Madeline Kahn (47 page)

Stone had scored a hit four years earlier with
JFK
, dramatizing an unprovable conspiracy theory. For
Nixon
, Stone again assembled an impressive cast, which managed to evoke figures many in the audience remembered well from newspapers and television. This time, however, the most provocative aspect of Stone’s work is his sympathetic treatment of the disgraced former president, who died in April 1994. Since Nixon still has his admirers, the director’s generosity toward his subject isn’t universally viewed as a flaw. Faced with a large cast and limited column inches, not every critic mentioned Madeline, but Mick LaSalle of the
San Francisco Chronicle
ended his review by saying, “Madeline Kahn appears all too briefly here as Martha Mitchell; she should have played Pat”—which of course she’d done on
SNL
nearly two decades before.
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Madeline almost didn’t get to play Martha. Diane Ladd had been the leading contender to play the role, but she was unavailable. Madeline’s performance is as good an example as any of her late-career work. No longer burdened with much if any responsibility for the box office success or failure of the projects she took on—and freed from the demands of broader comedy made on her in so many of her earlier movies—she has the skill and talent to etch deft portraits using minimal means. She’s often funny, but even when the writing is substandard, she builds her humor on a solid foundation of character, and she knows how to deliver any line to make it register effectively. Looking back at her performances in these years, the possibilities seem limitless. But she was a mature woman now. Though she lent her voice to Pixar’s
A Bug’s Life
, in 1998,
Nixon
marked Madeline’s last onscreen appearance in a major studio release.

Having played Nan Chase probably made another assignment easier for Madeline: playing another New York gossip columnist in
For Love Alone: The Ivana Trump Story
, a TV movie that aired on CBS on January 7, 1996. An adaptation of a roman à clef written by the ex-wife of Donald Trump,
For Love Alone
plays with the audience’s presumptions about the Trumps’ marriage, dramatizing known incidents while keeping the
heroine ever-admirable and blameless.
³⁸
The only leaven in the melodrama comes from Madeline, playing Sabrina, first the heroine’s antagonist, then her ally. Making astute use of her character’s enormous, black-rimmed eyeglasses, Madeline recalls Edna Mode, the diminutive costume designer in Pixar’s
The Incredibles
(2005). In one of the movie’s rare visually telling sequences, Madeline appears in the background of a shot, rising from behind a bank of potted flowers while she eavesdrops—like an owl spying on mice in a garden. She didn’t impress the critics (“equally uninspiring,” wrote Lisa D. Horowitz in
Variety
, while noting the similarity to Nan Chase), but she got a paycheck.
³⁹

The same year, Madeline took a more substantial role in a TV movie,
Neil Simon’s London Suite
, opposite her
Harvey
co-star Richard Mulligan. Playing a widow who engages in “shopping therapy” rather than facing her loneliness, Madeline recalls a better-dressed Mrs. Muchnik from
Mixed Nuts
. Now that she was middle-aged, and not at all a saucy wench, she was on the brink of being typecast as something of a prig who was funniest when rattled. The writers of her next project would do little to change that image.

Cosby
(1996–99)

WITH MADELINE’S FOURTH TELEVISION SERIES, SHE FOUND ARTISTIC
and personal satisfaction at last. Yes, weak scripts posed a problem again, but this time she was working with Bill Cosby, an incorrigible improviser whose riffs were superior to anything most writers could devise, and who gave her ample room to join him. When his producers, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, cast her in the role of Pauline Fox, the wife’s sidekick in their new sitcom, they played to Madeline’s strengths—once again applying the lessons they’d learned from their mistakes in
Oh Madeline
. Caryn Sneider Mandabach joined the team again, too. Madeline was among friends, and Cosby’s arrival at CBS was heralded as nothing less than the salvation of the “Tiffany Network,” after an erosion of audiences and the humiliating loss of NFL football and several affiliate stations to Fox. Though triumph was hardly guaranteed, the welcome could not have been more propitious.

Since the finale of
The Cosby Show
in 1992, Bill Cosby had hosted a syndicated game show,
You Bet Your Life
, and, on NBC,
The Cosby Mysteries
. Neither show had anything like the impact of his previous prime-time juggernaut, and therefore was nothing like the national platform to which he’d grown accustomed. Now, hoping to replicate his earlier success, he turned again to Carsey and Werner, and when NBC passed on the new series, CBS snatched it up. Based on the British series
One Foot in the Grave, Cosby
is centered on Hilton Lucas, a cantankerous sexagenarian in Queens who is laid off after working thirty years as a baggage handler. His wife, Ruth, isn’t entirely pleased with this development, either, but she manages to keep her sense of humor—thanks in part to her friend Pauline.

Phylicia Rashad, the onscreen spouse from
The Cosby Show
, played Ruth, and her ease with the star transferred seamlessly to the new program. The Lucases are less huggable than the Huxtables, and far more conscious of decline and mortality. The sharper, sassier humor now at play inspired both actors to deliver loose, witty performances. As Hilton, Cosby sometimes breaks the fourth wall, addressing the camera, while launching his ad-libbed “rants” (as Carsey called them) more freely than was possible when he was working with a supporting cast composed of children who couldn’t always keep up with him or return to the script when he was ready. Precisely because Rashad knew how to “catch” his improvisations, Cosby told the press, she prevailed over Telma Hopkins, the actress originally cast as Ruth. As for Madeline, “I have to catch
her
,” Cosby told Charlie Rose in 1996. “She knows that she can do this to me,” he explained, mashing his face, “and I couldn’t care less. She can do
that
to me,” mashing his face a different way, “I couldn’t care less. She knows that she’s got somebody that she can come to and roll ’em over and push.”
⁴⁰

In a preview feature for the
New York Times
, Lawrie Mifflin noted, “While Ms. Rashad plays the patient foil, Ms. Kahn matches Mr. Cosby raised eyebrow for raised eyebrow in the mugging department. Their melocomedic exchanges have had audiences hooting at the Thursday night tapings.”
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Throughout the series, Pauline and Hilton would engage in tart but affectionate teasing that Cosby insists was never inappropriate, because Hilton knew too well that Pauline and Ruth were not only friends, but also business partners in a flower shop/coffee house. But Hilton is unstoppable. Throughout the series, whenever Pauline leaves the Lucas home, he asks, “Do you love me, Pauline?” “I do,” she replies in the pilot episode, adding after a pause, “but I don’t show it.” As the series went on, each iteration of Hilton’s question would elicit a fresh response from Pauline: “When two people have what we have, there are no words,” and so on. In the most elaborate of these exchanges (in the first-season episode “Social Insecurity”), Hilton has undergone a near-death experience, about which Pauline questions him avidly. At last he tells her that he saw
her
in the afterlife, and that, as she ascended to heaven, he called up to her: “Do you love me, Pauline?” With a smile, Pauline interrupts him to answer, “I’ll get back to you on that!”

Cosby insists that Madeline improvised every one of Pauline’s “Do you love me?” comebacks, and he compares the experience to playing jazz. “If I was a drummer, and she was playing tenor saxophone, then I would do something, change the rhythm on her, and look right at her,
and make her come to the moment with that honesty that she had—it’s called ad-lib, by the way—and every time, she was always brilliant.” He particularly admires her body language in these scenes, and he laughs as he recalls the way that Madeline’s Pauline would be “bowing, almost
bowing
, begging to get out of this. She was not of a character to just say to him, ‘Shut up.’ Her head would go down, and she would start this stepping backwards, and then out would come—and they were all ad-libs.”

For most of her career, Madeline preferred to improvise within a script, that is, to ad-lib the interpretation, not the jokes. (“Flames!” in
Clue
is a notable exception.) She told a reporter for the
Washington Post
that she’d never before been involved in a project so “free-flowing.” Cosby gave her the impression “he was determined to break through typical sitcom barriers. He wanted to let the show form itself, as opposed to sticking to format. . . . The spoken word is much more important than the written word.”
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As Madeline diplomatically suggested, however, one reason to resort to ad-libs was that the scripted material wasn’t top-notch, an assessment with which critics generally agreed.
⁴³
Cosby was dissatisfied with the writing for Pauline’s character in particular. As he saw it, Madeline was an attractive, intelligent, successful woman, while Pauline was naïve, uptight, lonely, and a bit desperate. If the character we see retains her dignity, he says, that’s because Madeline understood Pauline better than the writers did.

Pauline is “an innocent, has a certain naïveté that’s necessary to survive and come through vibrant and independent,” Madeline told the
Washington Post
. “She is able to hold her own among people who are not similar to her at all.” Perhaps thinking of the script problems, and almost as a warning, Madeline continued, “If Pauline were approached without delicacy and sensitivity, we’d hit some snags. We’d get an edge—perhaps even a certain truthfulness—but not humor.”
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The writers were “very, very impatient with whatever character they wanted to give her,” Cosby says. With great writers, any series Madeline was in “would have been a hit. When you reach . . . to the next level down, and get to writers who
want
to be funny, but don’t have the genius of better writers, then you have people who will give a genius like Madeline things to say that are very, very—
negatively adolescent
.” The writers understood Madeline’s potential, he believes, “Yet they kept writing things that were sexually oriented, driven, in a kooky, weird, unsatisfied-woman behavior.” Cosby told the writers, “She is not a woman who is unhappy in a love affair. Make her a woman that other women should in fact be laughing
with
, because she believes in herself.” But
Cosby, an executive producer of the show, remained “very respectful . . . and very tolerant” toward the writers, to a degree that at one point infuriated Rashad, as she recalled in an interview.
⁴⁵
After all, here was a man who knew comedy, and it was his show, besides. When the writers brushed off one of Cosby’s suggestions, Rashad demanded, “Did you hear what he said?” Cosby promptly apologized for her outburst. “Okay, I got it,” Rashad said to herself, “they’re related to somebody in the network. That’s what it is.”

What Rashad saw as Cosby’s “tolerance” did have its limits, and he remembers reading over one of Pauline’s typically rambling monologues. He asked that the speech be overhauled or cut, but on the day of taping (“‘A’ Day,” he calls it), he found Madeline on the set in front of the studio audience, performing the scene as originally written. “It was about sex, and it was
not
funny. It had
no
dignity,” Cosby recalls. “The lone [recurring] white actor, they give degrading, beneath her character and her ability, trash-monologue lines to.” Cosby gave the scene a chance, saw that the audience wasn’t laughing, and called out, “Stop it! This is not funny.”

There were women on the writing staff, but nobody provided Madeline with the kind of material Cosby wanted. He suggests that the entire staff had trouble writing for women characters. He marvels that any comedy writer could walk out of a Brooks movie not wanting to write scenes for Madeline. “These writers are spoiled, in a sense, because they can push a button [in the editing room], and there’s laughter coming into the [audience’s] living room,” Cosby says. “No one is laughing, just your TV set. Which I’ve always thought was amazing, because you could turn on [an unfunny] sitcom—is your TV set laughing at you? You get a paranoia.”

As the seasons progressed, the writers would move to find a suitable love interest for Pauline—other than the elderly, overly frisky man (Red Buttons) who is her blind date in the episode “My Dinner with Methuselah” (Season 1), or the younger, ineffectual employee (Michael Bergin) at the Flower Café, whom Pauline finds too attractive to fire in the episode “Old Yeller” (Season 2). By then, however, it was too late to develop either a new character or Pauline. Madeline was already very ill.

Still,
Cosby
provided a showcase for Madeline. Pauline often sings, many of her long speeches are quite funny, and her pratfalls offer fertile ground for Madeline’s improved ease with physical comedy. In the pilot episode, Pauline believes Hilton has tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Tiny Madeline slings the arm of former Temple
University fullback Cosby over her shoulders and pushes and throws him around the stage. “I’d give anything to see that scene again,” says Lily Tomlin now. (The show hasn’t been released on home video, though it recently became available for streaming over the Internet.)

Cosby describes the characters Ruth and Pauline as “separated at birth,” and Rashad stoutly defended the friendship between a black woman and a white woman: “[I]f we actually step outside of this little bubble that seems so much bigger than it is, people are living like this all the time.” Throughout his career, Cosby has striven to show audiences that people’s similarities are more important than their differences. But because Madeline was the only white actor in the regular cast, many episodes do play on the notion of Pauline being a “fish out of water” (a description Madeline used), finding comedy in the way she tries to sing like Patti LaBelle, for example, or in her initially clumsy attempts to “throw shade” (to trade humorous insults) with Hilton. In general, however,
Cosby
depicts a harmonious, multicultural community. Pauline feels herself so much a part of the Lucas family that, in a memorable confrontation with a bank officer who’s refused a loan for the Flower Café, Pauline cries, “It’s because we’re black, isn’t it?”