Madeline Kahn (40 page)

His enthusiasm notwithstanding, Madeline struggled to fit into a part that had been tailored to Holliday’s measure, and her work was complicated by the similarity between her own sometimes babyish speaking
voice and Holliday’s. Both grew up in Queens, and to some, they even looked alike. But Madeline “gradually creates an interior presence that is just right for the needs of the play,” Walter Kerr wrote in the
Times
. “She is attractively sensual . . . [a]nd, behind Billie’s accumulated shellac, you hear and feel an intelligence that is both wistful and tough-minded steadily stretching its wings.”
⁴⁹

On tour, Madeline received some of the best reviews of her career, and critics rhapsodized about her performance, most singling out her comic business in the play’s centerpiece, in which Billie and Brock (Edward Asner) play gin rummy. Several admired the way her Billie walked, as if wearing a showgirl’s headdress. All praised the subtlety and wit of her characterization. Headlines like “The Kahn Festival” (
Washington Post
), “Madeline Kahn steals show in ‘Born’” (
Denver Post
), and “Asner and Kahn a delight in ‘Born Yesterday’” (
Boston Globe
) followed them on the road. Madeline’s work in Brooks’s movies left one Colorado critic unprepared “for the polished, highly inventive—and equally comic” portrayal of Billie.
⁵⁰
After the show opened on Broadway, Mimi Kramer wrote an astute appreciation in the
New Yorker
: “That her approach consists largely in humanizing the character should not be surprising: acting the part of a brainless sexpot—and acting it well—is Miss Kahn’s forte, but she herself came on the scene, and rocketed to stardom, giving the figure of the kept bimbo a realistic aspect.” In Madeline’s hands, the script was “funnier than Holliday’s performance gave it credit for being,” though every other part of the production was “a disappointment.”
⁵¹

For me, Madeline didn’t entirely succeed in making the role her own in the matinée I attended during the play’s Broadway run. She did make Billie tougher and smarter, less a victim than she was in Holliday’s performance onscreen, but there are simply too many traces of Holliday in the script—as Madeline herself knew. “There’s definitely . . . a ghost,” she told the
Washington Post
. But, she said, “if the playwright asked me to do this, wouldn’t I have to be a fool in this lifetime to turn it down?”
⁵²
Billie was “a role with some dimension to it.” As she told
Interview
magazine, it constituted her “first hearty meal after living on scraps. Was I starving. I can’t lie—everyone’s memory of Judy Holliday is a concern. But I’m not going to worry.”
⁵³

Holliday wasn’t the only specter Madeline had to contend with. The other was Lily Garland, and Madeline was determined to make her Broadway comeback offset the debacle of
Twentieth Century
. Arriving at the first rehearsal for
Born Yesterday
in Cleveland, Charlotte Booker was advised not to mention that she was Madeline’s understudy. Booker
proceeded to read her own part, that of the Manicurist, but during the first break, Madeline found her in the restroom. “You’re my understudy, aren’t you?” she said. The other women cleared out, but Madeline wasn’t spoiling for a fight. “Look, I don’t know what’s gonna be funny and what’s not gonna be funny,” she said. “I know I’m not Judy Holliday. And I’ve had trouble with understudies in the past. Can we just say that we’re working on this together?”

Booker was charmed. “Well, yes, that would be a wonderful thing to say!” she thought. When Madeline alluded to “the history here,” Booker thought she meant Jean Arthur, who was replaced by Judy Holliday before the premiere of the original production. But Holliday wasn’t the understudy. Madeline was talking about Judy Kaye, and she meant to warn Booker that she’d get no opportunity to outshine her. “We did the show for almost a year, and she never missed a show,” Booker says. “I was the only understudy who didn’t go on.”

In rehearsal and every performance, then, Booker watched Madeline develop Billie’s character. Madeline worried that she was too old for the role, and she seemed “cautious,” Booker says. “She played everything very close to herself, nothing broad.” When she did get a laugh during rehearsal, “she would look up as if they were laughing at her. She was very protective of her process.”

“I start with the text,” Madeline told the
Washington Post
. “Stay right with it, study it meticulously and deeply until you can picture someone who would say these words, what sort of person is this?” Billie’s ignorance, for example, is “not even funny. How am I going to believably—and I have to believe in it myself—construct someone who will not only be believable to me but who will also be funny? Who has agreed to live a life with no prestige, no status, no position. It was quite a job, a nice challenge.”
⁵⁴
Because of her feminist sensibilities, she rejected the “dumb blonde” aspects of the comedy, and she looked forward to acts 2 and 3, when Billie asserts herself. Even Billie’s elaborately upswept ringlets helped Madeline feel “uncomfortable,” the way the character does. She was “adorned and far from her natural self,” Madeline told the
Times
.
⁵⁵

Madeline tried not to emulate Judy Holliday, “but the trap is that you kind of have to,” Booker says. The script’s built-in limitations also affected Asner’s performance, described by the
Washington Post
as “loud and blustery.” New York critics were even tougher on him.
⁵⁶
(Recalling Frank Rich’s review in the
Times
, Asner wonders, “Could he have been any meaner?”) Though
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was taped before an audience, several critics suggested Asner’s years in television had spoiled
him for stage work, much as Madeline was sometimes dismissed as “just a movie star.” Asner’s great gift as an actor is his gradual revelation of warm, decent qualities in outwardly unsympathetic characters, but to make Brock sympathetic would unbalance the play, and the script simply doesn’t offer such opportunities. Asner tried not to let the reviews discourage him, and he takes pride in the work he continued to do during the play’s run. When the show closed, Kanin told him he was the best Brock yet. Asner had played Brock once before, in summer stock in 1973, but Gregory Jbara, playing two small roles in this production, says Asner didn’t seem to trust the material. When he did find an effective bit of business, he’d almost immediately begin to overdo it. In the scene where Brock discovers that Billie has betrayed him, he considers having her killed. Asner poured a drink and slowly, softly moved the glass as he thought. “There was no sound but the ice as it was tinkling,” Jbara says. “It was absolutely fabulous and brilliant. . . . But over time, the subtle glass tinkling was like a maraca in his hand.”

While Asner struggled with his characterization, he was playing opposite Madeline, and, as she told the
Washington Post
, “A lot of my acting choices have to do with the fact that I’m working with Ed Asner.” She said this neutrally (“Now if he talks to me in a certain way, then [Billie has] lived with him for nine years, and I feel comfortable, so I talk a certain way, too”), but Asner’s process was necessarily part of Madeline’s, and it added to the challenges she faced.
⁵⁷
For example, the play’s most important scenes depend entirely on Billie’s physical interactions with Brock and require a high degree of coordination between the actors. The gin game that concludes act 1 isn’t merely comic, it also paves the way for her to turn away from him by making it “obvious that they have nothing whatever to say to each other,” as Kanin’s detailed stage indications prescribe.
⁵⁸
The climax of the play comes when Brock strikes Billie, forcing her to sign several legal documents he needs—and ensuring that she’ll leave him almost immediately. On Broadway, the gin game went beautifully, with Asner developing a long, slow burn with genuine craft and discipline, while Madeline airily toyed with her cards and with him. But at least on the occasion I saw the show, Asner overplayed the slap in act 2. As other critics agreed at the time, it was Madeline’s acting, not his, that made the scene work.

Offstage, Madeline got even less support, though she needed it because, as Asner remembers, “We were in trouble from the beginning.” The revival originated with Josephine R. Abady, artistic director of the Cleveland Playhouse, which would be the first stop on
Born Yesterday
’s
long road to Broadway. The year before, Abady had enjoyed success in New York with Tom Griffin’s play
The Boys Next Door
, following an initial run at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, where she was artistic director at the time. With Theodore Mann, she would later serve as co-artistic director of Circle in the Square, a highly regarded New York repertory company. But with
Born Yesterday
, with two powerhouse stars onstage and with the playwright (and original stage director) looking over her shoulder, she was evidently out of her depth. While Asner speaks only generally of a production that wasn’t working, Jbara recalls that the older actor “was unable to take direction from a female director,” and that Abady didn’t prove adept at handling Madeline, either. Before
Born Yesterday
made the move to Broadway, the producers eased Abady aside in favor of John Tillinger, who arrived in Washington on opening night, November 2. Rehearsals continued on days when there was no matinée, but with Tillinger in charge. Because of the participation of the Cleveland Playhouse, Abady herself was a producer of the show, and she retained the director’s title through the end of the run, while Tillinger received billing as “production supervisor.”

Then Jack Gilpin lost the role of Paul Verrall, to be replaced by Daniel Hugh Kelly, best known for his work on the ABC soap opera
Ryan’s Hope
.
⁵⁹
But the arrival of new talent didn’t eliminate the show’s troubles, and Booker felt that “Madeline never really got to do what she wanted to do. But for that matter I don’t know if anybody ever got their footing.” While Kelly and Madeline hit it off during rehearsal, Asner found them “unmindful,” giggling behind his back. (“I turned and wheeled and glared, and it stopped,” he says.) Tillinger was at times unsupportive, too, and Asner saw little difference between his directorial approach and Abady’s, “Just trying to get the trains running on time was his main purpose, I think. . . . The interesting thing is that, opening night, Tillinger was heard to apologize to a couple of friends to the effect that ‘You really can’t do a lot when you take over for someone.’”

Madeline and Asner didn’t get along, he admits. “She was a strange duck. I suppose I was steeped in my own insecurity and problems. I should have asked her to dinner, which I never did. I think I probably was in awe of her, and I figured I would merely execute as best I could—we never fought.” He remembers one sign that she might not like him, a joke that she told during a question-and-answer session at a benefit. Asked what it was like to work with Asner, Madeline replied, “It’s like being with a 600-pound gorilla.” “I didn’t know what it all meant,” Asner says, and he didn’t ask.

In fact, Madeline’s personality clashed with his to a far greater degree than he realized. Although Booker and Jbara laud him as an actor and a mensch, Madeline complained to her friends and family of “inappropriate” behavior. The low point came at a Russian restaurant in Denver, when Asner began to roughhouse with Madeline in front of several other members of the company. If he’d realized how far he’d gone, Asner would have been mortified. Madeline said nothing to him, and she made no formal complaint. Instead, she froze him out altogether. Asner “didn’t have an edit button,” Jbara says. “So I would imagine that if Madeline had a certain template for what’s appropriate for innuendo or behavior, or how women are to be treated in the workplace, it’s quite possible that it may have tested her boundaries.” “She definitely had a sense of decorum and
comme il faut
,” Booker says. In this case, Madeline’s dignity required her to avoid making a fuss. But the damage was done, and she gave Asner no chance to make amends.

With other cast members, Madeline let down her guard only gradually. Jbara observed “a definite evolution of her willingness to show a zaniness and an appreciation of life that definitely became more prominent over the time we did the play, both in rehearsals and also socially, after performances.” Only after opening night in Denver did she go out with him and a few other actors, dancing in after-hours clubs. One club had a cage for go-go dancers. When Jbara climbed into it, Madeline cheered and called out, “Take off your shirt!” “For me as a guy, it was a little bit of living a fantasy,” he says. “I did have a mad crush on her.”

During the pre-Broadway run, Madeline’s Diet Coke commercial first aired. Though Jbara has gone on to success on television and on Broadway (winning a Tony Award for
Billy Elliot
in 2009), at the time of
Born Yesterday
his primary income came from acting in commercials. The day after he saw the Diet Coke ad, he commended Madeline backstage at the Shubert Theater in Boston. She stopped short, then wheeled around. “Is that supposed to be funny?” she asked. “By her reaction, it was as if I’d said, ‘Boy, you really sold out, doing a TV commercial!’” Jbara remembers. He assured her that he sincerely thought she’d done good work, and that he saw no shame in the job. He’d gotten a glimpse of her discomfort with some of the professional choices she’d made in order to support Paula.

Born Yesterday
generated extensive press coverage for Madeline, as well as gratifying responses from audiences across the country, as people who knew her only from movies came to see her perform live. She also got a Tony nomination, proof that she’d moved beyond
On the Twentieth
Century
and that the theater community still valued her. But her happiness about the nomination was overshadowed by the death of Gilda Radner from ovarian cancer, on May 20. On June 4, Madeline lost the Tony to Pauline Collins (reprising her London triumph in
Shirley Valentine
). With no other nominations—and thus no wins—
Born Yesterday
closed one week after the awards ceremony, after 153 performances.