Madeline Kahn (9 page)

The film centers on Prof. Viktor Lundkvist (Coe), an elderly man who, in flashbacks, remembers his beautiful sister, Inga (Pamela Burrell) and the day that Death (Davis) came to claim her. Rather than surrender, Viktor challenges Death to a game of badminton. Following the intervention of the titular bird, brother and sister are free to pursue their innocent yet
very
passionate relationship. For the role of Sigfrid, a cigar-smoking
lesbian who has an eye for Inga, Coe suggested Madeline. Forty-five years would pass before he learned she was a lifelong Bergman fan. Offering Inga a cigar, she intones, “Phalliken symbol?” using an accent derived from many viewings of the master’s movies.

But for Madeline, this labor of love was also an important career step. Coe had already served on the board of the Screen Actors Guild in New York, and he later served on the union’s national board. He insured that
De Düva
observed SAG rules. The actors were paid scale, and those, like Madeline, who didn’t have union cards, became eligible to join.
De Düva
wound up an Oscar nominee for best live action short at the forty-first Academy Awards, a credit that Madeline played up in her subsequent playbill biographies. However, Coe says, once the nominations were announced, the team knew they couldn’t beat the documentary
Robert Kennedy Remembered
—and they didn’t.

Even apart from the nomination,
De Düva
met with success that no one anticipated, and it surely helped to raise Madeline’s profile. For years to come, repertory cinemas and film societies would run the short before screening real Bergman movies, and the picture is still hilarious. Blurry copies enjoy a cult following on the Internet, though the film has never been released commercially for home viewing. By now, the enduring popularity of
De Düva
owes at least as much to Madeline’s fans as it does to Bergman’s.

Madeline is entirely comfortable on camera in
De Düva
, and though her role is tiny, she devours it. Looking back, it seems obvious that she would go on to pursue a career in movies, and that she would stick to comedy. It’s not surprising, either, that she’d excel in film parodies. She’d been going to the movies since she was a little girl, and watching closely. But it would be four years before she made another film, and for now movie stardom seemed a remote possibility. Other career paths would open up instead, leading almost anywhere but Hollywood—and the next path led to the opera house.

Madeline’s second major project after
New Faces
was more in keeping with Paula’s expectations. As part of a fiftieth-birthday celebration for Leonard Bernstein, plans were underway to revive his operetta
Candide
, beginning with a gala concert with the New York Philharmonic. Madeline was cast as the heroine, Cunegonde. Originally produced on Broadway in 1956,
Candide
ran only briefly, though the cast album is still prized for the beauty of its score and for the freshness of its performances,
particularly that of Barbara Cook as Cunegonde. Since then, it hadn’t been performed in its entirety on a New York stage.

Bernstein hoped to change that state of affairs, and the birthday concert became the springboard for a three-year plan that would take
Candide
on the road, fully staged. First the show would travel to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles, then to Washington’s Kennedy Center (which Bernstein was scheduled to inaugurate in 1971, with the world premiere of his
Mass
), and finally arrive in triumph on Broadway. The road trip would amount to an extended workshop for a newly revised book, since Lillian Hellman’s original, unfunny adaptation contributed to the show’s failure, and she later forbade further use of her work. When Sheldon Patinkin, a young director in Chicago, submitted a concert narration for
Candide
, Bernstein immediately “suggested” that they meet (a suggestion from the composer was in reality a summons). Bernstein approved the narration and proposed that Patinkin craft an entirely new script, incorporating all the original songs, to premiere at the birthday gala at Lincoln Center.

In every one of its many incarnations,
Candide
follows, yet streamlines Voltaire’s tale of a wide-eyed innocent forced to test his teacher’s philosophy, “Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” He and his childhood sweetheart, his cousin Cunegonde, are subjected to every kind of ordeal, caroming from catastrophe to catastrophe and country to country, before concluding that since the world is
not
such a nice place after all, the best we can do is to “Make Our Garden Grow.” As Patinkin observes, “The essential problem is, the show doesn’t have an arc.” Instead, it’s a string of episodes capped off by a change of heart. The more music one includes, the more dramatic impact one loses. But
Candide
boasts one of Bernstein’s most captivating—and easily his most “classical”—scores for the theater, and the challenge of fixing it, making it stage worthy, and helping it to find new audiences would nettle him almost to the end of his life.

An original member of the Second City troupe, Patinkin directed the gala. (He went on to a distinguished career as a stage director and teacher at Columbia College Chicago and the University of Chicago, and as a consultant to Second City and the Steppenwolf Theater.) For the gala, Bernstein entrusted the score to one of his former assistant conductors from the Philharmonic, Maurice Peress, but he laid out a number of requirements. One of these was that Cunegonde must have a high E-flat, so that her music wouldn’t be transposed. Patinkin remembers that Barbara Cook came in to audition but no longer had the note.

With the original Cunegonde out of the running, Madeline recognized a high-profile opportunity to jump-start her New York career, and she was determined to seize it. She and Michael Cohen coached her audition piece, Cunegonde’s “Glitter and Be Gay.” Both a direct descendant and a parody of Marguerite’s “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s
Faust
, the aria describes Cunegonde’s fall from aristocratic virgin to high-class courtesan, even as she takes solace in the jewels with which her sugar daddies have rewarded her. Wailing lamentations alternate with giddy laughter—
staccati in alt
. This coloratura tour-de-force has become both a calling card and a challenge for big-name sopranos such as June Anderson, Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay, and Diana Damrau. Broadway’s Kristin Chenoweth sings it, too, drawing on her classical training. Yet Madeline’s rendition, heard on a pirate recording made during the concert in 1968, is possibly the greatest of them all, musically accurate and comically sublime.

Much of this polish she brought directly to her audition. She and Cohen had worked out every note and every bit of business in advance. “She was not foolin’ around,” Patinkin remembers. “She wanted the role.” Having demonstrated that she had the requisite high E-flat, Madeline read a scene with Alan Arkin, who was to play the Narrator, Dr. Pangloss, and Martin. She instantly found the comedy in the script and won the part. The cast also included the original Old Lady, Irra Petina, and as the Governor, tenor William Lewis, an alumnus of Sid Caesar’s
Your Show of Shows
, soon to become a leading exponent of Richard Strauss’s operas.

Peress, who was at the helm of the Corpus Christi Symphony at the time, now declares Madeline a standout among the artists he’s worked with. Bernstein was so thrilled by her performance at the orchestra-dress rehearsal that he rushed onstage and knelt before her. But in conversation with Patinkin and Arkin, Madeline seemed unsure of herself, always discussing opera in terms of Paula’s aspirations and influence. Madeline “was interested, but she wasn’t sure,” Patinkin says.

The cast rehearsed in Peress’s apartment, but there weren’t many rehearsals with the full orchestra. By opening night, Lewis says, “We were thinking, ‘We’re about to go out and sing for everybody who is anybody in the musical world.’” But then Madeline broke the tension, crawling under the piano and shrieking, “Oh, my God, I’m so scared, I’ve got to get out of here!” After a few minutes, she popped up again: “Okay, I’m ready.” (Ten years later, Madeline’s panic attacks before—and during—shows would be no joke.)

The pirate recording remains a fascinating document of Madeline’s interpretative skills. For example, there’s the line, “Bracelets! Lavaliers! Can they dry my tears?” Most Cunegondes wail the line melodramatically, but Madeline varies her reading and fairly growls the word “bracelets” in disgust—and the audience roars with laughter. Tellingly, perhaps, “Glitter and Be Gay” is the rare number with almost no glitches: Madeline’s singing is utterly secure, and the orchestra plays smoothly despite lack of rehearsal. Listening, one misses much of the comedy in her performance, Peress says. “She juggled her breasts! It was amazing. She was outrageous. Onstage, you’d just let her out of her cage.” The “topper,” he says, was the moment when Madeline put the last of her jewels, a big ruby, in her bellybutton.

A benefit performance, the
Candide
concert seems to have gone unreviewed by the New York papers, but its success encouraged Bernstein to pursue his plans for the stage revival. Peress brought most of the company to Corpus Christi for another concert performance, replacing Alan Arkin with Robert Klein, who had worked with Patinkin at Second City and who would play Pangloss and Martin again in the touring stage production, which Madeline hoped and expected to join. In a profile in
Newsday
the next year, she spoke of Cunegonde: “‘You know how you always dream of doing something and you cherish the dream . . .’ she trailed off with a wistful look in her eye. ‘I was scared. But it was everything I thought it would be.’”
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While the number of credits on her résumé during this period may seem slight, Madeline didn’t keep a thorough accounting of the work she did early in her career. She consistently landed one-shot jobs throughout the 1960s on television—both in advertising and on talk shows—as well as in “industrials,” promotional shows staged at trade fairs and conventions. Because of the gaps in Madeline’s surviving records, there’s no way for a biographer to know precisely how many TV ads she did—though in interviews she referred to at least three, for products that included chicken soup and pharmaceuticals. Other references and relics do crop up, however. A national commercial for Ban deodorant dating from about 1968, for example, survives on YouTube, and television listings in old newspapers confirm that Madeline was a frequent guest on shows hosted by Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett, and Johnny Carson. Such appearances meant greater exposure than she could expect from
her stage work, and they sometimes led to more substantial jobs, much as Madeline hoped.

Industrials entailed far more than simply acting as a spokesmodel. Replete with sketches and music, they were often more like nightclub revues, and some were lavish song-and-dance spectacles. Sometimes industrials involved travel within the United States and to Europe, Mexico, and Canada, Madeline’s
New Faces
co-star Dorothy Danner remembers. The shows gave dancers like Danner a chance to try comedy and comedians like Madeline a chance to try dance in front of an appreciative, non-judgmental audience.

Talk shows gave Madeline her biggest audiences during the early phase of her career. But these showcases—and the paychecks that talk-show guests receive—came at a price that Madeline found steep. Almost immediately, all of the hosts effectively typecast her as an attractive, naïve, or spacy woman who was funny without meaning to be. For most of her life, Madeline didn’t understand why people found her funny, and on talk shows, where she tried to give thoughtful, intelligent answers, the hosts’ and other guests’ attitudes baffled her. The result of Madeline’s talk show experience was heightened anxiety or stage fright. And as she told Rex Reed in 1974, “[O]ne night I watched myself on Merv Griffin, and there I was, sandwiched between [standup comics] George Jessel and Marty Allen, and just being treated like a dumb kook for them to bounce their jokes on, and I said that’s it. Where did it ever say I have to do that? What’s happening to me? So I just stopped doing talk shows.”
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