Madeline Kahn (46 page)

Madeline had long supported a number of charities, her sympathies for the less-fortunate being exceptionally keen, Hansbury says. Mostly, she made donations privately, but in the 1980s, she began to lend public support to AIDS charities, as the epidemic sliced through New York. Her most important contribution to the cause was her performance in a 1995 concert staging of Sondheim’s
Anyone Can Whistle
. Both ticket sales on the night of the show and a cast album would raise funds for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The project was a worthy vehicle, surely, yet it was also a daring choice for Madeline—for a number of reasons.

The first reason was artistic. The book for
Anyone Can Whistle
, by Arthur Laurents, is fatally convoluted, and Madeline, with her astute critical perceptions, disliked it. Sondheim’s songs are difficult, based on tricky rhythms and building on dense lyrics that must be projected with precision. The consensus after the concert at Carnegie Hall was that Madeline hadn’t rehearsed enough in the role of Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper. And indeed, she missed a cue in “The Cookie Chase” and had to ask conductor Paul Gemignani to start over. (Her entrance, in “Me and My Town,” and her dance routine in “I’ve Got You to Lean On” earned thunderous applause, however.)

The second reason was psychological. Walter Willison, taking part in what was billed as “an all-star chorus” (each member of which had a Tony nomination) believes Madeline was thoroughly intimidated. She knew that the nature of the concert guaranteed an audience composed of the most discerning Broadway fans. The narrator for the evening was Angela Lansbury, who originated the role of the Mayoress and who declined an invitation to reprise the part for the concert. Watching Madeline
in rehearsal, Lansbury is said to have remarked, “I should’ve played it after all.” Also starring—and sharing a duet, “There’s Always a Woman,” with Madeline—was Bernadette Peters, by this point the idol of Broadway musical fans. Both Lansbury and Peters could be confident of the approval of Sondheim, who’d written entire shows for them; Madeline had no such insurance. Taking many by surprise, Scott Bakula flew in from shooting the TV series
Quantum Leap
to play Hapgood, the male lead. Singing with suave authority and looking like a grade-A hunk, he brought down the house. But his success only compounded Madeline’s fear that she was the weak link. Gemignani tried to reassure her, but he says, “She wanted to be great and never wanted to do something when she could not be at the top of her game.”

When Willison approached Madeline after a rehearsal, she seemed hardly to recognize her old friend. They’d been through so much together: Danny Kaye, Paula’s one-woman show. He’d even taken part in the saga of Peter and Cybill, since he was supposed to play a lead in Bogdanovich’s Rodgers and Hart project. Yet now Madeline was cold, distant, perhaps even disoriented. The reason seems clear enough: At this point in Madeline’s life, even Willison couldn’t penetrate her densely woven anxieties. Forever sensitive, she knew already that she wasn’t making a good impression on people like Lansbury, possibly on Sondheim himself—and ultimately on the audience. And to make her New York musical comeback with limited rehearsal in a difficult role made it almost impossible to live up to her own exacting standards.

After
Anyone Can Whistle
, Madeline wrote in her private notebook:

I don’t really like winging it—I’m not brassy naturally, I don’t “sell it”! So, this BENEFIT THING is really not my area, esp. when the part is imperfect. I would’ve needed more time, in the theatre, etc., off book, etc., to do a decent job on the role. Well—one reason I did it was to learn; to experience what I like and where I belong. The results will surely be the evidence and feedback that I asked for. Do I want to feel that I should pursue musicals? (Maybe Noël Coward) Of course when I could fool around and have fun—it was good, and I did get better as the evening went on and I got used to the space. After all I opened the show.

Why do you feel—“it’s all over” when it rarely is . . . ?

New York News, Saturday Night Live, For Love Alone
, and
London Suite
(1995–96)

MADELINE APPROACHED
NEW YORK NEWS
, THE VEHICLE FOR HER RE
turn to series television, with trepidation. “She felt she probably would have only one more television show in her, and she wondered whether that was it,” her agent at the time, Bill Butler, recalls. “If that show went five or six years, she knew that she was in her last very fertile period, and she was aware of that.” Part of her concern, he says, was that while she still felt “hotsy-totsy” (the word she used), she’d noticed that other people didn’t always agree with her assessment. But Nan Chase, gossip columnist for the
New York Reporter
, wore nice clothes and looked pretty. Madeline might be playing a middle-aged character role, but amidst the gritty surroundings of a tabloid newsroom, she was downright glamorous.

Intended as “
E.R
. at a newspaper,” as Butler puts it,
New York News
featured Mary Tyler Moore as Louise Felcott, the paper’s editor-in-chief. Most episodes contained some comedy, but this was drama, and while the show did put Moore back in a newsroom, this one was nothing like the WJM studio in
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
(or, for that matter, the Chicago newspaper setting of the short-lived
Mary
[1985–86]).
New York News
more closely resembled two previous shows produced by MTM Enterprises:
Lou Grant
, particularly in the newspaper setting and in many of the characters, and
Hill Street Blues
, with its overlapping plot lines and urban ambiance. Louise Felcott seems like a mixture of
Lou Grant
’s Mrs. Pynchon and Lou himself, though she is decidedly less amiable than either: Felcott’s nickname is “the Dragon.” Audiences and critics alike found Felcott not merely tough but unsympathetic. The result was brutal reviews that made the star less of a draw for a show that had barely
gotten on the lineup in the first place. Almost immediately, Moore began trying to get out of the show, putting
New York News
—and Madeline’s job—in jeopardy.

As Nan Chase, Madeline reaped most of the scripts’ funniest and most effective lines. Faced with staff cuts in the pilot episode, Nan tells her hard-news colleagues, “If anyone at this paper is expendable, it is all of
you
.”
Entertainment Weekly
praised her for her “shrewd embodiment of a haughty gossip columnist who has the cheerful gall to rag on Liz Smith,” while the
New York Times
singled out Madeline’s “maniacal relish.”
³⁰
The
San Francisco Chronicle
observed that co-star Gregory Harrison “may dominate the narrative, but as usual Kahn manages to commit larceny.”
³¹
However, Tom Shales of the
Washington Post
found nothing to admire in Madeline’s “bossy and blabby” character.
³²
Subsequent episodes showed Nan almost in her own orbit, not only in the comic nature of her scenes but also in her spiritual and physical isolation from the other characters. Often, it seemed that Nan and Madeline were in another series entirely.

Although in her own career Madeline had been mostly spared the ire of gossip columnists and entertainment reporters, and though she had more often found champions like Rex Reed and Shaun Considine, she hadn’t developed much sympathy for the fifth estate. “I experience the press as this large clump . . . ,” she told the
Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner
. “[I] don’t think of them as individuals. So it will be interesting to me to try to find the inner life and find the individual underneath the person who’s doing the reporting that I often feel uncomfortable with.”
³³

“BOY, did I stumble into this,” Madeline wrote in her notebook. She hadn’t expected the “queen” treatment accorded to Moore, whose return to television became the primary focus of publicity for the show. Madeline found the scripts “boring, i.e. conservative . . . yesterday’s news,” and as for Nan Chase, “the character IS NOT THERE on the page—NO CHARACTER—and not enough [screen] time” to develop the role. Once again Madeline worried “that I’m only meant to be funny,” but this time she complained to the producers. Soon she saw results: “I like Nan also for the facts = she is WORKING, SUCCESSFUL, fit, single.”
³⁴

The character remained underused, however, and Madeline believed that Moore’s looming departure meant that Nan, too, would be phased out, since so many of her strongest scenes are those in which Louise and Nan, the senior women in the newsroom, commiserate in the restroom. The off-screen rapport between Madeline and Moore is reflected in their playing, and their scenes offer an intimate glimpse of a bond between women in the workplace that was, in its way, as revelatory as the
dialogues between Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern, friends who bonded outside the workplace. For a few minutes, at least, Louise could be sympathetic and Nan could be sensible—and viewers got a welcome respite from the churning plots that focused on the other leading characters, played by Harrison and Melina Kanakaredes. Even if
New York News
could have survived without Moore, her absence would have deprived the show of its most effective material.

CBS cancelled
New York News
with half the season’s episodes completed. The final episode appeared on November 30, 1995, leaving five more episodes unaired.
³⁵
The show’s untimely demise didn’t in itself diminish Madeline’s reemergence. Oliver Stone’s
Nixon
would be released in December 1995, and the new movie, which featured Madeline in a cameo role, gave the producers of
Saturday Night Live
a reason to sign her for her third and final appearance as host (substituting for another star who’d had to drop out, as Bill Butler recalls).

By the time Madeline got to Rockefeller Center, on December 16, 1995, her
Mixed Nuts
co-star Adam Sandler had been fired, as had cast member Chris Farley. Despite pressure from NBC executives, the transition from the kind of frat house humor championed by Sandler and Farley had barely begun. Neither the show’s idea of comedy nor the show itself was what it had been in the 1970s—or even the year before. Punch lines relied heavily on name-calling, and if referring to a politician’s husband as “fat” got laughs from the studio audience, why bother writing sharper material? Madeline’s second sketch demonstrates the laziness of the writing. “Leg Up,” a talk show about dance hosted by Ann Miller (Molly Shannon) and Debbie Reynolds (Cheri Oteri), quickly devolves into a vulgar discussion of the sex lives of aging dancers, as they interview a legendary Russian ballerina (Madeline). There’s scant indication that any of the writers had ever seen a ballet or an MGM musical, or that Oteri had ever seen or heard of Debbie Reynolds.

Madeline’s first sketch is stronger: Bickering picnickers, husband and wife, are being carried off by a gigantic bird. We see only the bird’s claws gripping Madeline and cast member David Koechner in mid-air, as the couple reviews how they got into this mess. The gimmick is that each repeats, with heavy sarcasm, things the other ostensibly said earlier in the day. (“There’s a good spot, Nancy, up on top of that hill, in that big, round ball of hay!” “Stop running! It can’t see you when you stand still!”) In Madeline’s only other sketch, she plays a dissatisfied customer in an antique shop run by two impossibly fey men in eighteenth-century costumes (recurring characters played by Koechner and Mark McKinney).
The shop owners are too outlandish to be funny, but Madeline delivers a nicely scripted speech as she tells them off.

What’s most striking, especially to anyone who has seen Madeline’s first guest-hosting gig, is that the material she was given in 1995 is so generic. Virtually any woman could have been cast in these sketches, and no one would know the difference. Madeline brings a few assets: She knows how to deliver a sarcastic line, she can do a Russian accent, and she can play an elegant, middle-aged lady. But dozens of others (presumably including the host she replaced) could have done the same. At least in Madeline’s opening monologue, she’s given some personal material, a self-deprecating account of her eighteen-year wait to host the show again: “But 1978 passed, you know, and um, no phone call from the show. Anyway, uh, ’79, ’kay? . . . Then came the ’80s—the entire ’80s, actually. And then the ’90s arrived, and it seemed very promising, you know, what with the miracle of fiber optics and so on.” When the phone rings in 1994, Lorne Michaels’s office is looking for Madeline—Madeline Stowe. Finally, Madeline has the chance to perform the song she’s been rehearsing since 1978. In reality, it’s one of her party tricks, singing Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home” in three distinct voices. The song doesn’t compare with the abundant musical material she had in her earlier appearances, but it’s recognizably Madeline Kahn.

Behind the scenes, the show was in trouble. It had narrowly escaped cancellation the previous season, its twentieth. Longtime producer James Downey had been fired, and only five cast members returned for the twenty-first season. While the writing may have gotten away from its reliance on frat house humor, Downey identifies 1995 as the year that
SNL
“became very much a performer’s show . . . enforcing the idea that ‘the cast isn’t here to bring to life the writer’s notions; the writers are there to supply material for the characters that the cast already does.’”
³⁶
This background helps to explain why Madeline’s material is so weak, and why the episode as a whole is so disappointing. The only sketch that lands squarely is a mock TV commercial, presented by actor Sam Waterston, that urges the elderly to purchase insurance against robot attacks—and Madeline isn’t in it.

Four days after that final gig on
SNL
, Oliver Stone’s
Nixon
opened. As Martha Mitchell, Madeline doesn’t look like the woman she’s playing, but she captures Martha’s essence—or anyway, what many Americans perceived her essence to be. As the wife of United States Attorney General John Mitchell, Madeline has only two brief scenes, and she isn’t seen at all until nearly forty-five minutes into the “director’s cut” of the
movie, released for home viewing. Madeline makes a vivid impression, however, as a garrulous Southern matron, with an accent not unlike Trixie Delight’s. She knows how to hurt Nixon, as well as her husband, and she has no qualms about doing so. So much of the rest of the rest of the movie is intensely dramatic, or surreal, or lugubrious, that Madeline’s performance has the effect of comic relief, though one comes to realize that nothing she does is funny. It’s delicate, almost surgically precise work.