Madeline Kahn (45 page)

Lee Roy Reams brought Carol Channing backstage after seeing
Sisters Rosensweig
. “You know of course I could never have done this play
without having worked with you last summer,” Madeline told them. “For the first time, I had confidence. When I put on that Chanel suit, I was Dolly on the ramp.”

At the Newhouse,
Sisters Rosensweig
was performed in a modified three-quarter round. After retooling for the Barrymore Theater’s proscenium stage, and after bringing Christine Estabrook into the cast, the play transferred to Broadway. That move made the show eligible for Tony nominations. It was a competitive year. Klein didn’t even receive a Tony nomination for
Sisters Rosensweig;
the prizes for actors in a play went to Ron Leibman (lead) and Stephen Spinella (featured) in
Angels in America
. Everyone assumed that Alexander would be nominated for best leading actress in
Sisters Rosensweig
, with the support of the producers. After all, the role of Sara is central, and no one disputed Alexander’s status in New York theater. She won the Tony for her Broadway debut in
The Great White Hope
(1969), and before
Sisters Rosensweig
, she’d been nominated four more times as best leading actress in a play, most recently in 1992. But this left Madeline’s status in question. If Alexander was the leading actress, did it necessarily follow that Madeline was a featured actress? Other award nominations that year reveal the uncertainty. For the Drama Desk Award, Alexander was nominated as outstanding actress (and won), and Madeline was nominated as outstanding featured actress (and also won). At the Outer Critics Circle Awards, Madeline and Alexander both received nominations in the best actress category, and Madeline won.

The potential box office impact of Tony Awards came into play, too. If Madeline vied for featured actress, that might mean that both she and Alexander would win Tonys and give the producers an extra prize to publicize. But if both were leading actress nominees, then—barring the unlikely possibility of a tie—only one could win, or they might cancel out each other’s votes. Bishop left the decision up to the actors, according to his longstanding policy, and Alexander also left the decision to Madeline. Wasserstein, however, made her position clear.
The Heidi Chronicles
had earned her three major theater awards (Tony, Drama Desk, and New York Drama Critics) and a Pulitzer Prize, and now that she faced the juggernaut represented by Tony Kushner and
Angels in America
, she wanted to exceed
Heidi
’s tally, one way or another. As far as Madeline was concerned, this was hardly the self-serving demand of a celebrated writer, but the completely understandable desire of a colleague and friend. Madeline discussed her options with other close friends and family, including Gail Jacobs and Gerri Gerson. The confidence she’d been developing
since
Born Yesterday
and
Hello, Dolly!
—not only as an actor but also as a star—now bloomed.

“You know, they come to see me,” she told Gerson. “I have the plum part.”

“What do
you
want?” Gerson asked.

“I want best actress,” Madeline replied. She told Bishop of her decision, and once the nominations were announced, “I never doubted for a minute that she would be the one,” Alexander says, sounding pleased and rather proud of Madeline, “so I never had any problem with that.”
²⁴

Immediately, Madeline booked a trip to see Gerson, whose husband, Sam, was CEO of Filene’s Basement. “She didn’t seem to shop that well in New York,” Gerson remembers. “She wasn’t her own best advocate when it came to things for herself. She wasn’t an asky person.” Gerson always offered advice and retail contacts, but in the end, one of her friends lent Madeline a simple yet sparkling black gown. “You know, you need a certain glitz and a certain look when you’re onstage,” Gerson says, “because it doesn’t show if it’s just a lovely sedate little thing. It has to have some
pow
to it.”

On June 6, 1993, the night of the forty-seventh annual Tony Awards ceremony at the Gershwin Theater, Madeline joined Alexander and Klein in a brief excerpt from
Sisters Rosensweig
, presented as if at a rehearsal or audition, with the actors in street clothes and seated at a table. A stage manager (who was not Roy Harris) set the scene. Madeline got off a couple of her surest-fire laugh lines, including “You’ve heard of Dr Pepper? Well, I’m Dr. Gorgeous.” But the big event was yet to come. Madeline’s friend Lily Tomlin, herself a two-time Tony winner, presented the award for best performance by an actress in a leading role. Entering to applause, Tomlin called a return to New York theater a homecoming, “So I must say it is with great family pride that I announce the nominees.” The family theme persisted as Tomlin read the names: “sisters” Alexander and Madeline; Lynn Redgrave for her autobiographical one-woman show,
Shakespeare for My Father
; and Redgrave’s niece, Natasha Richardson, for a revival of O’Neill’s
Anna Christie
. Tomlin’s introduction turned out to be prescient. As joy transformed her features, she opened the envelope, then clutched it to her heart and said, “And the Tony goes to the person who gave me my first job at the Upstairs at the Downstairs by writing a note to the producer because she saw me at the Improv: Madeline Kahn,
The Sisters Rosensweig
!”

Revealing the extra “pow” of her gown—a hem-to-thigh slit up the skirt, visible only when she walked—Madeline hurried to the stage and embraced Tomlin. “Thank you so much for this recognition of my work,”
she said. “To be named among such fine actresses, for work labeled as comedy, is I’m sure a rare privilege. But then again, this comedy is laced with hidden meaning, thanks to Wendy Wasserstein. And thank you Wendy and Lincoln Center Theater, André and Bernie [Gersten], and especially Daniel Sullivan, for choosing me to bring this woman to life and for making sure that she is an individual . . .” The orchestra began to play her off. Madeline wasn’t finished making her point, one that had been of paramount concern to her since
Sisters Rosensweig
first came her way. Without skipping a beat, she continued, “. . . not a stereotype of a Jewish woman. Thank you to my entire cast, especially Jane and Robert, true champions. And Mom, you’re always right!”

Tomlin wasn’t the only friend on Madeline’s mind that night. Around midnight, Lee Roy Reams’s phone rang. No sooner had he picked up than Madeline said, “I called my mother first.” Gerson called and left a message on Madeline’s answering machine just minutes after Madeline received the award. “I wanted to be the first,” she says. “The next morning, she called, I picked up the phone, and she just. . . .” Here, Gerson lets out a little scream.

“As far as I can tell, your winning that Tony is about your future work,” Roy Harris told Madeline. “People will finally see—and too bad it took an award to do it—what a fine dramatic actress you are. The Tony will give you a new kind of clout.”

“And who knows what that will mean?” Madeline answered.
²⁵

Yet even at Lincoln Center, Madeline was still associated with comedy. Urged on by their mutual friend Gail Jacobs, André Bishop mulled over potential projects for Madeline, with
The Matchmaker
a strong contender. “For all her brilliance, I don’t know how versatile she was,” he says now. “She was a great actress and a great persona [but] she was not that easily castable. You wouldn’t cast her as Gertrude in
Hamlet
or Medea, though she would be interesting.”

Madeline would never return to Lincoln Center or to Broadway in a full production. And yet, more than any other project,
The Sisters Rosensweig
confirmed her comeback from
On the Twentieth Century
. Her performance as Gorgeous earned her vast acclaim, and it reminded the press and audiences alike of her range as an actress. The role not only proved her popularity, it reinforced it, by linking her more closely to Jewish Americans, who now embraced her as never before. (After all, for theater groups from Jewish organizations,
Sisters
was a natural choice.) The success wasn’t enough to calm Madeline’s insecurities entirely, but she proceeded through the 1990s with greater confidence—and a few superior gigs.

PAULA KAHN WAS RIGHT ABOUT
SISTERS ROSENSWEIG
, BUT BY NOW
her mental deterioration had become an inescapable reality, not conjecture. Nearly five decades after she filed suit against her own father, she filed one against Madeline in a dispute over the house in Charlottesville. Though Madeline had paid for the house, Paula insisted that the title be transferred to her, and “weirdly” (as Madeline described it) she accompanied the attorney’s letter with an old photo of her holding baby Madeline. At the same time, Paula filed another suit against Jef, claiming that he wasn’t allowing her to visit Eliza and boldly charging into the still new territory of grandparental rights. Although she dropped both suits, the siblings had to consult an attorney, and as Madeline wrote in her notebook, the suits constituted “an undeniable ‘ACT’ which among other things let the truth in.” The dispute marked a sharp change in the way Madeline approached her mother. She described Paula as “delusional, probably paranoid schizophrenic.” The lawsuit represented an “episode,” she wrote. “But wasn’t her first episode really when she left the whole family [in Boston] and came to NYC with me, and me having no one[?]”
²⁶

Jef had long felt that Paula needed limits and boundaries, and now Madeline agreed. “We really cut the cord finally,” Jef says. Joining forces made it more difficult for Paula to “triangulate” or manipulate them. They waited for her to make the next move. Remarkably, it didn’t occur to Paula that her children might be upset with her; she began phoning Madeline as if nothing had happened. Madeline screened the calls, but at last she drafted a letter.

Dear Mother,

. . . I do feel somewhat at a loss in expressing myself to you after the shock of receiving letters from your attorney (to all that followed). I’d be reticent about communicating with anyone who did that to me—perhaps even more so because it wasn’t just anyone, but my mother. I do not deserve that and don’t know when or if I’ll be able to be spontaneous and un-self-conscious with you again.

Even so, or “beyond our differences” as you call it, I do not wish you any harm. I hope you are well and free from pain. I assume you are (and) flourishing in your activities. I hope (they are/your life is) bringing you gratification and nourishing friendships. I am well.

Always love,

Madeline

She went through several drafts, Jef believes; this is the version she showed him. In her notebook, Madeline expressed anxieties over the “role reversal” and the need to exercise power over Paula. She questioned why she felt obligated to care for her mother, when no reasonable obligation existed after years of Paula’s manipulation. “When did I stop loving her? And why[?],” she asked, answering herself with the next line: “She stopped talking to me in the same way.” A few days later, she wondered, “Am I liberated or just mean[?]” She tried to see herself as a “good person doing one’s best with a
sick
and
twisted
woman,” but instead returned to the image of a “beaten victim.”
²⁷

At last Madeline suggested that Paula come to New York, but insisted that she couldn’t stay at the Park Avenue apartment. Paula took the train, arriving at Madeline’s door without a suitcase. She’d left it outside the restroom, she said, and someone had taken it. With no other choice, Jef says, “Madi runs to the rescue. This was Paula’s way of getting back in.” Meanwhile, Madeline started to sketch ideas for a comedy act, “The 50-year-old daughter and the 70-year-old outlaw,” the flip side of Paula’s
A Little Off-Broadway
. To play the role of Freda/Paula “truthfully would require such meanness, hostility toward a young woman you’re in love with,” she observed. “My retribution could be standup.” However, she added, “We must ask ourselves—is this funny?”
²⁸

Mixed Nuts
(1994) and
Anyone Can Whistle
(1995)

FOR MADELINE,
SISTERS ROSENSWEIG
MEANT SHARING HER SUCCESS
with her old friend Robert Klein, and making a new friend in young Julie Dretzin, who in many ways came to fill the role of niece in Madeline’s private life, as she’d done onstage. John Hansbury got along well with Dretzin, too, and the three went out together often after Madeline left
Sisters
. “They were consumed with my romantic life,” Dretzin remembers, “always wanted to make sure I was dating someone and someone who they liked!” And Hansbury “adored” Madeline, “which was lovely to see.”

Together, Madeline and Klein tried to seize the
Rosensweig
momentum with
Mixed Nuts
, a film by Nora Ephron released in 1994. An American remake of a farcical French hit (
Le Père Noël est une ordure
, or “Father Christmas Is a Shit”),
Mixed Nuts
is a mess that nevertheless finds defenders among Adam Sandler’s fans (it’s one of his first pictures). Madeline plays Mrs. Muchnik, a crisis counselor at a suicide prevention hotline run by Steve Martin. Working with Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks’s wife, made Madeline realize “there’s no one ‘behind’ me”—certainly not a husband and not even her agents, who could have cut her a better deal, she believed, since Ephron’s sister, Delia, told her that no other actress had read for the part. In her notebook, Madeline wrote of feeling “insecure” and “sabotaged” as shooting began, and she worried about working with a cast of such varied acting styles, ranging from Sandler’s insouciance to Liev Schreiber’s intensity.
²⁹

Remarkably, Madeline comes up with a winning performance. Though Mrs. Muchnik is supposed to be an object of mockery—a sexually frustrated killjoy, exactly the sort of role she had set aside after Eunice Burns—Madeline consistently finds moments in which to shine. An
extended sequence in which she’s trapped in an elevator is at once real and funny, and she lets her hair down near the end of the picture, by which time she’s been revealed as pretty, sexy, and fun in scenes with Klein that benefit from their quarter-century of chemistry. “I guess we were a thing in casting people’s eyes,” Klein says. “As an actor, I resented having such a small part, but I didn’t resent getting so much money for it. They kept delaying things and leaving equipment on the boardwalk in Venice, [while] Sven Nykvist [kept] looking at the sun, hung over from a party the night before.” Once again, Madeline invited Hansbury to join her on location, and he, too, remembers long waits between takes on cold nights, shivering in the van and quaking with laughter at Sandler’s improvised routines. In her determination to line up better support, she soon changed agents, too, after losing a role in a Broadway revival of Cocteau’s
Les Parents terribles
(billed as
Indiscretions
) in 1995.