Madeline Kahn (12 page)

Two by Two
brought changes to Madeline’s personal life, as well. She started an affair with Karm and developed a close friendship with Willison, and she used an argument with Paula as an excuse to move out of the house on Romeo Court once and for all. Working on the show should have been a dream for Madeline, but it turned into a nightmare for everyone in the company. The troublemaker was Danny Kaye.

Decades of public adulation hadn’t brought Kaye emotional security. He hadn’t performed in a book musical on Broadway since 1943, and Noah was unlike any part he’d ever played. Nervous, he fell back on what he knew best: scene-stealing. From the first day of rehearsals, Kaye began to demand more and more attention. At first, he might insist on re-blocking a scene, or complain that the audience wouldn’t recognize him when he made his entrance in old-age makeup as the six hundred-year-old Noah. (The resulting changes to his makeup diminished the impact of his song in act 1, when God makes Noah “Ninety Again.”) He also rejected several actresses for the role of Esther, Noah’s wife, and the show had been in rehearsal for a week before Copeland joined the cast.

Harold Prince, a protégé of Rodgers, told the composer during Boston tryouts that
Two by Two
needed Helen Hayes, or an actress of comparable age and stature, to play Esther and to counterbalance Kaye onstage and off. Copeland couldn’t, though eventually Peter Stone dubbed her “Mother Courage” for her efforts to hold the
Two by Two
company together. Copeland, the sister of playwright Arthur Miller, was already far along in her distinguished career, but she says, “I’d never been in a play where there was a war like that backstage.” Company members still talk about the show like combat veterans and treat each other like army buddies.

Ultimately, nobody could defeat Kaye’s power grabs. The company was “held hostage to the fact that Kaye had sold so many tickets on the announcement of his return to Broadway,” Charnin says. “You couldn’t thumb your nose at a $3 million advance in those days.” During rehearsals and tryouts, Kaye managed to take away “all the jokes” from the other men, but he “couldn’t really touch what Madeline did,” Charnin says, “because she’s the outsider . . . with a funny story that has to be honored in order to make it work.”

But Kaye found other ways to make sure Madeline didn’t upstage him. During rehearsals, her act 1 solo, “Getting Married to a Person,” caught his notice. He demanded that she share the song with him as a duet. Then, as the show ran long, the song was cut altogether. During Boston tryouts, Kaye decided that a number Karm sang to Madeline, “Forty Nights,” was getting too many laughs. Kaye threatened to leave the show if the number wasn’t cut. As the creative team tucked and trimmed, the spotlight on Madeline dimmed. Though critics in Boston singled her out, in New York her co-star, Tricia O’Neil (as Ham’s wife and Japheth’s love interest), got more attention once the show opened on November 10, 1970.
⁷

Madeline persevered, no matter what changes the creative team threw at her. In performance, “There was always something funny and hidden in what she did. She was, I thought, a very secretive kind of girl.” Able to “be sexual and innocent simultaneously,” Madeline “was screamingly funny and truthful onstage,” Charnin says.

Critics generally cited Kaye’s performance and, to a lesser degree, Rodgers’s score as reasons to see the show, while Stone’s book found less favor. In the
New York Times
, Clive Barnes lavished affection on Kaye—“so warm and lovable an entertainer, such a totally ingratiating actor, that for me at least he can do no wrong”—while summing up the rest of the “very good indeed” cast in a single paragraph.
⁸
Madeline’s most
substantial review came from John Simon. Writing in
New York
magazine, he described her as having “at least two 40-inch busts” and delivering “an outrageously vulgar caricature of a Mrs. Ham.”
⁹

Nevertheless,
Two by Two
was still the play much as it had been conceived and written, and Kaye was still an actor playing a character. For a time after the opening, he didn’t take many liberties with the show, Willison says—except when he interacted with Madeline. Kaye was always looking for ways to break her up onstage. Nervous laughter came naturally to her, and it made the audience laugh, too. Such behavior wasn’t necessarily out of character for Goldie or for Noah, but Kaye went further, playing variations on a burlesque act by ogling her breasts. “To Danny, Madi was just a big tit joke,” Willison says.

For a while, both Madeline and Willison remained on friendly enough terms with Kaye. When he was honored as
Cue
magazine’s entertainer of the year, they performed a tribute number, “Oh, Kaye!” written by Sylvia Fine, Kaye’s wife. And in February, 1971, when Kaye injured himself during a dance, Madeline and Willison accompanied him to the hospital, waiting anxiously with him into the night. Kaye had torn a ligament in his leg, an injury requiring him to wear a cast on his foot and limiting his movement. For two weeks, Harry Goz (who ordinarily played oldest son Shem) took over, and box office figures dropped precipitously.

Alternating now between a crutch and a wheelchair, Kaye was more insecure than ever. When director Joe Layton tried to restage the show to accommodate him, the actor declared “I can’t do that” so often that Layton conceded defeat. The next sign of trouble came just before Kaye rejoined the show. During “The Golden Ram,” Kaye stood in the orchestra pit, making faces and mock conducting—a specialty of his—as the aria began. Madeline began laughing, and the performance degenerated into such chaos that, at last, Kaye worried he’d gone too far. “He slithered out of the pit,” Karm recalls, and conductor Jay Blackton started over.

The night he returned to the stage, Kaye made his entrance and greeted the audience applause with an unscripted line: “Well, I finally showed up.” From that point forward, he milked his injury, whether for laughs or sympathy from the audience. Offstage, a real-life version of Sheridan Whiteside in
The Man Who Came to Dinner
, he tyrannized the company.
¹⁰
In performance, Kaye would break character, insult and humiliate other actors, and chase them offstage with his wheelchair. He improvised while they tried in vain to keep up with him as he performed bits of his nightclub act and, on occasion, changed the ending of the play.

Polite, pretty Madeline was “butch insurance” for the sexually repressed Kaye, Willison says, and she was particularly vulnerable. To a ham, any kind of laughter becomes a license, though Copeland speculates that Madeline laughed as a conscious defense. “She was giggling to get what she wanted and giggling
not
to get what she didn’t want,” she says. If Madeline humored Kaye, then he might spare her worse indignities. But there was no chance that he’d ignore her, and he didn’t limit himself to leering. Years later, after Kaye’s death and with palpable reluctance, she told David Letterman that when she was singing, Kaye would come up behind her and stick his finger under her arm. This was only part of the story, Karm confirms. Using her little-girl voice to make light of the incident, Madeline told him that Kaye “tried to touch my tillies.” “Danny Kaye was very proprietary about her,” Robert Klein says. “When I took her to [the] opening-night party, I had the feeling about it, and she actually suggested, that he was a little jealous.” What’s more, Jef Kahn says, “Danny Kaye hit on our mother.”

When Kaye was unhappy, he’d “pout,” giving an intentionally bad performance. The general fear was that he’d leave the show if anyone tried to rein him in. The company had little recourse. Actors Equity (where Paula Kahn worked at the time) was less powerful then than it is today, and when Kaye heard that Layton was planning to intervene, he banned the director from the theater. Only Willison stood up to the abuse. One by one, the cast stopped speaking to Kaye. Copeland was the last to do so, after Kaye blew up at her for walking offstage when he launched into an impromptu monologue. Backstage, he raged at her: “You’re so temperamental! Nobody could work with you!”

Milton Berle had signed to play Noah in the upcoming national tour and might have stepped in, but the producer (Rodgers himself) was unwilling to take that risk. Meanwhile, Rodgers’s office was inundated with complaints from theatergoers, Willison remembers. Two such letters, published in the
New York Times
, prompted Kaye to defend himself in
Variety
. Though many audiences were perfectly happy to see Kaye do as he pleased, the backlash built. When Tony nominations were announced, Willison received a nomination as best supporting actor in a musical, widely construed as a reward for his grace under fire, while Kaye received a public reprimand from a member of the awards committee. If Willison won, Kaye told Copeland, he had a plane waiting and would fly home to California.

Madeline tried to sail above the conflict backstage. This tactic led to the impression that she was “slightly disconnected,” Copeland remembers,
“as if she were a little in between reality and what she was thinking. She had a different kind of relationship with the world. That was enchanting but also sometimes confusing to the onlooker.” Even as the cast divided (“Danny on one side, everybody else on the other,” as Charnin puts it), everybody adored Madeline, and Willison still speaks of her as if she were his kid sister. But the stress took its toll in the form of severe back pain. “I think emotionally things would just attack her back,” Karm says.
¹¹

During the rehearsal period she began to travel by taxi, lying flat on her back. The first time Karm saw her arrive, he asked, “How are you feeling?” Ever wary, she answered, “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I care about you,” he said. He meant it. He’d met her at the Upstairs, and now, working closely and spending every day with her, he began to feel for her what Ham felt for Goldie. She was falling in love with him, too. A few years later, as their affair wound down, Madeline wrote in her personal notebook, “One needs to believe in the existence somewhere of that uniquely different face, the mind mysteriously in tune with one’s own. . . . But with a ‘first love’ there’s no need of questioning, no room for doubt, just the simple loving certainty that here is my person and that I am only at home in the world when we are together.”
¹²

They didn’t move in together, but Karm spent most of his time at her apartment on East 73rd Street. They hosted dinners and took long walks together. He remembers her infectious laughter, and offstage as well as on, once she started, he couldn’t help but join in. She took a childlike delight in “secrets,” refusing to tell him where she’d found a new dress or the special “no-calorie” candies that she and Brenda Vaccaro craved. Marriage didn’t come up. Matrimony didn’t match the tenor of the times, and as Bernie Wolfson prepared to leave Shirley and take a new bride, Madeline grew even more certain that divorce was in her DNA. But until she met John Hansbury in 1989, her affair with Karm would be her longest-lasting romantic involvement. It had a direct impact on her professional life, too.

Karm found the experience of
Two by Two
so miserable that after the show closed, he gave up his career and started teaching acting. He welcomed Madeline and Paula to his classes, and he coached Madeline for some of her most important early film roles, including her Oscar-nominated turn in
Paper Moon
. Her work with him recalls the way she prepared “Glitter and Be Gay” with Michael Cohen, in meticulous coaching sessions long before she won the part. She was learning that sometimes
actors must rely on resources outside the rehearsal room, and that a trusted friend can be as good a coach as—or better than—a movie director.

Seeking to escape
Two by Two
, Madeline began to look for other work. Before the end of the run, she’d lined up her first feature film,
What’s Up, Doc?
After a Sunday matinée she flew to Los Angeles for the first read-through, flying back in time to be at the Imperial for the Tuesday night performance.

What’s Up, Doc?
(1972)

WHEN MADELINE FIRST MET PETER BOGDANOVICH
, “
[H]E SAID HE WAS
going to make a movie called
What’s Up, Doc?
Well, I thought that was a pretty tasteless title, and I wasn’t ready to do a bad movie,” she told Shaun Considine, a reporter for
After Dark
magazine. “I had just landed on Broadway, finally, and I didn’t want to cancel myself out by doing a tasteless film. A lousy movie, especially if it’s your first, can kill you. But then I read the script, and I knew it would be good, and working with Ryan and Barbra couldn’t hurt.”
¹³

With an Oscar nomination for his previous movie,
The Last Picture Show
(1971), Bogdanovich was riding high. A film critic, he brought to bear on his directing the lessons he’d learned from studying and interviewing veteran filmmakers such as John Ford, Orson Welles, and Howard Hawks. His upcoming project would pay homage to the screwball-comedy tradition, particularly Hawks’s classic
Bringing Up Baby
(1938). He needed comic actors, and casting director Nessa Hyams brought Madeline to meet him in New York. Bogdanovich dislikes readings, so they simply talked. “She had this wonderful, funny voice,” he remembers, “and this very straight delivery, and I just thought she was hilarious.” But this was effectively a job interview, not an audition, and Madeline wasn’t trying to be funny. “Why are you laughing?” she asked Bogdanovich repeatedly. “Because you’re funny,” he answered. She looked “surprised,” he says now. It was a conversation that they would have often, but that first time, her surprised look came with laughter of her own—as if she found his reaction strange.

Madeline went into the meeting believing she’d read for the role of Judy Maxwell, but Barbra Streisand had already accepted that job. Instead, Bogdanovich wanted Madeline to play Eunice Burns, the shrill
fiancée of an absent-minded musicologist, Howard Bannister (Ryan O’Neal), who dumps her for the free-spirited Judy. Co-starring Kenneth Mars as a rival musicologist and Austin Pendleton as a philanthropist,
What’s Up, Doc?
would be Madeline’s feature film debut and her first collaboration with Bogdanovich. That she didn’t audition for the role, but won it instead
as herself
, proved an exceptionally ill omen.