Madeline Kahn (6 page)

Much of her experience at Hofstra confirmed this last insight. The theater faculty made her feel “like an outcast,” she said. Another classmate, Charlotte Forbes, described the faculty as “very narrow-minded . . . whenever any real talent showed up, they shot it down.” Forbes told Ludlam’s biographer, David Kaufman, “[T]he theater department felt so threatened by Madeline Kahn that they literally threw her out. . . .”
¹⁵
The abrupt change from theater to music “was very painful, very difficult, and very interesting—I mean,
looking back
,” Madeline said. “Looking back, I can now say, ‘Well, thank you for that, because this was great training for the outside world.’”
¹⁶

In the evenings and on weekends, Madeline took jobs as a dirndl-decked singing waitress at German restaurants on Long Island. Summers, she lived and worked at the Bavarian Manor, a Catskills resort in Purling, New York. Looking back, she counted that gig among the dues she’d paid in a hard life (her words), though she kept her sense of humor. When dogs wandered into the performing area, they’d howl along with her singing, to the amusement of the customers. “I would conclude that there was something wonderful in the sound of my voice which set animals going,” she wrote years later.
¹⁷
Figuring that Kahn was too Jewish a name for such a setting, she adopted a stage name, Madeline Gail, for the only time in her career. Her sheet music dating from those days survives: lots of Friml and Romberg, with “Madi Gail” written in graceful cursive on each cover, and less dignified pencil markings inside.

“I sang musical-comedy numbers during show time, and
Student Prince
-type things,” she remembered in 1985, during an intermission feature of a television broadcast of Verdi’s
Aida
from the Metropolitan Opera. “There was a big important customer, an Italian man, and he shouted out, ‘Sing
Madame Butterfly
!’ And of course he didn’t mean the whole opera, he meant that one very popular aria—‘Un bel dì.’ So if I was to come back the next summer and earn more money to get through my next year [of college], I’d better come back knowing that aria. And I didn’t know anything about it. So I just learned that one aria, and a few others, and then one thing led to another. You know, I studied it, and I discovered I could sing that, sort of, that way.”
¹⁸

While Madeline never did possess the chutzpah to boast of her own talent in the middle of Leontyne Price’s farewell to the stage, this modest account doesn’t square with what we know about Freda’s training and ambition for her daughter. On occasion Madeline clarified: The discovery she made at the Bavarian Manor was the potential
size
of her voice. As she began studying with teachers other than her mother, she built on her skills in the opera club and got plenty of experience in light classical singing for a paying audience at restaurants. Whether this kind of music would do her any good was another question. The “British Invasion” was underway, Bob Dylan would soon inform America that “The Times, They Are A-Changing,” and already the Bavarian Manor’s repertory was dated. Romberg’s
The Student Prince
opened on Broadway in 1924, and even the Mario Lanza film version had debuted nearly a decade before Madi Gail began to warble “Deep in My Heart, Dear.”

Madeline graduated in 1964 with a degree in speech therapy and experience as a student teacher, as well as an impressive array of less “practical” credentials. She was a member of two theater groups—the Spectrum Players (of which she was secretary) and the Gadfly Players—and two singing groups, the Hofstra Singers and the Opera Workshop. Taking the Drama Achievement Award and the Music Achievement Award, she was also on the dean’s list. She had developed a taste for foreign films, and in one yearbook picture she bears a striking resemblance to the young Jeanne Moreau. Was that intentional? “I would never underestimate her,” Jef Kahn says with a laugh.

Green Mansions (1964) and Upstairs at the Downstairs (1965–66)

AT THE START, MADELINE’S TRAINING AT HOFSTRA HAD LITTLE DIRECT
impact on her performing career. She found her niche not in plays or in opera, but in cabaret and revues. Shortly after graduation, she got a job at Green Mansions, a theater colony founded in the 1930s by members of the Group Theatre near Warrensburg, New York. Still operating as an Adirondacks resort property, Green Mansions boasted a barn where young performers staged shows four nights a week. They were housed in conditions hardly distinguishable from those of a vacation camp. Green Mansions was more prestigious than the Bavarian Manor, though, and Madeline’s acting skills were more frequently called on here.

Arriving at the colony, she met the man who would become her most important musical adviser, after her mother: Michael Cohen. A little older than Madeline, he had already spent a summer at Green Mansions as rehearsal pianist and accompanist. The troupe was looking for opera singers, and from the moment she started her audition piece, Musetta’s waltz from
La Bohème
, Michael loved Madeline’s voice. Before the summer was out, he’d written “Vocalise for Soprano and Piano,” which was “dedicated to Miss Kahn.” They performed this piece at a classical concert, at which Madeline also sang Schubert’s coloratura Lied “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” and the aria “Steal Me, Sweet Thief” from Menotti’s
The Old Maid and the Thief
.

“We became fast friends because of the musical connections,” he says. “But then it turned out during all of our work sessions she was extremely funny, too.” Cohen recalls that not all their time was spent making music. Cast members met in the Green Mansions barn to work on improvisations almost every day, and as a result, Madeline’s status changed. “Miss Kahn was hired as the company opera singer, but she soon became
the company comedian,”
Newsday
noted in 1969.
¹⁹
Offstage, she could be prankish, Cohen says: “She used to burn my T-shirts ironing them—on purpose.”

Working closely with her on music, Cohen discovered that “Madeline always had a subtext when she sang. She had to know who this person was, why she was singing these notes and not some other notes, analyzing what she was singing. Especially if you take a song out of context, she would find something in it to make it relevant. She’d get the technical challenges out of the way first, then interpret.” Like Madeline, Cohen had been classically trained; he would go on to write operas and several music-theater pieces. He found Madeline’s approach an excellent match for his own.

When Green Mansions presented an evening of Kurt Weill songs (an appropriate choice, since Weill worked with the Group Theatre), Madeline and Michael came fully prepared. Like many New York liberals of their generation, both developed an early affinity for Weill’s music. The revival of his
Threepenny Opera
, starring his widow, Lotte Lenya, had opened at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village in 1954, and over its seven-year run pretty much established the concept of Off Broadway. A social satire by Bertolt Brecht,
Threepenny
seemed an oasis during the McCarthy era, and its cast included many blacklisted actors. Three decades after
Threepenny
’s premiere in Berlin, Weill’s German songs became rallying cries for members of a new liberal intelligentsia whose parents knew him only as the composer of “September Song.”

For Madeline, Michael Cohen composed “Das Chicago Song,” a parody pastiche of easily recognizable Weill themes from
Threepenny
and
Happy End
. Tony Geiss’s lyrics take particular aim at “Surabaya Johnny” and “Bilbao Song” as the singer recalls her affair with Max, who broke her heart and stole her lunch while they “tangoed the night away . . . in old Chicago, by the sea.” Rhapsodic recollections are punctuated by disgusted outbursts (“Ptui!”), and the song culminates in the plaintive cry, “Max, come back! You forgot your whip!”
²⁰

“Das Chicago Song” would be Madeline’s ticket to Broadway in 1968, and it was one of her audition numbers for Mel Brooks in 1973. She was still singing it in the 1990s. To listen to her imitation of Lenya is to confirm her claim that Marlene Dietrich wasn’t the only Weimar star she was mimicking in
Blazing Saddles
. Though the accents are different (Lenya was Viennese, Dietrich Berlinerin), the attitudes are comparable, and Brecht’s “alienation effect”—the sense that the performer is standing outside the drama—likewise informed Madeline’s work in Brooks’s
films. At the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Madeline said, “Everything I’ve ever done in the movies, I’ve drawn from my work on the stage, whether it has been in plays, or in opera, or concerts, or anything like that. Even
Blazing Saddles
, I based entirely on my knowledge of Kurt Weill, really, more than anything else. I mean, I looked at a Marlene Dietrich movie or two because Mel wanted me to. But really,
my
contribution had to do with
my
feelings about Kurt Weill.”
²¹

At the end of the summer, Madeline returned to live with her mother in Queens and took part-time jobs: temporary office work, babysitting, and singing three nights per week at a restaurant on Long Island. Gradually she earned enough money to afford a place of her own, an apartment on East 63rd Street in Manhattan, and she applied to the New York City school system for work as an elementary-school teacher of “speech improvement,” either full-time or as a substitute, putting her Hofstra degree to use. Her application, dated March 29, 1965, reveals intriguing details, including her omission of any mention of the Manumit School. Her decision was at least in part pragmatic, since Manumit had closed, and its records were destroyed. There was no way for anyone to check them, and that in itself might appear suspicious. Moreover, the application, very much a product of its time, required Madeline to state whether she’d ever been a member of the Socialist, Communist, or Fascist Party, and while little Madalin Wolfson wasn’t a card-carrying member of any political organization, Manumit did have a leftist reputation, as did Freda. Better to mention only P.S. 135. Beyond such considerations, however, the application proves that Madeline’s longtime reluctance to talk about Manumit had begun already.

She did refer in interviews throughout her life to her experience as a teacher. She filed her application for employment in the coming school year, 1965–66. Records don’t indicate further action, such as assignment to a particular school or employment either as a full-time or substitute teacher. She’d been a teacher’s aide at Van Buren High, and she did engage in student teaching as part of her course work at Hofstra, but her teaching career ended with her application. She had hardly submitted it to the board of education before she took off in a different direction altogether. As a young adult in the big city—but also as Freda’s daughter—Madeline craved independence, and she understood she’d need an income in order to get and keep it. Surprisingly, perhaps, she discovered that show business could provide steadier employment than teaching.

Shortly after applying to the board of education, Madeline auditioned for and won a spot in the chorus of a limited-run revival of Cole Porter’s
Kiss Me, Kate
, featuring the original star, Patricia Morison, under the aegis of the New York City Center Light Opera Company. This was an Equity production, making Madeline eligible for her union card and opening up new professional possibilities.
²²

One of these was a Manhattan cabaret, Upstairs at the Downstairs, where Michael Cohen was musical director. Recently relocated to a townhouse at 37 West 56th Street (the former home of department store magnate John Wannamaker), the club had begun at 51st Street and Sixth Avenue, where the success of the Downstairs Room led to expansion to the second floor, the first Upstairs at the Downstairs. While the golden age of nightclubs was drawing to a close, these venues still offered the promise of an almost unmatchable sophistication, and they proved a breeding ground for generations of talent: singers who breathed new life into pop standards, comedians who set the tone for American humor. Those who didn’t know already learned how to work an audience, how to put over a joke or a lyric, and how to hold a listener’s attention despite the distractions of clinking cocktails and handsome busboys. Producers, casting agents, and other performers regularly came by to check out new talent, and New York nightclubs could still provide a springboard to national attention via television (notably
The Ed Sullivan Show
). As Madeline told writer James Gavin, her hope was always that the Upstairs would lead to something bigger.
²³

Downstairs at the Upstairs generally featured solo acts, and when Madeline wasn’t working, she could hear performers like singer Mabel Mercer and comedian Joan Rivers. In the Upstairs room, Madeline and other young unknowns romped through a series of topical sketches and humorous songs, periodically updated and retitled. In the course of three revues—
Just for Openers, Mixed Doubles
, and
Below the Belt
—she worked with such soon-to-be-stars as Fannie Flagg (
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
), Betty Aberlin (
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
), Judy Graubart (
The Electric Company, Simon
), and Jenna Carter, who went on to achieve fame under her first name, Dixie, on TV’s
Designing Women
. For
Below the Belt
, Madeline recommended a young comic she’d recently seen, and thus Lily Tomlin was hired for her first gig in New York. Among the men in these shows, none became a household name, but it’s a measure of the talent pool at the time that the Upstairs managed to field superior performers despite low pay and a demanding schedule of two shows per night, six nights per week.