Madeline Kahn (33 page)

At least by the Festival Theater’s standards,
Blithe Spirit
was a success. Sabato retains vivid memories of Madeline’s grand entrance on a bicycle, spinning across the back of the house. “Audiences and the local critics
appreciate her comic inventiveness in the role,”
People
noted. Yet the safety of Santa Fe wasn’t inviolable. In the article, a mention of Madeline’s exercise routine was used to remind readers of
Twentieth Century
, “when fatigue and a faltering voice forced her out of the Broadway hit. . . . This time no replacement is likely to be necessary.”
¹³

Offstage, Madeline found a welcoming community of colleagues and friends. Younger company members expected to find a movie star—or at least the kind of personality Madeline played onscreen. Instead, Burkholder was surprised by how tiny, shy, and soft-spoken she was. Sabato noted that she treated everyone, from novices to Lily Tomlin, with the same “wonderful spirit and energy.”
Amerika
was only Burkholder’s second professional acting job, and he was under great pressure in a huge role with constant revisions. He remembers that Madeline sometimes “translated” Ackerman’s directions in order to help him during rehearsals. When his parents drove in from Tucson to see the show, she joined them for dinner but made sure he remained the center of attention. Both Ackerman and Garber had known Madeline since the 1970s, each having been introduced to her by Gilda Radner. Working together in Santa Fe brought them closer, Garber says. The three had dinner together almost every night, and tea on Sunday afternoons. After hours, they might socialize with other members of the troupe and the opera company, too.

During
Amerika
, producers Gardner and Beach found a rental for Madeline, the Pit House, outside town. Inspired by traditional Anasazi structures, it was almost completely underground and blended in with the desert scenery. Ultra-urbane Madeline found the Pit House claustrophobic and remote. Fearful of bugs, she walked around “on semi-tip-toes,” Ackerman says. “Madeline was not the sort of person you would think would go camping.” But she didn’t want her friends to think she didn’t appreciate the effort they’d made for her. She phoned Ackerman often: “Tell them I love it!” Then she would squeal, “Come over, don’t leave me here alone!” (For
Blithe Spirit
, she rented a one-bedroom adobe house more to her taste.)

Because of film and television commitments, Madeline couldn’t return for another season with the Festival Theater, and the company closed in 1985. She’d wait until 1992 for her only other professional engagement in the area.

Yellowbeard
(1983)

THE EARLY 1980S SAW A NUMBER OF PIRATE MOVIES. MOST WERE COM
edies; all were failures. None was starrier than
Yellowbeard
, featuring
Monty Python
veterans (Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, John Cleese); British comedians old (Spike Milligan, Peter Cook) and young (Nigel Planer);
Young Frankenstein
favorites (Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Kenneth Mars); acclaimed “legit” actors (Michael Hordern, James Mason, Susanna York, Beryl Reid, Peter Bull); one rock star (David Bowie); two American counter-culturists (Cheech and Chong); and one female comedian, Madeline. But as Bob Thomas of the Associated Press asked in his review, “How could so many comedic talents produce such a mirthless movie?”
¹⁴
Warning signs were evident even during shooting. “They’re saying it’s very funny, which is usually the kiss of death,” Milligan told two documentary-makers on the set.
¹⁵
Curiously,
Yellowbeard
works better as a straightforward swashbuckler, interrupted by scattershot bursts of humor.

For her part, Madeline fares rather well, with a creditable Cockney accent and a fetching costume. A paragon among the many saucy wenches Madeline played, Mrs. Yellowbeard is the common-law wife of an especially ruthless pirate (Chapman). When he’s imprisoned, she ensures the security of his treasure map (and of her own desire for wealth sufficient “to own Denmark”) by tattooing it onto the scalp of their infant son. Years later, Yellowbeard escapes from prison and finds the boy (Martin Hewitt), now grown and a tremendous disappointment who’s more devoted to books than to plunder. Yellowbeard kidnaps him and sets off in search of the treasure, with the British government, the boy’s foster father, rival pirates (Boyle and Feldman), and Mrs. Yellowbeard in pursuit.

Many of the problems with the film originate with Chapman, who conceived of the movie as a vehicle for himself and the drummer Keith
Moon, who loved pirate movies. Even after Moon died in 1978, the pirate theme persisted, and he’s memorialized in Boyle’s character’s name. The script, written by a mini-committee that included Chapman, Cook, and Chapman’s lover, was the worst Cleese had ever seen, and it required harum-scarum antics of Chapman that were sadly unlike the authoritarian stuffiness at which he excelled. But he wanted the lead, and he wanted a hit to rival the post-
Python
successes of Cleese, Idle, and Terry Gilliam.

Chapman’s efforts to control the movie extended to the selection of Mel Damski as director. A seasoned television director making his feature-film debut, Damski’s experience in comedy was limited to one episode of
M*A*S*H
. Chapman expected to dominate him, though Damski pushed back as well as he could. The cast proved unruly, however, leading to production delays when shooting moved from London’s Pinewood Studios to the resort town of Ixtapa, Mexico. And Damski never managed to integrate the different comedy styles of his actors. Cheech and Chong, for example, strike discordant notes whenever they interact with other cast members.
¹⁶

While
Yellowbeard
is an ensemble picture, it can’t have escaped anyone’s notice—and it didn’t escape Madeline’s—that she was the only female lead among all the funny men, confirming her status as the reigning queen of film comedy. The other women in the film have far less screen time and few lines, and the juvenile lead, Stacey Nelkin, doesn’t make her first appearance until the movie is half over. No matter that Madeline had to play the mother of a grown man even as she celebrated her fortieth birthday. She found it “flattering to be one of the few women who work with these guys who are so clever.”
¹⁷
But as Lawrence Van Gelder observed in his review in the
New York Times
, “What
Yellowbeard
establishes is that even for the funniest of performers, a good script may be as essential as pitching is to baseball.”
¹⁸

Yellowbeard
holds the dubious distinction of being the 107th-highest grossing film of 1983. For Madeline, it signaled the end of the Brooks era in another important way. After she’d returned to New York, production moved to Mexico City, where Marty Feldman died of a heart attack in his hotel room on December 2, 1982. Receiving a phone call, she noted in her appointment book “M. Feldman,” drawing a black box around the name. Never again in movies would she find the mix of fun and good fortune she’d derived from her collaborations with him, Brooks, Wilder, and Boyle.

Scrambled Feet
(1983)

YELLOWBEARD
WAS THE LAST IN A SERIES OF GLOOMY PORTENTS
. While she remained a popular—and evidently bankable—star, Madeline wouldn’t appear onscreen in another hit movie for the rest of her career. (Only a few animated films succeeded.) Paradoxically, perhaps, it was in the early 1980s that the phrase “a Madeline Kahn movie”—distinct from yet related to “a Mel Brooks movie”—gained currency with audiences, especially college students. The phrase was shorthand: Madeline’s participation in a movie instantly connoted an irreverent comic sensibility, an ensemble cast of familiar and well-liked faces, and, in all likelihood, genre parody. Madeline’s pictures promised—and usually delivered, however fitfully—a generational cry of rebellion, refusing to take seriously the icons of earlier filmmakers.

Success in character parts had helped her to postpone many of the anxieties that typically come to Hollywood actresses over thirty. After all, Madeline made her feature debut just as she
turned
thirty, and nobody suggested she was too old for her roles in the Bogdanovich, Brooks, and Wilder movies. She wasn’t a conventional starlet, and the appearance of youth didn’t determine her casting. But as she turned forty, and as film after film flopped, she began to worry. Paula continued to run up bills and to concoct schemes that proved more expensive than get-rich-quick. Meanwhile, despite the reassurance that her role in
Yellowbeard
offered, Madeline believed her tenure as the top comic actress in Hollywood was in jeopardy.

The biggest warning sign may have been
To Be or Not to Be
, Alan Johnson’s remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy from 1942, in which two actors, husband and wife, thwart the Nazis in occupied Warsaw. While Mel Brooks didn’t direct the film, he did produce it, and he took the lead role
(played originally by Jack Benny) for himself. Since the role of the wife had been played by Carole Lombard in the Lubitsch movie, one might have supposed that the part in the remake would go to an actress who was often compared with Lombard and who had worked so well with Brooks in the past: Madeline herself. Instead, Anne Bancroft got the part.

While Brooks emphasizes that his wife admired Madeline and considered her a friend, Madeline worried privately that Bancroft had grown jealous or resentful of her. Surely Bancroft must have wanted in on the fun of making a Mel Brooks movie. Watching Bancroft’s cameo in
Silent Movie
, you see her becoming almost giddy as she ventures into broad comedy, a field far distant from the serious dramatic roles she usually played. You can see her pleasure in her smile, and she’s smiling much the same way in the opening scene of
To Be or Not to Be
, in which she and her husband sing “Sweet Georgia Brown”—in Polish. Brooks recalls that the scene required a full month of intensive private instruction at home.
¹⁹

In 1997, when Madeline met with Eric Mendelsohn, the director of her final film and a lifelong Brooks fan, the subject of her movies with Brooks came up. She “spoke of them very dismissively,” he says. How much of her response was an attempt to boost the morale of a fledgling director who was trying to create a comedy at once airier and darker than
Young Frankenstein
? It’s impossible to say. But in the 1980s, the primary question was blunter: If Madeline couldn’t be sure of playing the lead in a Mel Brooks movie, what could she be sure of?

Television appeared to hold the answer. She tried to make the move sound like “a practical matter of opening new vistas and expanding my career,” as she told the UPI. “I wanted some continuity in my life for a change, a chance to work with a company of people week after week in a consistent structure. I’d just finished doing
Yellowbeard
, and the constant starting and stopping of movies was getting to me a little bit. I wanted to lead a more normal life personally. On a professional level, I hope to be able to develop a character in greater depth and detail than the kind of roles I’ve played in movies.”
²⁰
In effect, she was following the example of Lucille Ball and Eve Arden, who turned to television and situation comedies when they hit middle age and movie studios had less use for them. With
I Love Lucy
and
Our Miss Brooks
, Ball and Arden suddenly were bigger stars—and more regularly employed—than actresses to whom they used to play second banana.

So when ABC offered Madeline a sitcom, she did what she’d done before in high-stakes ventures: She tried something smaller-scale first. The songs or sketches she’d performed on other television shows required
at most a week of rehearsal time, but
Scrambled Feet
would be more demanding. A theatrical revue videotaped as a one-off for the Showtime cable network, it positioned Madeline as first among equals, the only marquee name in a cast of four, and she appears in most of the scenes, singing, dancing, clowning, and even playing piano.

A lighthearted look at theatrical life,
Scrambled Feet
originated in Chicago, where a group of friends—John Driver, Jeffrey Haddow, and Evalyn Baron—assembled in Baron’s living room. Like all good Chicago actors, they began to improvise scenes, based on their experiences and on stories they’d heard from other friends. Enlisting Jimmy Wisner and John Vaccaro to produce, Driver and Haddow shaped the material into sketches and wrote several songs. Wisner and Roger Neil contributed musical arrangements, as well. With Driver, Haddow, Baron, and Neil performing, Chicago audiences responded enthusiastically, and the team headed to New York, where the show was a smash hit at the Village Gate, running for two years. By the time the show was taped, the team had also traveled to Boston and Los Angeles and returned in triumph to Chicago. Cast members cycled in and out of the show as it ran, so it wasn’t unprecedented to replace Baron, though neither she nor Haddow remembers who decided to replace her with Madeline, a better-known performer. Not even Baron objected. “It makes total sense, if you want to sell a program and put it on Showtime,” she says.

Songs for the female role in
Scrambled Feet
include three high C’s, Baron says, and like Madeline, she had classical vocal training. Both women knew what life was like for a struggling actor in the big city, and both had performed in revues. (Today, Baron describes
Scrambled Feet
as “the new Upstairs at the Downstairs.”) Beyond this, however, the two women weren’t much alike. While Baron was statuesque, Madeline was petite and a decade older. And Madeline had never even met the men in the company, who were Baron’s lifelong friends. Indeed, Haddow doesn’t remember interacting with Madeline at all outside their scenes together. Madeline didn’t share anecdotes from her early years or any of the background that might have suggested why
Scrambled Feet
could be particularly meaningful for her. “She was cordial, as I recall, but not terribly communicative or social,” he says.