Madeline Kahn (42 page)

Avonlea
(1991),
For Richer, for Poorer
and
Lucky Luke
(1992), and
Monkey House
(1993)

DESPITE HER EAGERNESS TO WORK, MADELINE CONTINUED TO BELIEVE
that accepting guest roles on American television series would limit her appeal. In hindsight, she was probably wrong. A few select appearances on better shows would have afforded her big audiences and the luxury of good writing, benefits she reaped in few other projects at the time. High-quality programs like
Cheers, Murphy Brown, Evening Shade
(Burt Reynolds’s gently quirky sitcom, which was a playground for good actors), or any of the thriving Carsey-Werner shows, represent missed opportunities for Madeline, casualties of her professional judgment. Yet she did sometimes bend her rule for TV movies and for international productions, and in the early ’90s, she signed on for four relatively quick gigs, all of which treated her as a “very special guest star.”

Her first stop was Ontario, for an episode of the CBC series
Road to Avonlea
(or simply
Avonlea
, as the Disney Channel called it). Based on the work of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the series grew out of a beautifully crafted television movie, adapted from
Anne of Green Gables
(1985). While Anne is something of a national heroine, audiences far beyond the Canadian border also embraced the show. A slew of awards followed, as did a boom in Montgomery’s book sales, three more films about Anne’s adventures, and
Road to Avonlea
, which is based on Montgomery’s many other stories about Anne’s fictional home on Prince Edward Island. Produced 1990–96, the series skewed to younger audiences and at the start featured the child actor Sarah Polley. Polley plays Sara, a wealthy girl from Montreal who, after her mother’s death, moves to live with her maternal aunts in Avonlea, where she becomes involved in the lives of the townspeople. In Madeline’s episode, another relative returns to town
after a long absence: Sara’s cousin, the celebrated actress Pigeon Plumtree, whose beauty, fame, and selfishness soon create trouble, derailing the wedding engagement of a farmer who’s besotted with her. At last, a word from Sara makes the fundamentally good-hearted Pigeon see the error of her ways, and together they steer the farmer back to his fiancée.

Madeline obviously relished Pigeon’s comically grand manner, and there’s the added interest of seeing her work with young Polley (now an acclaimed filmmaker), revealing not merely comfort, but complicity with a child actor. Montgomery’s stories depict young heroines who are intelligent and unafraid to speak their minds. These traits resonate for innumerable women and girls—Madeline included—and they account for the enduring popularity of Montgomery’s books and their television adaptations, long after other fiction from the period has been forgotten. While
Avonlea
didn’t maintain the extraordinarily high level of quality shown in the first films, Madeline’s elegant costumes are unquestionably becoming, and the script, while simple, is great fun. Polley somewhat resembles the young Eliza Kahn, and you can almost see Madeline thinking, “Won’t Eliza enjoy watching this!”

A more demanding, decidedly less glamorous role in the made-for-TV movie
For Richer, for Poorer
(HBO) found Madeline playing a homeless woman opposite Jack Lemmon. Just working with Lemmon was a good omen. A popular and gifted actor, he was also a generous co-star with a track record of making his onscreen partners look good. Writer Stan Daniels and director Jay Sandrich both made important contributions to
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, and both had connections to
Oh Madeline
’s producers, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner. Something of an urban fairy tale,
For Richer, for Poorer
wants to be a comedy, though it contains few jokes. Lemmon’s self-made millionaire grows weary of his son’s insouciant indolence, and in response, sells his business and gives away his money. When even that doesn’t spur the son to act, Lemmon is left with nothing. He contemplates suicide, but Billie (Madeline) talks him out of it. As he relates his story to her, we see it acted in flashbacks, with Talia Shire as his wife, Joanna Gleason as his mistress, and Jonathan Silverman as his son.
⁵

Weather-beaten and suntanned, wearing a battered hat and a man’s jacket and trousers, Madeline’s character, Billie, is nevertheless romanticized. “Madeline didn’t want to be dirty, she didn’t want to be messy,” explains Carol J. Bawer, who was on the
For Richer
set, where her mother, an extra, played another homeless woman. Madeline “wanted to have some class,” Bawer says. “She wanted to portray [Billie] as someone who
was confident in herself and not giving up. She didn’t want to come across as a victim or as
less
because of her situation.” It was an unfortunate marriage of armchair liberal sensibilities and her persistent desire to look pretty, and on location in Los Angeles, Bawer says, Madeline realized that the real homeless nearby didn’t resemble Billie. In a review, the
Los Angeles Times
described Madeline’s performance as “the most fatal element . . . [a] straight-outta-Hollywood street person.”
⁶
But Daniels’s script is hardly blameless. Billie is merely a device in service to the main character, existing only to help him get his life back on track. She functions much as a psychoanalyst—or a fairy godmother—might. But she gets off a few good lines, and even in 1992, long before HBO earned its reputation for prestige vehicles,
For Richer, for Poorer
helped to elevate Madeline’s profile, exactly as she hoped. The cover of the
New York Times
television magazine for that week shows Lemmon with a
very
unglamorous Madeline. She sent a copy to Paula and wrote across the top of the cover page, “Ma—A cover girl at last.”

Madeline next returned to Santa Fe to work in Terence Hill’s short-lived television series,
Lucky Luke
. Adapted from the comic books by the Belgian artist Maurice de Bevere (under the nom de plume Morris) and the superlative French writer René Goscinny,
Lucky Luke
—an affectionate lampoon of American cowboy movies—depicts the adventures of a laconic sheriff in a small western town. In the episode “Midsummer in Daisy Town,” Madeline plays Esperanza, a Gypsy fortuneteller whose love potion actually works—much to her surprise. A Shakespeare-themed farce ensues, and soon Luke (Hill); his romance-starved girlfriend, Lotta, the saloon keeper (Nancy Morgan); Betty Lou, a shy seamstress (Julie Hagerty); Luke’s arch-nemeses, the four Dalton Brothers; and even Luke’s horse, Jolly Jumper (voiced by songwriter Roger Miller), fall under the potion’s spell. The mismatched lovers flee to the forest, where Luke manages to sort out the mess.

A veteran of spaghetti Westerns, the Italian-born Hill saw
Lucky Luke
as an opportunity to capitalize on his fame while providing work for his son, who would have played Billy the Kid but who died before production began. Only eight episodes were shot (in English, then dubbed into Italian), and Hill insisted on filming at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, near Santa Fe, rather than in Spain, as his European backers proposed.
⁷
The prospect of returning to a place she loved and spending time with Ginny Kahn—and getting paid for it—appealed to Madeline, and she thoroughly enjoyed herself. She plays Esperanza with a parrot on her shoulder, a bangle on her forehead, and a purposefully vague Mittel-European
accent on her lips. She was working with an Italian crew, and it comes as no surprise when she starts singing an Italian aria. “Midsummer in Daisy Town” reunited her with Ron Carey, who plays Joe Dalton, and in her scenes with Hagerty, Esperanza’s cynicism plays in perfect counterpoint to Betty Lou’s glorious naïveté. Their work promises the birth of a terrific comic team, and indeed, the characters ride off together at the end of the episode. Although Madeline and Hagerty would co-star in
London Suite
in 1996, they share no scenes in that TV film, and this was as much of their partnership as we’ll ever get.

In 1993, Madeline appeared in one episode, “More Stately Mansions,” of the Canadian TV series
Welcome to the Monkey House
, based on an eponymous collection of Kurt Vonnegut short stories. Madeline’s experience in the show redeemed the disaster of
Slapstick
in many ways. Vonnegut served as host for the series, and he praised Madeline as “a superb actress” who “added touches . . . [that] made the character come totally alive. I’m honored that actors and actresses of that degree of talent can respond to my material.”
⁸
At the helm of “More Stately Mansions” was Brad Turner, who had recently directed three episodes of
The Ray Bradbury Theater
and one episode of
The Twilight Zone
, good preparation for the tricky material in “More Stately Mansions.” Madeline plays Grace Anderson, a woman with exquisite taste and boundless enthusiasm for redecorating; her neighbors are surprised to find that she and her husband (Stuart Margolin) have lived in squalor since he lost a fortune in the stock market. Grace falls ill, and while she’s in the hospital, her husband inherits money, which he uses to create the home of her dreams. But when she returns, she reacts in ways that nobody anticipated—more O. Henry than Rod Serling, perhaps, but close enough.

Madeline gives an unusually physical performance, dancing across rooms as she describes the beautiful objects she wants to place in them, and her careful diction and always musical speech give viewers reason to believe, as the neighbors do, that Grace must be a wealthy aristocrat. As the episode continues, however, it becomes clear that decoration isn’t a hobby, it’s an obsession, and Grace is something close to a nutcase. Yet Madeline plays the role subtly, as Grace’s delicacy turns brittle, then cracks. Margolin (best remembered from
The Rockford Files
) underplays beautifully. A small gem, “More Stately Mansions” exemplifies the kinds of opportunities Madeline sacrificed to her determination to avoid becoming a too-familiar presence on television.

Hello, Dolly!
(1992)

IN FEBRUARY, 1992, MADELINE PARTICIPATED IN A READING OF A NEW
play by Wendy Wasserstein at Lincoln Center Theater, and everyone from the playwright to Paula Kahn urged her to sign on for the production, slated to open in the fall. True to form, on May 13, 1992, Madeline committed to a short-term theatrical engagement to make sure she was ready for the more prominent gig. Jerry Herman’s
Hello, Dolly!
would be her last fully staged musical comedy, and at first glance it may look like a fool’s errand: a three-city tour of enormous outdoor theaters in the summer heat, with limited rehearsal time, in an iconic role written not for lyric soprano but for Broadway belter. Madeline hadn’t appeared in a musical since
Amerika
, a decade earlier, and though she’d done summer stock, those engagements didn’t require touring; only for
Born Yesterday
had she embarked on a multi-city, quick-stop tour. She told friends that she signed up for
Hello, Dolly!
precisely because it meant a new experience for her—even as she told her director, Lee Roy Reams, that she took the job for the money. Paula was yet again racking up bills.

“
Hello, Dolly!
is an old warhorse, but I had never seen it, so I came with no preconceptions,” Madeline told
Theater Week
in 1993. She returned to the source play, Thornton Wilder’s
The Matchmaker
, basing her interpretation on those of Ruth Gordon and Shirley Booth, rather than on “all those musical ladies, some of whom camped it up. I treated it as a regular straight role, with music added.”
⁹
She went so far as to ask John Hansbury, a practicing attorney, to introduce her to some of his clients from Yonkers, so that she could get the right accent (for example, referring to Ephraim Levi not as “my husband” but as “m’husband”). Only after watching Booth in
The Matchmaker
did she begin work on the songs.

Madeline and John Schuck, a versatile character actor, had already been cast when producer Chris Manos hired Reams, whose credentials were impeccable. Reams had worked with the original Dolly, Carol Channing, first in
Lorelei
, in 1974, then again in her first Broadway revival of
Dolly
, in 1978. The
next
time Channing played Dolly on Broadway, in 1995, Reams himself directed her. By the time he met Madeline, Reams had also directed the French premiere of
Dolly
. And in 1980, he’d starred in
42nd Street
, working with director Gower Champion, producer David Merrick, and book writer Michael Stewart (all three had performed the same duties in the original
Dolly
).

The week of June 1, Reams and composer Jerry Herman met Madeline for the first time, at Herman’s townhouse in Manhattan. “Jerry was very excited, because she had all the necessary skills and was also really a singer,” Reams remembers. When she walked in, he was struck by her “mass of thick red curly hair” and her “classic-looking face,” which he knew would read well onstage. “She was charming, and we hit it off.” But at the outset, Madeline announced, “You know of course I’m little and I’m not Carol Channing.” “Nor would anybody want you to be Carol Channing,” Reams replied. Pointing out that “Ruth Gordon was even littler,” he said, “Dolly is big on the inside.”

Reams began to outline the character in terms that appealed to Madeline. Dolly Gallagher was Irish and probably worked in a factory when she met Ephraim Levi, a merchant with an outgoing personality. Because he gave his customers credit, he left her with outstanding bills when he died. As a woman in turn-of-the-century New York, Dolly had few options and “did whatever she had to do to make a buck,” as the opening number, “Call on Dolly,” reveals. “At this point,” Reams says, “she’s getting older, and she’s tired of living hand-to-mouth. She had to sell her husband’s business, because she couldn’t keep it. Basically, she was probably this shy Irish girl, but she adopted the ways of her husband to survive.” Just four months away from her fiftieth birthday, Madeline heard echoes of her own story—and Paula’s—in Dolly’s, as well as currents of seriousness she found essential to establishing the “truth” of her characters. However, Reams warned her, with only ten days to rehearse, there wouldn’t be time for “a lot of discussions to find things.”