Madeline Kahn (16 page)

Of course, Madeline had no desire to look anything like Eunice ever again. When she showed up on the Warner lot to begin shooting
Mame
, she was sleek, beautiful, thirty years younger than Ball, and a redhead, too. Lucy “took one look at me, went straight to her trailer, closed the door, and a few minutes later, I was told that I had been fired,” Madeline said. Years later, co-star Robert Preston told Michael Karm that he could tell from the moment Lucy set eyes on Madeline, she’d be gone before the end of the day. “We went to my office,” director Gene Saks remembered, “and Lucy started to weep, saying, ‘I swore I wasn’t going to cry.’ She was so manipulative, so controlling, that she absolutely wouldn’t have Madeline, who was too young and too pretty.”
⁴¹

These stories portray Lucy either neutrally or negatively, but there’s an anti-Madeline story, too, ostensibly originating with Ball herself and circulated by her partisans. According to this story, Madeline was already angling for the role of Lili von Shtupp and actually tried to be released from her contract for
Mame
in order to make
Blazing Saddles
. In Lili, she had a better role with a sure-fire scene in the spotlight that ultimately won her a second Oscar nomination. Madeline came looking for trouble, this story goes, and when the opportunity arose, she seized it—and circumstances obliged the producers to pay her nonetheless.

But that story falls apart under scrutiny. Throwing away work wasn’t Madeline’s practice, and Gooch was a surefire role that, in the original play and film
Auntie Mame
, made Peggy Cass a star. Nobody could know whether
Blazing Saddles
would succeed, and Brooks’s previous movies,
The Producers
and
The Twelve Chairs
, had flopped. Michael Karm refutes the “pro-Lucy” story altogether, and Brooks says he’d never heard it before. Possibly Lucy was trying to save face when she realized that the young actress she’d fired wound up with an Oscar nomination for her next movie. “It was right under her nose and she didn’t see it!” Brooks says, suggesting that the story was something Lucy “concocted to make herself feel better.” In reality, Madeline lost one job and lined up another as soon as she could, auditioning for Brooks while she was still in Hollywood.

Madeline wasn’t the only one who clashed with Lucy. On December 22, 1972—well before cameras started rolling—the
Hollywood Reporter
announced that Beatrice Arthur, recreating her role as Vera Charles, had quit
Mame
over “conceptual differences” with Ball. To replace her, the paper said, the studio had called on Bette Davis. Ruth Buzzi had been tested to play Gooch.
⁴²
Arthur did complete the movie, and it surely helped her cause that she was married at the time to Saks, who also directed the Broadway production. An unapologetic perfectionist overseeing every aspect of production, Lucy wanted
Mame
to reflect the Broadway show as much as possible. She insisted on the original choreographer, Onna White, and she got Connell, too. Dismayed by the growing permissiveness in American entertainment, Ball also wanted to make a family picture. But
Mame
exposed her to wounding criticism, and she never returned to the big screen.
⁴³

“Losing a role, no matter how secure you are in your craft, still hurts,” Madeline said in 1973. “I felt bad about
Mame
, but I didn’t take it personally.”
⁴⁴

While Madeline was still in Hollywood, she guest-starred in a two-part episode of
Adam’s Rib
, a sitcom based on the 1949 film directed by George Cukor and written by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. On TV, as in the movie, the principal characters are Adam Bonner, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and his wife, Amanda, a private attorney active in women’s rights. In the series premiere, a two-episode recapitulation of the plot of the movie, Adam and Amanda
clash when she defends Doris Attinger (Madeline), a woman accused of shooting her husband.

Playing roles indelibly associated with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were Ken Howard and Blythe Danner (sister-in-law of Madeline’s
New Faces
co-star Dorothy Danner). Most actors feel uneasy about following in the footsteps of icons, and as Doris, Madeline took on a role created by Judy Holliday. Years later, she would wrestle with conflicting emotions when Kanin asked her to take another Holliday role in his play
Born Yesterday
. But in 1973, as she told interviewers at the time, she could hardly afford to pass up paying work, no matter how much she wanted to be her own performer.

Holliday was one of a few great stars with whom Madeline was sometimes compared. Both grew up in Queens and had a gift for playing ditsy characters in comedy, though both were highly intelligent. Like Madeline, Holliday got her start in New York cabaret. Her troupe, the Revuers, also launched Betty Comden and Adolph Green and established the prototype for the kinds of shows Madeline performed at the Upstairs. Holliday’s distinctive speech—a strangely husky sort of baby talk—coupled with her good looks, led to success in Hollywood and on Broadway. Madeline might have done well to embrace the Holliday comparisons more often, and
Adam’s Rib
is a case in point. Cukor and Kanin effectively used the movie as Holliday’s screen test for the movie adaptation of
Born Yesterday
, in which she’d starred onstage. The trick worked, and for
Born Yesterday
she won a best actress Oscar, instantly graduating from character actress to leading lady in Hollywood, a feat that Madeline never entirely managed to achieve.

The television version of
Adam’s Rib
didn’t have the impact that the movie had, either on the career of the actress playing Doris or on audiences. The series lasted only thirteen episodes. Though Blythe Danner thought Madeline was “great,” even she has few memories of the series, since it began during what she calls “a chaotic time” immediately after the birth of her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow. However, it’s certain that if Garson Kanin didn’t know already who Madeline was, she couldn’t have escaped his attention in the premiere episode of
Adam’s Rib
.

Returning to New York, Madeline proved her aptitude as a character actress in her third feature,
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
, also released in 1973.
⁴⁵
An adaptation of E. L. Konigsburg’s ingenious, Newbery Award-winning novel (published in 1967), the movie concerns a sister and brother who run away from home to live in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. In one quick scene, they tag along with a school group and a teacher who’s so harried she doesn’t notice that two of these students aren’t hers. She’s played by Madeline, drawing on her own teaching experience, and she’s the best thing in the movie. The scene is funny, and it conveys the fun kids could have if they lived in a museum; it’s also the rare occasion when Madeline got to play a character so much like herself. Despite the star power of Ingrid Bergman as Mrs. Frankweiler,
Mixed-up Files
flopped. But the other movie Madeline shot in 1973 proved to be the biggest hit of her career.

Blazing Saddles
(1973–74)

WHEN MADELINE FIRST HEARD ABOUT MEL BROOKS’S NEW PROJECT, A
spoof Western to be entitled
Black Bart
, she was intrigued. Brooks had written a character based on Frenchie, Marlene Dietrich’s part in
Destry Rides Again
(1939), and Madeline thought she’d be right for it. But she’d met Brooks only briefly in the Warner Bros. commissary, and as she later recalled, “No one knew that I had spent time working in Hofbrauhauses and sung German Lieder and stuff like that. How would [Brooks] ever know that? I must try and see if I can inquire about this, even though I’m not a Marlene Dietrich type at all, but I understand that sort of thing, mentally.”
⁴⁶
For her meeting with him on the Warner lot in 1973, Madeline prepared “Das Chicago Song” and a couple of German numbers. What she hadn’t prepared for was Brooks himself. She later told an interviewer, “My audition for Mel for
Blazing Saddles
was . . . intense. It lasted two hours. I felt like I was at the Mayo Clinic. For a funny man, he’s
very
serious.”
⁴⁷

Brooks remembers the scene vividly. As soon as Madeline saw that her character would be called Lili von Shtupp, she said, “Are you really gonna go with that name?” After all,
shtupp
is the Yiddish equivalent of the English slang “screw” (from the same root as the English “stuff”). Then Brooks said, “Can I see your legs?”

“Don’t you want to hear me read?” she asked, but Brooks insisted. She blushed, he remembers, and she asked, “What, are you crazy? What is this? I thought I was auditioning for a part in your movie. I didn’t think you wanted to screw me on your desk.” Brooks assured her he was happily married and not the kind of man who chases starlets around his office. He simply wanted Lili to straddle a chair and to wear net stockings, à la Dietrich. “So she showed me her legs,” Brooks remembers.
“She straddled the chair, and that was it. ‘You’ve got Dietrich legs.’ The first two or three minutes we met, she was insulted. I had a lot of explaining to do.” At first, he thought she was “incredibly prudish, and incredibly societally closed-off and bound,” but as she relaxed, he began to revise his impression.

Moreover, she had a terrific German accent, and he responded immediately to her musicality. He decided to hire her, and he and Anne Bancroft began to socialize with her. They went to dinner often, Brooks says, “so she could see how much I loved Annie, and there was no straying from that love.” The result was a long friendship among all three. Brooks had good reports of Madeline from Liam Dunn, who would play Rev. Johnson in
Black Bart
. But in retrospect, Brooks believes Bancroft also steered him toward Madeline. Because Thomas Meehan and Martin Charnin had worked with Bancroft on her television specials in the 1960s, she’d have been familiar with Madeline’s work in both
Comedy Tonight
and
Two by Two
. “Don’t miss this one! She’s the best,” Bancroft told her husband. Madeline’s collaboration with Brooks would be the most significant of her career—for better and for worse.

Like Frenchie in
Destry Rides Again
, Lili von Shtupp falls for an unlikely sheriff and sings a suggestive song. But Brooks carries those essential ingredients farther. His sheriff isn’t merely a pacifist, as Jimmy Stewart was in
Destry
; played by Cleavon Little, he’s also black and policing a deeply racist community. Lili’s “I’m Tired” isn’t merely suggestive, like Frenchie’s “Laziest Girl in Town”; it’s “probably the dirtiest song I ever wrote,” Brooks observes. And Lili isn’t merely a saloon singer; she’s a Wild West Mata Hari, paid to use sex for political ends. Enlisted by corrupt Gov. William J. Lepetomane (Brooks) and his nefarious henchman Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) to undermine the renegade sheriff and make way for a new railroad, Lili accedes readily. She arrives in the town of Rock Ridge with all her weapons: well-stocked corset, tapering legs, and mouth-watering
moue
. The only trouble is, she’s tired. “Tired of being admired. Tired of love uninspired. . . . Let’s face it, fellas, everything below the neck is
kaputt
.”

Madeline gives her best-known performance as Lili, doing an uncanny imitation of Dietrich. Her peroxide rinse and bustier garnered her pin-up status with a couple of generations of fanboys, and with
Blazing Saddles
as with
Paper Moon
, a single scene sealed the deal on an Oscar nomination. In this case, it’s the song, and much of the number is pure Madeline. Brooks told her to “harmonize the way Dietrich would,” so she came up with the meandering “Ah” in the middle of the song, “in a
key that was just a little wrong. Ordinarily, she was always in the center of the note,” he says. The moment when Lili reaches out to lean on the set and misses was also Madeline’s. Her most important contribution, however, was to point out that the song had only verses and a chorus. Brooks went home and, in one night, wrote the words and music to the introduction that begins “Here I stand, the goddess of desire.” Madeline was thrilled, and so was Brooks, though it meant restaging the number. Summing up her performance, he recalls a moment that “always makes me laugh and cry” at the end of the number. As the cowboys shoot up the saloon and the chorus of Prussian soldiers carries her off, she looks around as if to say, “Oh, the hell with it all.” “You gotta watch her all the time,” Brooks says, “because she’s always doing something unique and Madeline-esque.”

During the filming of
The Producers
, Brooks despaired when takes were ruined because the crew cracked up at Zero Mostel’s performance. The solution was to buy handkerchiefs and distribute them: “If you feel like laughing, stick this in your mouth.” Brooks resorted to the same tactic for “I’m Tired.” “I knew I had a great scene when I looked around and the whole crew was standing there with white handkerchiefs in their mouths,” he says. “I must have gone through a whole case of white handkerchiefs on that picture.” Between takes, he says, Madeline sang Weill songs and coloratura arias, sometimes bringing work to a halt as the crew listened to her. “Trills for her, thrills for us. . . . We just marveled at her.”