PROVINCETOWN — Ongoing litigation among the four owners of the Pilgrim House may determine that storied hotel and entertainment venue’s future — and along with it, the future home of the puppet and comedy act called Madame.

Created in 1971 by Wayland Flowers and performed by him until his death from AIDS in 1988, Madame was an unusually queer presence on American television whose subversive, acid-tongued humor “launched a million drag queens,” said Jacques Lamarre, a playwright who has written material for Madame shows in recent years.

In 2021, Marlena “Shell” Schilovitz, the longtime manager of the Madame act and Flowers’s estate after his death, joined with Ken Horgan, a partner and manager at the Pilgrim House, to set up a corporation, Madame LLC, to share control of the act.

Their business venture was intended to be a homecoming: Flowers’s performances with Madame at the Pilgrim House in the early 1970s had helped to launch his career.

“It was right here, decades ago, that Wayland and Madame were discovered,” says a page on the Pilgrim House website.

Madame LLC is now playing a cameo role in the litigation among Pilgrim House owners Maria Cirino, Elizabeth Barbeau, Kevin Scott Bente, and Horgan. Cirino and Barbeau, who are partners, have accused Horgan and Bente, who are also married, of fraud and mismanagement in two lawsuits filed in Barnstable County and in Puerto Rico.

Horgan and Bente, who manage the day-to-day operations of the hotel, have countersued Cirino and Barbeau for defamation and tortious interference in the business.

In their Barnstable County suit, Cirino and Barbeau allege that Madame LLC was one of the businesses to which Horgan and Bente improperly funneled hotel funds. The company, they allege, received $12,200 that was siphoned from the hotel, along with $54,000 that was improperly spent on Horgan’s legal fees in another lawsuit from 2023 contesting ownership of the puppet act.

Cirino and Barbeau had requested that the court consider holding Horgan and Bente in contempt at an Aug. 12 hearing. They requested the immediate removal of Horgan and Bente from hotel management if their complaint was found to have merit.

At the hearing, Barnstable County Judge Elaine Buckley extended the deadline for Horgan and Bente to answer the complaint to Sept. 2.

If Horgan is removed as manager — or if the hotel is sold, as Cirino and Barbeau have sought to do — Madame’s future in Provincetown will be in doubt. Horgan has said in court filings that a predicate for his Madame LLC venture was the puppet’s historic connection to the Pilgrim House.

Although “it’s never been my dream to own a puppet,” Horgan told the Independent in July, “I’m attached to it because it’s attached to the Pilgrim House. I want that history to continue.”

The hotel’s website encourages guests to “join us in welcoming Madame back to the live stage” in 2025, although no shows have been advertised yet this summer. Horgan told the Independent on July 20 that the hotel is “working on a show.”

 

Back to Provincetown

Flowers first came to Provincetown to perform in the summer of 1972, according to a 1989 tribute published by the Center for Puppetry Arts. Although he had premiered his Madame character the year before in New York City, his breakout success came as a pre-show act in the lounge of the Pilgrim House.

“Within a week, the crowds for Wayland’s show were so large the lounge couldn’t accommodate them,” the tribute says. “He and Madame became the toast of Cape Cod.”

Wayland soon expanded his act to cabaret shows and television appearances, including on Laugh-In, the Hollywood Squares, and Solid Gold. Although she was “a Southerner of indeterminate age” made wealthy by oil money, Madame’s bawdy humor and impish attitude toward sexuality conveyed Flowers’s queer sensibility to a mass audience.

In a 1977 reboot of the Laugh-In spot, Madame gushed to Frank Sinatra, “Blue Eyes, I just knew I was your type,” before kissing him on the mouth.

Variety magazine called the Madame act the “crème de la crème of high camp,” according to the Center for Puppetry Arts tribute. Wayland and Madame won an Emmy for their first TV special in 1975.

Horgan and Schilovitz intended for Madame to be performed again at the Pilgrim House, and a series of puppeteers were retained to work for her.

Since 2021, four puppeteers have worked with Madame, Horgan said. Two of them, Joe Kovacs and Matt W. Cody, told the Independent they walked away because of “creative differences” and problems getting paid.

Another puppeteer, Jeff Goltz, had begun to develop material with Madame over the winter to perform this year, Horgan told the Independent on July 20 — although he added that Goltz had left town for Indiana by the summer.

“Ken didn’t quite know what to do with her,” Kovacs said, adding that Horgan was “always scattered with 15 different projects.”

Madame is a difficult act for other reasons, Kovacs said. She needs a conversation partner as well as a puppeteer, as “it’s not a ventriloquist act of me and Madame sitting there talking to each other,” he said.

Trying to publicize the show was also tricky, Kovacs said, since the traditional Commercial Street method — “barking” a show by engaging passersby in the daytime in stage persona — is difficult for a puppet act.

Madame’s reference points are classic Hollywood figures like Gloria Swanson and Carol Channing — touchstones that Kovacs believed should be preserved but that Schilovitz believed were “dinosaurs,” he said. Kovacs had previously worked with Schilovitz and Madame between 2002 and 2006, according to promotional materials for a 2006 show in New York.

“Hiring a puppeteer to come in and ‘do Madame’ isn’t what Madame is,” Kovacs said. To bring a dynamic character into being requires a single performer to dedicate years. “It needs to be one person, one thought, one brain,” he said.

 

The 2023 Lawsuit

Nearly two years after Schilovitz, who is in her early 80s, agreed to Horgan’s proposal to bring Madame to Provincetown, she filed a lawsuit of her own against him in 2023, also in Barnstable County.

That suit alleged that Horgan misrepresented his intentions in acquiring the Madame act, failed to properly separate the LLC funds from his other businesses, and made key decisions over Schilovitz’s objections.

When she agreed to the partnership in 2021, Schilovitz alleged in the suit, Horgan knew she was “under financial strain.” She said she signed Madame’s trademark rights over to Horgan with the understanding that Horgan would provide monthly financial support and help with purchasing a $125,000 home in Palm Springs — two conditions that Schilovitz says were not met.

She further alleged that Horgan was a poor manager of the puppet act. Her lawsuit contends that two productions of a show titled “Madame Live!” at the Pilgrim House in 2021 and 2022 resulted in “losses to Madame LLC of at least $155,000.”

Further performances with Madame in Palm Springs in 2023 resulted in cease-and-desist letters sent by Schilovitz’s attorneys.

Horgan and Schilovitz settled their suit out of court in January. The terms of their settlement agreement have not been made public.

Horgan told the Independent in July that even after the settlement, he and Bente continue to own the intellectual property rights to Madame outright.

“The IP, I own,” Horgan said. “Scott and I own that property.”

Reached for comment by phone this week, Schilovitz said that she is “sharing the trademark” for Madame with another party and could not speak further on the matter.

Though Madame LLC is still listed as a “current owner” of the Madame trademark, U.S. patent office documents indicate that the trademark’s registration was changed on April 17 from the Pilgrim House address in Provincetown to a post office in Queens, N.Y., where Schilovitz lives.

Because the terms of the settlement agreement are confidential, “we can’t discuss them,” Gregory May, Schilovitz’s attorney, told the Independent.

In July, Horgan said of the Madame act that “I’m hopeful that we can make something of it again.”

Ryan Ratelle, a Broadway publicist who had begun work on a “refreshed” Madame show with Schilovitz before she went into business with Horgan, told the Independent he was still interested in reviving a Madame act, although not with Schilovitz or Horgan.

“My main concern is for the legacy of Wayland Flowers and Madame,” Ratelle said in August. “It’s just kind of heartbreaking that she seems to be getting lost in this larger drama.”