“It, it, the fee -- it, flame … flames, flames, on the side of my face.”
Of course we all know Madeline Kahn for her fabulous film roles.
"Hello handsome, is that a ten gallon hat or are you just enjoying the show?"
But did you know about the time Madeline used a failing sitcom to introduce America to radical
queer theater, convincing ABC to broadcasting an appearance by one of the most subversive
drag artists in the country?
“You’re not like any woman I ever met before.”
“I can guarantee that.”
All aboard and welcome to Matt Baume’s Culture Cruise, where we take a look at queer entertainment
that changed the world. This month looking at Oh Madeline, a sitcom that Madeline Kahn
used to give a national platform her old college friend named Charles Ludlam -- a performer
who revolutionized queer theater in New York, and whose influence can still be found in
your Drag Race faves to this day.
“It was in all the magazines at the time.”
Culture Cruise is made possible by members on Patreon -- folks like Jyri Kuokka, Alexandra
Kwan, and James P. Smith. If you’re enjoying these videos and you want to see more, head
over to Patreon.com/mattbaume to check out the rewards for backers.
On September 27, 1983, the show Oh Madeline premiered on ABC. Madeline Kahn was at this
point a huge movie star -- famous for Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, an Oscar
nomination for Paper Moon, and of course What’s Up Doc, where she appeared with fellow gay
icon Barbra Streisand.
“Who is this person?”
Oh Madeline was her attempt to get into television. It was based on a bawdy British sitcom called
Pig in the Middle, but ABC executives insisted that they tone down the sex and turn it into
something a little more like I Love Lucy, and after an onslaught of network notes, the
show became a bit of a mess -- it's a mish-mash of recycled zany sitcom schemes, like Madeline
promises to get Johnny Mathis to sing at her high school reunion and then she can’t get
him so she hires an imposter but the real Johnny Mathis shows up but she thinks he’s
the imposter … you get the idea.
Critics and viewers agreed -- Madeline Kahn was great! But Oh Madeline the show was…
well, there’s a reason it didn’t stick around. Midway through the first season, ratings
were so low that ABC told the cast and crew the show was getting cancelled, but could
still shoot the last few episodes of the season. And that’s when Madeline hatched a plan
that was zanier than anything her character on the show ever attempted.
She insisted that they write an episode for one of her old drama department friends from
college, Charles Ludlam, who by then was known for producing outrageous plays in New York
featuring sex, drugs, nudity, and lots and lots of cross-dressing. Madeline later told
interviewers that she was fed up with the network constantly interfering with the show.
She wanted to try something truly risky. So that’s how we wound up with the second to
last episode of Oh Madeline, a bizarre drag farce entitled “Play Crystal For Me” that
brought subversive queer theater into America’s living rooms.
The episode starts with an extremely sitcommy setup. Madeline’s husband is a romance novelist
who writes as a woman under the pen name Crystal Love. He’s got a problem: Crystal is being
outsold by a competing author named Tiffany Night.
“You're kidding. That ridiculous woman with the feathers, the hair, the makeup? She looks
like an explosion at the Rose Parade.”
He needs to drum up publicity for his Crystal Love persona by having the author make public
appearances around their little suburban town -- try not to think too hard about how implausible
that is -- but he can’t appear in public, because then everyone would know he’s really
a man. So of course, they come up with a wacky scheme.
"Well why doesn't your publisher just hire someone to pretend to be Crystal Love?"
“We can't trust anybody with a secret like that ... except ...”
You can probably see where this is going. Madeline puts on a wig and a dress that has
what you could call an empire waist after the empire collapsed. She heads to a bookstore
for the first-ever public appearance of Crystal Love. It’s going pretty well … until their
rival, Tiffany Knight, makes a dramatic entrance.
“Well, if it isn’t Crystal Love at last.” "Tiffany Knight!"
Okay, let’s pause here to talk about Charles Ludlam, one of the greatest drag performers
of the 20th century who you’ve probably never heard of.
Charles and Madeline were both classmates at Hofstra New York in the early 1960s, and
they both had a terrible time there. They were funny and creative and weird, but their
teachers kept insisting on seriousness and normalcy.
Today we know and love Madeline for how unique and hilarious she is, but in college, instructors
barraged her with constant criticism for not fitting in, and eventually she left the theater
department altogether and got a degree in speech therapy. Her friend Charles, meanwhile,
loved camp and over-the-top flamboyance. He got low grades for having a rebellious attitude,
which was maybe just code for being too gay at a time when that was literally against
the law.
And so of course Madeline and Charles struck up a friendship and a mutual respect for each
other’s work.
After graduating, Madeline headed to Broadway and then motion pictures, but Charles headed
to Greenwich Village of the mid-60s -- that's a few years before Stonewall -- and helped
found a new style of performance called Theater of the Ridiculous.
Theater of the Ridiculous style was what we would probably call alt-theater today -- it
was scrappy, and cheap, and homemade, super sexual, very queer, and sometimes so weird
it didn’t always make sense. But Charles figured out a format that worked: basically,
make it funny, make it gay, and audiences will keep coming back for more.
With his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, he wrote and produced over two dozen plays, with
titles like When Queens Collide, and Eunuchs of the Forbidden City. Charles often played
female parts, and he also played around with gender presentation in ways that still feel
modern -- exposing his hairy chest while in drag, for example, like today’s bearded
queens.
But these shows were more than just drag comedies. Remember, this was pre-Stonewall, when gays
could be arrested just for hanging out together.
Back then, New York had what was informally called a three-piece law -- if police stopped
you and you weren’t wearing three pieces of clothing that aligned with what they thought
your gender should be, you went to jail. Here’s how the show Barney Miller explained that
kind of thing at the time.
“Darryl was arrested the other day by a detective from this precinct.”
“What charge?” “Being unique.”
For more about the relationship between gays and police in New York, check out my friend
Drew’s podcast Gayest Episode Ever -- they just did a whole episode on this Barney Miller
episode.
Charles Ludlam’s plays were among the first that told gay stories without shame, at a
time when society heaped shame on gay people. In 1970, the first commemoration of Stonewall
is credited as coining the term “gay pride.” But Charles’ shows had been bringing a feeling
of pride to gay audiences for the better part of a decade at that point, and he kept at
it through the 70s and into the early 80s. It’s thanks to the rowdy movement that he
helped create that Broadway started opening up to explicitly queer shows to reach mainstream
audiences. Shows like The Boys in the Band, and Torch Song Trilogy, Angels in America.
So that’s the friend that Madeline Kahn, annoyed at network meddling, insisted ABC
hire and broadcast into America’s homes, playing a female romance novelist.
Ludlam loved old movies and Hollywood stars, and he plays Tiffany Knight with a sort of
Tallulah Bankhead vamp with lots of sexual innuendo. Here’s Tallulah flirting with
Frank Sinatra:
“You know, Tallulah, I really didn’t realize you were so interested in the national past
time.” “Baby, I AM the national pastime.”
And here’s Pierce’s entrance as Tiffany Knight:
“Take my fox, will you Rod? My secretary. He’s my rod and my staff.”
He gets some very good villain lines:
“I understand this is your first public appearance. With that figure I can see why.”
But Madeline gets some fun zingers too. When Tiffany boasts about her romantic experience:
“Everyone knows about my love life.” “Well, I suppose in terms of quantity that
Tiffany would have the edge. Of course at her age she has been at it that much longer.”
And the scene ends with what I think is supposed to be a reveal as we go to commercial:
“This woman's going to be trouble.” “What are you going to do about her ?”
“I don’t know but we can’t discuss it here, my bazongas are falling.”
Fun fact about those bazongas -- they’re actually filled with birdseed throughout this
episode because Ludlam thought that made them move more naturally. Just a little helpful
hint to all you drag queens and birdwatchers out there.
This show wasn’t the first time Madeline was involved with LGBTQ entertainment. In
1980, she took a role in an indie film called Happy Birthday Gemini, about a college kid
who’s stressed about coming out as gay. Making a gay film at that time was a big risk,
but one reason Madeline took the job was because she knew her gay fans were among her most
loyal. She wanted to do something specifically for them.
And maybe that’s why she wanted to do something queer when she found out her show was getting
cancelled. By insisting that ABC air an episode with Charles Ludlam, Madeline took a was taking
a step that not a lot of other shows dared take at that time. In the early 80s, queer
TV characters were virtually nonexistent, aside from a few very special episodes of
shows like Cheers and Kate & Allie. Drag performers on TV could probably be counted on one hand,
and tended to be established male comics dressing up in frumpy dresses for a laugh.
But there were a very small handful of female impersonators (as they were called at that
time) on television. And in a strange coincidence, one of the other female impersonators was
also named Charles -- Charles Pierce.
Charles Pierce started performing live in Altadena California in the 1950s -- his dream
then was to break into TV and film, but at the time it wasn’t just hard for gay actors
to find work in mainstream entertainment. It was impossible. Pierce couldn’t get cast
in anything, until he discovered that he had a talent for drag impressions of old-timey
Hollywood stars. And so, he started doing standup at San Francisco gay bars in the 1960s,
becoming a sort of west coast version of Charles Ludlam.
And gradually, through the 50s and 60s, he became famous for his impressions of classic
film stars like Tallulah, and Mae West, and Joan Crawford, and his trademark impression,
Bette Davis.
“What a dump!”
As Pierce was getting famous for his live shows, television was slowly -- very slowly
-- evolving, and drag started to shift from something taboo to something daring and fun.
By the 1970s, Charles Pierce started getting hired by shows like Starsky and Hutch …
“Betty.”
And as an implausibly dubbed villainess on Wonder Woman.
“In other words I don’t move until that Prince woman is eliminated.”
Roles kept coming through the 80s and 90s, and during that time we’d see lots more
professional drag performers on TV thanks to his groundbreaking roles. Pierce kept showing
up, playing Bette Davis on Designing Women…
“One bitch on this boat is enough!”
And he made an appearance on Duck Tales -- although there’s something weird about that one.
The episode has a character who’s clearly supposed to be a Bette Davis type...
“What a dump!”
But instead of voicing her, Pierce voices … the warden.
“Don’t worry, Mr. McDuck.”
I have to assume he was hired for the Bette Davis role, and then maybe someone at Disney
objected to having a man voicing the female part? Who knows. That one’s weird. But by
that point, Charles Pierce didn’t really NEED another Bette Davis role. After being
passed over by Hollywood in the 50s, he'd managed to carve out his own spotlight by
being one of the best female impressionists in the world. At a time when he couldn’t
get any roles, he created his own and let Hollywood come to him.
“What I’ve liked about this career is that I have been more or less my own boss.”
So that’s the context in which performers like Charles Pierce and Charles Ludlam managed
to find their way, against all odds, onto mainstream television … with a little help
now and then from old friends.
Oh Madeline comes back from commercial with another Ludlam scene. This time, the Tiffany
Knight character drops by unannounced at Madeline’s house, forcing her to scramble to maintain
her romance writer persona. And I just have to point out just how fantastic the physical
acting is here -- that shimmy on the way to the sofa is so much fun to watch, and Ludlam’s
comedy is a great match for Madeline’s.
“I have a million questions to ask you.” “Well I only have six answers, so I’ll
be finished long before you.”
In a perfect world, this sitcom would be retooled to be all about these two characters, with
Madeline running scams every week and Ludlam as the nosy neighbor trying to catch her.
Oh well, we can dream.
After a little banter, Tiffany begins to suspect that Madeline isn’t really the writer she’s
posing as, and Tiffany concocts a wacky scheme within a wacky scheme to seduce the next door
neighbor Robert to uncover whatever the secret is. I realize that plot summary doesn’t
make a ton of sense. But let’s go with it.
Robert the neighbor is a slobby bachelor who for some reason wears what appears to be a
tank top with his last name written on it with a Sharpie, and Tiffany drops by to deliver
such memorable line readings as:
“I like a man who sweats.”
Hey, that’s my profile on Scruff.
“All that writing about people getting hot and bothered can start to get me hot and bothered.”
This dialogue is so ridiculous and I love it so much. Ludlam excelled at overwrought
melodrama, and he’s completely in his element with this bonkers writing. Tiffany’s seductive
interest in sweat manages to get Robert’s defenses down, and then she sets the trap:
“You see, I know all about Crystal’s little secret.”
“You do?” “Of course! You don’t think she could
fool anyone for long, do you?” “Of course. So you know that Crystal Love
is really a man, great, why don’t --” “So that’s it!”
Aha! And now we have it, the classic sitcom double-misunderstanding. Robert was talking
about Madeline’s husband, who actually writes the books, but Tiffany thought he was talking
about the woman who’s been appearing as Crystal. And I know, this is a very stupid
premise -- why would Robert have phrased it that way? But it’s what he needed to say
in order to light the farce’s Act III fuse: Crystal and Tiffany are scheduled to appear
that night on a local talk show -- again, please do not think too hard about the plausibility
of THAT -- and Tiffany plots to reveal, incorrectly, that Crystal is a man as the cameras roll.
This setup has some echoes of the movie Tootsie, which came out just a year before. In that
film, Dustin Hoffman plays a man who plays a woman who plays a different woman on a soap
opera, culminating in a shocking on-camera reveal that I’m not going to spoil for you
in case you haven’t seen it yet, but oh boy it’s really good.
Tootsie takes place in New York, and focuses on a struggling actor who’s having trouble
getting the roles he wants so he decides to try out for female parts. The movie was a
huge hit, and it’s possible this episode of Oh Madeline wouldn't have happened if there
hadn’t been a successful cross-dressing farce a year before. But Tootsie might not
have happened either if a pathway hadn’t been cleared by performers like Charles Ludlam
and Charles Pierce -- as well as a third actor named Charles: Charles Busch.
Charles Busch started his career a bit later than Charles Ludlam and Charles Pierce, but
the details are remarkably similar. He was inspired by Ludlam and Pierce, and even performed
in Ludlam’s company at one point. But mostly he was a struggling actor and playwright who
had difficulty landing the gigs that he wanted.
At one point in 1985, as a favor to a friend he created a ridiculous campy skit, someone
gave it the catchy title “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,” and it just happened to catch
the attention of a theater critic at the New York Times. The show hit some of the same
notes that worked for theater of the ridiculous: it was campy, over the top, gender-bending,
full of old-timey references … and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom was a huge hit.
Like performers who came before, Busch discovered he had a great gift: playing extravagant grand
dames, inspired by ostentatious female stars of the past.
“To get where I am I’ve had to crawl my way up from the gutter"
Busch created roles for himself through the 80s and 90s that were a kind of fantasy -- his
plays delved deep into lost theater, and brought old characters and acting styles back to life
in campy shows like Psycho Beach Party, Die Mommy Die, and Kiss the Blood off my Castanets.
“This time it's for me. For me! For me!”
Busch’s plays weren’t just imitations of old fashioned stories and stars. He used
the drag element to create something new -- adding a twist by playing with gender in a way that
would have been considered taboo in decades past.
“Chicklet, you can’t take your top off here!”
“Oh just hold the blanket up around me.”
Busch’s shows have been turned into films and earned a Tony nomination. Vampire Lesbians
of Sodom it one of the longest running plays in Off-Broadway history. The qualities that
at first seemed like they made him unemployable as an actor turned out to be Charles' super
power -- just as had happened to Charles Pierce, and to Charles Ludlam.
And Charles Busch is still working to this day! He recently stopped by my podcast, The
Sewers of Paris, where I talk to queer folks about entertainment that changed their lives
-- check out that full interview at SewersOfParis.com and look for episode 283.
Anyway, the episode of Oh Madeline culminates in a talk show appearance where Ludlam's character
is determined to unmask his rival as a man. Madeline does her best to prevent him from
saying anything...
“I think all of your viewers should know that this woman is …”
“Whoop whoop whoop whoop...”
But finally it’s time for the big reveal.
“Tell the world about the lie you’ve been living. How you fooled everyone into believing
you’re something you’re not. The truth is --”
“Oh I said I would do it, just sit down.” “Crystal Love is perpetrating an outrageous
hoax on her loyal readers.” “Whoa!”
I do love a good wig reveal. Now the truth is out, Tiffany is unmasked as the fraud,
and that’s that.
“So for tonight, let's just say goodnight Crystal Love, and goodnight …”
“Bert.”
I love that the host of the talk show just sort of wanders away at the end. We get a
hasty happy ending when it’s revealed that the host's decided not to air the segment
after all:
“It’s not going on because he realized his fly was open.”
“Oh. Who wants to see that? I don’t.”
The end. Of course this leaves the initial problem of Tiffany’s books outselling Crystal’s
still unresolved, but let’s just add that to the list of things that we shouldn’t
think too hard about.
The impact of these Charleses -- and performers like them -- is still felt to this day in
the performances of modern-day drag artists. Remember back in Season 5 of Drag Race, everyone
thought Jinkx Monsoon was making a terrible choice to portray Little Edie from Grey Gardens,
but she knocked it out of the park:
“It was in all the magazines at the time.”
And after taking home that season’s crown, Jinkx made a name for herself with a performance
style that’s very much in the tradition of Theater of the Ridiculous: bawdy, unpredictable,
and paying tribute to actresses and styles of old, whether playing Marlene Dietrich … or
Liza … or Bette Davis.
"What a dump!" "There you go."
Jinkx’s longtime friend and collaborator BenDeLaCreme works in these traditions too.
DeLa as a character is big and campy and fun, and she’s clearly inspired by classic film.
I can’t say enough good things about DeLa’s one-woman show Inferno A-Go-Go. And my favorite
is her works is her annual Halloween spectacular, Beware the Terror of Gaylord Manor -- which
is full of references to the horror films like The Haunting.
I think live shows like these would have absolutely delighted Charles Ludlam -- to see performers
today following in the footsteps that he blazed, when there was virtually nobody else there
to do it. He once wrote that his goal was to “focus on those things held in low esteem
by society and reveal them, give them new meaning, new worth, by changing their context.”
Drag performances inspired by faded Hollywood stars were held in pretty low regard when
he started his career, when drag was literally a crime. Bit by bit, over the years, with
the help of friends like Madeline, those pioneers found creative ways to get queer camp theatricality
on television, opening the door for other types of queer entertainment. As Ludlam himself
put it:
“When the audience willingly allows themselves to be deceived, and when you’re really pulling
the wool over their eyes for a while, there’s magic.”
Land ho! Thanks for cruising along with us. And thanks to everyone who makes Culture Cruise
possible with a pledge of support on Patreon! If you’re enjoying these videos, head on
over to patreon.com/mattbaume to support the show and get rewards like early ad free access
to Culture Cruise videos, books and stickers in the mail, and more.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Madeline’s volunteered to write my new Scruff profile.
"I'm saying that they're gay. Just gay! Just gay gay gay."