Madeline Kahn (27 page)

In “Veronique,” Oscar insists that the drab Mildred Plotka read a synopsis of his latest show, the inspirational tale of a French girl whose refusal to sleep with Otto von Bismarck starts the Franco-Prussian War. Mildred is the least likely candidate to play a patriotic martyr, as she’s the first to realize. She begins to read in character voice, with a Bronx accent and a limited, even amateurish tonal quality below the middle of Madeline’s range. But as she continues, her accent fades and her voice swells. By the end, she’s even pronouncing French correctly (Veronique dies “dans la rue”) and her voice is soaring over the orchestra as, in a helmet and skimpy tunic, she’s hoisted aloft by the ensemble. The audition becomes reality, transforming Mildred the rehearsal pianist to Lily Garland, star.

“Never,” Lily’s next number, similarly ranges from lower-middle chest range to the upper extension of Madeline’s lyric soprano. At points, she’s almost shrill—and she means to be. It’s an interpretive choice, not a flaw. As Lily informs Oscar’s lackeys of precisely when she would be available to work again with Oscar, Madeline gives a phenomenal display of character singing. She teases out the lines as she goes through her calendar, employing her most elegant diction. But the music accelerates, and the orchestra shifts from lilting grace to rumbling menace—until Lily explodes: “Never? Never. Never!” In chest voice, she tells off Oscar’s sidekicks, rising gradually to lyric voice, then dropping back into chest and rising again. As the song reaches its climax, she groans and shrieks, at two points ascending from the very bottom of her range to the very top, most notably in the finish:

Go back with him? Here’s my reply!

Ah-ha, ah-ha, ah-ha!

Aaaahhh, let me see
.

I’d rather die! Die! Die!

She floats in her upper register for the first lines. The “ah-ha”s are upward spirals. The long “Aaaahhh” begins as a guttural low note, then rises to her upper register for “Let me see.” The final “Die! Die!” is delivered at the top of her range.

Two duets with Oscar are fascinating compositional variations on standard operetta themes, largely because Lily and Oscar sing together only on the final notes in each. “Our Private World,” a tender waltz sung in remembrance of their love affair, begins with Oscar. As Lily is caught up in the memory, she joins in, but
after
Oscar, in a round. Madeline’s singing here is lyrical throughout, nicely complementing Cullum’s warm baritone. Even when they agree, they’re in competition—in fact, they’re in separate rooms. Face-to-face for their next duet, “I’ve Got It All,” they’re
not
in agreement. Oscar begins by trying to cajole and flatter Lily, who sees through him immediately. She answers him, gloating in her success and his failure. Losing patience, Oscar belittles her: Hollywood has cheapened her, and her fame is hollow. “You’ve lost it!” he sings, to which Lily replies, “I’ve got it all!”

The sextet finds Oscar and his sidekicks exulting in Mrs. Primrose’s munificence, a check for $200,000. (Having heard that Oscar’s new play will be the story of Mary Magdalene, Primrose believes her gesture will further the cause of salvation so dear to her.) Now Oscar can offer Lily a contract, but when Lily and Bruce enter, Bruce tries to stop her even from reading it, while Oscar and his friends implore her to sign it, and Primrose stands back and marvels at the scene. Against this backdrop, Lily wonders why she’s even considering working with Oscar—then realizes she wants him back. Madeline begins with an extended passage of soft singing in her soprano register to piano accompaniment that recalls a Rachmaninov concerto. As she comes out of her reverie, the rhythm accelerates (“You can’t go back!”), and all six characters come together as Oscar, Owen, Oliver, and Primrose sing in surging repetition, “You must come back! Sign it, Lily!”; Bruce sings in plaintive isolation, “Don’t sign, Lily!”; and Lily wonders, “Should I sign it?” She concludes the sextet on a high “Sign?,” sailing over the other voices.

As the passengers realize the truth about Primrose, declaring that “She’s a Nut,” Lily enters after Owen, Oliver, and Oscar have made the discovery. At first, like the others, she sputters in disbelief, at a frenetically galloping tempo (much like a runaway train.) Her next line, naturally, is self-centered and full-flying soprano: “What will become of my movie? Wait ’til I get my hands on Oscar!”

Lily resolves to sign with a rival producer (who is Oscar’s former office boy). In “Babbette,” she reads the eponymous new play, a drawing-room melodrama. As an exercise in vocal characterization, it’s a marathon. Lily begins reading with the lilting Lily leitmotif underscoring, which breaks into a brassy Charleston when she comes to a party scene. She skims past other characters’ parts to get to her own. But she can’t banish thoughts of Oscar and of Mary Magdalene. She lapses into a stately hymn (“We shall be saved!” on a Gounod-flavored melody), then pulls herself back to the “Babbette” play. In one passage, she flips back and forth word-by-word between the two plays, before summoning her strength and announcing, “Max, I’ll do this play!” to the freewheeling Charleston theme, which Madeline sings in a squealing character voice (something like her little-girl voice) in her upper register. She scats on the phrase “do it” and, for the big finish, on the name Babbette.

At the end of
Twentieth Century
, after Oscar’s “fatal” accident and his brilliant
scena
, “The Legacy,” Lily rushes to his side to bid him farewell in one last duet, “Lily, Oscar.” The most fully operatic number in the show, it abides by the rule: Lily and Oscar take turns, rather than singing together, until they reach the final notes of the song. On the cast album, Madeline’s soprano is at its most secure in this number, and a listener hears both Lily’s tears as she calls out to Oscar, and her smile as she grants his dying wish by signing the contract for the Mary Magdalene play. She soars in her upper register, just as so many sopranos in grand opera do when cradling their dying lovers, and the recording ends with her barely suppressed sob. As far as the plot of
Twentieth Century
goes, it’s all a trick: Oscar isn’t really dying. But then, Lily didn’t really sign the contract.

Performing this part in a studio, with retakes, producers, and sound engineers is one matter. Doing it live in the theater eight times a week is another.

Unlike Madeline, Judy Kaye was completely unfazed by Coleman’s score. As Kline says, she “has pipes that are just inhumanly extraordinary. . . . She could belt out fifteen performances a week. She had steel pipes, a great, amazing voice.” Whenever she went on for Madeline, first in rehearsals and later in the theater, “We were like, ‘Great, Judy Kaye just kicked ass! Listen to those notes!’” he remembers. “We always cheer the understudy when she goes on.” But Kaye found understudying rough on her ego;
Twentieth Century
was the only time she tried it. With her, as with
Madeline, Prince offered little feedback, saying something only when he didn’t like what she did. At last he suggested that she “find another template,” Kaye remembered. “If Madeline was Carole Lombard, I was a Jean Harlow. Something a little tougher.” Kaye went on for Madeline in several rehearsals, displaying her growing mastery of the material each time, Cullum remembers. After the gypsy run-through, “Madeline asked me, ‘How did Judy do?’ ‘She knows all the blocking,’ I said.” By the time
On the Twentieth Century
got to Boston, Cullum told Madeline, “She now knows the show.” And by the end of the Boston run, Cullum said, “in no uncertain terms, ‘Madeline, don’t miss any more performances.’”

In blizzard-bound Boston, Madeline’s offstage love affair blossomed. Even more discreet than usual, she mentioned neither her married lover nor personal engagements in her appointment book during this time. But her misgivings about the show persisted, and the critical response didn’t reassure her. Kevin Kelly, writing in the
Boston Globe
, found the show “about as much fun as taking the Amtrak to Providence.” While he admired the score and Cullum’s performance, Kelly found structural flaws throughout
Twentieth Century
and merely “lie-in-wait dazzle briefly glinting” in Madeline’s work. Kelly proposed a few ways to remedy the show’s weaknesses, including a big, old-fashioned production number for Lily—as if “Veronique” weren’t enough. A new number only would have added to Madeline’s burdens.
¹¹²

At the end of the Boston run, Madeline learned that Prince asked the show’s producers to fire her. They refused, pointing to two million dollars in advance ticket sales. But as
Twentieth Century
returned to New York, Madeline contended with Prince’s hostility and the breakup of her affair. Even showing up for rehearsals now risked an emotional ordeal. Before, when she’d mixed her love life with her work, the experience sustained her (Michael Karm being the principal example) or made no difference. But now she couldn’t escape reminders of her unhappiness. Very little was going right for Madeline. The creative team did make changes to the show, though nothing as significant as a new production number for Lily. Madeline’s anxieties got worse, not better, and Prince seemed firm in his opposition to her.

“In New York, the show was in trouble, and Hal knew it,” Cullum remembers. “[H]e came to me complaining of the trouble Madeline was giving him and the rift between her and Cy Coleman,” Cullum remembers. “I told him, ‘Madeline is my leading lady, and you’re not going to get me to say anything negative about her. I think she’s terrific and I love what she’s doing with the part.’ That ended that”—at least as far as
complaining to Cullum went. But on opening night, February 19, 1978, Prince still didn’t believe he could get a consistent performance out of his star. “I sat there very nervous,” Prince remembers. “‘Will she or won’t she?’ . . . The two guys, I could count on. But she delivered. Every nuance, everything.” A pirate recording of the opening-night performance in its entirety confirms that Madeline was “on,” and the audience loved her. “Babbette,” in particular, found her at the height of her powers; ultimately, it’s a miniature mad scene. Cullum calls opening night “an unforgettable evening.”

After the curtain fell, Prince ran to Madeline’s dressing room, where she sat in front of her mirror. “That’s what I’ve been talking about for weeks!” Prince told her. “You can do it! You can do better than do it, you can knock the ball out of the park! It’s wonderful!” Without taking her eyes off the mirror, Madeline replied, “I hope you don’t think I can do that every night.”

Prince went cold. “That’s when I decided she hasn’t the energy for eight performances a week,” he says now. “Not necessarily just the energy, maybe the discipline. But I thought she’s too used to cuts. ‘Cut! Let’s take it again! Or let’s not.’” Madeline was “very funny. Smart. Eccentric. Loony, and very—it was good casting. The problem was that she can’t sustain. And I thought, ‘She’s killing the show.’ And you know, I really did think this, because it never happened to me before.”

At the opening-night party, Madeline put on a brave face. With her ex-lover and his wife expected to attend, she asked Paula to escort her. Soon, however, the writer Shaun Considine arrived. He’d become a friend since he profiled Madeline for
After Dark
, and now she posed with him for photographers and teasingly suggested he was really her date. A few minutes later, she asked what Considine “really” thought of the show. “You were first class,” he said, “but the play wasn’t.” “See?” Paula cried.

Madeline received excellent reviews for
Twentieth Century
. Though
Time
’s T. E. Kalem found the show itself “about as much fun as getting stranded on a station platform,” he praised Madeline’s “arsenal of talents. She is kooky, vulnerable, and seductive in succession, and her voice has a near-operatic authority.”
¹¹³
In the
New York Times
, Richard Eder, too, found that the show had “rough spots,” but he especially enjoyed Madeline in the Mildred Plotka scene.
¹¹⁴
Also in the
Times
, Walter Kerr observed that Madeline was “spending much of her romantic time bent double and backward, unraveling herself long enough to snarl at the very memory of Mr. Cullum in a song [presumably “Never”] that
requires her to use a cellar coloratura (what else are we to call trills that seem to scrape ground regularly, possibly digging a convenient grave?).” But he also praised her “gentle handling” of “Our Private World,” and compared her with Judy Holliday.
¹¹⁵
In
New York
magazine, however, John Simon found Madeline “downright offensive” in the Mildred scene and accused her of “campy gurgling and shrilling during the songs.” “[I]t would be nice,” he concluded, “if Broadway leading ladies could occasionally represent the heterosexual image of a woman.”
¹¹⁶

Eder’s remark that “the performances seem to lose their drive” toward the end of act 1 now seems ominous. As the run continued, some audience members recollect, Madeline’s performances varied, not only night to night but scene to scene. Her energy level was sometimes frenetic, other times low. Some suspected drug abuse. In reality, she was either protecting her voice or panicking—or both. Prince remembers that Madeline “proceeded to play it some nights, or not play it other nights.” Striking his hand for emphasis, he continues, “Audiences could tell the difference, totally.”