Free Madeline Kahn by William V. Madison Page A

important in Madeline’s career. It would endure for the rest of her life.

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Cigars and Lavaliers
    De Düva
and
Candide
(1968)
    THROUGHOUT HER CAREER, MADELINE RESPONDED TO SETBACKS BY lining up other jobs as quickly as possible. She didn’t wallow in disappointment; she needed work. After
New Faces
closed, she returned to the Philadelphia area in the summer of 1968 for a production of Peter Shaffer’s
Black Comedy
, which starred Hollywood luminary Sylvia Sidney. Playing a featured role, Madeline figured prominently on the cover of the playbill, standing in front of Sidney and co-star John Horn. In her program biography, she made no mention of Manumit or of her ties to the area, and in later years she made no mention of
Black Comedy
. She did keep a copy of the playbill, though.
    More auspicious was her first professional movie credit,
De Düva
, also known as
The Dove
. A parody of Ingmar Bergman’s
Wild Strawberries
and
The Seventh Seal, De Düva
grew out of a sketch on George Coe and Sidney Davis’s radio program,
It’s Your World and You Can Have It
. Presented as if it were the soundtrack to a Bergman film, the sketch consisted of Davis pretending to speak Swedish, along with Coe’s English “translation.” Response to the radio sketch inspired them both to collaborate with Anthony Lover to film
De Düva
, shot in evocative black-and-white and performed entirely in fake Swedish (what Davis called “English with party hats on”), with English subtitles that serve less as translation than as counterpoint. 34
    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-smokinglesbian 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