Madeline Kahn by William V. Madison Read Free Book Online

conclude that there was something wonderful in the sound of my voice which set animals going,” she wrote years later. 17 Figuring that Kahn was too Jewish a name for such a setting, she adopted a stage name, Madeline Gail, for the only time in her career. Her sheet music dating from those days survives: lots of Friml and Romberg, with “Madi Gail” written in graceful cursive on each cover, and less dignified pencil markings inside.
    “I sang musical-comedy numbers during show time, and
Student Prince
-type things,” she remembered in 1985, during an intermission feature of a television broadcast of Verdi’s
Aida
from the Metropolitan Opera. “There was a big important customer, an Italian man, and he shouted out, ‘Sing
Madame Butterfly
!’ And of course he didn’t mean the whole opera, he meant that one very popular aria—‘Un bel dì.’ So if I was to come back the next summer and earn more money to get through my next year [of college], I’d better come back knowing that aria. And I didn’t know anything about it. So I just learned that one aria, and a few others, and then one thing led to another. You know, I studied it, and I discovered I could sing that, sort of, that way.” 18
    While Madeline never did possess the chutzpah to boast of her own talent in the middle of Leontyne Price’s farewell to the stage, this modest account doesn’t square with what we know about Freda’s training and ambition for her daughter. On occasion Madeline clarified: The discovery she made at the Bavarian Manor was the potential
size
of her voice. As she began studying with teachers other than her mother, she built on her skills in the opera club and got plenty of experience in light classical singing for a paying audience at restaurants. Whether this kind of music would do her any good was another question. The “British Invasion” was underway, Bob Dylan would soon inform America that “The Times, They Are A-Changing,” and already the Bavarian Manor’s repertory was dated. Romberg’s
The Student Prince
opened on Broadway in 1924, and even the Mario Lanza film version had debuted nearly a decade before Madi Gail began to warble “Deep in My Heart, Dear.”
    Madeline graduated in 1964 with a degree in speech therapy and experience as a student teacher, as well as an impressive array of less “practical” credentials. She was a member of two theater groups—the Spectrum Players (of which she was secretary) and the Gadfly Players—and two singing groups, the Hofstra Singers and the Opera Workshop. Taking the Drama Achievement Award and the Music Achievement Award, she was also on the dean’s list. She had developed a taste for foreign films, and in one yearbook picture she bears a striking resemblance to the young Jeanne Moreau. Was that intentional? “I would never underestimate her,” Jef Kahn says with a laugh.

-6-
The Graduate
    Green Mansions (1964) and Upstairs at the Downstairs (1965–66)
    AT THE START, MADELINE’S TRAINING AT HOFSTRA HAD LITTLE DIRECT impact on her performing career. She found her niche not in plays or in opera, but in cabaret and revues. Shortly after graduation, she got a job at Green Mansions, a theater colony founded in the 1930s by members of the Group Theatre near Warrensburg, New York. Still operating as an Adirondacks resort property, Green Mansions boasted a barn where young performers staged shows four nights a week. They were housed in conditions hardly distinguishable from those of a vacation camp. Green Mansions was more prestigious than the Bavarian Manor, though, and Madeline’s acting skills were more frequently called on here.
    Arriving at the colony, she met the man who would become her most important musical adviser, after her mother: Michael Cohen. A little older than Madeline, he had already spent a summer at Green Mansions as rehearsal pianist and accompanist. The troupe was looking for opera singers, and from the moment she started her audition piece,