Madeline Kahn (49 page)

Yet for Madeline, the prospect of making an independent movie was daunting, and Mendelsohn believes “her agents didn’t know the landscape she would be walking on.” She required more than the script and Dishy’s good name to persuade her to sign on. She asked whether she would have a dressing room, car service, and a professional crew, but above all, she wanted to know his intentions for the role of Alice Gold. “I don’t know anything about this world,” Madeline told Mendelsohn. Her concern was much what it had been when Wendy Wasserstein wrote Gorgeous Teitelbaum: Would this production in any way mock a character that Madeline preferred to play as sympathetic? Meeting with her
privately at her apartment, Mendelsohn assured Madeline, “There is no way in the world I am making fun of this person. I adore her. She is very close to my experience, not someone I am poking fun at.”

Much of the development of Alice’s character sounds like business as usual for Madeline: going through the script line by line, looking for “dramatic steppingstones” to help her find emotional truth. Mendelsohn had worried that she might be “shrill,” but as soon as they met, he saw that “she wanted to get at the sadness of the character and her delightfulness and her little-girl quality.” The preliminaries were necessary to free up her imagination once she got to the set. Meanwhile, however, she emphasized the differences between her and Alice: “I’m nothing like this Jewish person, I’m from Boston.” “It stuck with me,” Mendelsohn says. “It seems like one of those insistent comments one makes to distance oneself from the truth.” And the truth was that Madeline was only technically from Boston, that she
was
Jewish, and that she’d grown up thirty-five minutes from Mendelsohn’s home on Long Island. No, she’d never been a housewife and mother, but Madeline was trying to see as little as possible of Paula Kahn in Alice Gold.

Looking around her apartment, Mendelsohn sensed Madeline’s aversion to “any kind of ugly, bumpy encounter,” he says. “She wanted to float or rise above everything that was uncomfortable or ugly.” He describes her as highly sensitive, such that “a misapprehension, or the subtleties of human interaction seemed almost to pain her.” It was as if she “had her nervous system mistakenly put on the outside of her body.” Moved, he told her, “I can see just how hard it is to be you.”

The serene detachment Madeline sought could be costly to maintain, and easily shattered, as Mendelsohn observed as soon as she arrived on the set, his parents’ home in Old Bethpage, the first morning. She complained vehemently to the producer about the car service, though she was perfectly pleasant with the director. He saw at once that she was “terrified” that her professional standards wouldn’t be met, not only by the driver but also by the crew, consisting largely of volunteers almost none of whom (including the producer and the director of photography) had any experience working on a feature film.

Later in the shoot, Madeline lashed out at Mendelsohn in a way pretty much unprecedented in her career. They’d begun filming one of the eclipse scenes at four or five in the morning, and Madeline had to deliver her longest speech. Arthur has driven off and Carol has left Alice alone, when she encounters her psychotherapist in the street in front of his house. He’s far more anxious about the eclipse than Alice is. “Don’t be afraid,” she tells him. “I’m actually very good in emergencies, really. It’s
just the day-to-day things that give me a little trouble. Something like this happens, and I just feel that finally the rest of the world and I are speaking the same language.” She reassures him, then walks away. Musing on the word “Wednesday,” she unleashes a stream of fragile emotions: “The whole world crumbles and a thing like Wednesday that you thought you could depend on just vanishes, and I think of Arthur and the time that he got up in the middle of the night to get himself a glass of water, and without asking, he got one for me. Without asking.” And so she wanders onward in the darkness.

Everyone was tired, Barrie had fallen asleep on the floor of the production office, and the sun would soon rise. “The tension that Madeline was throwing off was like nothing I’ve ever felt,” Mendelsohn says. She later told him that Alice’s isolation in the scene overwhelmed her, and that this unconsciously affected her behavior. He also believes that she wanted his help in achieving specific goals. But at the time, he felt “inarticulate,” and communication between them faltered as shooting continued and nerves wore thin. At last, “She attacked me and just about everyone on the set.”

After one take, Madeline turned to him and said, “How was that?”

“That was really great,” Mendelsohn said, adding, “I want to go again, but it was great.”

“It was
terrible
,” Madeline replied, “and I did it on purpose, and
you
said it was great.” She continued in this “immensely mean” vein, then left the set. The shoot ended without the director’s knowing whether they had the scene.

The next day, Madeline called to apologize. By then Mendelsohn had seen the rushes and, although the sound quality wasn’t what he’d hoped, he could reassure her that the scene had turned out beautifully. “Of course I forgave her,” he says, “but [her outburst] was something I had never experienced before.”

At other times, he saw a more familiar side of her. After four decades in comedy, she still didn’t seem to know she was funny. After the first take—one of the interior scenes at the Golds’ home at the beginning of the movie—the crew broke out laughing as soon as Mendelsohn called “cut.” Just an hour or so before, she’d been furious about her car, but now, “Whatever iciness she had come in with melted,” he says. “She was delighted.” Mendelsohn had spent a year writing the script; on the set, Madeline’s line readings didn’t sound like what he’d imagined. But he often let them stand. As he saw it, “this woman has created an entire castle of Murano glass that is this character and this movie, and to break one column just to get a line right would be ridiculous.”

Toward the end of the shoot, Madeline told Mendelsohn how much she’d enjoyed working with Dishy and how much his portrayal of Arthur reminded her of her father (he has no idea whether she meant Bernie or Hiller—or both, since both walked out on her mother). Madeline also loved working with Harnick, who found her fascinating and quite sexy. For him, the movie was “a harrowing experience,” because his character is so depressed, a tough order for an inexperienced actor. Harnick hadn’t acted since high school, and today, he says, he probably wouldn’t take the job. When Mendelsohn first suggested that he read for
Judy Berlin
, he scoffed and told him to call Ethan Hawke instead. Harnick’s first scene proved most difficult, “because I had to cry and yell—with Madeline Kahn, whom I had never met,” he says. Yet he instantly admired “how good she is. So simple. Just
there
, and I’m emoting all over.” “Madeline is the kind of actor where, before they speak, they vibrate with intensity as if they’re a struck gong,” Mendelsohn says. “There was no line, no gesture, no breath that wasn’t going to be consummate, thorough, and throbbing with Madeline Kahn-ness.”

The combination of no-frills indie production, late-night shoots for the eclipse scenes, and late-autumn weather (“January in November,” Mendelsohn says) proved difficult for everyone involved. Although
Judy Berlin
is set during the second day of the school year, Madeline wore a coat, because she was afraid of the cold. Barrie, for her part, was still shivering some mornings when she came home to Manhattan. “It was torture!” she remembers. In the movie’s final scene, Sue helps a retired teacher (Bette Henritze) with Alzheimer’s find her way home in the dark. In the bitter cold, without even soup to warm the actors between takes, Barrie lost her temper as Mendelsohn kept retaking the last shot, a long pullback as the women walk away from the camera. “I kept saying to Eric, ‘What’s wrong with it? Why are we doing it over? I want to go home!’” Generally, however, she found Mendelsohn extremely effective, albeit, as he suspected, not always articulate. Giving direction, he’ll “phumpher around,” she says, yet he managed to convey his meaning. “You feel you would do anything for him,” she says, and Madeline felt the same. “She really loved doing that part,” Barrie says.

“The last day of her shoot, [Madeline] seemed like she was going to cry,” Mendelsohn remembers. “She was so thrilled and thankful about the opportunity to have played, to have played
around
.”

Judy Berlin
premiered at the Sundance Festival in January, 1999, taking the award for best director of a dramatic film and a nomination for the grand jury prize. A New York premiere at the Museum of Modern
Art and a slew of foreign festivals followed, including Cannes and Toronto. Mendelsohn won the Prix Tournage at Avignon and nominations for grand prizes at Deauville and Ghent. In the United States,
Judy Berlin
took the prize for best American independent film at the Hamptons International Film Festival, and a nomination for best film at the Newport International Film Festival. In 2000, the movie was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards: best first feature, best cinematography (Seckendorf), and best supporting female (Barrie). Despite the acclaim, Mendelsohn and his producer, Rocco Caruso, had trouble finding a distributor;
Judy Berlin
wasn’t commercially released until after Madeline’s death, and in tribute to her, proceeds from the premiere were donated to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. National distribution followed a year later, in April 2001. Because of the extended rollout, reviews (while generally admiring) were scattered, compounding the challenge of finding an audience for a small, sensitive, black-and-white film.

To some degree,
Judy Berlin
is still searching for its audience—though not for lack of trying. In addition to entering the film in so many festivals, Mendelsohn and Caruso worked hard to promote the movie, and Madeline pitched in, though she was already undergoing treatment for cancer. She joined Mendelsohn for press interviews and attended the premiere at MOMA, where the director’s mother complimented her on her hair. “To this day I don’t know whether my mother knew that it was a wig,” Mendelsohn says.

Immensely pleased with
Judy Berlin
and relieved of any pressure associated with making the movie, Madeline grew close to Mendelsohn in the last months of her life, speaking regularly with him by phone. He wouldn’t direct another feature until 2010, with
3 Backyards
, also starring Edie Falco. He’s got one muse, and she’s Falco; it’s anybody’s guess whether he needed or could have handled a second. But it’s tempting to think that, had Madeline lived, Mendelsohn might have been inspired to work with her again. Sensitive to her talent and her needs, he might have guided her to richer, more satisfying work. “She knew what greatness was,” David Marshall Grant says, “and she struggled, because she believed she could never achieve it. So I was moved by how
proud
she was of her performance in
Judy Berlin
, succeeding as an actress in an independent film, that people could respect her. I remember her telling me, ‘I’m so glad that happened before I died.’”

She told Mendelsohn that
Judy Berlin
“was going around like a satellite, and that, though she couldn’t be there, it was traveling for her.” Still, he wonders whether his first movie was truly worthy of her. “I was such
an amateur, and she was such a pro,” he says. “When she died, I felt as if I had let down all the people who expected one kind of thing from her, and that her last offering had to be my paltry film.” But the one thing
she
wanted was to defy moviegoers’ expectations of her, and Mendelsohn helped her to do it. As Bill Cosby has observed, cancer cut Madeline down “just when she was ready to break records.”
⁵⁵

IN AUGUST OF 1998, ON VACATION ON FIRE ISLAND, MADELINE FAINTED
. A doctor examined her and suggested she’d merely had low blood sugar. “I was worried something was really
wrong
!” Madeline said. But upon returning to New York, she continued to feel bloated and uncomfortable. Her doctor, Bill Perlow, referred her to Peter Dottino, a specialist at Mount Sinai. Dottino found elevated levels of CA 125, a protein released by ovarian cancers. An ultrasound test proved inconclusive, so he recommended laparoscopy. He found that the cancer had spread throughout her abdomen.

It was time for Madeline to return to work on
Cosby
, but instead she went immediately into surgery, where doctors “removed as much tumor as they could see,” Hansbury remembers. Afterward, he packed up cell samples and sent them to California, where they would be cultured in order to determine what form of chemotherapy would be most beneficial. To his surprise, this procedure wasn’t covered by Madeline’s health insurance—indeed, Hansbury found, it wasn’t covered by most policies, and no doctor he asked could explain this to him.

Ovarian cancer is the fifth-leading cause of cancer death among women in the United States, according to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. If treated and detected early, there’s approximately a 92 percent survival rate. But very often it’s not detected early, as most of the symptoms associated with its early stages are also associated with relatively common ailments: bloating; pelvic and/or abdominal pain; difficulty eating or filling up more quickly than usual; urgency or frequency of urination—the sorts of troubles most people wouldn’t worry about.

At present, there is no accurate test for ovarian cancer. Blood tests for CA 125 miss 50 percent of early-stage cancers, and levels of the protein can be elevated by other, benign conditions. The National Cancer
Institute doesn’t recommend CA 125 tests for women at ordinary risk. Researchers have, however, identified certain other genetic markers, called BRCA 1 and 2, which are associated with breast and ovarian cancer, and on that basis, they are exploring reliable tests for ovarian cancer. According to Audra Moran, Chief Executive Officer of the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, certain groups are associated with higher risk, and Madeline belonged to several of them. She was of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage; she never gave birth; she didn’t consistently use birth-control pills; and evidently she carried the BRCA 1 and 2 genes. (A family history of breast or ovarian cancer is another indicator.)