Madeline Kahn (19 page)

A slap and a tickle

Is all that the fickle

Male ever has in his head

and in the same song, Shepherd sings,

. . . 
A rock and a quickie

Is all little Dickie

Means when he mentions romance
.

This sort of suggestive language might not have played in Peoria during the Depression, but times had changed—or so the filmmakers hoped. Accordingly, Bogdanovich wrote a screenplay in which the plot was simultaneously simple and sophisticated, depicting the romantic foibles of the wealthy and glamorous, just as Hollywood musicals of the 1930s did. But he tweaks the formula with the sensibilities of the 1970s. It’s not quite a ’70s-style key party or swingers’ club, transplanted into the context of a ’30s-style musical—but it’s close. And in the authority-questioning style of the times, some cast members sang and danced more like ordinary people than like old-fashioned musical stars.

And so millionaire playboy (Burt Reynolds), madcap but penniless heiress (Shepherd), Broadway star (Madeline), and worldly gambler (Duilio del Prete) meet, pair off, break up, then pair off again with one another’s partners, all while drinking vast quantities of alcohol. Commenting from the sidelines—and eventually pairing off, too—are the heiress’s lusty maid (Brennan) and the playboy’s standoffish valet (John Hillerman). As an extra treat, one of John Ford’s favorite actors, Mildred Natwick, plays Reynolds’s mother. However, instead of the usual happily-ever-after Hollywood musical finale, Bogdanovich opted for what he calls a “bittersweet,” “sort of up-in-the-air ending, where nothing is really resolved.” As the couples look wistfully at the lovers they’ve left behind, they sing and dance to the final song, “A Picture of Me Without You.” Bogdanovich wasn’t displeased when a reporter pointed out that no other musical comedy had had an unhappy ending since Lubitsch’s
The Smiling Lieutenant
, in 1931.

In hindsight, that ending may have sealed the doom of
At Long Last Love
. The movie is deeply flawed, and yet it does boast incidental pleasures. Audiences and critics alike might have found it easier to rally around the picture had it sent them out of the theater feeling good, as old-fashioned musicals generally did. Perhaps, in the cynical ’70s, a happy ending would’ve risked appearing corny, but even in the extensively restored version that’s seen today, the picture doesn’t leave a viewer with much to cheer about.

As Kitty O’Kelly, the Broadway star, Madeline joins other cast members in eight numbers. She took tap lessons to prepare for the role, though choreographer Rita Abrams remembers that the dancing was “basic tap” and “elegant movement.” In the original cut of the movie, Madeline sang two solos: “Find Me a Primitive Man” (Kitty’s stage act, with a chorus of galumphing cavemen), as well as, “Down in the Dumps,” the movie’s most audacious stunt and its opening number, filmed in a single, unbroken tracking shot as she sings and staggers drunkenly through her apartment. The scene was cut from the picture shortly before its theatrical release.

Much of the movie’s reputation stems from Bogdanovich’s hasty re-editing under pressure from Fox executives. “The studio said they loved the film,” Shepherd remembers, “but they kept saying, ‘We love it. Make it better. Make it shorter.’” By this they meant less Madeline, less del Prete, and more Shepherd, more Reynolds. Meanwhile, the grand opening at Radio City Music Hall on New Year’s Day was fast approaching. “That’s a lot of pressure for a filmmaker to be under,” Shepherd says. Bogdanovich concedes he “made some mistakes in the original cut.” After a disastrous first preview, he re-cut the movie for a fresh preview. The second cut “was pretty good,” he says, but then he tinkered with it further and released the new version without a preview, “a huge mistake, because the worst version of all was the one that was released.” Moreover, rumors of the last-minute editing excited critics who’d been waiting to bring down the ambitious young director. We’ll never know whether his original vision would have met with success in 1975, but Fox pulled the released version from theaters early, earning no more than $1,600,000 (and costing an estimated six million dollars). According to Bogdanovich, the movie had started to see an uptick at the box office, but the studio preferred to write off the picture as a loss.

At every step of the production, Bogdanovich posed immense challenges to himself and to the entire cast and crew. Gene Allen’s production design relies exclusively on shades of black and white, to give the feeling of an old Paramount musical, but this scheme complicated the work of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who had to find ways to keep the images interesting. Long takes proliferate, including the three women’s complaint, “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love” (another unbroken take, this one set in the ladies’ lounge at Lord & Taylor); and the sextet, “Friendship” (set in a moving car, with two establishing shots followed by a long, unbroken take). As if those challenges weren’t enough, the ladies’ lounge is decorated with mirrors, though the camera must remain out of the shot. And in the confined space of the car, the camera has to dart to keep the actors from blocking whoever’s singing. In dance numbers, just as Astaire insisted that his whole body be photographed so that audiences could appreciate his every move, Bogdanovich keeps his cast on full view. The grand vision meant that cutaways couldn’t be inserted to cover missteps, and these limitations in turn required extra rehearsals and extra takes, and choreographers Albert Lantieri and Rita Abrams found themselves with a narrower range of options. Above all, every one of the sixteen numbers required new solutions to “the whole issue of how they were going to hear and sing without accompaniment,” Abrams remembers.

In most Hollywood musicals, audio tracks were recorded weeks before filming began. Bogdanovich objected to the practice. If he did the same, he believed, the actors wouldn’t have found their characters when they sang, and their interpretations might have changed by the time cameras rolled. Most of all, he wanted spontaneity. In only one number, Shepherd and Brennan’s duet, “It Ain’t Etiquette,” did he go back and loop in pre-recorded audio. “But the rest of the picture,” Bogdanovich says, “what’s shot is what was used. It had a certain energy that I liked.” As he explained to Miles Kreuger, the goal was not “to make a musical that was about singing and dancing: I wanted to make a musical about some people who sing and dance instead of walk and talk.”
⁷³

Each dance number required four to six weeks of rehearsal, Shepherd remembers. “That’s how they did it in the musicals with Fred Astaire. Not that we were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! By no means!” Indeed, apart from Madeline and Eileen Brennan, nobody in the cast had much experience with American musical comedy, and Reynolds had virtually never before sung in public. Despite two months of daily singing lessons before shooting began, Reynolds remained uncomfortable, and
living with Dinah Shore, one of America’s great song stylists, only pointed up his own awkwardness. Madeline boosted his confidence, though, with a bit of actorly advice: The trick wasn’t to
be
a singer, but to play a character who sings.
⁷⁴

Throughout the filming, the cast wore transistor radio earpieces in order to hear an electric piano off the set. For the several outdoor tracking shots, Bogdanovich put the piano in a flatbed truck that followed at a discreet distance. Just as a misstep in a dance meant another retake, so did a sour note in a song. But evidently some things, such as del Prete’s thick accent, were too much trouble to correct. A singer and songwriter, del Prete had perhaps more professional experience than anyone else in the cast, but the complexities of filming effectively sabotage his performance, and
At Long Last Love
put an end to his American career. His lack of ease seeps through the screen, and it posed problems for Madeline, since she played opposite him in so many scenes.
⁷⁵

Looking back, Abrams cites language in del Prete’s case, and singing and dancing in Reynolds’s, to illustrate the liabilities the cast had to overcome. Ultimately, she believes these struggles made it too difficult for the actors to communicate the “tongue-in-cheek” irony that Bogdanovich sought to convey, the opposite of what she calls “the straight-out Nelson Eddy–Jeanette MacDonald kind of musical” that many audiences expected. She points to Madeline’s “Primitive Man”—“a very spoofy, fun number”—as an example. Madeline wore a transistor earpiece, but the chorus didn’t. Unable to hear the music, they followed Bogdanovich’s off-camera cues, “not really dancing” but stomping around and pawing Madeline. “That was a strange one,” Abrams says. “She wasn’t real happy that day, I remember.”

The handwriting in Madeline’s appointment book reveals her mounting frustration as the shoot wore on. She resorted to block capitals and drew rigid boxes around her engagements. Almost as therapy, she turned to Brennan to commiserate, talking late into the night. The bond they established didn’t narrow the gap in their relationships with Bogdanovich, however, and without recalling many specifics, the director says that Madeline was “difficult” during the shoot. Though he’d written the role with her in mind, she seemed unappreciative, and “I was just a little bothered that she was so insecure about Cybill. She thought that both Cybill and I were trying to plot against her. She was a bit paranoid.”

If so, it was a paranoia that Reynolds and Brennan shared. “Because Peter was so in love with Cybill, if she was right on in a scene I could fall down and have a nosebleed and it was a print,” Reynolds wrote.
⁷⁶
As Brennan saw it, Bogdanovich “gave Burt and Cybill all the attention, all the work.” She’d worked with Bogdanovich and Shepherd in
The Last Picture Show
(and its sequel,
Texasville
, many years later) and
Daisy Miller
. “I tried and tried to like her. I tried,” Brennan said. But during
At Long Last Love
, those efforts were hampered by misgivings about Shepherd’s talent, mingled with reservations about her relationship with Bogdanovich, since Brennan liked Polly Platt very much. Abrams believes that Bogdanovich and Shepherd did themselves no favors by going off together during lunch breaks, while the rest of the cast ate and chatted together. “The line was drawn there,” she says. One visitor to the set, Ryan O’Neal, remembers, “Nobody got along on that movie! That was a mess! . . . I was nervous for everybody.”

Madeline had looked forward to working with Reynolds and harbored a passionate, years-long crush on him. In his memoir, he confesses to an unrequited crush on her, too: “Bambi’s father is still (especially lately) standing alone on a high cliff and thinking of white skin, brown freckles, and ships that pass in the night.”
⁷⁷
Privately, she told friends—and even her future husband—that the mutual attraction went farther. Yet on the set, she felt cut off from him, too. After all, he was the source of many of the production delays. Bogdanovich remembers that the studio talked him into casting Reynolds. His first choice, Elliott Gould, had sung and studied tap, but couldn’t match Reynolds’s marquee value.
⁷⁸
“We spent a lot of time trying to get Burt through it,” Bogdanovich says. “He was sick most of the time, hyperventilating because he was so nervous.” Madeline, by contrast, was a pro, and today Bogdanovich says her scenes are his favorite moments.

If Madeline had any sense of the director’s approval at the time, however, it wasn’t enough to calm her insecurities. “She’d been burned twice in two pictures of mine, one that made her a star and the other one that got her an Oscar nomination. But she didn’t like the way she looked,” Bogdanovich recalls with audible sarcasm. Now, working on
At Long Last Love
, she suspected that “because I was with Cybill I was gonna make her look bad.” Against his specific instructions, she went sunbathing, though tanning was wrong for the period style and brought out her freckles. “She looked like a lobster,” he says, “and next to Cybill, it was even worse.” The freckles are especially noticeable in Madeline’s section of the title song, in which she wears a short-sleeved blouse. Madeline didn’t like her costumes, either, and she made her unhappiness apparent to everyone. Several of her gowns are tight across her waist and lower abdomen, correct 1930s fashion but not reassuring to a woman who’s
concerned about her appearance in 1975. And in “Primitive Man,” one of those gowns is torn away, leaving her in a short slip, which prompted Pauline Kael to mention her “lavish, teasing thighs” in her review of
At Long Last Love
.
⁷⁹
While she’d lost weight since her debut, Madeline may have focused on one or two areas and worried that she looked fat. And as Bogdanovich says, standing next to Shepherd didn’t help.

Abrams, unlike Bogdanovich, remembers the best of Madeline’s time on the set, particularly her sense of humor and professionalism. “There was a certain amount of conflict between the three women,” she concedes, “but I think that’s natural when you put three ladies together in beautiful costumes, and all vying for Peter’s attention.”