Madeline Kahn (3 page)

Freda’s unraveling in 1997–98 reminded both her children that many of her destructive attitudes had been present for a long, long time. This realization in turn prompted Madeline to reconsider her own past. She was overwhelmed by the evidence that her parents’ break-up had been more Freda’s fault than Bernie’s. If Freda had misled her about that, in what other ways had she been less than honest?

In his letter, Ted Barry neglected to mention that all those who abandoned Freda effectively abandoned Madeline as well. And not long after Bernie Wolfson walked out in 1945, Freda would abandon her, too.

Bernie Wolfson

FREDA WAS RIGHT ABOUT THIS MUCH: BERNIE WAS A LADIES’ MAN. HIS
niece, Gerri Bohn Gerson, remembers, “He was smart, he was very good-looking, he had a great sense of humor. Lots of women thought he was wonderful.” Robyn Wolfson, Bernie’s daughter from his second marriage, says, “He did like women, and women did like him, and he liked the attention. He was gorgeous; he had a great sense of humor.” And though Robyn, too, adores him still, she concedes, “My father could be difficult to live with.”

Lending credence to Freda’s depiction of events, Bernie remarried shortly after divorcing her and leaving the army. “He kind of disappointed Madeline,” says Gerson, “because I think she thought that he should come and save her.” Bernie and his second wife, Shirley Feinstein Wolfson, had Robyn in 1951. The family moved several times, with a long stay in Chicago. Only in 1959, when Madeline first came to visit them there, did Robyn learn she had a half-sister. Madeline was sixteen or seventeen. Robyn was eight.

When the Wolfsons returned to the Boston area a short time later, Gerson’s mother, Lilyan Wolfson Bohn (Bernie’s only sibling), and Shirley determined that Bernie needed to see more of Madeline. Bernie’s mother, Bertha, a powerful influence who doted on him, was indifferent to all her grandchildren and didn’t join the campaign to bring father and daughter together. Bernie’s father, Louis, avoided the discussion. But Bernie had a predilection for strong-willed women, and his wife’s and sister’s encouragement led to more frequent visits from Madeline. It had always suited Freda’s purposes to keep her daughter apart from the Wolfsons, but by now Madeline was old enough to travel by herself, and she made the trip to Boston many times.

In the long run the Wolfsons didn’t spend much time with Madeline, and yet they did influence her. Before and after Robyn’s birth, both Bernie and Shirley were traveling salespeople for garment companies, a line of work that lent itself to Bernie’s skills as a joke-teller and to Shirley’s desire to keep up an immaculate appearance and make a good impression. To a degree, Madeline grew up in both their images, making her way in the world as a comedian, carefully dressed and intensely concerned about other people’s opinions of her.

Robyn also describes Shirley Wolfson as a perfectionist who loved to entertain and for whom family was very important, descriptions that don’t apply to Bernie. “If it wasn’t for my mom,” Robyn says, “he never would have gotten in touch with Madeline. That’s awful to say about a parent, but that’s just my gut feeling.” According to Gerri, Shirley would have welcomed Madeline into the family when they moved back to Boston, although both Gerri and Robyn doubt that Shirley and Bernie ever considered outright adoption. Madeline was by then a legal adult. “Shirley was happy to have Madeline,” Gerri says, “but there was no way Freda was going to do that! Ever!”

NOT LONG AFTER HER DIVORCE, FREDA MOVED TO NEW YORK TO PUR
sue a singing career, her daughter in tow. This move guaranteed that her authority over Madeline would trump Bernie’s, but her principal conscious motivation was her own ambition. Backwater Boston had never appreciated her talent, she believed, remembering how at the age of sixteen she was—almost simultaneously—passed over for lead soprano in the school choir (an insulting blow to an aspiring opera star) and designated “Second Prettiest” in a Junior League beauty contest. New York, the center of sophistication, the home of the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, surely would reward her.

The move was so abrupt that her daughter later speculated it might have been a “first episode,” an early indication of Freda’s mental instability, and it made a profound impact on young Madeline. Soon, Freda found it impossible to focus on her music while holding down a clerical job and caring for a small child. And so, in 1948, when Madeline was not yet six years old, Freda put her in a boarding school, Manumit, in the borough of Bristol in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

That decision may seem impossible to justify. Standards have changed, though, and even in those days most institutional facilities for young children were a long way from
Nicholas Nickleby
. John Kramer, who attended Manumit for most of his primary and secondary schooling (which included the years Madeline spent there), also enrolled at the age of six. Both his parents were living, not even divorced, but they were classic Greenwich Village bohemians who lived in the back of his father’s jewelry studio. “There just wasn’t room for three of us, so I was sent to school.” Neither Kramer nor Madeline was the only young child at Manumit.

The school enjoyed an excellent if somewhat eccentric reputation that appealed to Freda, who was active in left-wing causes in the 1940s. Founded in Pauling, New York, by the Rev. William Fincke in 1924, Manumit took as its model Britain’s progressive Summerhill School. For a time, Fincke called Manumit “The Workers’ Children’s School,” a kind of sobriquet, and he encouraged students not only to follow their own inclinations in their studies, but also to perform all sorts of chores. Both the Pauling campus and the Bristol campus (to which Manumit relocated in 1944, after a fire in 1943) incorporated working farms. The school’s leftward tilt can be detected in the name Manumit itself: Derived from the Latin, it means “release from slavery.” Rev. Fincke died in 1927 and was replaced by his son, Bill, who assumed full control in 1944 after a period of illness and interregnum. Kramer says that Bill Fincke resisted a takeover by communist sympathizers or labor-union leadership, but that he continued to pursue progressive policies. The student body included special-needs students, European–Jewish refugees, and African–American children—to the consternation of neighbors in Bucks County. Under pressure from the community, state and local authorities scrutinized Manumit closely, finding fault with everything from the physical plant to the secondary curriculum. Despite administrators’ efforts to comply, the school closed in 1958.

When Kramer arrived, about a year before Madeline, the Manumit curriculum was loosely structured, “a sort of classical progressive education.” The way Madeline spelled her name at the time, “Madalin,” seems to reflect this disposition. But Freda was the bohemian and the activist in the family. Ultimately Manumit was a better place for her than for her daughter.

As an adult, Madeline seldom talked about Manumit. She gave friends the impression that she was lonely and not terribly popular there. “She missed her mother,” says her widower, John Hansbury, noting that Madeline described herself as “hiding in the bushes” there. When Kramer and another alumnus, Aulay Carson, asked their Manumit classmates to share stories of Madalin Wolfson for this book, no one remembered her. Yet when Madeline’s uncle and aunt, Ted and Jean Barry, visited the school around 1952, they found her in a beautiful dormitory (a former mansion), happily surrounded by friends. She was eager to show them around the campus, and she gossiped about the other students. She and her friends liked to spy on the high schoolers’ make-out sessions. However, it’s clear that Madeline was putting up a front for the Barrys, and she was already a good enough actress to persuade them.

Theater was fundamental to the Manumit curriculum, and even the youngest students participated in “creative plays,” in which the children expressed their ideas and feelings about circumstances or events. There were no scripts, and Kramer (who also went into acting as an adult) describes a very loose process, involving a good deal of giggling and goofing around, under the typically laidback supervision of a teacher. But there was a stage and an audience. For a shy little girl in unfamiliar surroundings, in circumstances she hadn’t chosen, among strangers who might not be interested in what she had to say, the license to speak up and be heard meant a great deal. The idea of theater as a means of self-expression took hold.

The craft of acting changed radically in the years after World War II, and Manumit gave Madeline a head start in her career. Actors would rely less and less on the externalized, presentational style of acting that—especially because of the influence of film—had come to seem artificial and old-fashioned. Inspired by teachers and directors such as Constantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg, actors’ preparation came to include internalized work, psychological analysis, and the use of “sense memory,” experiences in one’s own life that might correspond to a character’s circumstances. Meanwhile, teachers such as Paul Sills and Viola Spolin recommended improvisation or “theater games”—very much like what Madeline and her classmates did in their “creative plays”—as a means of finding a character, rather than merely portraying one. Madeline’s interest in these methods allied her squarely with such future colleagues as Robert Klein, Alan Arkin, and Lily Tomlin, although her approach also put her on the wrong side of what amounts to a generational split with the more traditional methods of Lucille Ball, Harold Prince, and George Rose. Only during her years at Manumit would Madeline use improvisation to express herself, rather than working within the framework of a script or a character that (in most cases) scarcely resembled her. Looking back, Madeline told another Manumit alumna, the New York City television anchor Sue Simmons, “Every artistic bone in my body was formed at Manumit.”

Hiller Kahn (1949–58)

“I WASN’T ONE OF THOSE KIDS WHO TAP-DANCED ALL OVER THE
neighborhood,” Madeline told
After Dark
magazine in 1973. “I liked to perform, but not in front of company.”
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In her personal notebook, Madeline wrote, “[M]y original desires to perform were fantasies which I enjoyed creating in my mind rather than a desire to become a ‘star’”—which was Freda’s goal, not hers. “I lived in my mind, my fantasies, and the opportunity to make them alive [and] real is what turns me on. . . .”
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Outside the safe confines of “creative plays” at Manumit, young Madeline still considered performing in front of other people an “utterly terrible idea,” but her reluctance didn’t deter Freda. Whenever Madeline came home to New York, Freda pushed her to sing and dance for friends and neighbors. Freda was still Madeline’s primary music teacher (instruments were too expensive for Manumit’s budget), and as such she considered recitals par for the course. Madeline saw things differently. “You know, my mother noticed that I was amusing, or whatnot, and would like me to show someone,” Madeline said in 1989, “and I found this an infuriating suggestion that made no sense whatsoever. And this sort of went on for most of my life.”
⁵

Around 1949, Freda even pushed her daughter in front of television cameras for the first time. Madeline and a friend, Jimmy, were picked to appear on Horn & Hardart’s
Children’s Hour
. After singing “Cool Water,” they were invited back. Madeline recalled, “The second time, I got nervous. I saw all these kids in the wings, little savages, kicking and pushing each other out of the way. I got scared and started to cry, right there on camera. Needless to say, they never invited us on again.”
⁶

Television producers might be put off, but Freda wasn’t, and Madeline’s informal performances at home began to earn her “limited fame,”
drawing audiences of a dozen people or so, her stepfather, Hiller Kahn, later recalled. He first met Madeline and Freda at one such performance in 1949. Freda had taken a secretarial job, and Hiller was dating her supervisor, who suggested one afternoon that they drop by Freda’s apartment to hear little Madeline. When they got to West 60th Street, the pair found Madeline singing and dancing on a tabletop while Freda played piano. Hiller enjoyed the little show and found Madeline “endearing,” but initially Freda didn’t make much of an impression on him. Hiller continued to date her supervisor, although he and Freda socialized together frequently. Then, Hiller and Freda “got to like each other more and more as time went on,” he said. “I dropped my relationship with the girl that had introduced us in the first place, and started dating Freda. I fell in love. I don’t know if Freda did or not, but I did.”

It’s striking how many of the Kahn family dynamics were already in play at that first meeting. Hiller and Freda “didn’t hit it off right away,” as he put it, and as things turned out, they really weren’t meant to be together. While Freda harbored dreams of stardom, her daughter was already the main attraction. And starting perhaps with Hiller, good things often came to Freda because of Madeline.

Born and reared in Pennsylvania, Hiller had grown up somewhat in the shadow of his brother, Ernest (“Ernie”), the intellectual of the family and the pride of the boys’ father, Albert, an attorney. Family members believe Hiller, who had difficulty writing, may have had a learning disability, such as dysgraphia (which his granddaughter, Eliza, has), though he was never diagnosed. He was at any rate a disappointment to his father, and after high school, he entered the military rather than attending college, while Ernie went to Harvard and later taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Hiller’s sense of humor reinforced the lesson that young Madeline had learned from Freda and Bernie: A joke was a way to make a good impression, to endure an otherwise difficult situation, or to keep your cool. Ernie’s ex-wife, Virginia Lewisohn Kahn, describes Hiller as “a lot of fun,” adding, “I imagine Madeline picked up on a lot of this.” In June 1952, Hiller and Freda brought Madeline to Ernie and Ginny’s wedding in Westchester County, New York. Ginny remembers young Madeline as chubby, “very bright . . . and good company even then.” Later, young Madeline came to visit Ernie and Ginny in Washington, DC, and Ginny was surprised that any little girl could be so captivated by a trip to Mount Vernon.