Madeline Kahn (41 page)

John Hansbury

WHEN COMPOSER JONATHAN SHEFFER’S BIRTHDAY ROLLED AROUND IN
1989, he invited Madeline and their mutual friend Gail Jacobs to a party given in his honor. There, Madeline was introduced to John Hansbury, and both Jacobs and Sheffer remember watching in amazement at the result, which was like a scene out of a movie. From the moment they met, Madeline and John monopolized each other, ignoring everyone else at the party. It was the beginning of the last romantic relationship of her life. “And let me tell you,” Jacobs says, “he was a good-lookin’ guy.”

Madeline hadn’t been this serious about a man in years. Hansbury had several advantages over other men that she dated. For one thing, he actually liked her sense of humor, rather than being put off by it. And her celebrity amused him. He remembers an encounter with actors Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh who, much to her astonishment, began to reenact Madeline’s more famous scenes. On another occasion, arriving late to the Kentucky Derby, they were introduced to Oscar-winner Rod Steiger, who gushed, “I wouldn’t leave until I’d met you.” Hansbury urged Madeline to relax around less-famous fans, too, and he encouraged her to consider roles that would permit them to travel to interesting places. A shoot in New Zealand, for example, would make it easy to visit Bali, where he had friends who could put them up. The result, in 1992, was Madeline’s only trip, to Asia, which included stops in Hong Kong and Thailand. Now an attorney but trained as a painter, Hansbury appealed to Madeline’s natural inquisitiveness, and he introduced her to contemporary art, taking her to galleries and museums.

Hansbury characterizes himself and Madeline as “children of the 1960s” who weren’t interested in conventional commitments. She’d told
Village Voice
columnist Arthur Bell in 1973 that marriage “was once
an ideal, but I no longer have any ideals.”
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She and Hansbury didn’t move in together. She was as firmly ensconced in her apartment on Park Avenue, he says, as he was in Greenwich Village, but they fell into a comfortable pattern of weekends, parties, and vacations together. The ease she felt with him can be seen in pictures he took of her in front of European monuments. She mugs and clowns, she’s relaxed and happy.

Striking the right balance between “separate lives” and intimacy sometimes frustrated Madeline. After several years she remarked in her notebook that they sometimes seemed more like brother and sister than like romantic lovers. Yet she congratulated herself for not trying to change him, and she credited her years in therapy for the strength of their relationship.
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Hansbury gave Madeline an emotional foundation—and perhaps even the springboard she needed to revive her career once and for all.

MADELINE’S FINAL DECADE SAW A REFINEMENT OF HER SKILLS AND A
growth in her confidence as an artist. Though her movie career dwindled to almost nothing, in her last film,
Judy Berlin
, she turned in her finest screen performance, a subtle blend of humor and heartbreak. Her efforts onstage and on television, too, culminated in superior work in
The Sisters Rosensweig
and on the show
Cosby
. As she matured, it seemed that her personal life would similarly rise to new challenges. The greatest of these, however, she could not overcome.

Betsy’s Wedding
(1990) and
Shadows and Fog
(1992)

SO OFTEN, MADELINE SEEMS TO HAVE TAKEN PARTS IN ENSEMBLE
pictures almost as insurance. Her next movie,
Betsy’s Wedding
, found her amidst another all-star cast, yet this time she got lost in the crowd. Alan Alda, who wrote and directed, intended a personal statement about love and family, tradition and change. The Hopper family, like his own, is Italian on the husband’s side, Jewish on the wife’s, and like the character he plays, he’s the father of two daughters.
Betsy’s Wedding
might have been a sweet, observational comedy, but it’s hijacked by a subplot with broader comedic potential: the budding romance between a gangster (Anthony LaPaglia) and Betsy’s older sister, a police officer (Ally Sheedy). The Betsy in question (Molly Ringwald) seems almost an afterthought. Her preparations for the wedding are sketched in sporadic bursts, and her conflicts are resolved hastily. Though Madeline plays the mother of both sisters, there’s scant room for her in the gangster plot, and she suffers through long spells with little to do.
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The movie seems especially disappointing when one considers the squandered opportunities for interplay with such inventive comic actors as Catherine O’Hara and Joe Pesci. Even Madeline’s work with Alda himself fails to rise to the level he achieved with Carol Burnett in
The Four Seasons
, his best film (1981).
²

Behind the scenes, and beginning with the first read-through, Madeline and Alda failed to establish a rapport. “She may have rubbed him the wrong way,” says Carol J. Bawer, a production assistant on the film. “Alan likes to say he’s giving everybody the freedom to do what they want, but he’s got an idea in his head. When he’s writing and directing, he knows what he wants on the screen, and that’s what he wants from the other actors.” That wasn’t Madeline’s preferred way to work, and Alda’s own preferences didn’t stop others in the cast from trying to advise
him. “All these huge actors, very opinionated, colorful, and larger-than-life, so many creative minds in one room,” Sheedy says. “[E]verybody [thought he] knew how that movie should be shot. . . . I could see that Alan was worn down and needed to go to sleep for six months.” Later, Madeline’s cousin Sarah Kahn asked what working with Alda was like. Madeline answered with an imitation: “No, no, no! Me, me, me!” She wasn’t being mean, Sarah says, but rather suggesting that “it was about him and his needs and his desires, that she had no time for [and] it was clear that if another opportunity arose to act with him, she might look elsewhere.”

Following the read-through, rehearsals, costume fittings, and a few location shoots in New York City, the production moved to North Carolina, which doubles for Long Island in the film. There, Madeline had more opportunities to interact with Alda, and their lack of rapport posed problems that came to a head while shooting a bedroom scene. In one sequence, the stressed-out father of the bride dreams he’s wrestling a tiger, only to discover that he’s in bed, wrestling his own wife. For the scene, both Madeline and Alda wore pajamas. She felt vulnerable, and the force he used surprised her. On the few occasions when she’d played a scene with even mildly sexual roughhousing, she’d worked with actors she knew well and trusted as friends, such as Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder. Alda was different. After the first take, Bawer remembers, Madeline asked to be excused for a few minutes and tried to compose herself, without saying what was wrong. She resumed the scene, but at the end of the day, she asked a producer to have a word with Alda.

The next day, having been asked to “tone it down” because Madeline was uncomfortable, “He didn’t,” Bawer says. “After that, she just went through the motions and finished the movie. . . . She felt he wasn’t listening to her as an actor.” After the bedroom scene, Bawer frequently acted as a go-between, and Madeline began returning to New York on weekends, rather than remain with the crew at the hotel in North Carolina (where in any case she had to spend a great deal of time waiting by the telephone, because of weather delays). Though she grew close to Sheedy, Madeline didn’t complain about Alda. Madeline was “very private and circumspect,” as well as respectful of her younger colleague’s need to maintain a good relationship with Alda for artistic purposes, Sheedy says. “I was playing her daughter, who loves them both. She was also extremely creative and so completely committed to whatever your acting process was.”

Taking long walks together when the weather permitted, Sheedy found Madeline a good listener, “But she had so much more to tell me than I had to tell her.” Madeline gave her “little hints about her life,” and even talked about her relationship with John Hansbury. Madeline made Sheedy feel trusted and special, yet “It was very difficult for me to get over the being-dazzled-by-Madeline thing. She was a dazzling person, you know?” They couldn’t go anywhere without Madeline being recognized. Sheedy had been a fan since girlhood and made a point of sneaking the
On the Twentieth Century
cast album into the makeup trailer so that LaPaglia could listen—after Madeline left the vicinity.

Madeline hated long shoots, and the bad weather prolonged a difficult experience. Her appointment book for the fall of 1989 shows that rehearsals began on October 9 and lasted at least one week. She filmed her first scene on October 24 and flew to Wilmington to begin remote shooting six days later. With only brief breaks, she was still filming up to the end of the year, and to celebrate Thanksgiving properly, she invited Hansbury to fly down for the holiday. He made a few visits, his first to a movie set. He found Sheedy and Ringwald charming, and he made an excellent impression on Bawer, confirming Madeline’s belief that her new boyfriend was extraordinarily comfortable with her professional life.

Betsy’s Wedding
also reunited Madeline with Julie Bovasso. If any differences lingered between the two after
Boom Boom Room
, Sheedy saw no sign of them. Back in New York, Madeline and Bovasso met for dinner one night, and afterward Madeline attended a few acting classes at Bovasso’s studio, bringing Sheedy along for the first. Watching Bovasso’s “volcanic” emotional range, Sheedy says, “I was scared of her. Madeline
loved
her.” Their acting styles were very different, Bovasso “huge with her gestures, physically expressive,” while Madeline was “tiny” and “detailed,” Sheedy says. “She worked very internally, she was subtle.”

Madeline would need grand gestures onstage in the next few years, but her next theatrical assignment required hardly any movement at all. A. R. Gurney’s
Love Letters
involves only two actors, a man and a woman, who sit at a table and read aloud from correspondence between upper-middle-class Americans written over a fifty-year span. John Tillinger directed Madeline alongside Victor Garber during a two-week run in Toronto, in June 1990. Tillinger had directed the original production and the New York premiere, as well. Inexpensive to produce and requiring minimal rehearsal, the play quickly became a success on “dark nights” at the Promenade, and big-name duos cycled in and out of the production.
Garber, who performed
Love Letters
in New York as well, describes the play as best suited to such limited engagements, rather than long runs. “I was stunned that she wanted to do it,” he says, “but we had a great time.”

Once again, Madeline’s inventiveness amazed him, but in
Love Letters
, as opposed to
Blithe Spirit
, he had the script in front of him whenever she threw him off track. Toronto critics understood Garber’s occasional hesitation to mean that he was stumbling over his lines, but they praised Madeline’s “particularly vibrant and self-assured performance,” especially her adroit handling of her character’s transitions from girlhood to middle age and from depression to alcoholism.
³
This was the kind of “dimensional” acting she seldom got to do, and working with Garber and Tillinger (under more relaxed circumstances than in
Born Yesterday
) made the experience thoroughly happy for her.

As disappointing as
Betsy’s Wedding
had been, a greater one was on the horizon.
Shadows and Fog
, Woody Allen’s homage to Franz Kafka and the great films of German Expressionism, would be released in 1992. Madeline had yearned to work with Allen, a director who consistently wrote sophisticated roles for mature women, in pictures good and bad, at a steady rate of one per year.
Shadows and Fog
was her first opportunity to work with Allen—and her last. For a scene at a carnival, Allen cast Madeline as the “Bear Lady,” and called her to the set for at least two days of shooting, January 18 and 24, 1991, according to call sheets that she kept afterward. Her time on the set coincided with a visit from a reporter from the
New York Times
, and in a news feature about the historic Astoria Studios, Diane Ketcham observed, “Long Islanders don’t have to go to Hollywood to be in the pictures.” Ketcham cited a set dresser from Freeport and “Madeline Kahn, the actress and Hofstra graduate who was recently wearing a period costume with a hat that looked like a pizza pie.”
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As was usual for visitors to Allen’s sets, Ketcham was told nothing about the new movie, apart from the names of a few actors (“Mia Farrow, Jodie Foster, Madonna, Miss Kahn, John Malkovich and Lily Tomlin”). Looking at the décor, she guessed the movie must be set “in the late 1800’s in France,” but added, “That could not be confirmed. Trying to obtain information on an unfinished Woody Allen movie is like trying to obtain a casualty count from the Iraqis.” Ketcham would be one of very few witnesses to Madeline’s participation in
Shadows and Fog
, since the Bear Lady was cut from the finished film.