Madeline Kahn (20 page)

Madeline and Brennan had never met before the start of rehearsals, but Brennan broke the ice at a read-through at Bogdanovich’s home, and they quickly found common ground. Both had worked with Bogdanovich before and had a background in musical theater in New York. Brennan starred in
Little Mary Sunshine
in 1959, and she co-starred with Carol Channing in the original cast of
Hello, Dolly!
in 1964. Both loved music, which made
At Long Last Love
more trying for them. “Music means more to me than anything,” Brennan exclaimed. “Even more than dogs! Even more than
cats
!”

She recalled that neither Shepherd nor Reynolds made much effort to improve their (as she perceived them) limited musical abilities. “When you love music and it means so much to you, you want to have it right,” she said. During rehearsals and around the piano at Bogdanovich’s home, “Nobody wanted to work! Cybill didn’t want to work. You gotta work, you gotta practice!” Memory didn’t soften her impressions of Reynolds (“Why did Peter pick him? Box office? He [already] had that with Cybill!”) or of Hillerman, her partner in many scenes. “There was no class to our parts,” she said, “
and
you have to be with John Hillerman all the time. It really is not a pleasant thing to do.” Del Prete, she said, made “no impression. He was sweet. . . . At least he was a professional singer.” And yet, despite the hardships, “I’d love to work with Peter again,” she said, four years before her death. “I’d do it in a minute.”

To some on the set, the camaraderie between Brennan and Madeline seemed like an alliance every bit as intimidating as the one between Bogdanovich and Shepherd. During a dance rehearsal for the female leads, Lantieri misunderstood their “clever banter,” believing they’d insulted his wife, Abrams recalls. A scene ensued, upsetting everyone, and Madeline turned to Mel Brooks—not to her agent or to the producer, Frank Marshall—to intercede on her behalf. Thereafter, Lantieri worked
only with Reynolds, and he hardly appeared on the set for the rest of the shoot. Abrams was promoted from “drilling” the dances to sharing dance coordinator billing with Lantieri.

Admiring Brennan and Madeline, Shepherd was unaware of their unhappiness, and she considers the original cut of the movie one of Madeline’s masterpieces, if not
the
masterpiece. Indeed, Madeline has few advocates as passionately outspoken as Shepherd. This admiration would have astonished her, just as Shepherd was astonished to hear that Madeline was intimidated by her, by the attention Bogdanovich paid her, and especially by her looks. “She looks so beautiful in the movie,” Shepherd says. “Astoundingly beautiful! And she was intimidated? I was a cover girl, that’s intimidating, maybe,” she muses. If anything, Shepherd remembers being intimidated by Madeline, especially by her singing. Like Madeline, she’d had classical vocal training as a girl, but watching
At Long Last Love
now, she says, “I can’t believe what she’s doing with her voice.” Much of Kitty’s music lies in Madeline’s alto register—to the degree that a lyric soprano has one—and Shepherd says Bogdanovich wanted her, too, to sing in a lower register during filming.

Though Shepherd sings pleasantly in
At Long Last Love
, in 1975 critics simply didn’t want to hear her, and some still don’t. Whether because of laziness (lumping all the cast together) or lack of musical background, a number of critics to this day dismiss the entire cast, including Madeline. The all-damning summary, “They can’t sing,” hangs around the picture’s neck. The trend began with Vincent Canby in the
Times
, who praised Madeline’s comedic talent (“indestructibly funny”), but wrote off the cast as “performers who don’t dance and whose singing abilities might be best hidden in a very large choir.”
⁸⁰
In
Time
, Jay Cocks observed, “Even the few with musical training . . . flounder badly.”
⁸¹

The director has wondered whether his relationship with Shepherd didn’t antagonize people (he recalls being told it did by no less than Cary Grant). Having left his wife and the mother of his children for a cover girl whose talents would remain hotly debated for years, Bogdanovich was showcasing Shepherd in yet another big-budget feature—this time insisting that audiences accept her as a singer and dancer, as well as an actress. The movie is something of a celebration of infidelity, too. By the time the picture opened, a backlash against Bogdanovich had built up, with Cocks at its forefront. After attending a press preview, critic Judith Crist phoned Bogdanovich to warn him, “They’ve got the knives out for you.” Though Cocks opined, “This may be just the moment, then, if only out of simple charity, to attempt an uneasy truce with Peter Bogdanovich,” he gave no
quarter: “
At Long Last Love
cost $6 million, but might almost be worth it if the movie represented the low point of Bogdanovich’s talent—the point from which he can only ascend.”
⁸²
Pauline Kael found almost nothing to her liking in “a stillborn picture . . . this relentless vapidity.”
⁸³
At Long Last Love
would be a notorious flop, “a career-killer,” as Ryan O’Neal puts it. Bogdanovich took out a newspaper ad to apologize for the disaster. A few years later, he re-cut the movie, restoring “Down in the Dumps.” But ultimately, he says, “It was a favorite project of mine, and it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. So I sort of turned my back on it.”

Bogdanovich, Shepherd, and Reynolds received the worst reviews. Madeline walked away from the wreckage with a few words of praise (“the real pastry here,” Kael called her). Yet watching the movie today, it’s hard to understand why most critics were so harsh. Bogdanovich makes a number of miscalculations, and yet they hardly add up to a debacle. Perhaps the single greatest flaw is that listening to the same few people sing over and over becomes tedious, no matter how much one loves Cole Porter. At least in old-time musicals, singing chores were distributed more widely. The characters in
At Long Last Love
are less compelling than those in the movies that inspired them. Brennan’s wisecracks, no matter how expertly delivered, don’t rise to the level of those Helen Broderick put across in
Top Hat
and
Swingtime
, and audiences root for Fred Astaire’s characters because, no matter what, he dances well. No one in
At Long Last Love
shines in any comparable way. But each actor does bring a distinctive personality and at least a little charisma. Reynolds is visibly uncomfortable whenever he sings, yet he’s a natural athlete and fun to watch when he dances, light-footed and less self-conscious, as if his body can take liberties that his voice can’t. But neither the cast nor the script does much to involve the audience emotionally.

For modern viewers, the great surprise of the movie may be how much the characters drink. Madeline’s Kitty is soused when she sings “Down in the Dumps,” which informs her interpretation of the song. She slides from her lowest register to her plummiest operatic timbre; she staggers and reels and breaks into tap steps. The number ends when she collapses on her bed with a bottle of gin. It’s as impressive a performance as Bogdanovich hoped—in one unbroken take. At least audiences now have the chance to judge for themselves. “Down in the Dumps” wasn’t included on the soundtrack album; the number wasn’t even included in the commemorative songbook. But it’s the prize of the restored version that’s now available for home viewing on Blu-Ray, painstakingly reassembled by James Blakely, the head of Fox’s editorial department.
Well before the Blu-Ray release, Shepherd argued in favor of a reevaluation of
At Long Last Love
, primarily as a means of granting Madeline, del Prete, and cinematographer Kovacs overdue recognition. “When I watch the movie, I’m constantly going, ‘How did we do that?’” she said. “How did we shoot Madeline Kahn and ‘Down in the Dumps’ without a cut? When Peter and I see it, we’re still holding our breaths!”

Madeline later referred to
At Long Last Love
as the most unpleasant shoot of her career, and in its aftermath, Bogdanovich says, “We sort of lost touch.” That’s a shame, because he had exciting plans for her: a solo record album much like the Porter album he’d produced for Shepherd, and a second musical based on the songs of Rodgers and Hart. It was not to be, he says: “There was a joke going on at the time that said if Peter Bogdanovich was seen near an orchestra, he should be arrested for loitering.”

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother
(1975)

MADELINE’S DAYS OF BEING “SPOILED” BY HIT MOVIES WERE OVER
, but her next picture seemed like an embrace from old friends—three of whom were Gene Wilder. For
The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother
, his debut as a film director, Wilder played the lead, enlisted a screenwriter he trusted (himself), and tailored roles to co-stars he loved: Madeline, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise. Even before writing the script, he made sure they were willing and available; he’s often said that he wouldn’t have made the movie without them. As an added gift, Wilder shot in England, and Madeline had never been to Europe. Once again practically the only woman in the picture, she plays Jenny Hill, a London music hall artiste
and
opera singer who turns to Sigerson Holmes for help in a baffling case.

A hitherto unmentioned sibling to Sherlock and Mycroft, Sigerson is eager to prove his mettle as a detective—though doing so means pursuing a school of red herrings and seducing Jenny, who’s incapable of telling the truth except when sexually aroused. It’s precisely because of Jenny that Sherlock (or, as Sigi calls him, “Sheer Luck”) doesn’t want the case for himself. He means for his younger brother to fall in love, get married, and settle down. Sigi is far too resentful of Sherlock ever to tolerate any direct matchmaking, and so Sherlock orchestrates the entire case to its happily-ever-after coda, intervening at key moments to ensure that Sigi doesn’t screw up. Sigi is smart but not
smarter
, and it isn’t only because he’s in his famous brother’s shadow that he has to take what cases he can get. While he immediately sees through Jenny’s imposture at their first meeting, he stumbles badly in other, more routine areas of detective work. Every misstep provokes Sigi’s barely controlled hysteria,
which in turn leads to high comedy. As a screenwriter, Wilder knew how to make himself look good.

And just as he approached monster movies, Wilder makes
Smarter Brother
less an outright parody than a loving application of Baker Street conventions to alternative circumstances. His Holmes and Watson remain true to their original personae, and Wilder builds his plot from three Conan Doyle stories. Sigerson’s name is one of Holmes’s aliases. To transport the audience to 1895, Wilder engaged cinematographer Gerry Fisher (Joseph Losey’s collaborator on
The Go-Between
), as well as Oscar-winning scenic designer Terence March (
Dr. Zhivago, Oliver!
), who lavished meticulous period details on the film. Though the ingredients don’t always gel, Wilder had accumulated a wealth of ideas and influences that poured onto the screen: not only Conan Doyle, but also Ealing Studios, the Marx Brothers, and even Ingmar Bergman, as he admitted in his director’s commentary on the DVD of the film.

Above all, Wilder designed
Smarter Brother
as a showcase for the actors. A leading man and an action hero, Wilder’s Sigi explores a range of emotions as he falls for Jenny, and he fences in three scenes, drawing on Wilder’s theater training. Since both Madeline and DeLuise were opera fans, naturally they play opera singers, and the film’s climax takes place during a performance of Verdi’s
Un Ballo in Maschera
. Madeline and Feldman enjoyed working with each other on
Young Frankenstein
, so Wilder gave them scenes together now. Playing Sacker, Sigi’s sidekick, Feldman gets some lunatic business, but he also shows an almost romantic sensitivity in his scenes with Jenny. Later to win fame as Rumpole of the Bailey, Leo McKern is a hilariously deranged Moriarty. Even Mel Brooks gets in on the act, with a brief voiceover. “Apart from
Young Frankenstein
, it was the best experience I’ve ever had in a movie,” Wilder says.

However, he remembers, things got off to a rocky start, and again, Madeline’s concern for her looks created trouble. “Madeline, who was trying on wigs the day before filming, suddenly went crazy, yelling and acting like a spoiled brat,” Wilder says. “Fortunately for me, Dom DeLuise was there and calmed her down. The next morning, as we were all getting into costume and makeup, I was handed a note. It contained a drawing of a witch, with the message underneath that read: ‘You will never see that lady again. Love, Mad.’ And I didn’t.”
⁸⁴

Among Madeline’s lesser-known movies, only
Judy Berlin
offers fans greater rewards than
Smarter Brother
. Seen today, the movie looks like a lacy valentine to Madeline, who’s decked out in graceful costumes (and who’s at her thinnest for the occasion) and elevated to leading-lady
status. As she charts her course from “Miss Liar” to Mrs. Holmes, she is by turns artificial, vulnerable, sexy, and brave. (Look for her violent attacks on DeLuise in the
Ballo
sequence.) It’s no accident that Brooks beefed up her role in their next picture together,
High Anxiety
, in which, once again, she plays a neurotic damsel in distress who develops into a love interest with heroic qualities.

Madeline summoned all her resources in
Smarter Brother
, including her more “serious” acting ability. When Jenny can’t bring herself to tell Sigi the truth and turns to leave, Madeline was really crying. But seconds later, she joins Sigi in “Kangaroo Hop,” an out-of-nowhere song-and-dance number that Wilder says is among his favorite scenes in the film. And because Wilder “could listen to Madeline sing all day,”
⁸⁵
Smarter Brother
is also a musical comedy. The names Jenny Hill and Bessie Bellwood (Jenny’s alias) are those of real-life Victorian music-hall stars, and Jenny has hardly arrived at Sigi’s door, answering to the name Bessie Bellwood, when he demands that she sing Bellwood’s signature numbers. In the course of the film, Madeline also sings “Kangaroo Hop” (and its reprise), “Simply Crazy,” and “You Don’t Love As I Do” (joined by Sigi). (Some of these numbers, uncovered by assistant director Gail Mutrux, are associated with Gertie Millar, an Edwardian operetta star.) Madeline also sings portions of the
Ballo
pastiche. This is Madeline’s most prominent singing role onscreen, and it makes abundant use of her classical training.