Madeline Kahn (24 page)

GEORGE ROSE WAS MURDERED IN 1988; I NEVER MET HIM. IT’S IMPOS
sible to know whether he originated the drug rumor, or whether he merely repeated it because it seemed to explain Madeline’s behavior, which fell short of his standards of professionalism. But the rumor spread, and long before I began researching this book, I’d heard it often. For many years after Madeline’s next theatrical venture, the Broadway musical
On the Twentieth Century
, if you walked into a piano bar in New York and asked why Madeline Kahn left that show prematurely, you’d be told, with absolute authority, that she was a cocaine addict. Even Walter Willison heard this story and believed it to be true, though when pressed, he admitted he’d never seen Madeline doing drugs or known anyone who claimed direct knowledge of her alleged addiction. He and a few other veteran Broadway actors tried to find witnesses for me, and they failed. Ed Dixon came up with just one person, who refused to speak with me or to let Dixon give me his name.

Everyone I spoke with who knew Rose used the same words to describe him: “old school” and “by the book.” Madeline was neither. Certainly cocaine might explain her stage performances in 1977–78, which some (but not all) eyewitnesses considered “erratic.” And certainly some people with whom Madeline associated at the time, both in Hollywood and in New York, did abuse cocaine, particularly around the set of
Saturday Night Live
. But to imagine Mel Brooks on cocaine is impossible (or terrifying). And as Rosie Shuster points out, Madeline was Gilda Radner’s friend, not John Belushi’s, and Gilda “called cocaine ‘God’s dandruff,’” Shuster remembers. Chris Sarandon and Robert Allan Ackerman, friends both to Madeline and to Gilda, agree: Gilda didn’t do drugs. “She did a lot of other ridiculous, crazy things to herself,” Ackerman says. “She was bulimic, she was anorexic, and she drank a lot, but she never did drugs.
I never saw Madeline do anything. I don’t even remember her smoking a joint.” Sarandon worked with Madeline immediately before
She Loves Me
and
Twentieth Century
, and says he never saw her affected by anything other than her own nature. “She was a very highly tuned bird, Madeline,” he says. “Birdlike in the sense that she had a very delicate emotional constitution. She was mercurial in some ways. . . . I never had the sense that she was under the influence of anything but her own demons.”

While Madeline’s performances in
Twentieth Century
reportedly varied, it’s telling that neither that show’s director, Harold Prince, nor its music director, Paul Gemignani, ever suspected drug abuse. Gemignani reminds me that, from the orchestra pit, he was staring right at Madeline at every performance. If she behaved oddly, he’d have noticed. Prince never heard the rumor before I asked him about it, and Madeline’s co-star, Kevin Kline, told me that he hadn’t heard the rumor, either, until Prince repeated it, asking Kline whether he knew anything about what “Madeline’s biographer” had said a few days earlier.

Kline also worked with George Rose, in
The Pirates of Penzance
. Because of his work with Madeline but also his experience of other singers, he doesn’t believe the rumor. Before switching to a theater major at Indiana University, Kline studied music as a pianist, and worked on crews for the school’s acclaimed opera program. “I knew a lot of singers at that point,” he says. “I just think, if she was on a drug, cocaine would be the
last
! Notwithstanding the fact that it was the drug of choice for many rock‘n’roll singers, but they’re not worried about what an opera singer is worried about.” In an e-mail he explained, “For a trained singer like Madeline, the vocal cords, voice box, sinuses, etc., are the center of your universe and you protect them, coddle them, and avoid anything that would compromise them in any way.” One opera singer just a few months older than Madeline, baritone Richard Stilwell, was active professionally during the 1970s. He agrees that cocaine was far from prevalent among singers at the time, although some did smoke marijuana. “Even then, there was that addictive stigma attached to cocaine among my opera friends,” Stilwell says. “Those serious about mounting a career did not go there.”

A few years after
Twentieth Century
, while preparing the role of Nathan in
Sophie’s Choice
, Kline studied the symptoms of cocaine abuse. “I went to Phoenix House and studied all the symptoms, and in retrospect, I just never saw [in Madeline] the sweaty upper lip or the [hyperactivity] that cocaine can do to people. She seemed consummately professional. . . . I
can’t imagine her doing anything that would be that potentially harmful to her vocal cords or any part of her vocal apparatus.”

Maris Clement, another colleague from
Twentieth Century
, says, “She never pulled cocaine and went into the bathroom. Her mother was a voice teacher; she wasn’t going to wreck her voice.” Clement often spent time with Madeline and never saw her or her close associates doing cocaine. Although she was not yet the licensed therapist that she is today, Clement came up with a diagnosis other than drug abuse in Madeline’s case. “Those notes were very difficult to sing,” she says. “It took an unusual voice, and also I think what happened was that Madeline got scared of it, and then she became more nervous, and she started getting panicky.” This made the score all the more challenging for Madeline, and offstage, relationship troubles—among myriad other pressures—may also have played a role. Clement herself had experienced panic attacks, and after she saw Madeline onstage “look[ing] like a deer in the headlights,” she urged Madeline to see a therapist, who confirmed her (at the time) lay diagnosis. Though Clement and the therapist both tried to help Madeline, she left
Twentieth Century
two weeks later.

If Madeline’s drug habit was bad enough to threaten her career, then it’s probable that at some point she’d have sought help. She never discussed a drug problem with her closest associates, such as her brother and her best friend, Gail Jacobs. Neither did they see her doing drugs or coping with recovery. On the contrary, Jacobs remembers Madeline’s being so disciplined that she never drank red wine, for fear that it would stain her teeth, and when she did drink white wine, she limited herself to a single glass. Madeline’s appointment books don’t show her going into a rehabilitation facility, and during the period 1974–97, there are no blocks of unaccounted time sufficient to accommodate a stay at a clinic. Yet the rumors persist, and it hasn’t helped Madeline’s reputation that between
She Loves Me
and
Twentieth Century
she flew back to that well-known den of vice, Hollywood.

High Anxiety, The Cheap Detective
, and the Muppets (1977–78)

BOTH OF MADELINE’S NEXT MOVIES WERE ELABORATE PARODIES. MEL
Brooks’s
High Anxiety
sends up Hitchcock classics such as
Spellbound, Vertigo
, and
The Birds
, while Neil Simon’s
The Cheap Detective
offers a more affectionate takeoff of Humphrey Bogart’s greatest hits.

High Anxiety
was Brooks’s first picture since
Silent Movie
, and now Madeline returned to the fold, playing the troubled Victoria Brisbane. A Hitchcock blonde, Victoria is the most glamorous and subtle of Madeline’s collaborations with Brooks. Victoria serves, more or less, as a straight man to the rest of the characters (played by a cast that includes Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, Ron Carey, and Brooks himself). They get most of the comic business and the best-remembered lines, and Brooks sings the film’s only musical number. Nevertheless, Madeline grabs a few good scenes, including a phone call she mistakenly believes to be obscene (and thoroughly enjoys), and a romp through airport security while disguised as an elderly Jewish woman.
High Anxiety
is the only one of Madeline’s films with Brooks in which she’s not the object of a penis joke, and apart from her drivers license, it’s the only recorded proof of her ability to drive a car. She does so in a scene in which Victoria goes to Golden Gate Park to meet Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke (Brooks), who’s running from the law. From her first entrance, Victoria carries a Louis Vuitton purse, and by the time she arrives at the park, her brand loyalty has expanded. Now she’s carrying the Vuitton purse, wearing a Vuitton pantsuit, and driving a Vuitton car. It’s a terrific sight gag, and its humor wasn’t lost on fashion-conscious Madeline. Every time she got out of the car, Brooks remembers, she’d break up laughing.

She won the approval of no less than Hitchcock himself, whom Brooks consulted while making the picture. Madeline looked so much
like Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and Tippi Hedren that when Hitchcock saw
High Anxiety
, he asked where Brooks found Madeline. “You know she’s not really blonde,” Brooks replied, teasing him. “You never saw a woman that wasn’t blonde!” Hitchcock paused, then said, “That’s true, that’s true.”

The hair color Madeline used in
High Anxiety
was actually called “Hitchcock Blonde,” Brooks says, and during filming, she remarked to him that he took greater care to make her look good than other directors did (presumably she was referring to Bogdanovich). “I knew she had all the features,” Brooks says now. “You just had to paint it and light it properly. . . . Even in
Blazing Saddles
, I said, ‘She’s still got to be really handsome, she’s got to be German-beautiful.’ And she was.” Brooks took particular care with backlighting, shooting Madeline from the forehead down, giving her flattering hairstyles, making up her eyes to bring them out. “Because I knew she was a great comedian, but you don’t necessarily gotta make her funny looking,” he says.

High Anxiety
gave Madeline the pleasure of looking both gorgeous and funny, since she also got to wear Victoria’s little-old-lady disguise. The airport scene requires Madeline to create another character, entirely different from Victoria and from the majority of Madeline’s other roles. She played age rarely, and the Yiddish accent she uses makes this the most overtly Jewish character she would play until she appeared in Wendy Wasserstein’s play
The Sisters Rosensweig
in 1992. Here, Madeline develops a character that is basically the wife of Brooks’s famous 2,000 Year Old Man, and Madeline has a terrific time with the scene.

Victoria was Madeline’s largest role in Brooks’s films, allowing her to develop a more rounded character. In her first scene, Victoria is not merely worried about her father, she’s downright frantic. Terrified that she’s being followed or observed, she orders Thorndyke to draw the curtains—but to crawl on the floor to do so. (Brooks says this scene also required multiple takes because Madeline kept laughing.) Victoria is paranoid at the outset and neurotic to the end, but once she kisses Thorndyke, her confidence and courage begin to grow. When she’s faced with real threats—getting through airport security, thwarting an attempt to murder her father—she keeps her cool, more or less. We see a woman who is no longer sheltered, but instead excited by new experiences. Not least of these is the “obscene” phone call, when a psychopathic thug (co-screenwriter Rudy De Luca) tries to kill Thorndyke at a pay phone, and she can hear only his gurgles and gasps. Victoria is less inwardly vulnerable than Lili von Shtupp and less outwardly frigid than Elizabeth in
Young Frankenstein
(a kindred character in some ways). Playing Victoria wasn’t exactly the “dimensional” acting Madeline yearned to do, but it was a step in the right direction.

Brooks studied psychology briefly in college and has undergone therapy. Much of
High Anxiety
, set in the Institute for the Very,
Very
Nervous, is a spoof of psychiatry that feels like a patient’s payback. However, he says that, when writing, “I don’t examine the chemistry. I just enjoy the result. . . . I’m not gonna take it upon myself to break down Madeline’s unconscious. Much too complicated.” Brooks’s study of Hitchcock, on the other hand, is on full display. His obvious inspiration is
Spellbound
, in which the new director of a mental asylum grapples with a dark secret, just as Thorndyke does. Thorndyke’s “high anxiety” is vertigo, but the telltale word is never mentioned. Other memorable scenes refer to
Psycho
and
The Birds
. Thorndyke’s name echoes that of Cary Grant’s character, Roger O. Thornhill, in
North by Northwest
. Another Hitchcock trope, the director’s cameo, is inflated here, since the director is the star of the entire picture. And, on Hitchcock’s recommendation, Brooks hired Albert Whitlock to create matte paintings of the institute. Upon hearing Whitlock’s English accent, Brooks asked him to play Victoria’s father.
¹⁰²

At the box office,
High Anxiety
performed respectably, the seventeenth-highest grossing picture of 1977, though it didn’t reach the level of
Blazing Saddles
or
Young Frankenstein
—or even that of
Silent Movie
(twelfth-highest grossing in 1976). Not all the reviews were rapturous. Describing Madeline’s Victoria as “the kind of girl who has everything—and it all matches,”
People
magazine dismissed
High Anxiety
as “a takeoff that, despite a few funny traumas, never quite leaves the runway.”
¹⁰³
In the
Times
, Vincent Canby praised the movie, calling it “as witty and as disciplined as
Young Frankenstein
,” and calling Madeline “a woman who can be gloriously funny simply by attempting to control an upper lip. She’s a cocktail waitress’ loving concept of ‘the real Kim Novak.’”
¹⁰⁴