Madeline
, however, the supporting cast doesn’t register as strongly, and they’re seldom given the opportunity to do so.

Acting is like tennis, and any actor performs better opposite a skilled scene partner. Madeline and Sloyan never appear fully at ease with each other. “It was hard to get them to do any love scene at all,” producer Irma Kalish told an interviewer. Kalish’s husband, writer–producer Albert “Rocky” Kalish, chipped in with the recollection that, whenever Charlie is supposed to kiss Madeline, she’d usually “bend her head down, so he would kiss her on the forehead.”
³⁰
Naturally, this reticence posed challenges for a series ostensibly depicting a loving married couple. In any case, with less than a single season to work together, the cast of
Oh Madeline
never got much of a chance to establish a rhythm or to work past any differences. As Mandabach observes, Sloyan was an unusual casting choice to play the “pig in the middle” in
Yes, But I’m Married
, and the change in format did little to improve matters. “We should have cast a stronger person to play opposite Madeline,” she says. Sloyan “didn’t approach the project with the same sort of directorial intensity. He wasn’t a lead. And that’s just the truth. He was a much better character actor, and we forced him to be a lead.” With a stronger actor, such as Peter Boyle, opposite Madeline, the show would have been better overall.
³¹

At the same time, Mandabach feels Madeline was a character actor at heart. “One time I remember thinking how hard it must have been: ‘This is a brave woman, because it doesn’t come naturally,’” she says. She contrasts Madeline with John Lithgow, another actor she classifies as “a character person,” with whom she worked on the sitcom
3rd Rock from the Sun
. Lithgow “is a leader. He can teach others while he’s [acting], but Madeline was so fastidious in her own work that it was hard to be generous.” And indeed, there’s a striking lack of chemistry between Madeline and all three of her co-stars, nothing like the rapport one feels when watching her with Boyle, Wilder, Feldman, or Cleavon Little in the movies, or later in sitcoms with George C. Scott and Bill Cosby. The sense of mutual enjoyment simply isn’t there.