Madeline Kahn (11 page)

It seems strange to those who came later, but as the 1970s began, Madeline was best known as a talk-show guest, certified as such in a
January 14, 1970
New York Times
feature on women and comedy. Identifying “a new breed of funny girl,” who “can be both funny and feminine at the same time,” the article presents brief interviews with five performers.
¹
It’s a distinguished group that includes Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Fannie Flagg, and Jo Anne Worley, Tomlin’s co-star on
Laugh-In
at the time. When the article ran, Madeline was the least famous of the lot.

“Madeline Kahn is curvaceous and red-haired, and looks as though she should be entering beauty contests instead of making people laugh,” reporter Judy Klemesrud writes. She goes on to focus not on Madeline’s work, but on her marriage prospects: “I think that the fact that I’m funny scares a lot of men,” Madeline said. Noting that she still lived with her mother in Queens, Klemesrud concludes, “She said she might consider marriage if she met a man with a sense of humor. ‘It would be like being in jail otherwise,’ she added.” Madeline says nothing about recently having dated two comedians, Jim Catusi and Robert Klein, without any thought of marrying either. And there’s scarcely a word to suggest that, for the preceding five years, music had been more important to Madeline’s livelihood. The only professional engagement mentioned is an appearance on
The Merv Griffin Show
. Television exposure seems to have been the criterion for inclusion in the article, and Madeline couldn’t compete with
Laugh-In
—not yet.

La Bohème
(1970)

BECAUSE OF
CANDIDE
, MADELINE HAD WON A LIFELONG ADMIRER IN
conductor Maurice Peress, who engaged her to sing Musetta in Puccini’s
La Bohème
at the Washington Opera Society, the forerunner of today’s Washington National Opera. Three performances (March 6, 8, and 11, 1970), marked the beginning and end of her professional career in opera.

Baritone Alan Titus sang the role of her lover, Marcello. He would later win acclaim at New York City Opera and, in Europe, as Wagner’s Wotan. In talking with him, Madeline framed
Bohème
as an experiment. She would see whether her mother’s ambitions for her had any merit, whether critics and audiences would approve, whether her voice was sufficiently “operatic.” Yet what he remembers most is her approach to the comedy in the role of Musetta: “It seemed to me that she puzzled over her ability to make people laugh and was trying to become more conscious about how she said things, i.e., her ‘delivery.’”

Because Puccini worked out most of the delivery in advance (in 1896, in fact), Musetta would have been an ideal vehicle for Madeline as an actor, and any enterprising soprano can learn to work an audience simply by performing the role. A wily flirt, Musetta has already broken Marcello’s heart when we first see her in act 2, but she wins him back with a song. It’s foolproof comedy. In act 3, the lovers quarrel and break up (again comically). In the final act, they’re reunited at the deathbed of their friend, Mimì. Madeline and Titus made a charming, thoroughly credible pair, and at the time, Titus’s wife believed they were having an affair. (Later, this sort of suspicion would become a leitmotiv for partners of Madeline’s co-stars.) “I don’t think there’s ever been a Musetta like this,” Peress says. “Every opera singer should study the way she used the stage. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.” While praising her comedy
in act 2, he singles out “the pathos of the final scene”: “That was a great event.”

Musically, however, Puccini’s score seems heavier than Madeline’s light, lyric instrument could handle with ease. She had the range, certainly, but did she have the sheer muscle to project Musetta’s lines in an opera house, or to hold her own alongside professionals? Titus and Peress approved, but according to Paul Hume, critic of the
Washington Post
, Madeline “turned out more than her share of educated shrieks in a role that is supposed to be sung quite as much as Mimì.”
²
Although Musetta’s aria “Quando m’en vo” had been Madeline’s audition piece at Green Mansions, she never sang it in public after the curtain fell on
Bohème
. For her, the musical high point of the opera was the opening-night party, when she got to sing jazz with Peress’s friend Duke Ellington on piano.

Later, during a broadcast of
Live from the Met
, Madeline recalled her performances as Musetta as “utterly terrifying,” and she explained that, as far as an opera career went, “The muse was definitely
not
in attendance.”
³
At other times, she was more philosophical: “I think I had the raw material for an operatic career, but I really don’t regret it,” she told a reporter. “Being an opera singer is like being an athlete; you have to stay in training all the time.”
⁴

Over the years, she did have other prospects for operatic engagement. She auditioned several times for Bernstein for a 1973 television production of his
Trouble in Tahiti
. A few years later, she entered into serious talks with Julius Rudel about a premiere at New York City Opera, though in 2009 he didn’t remember the work in question. In the 1980s, Madeline looked seriously at Offenbach’s
The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein
, and the composer Thomas Pasatieri pitched the idea of Madeline in a new production of Offenbach’s
La Périchole
to Beverly Sills (by then Rudel’s successor at NYCO). There was even the possibility of reprising the role of Musetta in 1981 in Santa Fe.

With the exception of
Trouble in Tahiti
, Madeline didn’t pursue these opportunities with much enthusiasm or confidence, and impresarios seldom pursued her. Sills told Pasatieri she considered Madeline’s voice “too small” for the New York State Theater, the company’s home at Lincoln Center, though Peress scoffs, “If she could be heard in that awful place called Avery Fisher, she could be heard in the State Theater.” Several years after
Bohème
, Peress worked with Madeline in Kansas City in a hall he describes as “a barn, a football field, it’s horrible. And she could be heard there.”

At the Metropolitan Opera, conductor James Levine was a fan of Madeline. Soprano Teresa Stratas recalls him “flying through the air” to greet Madeline when she came backstage. Madeline might have made a terrific Adele in
Die Fledermaus
at the Met in the 1980s, in a production featuring Dom DeLuise as Frosch and Robert Klein’s wife at the time, mezzo Brenda Boozer, as Orlofsky. Klein believes Madeline could have excelled; her singing “was not living-room bullshit,” he says. Peress speculates that Madeline, “a total theater person,” could have had “a Callas-like, go-for-broke career, where she’d be the great actress–singer, in that order.” But, he adds, Madeline would have needed the right roles. To exercise control over her repertory, “You’d need money like Onassis.”

Several associates say Madeline determined that in opera she would fall inevitably short of her own high standards. Her last voice teacher, Marlena Malas, says that, “in her kooky, wonderful way, I could see her experimenting” with leading roles such as Gilda in
Rigoletto
and Lakmé, but both Malas and Madeline preferred to focus on lighter fare. While Matthew Epstein, an unrivaled guide for singers, believes Madeline might have found a berth in Mozart and operetta, Pasatieri disagrees—to a point. The composer used to play and sing through the score of Strauss’s
Salome
with her, for example, in addition to attending her public performances. “Her voice was a coloratura,” Pasatieri says, “but it was not what one would consider a first-class instrument, and she would not have made a first-class career as an opera singer. Her dramatic [and] comedic talent was so great that her path as a Broadway and film star was evident.”

Yet Madeline’s turn away from the opera house was largely the result of circumstance, dictated more by other people’s casting choices and by her need for income than by her own predilections. This state of affairs naturally led to uncertainty, especially in the early years of her career, and Pasatieri remembers that she returned from shooting
Paper Moon
with souvenirs of the film, “as if she thought she’d never be asked to do another movie.”

Comedy Tonight
(1970)

FOR MADELINE,
COMEDY TONIGHT
, A SKETCH-VARIETY SHOW ALONG
the lines of NBC’s
Laugh-In
, marked a number of auspicious reunions and first encounters. Robert Klein, the show’s star, invited her to join a cast that included Judy Graubart, as well as a recent graduate of Second City, Peter Boyle, with whom Madeline had never worked. Staff writer Thomas Meehan had just wrapped
Annie: The Women in the Life of a Man
, the first of many projects with Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and producer Joe Cates worked closely with lyricist Martin Charnin. Referring to the old Sid Caesar show, Klein calls Madeline “my Imogene Coca—except she’s much prettier.”

An early salvo in CBS programming executives’ “rural purge,” a shift away from countrified programs toward more urbane fare,
Comedy Tonight
was a summer replacement for
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour
. It resembled
Laugh-In
in many ways: the grouping of sketches by theme, blackouts, topical humor, songs, monologues, and unusual guest stars (baritone Robert Merrill, novelist Jacqueline Susann). Although satirical targets included Washington politicians, Madison Avenue, the military, and hippies, the writers steered clear of the kinds of material that had gotten the Smothers Brothers into trouble with CBS the previous year. The show was videotaped and employed a laugh track rather than a live studio audience, a challenge for a stand-up comic and a cast of nightclub and stage performers.

Madeline generally took part in sketches featuring the entire cast, but she did sometimes get the spotlight. In one “Man Against . . .” segment about parents and children (August 23), she played the domineering mother of a comic-book superhero, played by Boyle.
⁵
For Klein, Madeline’s most memorable sketch was “Oh, When Times Were Bad in
Vienna” (August 2), another Weill-flavored song. Madeline threw her leg up on a table and shrieked, “Garbage! We ate garbage!” “I died, even in rehearsal,” Klein says. “You can’t buy that, and you can’t write that. She was the kind of performer—there are a few out there, all virtuosos—they can give you invaluable laughs that were never written, that they can find by instinct.”

Unfortunately, Klein says, “All the tapes to the ’70s shows drowned in Joe Cates’ basement.” The connections Madeline made and remade on the show would prove far more enduring, with almost immediate rewards.

Two by Two
(1970–71)

BAD LUCK IN A BROADWAY MUSICAL MAY COME IN MANY FORMS. YOU
may get fired on the road, as Madeline did in
How Now
. Your show may fold after just a few weeks, as
New Faces
did. Or you may get cast in a show written by America’s most popular theater composer, starring one of the country’s most beloved entertainers, and wind up running for a long, long year.

No question, getting cast in
Two by Two
was an honor, giving Madeline the opportunity to work with a score by Richard Rodgers and with a superstar, Danny Kaye, in the lead. Advance ticket sales were impressive, and the show, a retelling of the story of Noah’s Ark, promised fun for audiences. Peter Stone’s book, based on Clifford Odets’s play,
The Flowering Peach
, found new relevance in the Bible story, with its generation gap and fears of global annihilation. A resemblance to
Fiddler on the Roof
, which was still running on Broadway, boded well. Like
Fiddler, Two by Two
is a heartwarming family story based on Jewish traditions, concerned with the pairing off of three children (one of whom marries a Gentile), and featuring a father who frequently stops to address God—though in
Two by Two
, God answers. There might be fun, too, for the cast of eight, which performed a pantomime during the title number to illustrate how the animals boarded the ark—constructed by the actors themselves during the earlier scenes of the play. Images projected on screens upstage showed the animals, as well as visual clues to messages from God that only Noah hears.

After Noah himself, Goldie is the funniest character, and Madeline got big laughs at every performance. Even her first costume, a clingy golden gown with an elaborate hairdo, was an attention-grabber.
⁶
Goldie is an
outsider, a celebrant from the pagan Temple of the Golden Ram. She wanders in to see whether the crazy rumors about an ark are true, and Noah and his wife, Esther (Joan Copeland), immediately size her up as a prospect for their youngest son, Japheth (Walter Willison). Marriage isn’t what Goldie has in mind, but during the flood, she and middle son Ham (Michael Karm), who’s already married, fall in love. When he touches her at last, Goldie exults in song, using the only frame of reference she knows: an invitation to the pleasures of “The Golden Ram.”

That number was Madeline’s ticket to the show. According to Charnin, he and Rodgers had already sketched the song when auditions began, but they weren’t sure they could find an actress who could handle the challenging vocal line they had in mind. Willison, already cast by then, remembers that they saw Bernadette Peters and “all the cute girls of the time.” Having seen
Comedy Tonight
, Charnin knew Madeline was funny; having heard
Candide
, Rodgers knew what her voice was capable of. They hired her and finished the song. The result may not be quite the tour-de-force that “Glitter and Be Gay” is, but it’s a coloratura extravaganza—a classic Rodgers waltz, lopsided. Rodgers was handing Madeline a valuable prize, and she was ready to run with it—a little too far, she discovered, when she eagerly played for him the cadenzas and ornaments she’d written for the song. Rodgers was deeply offended; she in turn was mortified. Thereafter, she sang the aria precisely as he’d written it, which was, after all, what he’d hired her to do.