Madeline Kahn (23 page)

While not on par with the conflict between Eunice and Mama, perhaps, Madeline’s relationship with her own mother had hit another rough patch. On Tuesday, September 7, 1976, Madeline drew a box around the words “BAD DAY” in her appointment book, jotting next to that, “Ma over.” Jef Kahn believes that this was the occasion when Paula informed Madeline about a real-estate scheme gone awry in California. It began when Paula’s tenants on Romeo Court trashed the house just as she wanted to sell it. Jef was summoned from Virginia to clean up the place, and Paula made the sale. Immediately thereafter and against all advice, she used the proceeds as a non-refundable deposit on a house in Santa Barbara. Jef, who saw the house, hesitates to call it a mansion, but he recalls a more lavish environment than Paula required. When he told her so on the way home, she began to drive faster, hitting one hundred miles per hour before he could calm her.

Only after paying the deposit did Paula explain that she expected Madeline to put up the rest of the money for her. Ever cautious, Madeline
balked, and Paula lost both the house and the deposit. Now she came to break the news—and to ask Madeline to pay rent on her latest home. This was three weeks before Madeline’s thirty-fourth birthday, and the timing of the visit was typical of Paula’s method. Birthday cards sometimes arrived with bills enclosed for Madeline to pay.

Paula knew perfectly well how to make Madeline feel guilty if she didn’t provide for her, but Madeline’s concern wasn’t entirely the result of manipulation. Paula was Madeline’s confidante, adviser, coach, and also of course, her mother. Moreover, Madeline hadn’t had the benefit of Hiller Kahn’s perspective, which helped Jef to understand that “Paula’s many desires [were] pretty much endless and insatiable,” as Jef puts it. Soon, Madeline decided that her duty was “to take care of our mother” and pay all her expenses. She shared this decision with Jef one September afternoon when they were staying on Fire Island. Jef thought Madeline was taking on too much responsibility, too much pressure, but her mind was made up. (A friend, Denny McElyea, was taking photos that day, and captured Madeline and Jef in the midst of that conversation.) From that point forward, she gave Paula an allowance and paid many of her bills directly. Though she explained to Jef that Paula “couldn’t take care of herself,” it was another twenty years before Madeline fully grasped what the words meant.

Marco Polo Sings a Solo
and
She Loves Me
(1977)

FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL MONTHS—WELL INTO 1978—MADELINE
worked nonstop, returning to the New York theater three times and, after the disappointment of
Won Ton Ton
, reuniting with Mel Brooks for a third film. As career strategy, this busy schedule made sense. She wasn’t merely returning to her roots, but reminding people why she was a star. Things didn’t turn out as she’d planned.

Ever an uptown girl, Madeline began with a rare excursion downtown to Joe Papp’s Public Theater. For a limited engagement, she took the female lead, Diane, in the premiere of John Guare’s absurdist comedy
Marco Polo Sings a Solo
, opposite Joel Grey as her husband and with a cast that also included Anne Jackson, Chris Sarandon, and a then-unknown Sigourney Weaver. Set in the distant future (1999) on an iceberg off the coast of Norway,
Marco Polo
mixes elements of drawing-room comedy and political satire with dense, lengthy speeches and an incomprehensible plot. Despite the challenges, Madeline was eager to work again with Papp, who’d provided her with her most gratifying stage role, Chrissy in
Boom Boom Room
. And to actors at the time, Grey says, the Public was “a magical box that was doing the most edgy and unusual plays. You felt privileged to be a part of something new.”

Guare’s script was perhaps a little
too
new, however. Though the playwright had already written
The House of Blue Leaves
and co-written (with Mel Shapiro) the Tony-winning book to the musical
Two Gentlemen of Verona
, both those plays are more conventional than
Marco Polo
, and in 1977, little of Guare’s work was familiar territory. Guideposts, if there were any, would have to be found during the rehearsal process, itself complicated by Guare’s “fluid” approach to writing, Sarandon says. Each morning, the cast would receive new script pages—sometimes as many
as twenty. To facilitate collating, Papp’s staff copied new pages on paper of different colors: “The joke was that they were running out of colors at the Public Theater office,” Sarandon remembers. “Literally, we’d say, ‘On Vermillion 13, Puce 84.’ It was a rainbow of a script.”

Shapiro directed, as he’d done for
Two Gentlemen
(also produced originally by Papp). After about six weeks, Shapiro, Guare, and Papp decided to freeze act 1 and run it, though it was extremely long, about sixty pages. After the run-through, the cast assembled onstage. They could hear Papp and Guare muttering, and after a long wait, Shapiro leaned on his desk and announced, “We talked it over, and we think what we need to do is cut the first 20 pages.” Madeline immediately burst into tears. Her “visceral response” shocked the other actors, Sarandon says. Madeline apologized: “I know, I know, this is just about my ego,
but that’s why I’m doing this
!” By which she meant working in theater in the first place. “It was such pure Madeline,” Sarandon says, “because she was at times painfully honest about her feelings, but at the same time extremely incisive in her estimation of the temperature in the room and also where we all needed to be in the moment.”

Calling Madeline “tender,” “guarded,” and “fragile,” Grey says, “There was something that frightened her more than we’re all frightened, before we open in a play.” He was struck by the difference between her screen persona (“It was like she had no fear of really going wild”) and the woman he met in
Marco Polo
. “In person, she was very—
withdrawn
is probably another word.” Sarandon spent time with Madeline outside the theater. From what he observed, “When something affected her, she reacted. She didn’t hold onto it and wait and wait and let it fester.” He found her combination of honesty, intelligence, and vulnerability “devastating . . . in the sense that it’s very appealing.”

Climbing all over the iceberg set designed by John Wulp, Madeline “came within inches of breaking her leg . . . before stretching herself out like a dead haddock on a vast cake of ice, where I feared she’d be quick-frozen,” Walter Kerr wrote in a late-season essay for the
Times
. Parenthetically, he added, “I like Miss Kahn, and I don’t want any harm to come to her.” His real purpose, however, was to reflect on memorable scenery in recent shows, and he suggested that some designers “seem to have turned against actors, even to the point of doing them bodily harm, and some have lost touch with what used to be called reality.”
⁹⁷
But then, in an earlier essay, Kerr declared that
Marco Polo
“took place on a planet with which I am unfamiliar.”
⁹⁸

“I think we in large part confused the critics,” Grey says now. “They didn’t like it. They didn’t get it. When you feel left out, you get cranky.” Indeed, Clive Barnes began his review in the
Times
by admitting he didn’t understand the play. Ordinarily in such circumstances, he wrote, “you try to bluff it.” In this case, “I had no idea what Mr. Guare was trying to do to my mind, which was possibly my loss rather than Mr. Guare’s fault. But I rather doubt it.” Barnes was more generous to the “distinguished,” “marvelous,” “lovely cast.” Reserving the highest praise for Grey and Jackson, he wrote, “Madeline Kahn as the wife, a blasé ex-concert pianist of a genius and Chris Sarandon as a mystery man are also, when the playwright permits, fitfully delightful.”
⁹⁹

In conversation thirty-five years later, critic Michael Feingold recalled a long speech in which Madeline’s character imagines that composers are flashing her. “You have to hear that monologue in her voice,” he says, “and I always see this troubled little face, and this funny body language, which is saying, ‘I want to assert this to you, but I don’t want to be assertive.’” Referring to Zerlina in Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
, who “wants and doesn’t want,” he added, “That may be why she made such a strong impression on me in the Guare play, because his plays are full of that: He wants to be funny and yet he doesn’t want to be funny. ‘This is what I believe.
This
is what I believe?’”

Marco Polo
closed on schedule, on March 6. Madeline followed up with another limited engagement, a semi-staged concert revival of Bock and Harnick’s
She Loves Me
, at New York’s Town Hall. The cast—including top-notch musical comedy stars Barry Bostwick, Rita Moreno, and George Rose—dressed formally and used scripts and music stands, which director John Bowab ingeniously configured to represent props and set pieces. Today, this kind of performance is almost routine, thanks to the successful
Encores!
series, but in 1977, it was uncharted territory, and the company had only one week to rehearse before opening to the critics and the public. For Madeline, the process was especially stressful, since Paula was on hand at all times, “not underfoot but sort of omnipresent,” remembers Michael Hayward-Jones, a cast member as well as the assistant stage manager. “My feeling of it was that [Paula] was trying to be helpful, and her helpfulness often got in both of their ways.” What’s more, this was one of Madeline’s first visits with Paula since the failed real-estate deal the summer before.

Madeline “had a lot to prove, going from Broadway to film, and now she was back in New York,” Hayward-Jones says. She was once again
playing a role created by Barbara Cook, whose longtime accompanist, Wally Harper, conducted the concerts, thus inviting comparisons not only to Cook but also to Madeline’s own early triumph as Cunegonde. The show’s choreographer, Joseph Patton, believes her agent may have advised against
She Loves Me
, spelling out the risks in a low-paying theater gig with limited rehearsal, so she’d have been insecure from the start.

Generally, Hayward-Jones found Madeline “aloof but pleasant,” but during the brief run she displayed several flashes of prima donna temperament of a kind she’d rarely if ever indulged before. The worst came just before the opening-night performance, when Moreno generously called her over to speak with a reporter who was interviewing her. Madeline high-hatted them both, and Moreno took her aside, explaining that her behavior was inappropriate. Madeline broke down. “I can’t go on,” she said, retreating to her dressing room. Only Patton dared to go in. He found her in tears. “I know how vulnerable you are. I get it,” he said, and he talked about fear and control. Gently, he added, “I think we’re pretty close to half-hour.” “Then I need to get ready,” Madeline replied.

Writing for the
Times
, Richard Eder devoted one-third of his review to Madeline’s performance, praising her above all as an actress.
¹⁰⁰
In
Time
, T. E. Kalem gave her a mixed review: praise for her singing, but for her acting, an accusation of self-caricature. Thus, only five years after Madeline’s feature-film debut, her work was already sufficiently well known that the critic from the leading news magazine could make such a charge. When an actress isn’t recognizable, nobody can tell whether she’s caricaturing herself. More ominously for Madeline, Kalem’s review appears to be the first suggestion that she might be too old for a part: “She lacks the vernal innocence intrinsic to the role.”
¹⁰¹

A pirate recording, despite rather dim sound, reveals Madeline in radiant voice and a fully realized character. Surely benefitting from Harper’s experience with Cook, Madeline’s account of “Vanilla Ice Cream,” alternating song with speech and concluding with an elaborately ornamented cadenza, has the audience in stitches. Patton says, “What she did with that role was astounding, with no rehearsal. There was not a moment that was not absolutely truthful and honest in her performance. Every choice she made was based on what the other actors were giving her.” Her rendition of “Help Me Find My Shoe” was also brilliant and very funny, Hayward-Jones recalls, but her performances varied wildly, as she altered her lines, blocking, and characterization. “It was always what we called ‘the show
du jour
’ once we began performing. We even had ‘the
key
du jour
,’” and Harper prepared three arrangements for each of her songs.

Both director Bowab and Bostwick adapted to Madeline’s methods, but George Rose lost patience with her entirely. Actor–playwright Ed Dixon says that, for the rest of his days, the otherwise genial Rose (“everybody’s best friend,” as Hayward-Jones puts it) refused to hear Madeline’s name spoken in his presence. “George was old-school: ‘This is the way you do it, you do it consistently,’” Hayward-Jones says, whereas Madeline “never gave the same performance twice. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in other people who expect consistency, show to show, it can be disconcerting.” Harold Prince would react similarly, blaming Madeline’s time in Hollywood for a lack of discipline in her stage work. According to Dixon, Rose ascribed Madeline’s behavior to another cause: cocaine abuse.