Madeline Kahn (5 page)

As an adult, Madeline was often wary of people, and not just in the expected way of a star concerned that others will try to exploit her celebrity. Even with close friends, she could remain guarded, and her romantic relationships were marked by varying degrees of mistrust. She balked at the idea of marriage, almost to the end of her days. Freda’s frequent disparaging of Bernie and Hiller suggested that marriage was something to pursue only with partners one disliked. During Madeline’s first long-term affair, Bernie and Shirley divorced, confirming her belief that marriage was a risky, improbable venture. She wasn’t always able to prevent her insecurities from coloring her professional relationships, either, and if her personal history made it easier to play fragile or neurotic characters so memorably, they sometimes made her a difficult collaborator.

AT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL 109 AND AT MARTIN VAN BUREN HIGH
School, Madeline made good grades. Eventually graduating third in her class at Van Buren, she expected to attend City College of New York, a public institution that had the advantage of being free (the “Poor Man’s Harvard”). She intended to become a teacher, and she would never have taken a drama course if it hadn’t been required. “[T]he idea of making [acting] an
occupation
never occurred to me,” she said. “I was not the type at all.” When the drama teacher suggested she audition for a drama scholarship to Hofstra College, Madeline recalled, “I thought it was a ridiculous idea.” Nevertheless she went to the school library and prepared two monologues, one dramatic, one comic.
¹⁰
She performed the serious piece first, but it was her second monologue that made the difference. From the back of the darkened theater, she heard the professors laughing—and she won a full scholarship to Hofstra.

In the short term, this meant that Hiller wouldn’t have to pay for her college education, which was a relief to them both and a source of pride to him. He was still bragging about her achievement five decades later. To a young woman of limited means but exceptional intelligence, the scholarship was invaluable. She had never before realized that “this ability to elicit laughter . . . could bring me something,” but here was proof.

For her humorous monologue, she had chosen the work of an important influence on her aesthetics, the writer–actress Ruth Draper.
¹¹
Born into an upper-class New York City family in 1884, Draper performed “monodramas,” playing a variety of roles with only minimal props and a shawl, artfully rearranged to distinguish a variety of characters, even several at once. Draper’s deft satire of her own class recalls that of the writer Edith Wharton, who admired her. Draper pursued a stage career to international acclaim, and she was just breaking through in recordings,
radio, and television when she died in 1956. Draper’s characters ranged beyond Mrs. Astor’s ballroom to embrace European peasants and Midwestern housewives. Portraying them required skills that, through singing lessons, Madeline had already been developing: notably, familiarity with foreign languages. Throughout Draper’s work, she manifested the kind of sophistication to which young Madeline aspired, and which she would soon make her own.

The day she auditioned for Hofstra, Madeline’s career began to fall into place, not least because she aimed for a drama scholarship rather than a music scholarship. No matter what monologue she performed that day, she wasn’t singing. In a sense, she was declaring independence from her mother. Yet she retained one talent even as she developed the other: The tension between the lyric soprano and the comic actor had begun. While most young performers would be thrilled to have both options at the ready, Madeline’s experiences at Hofstra would exacerbate this tension, which dominated her professional life for at least the next dozen years.

When Madeline matriculated, Hofstra College was on the cusp of becoming a university. (It was accredited in 1963, while Madeline was a student there.) A private institution and formerly a branch of New York University, located in Hempstead, Long Island, Hofstra “was a local school, almost like a community college,” says filmmaker David Hoffman, class of 1963. He played oboe and had won a full music scholarship, which in his case included not only tuition and books, but also money for food, a car, and an apartment. “Those scholarships don’t exist any more,” he says, but they and others like them at one time attracted an exceptional student body from the middle- and lower-middle classes. School administrators viewed the arts as a draw, one cheaper to develop than the sciences. When Madeline arrived, the radio and television department was new, and the school boasted enviable resources for music and theater. Even student productions might involve a full orchestra, and through the school’s connections, student musicians could obtain professional gigs in New York City. For future directors like Hoffman, Francis Ford Coppola (class of ’59), and Charles Ludlam (class of ’64), the school provided opportunities to explore and experiment, and to showcase student performers.

At first, Madeline
didn
’
t
perform. From time to time, she wandered to the theater to see what plays were auditioning, “and I saw those actors
hanging around there in bare feet and smoking cigarettes, ooh—I got out of there so fast! I mean, I didn’t feel like one of them at all, you know, and I just didn’t even have the courage to look at the callboard anyway. So, I didn’t.” Still unconvinced of her own potential, she chose to study practical subjects that could lead to steady, regular employment: She majored in speech therapy, with a minor in education. Any current or former college student with artistic inclinations will recognize these fields of study as precisely the sort that nervous parents recommend to their children (or foist upon them) as “something to fall back on.” There’s no indication, however, that Madeline’s parents pushed her toward speech therapy. The extent of their influence may simply have been her own clear-eyed recognition that, some day soon, she would have to support herself.

Arriving at the start of the second semester, Madeline continued to live at home, and she worked off-campus in her spare time. She did well in her courses and gave little thought to theater. A drama scholarship didn’t require her to major in drama, after all, but in the fall of 1960, she discovered that the school had previously failed to inform her that her scholarship did require that she take part in productions. Now her scholarship was about to be revoked. She scurried back to the callboard, where she learned that the next play to be produced would be Elmer Rice’s
The Adding Machine
. “I said to myself, ‘What can I get in this play?’” Madeline remembered. “[N]ot what part do I
want
, but, ‘What part do I think I can get?’” She won a role, and her scholarship was secure. But her troubles with the Hofstra drama department were just beginning.

The drama faculty at the time included Bernard Beckerman, a recognized Shakespeare scholar who provided the impetus behind Hofstra’s Shakespeare festival, performed annually on a replica of the Globe Theatre stage. His colleague Miriam Tulin specialized in scene work. An aspiring actress who’d given up her career when she married, Tulin “was brilliant, very gifted, very ar-ti-cu-late,” recalls Madeline’s classmate, Susan Carlson, an actress who took the professional name Black-Eyed Susan. According to legend, Tulin inspired one of Madeline’s most memorable characters, the actor–director Mavis Danton, featured in a sketch on
The Carol Burnett Show
in 1976. Mavis’s trademark exhortation to concentrate is, “In our circles, in our circles!” and Tulin, who died in 2008, “
really
wanted us to concentrate,” Black-Eyed Susan says.

In
The Adding Machine
, Tulin cast Madeline as Judy O’Grady, a prostitute, and thereafter she was typecast, playing saucy wenches and servants in one department production after another. Offstage, however,
Madeline led a very different life. David Hoffman recalls, “I never saw her with a guy.” He remembers her being “totally non-sexual,” unlike other young women on campus at the time. “There was a certain way of flirting, and she didn’t flirt.” Student productions often were musicals, and Madeline sometimes got lead roles in these. Hoffman directed her a few times, and while he found her attractive, he observed, “She never played her looks into anything. Her talent was the issue. She had a ridiculously funny voice and a ridiculously good singing voice.”

Leading roles in student productions didn’t translate to leading roles in theater department productions. Those went to classmates like Susan Sullivan, who went on have to a long career in television. “Madeline Kahn was a different kind of person,” Black-Eyed Susan says. When their mutual friend, the budding playwright–director Charles Ludlam, introduced them, “I think he was kind of in awe of her, actually. I looked at her, and she was very sophisticated-looking, and I wasn’t. Her hair was in an updo, a sweep, but it was all
big
. It was sort of like, ‘Wow, she’ll probably be a star. She’ll get major roles.’”

Madeline probably met Ludlam in Beckerman’s production of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. They fascinated each other, but it was Black-Eyed Susan who became Ludlam’s ally, and she remained so for the rest of his life. While Madeline and other actors tried out for more conventional shows, Ludlam delved into obscure and avant-garde playwrights, meeting with substantial resistance from the faculty. And he took Black-Eyed Susan with him—all the way to New York. Madeline, for her part, continued to struggle in the pigeonhole where the faculty had put her.

Near the end of her second year, she was ready for change. Tulin was directing Giraudoux’s
The Madwoman of Chaillot
, and Madeline wanted to audition for one of the madwomen. Tulin wanted her to play the Flower Girl instead, but when Madeline allowed that she’d rather concentrate on her studies and wait for the next play, hoping for a more challenging role, “They told me that if I
didn’t
do the Flower Girl, my scholarship would be revoked. That was my first big blow, and it was very difficult, very deflating, scary and discouraging. . . .” Madeline felt she’d already missed any opportunity to negotiate with the theater department. Her options now, she believed, were either to submit to typecasting or give up her scholarship, which would mean transferring—probably to City College—with no assurance that she could keep her credits.

She turned to Albert Tepper, the music faculty’s advisor for student theater and director of the madrigal group with which Madeline had been singing on Saturday afternoons. When Tepper told her the music
department would offer her a scholarship to cover the remaining two years of her Hofstra education, Madeline promptly cut her ties to the theater department. To satisfy the requirements of the music scholarship, her principal performing experience now came from one-act operas, oratorios, and concerts.
¹²
With the madrigal group, she also played Isabella in Orazio Vecchi’s opera
L’Amfiparnaso
. Her acting style had developed already. If one didn’t know better, one would think production photos showed a present-day college student imitating the famous movie star Madeline Kahn. At Freda’s insistence, Madeline also joined a professional opera workshop, which required further study and afforded her greater freedom than the theater faculty had, enabling her to play “parts I wanted to do—mature women. I got to do scenes from Mozart and Puccini, and roles like Manon Lescaut, womanly and dramatic.”
¹³
All of this activity fueled Freda’s ambitions for Madeline’s career in opera.

Madeline continued to perform in student theatricals, as well, and in 1962, she was cast as the frustrated girlfriend of Nathan Detroit in
Guys and Dolls
. “A person can develop a cold,” Miss Adelaide laments in her signature number—but in Madeline’s case, it was measles. Her friends remained hopeful that she might recover in time to do the show, and though they cast another student as a backup, Madeline lay in bed and rehearsed by herself, mentally preparing every entrance, costume change, gesture, and note. (The experience proved useful later in life, she said, when she arrived on movie sets and started to shoot a scene with no more preparation than what she’d done on her own, at home.) At last she felt well enough to take part in a few rehearsals with the rest of the cast.

She was still unsure of herself until opening night, when “the audience response was so enormous that I thought I was on a roller coaster,” she remembered. “It was such a surprise to me that what I had prepared so earnestly and diligently by myself, not to please anyone, but just to do what I felt was the right thing—I mean, the laughter, and so on. I had to stop.” For the first time, she began to think of pursuing a career in theater.

Guys and Dolls
was reviewed in the student newspaper, and the faculty weighed in with its judgments, too. When one professor told her “that I stood out and that I didn’t blend into the production, that I seemed to be doing some show of my own,” she took the criticism to heart. “I spent the next several years trying to blend into every possible place I could.” However, colleagues insist she
didn’t
blend in, and some years later, she wrote, “I don’t ‘hide’[;] I choose to stand out and
up
for myself at the
same time [and] so set an example for others to do so.”
¹⁴
Only later in life did she realize that the professor who criticized her was simply wrong. Speaking at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Madeline tried to share the lessons of her own experience. “If you look at [reviews] to find out who you are, you’re in big trouble,” she told her young audience, adding that “authority figures” aren’t always right.