Madeline Kahn (37 page)

Madeline’s artistic flirtation with Charles Ludlam hadn’t ended. In New York on March 11, 1984, she attended a performance of his play
Galas
(in which he played an opera singer based on Maria Callas). He told her that he wanted to return the favor she’d done him. Now that she was unexpectedly at liberty, he offered her the role of the female psychiatrist in his play
Reverse Psychology
, a comedy less outrageous than his other works. However, Black-Eyed Susan remembers, Madeline said she’d accept only if Ludlam appeared in the show with her. He preferred to work on other projects instead, anticipating that
Reverse Psychology
would in effect become
her
project. She declined. She’d admired Ludlam’s work with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company but hadn’t followed it devotedly over the years. Black-Eyed Susan says that only after several trips to the theater did Madeline admit she finally understood what the troupe was trying to do. She did become at least enough of a member of Ludlam’s gang to win an introduction to photographer Peter Hujar. A Ridiculous fan who took a series of photos of the troupe, Hujar also took a memorable portrait of
Madeline herself, expressing a profound, even startling melancholy. It’s one of those moments when the camera sees in a subject what the eyes alone can’t.

Astutely, Madeline judged that joining Ludlam at the Ridiculous—which by then had moved to a permanent home in a basement off Sheridan Square—might broaden his audience somewhat as her fans discovered his work. But to bring him to even greater attention, she needed to try to incorporate his sensibility in her more commercial world, much as she’d done in
Oh Madeline
. She wanted to bring him uptown.

Opera had long been a source of fascination to him, as several of his plays testify. Matthew Epstein, another of Ludlam’s friends, began to dream up projects in which Madeline and Ludlam might work together. He hit upon another Offenbach operetta,
La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein
. For Ludlam, who revered Molière, a farcical French comedy seemed like a good fit, and for Madeline, who found high-lying music increasingly daunting, the vocal line (usually sung by mezzo-sopranos or mature sopranos) might prove congenial. And the character of the Grand Duchess, who’s almost psychotically mad for men in uniform, suggested comedic possibilities that she might exploit brilliantly.

Long Beach Opera expressed interest, and after talking with Ludlam, Michael Feingold began to prepare English translations for several of the arias. The combination of Epstein’s impeccable credentials at Santa Fe Opera and Madeline’s work with the Festival Theater suggested another possible venue, and the pianist Earl Wild already had been lobbying Santa Fe Opera’s founder, John Crosby, to find something for Ludlam to do there. (He wound up directing Henze’s
The English Cat
[1985] and Strauss’s
Die Fledermaus
[1986].)

On the afternoon of Saturday, January 12, 1985, Feingold came to Madeline’s apartment with a pianist to audition three numbers. Endowed with a pleasing baritone, he did his best, “in my very apologetic fashion,” he remembers. “Oh, they’re wonderful, that was really well done,” Madeline told him. “But I don’t know if this is really right for me.” With a smile, she added, “I think
you
should do it.”

About a week later, Feingold’s agent called to say that Madeline was no longer involved with the project. By the time he gave up, he’d been through four directors and three prima donnas, including Brenda Boozer, Robert Klein’s wife at the time. “I think I never actually got a contract to sign,” Feingold says, “and I don’t think I ever got paid, and I don’t think I ever did all of the work.” As for Madeline, “The moral of the story is, she should have just sung opera, and she would have been great.”

Whatever the hopes for
Grand Duchess
or for any further collaboration between Madeline and Ludlam, they couldn’t last long. He had contracted HIV, and although he held off getting tested, Black-Eyed Susan is convinced that he knew he didn’t have much time left. He died on May 28, 1987. Several weeks later, Madeline spoke at his memorial service.

Madeline did return briefly to the New York stage for the first time since
On the Twentieth Century
in the gentlest way possible: a twenty-two-performance run of Donald Margulies’s
What’s Wrong with This Picture?
, at the Manhattan Theater Club from January 29 to February 23, 1985. Judy Graubart’s husband, Bob Dishy, co-starred, and Claudia Weill directed (this was a rare occasion when Madeline worked with a woman director). Presented as a workshop, performances were closed to the press, and the play gave Madeline a chance to confirm that her reputation in the theater community hadn’t suffered permanent damage. “I still brag that she appeared at Manhattan Theater Club,” the company’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, says.
³⁷

Clue
(1985)

“FLAMES! FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!” MADELINE’S MOST-QUOTED
line from
Clue
doesn’t appear in the shooting script and came as a surprise to the director and her fellow cast members—and quite possibly to Madeline herself. Although a box office disappointment in theaters, the movie has grown in popularity through cable television and home video. Only her work with Mel Brooks has done more to define Madeline in the public imagination. And it all started with a board game.

Invented during World War II by Anthony E. Pratt, a British law clerk, Cluedo (as it’s called outside North America) takes the ingredients of the classic English country house murder mystery, adds dice, and asks players to deduce the murderer, the weapon, and the room in which Dr. Black (or, in North America, Mr. Boddy) breathed his last. Originally, simple pawns represented the “characters,” whose personae were suggested by the color of each piece and even the most cursory reading of Agatha Christie. The game doesn’t depend on role-playing, but it’s more fun if you do channel English character actors as you move your pawn through the conservatory and the billiard room. In a sense, people had been playing Mrs. White ever since 1949, long before Madeline got the chance.

Surely inspired by the success of
Murder by Death
, producer–director John Landis optioned the film rights to Clue, braving the mockery of the press and public as he pursued what he believed was a surefire marketing gimmick. Like the board game, the movie would have different endings, and he expected that audiences would see the picture several times in order to see every permutation. At first, Landis planned to write and direct
Clue
, but he found himself drawn to other projects. He was editing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video and had two feature films in
production when Jonathan Lynn, the latest in a line of writers, arrived in Hollywood to meet him.

An affable Englishman best known at the time as the co-creator of the BBC comedy
Yes, Minister
, Lynn had recently directed an adaptation of a French farce at the National Theatre in London, which led film producer Jon Guber to recommend him as a good prospect for
Clue
. Lynn made his first trip to Los Angeles and wound up writing his first Hollywood screenplay, set not in Britain but in America. In fleshing out the characters beyond mere colors and in rounding out the plot, he set aside Agatha Christie and turned to a period that fascinated him, the McCarthy era. Thus the
Clue
characters became Washington insiders, each with a dark secret, summoned to a New England mansion for a confrontation with Mr. Boddy, the man who’s been blackmailing them. In the course of a dark and stormy night, the corpses pile up, and the characters frantically try to figure out whodunit—though ultimately “Communism is just a red herring.”

Lynn previously knew only one member of the
Clue
cast. He’d grown up with Tim Curry, who plays the indefatigable butler, Wadsworth. He’d seen a few of Madeline’s movies, and their mutual friend, Austin Pendleton, recommended her enthusiastically. “Mrs. White was not a particularly rewarding part as originally written,” Lynn says, “and I expanded it wherever I could in the hope that she would commit to the film.” It was Lynn’s conceit that the character names are all aliases, assigned to them by Wadsworth, and those names don’t correspond to the colors of the costumes. Mrs. White is the greatest departure from the board game. Traditionally, the character is a servant (variously a nurse, a cook, or a maid), but in Lynn’s script she becomes a well-to-do widow, dressed in mourning black. And as the script reveals, she’s a black widow in the metaphorical sense, too, having lost five husbands in suspicious circumstances. Michael Kaplan’s costume for Madeline, a sleek black sheath and perilous stiletto heels, even manages to suggest a venomous spider.

Murders and marriages aside, Mrs. White comes as close as any of Madeline’s major roles to capturing her true character. Mrs. White’s polished exterior, emotional reserve among strangers, and distaste for bawdiness all find their equivalents in Madeline’s life, as does the character’s adroit use of wit to reveal surprising truths. Asked whether she misses her late husband, Mrs. White replies, “Well, it’s a matter of life and death. Now that he’s dead, I have a life.” Thanks to Lynn’s script, Madeline gets off a number of good lines, but she improvised her most memorable scene:

WADSWORTH:
You
were
jealous that your husband was shtupping Yvette. That’s why you killed him, too!

MRS. WHITE
. Yes. Yes, I did it. I killed Yvette. I hated her
so much
—it—it—the—flames! Flames on the side of my face! Breathing—heaving breaths!

Whether prompted by Wadsworth’s lapse into Yiddish (and an allusion to her best-known role), or by nerves, or by design, Madeline’s response delighted Lynn, and all these years later, he doesn’t remember whether he bothered to reshoot the scene with the original line (“Yes. I did it. I killed Yvette. I hated her.”). It’s good luck that Martin Mull, standing just behind Madeline during the “flames” speech, is an experienced improv actor who didn’t break character when she went off on her tirade. Really, he barely reacted, so there was no obstacle to using the take. According to Michael McKean, Lynn shot Madeline’s improvisation more than once. Madeline “just went into a kind of fugue about hatred . . . and each time was funnier than the last. I thought they could have strung a bunch of them together, because they had plenty of cutaways of all of us going,
What the fuck is she talking about
?”
³⁸
But Lynn used only one take, and the scene appears in only one of the three endings released.

Lynn wasn’t particularly familiar with the work of the rest of the cast, but he assembled a team of many of the best-loved comic actors in America at the time: Mull, McKean, Christopher Lloyd, and Lesley Ann Warren, a last-minute replacement for Carrie Fisher. Seemingly indestructible—though the universe did keep on trying—Eileen Brennan had only recently returned from the Betty Ford Clinic to treat an addiction to painkillers following a horrifying traffic accident in 1982.
³⁹
She worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep up with “all that running,” but she manages bravely as the garrulous Mrs. Peacock. Fans of these actors must wish they’d been on the set, too, but in some ways shooting
Clue
was the opposite of shooting
Yellowbeard
, despite the similarities between the first-time directors and loony ensemble casts. “I don’t recall much clowning around between takes, if any,” Lynn says. The complexity of the shoot, especially the lighting set-ups, required the full concentration of the cast, and he’d instructed them to deliver their lines at breakneck pace, using Howard Hawks’s
His Girl Friday
as a reference.

Brennan had looked forward to seeing Madeline, but now when they got together after work, Madeline would say little, then leave abruptly. “Something would happen,” Brennan said. “She wouldn’t talk to me.
She knew it. I would just go home.” Soon enough the two stopped trying to see each other off the set. They had drifted apart, but the reasons had to do entirely with Madeline’s psychology. She had tried so hard to insulate herself from unpleasantness for so long, but seeing Brennan forced her—whether they talked about it or not—to confront the violent, painful reality of her accident. Near the end of her life, however, Brennan still wasn’t sure whether the reason for the distance between them lay with Madeline’s personality or perhaps with some fault of her own, and the memories seemed painful to her. “She was a unique person and people wanted to love her and be with her,” Brennan said. “But that wasn’t what she did.”

Lynn remembers a more generous spirit. His eleven-year-old son worked as a runner on the set, and for the wrap party, he dyed his hair red, green, and purple. Other people stared at him, but Madeline “complimented him on it and danced with him for much of the evening. As he was a total fan of hers, he was thrilled. So was I, of course.”

In the finished picture, each of the three endings has its merits and boasts a prodigious performance from Curry, who dashes around the set reenacting the crimes, at one point dragging Madeline off her heels and face-first up the stairs. But this kind of mayhem wasn’t payoff enough for moviegoers to see the movie three times, and in smaller markets, only one ending was available. Picking which ending to see proved difficult. As Roger Ebert reported in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, even Paramount didn’t know which was ending A, or ending B, or ending C.
⁴⁰
“The multiple endings were a terrible idea,” Lynn says now. They had a “reverse effect: people didn’t know which ending to choose, so they didn’t go at all. This problem was compounded, I think, by the thought that if the filmmakers don’t know how to end the film, why should people bother to go see it?” Further burdened by bad reviews, the film fell just short of earning back its $15 million budget.

Ebert may have been the first to suggest that
Clue
, as a relatively short film, would fare better if all three endings were included in the final cut. For viewers at home, the fun of watching all the endings proved the movie’s salvation. The same was true of the smuttiness that Janet Maslin disparaged in her review in the
New York Times
.
⁴¹
For generations of kids watching cable and home video,
Clue
would seem daring and grown-up, yet unthreatening. “It was a surprising twist when the film gradually developed the enthusiastic following that it has today,” Lynn says, adding that he receives more fan mail about
Clue
than about any of his other
work. “I don’t know why it was so reviled then, and I don’t know why it is now so loved.”