Madeline Kahn (4 page)

Not long after his brother’s wedding, Hiller proposed marriage to Freda, and at the same time suggested they take Madeline out of Manumit and bring her to live with them. “I felt it was grossly unfair to have her in boarding school,” he said. “I wanted her to be part of the family.” Looking back, Hiller described the appeal of his paternal relationship with Madeline as much of the reason he married Freda. “She was the only little girl I’ve ever been very, very close to,” he said. He especially enjoyed taking her to the movies on Saturday afternoons. “She loved movies, and I loved being with her. She was fun to be with.” She seldom gave him any cause to worry about her, perhaps a conscious choice on her part. He recalled a little girl eager to make a good impression. “I always had a feeling that she was a little affected in the way she spoke, as though there were someone who told her that she should be very careful about choosing her words and the way she formed sentences.”

Madeline’s fans will recognize in this the carefully enunciated sophistication for which she strove, with pointed vocabulary and seldom so much as a hint of her Queens (or, for that matter, Boston) origins. Her distinctive manner of speaking was one of the principal elements of her performing career, constituting the basis of her characters in
High Anxiety
and
Clue
, and it’s not unlike the flawless penmanship, grammar, spelling, and punctuation that characterize her writing, even in her appointment books. While it might be supposed that some of this polish derived from Madeline’s college years, when she studied speech therapy, Hiller’s recollection suggests that Madeline was already on this track when she was a very young girl, striving to be irreproachable.

Shortly after marrying Freda in Mexico in 1953, Hiller legally adopted Madeline, and she kept his surname for the rest of her life. The Kahns moved to an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and Madeline enrolled at P.S. 135. “[E]ven tho’ public school was less than adequate, it seemed easy or easier in a way to follow rules,” Madeline remembered. Manumit had given her at least some preparation for life, “which is chaos.”
⁷

Hiller remembered the early years warmly, but there were danger signs from the start. Perhaps because she’d been living on her own for eight years, Freda’s ambitions had changed by the time she married Hiller. Where once she craved stardom alone, now she also craved the perks that stardom often brings: money, and the things that money can buy. She wasn’t inclined to wait for fame, or even to wait for much income, before she grabbed the cash—and spent it.

Growing up during the Depression, Freda had learned “that you do what you have to do, to get what you need,” her son, Jeffrey, explained. She also learned through mishaps great and small that life isn’t fair. For example, most people would agree that Freda shouldn’t have needed to sue her father for child support, and that after she did sue him, she should have won. She should have won the soprano lead in the school choir. She should have won the Junior League beauty contest, and so on. If life wasn’t fair, Freda seems to have reasoned, then there was no point in playing fair.

Shortly after she married Hiller, Freda carried out one of her more daring schemes. She borrowed $400, a considerable sum, from her sister-in-law, Jean Barry, on behalf of Hiller. At the same time, she went to Hiller and borrowed another $400 on behalf of Ted Barry—who, she said, needed the money
right away
, because the Mafia was after him. Freda then took all the money for herself. Neither Hiller nor Ted knew there were two loans, and each man believed he’d lent the money to the other man. Neither of them felt comfortable asking the other to repay the supposed debt. Over the years, animosity built up between Hiller and Ted, which suited Freda’s purposes, but the bitterness effectively poisoned her children’s relationships with her brother. It took Ted nearly half a century to figure out how Freda had conned them all.

No matter where she got the money—and sometimes when she didn’t get it at all—Freda spent lavishly. To a degree, she merely hearkened to the tenor of the times: the economic boom of the 1950s in America, the rise of the middle class, and the blossoming of consumerism. But Freda went farther. She acquired grandiose tastes, and years later, both Hiller and Ted were able to quote the prices of her extravagant purchases and redecorating schemes. Her new kitchen cabinets cost a whopping seven thousand dollars, and according to family lore, she had her bedroom re-wallpapered twice in one week. Though Freda augmented the household income by giving music lessons (even charging Madeline for them), she’d quit working outside the home and didn’t earn nearly enough to cover her expenses.

At first, Hiller paid, though grudgingly and with warnings that Freda must start to economize. He’d just started an automotive-supply business. “We were doing well,” he remembered, “but there are limits to how much money you can spend when you’re just getting underway.” There was a new mouth to feed, too. Jeffrey was born on October 28, 1953, and the family moved into a house at 19904 Romeo Court in Holliswood, Queens. One-and-a-half stories built in Cape Cod style with an
attached garage, the house sat on a wooded lot on a quiet street. It would remain Madeline’s home base well into adulthood.

Madeline adored her baby brother, and Jef recalls her loving care more warmly than he does his mother’s. His first memories are of Madeline carrying him, playing with him, and sometimes teasing him “in a very loving way,” Jef says. Most of the time, however, Jef was the troublemaker. “Jef wouldn’t listen to his mother, but he would listen to Madeline,” Ginny says. With a background in social work and education, she was already critical of Freda’s handling of both children.

Only once, when she was fourteen or fifteen, did Madeline get into serious trouble. At that age, her cousin Gerri Gerson says, they both were boy-crazy, and when Madeline came to Boston to visit, they liked to throw parties where Madeline could meet boys her age. One evening in Queens, when Hiller and Freda had gone to the movies, Madeline called a few boys, told them her parents were out, and invited them over to the house. But this wasn’t like one of Gerri’s parties in Boston, and things got out of hand. When Hiller and Freda came home, the boys fled. They found Madeline crying in the basement. While it was unclear exactly what happened, Hiller and Freda understood that the boys “had taken advantage of Madeline.” They called the police, who questioned the girl and determined she hadn’t been raped. The police then rounded up the boys and their parents, who came to Romeo Court to apologize. After Hiller and Freda calmed Madeline down, he believed “the whole incident was over. I don’t think I’ve thought of it since then.” As he looked back more than fifty years later, this was the only instance of poor judgment on Madeline’s part that he could remember. As he saw it, Madeline shouldn’t have spread the word that she was home alone. “I think [the boys] probably scared the hell out of her,” Hiller said. This fear marked her more than he knew. A few years later, when she was an undergraduate at Hofstra, she stood out among her classmates because she showed no interest in sex.

Hiller and Freda’s marriage showed strains early on. Jean and Ted Barry visited New York not long after Jef was born, but Freda called to ask them not to come to Queens. Hiller had moved out, she said, and she didn’t want company. A day or so later, Madeline phoned and begged Jean and Ted to come to the house. She’d persuaded Hiller to come back, and everything was all right. Once Jean and Ted arrived at Romeo Court, they found a relaxed, evidently happy couple.

“No, we didn’t fight. No, never,” Hiller said. “We may have had an angry word once in a while, but we didn’t fight. We had two children
in the house, and we controlled ourselves pretty well.” But Freda’s manipulative behavior and out-of-control spending got progressively worse, and by 1957, they drove Hiller to leave her. Moving to the 63rd Street YMCA in Manhattan, he took a second job and borrowed money to pay off Freda’s debts. She phoned him constantly, but he had no intention of reconciling with her. In 1958, they obtained a divorce, although a formal Mexican divorce wasn’t handed down until 1963.

Citing cruel and inhuman treatment (a common legal tactic in such cases and virtually a necessity under divorce law at the time), Freda sued for alimony and child support for both Madeline and Jef. However, the Domestic Relations Court of the City of New York found, contrary to Freda’s claim, that there had been no such “cruel and inhuman” behavior on Hiller’s part. Moreover, the court found Freda, not Hiller, “responsible for the separation.” Although she apparently concealed from the court the money she earned from music lessons (“the Petitioner has an income of no dollars”), Freda failed to persuade the judge that she had no earning capacity. After all, she’d earned her living for eight years before marrying Hiller, and she gave no reason to suppose that she couldn’t return to clerical work. The court turned down Freda’s demand for alimony (a highly unusual decision in those days), ordered Hiller to pay her sixty-five dollars per week for the children, and told Freda to get a job.
⁸

Freda made it clear that she’d put up a fight if Hiller exercised visitation rights with Madeline, and he resigned himself to this situation, a decision he later regretted. However, he insisted on his visitation rights with Jef, particularly regular Saturday outings to Manhattan. At first, Freda resisted this, too, and one day when Jef was five, she tried to prevent Hiller from taking him out of the house. A shouting match ensued, and the police were called. Jef ran upstairs to his bedroom, and Madeline hurried to comfort him. He remembers that with exceptional sensitivity, “she explained that, while we were the only people in the neighborhood to be a family of divorce, that did not make us freaks or bad people.”

From that point on, Hiller’s visits to Romeo Court would be marked by Freda’s gleefully handing him fresh stacks of bills to be paid, and by his desire to make a quick getaway with his son. Generally, he recalled, Madeline lingered in the background, laughing along with Freda; he had the impression that Freda expected her daughter to behave this way. “Madeline was loyal to her mother,” he said simply, but he and Madeline grew apart. In later years they made efforts to bridge the distance, usually at Jef’s instigation, but their encounters were correct and not much more.

Madeline made more of an effort with Bernie Wolfson, but their relationship followed a similar course, Robyn Wolfson says. After Hiller and Freda divorced, Madeline began to see more of her father. On those visits, their interactions were merely “amicable,” Robyn observed, and she speculated that Madeline’s real father–daughter relationship was with Hiller. In truth, Madeline didn’t have one.

Jef’s Saturdays with his father meant the boy got away from his mother on a regular basis, while Madeline was left to fend for herself. Years later, Jef sensed that his sister harbored a degree of wistfulness or resentment. After all, he says, “I’ve got a sane parent, and she doesn’t.” Though he now works in a mental health facility, he hesitates to diagnose his mother. Some of her behavior struck him as manic, he says, and at times he wondered whether she was a borderline personality.

She could be charming and highly persuasive, never more so than when she silenced or banished those who disputed her perspective or questioned her influence. Growing up, Madeline believed that neither of her fathers could be trusted, and therefore security must come from Freda and her insistence that “[t]he universe will provide,” as Jef puts it. At the same time, Freda exploited the sense of responsibility that her husbands’ abandonment had helped to instill in Madeline, the sense that she needed to protect and support her mother. That’s a terrible burden for a teenager, and it persisted, informing not only Madeline’s personal life, but also her career choices, as “support” took on financial meaning, too. Making a commercial for Light beer or Diet Coke might not befit an Oscar- and Tony-nominated star, but it’s what a working single woman has to do to provide for a loved one. “Of course I have” taken jobs just for the money, she once told an interviewer. “I hope people can tell which ones those are.”
⁹

“It’s clear that a lot of Madi’s motivation in life was to please her mother,” Jef Kahn says. “She did such a good job that she actually made her jealous.”

The wreck of Freda’s marriages continued to affect Madeline profoundly and in several ways. Like Bernie before him, Hiller walked out on Freda and Madeline at a time when the girl’s appearance made her feel vulnerable. In adolescence she was chubbier than at any other point in her life. Jef says that other women in the family have gone through teenage weightgain and wound up perfectly slender as adults, but young Madeline, cut off from so many relatives, didn’t have that long-range perspective.

The principal lesson of Madeline’s childhood was:
People will leave
. People may
not
leave so long as you’re pretty and charming and entertaining, and so long as you do absolutely nothing wrong. Her singing brought Hiller into her family, and so she sang; the little girl who was “almost
too
polite and well-behaved” was determined not to scare him away. But he left anyway, and on a day when she was fat.