Madeline Kahn (31 page)

Despite the dismal results of the films Madeline made in 1980, that quick succession of roles confirmed that she was still in demand as a motion picture star, and the steady work helped her continuing recovery from the disaster of
On the Twentieth Century
. One person in particular hoped to capitalize on Madeline’s heightened visibility: her mother.

A Little Off-Broadway
and
History of the World, Part I
(1980–81)

PAULA KAHN, STILL CERTAIN THAT STARDOM WAS HER RIGHTFUL DES
tiny, decided that now was the time to reveal her talents to the world. But a mere showcase, such as those that aspiring actors stage all the time, would not do. A one-woman show was required, she felt, and she asked Madeline to bankroll it. Understandably nervous, Madeline asked Walter Willison to direct the show. “Walter, you gotta protect me here,” she told him, and he took the job, also writing lyrics for two songs, including the opening number, “I’m Somebody’s Mother,” with Jeffrey Silverman, the show’s music director. The script consisted of a loose collection of anecdotes—“Paula’s take on womanhood,” as Jef Kahn calls it—as well as reenactments of scenes from her life. Just in case anyone was unaware that she was Madeline Kahn’s mother, she insisted that her one-woman show be expanded to include an actress representing the Daughter, though the character had no lines. This daughter, unlike the real-life one, would merely look on, almost like a stage prop, while Paula went about her business. Willison cast his friend Joanna Rush in the role.

Paula had wanted all along to extract Jef from the Twin Oaks community, so she summoned him to work on the show. Jef was ready to leave, so he drove out to Los Angeles with his cousin, Dan Kahn. Frustrated by his inability to get Paula to stick to the schedule and learn her songs, Jef next asked his girlfriend, Heidi Berthoud, to make the trip out, for emotional support. But Willison and Rush found Paula as undisciplined as she was temperamental, and they soon went into a huddle with Jef and Heidi, then quit the show. Undaunted, Paula cast another actress as the Daughter, hired another director and, ultimately, another musical director, and forged ahead.

A Little Off-Broadway & Slightly North of Wilshire
played first at UCLA. Paula invited Madeline’s friends, and a few did attend, more as a display of solidarity than out of any expectation that a star would be born that night at age fifty-seven. “Who wants to see Madeline Kahn’s mother when Madeline Kahn is in the audience?” Mel Brooks asks. Nevertheless, he and Anne Bancroft watched as Paula sang and revealed “funny” details of her relationship with Madeline. Always striving to be a polished professional herself and resolutely guarded about her private life, Madeline was humiliated in front of some of her most important Hollywood connections. Today, Brooks politely declines to remember any details of Paula’s show. “It was okay,” he says. “[I]t was a blur. I was just so unhappy for Madeline.”

Seemingly unaware that her show was anything but a hit, Paula arranged to sign on for a longer run—Monday nights for six months, with the possibility of an extension—at the Westwood Playhouse, beginning June 16. This time, Madeline refused to pay the upfront money. Undaunted, Paula “borrowed” it from Jef. For the second show, however, Paula neglected to rehearse or even to learn her lines. On opening night, she tried to wing it, humming when she forgot song lyrics, laughing as she repeatedly asked for cues. Now Madeline put her foot down. The show closed, and Paula resumed her primary occupation, “being taken care of,” as Jef says. She continued to stir up activity without following through, blaming others for her failures, and then asking Madeline to pick up the pieces.

At the time of Paula’s show, Madeline was shooting
History of the World, Part I
, her fourth and final picture with Brooks, in which she plays the Roman Empress Nympho. Spanning centuries, from the cavemen to the Spanish Inquisition to the French Revolution,
History
may be the most lavish of Brooks’s directorial efforts. With an estimated budget of $11 million, and gross earnings of $31,672,907 (ranked nineteenth at the box office for 1981), it nonetheless didn’t rival
Blazing Saddles
and
Young Frankenstein
in impact. Only years later did the line “It’s good to be the king” (uttered by Brooks as Louis XVI) become a catchphrase, thanks to viewings on cable and video. The highlight of Madeline’s performance is a musical moment in which she selects the best-hung imperial soldiers to escort her to an orgy. “Yes, yes, no, yes, no, no,” she sings to an accelerando rhythm, but it’s not really a song. And she gets nothing more to sing, though Broadway hoofer Gregory Hines plays her favorite, a runaway slave. “After seeing the movie about 30 times, I realized that was a mistake,” Brooks says. “I had Madeline Kahn and Gregory Hines! And
I didn’t give them a musical number!” He did, however, give Madeline jokes and shtick that were vulgar even by the standards of his comedy. She goes along gamely, as far as one can tell from watching the screen. But to friends and family she again revealed her discomfort with this kind of material. In private, she wasn’t entirely uptight, and to her dying day she kept old love letters that include rapturous paeans to her breasts. But what she wanted to present to the public wasn’t necessarily what Brooks asked for.

At least the material Brooks gave her was
funny
, unlike so many of the roles that other moviemakers offered her. “Mel gave sexy ladies a chance to be funny, and he allowed Madeline Kahn to be sexy
and
funny. There’s a big difference,” Joan Rivers told a film interviewer. In the same documentary, Tracey Ullman describes Brooks as one of the rare “men in the business that like women and get women and are comfortable with women being funny.”
⁶
Madeline almost certainly would have agreed with this assessment. But there was a catch: Brooks’s films brought Madeline prominence and acclaim, but also a widespread belief that she really
was
bawdy, and that broad comedy was her preferred field—her specialty, if not her one-trick pony.

Nympho is hardly a substantial role. She may be empress, but she’s not the leading lady, as she had been in
High Anxiety
. In the Roman episode she is overshadowed by Brooks, who plays a standup comic helping Hines to escape to freedom. But she enjoyed working again with Brooks and with Dom DeLuise, who plays the emperor Nero, and she established a good onscreen rapport with Dena Dietrich (playing her lady-in-waiting), with whom she’d appeared on
Adam’s Rib
.

Over the next several years Brooks directed three films without making any substantial offers to Madeline. She took this as a personal slight. Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine an appropriate part for her in Brooks’s next movie,
Spaceballs
(1987), since she was by then too old for the role of the Princess (played by twenty-five-year-old Daphne Zuniga) and the wrong type to play the android Dot Matrix (Joan Rivers). To Brooks’s credit, he’d already doubled the number of female leads in the film he was parodying,
Star Wars
. It’s far easier to picture Madeline as Brooks’s love interest in the class comedy
Life Stinks
(1991), and yet that character’s best scene is a dance number. With Lesley Ann Warren, who studied ballet as avidly as Madeline studied voice, the scene achieves an arresting beauty that Madeline could never have brought off, no matter how hard she tried.

Madeline’s family and friends report that Brooks’s representatives offered her the part of Latrine, the cook in
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
(1993),
at a fee too low for her to consider. Brooks tells a different story. There was no question of money, he says, but the part itself “was simply not enough.” Tracey Ullman played Latrine, and Brooks never worked with Madeline again. When asked whether he considered her for other roles, Brooks said that he wanted to expand the role of Elizabeth in the Broadway musical adaptation of
Young Frankenstein
, and with Madeline in mind, he’d wanted to do so long before his adaptation of
The Producers
opened on Broadway in 2001. But the musical version of
Young Frankenstein
wouldn’t see its New York premiere until eight years after Madeline’s death.

Slapstick (Of Another Kind)
(1982–84)

SLAPSTICK (OF ANOTHER KIND)
, AN ADAPTATION OF KURT VONNEGUT’S
novel
Slapstick: Or Lonesome No More
, teamed Madeline with Jerry Lewis and Marty Feldman, but the results were so bad that the picture was held back from American release for two years, seeing its US premiere only in March 1984 (European audiences saw it beginning in late 1982). According to the film’s director, co-screenwriter, and producer, Steven Paul, critical and audience responses were so negative that distributors around the world tried to break their agreements with him. Although Vonnegut joined in writing the screenplay—and, according to Paul, enjoyed himself at a preview screening in New York—the author ultimately dismissed the movie, and the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation nominated Lewis for a “Razzie” for worst actor in 1985. Even today, Internet critics continue to throw insults at the picture. “Horrifying,” runs a typical comment on the IMDb website. “[T]he movie takes the book, shreds it, puts a Hollywood sheen on it, dripped slime on it, then pooted it out into the world.”
⁷

Vonnegut’s novels are reputedly unfilmable, and
Slapstick
is a hodgepodge of science fiction and social and political satire that the author described as “the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography.”
⁸
The problem with this movie doesn’t lie so much with the material as with the approach. Paul, a wunderkind actor and producer (whose relationship with Vonnegut dated back to childhood), was less experienced as a filmmaker, having only one prior credit,
Falling in Love Again
(1980). Today Paul cheerfully accepts responsibility for
Slapstick
’s failure, but he points out that as a producer, he managed to make a complex film on a tiny budget with popular stars. His biggest mistake was hiring himself to direct, and he wistfully recalls meeting with Terry Gilliam to discuss
the project. Gilliam found
Slapstick
intriguing, and he outlined his vision, which embraced suggestions of incest between the principal characters, a brother and sister who are also twins. However, Gilliam was committed to the final Monty Python movie,
The Meaning of Life
, and with money lining up, Paul couldn’t afford to wait.

By producing and directing, Paul effectively held down two full-time jobs simultaneously. He was responsible for the film’s completion bond and financing, for securing distribution, and for paying every bill—to the point that he had to interrupt takes to sign checks. As an inexperienced director, he opted for what he now believes was the wrong tone—“comedic and softer,” less bizarre than that of the novel or, for that matter, Gilliam’s scheme. Also, he should have “pulled more” from the cast. He sought out Lewis because he admired the “young, innocent, idiot kid” the comedian played in his early films, but he came to understand that in middle age Lewis could no longer tap into that persona. “I kept pushing to get that character from him,” Paul remembers, “and he couldn’t find it. I think we finally got close to it, that childish quality.”

Finding an actress to play the dual role of the sister and the twins’ mother proved a challenge, but after considering a number of candidates, Paul remembered Madeline, with whom he had worked on
Comedy Tonight
. Joining forces with her agent, Johnnie Planco, he persuaded Madeline to commit to
Slapstick
, and prepared a press release. Only then did Paul share the news with Lewis, who replied, “I won’t work with her.” The two had never met, but Lewis believed that Madeline’s work was “not my kind of comedy,” suggesting that he, like so many others, expected Madeline to be Lili von Shtupp. After repeated assurances from Paul, Lewis relented, and Paul was spared the ordeal of retracting his press release and tearing up Madeline’s contract. Lewis may not have been completely convinced, and when he met Madeline at last, it was on neutral ground, at the Polo Lounge. Later, he hosted several rehearsals at his home in Beverly Hills, and by the end of shooting, he told Paul that working with Madeline “was the closest he had come to working with Dean Martin.”

Because
Slapstick
was a non-union project, Madeline was able to secure jobs on the set for her brother and for Heidi Berthoud. But coming to work meant crossing a picket line every day, which heightened tensions on the set—particularly for Lewis, since the Teamsters were longtime supporters of his Labor Day telethons. At one point, Lewis lost patience with his director (“You’re appalling. A-
Paul
-ing”), but apart from this outburst, Jef and Heidi say, he remained quiet, professional, and
somewhat aloof on the set. Shoots tended to run long, and Madeline often worked ten- and twelve-hour days.

As the continuity person, Heidi had a front-row seat for the ad-libs and teasing that followed flubbed lines. Feldman “would go off on these riffs and make everything funny and fine. And of course Madi would play off of him. They had fun together,” Heidi remembers. Madeline tried to “stay above the fray,” Jef remembers, and she kept her opinions to herself. On one occasion, however, the fray came to her. A popular television actress came to the set and confronted Madeline, believing that she was having an affair with her husband, a member of the production team for
Slapstick
. Madeline “handled it very diplomatically and didn’t raise her voice and kept her integrity about it,” Jef says. Her capacity for arousing suspicion among other women (Alan Titus’s wife, Gene Wilder’s daughter, Ursula Andress) may have contributed to her aplomb. She’d endured such situations before, but she would’ve preferred to avoid them altogether.

Other film sets have seen more tensions and more outright conflict than this one, and they’ve turned out just fine.
Slapstick
turned out to be an unfunny, cheap-looking mess that wasted the talents of its stars and the goodwill of Vonnegut’s fans. As freakish twins—brilliant so long as they’re together, but infantile idiots when they’re apart—Madeline and Lewis are saddled with grotesque makeup, one-piece pajamas for costumes, and no way to salvage creditable performances. For Lewis, who had only just completed Martin Scorsese’s
The King of Comedy, Slapstick
must have been especially painful. He and Madeline also play the twins’ parents, “the most beautiful of the Beautiful People,” and he seems to channel his discomfort into his portrayal of the father. Though the character is supposed to be ill at ease, the audience can sense the actor’s desire to escape from the movie.