Madeline Kahn (29 page)

Already the Broadway equivalent of public opinion found fault with Madeline, and one member of the theater community, Walter Willison, feels that Madeline unwittingly had become the kind of problematic star that Danny Kaye was in
Two by Two
. Certainly Prince found her so disagreeable to work with that initially he was reluctant even to speak about her three decades later. Alienating the most powerful man on Broadway is never a good career move. Madeline’s closest associates were unaware of the drug rumor (which Willison says was rampant in Hollywood at the time of
Twentieth Century
), but they did worry that she’d been blackballed from Broadway. If she was, Prince says, then “I can’t regret that. She absolutely did it herself.”

While she did manage to improve her relations with Comden and Green, Madeline believed that other influential people on Broadway were reluctant to work with her. The chief example was Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated often with Prince. Madeline wanted desperately to be taken seriously by the composer, but opportunities to perform his work came only at gala concerts. Sondheim’s next premieres,
Sweeney Todd
and
Merrily We Roll Along
, didn’t have roles suited to Madeline, and both were directed by Prince, so there was little point in her making any attempt to find a part in those shows. Gemignani, another frequent collaborator with Sondheim, says that Madeline wasn’t blackballed so much as undone by her own anxieties about returning to Broadway.
“[B]ecause she didn’t really understand the rigors of theater performing[,] she herself got nervous about trying it again,” he says, and for the next few years she avoided theater. However, Gemignani adds, “I know that her fellow performers loved and respected her.” As Judy Kaye remembered, Madeline “actually came to the show after I went in for her and brought a bottle of Champagne. Very nice. Really, really dear. I think she wanted more of a dialogue than I was capable of, because I was embarrassed at what had happened, and I couldn’t change it. And I didn’t want to make her feel bad.”

On May 15, the day her
People
interview hit newsstands, Madeline’s nomination for the Tony Award for leading actress in a musical was announced, and she stepped up her campaign of damage control. Certain economic considerations typically factor into the decisions of Tony voters, and awards seldom go to shows that are no longer running. Though
Twentieth Century
continued to run, Madeline had virtually no chance of winning, even had her rivals in the category not included stars like Minnelli and Eartha Kitt. Nevertheless, Madeline made a point of attending the luncheon for nominees at Sardi’s two days later, and posing for news photos with the other nominees (Frances Sternhagen was the fourth).

She also attended the awards ceremony on June 4. Naturally her attendance meant being caught on camera, and she risked running into her ex-lover, Prince, and the rest of the
Twentieth Century
company. While Madeline sat in the audience, the cast performed a medley of songs from the show, which garnered eight other nominations. Ultimately, Comden and Green won for best book and, with Coleman, for Best Score, while Cullum, Kline, and Robin Wagner won their respective categories. Despite that tally, Prince is still resentful: If Madeline had bowed out of the show during Boston tryouts or New York previews, he says, then Judy Kaye would have been eligible for and won the Tony. “We could have promoted that,” he says, and Kaye’s victory could have boosted the show’s box office and extended the run beyond March 18, 1979, when
Twentieth Century
closed.
¹²⁵

Attending the Tony events required considerable courage, and Madeline wrote a note in her appointment book as a sort of pep talk to herself: “[A]tmosphere of clean, young, country beauty—the feeling of a contented baby. [S]weetness. [P]ristine. I am a teacher, too. One of them. Queen.” (Such notes are rare in Madeline’s appointment books, which she maintained almost exclusively for their intended purpose. This note surrounds a reminder of a massage appointment on the Friday before the ceremony.) And indeed she tried to be kind to herself after leaving the
show. In the coming months, she took a week’s vacation in Bermuda, and spent two weeks sightseeing in Rome, Zurich, and London. But first she booked a series of stays at the New Age Health Farm, a spa in Neversink, New York: a week in early May, a long weekend later that month, and another week at the beginning of June. Defenders of the drug rumor might point to this as evidence of Madeline going into rehabilitation, though Deborah Birch, who works at New Age today, says the spa was famous at that time for weight-loss programs. Elsa and Graham Graydon opened New Age in 1976, and they promoted juice fasting, massage, yoga, meditation, hiking, and swimming. They didn’t permit drugs or alcohol on the farm, and it’s located in a dry county. In any case, it appears that—beyond a desire to relax in a resort that was more spiritually oriented than most, and thus more attuned to her own personality—Madeline’s primary interest was weight loss. In her appointment book, she recorded her weight each day of each stay.
¹²⁶

For solace, she turned to friends, including Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Dom and Carol DeLuise, Steve Novick, Gail Jacobs, and Michael Cohen. For the remainder of 1978, her appointment book is relatively empty of professional engagements. That’s understandable; she’d planned to be in
On the Twentieth Century
during these months. After her busy calendar for 1977, the contrast must have been poignant.

Madeline saw Bernie Wolfson a few times in New York, and she also turned to her brother, Jef, making an extended visit to the Twin Oaks Community in Virginia. Jef’s girlfriend at the time, Heidi Berthoud, was also a member of the community, and she’d met Madeline before on trips to New York. She recalls Madeline as “full of energy, sprightly, very outgoing—which I think would be a requirement for any superstar. It goes with the territory.” “I was well entrenched into feminism,” Berthoud says, “so I was at once impressed with this woman who was a little powerhouse of her own, and [I was] at the same time feeling a little guarded . . . kind of wondering what it would be like” to travel in Madeline’s circles. “And I soon found out.” She describes a town mouse/city mouse split in her sensibilities and Madeline’s when each entered the other’s territory.

At Twin Oaks, Jef recalls, Madeline “was fascinated. It was like going on safari. She felt safe with me, but—.” “The kind of amateur sociologist that she was,” Berthoud interjects before agreeing with Jef, “[s]he needed her guide.” “She was just impressed with how open people were,” Jef continues. Berthoud adds, “And you can’t do that in her world.” During her stay at Twin Oaks, Madeline attended a party and got to know Julio,
or “Hoots,” a little boy from Honduras with whom Jef had grown close, before “she had her fill of it and went back” to New York, he remembers.

During this time, Madeline’s longest sustained professional activities were a media tour of Los Angeles in June to promote
High Anxiety
, and a three-day shoot for
The Muppet Movie
in August. The Muppets’ first big-screen adventure is a road picture that owes more than a little to
The Wizard of Oz
, including a wistful opening song about rainbows. Throughout the film, directed by Jim Frawley, the Muppets interact with human stars, much the way the characters interacted with guests on
The Muppet Show
. The villain and his reluctant henchman are played by two of Madeline’s favorite colleagues, Charles Durning (who played her father in
Boom Boom Room
), and Austin Pendleton. Mel Brooks, Dom DeLuise, and Cloris Leachman also appear. But Carol Kane was the only one of Madeline’s friends who shared screen time with her, and Pendleton confirms that during his time on the set he never saw Madeline at all.

Madeline appears in the El Sleezo Café, a low dive into which Kermit (Jim Henson) stumbles. Dressed like an Apache dancer and using her Dietrich voice, Madeline tries to vamp the frog, then sics her burly boyfriend (Telly Savalas, after whom one of the hairiest Muppets was named) on him, while Kane looks on—and that’s all we see of Madeline. Here, as on
Sesame Street
and
The Muppet Show
, her work with the Muppets is exceptional. The writers had a strong grasp of her persona, and she worked well with them. It’s apparent that she enjoyed herself, as did so many other stars. (Lily Tomlin once remarked that the only trouble with working with Muppets was you couldn’t go to dinner with them after the show.) However, there’s a technical flaw in Madeline’s acting: She tends to look over the Muppet’s head, instead of at its face.
¹²⁷

Released in July 1979, when many of the Muppets’ biggest fans were on vacation,
The Muppet Movie
grossed $76,657,000, the seventh-highest grossing picture of the year. That figure becomes more impressive when one remembers how many children saw the movie at reduced ticket prices. In any event, the take was sufficient to propel Henson and his Muppets into more movies, and it also served as a template for
The Muppets
(2011), which targeted the children who’d grown up with the original movie—and the children of those children.

Despite its success, at first the picture didn’t seem to do much to raise Madeline’s profile. She was billed prominently on the poster advertising the movie, but most reviewers simply listed Madeline among the cast or omitted her altogether while raving about the ways in which Kermit played banjo and drove a car. However, when the home video revolution
flowered, just a few years later,
The Muppet Movie
became a staple of the VCR, played endlessly for young children. Over the years, Madeline’s performance has won her a tremendous audience—though many of those watching had no idea who she was.

Madeline spent the rest of 1978 taking singing lessons—including at least one session with her mother in Los Angeles—and studying French at the Alliance Française in New York. Madeline reconnected with her friends, ran errands, dined out, and went to a
lot
of movies. On October 14, she saw Terrence Malick’s poetic
Days of Heaven
, which concludes with the teenaged narrator (pint-size New Yorker Linda Manz) escaping from an orphanage at night, then wandering the deserted streets of a small town. Madeline noted in her appointment book, “Just like when I was little. Alone in N.Y.C.”

Already, she was starting to rally. She spent January 1979 reading film scripts, and in February, she met with Woody Allen. Nothing seems to have come of their conversation, but she was lining up projects, and over the ensuing months she made four movies in quick succession. Not one would be a hit. Engineering a comeback would take more than hard work.

Her most remarkable engagement during these months is the least known. On Thursday, May 3, 1979, she flew to Kansas City, where Maurice Peress had invited her to participate in another Bernstein gala. By this time leading the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra, Peress had watched in dismay as Bernstein’s sixtieth birthday came and went without the kinds of tributes he’d been accorded in 1968. Peress resolved to remedy the situation, programming a weekend-long festival of Bernstein’s music, with the composer in attendance. The performances were divided into chamber music (Friday evening), theater music (Saturday evening), and symphonic works (Sunday afternoon, after Bernstein and Madeline had left town). Guest artists included pianist Lukas Foss, members of the American Ballet Theater, and dancer-choreographer Judith Jamison from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. On Friday, following
Songfest
, Bernstein himself conducted the finale.

Madeline joined the performance on Saturday night, when the dancers performed the ballets from
On the Town
, and Larry Kert, the original Tony, sang “Tonight” from
West Side Story
. Madeline didn’t sing “Glitter and Be Gay,” but Bernstein’s amanuensis, Jack Gottlieb, devised a terrific set-up for her. On a screen behind the orchestra, a clip of the rape scene
from
Young Frankenstein
played—up to the point where Madeline sings “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.” Just then, the lights went up, revealing Madeline onstage. “Ah, the movies!” she said, and then performed an aria from
Trouble in Tahiti
, “What a Movie!”

The reunion with Peress and Bernstein—and what amounted to one last
Trouble in Tahiti
audition—was by no means the only big event that night. Also on the bill, singing numbers they’d written for
On the Town
and
Wonderful Town
, were Betty Comden and Adolph Green. In addition to the concert on Friday, Comden, Green, and Madeline would have rehearsed together on Friday afternoon, and presumably they all stayed at the same hotel, the Alameda Plaza, in Kansas City. This was the longest-sustained encounter they’d had, at least since the Tony Awards ceremony the year before. While Green’s daughter, the Broadway lyricist and composer Amanda Green, says her father bore Madeline no ill will, Madeline herself may not have been so confident. But once again, she was determined to show the world that
On the Twentieth Century
hadn’t broken her.