Madeline Kahn (48 page)

In other scenes and episodes, Madeline capitalizes on her uptown girl gentility, almost as a way to combat that portion of the material that Cosby considers undignified. The prospect of a visit by President Clinton sees her artfully trying to finagle an invitation. When that effort fails, she pops up anyway, dressed to the nines. In another episode, when Hilton informs her that a bat has been removed from the house, Pauline says all the right things—with a double edge: “Well, there is no shame connected to any of this. And it does not mean that you have a filthy home. In fact—because, you know, I would eat here
any
night of the week.” But she can’t control her grimaces of revulsion as she beats a hasty retreat. When Pauline and Ruth host a poetry slam at the Flower Café, Pauline doesn’t know at first how to react to the angry, minimalist (and comically bad) poetry she hears. Soon enough, she’s donning a black leather jacket and sunglasses, and she slams away. “To use a musical term, I’m a counterpoint here,” Madeline told the
Washington Post
.

“When I heard that Madeline Kahn was in the show, I thought, ‘I’m gonna work with Madeline Kahn! Oh, boy, I’ve arrived!’” Rashad said. “That’s what I really thought: ‘I have
arrived
.’ . . . Nobody like her, anywhere in the universe!” No matter how small a part Madeline had in a given episode, Rashad remembered, she would rehearse at length in her dressing room. “What she would do was move to the center of the
thought that made those three lines significant.” The reason Madeline worked in her dressing room was that her fellow cast members were less keen on rehearsals. For her, these were the equivalent of multiple takes in a movie, or the variations she’d try when acting onstage. Rashad assured her that the extra practice wasn’t necessary. “I could see that this was a real dilemma for her,” she said. Then one day Madeline told her, “I’ve got it now, I’ve got it, you’ve just got to [grab] that throat and just go for it.”

Madeline was in her element, and soon she was telling her colleagues, family, other friends, and the press that she’d found the professional berth she’d been seeking. She may have winced when Cosby, observing the kind of reactions that led people like Merv Griffin to think Madeline was “kooky,” started to call her “Space,” but clearly her colleagues appreciated her. Cosby described the show as “a family”—with the understanding that, at all times,
he
was the head of that family.

Because stations in some markets had changed their network affiliations, CBS was now vulnerable to ratings competition. Viewing patterns had changed and
Cosby
skewed too old demographically to be the kind of hit
The Cosby Show
was, but early ratings were strong. With
Murphy Brown, Cosby
anchored “Big Comedy Monday,” one of CBS’s better-performing nights. In its initial season, the series won its timeslot and finished as the network’s leading comedy. While comparisons to the earlier series were inevitable,
Cosby
nevertheless found a following and a measure of critical acclaim—with extra praise reserved for Madeline. “Kahn gives her dull lines bright, off-kilter readings,” wrote Ken Tucker in
Entertainment Weekly
. “Oddly enough, Hilton and Pauline’s relationship—wary, but a little flirty—is more interesting than Hilton and Ruthie’s. . . .”
⁴⁶
In the
New York Times
, John J. O’Connor wrote that Pauline was “the character that gives
Cosby
just the extra bit of edge that it needs,” and noted that Madeline had “refined deadpan sarcasm into an art form.”
⁴⁷

Satisfaction with her work gave Madeline some of the strength she needed to face two crises at home. The first was her mother’s decline. Paula Kahn was still living in Charlottesville, near Jef and his family. In her basement, she had opened an acting school for children. This enterprise violated both zoning laws and the fire code, but Paula didn’t care. Her brother, Ted Barry, sensed “obsessive plans” for Jef’s daughter, Eliza, and wondered whether Paula was “trying to groom another Madeline.”
⁴⁸
Paula gave Eliza private music lessons and enrolled her in the acting school, making no secret of her connection to Madeline as she publicized the classes. “She did teach me a lot,” Eliza says. “She was a good teacher, not too harsh or strict.” Periodically, the children would perform for their parents in plays written by Paula, who also created beautiful costumes for her pupils.

At one such performance in 1997, Paula was still attending to last-minute details long after the show was supposed to begin. Meanwhile, the parents sat impatiently in the airless basement. At last, little Eliza gave the signal to start. Paula lost her temper and began to berate her granddaughter. In tears, Eliza phoned Jef and Jules and asked to go home. She never wanted to go back, she said. For a full year, she and Paula didn’t see each other, and Paula didn’t ask to see Eliza. The other parents removed their children from the school.

Then Paula—now seventy-three years old—fell and injured her shoulder. Madeline went to Charlottesville, where she and Jef met with their mother and gently urged her to move from her four-level house to a single-story home. Paula refused, hurling insults at them, then running to phone her brother and other people who, she believed, might “rescue” her. Everyone refused; Ted went so far as to tell her the single-story home seemed like a good idea. Once again, Paula tried to sue her children, and Madeline and Jef staged “a mini-intervention,” Jef remembers. He checked her finances, discovering high debts, “sketchy stuff with insurance companies,” and other signs of erratic behavior.

Madeline had always resisted looking too deeply into her mother’s behavior, no matter the provocation, but now she was forced to do so. Such scrutiny meant coming to terms with the ways Paula treated her, and confronting a great deal of unpleasant history. For some twenty years, she’d kept her personal notebook. (That there’s only one suggests not only how meticulous Madeline was, but also how seldom she wrote.) She returned to it now. Her observations about her relationship with Paula probably spring from sessions with a therapist, but all are insightful. To cite one example:

Guilt: why do I have it and what does it look like.

She did not see your needs as separate from hers. You learned that her needs were your needs. To deviate from this is wrong.

To have your own needs, which may not please—GUILT. You’re bad for leaving.
⁴⁹

Madeline also wrote to Ted Barry, who replied with a long letter.
⁵⁰
From her few marginal notes on that letter, one sees that Madeline always been led to believe that Paula had thrown out both Bernie and Hiller, when in truth it was they who walked out on her. It was her behavior, not theirs, that led to the divorces. For the first time, too, Ted shared his solution to the mystery of the matching four hundred-dollar “loans” that engendered so much resentment between him and Hiller.
⁵¹
Madeline even began to analyze how her relationship with Paula might have affected her career choices. She writes of watching
Gypsy
and realizing for the first time why she’d shied away from that ultimate stage mother, Mama Rose: because she identified with Louise, the daughter who becomes a star.

It’s hard to know what use Madeline might have made of her new understanding. According to many of those who knew her best—including Jef Kahn, Gail Jacobs, and John Hansbury—Madeline had come close to an epiphany several times before, and each time turned away from it. As Hansbury put it, “She willingly let Paula pull the wool over her eyes,” and Paula, for her part, had grown proficient in stirring up trouble or getting into a jam whenever she sensed Madeline might lose patience with her. Now Madeline had the chance to focus on her past. But her time was already short, and her second personal crisis was imminent.

Judy Berlin
(1999)

IN ERIC MENDELSOHN’S
JUDY BERLIN
, MADELINE AT LAST FOUND A
movie role that went beyond the “sketches” or “bits” that she had complained of for so long. She plays Alice Gold, a Long Island housewife who, during a solar eclipse, begins to see her own life more clearly. Madeline set aside many of her hang-ups for the movie, her first and only independent film, and she abandoned some of her usual safeguards.
Judy Berlin
is shot in black-and-white, which she had always found unflattering, and she plays a far from glamorous, unsexy, middle-aged mother and wife. Yet her sympathy for Alice Gold is unmistakable—remarkably so, given her status as an unmarried, childless actress—and when, as Alice, as she wanders about her neighborhood in sneakers and a down jacket, she’s irresistibly cute and, in her emotional fragility, quite beautiful after all.

Judy Berlin
begins in the Long Island home of Alice and her husband, Arthur (Bob Dishy). Their son, David (Aaron Harnick), a screenwriter just turned thirty, has recently come home in a deep depression after a sojourn in Hollywood. Alice tries relentlessly to cheer him up. For her, light conversation—even the one-sided variety—is a refuge from unpleasantness. Then a random encounter with a high-school classmate, Judy Berlin (Edie Falco), sparks David’s interest. An aspiring actress as upbeat as David is glum, Judy is preparing to leave, this very day, for Hollywood—or, as she calls it, with expertise apparently derived from watching
Entertainment Tonight
, “the Coast.” Neither is aware that David’s father and Judy’s mother, Sue (Barbara Barrie), a teacher at the elementary school where Arthur is the principal, are on the brink of an affair; Arthur and Sue barely know it. With this situation in place, the sky grows dark in the middle of the day.

The eclipse goes on until the characters begin to wonder whether something has gone wrong. For Alice, it’s the end of the world—and also its remaking. After a lifetime of hiding behind barriers of chatter, she realizes that none of her relationships is quite what she thought it was. A friendly visit with a neighbor (Carlin Glynn) serves to expose the miscommunication between them. Her housekeeper, Carol (Novella Nelson), tags along as Alice plays “space explorer” in the dark. But then it’s time for Carol to go home; she’s not Alice’s friend and has a life of her own. Even Alice’s therapist (Arthur Anderson) turns out to be less reliable than Alice believed, and when she sees her husband parked in front of the house at an hour when he should be at work, she understands—correctly, yet without knowing anything more—that he’s leaving her.

A testament to the beauty of suburban ordinariness,
Judy Berlin
is imbued with great charm and a generous spirit, in which no one is what she seems on the surface. Lonely, embittered Sue feels passion and, more importantly, compassion. At age thirty-two, with adult braces, Judy may be an unlikely starlet, yet when David chances to see her in a TV commercial, her dreams seem plausible. And Alice is more aware, better attuned to her own feelings and those of others, than anyone might have guessed. Throughout the film, Alice recites the first lines (“I wish, I wish, I wish in vain, / I wish I was sixteen again”) of a poem, completing it only at the end of the picture (“But sixteen again I’ll never be / ’Til apples grow on a cherry tree”). It seems like a lament for lost youth, but instead it’s the conclusion of a traditional ballad, known as “The Butcher’s Boy” or “In Jersey City,” in which a girl hangs herself when her lover is unfaithful. The verse Alice recites is part of the girl’s suicide note.
⁵²
It’s as if, on a barely conscious level, Alice knows even at the beginning of the movie that her husband might leave her for another woman. In their first scenes together, Arthur scarcely looks at Alice, grumbles wearily in response to her chatter, and shies from her embrace. She may pretend not to notice, but ultimately we realize that she’s missed nothing, she knows the truth.

Above all,
Judy Berlin
gives a moviegoer the clearest possible impression of Madeline’s range and potential. Completely submerged in the character, she traces a gossamer thread between comedy and tragedy, as Jeffrey Seckendorff’s cinematography catches the luminosity of Madeline’s face and the minute flickers of her emotion. While there are elements of Trixie Delight and Gorgeous Teitelbaum in Alice Gold (the three share a need to talk and joke their cares away), Alice is more delicate
than Trixie and less resilient than Gorgeous. Alice has less to occupy the empty spaces and hours of her life. In many ways, the role is a summation of Madeline’s career, combining the lessons she’d learned in earlier work with the instincts and experience life gave her. By now, she knew how to find the sympathetic heart of a woman who might otherwise seem shallow, annoying, or ridiculous. While one of Madeline’s least-known performances, Alice Gold is one of her finest, and it should have been the prelude to a new era in her work. The movie leaves you wondering what might have been.

Mendelsohn had worked as costume design assistant on six films with Woody Allen, including
Shadows and Fog
. His first film as writer–director, a short called
Through an Open Window
(1992), also offered a somewhat mystical view of life on Long Island, shot in black-and-white and starring Anne Meara, another actress less known for drama than for comedy.
⁵³
That experience led him to believe that Madeline might deliver the “grit” he wanted. He’d written the role of Judy specifically for Falco, a friend since their college days at SUNY Purchase who hadn’t yet been cast in
The Sopranos
. Surrounding her was what Mendelsohn calls “a little jewel box” of a cast: Oscar-nominee Barrie, Barrie’s real-life son Harnick, and Dishy.
⁵⁴
When Dianne Wiest withdrew from talks to play Alice, Dishy’s wife, Judy Graubart, read for the part. But Dishy’s casting gave Madeline confidence in Mendelsohn’s taste and his ability to make a movie she’d be proud of. Graubart wound up with the small but (one hopes) consoling prize of a funny cameo as a schoolteacher. For Madeline and all the actors in
Judy Berlin
, Mendelsohn’s script served as a highly effective lure, Barrie says, “so well written, and I think people do love to do good characters.” Most of the scripts she sees are “junk stuff,” “cheap commercial films that do
not
elevate the human spirit.”
Judy Berlin
was something else.