Madeline Kahn (21 page)

Shortly before leaving for London, Madeline began keeping the personal notebook in which she recorded her observations and experiences as part of her psychotherapy. She continued to write sporadically in the same spiral notebook for the next twenty years. Near the start, she wrote two pages of character analysis, a fascinating documentation of her approach to a role. Jenny was

trying to control situation—manipulate him into helping—You’re playing “the game of life” very unwillingly because you’re not suited for it—but gamely and with spirit as long as it must be done I’ll do it well—so it’s thrust + parry I go—When he seems to be getting the upper hand—gamely + gently try to get the ball back as best you can which is with
charm
—let them try to break you but treat them as school boys-will-be-boys and change the subject (saying excuse me, of course): All this put over great
fear
[and]
insecurity in self-abilities
and
deservance
[sic] of winning so when they start
breaking thru this rather fragile, unsteady defense system, oh the panic that it’s going to break down, all systems will start running amuck in just a few moments and not only will you revulse everyone around you, but you’ll ruin any chance of getting help as well.

And of the song “Simply Crazy,” she wrote:

A little girl—precocious—“
singing a song
”—testing and then reveling in her voice; + getting off on the sexy parts—her chance to pretend she’s a “woman”; One
would
sneak out at night to sing this (even as the character who is playing that she’s an adult) and, Jenny who can be 5 again when everyone loved her[.]

“To me,” Wilder says, “the beauty of Madeline’s performance was that she could sing English music hall and opera, plus do comedy and drama . . . all equally well. She could, occasionally, do comedy and drama at the same time.” Essentially, he wrote a part for her that would give him, many times over, the same kind of pleasure that he found on the set of
Blazing Saddles
when she sang “I’m Tired.”

Madeline’s onscreen chemistry with Wilder is stronger—and given more chance to develop—here than in
Young Frankenstein
, and we see the true measure of her trust in him. In a dressing-room scene, Jenny makes it as easy as possible for Sigi to seduce her, so that she can tell him how to help her. He finds her dressed in pantalettes and a corset, reclining on a chaise longue. When, despite herself, she can’t confide in him, he places a hand on her breast and massages it; as the scene continues, his hands roam, they kiss, and he undresses. It’s one of the most intimate scenes Madeline ever filmed. Wilder has said that as originally written, the physical seduction didn’t appear in the script, but that the scene fell flat without it. All the rest grew out of improvisation, and would serve only to enhance the widespread belief that Madeline and Wilder were lovers. Even now, Brooks insists that Wilder and Madeline must have been having an affair. “Gene, maybe he was just being brilliant,” he says when reminded that Wilder consistently denies any romantic involvement. “She was working for him, so why not be in love with her, for the time they were working together?” (Told of this, Wilder replied in an e-mail, “I never thought or was aware that anyone thought Madeline and I were lovers. It certainly wasn’t true.”)

Madeline never found a better onscreen vehicle for all of her talents at once. In the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby hailed her as “possibly
the funniest woman in films today.”
⁸⁶
Released at Christmas, just a year after
Young Frankenstein, Smarter Brother
received similarly appreciative reviews, and ranked twentieth on the list of top-grossing movies of 1975. That status was more than enough to win approval for Wilder’s next picture. His new career was officially launched.

This situation put him in the enviable position of weighing options: whether to spend two years directing a single movie, or to make several pictures in the same amount of time by working under other directors. When other people didn’t offer him good material, he’d write his own.
⁸⁷
Madeline, like most actors, didn’t have these options. She had to wait for the good scripts, and in-between times make a living with not-so-good scripts.

Neither good nor bad would come to her from Wilder. He didn’t write another part for her, and they never worked together again. In his next movie,
The World’s Greatest Lover
, he cast her friend Carol Kane as a naïve baker’s wife who fixates on Rudolph Valentino. The part, as he wrote it, would have been wrong for Madeline, whose sophistication we’d seen too often. She and Wilder both would have had to work too hard to persuade us that, for once, she was unworldly and innocent. An additional female lead would have unbalanced the picture, and Wilder didn’t write one. The leading roles for women in his subsequent writing and directing efforts went (understandably) to his wife, Gilda Radner. From an objective perspective, one can justify these choices easily, yet one wonders whether both Madeline’s
and
Wilder’s stars might have burned brighter if they’d explored further the creative partnership they’d barely begun. Madeline would learn this lesson again as the years went by: A colleague may love you as a person and admire you as a talent, but when it comes time to make a movie, if he’s an artist and a pro, chances are he’ll put the script ahead of friendship.

“Gene left me to
make
movies,” Brooks says, “and Madeline left me to
star
in movies. In my pictures, she was always one of many, never the star. Then she realized that you can’t star in something unless it’s really good. You need a good script.” It was a problem that would plague her for the rest of her movie career—beginning immediately.

Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood
(1976)

HER INCOME GREATLY IMPROVED, MADELINE UPGRADED, MOVING
from the apartment on East 73rd Street to a larger place at 975 Park Avenue. It was still, however, a rental, and when the building went co-op, she hesitated. New York City was in the midst of a fiscal crisis, making real estate investment riskier than usual. But Madeline was always “insecure, because of Paula,” Jef Kahn says. “She always felt like she was going to lose everything. She was conservative in her investments, always concerned whether she would make it, when her next job would happen.” Ultimately, Madeline decided to buy in, and the apartment would become “her sanctuary,” as Jef calls it. She furnished it with books and a piano, and not long afterward, her friend Gail Jacobs, a decorator, would help her create an ideally tranquil, gracious environment. At Jef’s home today, it’s easy to spot which pieces were once his sister’s. Madeline’s tastes were her own, and Gail understood them perfectly. Nobody but Madeline Kahn could have owned these things.

By the mid-1970s, Jef was living at Twin Oaks, an intentional community in Virginia. He was always welcome to visit Madeline’s home, and Paula visited her often, but on Park Avenue “There was
no
sense that there was a place for Paula!” Jef says. There was a guest room, but it was never designated as “Paula’s room,” or, for that matter, “Jef’s room.” “Paula could come and visit,” he says, “but that was about it. No, there was no sense of inclusiveness.” The purpose of the apartment was to shelter Madeline. By this time, she and Michael Karm had broken up, but the pattern she established with him would continue for the rest of her life: Boyfriends didn’t move in with her, and she didn’t move in with them. Jef approved of very few. “The one way you could bullshit her was to be in an intimate relationship with her. Then she was blinded,” he
says. “I saw a lot of men wanting the title of ‘I was Madeline Kahn’s boyfriend.’ It’s kind of a big mark on your bedpost. It’s a bragging right. And I think she would allow herself to be mistreated—to a point.” Madeline deserved better, but “[n]obody could” convince her of that, Gail Jacobs agrees.

Jef speculates about his sister’s psychology. Doubtful of Paula’s love, Madeline sought approval from the public, but that didn’t satisfy her. She sought approval in intimate relationships, yet even then “you don’t think you’re really worthy of it, because from the start, you never got it from your mom,” Jef says. These are tough words from a man who shared that mother, but in Madeline’s case, there also were doubts about the love of two fathers and her sense that their emotional distance was her fault. The adults in Madeline’s early life didn’t just provide her with bad examples (conflict, divorce), and they didn’t merely abandon her physically. In trying to construct a satisfying emotional life, she had no models and many deep wounds. Madeline spent the next few years developing crushes on her co-stars. Sometimes her feelings were reciprocated, sometimes not. She entered into relationships with “civilians” that, for various reasons, didn’t last. With one exception, her love affairs didn’t affect her work in any significant way—but that exception contributed to her early departure from the musical
On the Twentieth Century
(1978), the most painful episode of her career.

While Mel Brooks’s analysis isn’t entirely accurate—Madeline didn’t exactly “leave him to become a star”—she did sign up for other directors’ movies, in which the spotlight might be focused more narrowly on her. Star status meant more money, of course, but for her as an actor, it could also mean better roles and perhaps the chance to venture beyond comedy. Her next movie met only one of her goals. She was the star, certainly, yet she was also “one among many”—more than ever before.
Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood
was yet another broad comedy, but one with virtually no laughs. She’d have been better off working with Brooks in his next picture,
Silent Movie
(also 1976), but he thought the woman’s role was too insignificant for her, and he hired Bernadette Peters instead.

A satire of moviemaking in the 1920s,
Won Ton Ton
concerns a canine star that resembles Rin Tin Tin. Madeline plays Estie Del Ruth, an aspiring actress whose career is stymied because the dog in question will perform only at her command. Her co-star Bruce Dern has written that the script seemed like “the funniest thing I ever read,”
⁸⁸
and the talent
assembled for the production included two reliably funny second bananas, Teri Garr and Art Carney; a reputable director, Michael Winner (
Death Wish
); and dozens of cameos by intriguing old-time stars, from Joan Blondell and Ann Miller to William Demarest and Johnny Weissmuller.
Won Ton Ton
may have promised to be an all-talking, no-dancing update on
Singin’ in the Rain
(1952, still the best comedy about Hollywood), but the picture bombed. It deserved to. From Madeline’s shrill Estie to Ron Leibman’s shriller, cross-dressing burlesque of Rudolph Valentino, the lead characters are shallow, unsympathetic, and often offensive. In
Singin’ in the Rain
terms, it’s as if all of them are Lina Lamont—without the redeeming characteristics. The Hollywood legends, including several in their final film appearances, are poorly used, and most cameo turns are so brief the viewer has little time even to identify the actor. This insensitive treatment is particularly painful because Blondell gave the acting performance of her career just one year later, in Cassavetes’s
Opening Night
. Who knows what the veteran stars might have done, given a chance?

Won Ton Ton
depends in some measure on the audience’s knowledge or appreciation of old movies. Dubious though the pleasures are in recognizing the stars, the exercise is even less fun if one doesn’t know them at all. The script, by Arnold Schulman and Cy Howard, grows out of (relatively) little-known history. As the novelty of movies wore off, Hollywood floundered until Rin Tin Tin sailed into town in 1922, on a tide that raised all boats. Leibman’s character finds its origins in speculation about Valentino’s sexuality (largely confirmed by later research), which movie buffs engaged in while the actor was alive. But there’s a difference between gossiping about Valentino’s “pink powder-puff” proclivities and watching the hysterical, effeminate character in
Won Ton Ton
. Leibman’s performance is painful.
⁸⁹