Madeline Kahn (50 page)

Again, early detection is the key to survival. Most patients, however, are diagnosed only in advanced stages of the disease, at which point a mere 45 percent survive longer than four years. In 81 percent of all cases, the cancer has spread beyond the ovaries to the pelvic region. Recent research indicates that the cancer may actually begin in the fallopian tubes, and then move, but as Moran points out, these parts of the body aren’t as accessible as the breasts, for example, and the only way to be sure is through surgery. “You don’t want to over-operate,” she says. Among researchers in the field today, “It’s not that they’re not looking for early detection, it’s that they’re trying to minimize risk.” The other important trend now is toward personalizing treatments and understanding why, for example, some women respond well to chemotherapy in the first instance, but don’t respond the same way in the event of a recurrence. Madeline’s cancer was “very aggressive,” Moran observes; it killed her a little more than a year after her diagnosis.

“With breast cancer, there are options, time to get a second opinion,” Hansbury says. “With ovarian, there are no options. You must operate. Thereafter, you may have options.”

Following her first surgery, Madeline underwent chemotherapy and returned to work. She told no one on the
Cosby
set about her cancer, though hair and makeup artists had enough clues to guess, and Mel Brooks remembers Cosby’s telling him, “She’s sick. We don’t know what it is.” Because of chemotherapy, Madeline now penciled in her eyebrows and wore a wig and false lashes until her own hair grew back. However, even those with suspicions respected her privacy as she continued to fight. “She didn’t want to be pitied,” Hansbury says. “She wanted encouragement and sustenance. I never told anyone unless she said it was okay.”

Madeline immediately broke the news to Jef, who spent much of the subsequent months with her in New York. Her friends Gail Jacobs and
Carol Greenberg were told, too. A multi-talented, exuberant redhead, Greenberg is a physical therapist. She applied her skills to massage and comfort Madeline, while attending to the spiritual side, too, by taking Madeline to a Kabbalah class and to a holistic healer. Julie Dretzin joined the support team, as well, and she and Madeline went shopping for wigs.

Chemotherapy left Madeline’s immune system suppressed, and she was constantly exposed to infections. Each proposed cancer treatment raised the question of her ability to withstand it. She underwent a total of three surgeries in addition to three rounds of chemo. Each time her hair grew back, she left it silver and cropped short. Photos from a summer stay on Fire Island in 1999 show her smiling and extraordinarily beautiful. “It wasn’t about the hair,” Hansbury says. “I never loved anybody as much as I loved her when she was bald.”

Despite her illness, Madeline worked as much as she could, returning to
Cosby
for the third season and for the fourth, albeit for only four episodes. “When she became ill the first time, the illness was never discussed,” Phylicia Rashad told an interviewer. “And she came back and we were very, very happy to see her. She just looked a little frail, but she was so determined to work. I think she might have come back sooner than she really should have. But she was determined to do that.”
⁵⁶

Madeline told Robert Klein that
Cosby
was “the best job I ever had.” Her longtime friend joined her on the series for a single episode, “A Very Nice Dance,” which aired in February, 1999, and in which he plays a police detective and potential love interest for Pauline. “It was a nice bolt out of the blue,” Klein says. He remembers thinking, “Maybe the part will float and they’ll continue to do it.” Cosby did his best to welcome Klein, offering him a bottle of his private-label wine and insisting that Klein’s costume, a jacket, be made of “the most beautiful kid-glove leather.” By this point, Madeline’s health problems were an open secret throughout the studio. Klein says that, though she said nothing to him, he believes she already knew she wouldn’t recover. “That’s certainly the way she played it,” he says.

Actor–director–choreographer Lawrence Leritz confirms that impression. In “A Nice Dance,” he plays a policeman. Because his role included stunt work, he arrived at the studio early for extra rehearsal. He’d been a fan of Madeline since his boyhood, when he sent her a fan letter. He was looking forward to meeting her now, but as the rehearsal began, a stand-in read Madeline’s lines, and she was nowhere to be seen. “In television, that’s totally unusual,” he says. “You put together an episode in one week. You go to rehearsals, and then you shoot. You’re just
there
.”
Privately, a friend in the production office told him that Madeline was too sick to come until the taping. “The set was not relaxed,” Leritz says. “People were freaked out because they saw the writing on the wall. With Madeline dying, they knew the show was coming to an end in the near future.” The next day, Leritz met Madeline in the hallway. He reminded her of the fan letter he’d written in 1971 and told her she’d sent him a picture and a nice letter. “You were lucky,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that today.” She hugged him, and for the rest of the day, she smiled whenever she saw him. At one point she even confided in him, admitting she was sick. “I think I reminded her of the good days, when she was young,” he says.

When Madeline returned for the fourth season of
Cosby
, Hansbury’s encouragement gave her the confidence to dispense with wigs and appear with her own short silver hair. She got one last glamour role, playing a Russian femme fatale in the season opener (an elaborate dream sequence that spoofs Cosby’s first TV series,
I Spy
), and in that and two other episodes, she throws herself into her work with something like her usual gusto. She’s thin yet lovely, and hale enough to push Cosby on a rolling ladder in an episode set in a bookstore. But in the fourth episode she shot, “Book ’em, Griff-o,” she’s barely a walk-on. Madeline took another medical leave, and this time, she felt she had to say something to her colleagues. She went to Rashad’s dressing room. “We never talked about what was wrong,” she said. “It’s happening again, and I have to go back. And I just wanted to be the one to tell you.”

“Come back when you want to,” Cosby told her—then locked her dressing room and handed her the key. She understood: As far as he was concerned, this wasn’t goodbye.

Beginning with the first surgery, Hansbury arranged for private nurses to come to Madeline’s apartment, allowing her to spend as much time as possible at home. Now friends and family began calling on her, and Madeline consented to see many of them, including Roy Harris and Betty Aberlin. “She was always made-up,” David Marshall Grant remembers. “She couldn’t stand for people to see her when she wasn’t in control. That was distasteful to her.” Cosby sent her gifts, and Eric Mendelsohn phoned often, ending each call with “I love you.” “Which was difficult,” he says. “She was so private a person. But I didn’t want to be intimidated by that, I wanted to tell her how much I felt for her.”

She found it more difficult to see—or to let herself be seen by—two family members. Paula wanted to come up from Charlottesville, and Madeline allowed her to visit the apartment, but not the hospital. “It wouldn’t have been helpful,” Hansbury says. “I tried to limit her burdens, to act as a gatekeeper. We wanted to preserve her strength to fight for her life.” Madeline couldn’t bring herself to let her twelve-year-old niece see her at all. Though her regret is palpable, Eliza now says she understands why her aunt felt this way. “She always tried to show me what it meant to be a woman, to be feminine,” and sickness wasn’t beautiful.

Other friends knew she was ill, but didn’t know how to approach her. “I should have called her, I should have gone to see her,” Lee Roy Reams says. “But I didn’t know where her head was or what condition she was in. It’s very hard to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hi, Madeline, I hear you have cancer.’ I didn’t know how to handle it, so I didn’t handle it. I felt guilty [but] I wasn’t involved in her life as Madeline. I was involved in her life as Dolly.” Robert Klein remembers, “She chose to go totally private. I heard some floating rumor somewhere, and by the time I knew anything, she didn’t want to see anybody. It was the opposite with Peter Boyle: I sort of participated, and that was not pretty. Two of my oldest friends in show business, to die before their time. I don’t get any wisdom out of it.”

In October 1999, Madeline’s accountants learned that the bulk of her pension from the actors’ unions would go to taxes if not left to a spouse. Madeline was still single. Hansbury asked to be the one to discuss the matter with her, and he did. Thereupon, he got down on one knee and proposed. “I must be really sick,” she answered.

“I should have asked a long time ago,” he told her. Both believed she would recover. “She was going to fight,” he says. “She never stopped.”

But on her wedding day, October 10, she was too sick to leave the hospital. Mount Sinai had a priest, a rabbi, and a minister on hand, and Madeline and John chose the minister, a black Southern Methodist. Jef Kahn and Gail Jacobs attended, and Gail remembers Madeline’s cold feet. “Am I making a mistake?” she asked. “Don’t worry,” Gail joked, “you can always get a divorce!”

Shortly thereafter, Madeline returned to her apartment. John tried to adjust to married life. “The nurses would say, ‘Your husband’s home,’ or ‘Your wife is okay,’ and I’d think ‘Who are they talking about?’” Whether at the hospital or the apartment, John and Jef took shifts, to be sure Madeline was never alone.

One day in November, the private nurses told John, “We don’t think she should be here anymore,” and she returned to the hospital. The private nurses came, too, since the doctors believed it would be helpful for Madeline to see familiar faces.

At last Madeline understood that she would have to release a statement to the press, and so the truth guarded by her friends and colleagues became public knowledge. “It is my hope that I might raise awareness of this awful disease and hasten the day that an effective test can be discovered to give women a fighting chance to catch this cancer in its earliest stage,” Madeline wrote in a press release. “I would urge everyone to support the vital work being done by the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.”

Late in November, she was diagnosed with a massive tumor in her chest that suppressed her throat and made it difficult to speak. Doctors told John that they could operate on the tumor, but that surgery would impinge on the vocal cords. Dr. Dottino advised him that surgery would be only a temporary measure, but without it, she would die. “How much longer?” John asked. Not long, was the answer, and John said, “Don’t do it. It would be too painful.” “She lived about a week,” he says. “They said she’d live 24 hours.”

On December 3, around 4 o’clock, Jef Kahn and Madeline’s friend Stephen Clark had been standing vigil. Madeline was unconscious, but a nurse said she might still be able to hear. Jef whispered, “I love you,” and she squeezed his hand. When John came to relieve Jef and Steve, they went to get a cup of tea. Then Madeline made a strange sound. John said to the nurse, “‘Is it now?’ And she said it was. I told her I loved her. It was peaceful. And I’m glad I was there. I hope she heard me. I think she did.”

Hansbury pauses, then rallies. “It was an honor to be with her,” he says. “She was a great lady. She couldn’t tell a joke, though. But she was very sweet.”

AFTER MADELINE DIED, HANSBURY SPOKE TO THE PRESS OUTSIDE THE
hospital. “We all suffered a great loss today,” he said. “While we mourn her passing, we celebrate a full and wonderful life.”
¹
As the news spread, New York City seemed to stop short and gasp, “Oh, no! I loved her so much!” You didn’t have to ask about whom people were talking. Some actors’ deaths are taken almost personally by the public, and in the city, at least, Madeline’s was one of these. At the time, I wondered whether she knew how people felt about her. Her friends and loved ones agree: She didn’t.

Paula Kahn took Madeline’s death hardest. “She’d lost her sparring partner,” Jef says. Paula’s own health declined rapidly. In 2001, after she collapsed in a restaurant, Paula was diagnosed with colon cancer—just as the city of Charlottesville declared that she had sixty days to bring her house up to code or see it condemned. Confined in the hospital and desperate to keep her possessions, she asked Jef to take charge, but he refused unless she agreed to grant him power of attorney. Entering the house for the first time in years, he discovered a mess. Paula had become a hoarder, making innumerable purchases from home shopping networks. Sorting through the accumulation, Jef filled two dumpsters with detritus. He sold the house, and Paula moved to an assisted living facility, where she lived until moving to a nursing home. She died there on June 11, 2012, five days after Hiller Kahn’s death.

In the immediate aftermath of Madeline’s death, the show
Cosby
prepared a tribute episode, “Loving Madeline” (December 29, 1999), that featured clips of her best scenes and a conversation in which the cast shared memories of her. At a memorial service at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater on May 20, John Hansbury introduced a program that featured speakers Wendy Wasserstein, Stephen Clark, Robert Klein,
Phylicia Rashad, David Marshall Grant, and Peter Bogdanovich. Jonathan Sheffer, Christine Ebersole, John Cameron Mitchell, and Audra McDonald offered musical tributes. Joseph Feury’s wife, Lee Grant, directed an
Intimate Portrait
documentary for the Lifetime channel that first aired in April 2001, narrated by Teri Garr, whose voice betrayed her grief. And in October 2003, Madeline was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame (alongside Kevin Kline, among others). Her portrait hangs today in the Gershwin Theater on Broadway.