Madeline Kahn (26 page)

Looking with Coleman for “an overblown, bravura musical style,” they arrived at European opera traditions, hastening to say they hadn’t written an opera, merely “a demanding score.” There’s even a sextet, not unlike the one in
Lucia di Lammermoor
(though this one is about money, not love, both numbers do involve contracts), and Comden and Green described Oscar and Lily’s finale as “a kind of Love-Death duet,” a reference to the
Liebestod
aria from Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
. Oscar, by turns domineering and romantic, becomes Méphistophélès and Roméo in a single baritone; Lily is exalted beyond the status of movie star to that of prima donna, with the temperament and high notes to match. But the stakes in their drama are pettier than those in an opera, and the music mocks them at every step.

Keeping jazz to a minimum, Coleman cut loose his gift for invention, with the result that the vocal lines for Lily are especially strenuous, from
Sprechgesang
to chest voice to coloratura, through a very wide range. Tempos are frequently rapid—after all, on a speeding train, what could be more natural than
accelerandi
? Few actresses could meet all those demands and be funny, too. Invited to Comden’s apartment to hear a few numbers from the show, Madeline was assured not only that the creative team and producers wanted her for the role, but also that they had created it expressly for her. As things turned out, Comden and Green made prophecy when they wrote, “[T]he stress is on the impact of the music.”
¹¹⁰

Comden and Green’s association with Harold Prince dated back to
Wonderful Town
, which he stage-managed in 1953–54 under director George Abbott. Prince went on to produce such hits as
The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees
, and
Fiddler on the Roof
, and his directing credits include
the original productions of
Cabaret, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Evita
, and
Phantom of the Opera
, to cite only a few. He’s a Tony Award record-holder, with eight wins for best musical, two for best producer of a musical, eight for best director of a musical, plus three special awards and an additional sixteen nominations.

But
On the Twentieth Century
was an exceptional experience for Prince. “It’s the only show I’ve ever come into late,” he says. Indicating his office, he adds, “Shows always start here.” For
On the Twentieth Century
, however, the conceptual work was largely complete before he arrived. “I did some editorial work, and I certainly am responsible for overseeing the design, and all of that, which was smashing.” Comden, Green, and the producers approached Madeline a year before rehearsals began, and Prince had no say in hiring her. When he walked into rehearsals, he expected to find another actress: Bernadette Peters. “I have that kind of a mind,” he says with a shrug. “You could say I’m nuts. Why wouldn’t I know? But it was probably not much more than a matter of yin and yang. I thought Bernadette Peters would be very funny.” (He concedes that she would have needed to work hard to get through the score as Coleman wrote it.) Madeline was hired for her marquee value as much as for her abilities, Prince suggests, describing Comden and Green as “star people. They loved stars.” They may have been the ones who suggested that Danny Kaye play Oscar, prompting Madeline’s reply, “Sign him, lose me.” For Prince’s part, “In a million years, I would never work with Danny.”

To play Oscar, Prince chose John Cullum, who made his Broadway debut as Sir Dinadan in the original cast of
Camelot
and created the lead roles in
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
and
Shenandoah
. To play the supporting role of Bruce Granit, Lily’s dashing but dumb actor boyfriend, Prince hired Kevin Kline. He also cast Madeline’s understudy, Judy Kaye, an exceptionally talented, relatively unknown soprano he’d first spotted in California. Other casting choices Prince either made himself or agreed with, including George Coe and Dean Dittman as Oscar’s sidekicks, and Imogene Coca, for whom Comden and Green reconfigured the role of the religious fanatic. A man in the original play, she’s now Letitia Primrose, though the essence of the character remained unchanged. But Cullum says Prince “considered the set the star of the show, and in many ways he was right—it was incredible, with railway stations, hotels, spacious connecting Pullman suites, rolling locomotives from every angle.” Technical problems and the complexity of Robin Wagner’s set design frequently drew Prince’s attention away from the actors.

As Prince perceived her, Madeline was merely a movie star, unable or unwilling to come up with consistent performances onstage. He doesn’t want “cookie-cutter performances,” he says, but Madeline’s energy and involvement varied wildly. Prince was unaware of her difficulties with Coleman’s score, to say nothing of her being terrified—which she was. To the contrary, he says, “I thought she was—
emboldened
. By a huge career in hit movies, and that voice, that speaking voice, which was always funny.” This impression led to what he calls “an odd relationship with Madeline. I knew she was wildly creative. . . . I don’t think she had a lot of staying power.”

From the start, Madeline knew she’d have to fight to win Prince’s approval. He might not remember—but she did—that in 1970 she had auditioned eight times for him before he rejected her for the cast of Sondheim’s
Company
. In rehearsals for
Twentieth Century
, Prince’s attitude clearly hadn’t changed. He expected Bernadette Peters, and he believed Judy Kaye could do a better job. This made it harder for Madeline to approach him. “My problem is, I’m not who I appear to be,” Prince says. “I am not stern, I am not someone to be frightened of. But I’m a little removed. I’m not a cozy actor. I’m also not a bully. Not remotely. I’m just not cozy, and I wish sometimes I were.”

Insecure as always—and becoming ever more so as she faced the demands of the show—Madeline had agreed to play Lily long before learning she’d be working with Prince. The first day of rehearsal, she was already talking about the “Hal Prince machine,” referring not to Wagner’s set design, but to the director’s briskly efficient, “results-oriented” methods, Judy Kaye told an interviewer. “Already she was scared.”
¹¹¹
But in Madeline’s relationship with Prince—as in her relationships with Bernie Wolfson and Hiller Kahn—remoteness, whether physical or emotional, she believed must be something
she
had caused by being less than perfect. She would respond by looking for any way she could find to impress him. When at last she saw she would never win Prince over, she panicked—while he began lobbying the show’s producers to fire her.

The conflict between Madeline’s working method and Prince’s resembled in some ways those that she’d encountered with Lucille Ball and George Rose. She worked from the inside out, beginning by locating the character’s motivations and exploring her emotional life, something like but not identical to the Method of the Actors Studio. “She was all about process,” Judy Kaye said, and Maris Clement describes Madeline as “an organic actor.” But in 1977, three decades after Marlon Brando appeared in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, the Method was still likely to inspire mockery
in the musical theater. (Comden and Green themselves had lampooned a Method actor, the character Blake Barton, in
Bells Are Ringing
in 1956.) At the time of
On the Twentieth Century
, the specific needs of musical comedy—in which an actor’s line may cue not only a scene partner, but also an entire orchestra, chorus, and (in this case) a complex change of scenery—still dictated a by-the-book approach.

That wasn’t Madeline’s way of doing things. Because of her background in revues and also in film, she liked to improvise with a script. In film, this technique is often welcome; sudden inspiration can make one take superior to another. But some of Madeline’s collaborators in musical theater—certainly including Prince—interpreted the improvisational approach as inconsistent or undisciplined, even somehow disqualifying: “She’s not a theater actress.”
Twentieth Century
, like every premiere production Madeline had worked on so far, underwent substantial revision during rehearsals and tryouts, and Comden and Green had a legitimate interest in hearing and judging lines as they’d written them.

With Prince and Coleman, Comden and Green undertook the “editorial work” that Prince recalls, and as the first read-through began, the director worked through scenes, making cuts that “were permanent, with no questions allowed,” Cullum remembers. “[B]y the third scene, the actors were fighting desperately to hold on to as many of their lines as possible. Auditions are scary, but this was hair-raising, terror-time.” Prince cut some of Kline’s dialogue, and Kline thought, “Oh, great, it isn’t as if it’s an overwritten part as it is.” But Madeline, sitting next to him, whispered, “Don’t you worry about a thing, darling, it’ll be fine.” During rehearsals, she helped him look for ways to improve his part, working with him on comic business, which was mostly physical comedy. “People don’t write that in scripts. [W]e just invented it,” he says. Somewhat to his surprise, the creative team approved, and thanks to Madeline and Prince, Kline says, “I ended up with a showier part.”

Kline’s interpretation found him falling flat on his face and climbing up walls, a trial run of sorts for his Oscar-winning turn in
A Fish Called Wanda
(1989). Already in his still-nascent career, he’d “discovered that, instead of trying to do it
right
, just try to do it
well
. And that can mean playing in rehearsals and exploring, sometimes, not only in rehearsal but in performance, too,” as Madeline did. He contests the widespread use of the word “erratic” to describe her work in
Twentieth Century
. “I would say fun, spontaneous, in the moment, all the things I love about actors.” The show’s conductor, Paul Gemignani, suggests that the “erratic” label stuck “due to [Madeline’s] ability to ad lib within a scene. . . . With
comedy, she was like a jazz musician. Improv was her comfort zone.” And ensemble member Maris Clement approvingly describes Madeline’s performances as “different every night. She listened to a line from another actor and interpreted it differently all the time. That’s why she was so brilliant, so incredibly funny.”

By the second week of rehearsals, Kline became aware of Madeline’s anxieties about the score, though he didn’t grasp their extent until many years later. He remembers her saying to him, “Cy Coleman’s scores are so rangy. It’s like Cole Porter . . . really a challenge.” Today Kline describes
On the Twentieth Century
as a “fucking impossible score! It’s an opera!” Even so, he says that Madeline wasn’t complaining. “She seemed consummately professional. When she started taking the alternate notes, instead of hitting the high B-flat, she would take the G.” “I did my best to convince her that she was doing fine,” Cullum remembers, “but I noticed that she was transposing some of her lines in the sextet. I didn’t think this was a big deal, but I later learned that Cy was furious.”

Whether or not she behaved like a diva, she was the leading lady of a brand-new operetta, one of the most stressful jobs a singer can take. Anxiety distorted her critical perception of Coleman’s work (“I do
not
like the music,” she wrote in her notebook), diminishing her confidence further. Singing was never a simple process for Madeline; she couldn’t get past associations with Paula. As a girl, Madeline sang to please her mother, or to please people her mother wanted to please. As an adult, Madeline sang in order to pursue the kind of career her mother dreamed about. Singing required intense preparation; it had to be
perfect
. And like many another soprano before and since, Madeline felt insecure. Could she hit today the high note she hit yesterday?

Compounding her anxieties, Madeline became romantically involved with a married man, and when the affair ended, shortly before
Twentieth Century
returned to New York, Madeline didn’t break it off by choice. From the start, she understood that he would return to his wife, but she was hardly the first woman to think, “This time will be different. I can change him.” While the circumstances certainly differed, they brought back memories of Bernie and Hiller, the anxieties abandonment naturally produced in her, and the sense that a man had left because something was wrong with
her
. Rather than being able to lose herself in her work, she was obliged to spend her time onstage reenacting the ups and downs of Lily’s affairs and yearning for a lost love. There was no way to escape constant reminders of her own situation, and because he was involved in the production, he was never far away when Madeline, as Lily, sang, “I
want him back.” These anxieties and the physical strain of singing Lily’s numbers led to behavior that Maris Clement recognized as panic attacks.

To understand the vocal demands of the role of Lily Garland and to appreciate the ways Madeline tackled them, one begins by listening to the original-cast album, recorded on February 28, 1978. Lily is assigned significant portions of seven numbers, and from the album, one easily gets a sense both why Madeline could be so good in the part, and why she found it daunting.