Madeline Kahn (8 page)

Brenda Vaccaro played the lead, “and I played this extraneous nurse,” Madeline told an interviewer in 1973. “I really didn’t know why they needed me. I had nothing to do. But David Merrick kept saying I was great and that he would build the part up. So I relaxed and did my job.” But after the last performance at the Colonial Theatre, Madeline was handed an envelope. “I jokingly said: ‘What’s this—a pink slip?’ And that’s what it was. It was pink and it was a slip saying, ‘Services no longer required.’ I couldn’t speak. My heart stopped.”
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Vaccaro and another cast member, George Coe, offer more details. Director Arthur Penn hired Madeline to play a character called Miss Whipple; she was also Vaccaro’s understudy. Madeline “was just funny, if you can picture her as a young woman, in a nurse’s costume,” says Coe. An Upstairs veteran who would figure several more times in Madeline’s career, he remembers a solo number for Miss Whipple called “Rich Is Better.” The song isn’t listed in a playbill from later in the Boston run. At that point, Madeline sang in three ensemble numbers and the finale, and her role was shrinking underneath her. While Penn seemed to appreciate
Madeline, Merrick “just couldn’t understand her comic genius,” Vaccaro says. “He wasn’t on the same page with her as a comedienne; he didn’t realize what a talent she was, and he couldn’t relate to her at all, which was his shortcoming.”

Merrick didn’t seem to understand Penn, either, though the director had guided Anne Bancroft in her Broadway debut in
Two for the Seesaw
, and enjoyed tremendous success with
The Miracle Worker
, both on Broadway and onscreen. The year before
How Now
, he’d revolutionized American cinema with
Bonnie and Clyde
. But when
How Now
ran into trouble during Boston tryouts, Merrick fired Penn, “which he did with great aplomb, as he always did,” Vaccaro observes tartly. To replace the director, Merrick brought in George Abbott. Madeline had lost her champion, although she didn’t realize it.

Abbott, who began his directorial career in the 1920s, was an odd choice for a new musical trying hard to be up-to-the-minute, but he’d guided such classics as
On the Town, Pajama Game
, and
Damn Yankees
, and he was a renowned show doctor whom Merrick trusted. Coe describes Abbott as “abusive to actors,” and the director’s old-fashioned, by-the-numbers approach conflicted with Madeline’s exploration of her characters’ inner lives. She “was just in a long line of really extraordinary talent that was fired on that musical,” Vaccaro says, “because everybody had a sort of milk haze over their eyes about what to do about it.” Coe deliberately got out of the show, and he wound up with Madeline on the train back to New York. “I was probably more upset about them pushing her out of the show than she was,” he says, though Madeline remembered crying for days after she got home.

In the mid-1960s, with smash musical comedies like
Gypsy, Oliver!
, and
Hello, Dolly!
to his credit, Merrick was at the height of his power, as much a star as almost any actor in New York, and he wore the nickname “The Abominable Showman” proudly. Improbably, an Internet rumor holds that the very next season Madeline won a role in another Merrick show and got fired again during out-of-town tryouts. However, there’s no substance to the rumor that she appeared in
Promises, Promises
, and the show’s star, Donna McKechnie, confirms that Madeline wasn’t around. In fact, Madeline lost little time making her Broadway debut. The loss of
How Now
effectively freed her to accept an offer from producer Leonard Sillman, whose
New Faces
revues had introduced a number of future stars. But her debut didn’t do much to improve her luck.

New Faces of 1968

BY SIGNING ON FOR
NEW FACES OF 1968
, MADELINE JOINED THE
roster of Leonard Sillman’s other “discoveries,” which began with a 1933 edition in Los Angeles and featured Tyrone Power, Kay Thompson, and Eve Arden. Even a partial roll call from Sillman’s New York
New Faces
revues is impressive: Imogene Coca, Henry Fonda, Alice Pearce, Alice Ghostley, Carol Lawrence, Paul Lynde, Jane Connell, Inga Swenson, Eartha Kitt, and Maggie Smith. However, as the
Times
’s Clive Barnes pointed out in his review of the 1968 edition, the concept of “new faces” was relative: The performers were new only to people who never went to nightclubs or watched television.
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Several cast members, including Robert Klein and Dorothy Danner (under the name Dottie Frank), had made their Broadway debuts in other shows, and much of the material and cast in the 1968 show was recycled from the touring
New Faces of 1966
, which any New Yorker with access to Connecticut might have seen.

In
New Faces
, Madeline took part in several sketches, including a beauty pageant sketch (“Missed America”) written by her friends Gail Parent and Kenny Solms. In “Luncheon Ballad,” she joined Suzanne Astor, Marilyn Child, and Nancie Phillips in poking fun at society ladies involved in so many charities that they can’t keep them straight. Both numbers were recycled from
New Faces of 1966
. Remarkably, in Danner’s copy of the 1968 rehearsal script, Madeline’s big solo, “Das Chicago Song,” doesn’t appear, suggesting that it was a late addition. Toward the end of the show, Madeline and Klein joined Brandon Maggart and George Ormiston in another sketch from the 1966 edition, “Die Zusammenfügung, or the Connection,” a pastiche “opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” that concerns a purloined stash of marijuana. Composed by Sam Pottle, with lyrics by David Axelrod, the number took advantage of
Klein’s enthusiastic baritone and Madeline’s lyric coloratura. With pinpoint precision and sparkling roulades, she informs her father (Klein), that she’s found a mysterious new ingredient for her soup. Sampling it, he realizes that “The pot is in the soup.”

Marian Mercer took Madeline’s part in the 1966 edition of “Zusammenfügung,” and the resulting comparison, coupled with Madeline’s Lenya impression, led Danner to consider her “a brilliant mimic,” but less accomplished as an actress. Though Madeline’s later performances won her over, Danner says, “At that point, it seemed like sometimes she was doing an imitation rather than investing herself.” Maggart considered Madeline a great talent already, though it seems she’d set aside her Hofstra professor’s demand that she blend in. Maggart says, “If you want to know how it was to work with her onstage, you might as well not
be
onstage. She had no sense of focus as to the material and what to put over in the sketch. All the eyes went to Madeline, because the motor was always running. Even when she was still, quietly observing, everybody’s eye went to Madeline. She had star quality.”

New Faces of 1968
attempted to replicate the feel of one of Sillman’s famous, almost continual backers’ auditions, where excerpts from forthcoming shows would be presented to potential investors (“My longest run in show business,” says Maggart). Sillman held these auditions in his living room, which the set design evoked, and on Broadway he played the master of ceremonies, just as he did in his home. Maggart remembers that the “gypsy run-through” (a performance open only to other Broadway performers) “blew the roof off the house,” and the show got a good response in previews. But on opening night, the backers dominated the audience, and they’d heard all the jokes before. “I’ve done thousands and thousands of shows,” Maggart says, “but only one other was that silent on an opening night.”

In those days, critics still reviewed opening night performances, rather than previews. There wasn’t much good news in the papers for the cast, and there was even less for Sillman. Klein, Maggart, and Michael K. Allen earned favorable notices in the
Times
, and Clive Barnes singled out Madeline, too. She “had a strong voice and an incisive personality and was at her best in a Kurt Weill parody.” However, he didn’t mention any other cast member by name, and his overall take on the show was grim: “But perhaps the time for the Broadway revue is over. For there is no real satirical bite here—it is all far too prim and cosy. No one could possibly be offended—no one, that is, who is not offended by intrinsic mediocrity.”
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Klein and Maggart agree with that assessment. With the Vietnam War raging, with the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (during previews) and of Robert F. Kennedy (after the show opened), Klein says, “[W]e’re doing a show, [singing] ‘You’ve never seen us before, and we’ve never seen you before!’ Hello?” “We seemed rather frivolous,” Maggart agrees.

Musically,
New Faces
was old-fashioned (the first notes of the overture are glissandi on harp), while Broadway audiences wanted more for their money than a handful of satirical sketches that were, frankly, smarter than they were hip. At the same time, Danner points out, a more radical change was in the works on Broadway.
New Faces
opened at the Booth Theatre on May 2, just three days after
Hair
(which had been a hit at the Public Theater downtown in the fall of 1967) arrived at the Biltmore Theatre, two blocks away. Though
Hair
itself is a kind of revue, the contrast between the shows could hardly be greater. One cast of young performers was in formalwear and the other in tie-dye and blue jeans (and birthday suits). One show featured opera parodies and the other rock. One show focused on sassy topicality, while the other issued a call for social change.
New Faces
made youth a selling point;
Hair
made youth an instrument of revolution.

An actors’ strike gave
New Faces
a dignified excuse to close. Though Maggart insists that the show’s failure wasn’t predetermined or intended, Klein doesn’t dispel the widespread legend that Sillman was a model for the flop-happy Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’s
The Producers
. Sillman, like Bialystock, shared an affinity for widowed investors, and like his fictitious counterpart, Sillman produced many Broadway productions that lasted only a few performances.
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Klein calls Sillman “an amateur” and a con man who, as a patient of Max Jacobson, the legendary “Dr. Feelgood,” was “dealing with a loaded deck.” Regular treatment with “miracle tissue regenerator shots” (the ingredients of which included B vitamins, amphetamines, and painkillers) affected Sillman’s decisionmaking, prompting his insistence on “more ping” and sped-up tempos on the cast album, Klein says.

Sillman was a skillful enough promoter to land a feature in the fashion section of the
New York Times
just as
New Faces
began previews. In an account of the producer’s efforts to find appropriate designer gowns for each woman in the cast, Sillman told the
Times
that he didn’t want Madeline “to fall into the clichés of what is happening in fashion.” Her “effective but unadorned” “puritan look” can be seen in the accompanying photo of all eight
New Faces
women, including Elaine Giftos (later of
The Partridge Family
) and Gloria Bleezarde, who wears the only miniskirt in the company—though she’s posed so as not to reveal that the dress is backless, a calculated titillation that Sillman exploited during the show.
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For an aspiring actor, this sort of free publicity is welcome, even when the show doesn’t run. Another benefit was Madeline’s first commercial recording. Anticipating another success along the lines of
New Faces of 1952
, Warner Bros. produced an original cast album. In the liner notes, musical theater historian Miles Kreuger opines optimistically that “in 10 years, there will probably be a big Robert Klein film festival . . . there will be a Madeline Kahn–Brandon Maggart Comedy Hour on 3-D color television. . . .”
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Members of the cast—“a mixed jar of pickles,” Danner says—didn’t have time to get to know each other well, though Danner did get a glimpse of the “real” Madeline, calling Paula for a voice lesson over the phone. But Klein and Madeline had known each other for about two years, and they already socialized together often. She introduced him to Brenda Vaccaro, whom he dated for a while. And once, when he and Vaccaro weren’t seeing each other, he slept with Madeline. In the 1960s, he says, “you just did not have that long a relationship between two young, single, attractive people without finding out what it was like.” The interlude was brief, however, and they resumed their platonic friendship. “It was one of those things that goes against the books: it did not affect our relationship one iota. We were not to be partners, you know, but [it] was dignified and great. Somehow I have a big smile about it.”
New Faces
marked the beginning of their professional collaboration, one of the most important in Madeline’s career. It would endure for the rest of her life.

De Düva
and
Candide
(1968)

THROUGHOUT HER CAREER, MADELINE RESPONDED TO SETBACKS BY
lining up other jobs as quickly as possible. She didn’t wallow in disappointment; she needed work. After
New Faces
closed, she returned to the Philadelphia area in the summer of 1968 for a production of Peter Shaffer’s
Black Comedy
, which starred Hollywood luminary Sylvia Sidney. Playing a featured role, Madeline figured prominently on the cover of the playbill, standing in front of Sidney and co-star John Horn. In her program biography, she made no mention of Manumit or of her ties to the area, and in later years she made no mention of
Black Comedy
. She did keep a copy of the playbill, though.

More auspicious was her first professional movie credit,
De Düva
, also known as
The Dove
. A parody of Ingmar Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries
and
The Seventh Seal, De Düva
grew out of a sketch on George Coe and Sidney Davis’s radio program,
It’s Your World and You Can Have It
. Presented as if it were the soundtrack to a Bergman film, the sketch consisted of Davis pretending to speak Swedish, along with Coe’s English “translation.” Response to the radio sketch inspired them both to collaborate with Anthony Lover to film
De Düva
, shot in evocative black-and-white and performed entirely in fake Swedish (what Davis called “English with party hats on”), with English subtitles that serve less as translation than as counterpoint.
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