Madeline Kahn (25 page)

Taking only a three-day pause after
High Anxiety
, Madeline shot her scenes for
The Cheap Detective
in little more than a week. The picture (released in 1978) found her working with Neil Simon, who was, like Brooks, an alumnus of Sid Caesar’s writing staff. (Caesar himself plays a brief role in the film.) Like Simon’s first mystery spoof,
Murder by Death
(1976),
Cheap Detective
featured an all-star cast and exploited Peter Falk’s loving imitation of Bogart. As Simon later observed, studio heads ordinarily reject parodies, because they depend on the audience’s familiarity
with the original.
¹⁰⁵
However, after
Murder by Death
’s success, producer Ray Stark persuaded Columbia Pictures to green-light the second film, also directed by Robert Moore. With faithful recreations of the sets of
The Maltese Falcon
and
Casablanca
(including some of the original light fixtures from Rick’s Place),
The Cheap Detective
mashes together some of Bogart’s best-known films.

The incorporation of plot lines from different movies required ingenuity on Simon’s part. Since another
Maltese Falcon
spoof,
The Black Bird
, failed just three years earlier, it made sense to set
The Cheap Detective
apart as much as possible. Thus Falk’s Sam Spade character, called Lou Peckinpaugh, solves the murder of his partner and juggles a search for a legendary treasure (here, eggs with jewels in them) with an attempt to secure the necessary paperwork for his ex-lover’s husband to open a French restaurant. He does this in much the same way that Rick Blaine secures Victor Laszlo’s escape from Casablanca—which is to say despite the interference of a Nazi officer and his henchmen. (These Nazis, however, are stationed in Cincinnati.) Simon also gives a nod to
The Big Sleep
and
To Have and Have Not
as Falk shuttles among story lines and glamorous women.

Madeline plays a variation on
Maltese Falcon
’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), a duplicitous dame in distress. Whereas Brigid changes her name only once, Madeline’s character is so deceitful that she can’t keep her aliases straight. In her first scene, she runs through eight names before arriving at “Carmen Montenegro. That’s my last one, I promise!” She’s lying, of course. Before the picture is through, she’ll have changed her name—and hair color—several more times. She also claims she’s her identical twin and her father’s wife, one of the few references that have more to do with contemporary movies (
Chinatown
, 1974) than with classics.

Madeline’s material in
Cheap Detective
is less bawdy than that given to her in Brooks’s films. While some of the other women come onto Peckinpaugh or torment him with tales of their intimate relations with other men (another running joke), Mrs. Montenegro is comparatively demure. And in a succession of gorgeous period costumes, Madeline is even more glamorously photographed than in
High Anxiety
. Simon’s snappy rhythms posed no challenge to her, and having been denied the chance to work with him when he was brought in to revise
How Now, Dow Jones
, she hoped to do so more often. In the shorter term, taking a role in
The Cheap Detective
after
Won Ton Ton
was a smart career move. The
movie was an easy way to reassert herself in Hollywood. If this film and
High Anxiety
were hits, so much the better, but if either picture flopped, no one would blame her. As further incentive, her friends Eileen Brennan and Dom DeLuise co-starred.

Another movie that rewards rediscovery by Madeline’s fans,
The Cheap Detective
garnered generally good reviews and came in twenty-first at the box office for 1978, though it hasn’t enjoyed the kind of lasting popularity of Madeline’s spoofs with Brooks, or even
Murder by Death
. Vincent Canby’s review in the
Times
identifies one possible reason for the movie’s limited success: “[M]ostly, watching it is like being with a group of friends as they recall their favorite movie-going experiences. It’s not as a movie that it’s so much fun, but as a multimillion-dollar, all-star parlor game.”
¹⁰⁶
In so far as the movie
is
a parlor game, Madeline’s work falls somewhere below Falk’s and Louise Fletcher’s spot-on impressions of Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Madeline doesn’t mimic Mary Astor so much as she creates a character who is all artifice. At the end of the picture, she explains that she just wants the money so that she can get her hair done; after all those dye-jobs, Mrs. Montenegro is a multi-colored fright. Yet what sets Madeline’s performance apart is her eyes. She tries her best, but Mrs. Montenegro can’t
quite
control her nervous glances.

In midsummer, Madeline flew to London for the first of her appearances with Jim Henson’s Muppets, who proved boon companions for the remainder of her career. First came a guest-starring role on
The Muppet Show
, then shooting its second season. Produced in Britain by ITV and syndicated internationally, the program had become a worldwide hit in its first season, and exposure to audiences beyond America appealed to Madeline. Then, in September, she taped the first of her
Sesame Street
appearances. Among her most charming performances, these built a lasting fan base among viewers too young to see her films.

Most episodes of
The Muppet Show
entail a good deal of “backstage” material, as the Muppets prepare their weekly vaudeville routines and interact with their guest star. For Madeline’s episode, the backstage plot takes a dramatic turn when Gonzo the Great (Dave Goelz) misunderstands a kind word from her and falls hopelessly in love. Although Miss Piggy (Frank Oz) has no particular use for Gonzo, she’s indignant to learn that he’s given his affection to another woman. In fact, he intends to marry Madeline. Before Piggy can wreak vengeance (which might
have been fun to watch), Madeline sets Gonzo straight: She likes him, but only as a friend. He sings a maudlin “Wishing Song” but soldiers on, and thus ends his brief crush on Miss Piggy.

Meanwhile, Madeline stars in two “onstage” turns. A musical number finds her in a harem, surrounded by gigantic Muppets (actually dancers in costume) with outsize feet. The choreography features the constant threat of Madeline being stepped on. In a subsequent sketch, another gigantic Muppet sets out systematically to ruin Madeline’s stroll in the park. He causes a rainstorm, knocks over trees, and shoots a songbird, but she’s unflappable and gets the better of him. The episode first aired on October 1, 1977.
¹⁰⁷

Madeline’s first assignments on
Sesame Street
proved even more congenial to her gifts, most especially the “echo song,” “Sing After Me,” that she performs with Grover (Frank Oz). Cuddling the Muppet on her lap much as she would a small child, she explains what an echo song is (as Tony Geiss’s lyrics helpfully remind us, “You sing what I sing / Follow the leader and sing after me”) and promises him “a really, really swell time.” Once the song is underway, however, Madeline gets carried away, tossing off roulades and a trill that Grover can’t match. “Show-off,” he grumbles—yet there’s nothing mean-spirited about the way she outsings him, and the number ends in a hug.

On October 8, Madeline also returned to
Saturday Night Live
for a second guest-hosting gig, which turned out to be less artistically rewarding than her first turn. Throughout the episode, the writing feels tired, especially in a long, almost laugh-free sketch in which Madeline plays Bianca Jagger dispensing “wisdom” at a dinner party with other jet-set icons. Far more satisfying is Marilyn Suzanne Miller’s character-driven sketch, in which Madeline and Gilda Radner complain about men over a bottle of wine. The show’s highlight is “Bad Opera,” in which Leonard Pinth-Garnell (Dan Aykroyd) introduces
The Golden Note
, “as difficult to sing as it is to listen to.” With a little help from the sound effects team, Madeline, dressed as a Valkyrie, caps a quick mish-mash of Wagner themes with a high note “of such pitch, tone, and character, and it must be sustained for so long, that it causes ‘larynx lock’: The singer’s larynx simply locks onto the note
forever
” (actually more than two minutes, until the commercial break). The sketch ends as EMS technicians administer oxygen to Madeline and lead her away, while Pinth-Garnell gloats, “That was bad, wasn’t it? Delightfully bad!”

Madeline’s busy professional schedule during this period may have been motivated in part by something having nothing to do with her career. She had ended her relationship with Ted Bentell, an executive with a garment company and her first long-term boyfriend since Michael Karm. At one point, Bentell confronted her with a choice: either marry him or break up with him. As she explained to
People
magazine in an interview the next year, Madeline was too mindful of her parents’ divorces to commit. She and Bentell separated, and by the time the
People
article appeared, he’d already married another woman. Only in 1979 did Madeline begin another long-term relationship, with Dr. Myles Gombert.

But there was a practical strategy behind Madeline’s activity, as well. The Monday after Thanksgiving, 1977, Madeline started rehearsals for
On the Twentieth Century
. By making two movies and appearing on television, she sought to bring in money and to keep her profile high among audiences outside New York. Working on
Marco Polo
and
She Loves Me
allowed her to stretch her stage muscles before returning to Broadway, not as a featured actress but as the marquee star of a musical comedy written with her in mind. Yet the show proved the biggest setback of her career, and to this day, controversy surrounding
On the Twentieth Century
continues to damage her reputation.

On the Twentieth Century
(1978)

ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
IS AN ADAPTATION OF BEN HECHT AND
Charles MacArthur’s play
Twentieth Century
(1932), itself an adaptation of Charles Bruce Milholland’s unpublished play,
Napoleon of Broadway
.
¹⁰⁸
Oscar Jaffee, a theatrical producer down on his luck, hopes to resuscitate his fortunes with a new play, but to attract backers and guarantee his success, he needs the right leading lady: Lily Garland, his ex-mistress, an actress whom he discovered, dominated, and drove away years earlier. Now she’s a Hollywood star. Finagling his way into the train compartment adjacent to hers on the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago to New York, he uses wiles, blandishment, and physical force to persuade Lily to work with him again. A munificent check from a fellow passenger gives Oscar the backing he needs, and Lily is ready to sign—but the benefactor turns out to be a religious fanatic recently escaped from an asylum. Only by faking his own death does Oscar win over Lily.

Originally directed by George Abbott, Hecht and MacArthur’s farce has been revived twice on Broadway (1950 and 2004) and adapted for television three times between 1949 and 1956, yet it’s Howard Hawks’s film adaptation (1934) that endures as a landmark among screwball comedies. In adapting the piece as a musical, Betty Comden and Adolph Green had to keep their hands off the movie, because the rights still belonged to Columbia Pictures. The film made a star of Carole Lombard, and in Comden and Green’s hands, the role is still a tour-de-force offering a wide comedic range, as one Mildred Plotka is transformed into a glamorous screen goddess who has absolutely no intention of having anything more to do with Oscar. Playing Lily would give Madeline the opportunity to stammer like a schoolgirl and swan like a diva, while engaging in knockabout antics—and, unlike every Lily who came before her, she’d have to sing her guts out.

Comden and Green had struck gold before with show-biz tales of yore; after all, they devised the screenplay for
Singin’ in the Rain
. For
On the Twentieth Century
, they contributed book and lyrics to an ambitious score by Cy Coleman, the composer of such shows as
Wildcat
(starring Lucille Ball, 1960) and
Sweet Charity
(1966). Coleman believed
On the Twentieth Century
required something unlike the usual musical-theater vocabulary, or even pastiche of ’20s and ’30s jazz music, of which there had been plenty on Broadway lately. Kander and Ebb’s
Chicago
, for example, is set in 1925, and it ended its two-year run in August 1977. As Comden and Green explained in an essay published in the
Times
on the morning of
On the Twentieth Century
’s New York premiere, the show’s musical language grew out of Oscar and Lily, “two larger-than-life, extravagant, egomaniacal giants of the theater.”
¹⁰⁹