Madeline Kahn by William V. Madison

Author:William V. Madison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2015-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Madeline spent the rest of 1978 taking singing lessons—including at least one session with her mother in Los Angeles—and studying French at the Alliance Française in New York. Madeline reconnected with her friends, ran errands, dined out, and went to a lot of movies. On October 14, she saw Terrence Malick’s poetic Days of Heaven, which concludes with the teenaged narrator (pint-size New Yorker Linda Manz) escaping from an orphanage at night, then wandering the deserted streets of a small town. Madeline noted in her appointment book, “Just like when I was little. Alone in N.Y.C.”

Already, she was starting to rally. She spent January 1979 reading film scripts, and in February, she met with Woody Allen. Nothing seems to have come of their conversation, but she was lining up projects, and over the ensuing months she made four movies in quick succession. Not one would be a hit. Engineering a comeback would take more than hard work.

Her most remarkable engagement during these months is the least known. On Thursday, May 3, 1979, she flew to Kansas City, where Maurice Peress had invited her to participate in another Bernstein gala. By this time leading the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra, Peress had watched in dismay as Bernstein’s sixtieth birthday came and went without the kinds of tributes he’d been accorded in 1968. Peress resolved to remedy the situation, programming a weekend-long festival of Bernstein’s music, with the composer in attendance. The performances were divided into chamber music (Friday evening), theater music (Saturday evening), and symphonic works (Sunday afternoon, after Bernstein and Madeline had left town). Guest artists included pianist Lukas Foss, members of the American Ballet Theater, and dancer-choreographer Judith Jamison from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. On Friday, following Songfest, Bernstein himself conducted the finale.

Madeline joined the performance on Saturday night, when the dancers performed the ballets from On the Town, and Larry Kert, the original Tony, sang “Tonight” from West Side Story. Madeline didn’t sing “Glitter and Be Gay,” but Bernstein’s amanuensis, Jack Gottlieb, devised a terrific set-up for her. On a screen behind the orchestra, a clip of the rape scene from Young Frankenstein played—up to the point where Madeline sings “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.” Just then, the lights went up, revealing Madeline onstage. “Ah, the movies!” she said, and then performed an aria from Trouble in Tahiti, “What a Movie!”

The reunion with Peress and Bernstein—and what amounted to one last Trouble in Tahiti audition—was by no means the only big event that night. Also on the bill, singing numbers they’d written for On the Town and Wonderful Town, were Betty Comden and Adolph Green. In addition to the concert on Friday, Comden, Green, and Madeline would have rehearsed together on Friday afternoon, and presumably they all stayed at the same hotel, the Alameda Plaza, in Kansas City. This was the longest-sustained encounter they’d had, at least since the Tony Awards ceremony the year before. While Green’s daughter, the Broadway lyricist and composer Amanda Green, says her father bore Madeline no ill will, Madeline herself may not have been so confident.

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