Madeline Kahn (34 page)

He had expected to perform
Scrambled Feet
much as they had done in theaters. The studio was decorated like a cabaret, and a live audience sat at tables. But, Haddow says, the stage show had a forward momentum, facilitated by rapid costume changes—casual street clothes in the original Chicago run, and more formal dress as the show moved on to greater
success in other theaters, but nothing that required more than a few seconds. For the video production, costumes became more elaborate—especially Madeline’s. While shooting proceeded in the same running order as the stage show, Haddow remembers long, frustrating breaks between scenes, when Madeline went back to hair and wardrobe. Madeline wears everything from formal dresses to a Valkyrie costume and old lady drag. Her hair, curled modishly, goes through a few changes, too. Haddow understood the need for an actress to look good; he also suggests that the producers demanded the fancier costumes, perhaps from a desire to make
Scrambled Feet
more appealing by presenting not just a famous movie star but a glamorous one. He didn’t know Madeline well enough to recognize her anxieties about her appearance or to understand that television might exacerbate them. As the taping continued, he felt the audience response grow less spontaneous.

Viewed today,
Scrambled Feet
holds up remarkably well. The life of an actor hasn’t changed much in the intervening years, and despite a few references to then-current plays, the material eschews the kind of topicality that requires similar revues—notably
Forbidden Broadway
—to update regularly. If audience response is less than enthusiastic, there’s no way to tell, and Madeline’s work is remarkably self-effacing. Apart from the fact that she’s the only woman onstage, she blends in with her colleagues, seizing the spotlight only when it’s handed to her, exactly as the men do in their turn. Showtime may have intended for Madeline to be the big-name star, but she doesn’t act like one.

“She was letter-perfect,” Haddow remembers. Madeline excelled in the special number that he and Driver wrote for her, “Child Star” (“My career is finished if I start to grow!”), a surprisingly hard rock song that owes something to Gilda Radner’s punk character, Candy Slice. Elsewhere in
Scrambled Feet
however, Madeline is very much in her own realm. The Valkyrie speaks with a German accent redolent of Lili von Shtupp. The little old lady in the “Theater Party” song is clearly related to Victoria Brisbane’s charade in
High Anxiety
. Since the comedy of “Sham Dancing” depends on tricks deployed by actors who can’t dance, it still lies comfortably within the scope of Madeline’s abilities. She plays piano in three songs, and sings in more, including a wistful duet with Driver, “Send Me Two Tickets.” But the
pièce de résistance
is the final sketch, which purports to focus on opera and finds Madeline singing “Un bel dì,” the only extant record of her hit number from the Bavarian Manor. Then, a previously unseen performer interrupts her. This is the show’s mascot, a white duck named Hermione, whose well-timed bodily function leads
to the number “Never Go Onstage with an Animal.” Seeing the duck’s interest in one of the audience members, Madeline quips, “I think she wants you. She
does
want you. And she will
have
you! Don’t you understand?” She times each phrase to get a laugh before moving on to the next.

The Showtime network had been distributed nationally for only five years and didn’t penetrate as deeply into American households as its rival, HBO, did at the time. The home audience can’t have been as large as it was, for example, for
SNL
(though cable networks’ penchant for repeats would have boosted the numbers). But Madeline wanted the television equivalent of an out-of-town tryout, and she got it. As she proceeded to tape the pilot for her new sitcom, she crossed paths at last with Baron, cast as her neighbor. “I recall her being catatonic with fear, she was so nervous about going in front of a live studio audience,” Baron says. “She wanted a TV career so badly.” After the taping, they sat in Madeline’s dressing room, shared a drink to calm down, and swapped stories about their mothers. Both were in therapy, “and that’s what you do,” Baron says. “She was so relieved that it was over.” The sitcom went forward, Baron lost her role—and Madeline’s anxieties kept on roiling.

Oh Madeline
(1983–84)

TOGETHER AND SEPARATELY, MARCY CARSEY AND TOM WERNER, FOR
mer executives at ABC, had a hand in developing comedies that included
Happy Days, Mork & Mindy
, the serialized satire
Soap
, and the brilliant
Taxi
. Carsey left first, in 1981, to form an independent production company, and Werner joined her a year later. Over the next several years, they would meet with acclaim for their work. Often, they built shows around stars such as Bill Cosby (
The Cosby Show, Cosby
), Roseanne Barr (
Roseanne
), and Cybill Shepherd (
Cybill
). In that regard, their venture with Madeline was a template for their future shows—but in many ways, it was more like the sitcom equivalent of that first pancake that never turns out right.

Just two years younger than Madeline and a native of Massachusetts, too, Carsey was also a former actress. Bright and possessed of discerning taste (perhaps more so than some of the shows on her résumé might suggest), Carsey was arguably more high-minded than other people in authority in television. The opposite of a stereotypical network sycophant, she charted her course at ABC by speaking her mind. Eventually, she rose to the position of senior vice-president of prime-time series. Werner’s similarly straightforward style led Carsey to believe they could work well together—as they did, both at the network and in the Carsey-Werner Company. As they prepared their first production, they enlisted such behind-the-scenes talents as the veteran writer–producer Irma Kalish and the young, albeit experienced, producer Caryn Sneider Mandabach, as well as the director J. D. Lobue, who had directed twenty-eight episodes of
Soap
and who would direct every episode of Madeline’s show. Madeline was in good hands, though that was hardly a guarantee of success.
²¹

Yes, But I’m Married
, as the series was originally titled, pushed against the confines of what was ultimately a highly conventional husband-and-wife comedy. In the pilot, a married couple, Catherine (Madeline) and Charlie (James Sloyan), argue and separate. Charlie decides to start an affair with Annie (Francine Tacker), an attractive blonde kindergarten teacher, little realizing that Catherine and Annie are friends. Charlie invites Annie to dinner with the intention of sleeping with her, while Catherine goes to a party. Drunk, she demands to sleep with Bobby, Charlie’s best friend (Louis Giambalvo). Bobby’s half-inclined to agree. The farce is brought to a close with a bed trick, when Charlie discovers that the woman beside him isn’t Annie; it’s Catherine, passed out. The sanctity of marriage is upheld—for now.

This was racy stuff for an American sitcom at the time, and viewed today, it can be unpleasant. American television depends on likability, the quality that makes viewers invite performers into their living rooms week after week. Madeline had that quality, tinged with a vulnerability that makes it difficult to watch her being treated unkindly by her husband. But the source material for
Yes, But I’m Married
, a British sitcom called
Pig in the Middle
, had no need to consider the sensibilities of American viewers. Produced by London Weekend Television between 1980 and 1983 and taking its title from the name of a children’s game (known as “keep-away” in the United States),
Pig in the Middle
depicts the sex lives of middle-class suburbanites—particularly one married man’s unrequited infatuation with another woman. Adaptations of Britcoms had been Werner’s portfolio early in his career at ABC, and he triumphed with
Three’s Company
, an adaptation of the British
Man About the House
, in the 1970s. That show, like
Soap
and some other productions on which he and Carsey had worked, relied on sexier humor and themes than did sitcoms of earlier decades, and it made sense to set out in that direction for their first independent production.

Unlike some of their subsequent series,
Yes, But I’m Married
wasn’t created with a specific star in mind. Madeline joined a project already in progress with a premise that didn’t focus primarily on her character. In the British series, the “pig in the middle” is the husband. Still, she found the prospects encouraging, and ABC snapped up the show—only to have second thoughts about the material as the start of regular production neared. Abruptly, the network asked for changes, and with new executives in charge there, Carsey and Werner didn’t wield the kind of influence that would allow them to debate, much less refuse the demands. Interviewed in 2003, Carsey recalled, “We unfortunately took some
network notes that were not very good, because we were desperate to make this last, now that it was on the air. And we softened the concept and kind of watered it down to their liking, to such a degree that it kind of lost its center.” She and Werner learned “to really put those blinders on and follow the vision that you start with, because otherwise, things can go haywire.” There was no chance to apply that lesson to their first show.

The title was first to go.
Yes, But I’m Married
could have starred anybody, but
Oh Madeline
put the focus directly on the leading lady. Beyond that, Carsey and Werner’s team retooled the series with evident haste, throwing out the
Pig in the Middle
blueprint while continuing to credit the British show, retaining most of the cast and the sets, and recycling certain elements from the pilot in subsequent episodes. This process revealed a number of flaws—not only with the new approach, but also with the original premise—that rippled through the series as a whole. For example, Mandabach suggests that if they were following
Pig in the Middle
, they should have cast the male lead first. Today, they might have made Madeline the pig in the middle, choosing between her husband and a teacher, but in 1984, that premise wasn’t feasible.

Above all, ABC insisted that Madeline herself be made into “a Lucille Ball for the ’80s.” Carsey gamely played along, describing
Oh Madeline
as “in tone more like a
Honeymooners
or a
Lucy
than anything on television now,” in an interview during the television critics’ summer press tour.
²²
Lobue still believes it was a mistake not to capitalize on Madeline’s gifts, rather than someone else’s. The new premise portrayed a zany, redheaded housewife in a variety of comical misadventures. As network publicity put it, her goal was “to keep her marriage fresh,” rather than following Lucy’s lead by attempting to break into show business—but the debt is nonetheless weighty. The revamped show also required a far greater emphasis on physical comedy, which, as Lobue agrees, was Lucy’s trademark, but never Madeline’s.

Madeline’s character was now called Madeline, not Catherine, setting her up as “the new Lucy,” who used her own name, and also trading on her name recognition—by far the show’s greatest selling point. Charlie was a romance novelist, and Francine Tacker now played his editor, but she would be eased out of the show after just two more episodes. Filling that gap,
Soap
veteran Jesse Welles stepped in as Doris Leone, the estranged wife of Bobby, still played by Louis Giambalvo. Their interplay is meant to bring an edge to their otherwise generic second couple. It’s as if Fred and Ethel Mertz have gone beyond bickering to divorce.

The resemblance to
I Love Lucy
continued to dominate the series, as the producers and writers cherry-picked sitcom plots from three decades before. Madeline takes a magazine quiz and decides her marriage is in trouble. Madeline gets jealous of Charlie’s ex-girlfriend, a glamorous Hollywood actress. Madeline and Charlie go camping and land in jail. Madeline is supposed to sing in a local troupe’s operetta evening but loses her voice. After criticizing Charlie for playing poker, Madeline loses money at the roulette table and schemes to hide the truth. And so on. There’s even an ultra-
Lucy
setup, a guest appearance by a celebrity playing himself (Johnny Mathis).

Granted, the show is more concerned with sex than
Lucy
was. For example, during a vacation with her parents (guest stars Geraldine Fitzgerald and Ray Walston), Madeline learns that her mother once had an affair with an employee (Bill Macy) at the family’s favorite resort hotel. This episode and one featuring Madeline’s younger sister contain the show’s most serious, character-oriented scenes, signaling another direction that might have been explored further. But when
Oh Madeline
approaches the territory covered in
Yes, But I’m Married
, it backs off. The plot of “The Lady with the Lamp” closely resembles that of the pilot, but this time, when Madeline passes out, she sleeps alone, and there’s no pretty younger woman to tempt Charlie. The show’s other sexual references are generally more leering than knowing, and they seldom harmonize with the conventional premise and plots.

That’s a point that Tom Shales, the influential critic of the
Washington Post
, drove home in his review of
Oh Madeline
’s premiere when he observed that “the burnt-roast sitcoms of the ’50s” didn’t include “talk of ‘alabaster breasts’ and ‘deflowering.’” The show “essentially squanders Kahn’s singular broad-comic gifts on frazzled and tattered material. . . . [N]o intriguing concept is ever developed. It’s just Madeline thrown into a sitcom like a child dropped into a sandbox and told to play.”
²³
In the
Miami Herald
, critic Sandra Earley went so far as to suggest that even Madeline’s hairstyle, upswept in some scenes in the premiere, was copied from Lucy Ricardo’s—though she declared that Madeline “has the kind of TV presence that requires ours.”
Variety
approved of the show: “Kahn brings her odd voice and her capacity of using her body in odd ways to the series and generates a strong amount of big laughs. . . . The cast and concept, as revealed in the opener, looked like ‘Madeline’ might have the stuff to be around for a long while.” But Fred Rothenberg, writing for the Associated Press, dismissed the entire series as “forgetfully funny,
with characters you wouldn’t find in real life, or want to know anyway.” And, in an extremely brief “Picks and Pans” review,
People
magazine said, “This sitcom about a woman trapped in a mid-life crisis likewise traps comedienne Madeline Kahn.”
²⁴