Madeline Kahn (18 page)

The camaraderie on the set can be seen in outtakes saved by editor John Howard. In the scene in which Elizabeth arrives at Frankenstein’s castle, Madeline and Feldman worked out their business before the cameras rolled. But when Feldman did something unexpected—punctuating a line with a growl and a nip at the fox-fur stole around Madeline’s neck—the actors burst out laughing. Each time Feldman bit the stole, a tuft of fur (and eventually an entire leg) came away in his mouth. Madeline, Feldman, Garr, and Wilder kept more or less straight faces for the first take, but thereafter Wilder himself was usually the first to laugh, and even in the final take he’s on the brink of another burst of laughter. “It was the toughest moment in [Madeline’s] life,” Brooks says. “How could I not laugh?” she asked him afterward. “I had to play angry.”

Madeline delivered a few surprises, too. For the crucial scene in which the Monster (Boyle) rapes Elizabeth, the script called for her to burst into song: “Cheek to Cheek,” an Irving Berlin number (as is “Puttin’ on the Ritz”). The night before shooting, Madeline wondered whether another lyric might sound more like lovemaking than “Heaven! I’m in heaven!” If only there were a song that started out with “Oh!” or “Ah!” Suddenly, she had her answer, and the next morning, she approached Brooks on the set. He thought for a moment, then said, “Sure, let’s try it.”

“Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” is so apt that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t on Wilder’s mind from the moment he started writing the story of a scientist who discovers the mystery of life both in the lab and in love. Composed by Victor Herbert, with lyrics by Rida Johnson Young, for the operetta
Naughty Marietta
(1910), the song is as faithful to the period as other details in the movie, and in Madeline’s trained soprano voice, it’s over-the-top ecstatic. The result is a classic moment in cinema, forever associated with Madeline—though in the film Garr sings more of the song than she does. The first “Ah!” was all it took, though, and it was all Madeline’s. Arguably no other soprano has made as great an impact with a single note.

The last full day of shooting was devoted to the honeymoon scene between Dr. Frankenstein and Inga. Brooks found Wilder sitting thoughtfully on the edge of the bed. “You know, I’ve never had a better experience in my life,” the actor said. “Would it be crazy to write a new scene or two, just to keep going?” “No, we can’t,” Brooks replied. “But I’ll keep the set, if you want to just sit around for a while longer.”
⁶⁶
Instead, Wilder began writing a new movie, with leading roles for Madeline, himself, and Marty Feldman.

It’s become customary to describe
Young Frankenstein
as the most “disciplined” of Mel Brooks’s films, and certainly it eschews the chaos of
Blazing Saddles
, making it easier to appreciate the beauty of the physical details (from the quasi-expressionistic cinematography to the zippers on the Monster’s neck) and the thoughtful, coherent exposition of psychology. Even the
New Yorker
’s Pauline Kael was won over, though she reserved the bulk of her praise for Wilder and for Madeline:

When she parodied Marlene Dietrich in
Blazing Saddles
, it wasn’t the usual Dietrich imitation, because she was also parodying herself. Madeline Kahn has an extra dimension of sexiness; it’s almost like what Mae West had—she’s flirtatious in a self-knowing way. And everything that’s wrong about her is sexy. You look at her and think, What a beautiful translucent skin on such a big jaw; what a statuesque hourglass figure, especially where the sand has slipped. She’s so self-knowingly lascivious that she convinces you she really digs the monster. Madeline Kahn is funny and enticing because she’s soaked in passion; when you look at her, you see a water bed at just the right temperature.
⁶⁷

Given Madeline’s anxieties about her weight and appearance, she surely considered this one of the nastiest good reviews she ever got.

It’s easy for kids to focus on the broadest comic elements (and the ultra-sexy performances of Madeline and Teri Garr), yet when we return to
Young Frankenstein
as adults, we may appreciate a minute concern with questions of Jewish identity, as Frederick emigrates from America to Eastern Europe in search of his roots, and struggles until he can pronounce his name correctly: “Franken-STINE.” In this context, Madeline’s character is daring, a joke that Gentiles would be smacked for repeating: She’s a stereotypical Jewish princess. A daddy’s girl more interested in preserving her coiffure, her nails, and her taffeta gown (to say nothing
of her virginity) than in kissing Frederick, she succumbs to the Monster’s advances as soon as he unzips his trousers. What starts as rape turns into something else altogether, and we see that Elizabeth needs “an enormous Schwanzstücker” to tame her.

Today, in an era when “No means no,” the comedy is more daring than Wilder and Brooks intended, since Elizabeth does say no at first. But even in 1974, this scene was outré, and Madeline herself once asked, “What’s funny about that? It’s grotesque. I know when I’m in a Mel Brooks movie, we’re going to be doing some low, grotesque stuff. A lot of what makes sufficient numbers of us laugh, me included, is sometimes very broad, very low, grotesque, horrible stuff.”
⁶⁸
Some of her friends still balk at Brooks’s humor, and Betty Aberlin winces at the memory of Madeline’s “Let me see your legs” audition. Aberlin also objects to the characterization of the first encounter between Elizabeth and the Monster as “a rape scene.” To her, it’s “a love scene,” and she resists even the politically incorrect possibility that the script depicts a rape that turns to love. Lily Tomlin finds much of the movie objectionable on political grounds. Surprisingly, Tomlin recalls that she was offered the role of Frau Blücher but turned it down. “I was much too feminist in those days—my own politics,” she says. “I don’t even remember what happens to that character. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. I would never be able to throw myself into a part like that, at that time especially. The fact that Madeline would throw herself into a style of comedy that didn’t necessarily speak to what she would like to represent, and still pull it off, was remarkable. She was extremely sensitive, and her own sensibility was very developed. I would have been a disaster. Whatever I thought was wrong politically, I wouldn’t have been able to do it and make it work.”

Again and again, working in Brooks’s films obliged Madeline to compromise her natural reserve. In a 1975 profile of Brooks for
Newsweek
, she—perhaps unwittingly—summed up her dilemma: She worked with a man she adored, who made her do things she didn’t necessarily like. “Mel is sensual with me,” she said. “He treats me like an uncle—a dirty uncle. He’s an earthy man and very moral underneath. He has traditional values.”
⁶⁹
Off-screen, Brooks wasn’t going to take advantage of her, and he made her feel appreciated and protected. Yet his movies threw her into Transylvanian rapes and Roman orgies.

While Madeline admitted to laughing at Brooks’s movies, on only one occasion—a syndicated late-night talk show in 1979—did she suggest that his humor was in any way a reflection of her own. Brooks, she said, “understands me somehow and loves me somehow, and allows me to be
myself, to a greater degree than a lot of people do. And that’s wonderful, that’s a great feeling. I feel very liberated around him. He accepts my raunchier humor.”
⁷⁰
To no other interviewer, to no friend or family member did Madeline say anything similar. On the contrary, she worried that fans expected her to be like Brooks’s characters, and from the start, she insisted in the press that she wasn’t. She described herself as “the antithesis” of Brooks’s “gross, flat-out humor. . . . I think I am rather delicate and subtle.”
⁷¹
Yes, Brooks created an atmosphere on the set that made her more comfortable with rough language and outrageous behavior, and there’s no question she loved working with him. But as Tomlin says, Brooks’s sensibility was not Madeline’s.

Brooks believes otherwise. “She was a natural, entertaining commentator on the human condition,” he says, “and she always felt a little hidebound about not letting some of what we call ‘dirty stuff’ out. She felt with me, with
Blazing Saddles
and our adventures together, that there were no holds barred. I would be glad to express anything, you know, anything that was real, that expressed the human condition. I was a good conduit for her, for letting it all out.” The reason she trusted him, Brooks says—“very egotistically, you have to take it with a grain of salt”—was his intelligence. “Intellectually and mentally, she was probably superior to anyone and everyone she worked with, and actually probably had to hide her brilliance a little, not to in any way make them feel that they weren’t the kingpin. . . . And she admitted to me, ‘In the end, I never met anybody like you. You’re actually brighter than I am. You’re smarter than I am, and I feel such a great relief in working with you.’ It’s hard to meet somebody who was as smart as I am, and she was.”

Smart enough to persuade him that she enjoyed raunchy comedy, even though she didn’t.

Off-camera during the filming of
Young Frankenstein
, everyone from Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks to Wilder’s teenage stepdaughter believed that Madeline and Gene Wilder were having an affair. As Wilder explains, “Now and years ago, my stepdaughter and Madeline Kahn both had the same idea. My daughter thought it was true and my favorite acting partner and greatest actress wondered why it wasn’t true. But I was always attached to someone else.” In fact, he began seeing Teri Garr, but Wilder and Madeline got along so well that even he thought they’d make a good couple. If her feelings for him went deeper than the speculative stage, they didn’t interfere with her friendships with him and
with Garr—or with Gilda Radner, whom Wilder later married. But the rapport between Wilder and Madeline was important artistically, and it’s one reason they’re so closely associated, despite having made only three films together (in one of which they don’t interact). With Wilder, as with Brooks and with Boyle, the personal relationship made it easier for Madeline to take risks as an actor, and Wilder would capitalize on that trust in his directorial debut.

For Brooks,
Young Frankenstein
confirmed that he was now a powerhouse in Hollywood. The picture opened on December 15, 1974, and took third place at the box office for the year, just two spots behind
Blazing Saddles
. The disappointments of
The Producers
and
The Twelve Chairs
were forgotten, and to sweeten the moment, Brooks and Wilder received an Academy Award nomination in 1975 for best screenplay adapted from other material. At the Golden Globes, Madeline received a nomination for best supporting actress in a motion picture, but lost to Karen Black for
The Great Gatsby
.

To promote the movie’s premiere, Madeline appeared on
The Tonight Show
on November 11, along with the idol of her college years, Jeanne Moreau. The perks of stardom were beginning to add up. “I’m enjoying this,” she told a reporter. “It’s nice to be able to sleep at night and not have to worry about unpaid bills. It’s a very good feeling. And now I’m indulging myself—why not? I’m redoing my apartment. I’m buying lots of nice clothes, I’m spending lots of money. Listen, I worked for ten years to get here, so why not?”
⁷²

At Long Last Love
(1975)

MADELINE’S APPOINTMENT BOOK NOTES CONTRAST THE SHOOTING
of
Young Frankenstein
(five days, plus one day of pick-up work that doubled as a wrap party) with that of
At Long Last Love
, her final collaboration with Peter Bogdanovich (five and a half months). The latter picture, released in 1975, is representative of the majority of her subsequent movies: It must have looked good on paper, and it involved people she (for the most part) liked, but the result is an artistic misfire and a box office failure. Co-star Cybill Shepherd and Bogdanovich refer to it simply as “the debacle.”

Nothing if not a serious student of old movies, Bogdanovich is also a musician who revealed in
The Last Picture Show
and
Paper Moon
a visual lyricism, a sustained melody of images.
What’s Up, Doc?
, in contrast, plays its characters and confusion in jazzy counterpoint. In his earlier movies, he applied what he’d learned not only through study but also through his personal relationships with directors from the golden age of film. Now he wanted to apply lessons learned from another friend, Fred Astaire.

Who better than Bogdanovich to pay homage to Cole Porter and the classic Hollywood musicals of the 1930s? When Shepherd gave him a book of Porter lyrics, Bogdanovich latched onto the melancholy “I Loved Him (But He Didn’t Love Me)” and began to conceive of a lavish movie. Consulting musical-theater historian Miles Kreuger, he settled on sixteen Porter songs in their original versions—that is, with the original, racier lyrics written for sophisticated Broadway audiences and not the watered-down lyrics heard on recordings and movie soundtracks purveyed to the
wider, more conservative public of the 1930s. In “Down in the Dumps (On the Ninetieth Floor),” for example, Madeline sings that “Even the minister’s wife / Has a perfectly good sex life.” In “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love,” Eileen Brennan sings,