One need only ponder the effect that Jack Nicholson's eyebrows had upon his career to understand how greatly Madeline Kahn's career was shaped and confined by the basic physiognomy of her voice and innate demeanor. As well as her many crippling neuroses and a painful self-knowledge. As David Marshall Grant said of Madeline, "She knew what greatness was, and she struggled because she believed she could never attain it."
It's a psychological approach that author William V. Madison takes in the first biography of the beloved star, Madeline Kahn �" Being the Music • A Life (University Press of Mississippi, $35). As it's most likely going to remain the only Kahn bio, it's a good thing it's good. It's got lots of photos, and with 300 pages, Madison is allowed to devote a chapter to every single one of her projects.
Madeline's adenoidal voice and brittle posturing sabotaged her. Her poise and control were distancing, making her appear an ironic commentator in an almost Brechtian sense. How could she be so artificial and yet so real? Director Andre Bishop explained, "She behaved and worked like someone who was a Method actor, but she was a comic." A comic who was always, always worried that the audience was laughing at her, not with her. Attempting to dignify her characters, she made in-depth studies of their psychology, looking for the truth in every scene. And yet people laughed. This, among deeper-rooted insecurities, made her a neurotic mess. Madison relates that her confidence in her singing had been blasted by her mother, and that her preoccupation with her looks was a gift of her father, who told her she was ugly, then deserted the family.
Tie Madeline's massive insecurities all together, and you have a woman who, like Effie White in Dreamgirls, couldn't sustain. And so we arrive at the day she was famously let go (i.e., fired) from On the 20th Century (a tale surprisingly told with more acutely revealing detail in the recent biography of show composer Cy Coleman, which will soon be reviewed in the B.A.R. ). When director Harold Prince lauded Madeline's opening-night performance, her sharp-tongued retort was the legendary, "Well, I hope you don't expect me to do that every night." And indeed, she didn't do it every night, despite concessions made by management, like the lower-note alternatives to the score's plentiful high Cs, which she didn't think she could hit eight shows a week. Since her dismissal effectively blackballed her on Broadway, she turned to Hollywood and hated most of her roles, those bimbos with breasts, those shrews, feeling that viewers would think she wasn't acting the character, but was the character in real life.
Her limited career in musicals post-20th Century "still involved enormous psychological and practical complications for Madeline," yet Madison traces the development of her skill, her partial mastering of her traits, and to some degree, her overcoming her neuroses, with an analysis of her performance on a television special of Irving Berlin's comic song, "You'd Be Surprised" (it's on YouTube). She didn't want to do it, thinking it pigeonholed her as a comedian. Madison calls the performance "a mini-masterpiece of comic timing and lyric poise," which showed that "as an artist, she had arrived at a point where she could deliver exceptional work, even with material in which she had limited confidence."
She certainly had little confidence in the film roles provided by Mel Brooks, which she felt constantly degraded her. But they paid the bills, and she was nothing if not a trouper. She showed her quick humor when trouping to work in Florida, where a male fan gushed how much he loved her. Madeline didn't miss a beat. "Oh, really?" she said. "And how long have you been a homosexual?" She ultimately trouped back to Broadway, where the starring role in Born Yesterday (conspicuously not a musical) redeemed her legit career and led to her career-capping (and Tony-winning) performance in The Sisters Rosensweig. Of her performance in the show, critic Michael Specter praised her "not only for her ability to bring down the house, but for the streaks of sadness she lays on top of the laughs." In every way, the show was a vindication.
While having great success on television in Cosby , Madeline struggled with the ovarian cancer that she succumbed to in 1999, and which she had hidden from castmates and friends for several years. William Madison's biography hides little, from sadness to triumph, and is a fine tribute.