Madeline Kahn (28 page)

By now, Madeline had lost all confidence in the material she’d been given, from script to score to costumes—especially the skimpy tunic in “Veronique,” which required a quick change in the wings. Madeline had to undress in full view of the stage crew. “Even Marlene [Dietrich]
chose to
cover up for uniqueness, rather than showing (lovely) flesh,” she wrote in her notebook. As a feminist, she disliked the Pygmalion–Galatea relationship between Oscar and Lily: “This is not a show, music, point of view, that I am proud of. I do
not
look forward to my friends seeing me in it.”
¹¹⁷
After opening, she declared that Coleman had told her she no longer had to take all the high notes in her numbers, something that didn’t square with the “stickler” Kaye knew or the “very demanding” composer Cullum describes. The show’s choreographer, Larry Fuller, told Coleman’s biographer, Andy Propst, that Madeline began taking alternate notes as soon as the first rehearsal.
¹¹⁸
However, Madeline later told composer Fred Barton that she interpolated many of Lily’s high notes during rehearsals, improvising within the music as she’d improvised within the script. Therefore, she said, she considered it her prerogative to take lower notes, despite Coleman’s insistence that any changes he approved were now part of his score. She took the lower notes anyway.

As Kaye remembered it, Madeline “gave away the show . . . neither sharing it nor taking it. And I would listen and think, ‘Why is she doing that? Why is she squandering this opportunity?’ . . . I started to get extremely angry about it.” She determined to have a good time whenever
she stepped in for Madeline, to share the fun she found in the material. But many in the audience would walk out when they heard that an understudy would play the lead. Madeline picked up both on Kaye’s resentment and on the producers’: “An understudy is a person who only performs—fills in for you in a star role when you are
shamefully
incapacitated!” she wrote in her notebook. “You
wretch
you. How dare you commit such a crime[?] (We swallow this.)” If she so much as asked for a cup of coffee, she wrote, she was made to feel like the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
¹¹⁹
When Madeline began to miss performances, Prince thought, “She wants out.”

In fact, she did not. By now it should be clear that Madeline didn’t throw away work. She needed money to support Paula, and for that reason she would accept all kinds of jobs that possessed little more appeal than a paycheck. Because she’d signed on to
Twentieth Century
, she’d lined up no other work for a period of several months (a year and a half, by some accounts). If she had any inclination to quit, then she might have done so as soon as she learned Prince wanted to fire her, if not sooner. Determined to stay in the show, even as she worried that Coleman’s score would permanently damage her voice—her single greatest asset as a performer—she began to seek out people who might help her.

Nine times in the month and a half before she left
Twentieth Century
, Madeline consulted with Dr. Wilbur Gould, a throat specialist whose patients included Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti, Beverly Sills, Elizabeth Taylor, and Angela Lansbury. He performed surgery on Lyndon Johnson, removing a nodule from the president’s vocal cords, and he encouraged Dan Rather to wear sweater vests on
The CBS Evening News
to combat the chill of the television studio.
¹²⁰
Also, beginning on March 31, 1978, Madeline began taking lessons with Beverley Peck Johnson, perhaps the most celebrated voice teacher in New York at the time. Johnson also had a reputation for helping voices in distress. After Gould operated on LBJ, she coached the president (who was no relation). She helped soprano Anna Moffo with a condition that’s still known as “Moffo throat.” Her other students included such sopranos as Renata Tebaldi and Renée Fleming. Among actors, she coached Blythe Danner and Kevin Kline. Kline went to Johnson when he began to work on the movie adaptation of
The Pirates of Penzance
(1983). “She was very, very strict about protecting the voice and not damaging in it any way,” he says. At his first lesson, she told him that if he smoked, he had to choose between cigarettes and her, and this is another reason he believes Madeline didn’t have a
cocaine habit: Johnson wouldn’t have continued to work with her if Madeline took drugs.
¹²¹

Both Gould and Johnson had reputations for being the best people around to solve problems like Madeline’s. That she saw them demonstrates that she responded in the most professional, responsible way she could to what she perceived as a crisis. In this regard, at least, she refused to let her thwarted love life affect her. However, she didn’t tell Prince or Gemignani about her difficulties with the score or her efforts to protect her voice and carry on. Both men say they were unaware of her anxieties about Coleman’s music. Joel Grey finds her reticence typical of “actors who need the job, and who want the job, and want it to work, but don’t feel they can voice their opinion.” Grey, who has enjoyed a long, collaborative friendship with Prince, adds, “Actors are sort of the last people that are considered. [Directors and producers] say, ‘Get up and do it! Stop complaining!’” And indeed, Prince is still using words like “tired easily,” “lazy,” and “bored” to describe Madeline.

Today, Prince says he’d have tried to steer Madeline away from Gould, “the most suspect doctor in the throat business” who “was much more interested in being Svengali and keeping [performers] out of the show than in delivering them.” Gemignani takes a different view. “Firstly, Gould did not suggest performers taking off unless he felt that they would be doing permanent damage to themselves,” he says. Like any actor singing eight shows a week, Madeline worried about remaining healthy vocally, and “she was a soprano being asked to use her chest voice more often than she had in the past.” Going to Gould and Johnson was, in Gemignani’s view, the smart thing to do. “In this business, singer–actors have to protect themselves,” he says, and it’s up to them “to know your limits and to protect your instrument. Perhaps a good musical director will suggest things to help you, but ultimately it’s your call. Not an easy one to make. Management never makes it easy. Ask any opera singer who has to cancel. It’s one hundred times worse in the musical theater.”

In New York, Madeline missed the first three or four days of rehearsal at the St. James Theater (probably due, at least in part, to her emotional upset after breaking up with her lover). Once the show opened, she complained of laryngitis and appeared at the recording session against her will. Her voice gave out at the Sunday matinée on March 5, and she fell ill again on March 21 and 22, missing both the matinée and evening performances. Immediately, she began consultations with Gould. She
missed two more performances on April 12, and stayed out late on April 14 to give a press interview. She found the two shows the next day especially difficult, writing “Oy” in her appointment book on April 15. She missed one more performance, the matinée on April 19—but this time, her health had nothing to do with it.

Madeline had thought of one possible solution: to cut back the number of performances she gave per week. Across the street, Liza Minnelli was starring in Kander and Ebb’s
The Act
, and though Minnelli sang virtually every number, she lip-synched some to pre-recorded tracks, to facilitate her dancing. Minnelli played only seven performances a week; an advertised substitute went on for Wednesday matinées. Upon inquiring, Madeline was told that no such arrangement would be possible for her in
Twentieth Century
. The producers were right to refuse her, Prince says. Minnelli’s dubbing and her afternoon off didn’t help her, he says, and cutting back on the number of shows wouldn’t have helped Madeline, either. She could have given eight performances a week “just fine. She just did not have that frame of mind.” He didn’t know she was terrified of losing her voice, but her cancellations and stated desire to work less forced the producers to reconsider their position. She was no longer a box office asset, but a potential liability.

The simplest solution, at least from the producers’ perspective, was to let Judy Kaye take over the show. She had Prince’s enthusiastic support, and everyone in the cast (including Madeline) loved her. She consistently played the part as it was written, and she had no difficulty with the music. This last asset in itself made hiring her especially attractive to Coleman, and the favor he showed Kaye led to further friction between him and Madeline. While it might be somewhat late to publicize the launch of a talented unknown, the prospect of Kaye’s stardom generated excitement, both inside and outside the St. James. “[T]his was a dream story for Broadway, and they embraced it with open arms,” Cullum says now. Buoyed by good reviews and audience response to the reliable Cullum, Coca, and Kline, even the loss of Madeline’s marquee value no longer seemed an insurmountable obstacle. There would be liabilities. Madeline was on the cast album, and it was too late to re-record and release the album with Kaye. Madeline featured prominently in the television advertising campaign (which would continue to air, with Kaye’s name and Madeline’s image). Madeline would have to be paid off. And Madeline, not Kaye, would be eligible for the Tony Award. Yet all of these realities were preferable to the risks of retaining a star who, by her own reluctant admission, wasn’t up to the demands of the show.
¹²²

In an interview years later, Cullum expressed his disappointment. Madeline was “very sensitive, and a shy kind of person. I don’t think that they handled it with her right. . . . They didn’t treat her like the star she deserved to be treated like.”
¹²³
Today, Kline still seems somewhat stunned by Madeline’s departure. At the time, he thought, “This is a serious business.” If he missed shows, he’d better be
really
sick, because otherwise Prince wouldn’t put up with it. “That was my take-away. Not that Madeline was an impossible diva, and you thought, ‘Oh, it’s a wonder they put up with her this long.’”

On April 19, Madeline received a letter from the producers, informing her that they would prefer to let her go. Overwhelmed, she missed the matinée that day but returned to the theater that night. She gave her final performance on April 23. As she told
People
magazine a few days later, “Finally, I had my agent ask just what [the producers] wanted me to do. ‘To leave,’ I was told. So I left.”
¹²⁴
In her notebook, she wrote, “May an angel take my place—it will serve you right.”

As
Twentieth Century
’s opening night approached, the editors at
People
magazine began lobbying Madeline for a feature, possibly a cover story, on her Broadway comeback. Meeting with resistance, they asked Shaun Considine to interview her, and one of the show’s producers, Marty Richards, did his best to cooperate, despite Hal Prince’s objections. Madeline trusted Considine, yet she continued to balk, telling him she needed to save her voice. He attended the recording session, where he found her strangely distant, but after Richards intervened again, the interview took place after the April 14 performance. Madeline wouldn’t pose for pictures, and without illustrations, the editors at
People
couldn’t run the story before she quit the show. After she quit, the editors scrapped the idea of a cover story. Now the article would be a news feature, and Considine returned for a follow-up interview, in which Madeline went public for the first time about her vocal problems. Still refusing to pose, she told Considine to use one of the pictures he’d taken of her in Central Park a few years earlier. The article appeared in the May 15 issue.

Madeline knew that by speaking up, she might deprive herself of future singing jobs; producers might not hire her because they would believe that she couldn’t handle the challenges. By then, however, she faced a larger threat to her reputation: She’d left a starring role in a major Broadway musical after only two and a half months. The gossips on Broadway had been humming ever since her voice gave out on March 5.
She couldn’t merely sit back and hope that the producers might provide explanations that would cast her in a flattering light. She had to tell the story herself, and her interview with Considine amounted to the first salvo of a damage-control campaign.

“The schedule was ludicrous,” Madeline said. “Three weeks of singing a semi-operatic score nonstop? I needed a rest.” She cast herself as the victim, telling Considine, “[I]t became very unpleasant with the management. I was harassed constantly.” Even so, she couldn’t help but speculate that her vocal trouble might be “psychosomatic.” Neither statement was likely to dispel rumors that she was difficult to work with. When the article appeared, it wasn’t the personality profile Madeline expected. She felt that Considine had betrayed her. He explained that the editors waited a long time for their cover story, and her departure from
Twentieth Century
required a change of focus. Appeased, Madeline told Considine that, contrary to what he’d been told and what
People
published, the producers had bought out her contract for less than one hundred thousand dollars. He offered to request a correction, but she replied, “Let it stand. It will allow people to think I’m a rich woman.”