Madeline Kahn (39 page)

Corman describes “Dear Sam” as especially difficult to act in, and the abrupt shift affected Madeline and Scott, as well. As the series continued, there would be few references to Meg Tresch, and Lois’s crush on Sam didn’t come into focus in the ensuing episodes, revealing itself more
in the playing than in the writing. If the series ran for a few years, the producers intended to pursue a relationship like Sam and Diane’s on
Cheers
, though uncertainties about Scott’s health meant that long-range planning was difficult. “Nobody knew how long we’d be on and what the trajectory of the show would be,” Corman says. “We changed many times—my age changed many times. But I think they really just were hoping that Madeline would . . . make the show light and funny, which she absolutely did, 100 percent.”

From her first entrance in
Mr. President
, Lois Gullickson is in many ways an archetypal Madeline Kahn character, to such a degree that one wonders whether the producers considered anyone else for the role. She certainly reflects the image of Madeline that talk show hosts (including Johnny Carson) liked to highlight. Lois is bright but ditsy, loquacious, impractical, nervous. This may not have been the image Madeline preferred, but it was the sitcom equivalent of the song “You’d Be Surprised.” Audiences found the material amusing, and she knew precisely how to play it. To some extent, Corman says, Madeline kept playing Lois even when the cameras weren’t rolling: “She was on her own wavelength.”

Years later, playing second banana to another commanding star on the sitcom
Cosby
, Madeline would say that she’d finally found the professional home she’d been looking for.
Mr. President
provided her with a foretaste of that experience, and it reifies much of Caryn Mandabach’s analysis of her as a character actor who was more comfortable opposite a strong lead. Superior scripts don’t entirely account for the ease and wit in her performances in
Mr. President
, qualities she hadn’t displayed in
Oh Madeline
. Above all, her teamwork with Scott offers a marked contrast to her work with James Sloyan. Lois amuses Sam, as Madeline never amused Charlie.

Whereas Glynn tried to ease the tensions on the set, Corman says, Madeline appeared to take no notice of them. Instead, “she showed up and created her own energy.” Scott “lit up” around her, and she brought out “a silliness in him that I certainly hadn’t seen,” Corman remembers. “It was very easy to tiptoe around him. I loved him, but he was a very moody and sometimes an intimidating presence. But that didn’t affect her in any way. . . . She was this otherworldly being in our presence, and there was no way you could remain in a bad mood for long. And George adored her, which made all of our lives better.”

As a young actor working with distinguished older colleagues, Corman paid close attention, and she’s carried the lessons—as well as a flawless Madeline Kahn impression—into adulthood. No matter what else
was going on—whether ratings or alimony or arguments with the writers—Madeline, Scott, Bain, and Glynn were committed to their work and “never phoned it in.” Corman’s parents were fans of Madeline, and as a result, “she had been in my world for a long time,” Corman says. “But to be up close and personal was exciting, week in and week out.” At table reads, she found herself endlessly surprised by the laughs Madeline found in the dialogue. Even with the script before her, Corman says, she couldn’t anticipate Madeline’s delivery. And she appreciated the way Madeline approached her as a professional, saying, “That was exciting! How did you do it?” when she did well. Madeline complimented her especially when Corman found the comedy in her character, which encouraged her to focus on her acting, rather than on pratfalls or silliness.

They shared the name Madeline, an interest in clothes (“I
need
! That
hat
!
Where?
Did you
get
? That
hat
!”), and the bafflement of New Yorkers transplanted to the alternate dimension that is Los Angeles. Corman remembers an earthquake in 1988: When she called to ask whether the studio would close that day, the production manager replied, “Oh, please, the only phone calls we got were from you and Madeline Kahn.” After rehearsal had been underway for about an hour, Madeline stopped. “
People
!” she exclaimed. “
People
! There has been
an earthquake
no one seems to have
noticed
. But there was
an earthquake
, and
I
am
going
to
scream
.” She screamed for a few moments, then stopped. “All right, we can go back to work now.”

Both “Wanted: The Perfect Guy” and
Mr. President
meant that Madeline was working closely with child actors for the first time since
Paper Moon
—at precisely the moment she became an aunt. Jef Kahn and his wife, Juliette DeFord, welcomed their daughter Eliza into the world in 1987. “Both Madi and Paula were beside themselves,” Jef remembers. “They were like two little old ladies, they were so happy.”

In a sense, Madeline’s relationship with Corman was a rehearsal for her role as Eliza’s aunt. As the years went on, Madeline strove to instill in her niece a certain idea of femininity, “what it means to be a woman. She succeeded in her task,” Jef says. “Eliza is amazingly imprinted with Madeline. She has so many of the same expressions and gestures.” When Madeline came to Jef’s home in Charlottesville, she and Eliza would lie in bed and talk in the mornings. Often, they’d go on excursions together, shopping for shoes or taking in a Jennifer Aniston movie. “She knew how to get to Eliza,” Jef says. “It was beautiful to watch.”

In principle,
Mr. President
might have been an effective fusion of two time-honored sitcom traditions, domestic and workplace comedies, with extra humor deriving from the fact that, in this case, the home and the workplace happened to be the White House. It’s one thing when a father can’t stand his son-in-law; it’s something else when the father is president—or so the premise maintained. In practice, however, the comedy proved challenging to producers, writers, and cast. Unlike
SNL
, the show couldn’t rely on up-to-the-minute topicality, and any political satire was kept to a gentle, generalized minimum. Certain kinds of broad comedy weren’t suitable to Scott, and even Madeline’s meddlesome character could be deployed in only so many ways. As several shows proved in the years since, the
idea
of a White House sitcom may be funniest thing about a White House sitcom.

Madeline appeared in fourteen episodes of
Mr. President
before the series was cancelled in 1988. Nothing about the experience dispelled her perception of the precariousness of series television. It seemed like steady work with a huge audience, but there were no guarantees, even when you worked with the top names in the business. And if Carlin Glynn could be written off a struggling show, so too could Madeline Kahn.

Always insecure, Madeline now began to fear that her career was finished. She made television commercials for Diet Coke and Michelob Light beer, figuring “she’d better go ahead and make the money while she was still worth something,” as her brother put it. In 1988, the Beef Industry Council hired her for a fifteen-second promotional spot for its “Beef: Real Food for Real People” campaign. Casting about for more options, Madeline returned to the idea of a one-woman show that she would call “Kahn-cepts,” but she never got farther than selecting musical numbers from among Laura Nyro’s greatest hits and her own (“The Moment Has Passed,” “Das Chicago Song,” and of course, “I’m Tired”). At one point during this period, Madeline phoned Jef at his farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She’d helped him to buy the property, where he’d built a house, using skills he’d learned at Twin Oaks. Now she wondered whether he and Jules would mind if she sold her apartment, built a cabin somewhere on their place, and came to live there. “Her insecurities were always there, even when she was successful,” Jef says. “They were almost like a virus, like herpes: You can always have it without symptoms.” Once he reassured her that “she had a place to fall,” she thought through the idea more carefully and realized she was too much a New Yorker to live anywhere else, least of all a farm. “She loved coming down here, but it was more like a scene from a ’40s jungle movie with a safari
hat,” Jef says. Over the years, she grew more comfortable on the farm, “But New York was home. Manhattan was home.”

Paula Kahn, however, came to a different conclusion. Once and for all setting aside her dream of becoming “a professional star,” she determined to leave California and to focus on her granddaughter. Madeline bought her a house in Charlottesville, and Paula “proceeded to make our lives more challenging.” By “our,” Jef means not only himself, his wife, and his daughter, but also his sister.

Born Yesterday
(1988–89)

IN NEW YORK ON JUNE 15, 1988, BERNARD WOLFSON DIED OF LUNG
cancer, though he’d given up smoking some twenty years before. Madeline visited him often as his health declined, and she did so every day during the last week of his life. Illness didn’t dampen Bernie’s spirit. “He was joking when they put him into the hospice at Sloan-Kettering—he was joking even then,” Robyn Wolfson says. “Up to the end, that’s just what he did.” He was buried on June 17, following services at the Frank Campbell funeral home in Manhattan.

Madeline continued to see Robyn and Marti from time to time, but without Bernie’s presence to anchor them, drift set in. “She was busy, I always understood that,” Robyn says. “I did try reaching out to her over the years, but again, she was either in New York, busy, or in California, busy. And I understand.” Without having grown up together, as Madeline and Jef did, and without much opportunity to get to know each other, maintaining any kind of relationship meant a concerted effort for both half-sisters. Neither knew how little time they had. It was easier for Madeline to keep up with Marti, who continued to live in New York and who was available for the occasional date, like the lunch they shared just three months after the funeral. Keeping in touch with Robyn that year meant only a phone call on December 7.

Six days after Bernie’s funeral, Madeline lunched with playwright Garson Kanin, who had been looking for the right actress to revive his comedy
Born Yesterday
. For a long time he had hopes for Bernadette Peters, but he couldn’t build a supporting cast around her. In Madeline, he believed he’d found what he was looking for. One of the biggest gambles of her career,
Born Yesterday
would mean her return to a commercial Broadway stage for the first time since
On the Twentieth Century
. Before
arriving in New York, there would be a national tour, something Madeline had never done and sometimes disparaged. The rigors of travel would compound the demands of eight shows a week in seven cities before opening on January 29, 1989.

And the play itself is old-fashioned, “a pretty old duck,” as Kanin admitted. The plot concerns Harry Brock, a junk dealer who’s made a fortune during World War II and now, in 1946, has come to Washington to push for legislation that will permit him to corner the scrap market in Europe. Crude though he is, he realizes that his mistress, a former showgirl named Billie Dawn, lacks the cultivation and social graces that would make her an asset to him in the capital. Instead, she’s a liability who doesn’t know what the Supreme Court is. Brock hires Paul Verrall, a reporter from
New Republic
magazine (of all places), to give Billie a crash course in history and politics. Under Paul’s tutelage, Billie sees Brock for who he is and exposes his shady dealings. Inevitably, she and Paul fall in love.

For Madeline, the biggest gamble was Billie’s indelible association with Judy Holliday, who created the role on Broadway and on film, winning an Oscar for her performance in 1950. Because of the film, Holliday still effectively owned the role of Billie long after her death in 1964. And Billie—pretty, sweet, yet feistier and more intelligent that she appears to be—influenced most of the roles Holliday played after
Born Yesterday
. Madeline saw herself as a very different type, “more hard-edged” and more like other women of her generation, who had reaped the benefits of feminism, “just more incisive people. Maybe more aggressive.”
⁴⁶
Madeline hoped to put a more contemporary spin on her interpretation. But above all, the chance to develop a character over the course of a couple of hours, and to be the center of attention once again for an entire play, proved irresistible. Kanin encouraged her, and as
Born Yesterday
moved forward, he took unabashed delight in her performances and personality. On the eve of opening night in New York, he told the
New York Times
, “I’m not speaking ill of the dead, but if I had a choice between the original production and this one for a New York presentation, I’d choose this one. This girl has got sex.”
⁴⁷
Introducing Madeline a few months later at graduation ceremonies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Kanin declared that, in all the many productions he’d seen, the role of Billie had never seemed “as magical, somehow, as enchanting.”
⁴⁸