Madeline Kahn (30 page)

LOOKING BACK IN
1988,
MADELINE TOLD THE
WASHINGTON POST
, “Most of the stuff I’ve done, the good stuff, was done a long time ago. The stuff that I’ve done in TV and the movies has not been of high caliber, but who knew at the time?”
¹
The 1980s had been difficult for her.

Most actresses worry as they enter their forties, and some panic. Sexism and ageism have always been problems in the entertainment industry, and good parts are rare for any actor. Again and again, Madeline signed up for movies that fell short of their promise, while in hits like
Ruthless People
(1986),
Outrageous Fortune
(1987), and
Big Business
(1988) Bette Midler fielded plum roles that—as Madeline saw it—might otherwise have gone to her. For her, the decade began with back-to-back failures on the big screen. In 1980, Madeline co-starred in the forty-eighth and fifty-third top-grossing films of the year, respectively
First Family
and
Wholly Moses!
With an estimated gross of $6 million, Marshall Brickman’s
Simon
, Madeline’s first picture that year, would have ranked eighty-first, but mediocre or poor box office figures don’t convey the artistic disappointments of these movies. Her forays into television would earn her a People’s Choice Award in 1984 and a Daytime Emmy in 1987, but every one of her sitcoms failed. She remained a much-loved star, albeit one not so widely seen as she’d been in the mid-1970s.

Simon; Happy Birthday, Gemini; Wholly Moses!
; and
First Family
(1980)

PLAYING CYNTHIA, A DISTINCTLY INTELLECTUAL FEMME FATALE, IN MAR
shall Brickman’s
Simon
, Madeline is elegant, restrained, and fully dressed, the polar opposite of Lili von Shtupp—though both characters are hired by a bad guy to seduce the hero. Her hair looks soft and lovely in the light of the Hudson Valley (standing in for the state of Maine), and she wears chic outfits like those she preferred to wear offscreen. Cynthia doesn’t need fancy lingerie to ensnare a man, and when she sings, it’s not “I’m Tired,” but the aria from Villa-Lobos’s
Bachianas Brasileiras
, number 5. Madeline’s participation in
Simon
suggests that somebody had noticed her popularity among college boys: In the movie, as in life, she’s precisely the sort of woman about whom a bookworm might fantasize.

Working from his own screenplay, Brickman made his directorial debut with the film, having co-written three movies with Woody Allen:
Sleeper, Annie Hall
(sharing the screenplay Oscar in 1977), and
Manhattan. Simon
is the rambling tale of a Columbia professor who’s brainwashed by scientists into believing he’s an extraterrestrial. In quick succession, he becomes a media sensation, a threat to national security, and a fugitive. Brickman’s script is crammed with arcane cultural and scientific references, demanding a fair degree of sophistication from the audience and from the actors. As Austin Pendleton observes, great portions of the dialogue are “deliberately full of shit. . . . That’s actually the brilliance of the script.”

The title role went to Alan Arkin, with whom Brickman performed in a folk trio, the Tarriers, in the late 1950s. Pendleton plays the mastermind of the brainwashing, and Judy Graubart plays Simon’s girlfriend. Both of these are far more substantial roles than Madeline’s, though she
receives second billing. She’s onscreen for only about five minutes, sharing her scenes either with Arkin or with Pendleton and the cheerfully amoral scientists. Her reunion with Pendleton was especially happy, he remembers, but
Simon
had terrible word of mouth. Many moviegoers found the plot too weird to be entertaining, and Simon’s messianic rants are neither as funny as a standup comic’s nor as lunatic and true as Howard Beale’s in
Network
(1976). In the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby laid much of the blame on Arkin’s performance (“much too dour for these kinds of shenanigans”) and on Brickman’s screenplay, which “is never as funny as almost any two of its dozens of one-liners.”
²
Even hardcore fans of Madeline and Arkin stayed away.

Madeline got top billing in Richard Benner’s
Happy Birthday, Gemini
for her performance as Bunny Weinstein, a trampy single mother in South Philadelphia, though the plot barely involves her. Posters (incorporating caricatures by Jack Davis of
Mad
magazine) promoted the movie as a wacky Madeline Kahn comedy, a test of her box office drawing power—a test she failed. A hit at Playwrights Horizons in 1976, Albert Innaurato’s play
Gemini
had transferred to Broadway, where it ran for more than four years (1977–81), closing after the film adaptation had come and gone. Written without input from the playwright, the film script fuses familiar tropes from urban comedy—a close-knit community of noisy ethnic neighbors—with what was at the time daring sexual frankness and social observation. The “Gemini” of the title, Francis Geminiani (Alan Rosenberg), is a Harvard student home for the summer. His birthday celebration is upended by the arrival of Judith Hastings (Sarah Holcomb), the girl he’s been sleeping with, and her brother, Randy (David Marshall Grant), to whom he feels more profoundly attracted.
³
Translated to the big screen without input from the playwright,
Gemini
gained a longer title (presumably because movie audiences otherwise might have expected to see astronauts) and lost its balance. The zanier supporting characters overpower the Harvard students.

With her “hepatitis-colored hair” and tight dresses, Bunny is a juicy part, and Madeline pulls out all the stops. Just about everybody in the ensemble cast does, and that’s a problem: What’s broadly funny onstage can be overwhelming onscreen.

In her most substantial film role dating from this period, Madeline overcompensates for the differences between her own personality and Bunny’s. When Bunny is loud, Madeline gets
louder
. As usual in her acting, however, she does try to portray a richer emotional life for her character than the outlines of the script suggest. Bunny is shrill, outlandish,
attention hogging—but she’s also the mother of an emotionally needy, probably autistic son, Herschel (Timothy Jenkins), and she’s terrified of growing older. Among her stronger scenes is a tender moment when, after a blowup with Herschel, she sits at an upright piano, playing and singing “Moon River.” Beginning in a lower register, with dubious pitch, Bunny gains in force and confidence. Better still is a drunken monologue before a mirror in which Madeline reveals Bunny’s unwillingness to grow up. She’s become the neighborhood tramp because she fears no one will find her beautiful anymore, and she’ll wind up alone.

But there’s no firm directorial hand to bind together the character’s disparate traits or the movie’s seemingly contradictory motives. Even Bunny’s suicide attempt becomes just another screeching, extroverted distraction from what is, at heart, a simple coming-out story. Benner had broken ground with his 1977 film
Outrageous!
(about the friendship between a drag queen and his schizophrenic roommate), but gay-themed movies of any kind were still a novelty in 1980, and there were few guideposts. To his credit, Benner did emphasize that Francis sees his homosexuality as neither fearful nor shameful, and he wrote a new scene in which Francis and his macho father (Robert Viharo) come to terms.

Though the movie’s gay themes went unremarked in posters and other promotional material, Madeline took a risk by starring in
Happy Birthday, Gemini
. The subject matter was daring, and the comedy might not appeal to mainstream audiences—and it didn’t. Playing to primarily gay audiences also carried the personal risk of feeling less “feminine,” as had been the case when she worked at the Upstairs. But gay audiences were among her most loyal, Madeline knew, and she worked with and enjoyed close friendships with plenty of gay men. For her, making the movie—which, for all she knew at the outset, could have turned out to be as successful as Innaurato’s play—was a show of solidarity.

The movie had another, more immediate impact on her personal life: She began dating David Marshall Grant. When as Bunny Weinberger Madeline flirts with Randy Hastings (Grant), he flirts back. They’re color-coded, too, as Randy’s tight-fitting yellow T-shirt corresponds to Bunny’s tight yellow dress. And the attraction between the actors wasn’t playacting. Thirteen years younger than Madeline, good-looking, funny, and with a talent for writing, Grant charmed her completely, and she charmed him. The two saw each other almost constantly during location shooting in Toronto. Night after night, her appointment book is marked simply “David.” “He was the love of her life” up to that point and for at least several years to come, Madeline’s closest associates say. “[S]he really
thought he was the one.” Though she resumed seeing Myles Gombert when she returned to New York, Madeline and Grant continued to spend time together, and she continued to wonder whether things might work between them. However, Grant says, “I don’t think I turned out to be who she thought I was, and she didn’t turn out to be who I thought she was: the heterosexual and the formidable star. We were neither of those things.”

In Los Angeles in 1984, he came out to her. As he remembers, she spent hours talking with him, actually holding his hand as he tried to navigate the course he was setting. She called on the qualities that other friends remember in her: the ability to listen, to ask the right questions, to apply her intuition and her compassion. As an established actor, she also provided professional advice. Grant was at the start of a promising career. The year before filming
Happy Birthday, Gemini
, he’d made his Broadway debut in the premiere of Martin Sherman’s
Bent
, and he’d played a lead in the film comedy
French Postcards
. By 1984, Grant remembers, “I was tormented; I had aspirations as an actor, and I was very concerned for my career. I think she was concerned for my career, as well. She asked whether maybe I didn’t have to be gay. I think she wondered whether it was worth the risk: Why do it if it’s going to destroy your career?” But, he says, she was more concerned with his happiness.
⁴

What she didn’t tell him was that her heart was broken. Before, she’d consciously avoided certain kinds of closeness so as not to repeat her parents’ failures. The relationship with Grant suggested new possibilities, and she’d established a connection unlike any she’d found with other men. She continued to spend time with Grant and made a point of introducing him to people who might help with his career both as an actor and as a writer. Though the hope of romance vanished, she didn’t deprive herself of the pleasure of his company.

The difference in their ages made her disappointment more painful.
Happy Birthday, Gemini
was the first movie in which Madeline played anybody’s mother, and while she would do so again in
First Family
, the same year, nobody really believed Gilda Radner was her daughter. Thus far, Madeline had earned her living primarily by playing sexy, glamorous creatures. When Grant came out, she was turning forty-two. She still looked terrific, but nobody needed to remind her that Hollywood holds fewer opportunities for mature actresses.

Madeline’s next movie, Gary Weis’s
Wholly Moses!
, was yet another that seemed like a sure-fire hit, with another all-star cast of reliably funny actors. Weis had directed a short film with Madeline (
Autumn in
New York
) when she hosted
Saturday Night Live
in 1977. A box office disappointment, grossing $14,155,617 in its original release,
Wholly Moses!
suffered by comparison with
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
, another tale of mixed-up biblical destinies, released the year before.
Moses
is short on laughs and long on pointless raunch. Historical and biblical references surface tentatively, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide how sophisticated the target audience might be. In one brief scene, Madeline (as the Witch) drives a cart full of love potions and stops to pick up the hitchhiking Herschel (Dudley Moore), the biblical Moses’s brother-in-law. Wearing an immense silver wig, Madeline impersonates a yenta as she offers a couple of minutes’ worth of exposition, then tosses Herschel out of the cart. The movie offered her no opportunity to work with anyone other than Moore in a cast that also included Laraine Newman, Dom DeLuise, Richard Pryor, Jack Gilford, and Andrea Martin. As far as Madeline was concerned, the best that could be said about
Wholly Moses!
was that her role was so small few people remember it.

Madeline’s professional path had almost crossed writer Buck Henry’s several times. He skillfully overhauled the screenplay for
What’s Up, Doc?
, worked with Mel Brooks on the sitcom
Get Smart
, and hosted
Saturday Night Live
several times in the 1970s. Now, in 1980, he was ready to try his hand at directing his own work. He cast first-rate talent:
First Family
stars Bob Newhart as the President, Madeline as the First Lady, and Gilda Radner as their daughter, with Harvey Korman, Austin Pendleton, and Richard Benjamin in prominent roles. Oddly enough, Henry’s writing, not his direction, undoes the movie, as the political satire grows bitter and unfunny over the course of the movie. Pendleton says Henry was so dismayed by audience response to a preview screening he reshot the movie’s ending: The accidental death of the family becomes a miraculous resuscitation. But the changes didn’t help much, and the movie earned just $15,198,912 at the box office, far less than the studio hoped. Henry never directed another film.
⁵

Madeline doesn’t have many lines in
First Family
, though she’s in plenty of scenes. The movie sets forth the premise that the pressures of the presidency create stress for the president’s loved ones, too. Obliged to adhere to a strict code of conduct, his daughter is a deeply frustrated twenty-six-year-old virgin. His wife drinks in secret, not unlike the Pat Nixon Madeline played on
SNL
in 1976. In most scenes, the first lady remains somewhat in the background, trying to hold herself steady, and Madeline subtly varies her portrayal of the character’s levels of intoxication. In her most substantial dialogue scene, she tries to console her
daughter in one more example of Madeline and Gilda’s extraordinary chemistry.