Madeline Kahn (38 page)

Over the next five years, Madeline would make only two movies, and both were animated features to which she lent her voice alone:
My Little Pony: The Movie
, a spin-off of a popular line of toys and its companion television series; and
An American Tail
, Stephen Spielberg’s attempt to retell the experience of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants through mice, as animated by Don Bluth. In the latter, using a German accent that sounds more like Eva Gabor’s Hungarian, Madeline plays the aristocratic Gussie Mausheimer, leading a crusade against the bigotry of cats. According to some critics, she stole the show.
⁴²

Chameleon
(1986), “Wanted: The Perfect Guy” (1987), and
Mr. President
(1987–88)

ONCE AGAIN, MADELINE TURNED TO TELEVISION. AT ALL TIMES, HER
goal wasn’t merely to jump-start her acting career, but also to find a reliable source of income. She continued to support Paula, and the failure of
Oh Madeline
didn’t discourage her entirely. Several of her colleagues were now flourishing in the medium, notably Carsey and Werner. And in 1985, Cybill Shepherd, who quit acting altogether for several years, rebounded with
Moonlighting
. Madeline’s next forays wouldn’t prove so successful.

In 1986, she shot
Chameleon
, a pilot for ABC, playing Violet Kingsley, who lies her way into jobs and relationships, then tries to lie her way out of the predicaments that ensue. In the first scene, she pretends to be a food critic in order to get a better table at a restaurant—though her lunch partner, who happens to be her mother, Hannah (Nina Foch), instantly blows her cover. Foch, a respected acting teacher, had graced such films as
An American in Paris, The Ten Commandments
, and
Spartacus
. Considering how often Madeline’s own mother complicated her plans, the premise of
Chameleon
may have made her uncomfortable, and casting a strong actress in the role of Hannah wouldn’t have made matters easier. In fact, Madeline recommended several other women for the part, but all her suggestions went unheeded.

As the pilot episode proceeds, Violet goes to a local television station to urge the consumer reporter to investigate the diet clinic Hannah has been frequenting. When the receptionist (Priscilla Morrill, of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
) steps away from her desk, Violet takes her place. Thus ensconced, she regales a visitor with outlandish tales about the station owner, only to discover that the visitor and the owner are one and the
same (Henry Jones, of
Phyllis
). Amused, he tells her to investigate the clinic herself, and she does so, disguised in a fat suit and using the name Miss Arbuckle. Though Hannah once again exposes her daughter’s imposture, Violet nevertheless obtains incriminating evidence. By the end of the episode, she’s hired to perform off-camera investigations, and she’s discovered a new purpose in life.
⁴³

As sitcom pilots go,
Chameleon
isn’t bad, but its characters are rounded primarily because we’re familiar with the actors’ other work. Such promise as the show delivers comes from the talent assembled, including the executive producer and scriptwriter, David Lloyd, who’d worked as executive story editor on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and
Taxi
, and director John Rich, an industry veteran. For her part, Madeline offers an assured, charming performance, but off-camera, she was miserable. In general, she felt that no one was “receptive to my ideas.” In particular, she claimed that Rich disrespected her, accused her of “star tactics,” and threatened her with unnamed “consequences.”
⁴⁴
She immediately asked her lawyers to get her out of her contract, and they helped her draw up a letter of complaint. Before they could proceed, however, ABC dropped its plans to pick up the series.
Chameleon
aired only once, as part of a summer replacement series, an anthology of failed pilots.

More happily, Madeline took a role in an
ABC After-School Special
called “Wanted: The Perfect Guy,” which aired the next year. Billed as a “special guest star,” she plays Ellie Coleman, the divorced working mother of a teenage son, Danny (Ben Affleck), who schemes with his best friend (Pam Potillo) to find her a suitable boyfriend. Without telling Ellie, they place a personal ad in the newspaper, but she’s furious when she finds out the truth. Ultimately, Ellie has an epiphany much like the one Danny had at the beginning of the movie. Looking around her, she sees couples everywhere, and realizes she’s alone. “Fate has a funny way of playing with us sometimes. What am I saying, sometimes?
Most
of the time!” Ellie tells her son as she sets out on a date with the man he found for her (Keith Szarabajka).

Produced by Joseph Feury and directed by Catlin Adams, “The Perfect Guy” won Madeline a Daytime Emmy, and introduced her to Jonathan Sheffer, a composer and conductor who provided the film’s score. It was the start of a lasting friendship. Sheffer recalls that he actually suggested Madeline for the film in the first place. Feury liked the idea well enough but doubted Madeline would accept a made-for-TV movie—much less an
After-School Special
. What Feury didn’t count on was her desire for work and income. The result is one of Madeline’s subtler performances
onscreen, and even when she’s given funny lines or comic business (sitting on a scoop of ice cream, for example), she’s grounded and credible.

In several relatively long speeches in Mary Pleshette Willis’s script, we see that Ellie tends to ramble when she’s nervous—a trait shared by many of Madeline’s characters—and she frequently reenters the room to resume a speech we thought she’d finished. The character is weary of single life, of dating, of work, of raising a kid on her own, but she reserves a tenderness for her son at all times. We see this side of her most clearly in a nighttime scene, when Ellie visits Danny’s room and discovers the responses to his personal ad. She doesn’t read them, and he covers by telling her he’s trying to write a love letter. Lying on his bed, Ellie describes the kind of man she finds attractive. She tells Danny goodnight, but returns a moment later. “Everything all right? You’re acting weird. Clean up your room sometime, okay?” She’s a mother as seen through a child’s eyes, and yet she is, as she asserts at one point, “a very nice person and very cool.”

The Daytime Emmy Awards are generally considered less competitive and less prestigious than their prime-time counterparts, and Madeline’s nomination surely got a boost from her status as a well-known movie star. Yet the other nominees for outstanding performer in children’s programming were all accomplished performers: LeVar Burton, Ruth Buzzi, Adolph Caesar, and Paul Reubens. If anything, the Emmy helped persuade Madeline that television still welcomed her.

She made occasional appearances on television specials during this period, and one, an all-star gala at Carnegie Hall in celebration of Irving Berlin’s centennial (broadcast in 1988), warrants particular mention. The song selected for Madeline was “You’d Be Surprised.” An airy comic number from early in Berlin’s career, it concerns an unprepossessing boyfriend: He may not look like much, “but when you get him alone, you’d be surprised.” At first, Madeline balked at the choice. Yet again, she felt she was being pigeonholed as a comedian, whereas she’d hoped to field an assignment more suitable to a leading lady—as she’d done at a Gershwin gala not long before.
⁴⁵
The producers insisted, Madeline relented, and the result is one of the finest musical performances she ever recorded, a mini-masterpiece of comic timing and lyric poise, grounded in specific characterizations of gesture and accent. As an artist, she had arrived at a point where she could deliver exceptional work even with material in which she had limited confidence.

At least Madeline’s unhappiness with
Chameleon
hadn’t damaged an important professional connection. That show’s creator, David Lloyd, was also one of Johnny Carson’s favorite writers. In 1987, Lloyd, with Gene Reynolds and Ed. Weinberger, created a new sitcom,
Mr. President
, for Carson’s production company. Starring George C. Scott as Sam Tresch, the president of the United States, the series premiered on May 3. It was one of the first programs on the fledgling Fox Network, which had begun prime-time programming only a few weeks before—and only one night per week.

The show represented an unusually bold venture. Just two years earlier, ABC cancelled its own White House series,
Hail to the Chief
, after only seven episodes. Like its predecessor,
Mr. President
would strive to mix comedy and drama, the personal and the political, but it’s a difficult balance to achieve in a short amount of time. As critic Tom Shales observes today, Fox hadn’t yet found its style, but even so,
Mr. President
made an odd follow-up to the network’s early hit, the raunchy
Married . . . with Children
. “The sensibilities were incompatible,” Shales says. “
Mr. President
wasn’t particularly dirty. It was a civilized show: it could have been on NBC or CBS, which is why it probably shouldn’t have been on Fox.” And viewers had difficulty accepting the idea that Scott, best known as a dramatic actor, could be funny. Even Scott had doubts. One day Maddie Corman, who played his teenage daughter, asked why he was doing a sitcom. “Alimony,” he replied.

The producers surrounded Scott with first-rate talent, including Lloyd and Weinberger, another veteran of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and
Taxi
. Reynolds had worked on
M*A*S*H
and
Lou Grant
. Director Marc Daniels helmed the earliest episodes of
I Love Lucy
. One of the most reliable foils in television, Conrad Bain, played the chief of staff, and Tony-winning actress Carlin Glynn (fresh from screen roles in
Sixteen Candles
and
The Trip to Bountiful
) played the first lady, Meg Tresch. But Scott often clashed with Weinberger. When Scott was unhappy, most of the cast and crew gave him a wide berth, while Glynn tried to play peacemaker.

A show in search of itself,
Mr. President
often failed to strike the right tone and soon switched from a single camera and no laugh track to three cameras and a live audience. “I didn’t feel like, even at the time we were doing it, that we got into the groove,” Corman says. “We had some stops and starts. George had health issues in the middle [of production], we had cast changes, we had format changes.” As Fox announced that
Mr. President
would lead off the network’s second night of programming, Saturday, the producers decided to place more emphasis on comedy—and
wrote Glynn out of the series, a decision Corman calls “devastating.” Glynn was universally loved on the set and a surrogate mother to Corman. “But if the show wasn’t working, there’s only one person who was replaceable.” Bringing in Madeline made sense. On a show that consistently struggled with the perception that George C. Scott in a situation comedy was a contradiction in terms, Madeline’s brand-name recognition proved valuable. Just as casting another actor to play opposite her in
Oh Madeline
might have relieved her of the pressure to make the show a hit, so casting Madeline in
Mr. President
relieved Scott. Another star could at least share the burden.

In a two-part episode, “Dear Sam,” Meg Tresch does something no first lady has ever done: She leaves her husband. And with all the might of the presidency at his disposal, Sam can’t find her. At a press conference, he announces that he’ll meet her at a diner in her hometown, but she doesn’t show up. The first part concludes as Sam sits alone in the diner—or as alone as a president can be, surrounded by his chief of staff and a Secret Service detail.

Walking into this scene, Madeline starts the second episode. She plays Lois Gullickson, Meg’s sister, who has seen a news report and come to check on Sam. From the start, she sounds like Madeline. “I’ve known Meg ever since I was born,” Lois tells Sam. “She’s always been willful. She’s selfish. She’s spoiled. I never thought she deserved you, ever. Well, I’ve told you that before.”

Sam pauses. “You never said that,” he replies.

“Oh,” says Lois. “I meant to. I probably didn’t because you always seemed so—I don’t know. What’s the word? Happy.”

Faced with the prospect of single parenthood, Sam tells Lois that he’s worried about his children, and she offers to come to Washington “for a few days.” Shortly thereafter, she enters Sam’s office (“It really is oval, isn’t it?” she says giddily). When Lois has a long phone conversation with Meg, we learn that Meg isn’t coming back. The scene is actually a monologue, delivered as Madeline lies on a bed, much like a teenage girl chatting on the phone with her sister. Lois can’t understand why Meg would leave. Ultimately, Lois confesses that she’s long been in love with Sam, and when he asks her to move in and take on the duties of official White House hostess, she’s ready to agree even before he’s phrased the question.