Madeline Kahn (2 page)

48. Idle Tongues:
New York News, Saturday Night Live, For Love Alone
, and
London Suite
(1995–96)

49. Do You Love Me, Pauline?:
Cosby
(1996–99)

50. Enlightenment in the Dark:
Judy Berlin
(1999)

51. Loving Madeline

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Stage, Screen, and Television Roles and Recordings

Index

MADELINE KAHN

“ARE YOU LEAVING BECAUSE I’M UGLY?” AS AN ADULT, MADELINE KAHN
couldn’t remember whether she had measles or chicken pox or mumps the night her father walked out. All she knew was that her daddy was leaving, that she was “ugly,” and that these things must be linked. That her parents’ breakup might have nothing to do with her—and quite a lot to do with her mother—didn’t occur to a little girl not yet three years old. She never fully came to terms with what happened that night, and she shared the story with very few friends.

Little Madeline would grow up to be one of the top comic actresses of her generation, so much a fixture in American popular culture that it’s hard for some to grasp that she’s gone. A decade after her death, one of her colleagues asked whether I’d spoken to her recently, and asked that I give Madi her love. Though Madeline’s professional career spanned thirty-five years on film, stage, and television, her enduring reputation rests almost exclusively on a few movies, particularly
What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Blazing Saddles
, and
Young Frankenstein
, all released between 1972 and 1974. They earned her two consecutive Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress and, especially among college boys, a pin-up status she loathed. She was nothing like the bawdy characters she played in Mel Brooks’s movies, she complained, and she worried that fans who approached her would be disappointed to discover the reserved, refined, and intensely private woman she really was.

More than funny, she was (most of the time) a highly disciplined professional. She earned a degree in speech therapy from Hofstra University and sought work as a teacher, but as she took on ever-greater responsibility for her erratic, extravagant mother, she recognized the importance of money. She quickly learned that show business paid better than the
New York City schools could. A fiercely independent career woman, she nevertheless relied on two men, Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, for the roles that defined her, and without them she floundered. Gifted with shrewd intelligence and profound intuition, she seemed unsure of her talents. She was nobody’s fool—except when it came to her mother, who manipulated her in every area of her life. Madeline was a popular star who fretted that she’d never work again, and she nearly ended her career herself with her disastrous experience in
On the Twentieth Century
on Broadway in 1978. In the 1980s, as Bernadette Peters and Bette Midler eclipsed her on Broadway and in Hollywood, Madeline asked her brother to let her live on his farm in Virginia, so certain was she that her career was finished. Then, only a few years later, she staged an inspiring comeback and maintained a steady momentum that continued until her death.

There was never any real question of
not
working, but Madeline often took jobs she didn’t want, in projects that weren’t to her taste. Like many actors, she struggled with typecasting, beginning when she was still in college. Like many other comedians, she yearned to play dramatic roles that, with rare exceptions, simply weren’t forthcoming. The challenge, then, was to find the drama in comedy, to take seriously the most ludicrous characters and situations. Yet Madeline never fully emerged from the pigeonholes in which others placed her. At various points and to various people, she was
just
a comedian,
just
a singer,
just
a TV personality,
just
a movie star,
just
a character actor—presumptions that had important consequences for the roles she was offered and the working relationships she established.

Her career led her to work with some of the most important creative talents of her time: from Jerry Lewis to Bill Cosby, from Carol Burnett to Lily Tomlin, from Neil Simon to Charles Ludlam, from Leonard Bernstein to the Muppets. While the vast majority of her collaborators liked and admired her, she clashed with others, notably Danny Kaye, Harold Prince, and Lucille Ball. Her own anxieties succeeded in alienating some colleagues as well as directors such as Peter Bogdanovich and even, briefly, Gene Wilder. Tensions sometimes arose because of her habit of developing crushes (several of them reciprocal) on her leading men. But starting with the moment her father walked out, she remained wary of men and insecure about her looks, with ramifications for her professional as well as her personal life. After her parents divorced, her mother married and divorced once more, and her father married, divorced, and married again. For the rest of Madeline’s adult life, she would maintain a
doubtful opposition to marriage in general. Though she had several long-term boyfriends, she never lived with any of them, preferring to preserve her independence. Only in 1999, weeks before her death from ovarian cancer, did she marry the man she’d dated for the previous decade, John Hansbury.

Madeline had scant interest in sharing her life story, and she’d have fought to stop anyone else from publishing it. What mattered most to her was that she be taken seriously as an artist. When one does so, one returns, again and again, to the importance of music in her work. Inherited from both parents, her musical aptitude was first developed by her mother, a piano teacher and aspiring opera singer. Thus Madeline’s gifts carried a significant liability: They were associated with a fraught relationship and with childhood memories of her mother pushing her to perform for friends and neighbors. Writing in her private notebook, Madeline described the way she learned to sing as “
not
to find ‘my’ voice,” but based instead on “fear of retaliation.”
¹
A fundamental discomfort remained with her all her life despite her talent and success.

Because Madeline filmed only a few musicals, and sang only isolated snippets in other movies (including
Young Frankenstein
and
Clue
), movie audiences may not realize how central singing was to her rise as a performer. Yet Madeline owed all of her earliest opportunities and successes to her ability to sing, and it gave her an advantage at auditions. She landed a role in
Two by Two
, not least because the show’s composer and producer, Richard Rodgers, knew she could sing coloratura, whereas other actresses could not. Though she sang only one professional operatic engagement, in 1970, as late as the mid–1980s Madeline continued to consider invitations from American opera companies.

Even when she wasn’t singing, Madeline treated every script as if it were a score. She interpreted words as notes, establishing rhythm, accents, tonal coloring—and of course tempo, wherein lay the secret of her comic timing, as Mel Brooks observes. Improvising with her, Bill Cosby says, was like playing jazz. Hearing her high-pitched, somewhat nasal speaking voice and careful diction, audiences might be inclined to laugh anyway, but she exerted a formidable control over the responses she got, even when she had no other control over the material she played or the directors and actors who surrounded her.

During a break in the filming of Marshall Brickman’s
Simon
(1980), Alan Arkin asked Madeline which of her many talents she considered her foremost. She was unable to answer him. “Well, what was the first thing you thought of doing?” he asked. “There had to be something.”

Again she tried to thread her way back to her childhood ambitions. “I used to listen to a lot of music.” She paused, trying to find the words for what she was thinking. “And that’s what I wanted to be,” she finally said.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

She answered, and it sounded as if she’d never formulated this thought before, as if it was news to herself.

“I wanted to be the music,” she said.
²

MADELINE GAIL WOLFSON WAS BORN SEPTEMBER 29, 1942, AT MEMORIAL
Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts, across the Mystic River from Boston. Her parents lived in nearby Revere at the time. Bernard P. Wolfson was twenty years old, and his wife, née Freda Goldberg, just eighteen. The couple had been married barely a year and had known each other only a little longer. Theirs wasn’t entirely a stereotypical whirlwind wartime romance, and Bernie didn’t join the US Army until after becoming a father. But a whirlwind it was—spurred on, no doubt, by a physical attraction that would have been strong, maybe irresistible, even if the world had not been at war. Both of Madeline’s parents were strikingly good-looking: Bernie was lean, dark, and brooding; Freda red-haired and voluptuous. She passed on to her daughter the “bone structure” about which Trixie Delight would boast in
Paper Moon
(1973).

Both Freda and Bernie were fashion plates (Bernie went on to work in the garment industry), and each had a good sense of humor. Their daughter grew up to reflect and appreciate these qualities. Above all, both Freda and Bernie loved music. Years later, Madeline vividly recalled playing the “Dance of the Hours” from Ponchielli’s opera
La Gioconda
, which she’d discovered through Disney’s
Fantasia
. “I suppose we all had one [moment] when we said, ‘Ooh, that’s what I want to do,’” she told the graduating class of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1989. “And my first moment was pre-speech—I could run and walk, but I couldn’t carry on a conversation.” Playing the record, “I just went ‘Aaow!’ you know, inside. And I wanted to play it again, hear that go again. It took me to that resting place, and then—Whoa! Fury! I just became
fevered
.” She described “[an] awareness that there is some kind of journey you can take, without going anywhere, which transports you, utterly. And the moment I became aware of that, I just was
forever different. From that point on, I wanted to sing and dance, and do things, or anything like that—
alone
. Not in front of
people
—utterly terrible idea.”
¹

Bernie was an amateur who sang purely for pleasure. Freda had studied voice, and for most of her long life, she harbored ambitions for a professional career as a performer. In both training and tone, Madeline’s voice was her mother’s. Even in old age, Freda sounded much like her famous daughter when she spoke—the same sweet timbre, the lilting inflections.

Seeing Madeline’s early affinity for music, Freda taught her to sing and play piano while she was still a toddler, and as late as the 1970s, she was still coaching her daughter. Among friends, Madeline made fun of her mother’s lessons. Some can still imitate the exaggerated facial expressions she used to produce vowel sounds, and Madeline’s younger brother remembers that his sister’s sparkling high notes were achieved by evoking those times when he forgot to empty the cat’s litter-box. Yet Freda’s lessons provided a solid foundation on which Madeline would build as an adult with the help of professional coaches, including Beverley Peck Johnson and Marlena Malas. In short, Freda must have done something right, and music remained an important bond between her and her daughter. Moreover, Madeline’s success using her mother’s techniques suggests that Freda herself might have succeeded, if only she’d worked as hard as her daughter did.

Freda spent the end of her life in a nursing home in Virginia. I spoke with her in 2008, when her senile dementia had set in. She demurred when I asked for a singing lesson, and she could tell me little of Madeline. Her memory was bad, she said. In any case, it was easier to forget many parts of her life. Freda was a less than perfect mother, and Bernie was only one of the men who abandoned her.

When her own mother, Rose, became an invalid sometime in the 1930s, Freda’s father, Samuel Goldberg, left the responsibility of her younger siblings (a sister, Mindy, and a brother, Ted) to Freda. Then, when Rose Goldberg died in 1945, Sam remarried. Pressured by his second wife (also named Rose), he quit his children altogether, and he stopped providing Freda with financial support, complaining that she only spent the money on singing lessons. With Bernie still deployed in the war, Freda was now saddled with the teenaged Ted, who was by his own account a hellion. (She did manage, though, to rope him into baby-sitting young Madeline). Furious with her father, Freda took Sam to court—and lost.

Around that time, not long after the end of the war, Bernie Wolfson came home. Almost immediately it became clear that he and Freda were incompatible. Bernie laid the blame for their divorce squarely on Freda’s ambition: She wanted to move to New York, whether he wanted to go or not. She spun the story her own way, suggesting that Bernie was a womanizer and that the divorce was his fault. For most of her life, Madeline believed Freda’s account. But Jeffrey Kahn, Freda’s son from her second marriage, was more skeptical. “It’s my impression that Mother was difficult, and that he was a very decent, nice guy,” he says. “It was my mother’s eccentricities and desire to pursue a career that tore things apart.”

Other family members interpreted the break-up differently. “Your dad came home from the Army and HE LEFT HER,” Madeline’s uncle Ted wrote to her many years later. Ted had waited until he graduated high school, in 1945, then lied about his age in order to join the army, using the birth certificate of a brother who’d died in infancy. “I just wanted to run away and that was the only [way] to get out. I didn’t think of Freda, either. I LEFT HER. Just now, as I wrote this paragraph, I fully realize the tragedy, pain and despair she must have been going through in just those short months. EVERYBODY in her family LEFT! At 22, a single mother with no money, no craft, and alone.”
²

Ted Barry, who changed his name shortly after the war, wrote that letter in 1998, as it became clear to Madeline and Jef Kahn that Freda was mentally unstable and incapable of caring for herself. When Madeline contacted her uncle, she’d heard only her mother’s side of the story. For decades Freda had done her utmost to keep her brother at odds with the rest of her family, and she went so far as to tell many people that Ted was in the Mafia, he remembered. The hard knocks Freda endured don’t altogether explain her behavior, especially her sense of entitlement, her unshakable belief that stardom was her destiny— one that didn’t require much actual effort on her part.