Madeline Kahn (32 page)

For Madeline,
Slapstick
did come with a few perquisites, including the opportunity to work with Michel Legrand, who composed the score to the soundtrack, as he had done for Paul’s
Falling in Love Again
(as well as
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
and
The Summer of ’42
, among many others). Madeline recorded one song for the film, “Lonesome No More,” to a lyric by Vonnegut; Legrand himself provided piano accompaniment. But the US release featured a new score by Morton Stevens, the composer of the theme to
Hawaii Five-O
and Jerry Lewis’s preferred bandleader. Madeline’s song went unheard in America, and it is omitted from a soundtrack album that featured orchestral excerpts from both Legrand’s and Stevens’s scores.

Vonnegut visited the set on February 23, giving Madeline the chance to meet him. Paula Kahn also visited the set for her birthday, and after hours, Madeline spent time with Jef and Heidi. Once a week, the three of them went to eat together, in restaurants much fancier, and featuring more fattening food than anything the young couple had been accustomed to at Twin Oaks. The excitement didn’t stop there. “When she drove us around L.A.,” Heidi remembers, “she wouldn’t stop for stop signs. No way. It was like a thrill, a racecar-driver thing for her.”

Although Heidi and Jef had spent time with Madeline at Twin Oaks and in New York, Heidi’s perspective deepened during the shooting of
Slapstick
. For her, Madeline and Jef were simultaneously the adoring big sister and baby brother—and the famous actress and her fan. Jef was “deeply enamored of Madeline,” Heidi says. “Whenever we were with Madeline, he was focused on Madeline and, like, with
blinders
.” Neither Heidi nor Jef needed much attention, she says (“If you want name and fame, you don’t go join a commune”), but Madeline thrived on it. When they were with her, “it became really uncomfortable for me, to be like this appendage that wasn’t really needed. The fall-out of superstars! Living in the wake—in the ruins! That continued through the years to be difficult.” Heidi and Jef broke up some time later, but they remain close friends.

Santa Fe (1982–83)

“THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THIS PLACE, A LOT OF MYSTERIOUS AND
primitive stuff going on—faith healing, sorcery, herbal therapy,” Madeline told a reporter from
People
magazine who had come to see her as Madame Arcati in Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
at the Santa Fe Festival Theater in 1983. “Santa Fe is beautiful, and I’m moved by what I see and how I feel here.”
⁹
As she prepared the role of the addled medium, the spirituality of Santa Fe had already begun to work on her.

For most actors, New Mexico is “fly-over country” between Hollywood and New York, but for Madeline in the 1980s it became a haven. Visiting Hiller Kahn’s ex-sister-in-law, Ginny Kahn, Madeline could recharge her emotional batteries, and performing with a local theater troupe, she could take creative risks. Even when she wasn’t working, she sometimes flew out to enjoy the scenery and the opera festival, as well as the mystical atmosphere. Ginny had longstanding ties to the area around Santa Fe dating at least as early as 1948, when, as an anthropology student at Vassar College, she did field work among the Navajo. Many years later, having divorced Ernie, Ginny summered in Santa Fe, and around 1979, Madeline and Jef Kahn first visited her there. Madeline’s contacts with Ginny and her children were “intermittent,” Ginny says. “We didn’t write to each other, because she wasn’t a writer. We’d talk on the phone sometimes, but not a lot. But there was a bond between us.”

Because of their time together in New Mexico, Madeline’s relationship with Ginny and her children found its mark. It helped that Ginny’s son, Dan, is close in age to Jef Kahn, and the two were fast friends. To an outside observer, it’s as if the various divorces never splintered the family ties. Ginny’s younger daughter, Sarah, knew Madeline better than Robyn Wolfson did. Robyn believes geographical distance contributed to
the limited roles she and Madeline played in each other’s lives, but the neutral ground of Santa Fe gave Madeline space to enjoy the company of Ginny’s family. Madeline never discussed her mother with Ginny, but the two did sometimes share details of their private lives. On a visit in 1992, for example, they talked about marriage. Madeline had been seeing John Hansbury for three years, and Ginny had recently been through what she calls “a disappointing but exciting relationship.” Madeline treated her as an older sister, Ginny says. “She was safe with me, and we had a good time together.” Often, Madeline was in Santa Fe to work. Though she’d seen her niece’s movies, and her performances at the Upstairs and in plays, it was only in Santa Fe that Ginny realized, “My God, Madeline’s become famous!”

By the early 1980s, the Santa Fe Opera Festival, founded in 1957, had become a national and international destination for music lovers. Among the singers who performed with the company were William Lewis, Madeline’s co-star from
Candide
, and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, one of Matthew Epstein’s closest associates. Madeline herself nearly performed with the company in 1981, when a virus ran rampant through the cast of Strauss’s
Daphne
, necessitating a switch to Puccini’s
Bohème
. The Musetta fell ill, too, and Madeline considered stepping in, extending her stay by a few days to accommodate the opera schedule. The Musetta recovered, and Madeline never rehearsed the role; she flew home the next day. That she even considered a return to the opera stage is one more indication of the emotional security she found in Santa Fe.

For years, both locals and visitors wondered whether the town could support a theater festival, too. Artistic advisory board member Angela Lansbury echoed this thought at a press conference on June 16, 1981, announcing the opening of the Santa Fe Festival Theater,
¹⁰
and the project seemed promising to Madeline, who was involved from the start. Seasoned professionals from “back East,” as a local news account described them (producing director Thomas Gardner, executive director Christopher Beach, stage director Robert Allan Ackerman, and designer Robert Wojewodski), had their location already, the National Guard Armory on Old Pecos Trail. Somewhat removed from the downtown area frequented by tourists, the armory is one of the last constructions of the WPA. The building opened in 1940, just in time to be put to use as a processing facility. By the late 1970s, the armory saw less use. Gardner and Beach renovated it, with private money and a grant from the state legislature, taking over the entire structure for their theater.

Their first production, Hecht and MacArthur’s
The Front Page
, opened on July 29, 1981, with Madeline in attendance. The founders aspired to create an environment where both seasoned professionals and emerging actors could stretch their wings, where they were often cast against type in less-familiar repertory, and sheltered from the scrutiny of larger venues. Ultimately, though, their vision worked against them. As one of the Festival Theater’s original company members, Nicholas Sabato Jr., observes, audiences tended to skip plays without celebrity actors, such as Ted Tally’s
Terra Nova
. Instead, they held out to see Michael York in
Cyrano de Bergerac
, another of the company’s first season productions.
Terra Nova
“was brilliant, but no one came to see it,” Sabato remembers.

At a benefit in New York, Madeline had helped to raise funds for the Festival Theater, singing “I’m Tired” and appearing with Gilda Radner in a short play directed by Ackerman. Susan Sarandon and Stephen Collins also participated in the event. That lineup is a good indicator of the star power the company hoped to deploy in Santa Fe. Ackerman would direct Madeline in two productions at the Festival Theater: in 1982, a world premiere music-theater adaptation of Franz Kafka’s
Amerika
, with a book by Israeli playwright Yoram Porat and music by Shlomo Gronich, and in 1983,
Blithe Spirit
.

The second production is in some ways more representative of the Theater’s aims. While Madeline might have excelled in the role of the beautiful, disruptive ghost, Elvira, she played against type as Arcati. Both Ackerman and Madeline’s co-star, Victor Garber, agree that Madeline would be a wonderful Arcati
today
, but in 1983, she was too young for the part. Another star actor, Amy Irving, took the role of Elvira. But as Ackerman says, the
New York Times
didn’t dispatch critics to review a play in Santa Fe, and producers and casting agents were unlikely to turn up in the audience. The Santa Fe journalists who reported on theater and interviewed actors were also the critics who reviewed the plays, engaging in a kind of dualism that, in the era before industry-wide cutbacks in arts coverage, larger papers in bigger cities tried to avoid. Even today, Sabato says, “It’s not a theater town.”

But as Madeline told
People
magazine, “There’s a different feeling in the theater here. You aren’t as self-conscious as you would be on Broadway or a big city. You take more risks.” Working with the Festival Theater was important to Madeline, Ackerman says, because “It was so free, and I’m sure people have told you, she was kind of a frightened person. I think being there made her feel calm and secure, and she . . . enjoyed
being surrounded by friends who really cared for each other.” That atmosphere was important to her. She hadn’t worked in theater since
On the Twentieth Century
.

Amerika
tells the story of a young German, Karl (played by Scott Burkholder), whose parents ship him off to the United States after catching him with the housemaid. Madeline played three roles: the maid, the proprietress of a hotel where Karl works as a bellboy, and—most memorably, according to all accounts—an opera singer who spent most of her stage time in the bathtub. Yoram Porat didn’t write these roles for a single actress, he told the
Santa Fe New Mexican
, but, he said, “There is a thread of similarity in the three women, and with Madeline Kahn playing all three roles, that continuity is enhanced.”
¹¹
Madeline lost herself in her characters, Burkholder says. As the maid, a non-comic role, Madeline was “very, very girlish, not very well educated, very low-class,” he remembers, a strong contrast to her “imperious and very controlling opera singer.” And much of the “hilarious” business she came up with, especially for the bath scene, was unscripted. “She was constantly inventing things.” To get the accents right, she turned to Ginny Kahn, who put her in touch with a Viennese émigré.

Porat had premiered
Amerika
without music in 1976. Yet Shlomo Gronich’s score was the strongest element of the play, Ackerman and Burkholder agree, and Madeline approached it seriously (though sometimes she used her voice “to sing in a funny way, [as if] making fun of her own talent,” Burkholder remembers). Music “was like a religion” to Madeline, Ackerman says. He also worked with her in a number of benefits and special events when she sang. “If she was going to sing a song, she really
became
the song,” he says. “She analyzed the song. She built a character.”

Meanwhile, the demands of the show—a large cast in multiple roles, a two-level set (designed like a giant machine by Wojewodski), an elevenpiece orchestra—were compounded by extensive revisions to the script. Officially, though, it was a technical challenge, upgrading the sound system, that caused Gardner and Beach abruptly to postpone opening night. The reporter–critic for the
New Mexican
disapproved, and, returning to the theater on August 6, she found the show overlong, “a case of Kafka overkill”—then lumped her review in with that for another production. She praised Madeline, while warning that “if theater-goers expected her to out-act and out-sing everyone else, they were disappointed. . . . [The] play is written in a way that equalizes roles, forbids a ‘lead’ to emerge.”
¹²
Burkholder, however, remembers an “overwhelming” audience response to Madeline at curtain calls.

Especially because of the unhappy outcome in
Twentieth Century
, “I don’t think Madeline would have done
Amerika
anywhere but Santa Fe,” Ackerman says. “We all felt this was a safe place to try this out.” Burkholder agrees. Because theater affords actors the chance to repeat their work, to correct their errors, to relive a portion of their experience each night, “You can edge towards perfection,” he says. “It’s a very safe place to be.”

Madeline returned the next summer for what seemed a less risky choice of repertory, in what she believed to be the funniest role in
Blithe Spirit
. It’s an unusual instance of her getting to choose a role and choosing wrong. She had the eccentricity for Arcati, but not the maturity, Ackerman says now, and her “different kind of energy” ran up against the audience’s expectations of a Margaret Rutherford-type. Madeline had turned forty the previous September, and remarkably, she opted to depict Arcati as an older woman, following the standard interpretation of the play and adding this to the short list of roles for which she “greyed up.”

Here again, the protected atmosphere of Santa Fe encouraged her. Had she expected Hollywood casting directors to see the show—and to see her opposite the stunning Amy Irving—she might have played Arcati as younger and more attractive than usual, while still bringing her lunacy to bear. Instead, Ackerman remembers that Madeline stooped her shoulders and changed her voice, and photographs show her with age makeup and a wig. Embracing Arcati’s age may be one reason everyone remembers her as too young for the part, since her portrayal was artificial from the start. “She analyzed things to beyond the nth degree,” Victor Garber says. “She was so smart, and such an intellect, but I think it kind of worked against her in some ways.” Nevertheless, Ackerman says, Madeline dove into the role, with an attitude of “Let’s do this for the theater.” He found her inventive and collaborative, though Garber remembers, “Madeline’s process was sometimes frustrating, because she just didn’t nail stuff down. She was kind of all over the place—in a wonderful way. I mean, I adored it. But there were times I would think, ‘Are you actually going to move over
there
now?’”