“From birth, I, my family, and my life seemed different and special,” writes five-time Emmy winner Candice Bergen in her 1984 autobiography. Knock on wood“And deep down, despite all my insecurity, I was paradoxically convinced that I was privileged – as if some kind of divine grace had come down to me.”
Although she is best known today for her role as the brilliant, prickly news anchor Murphy Brown, Bergen – daughter of model Frances Bergen and comedian Edgar Bergen – was famous from birth. She was a stiff, beautiful starlet in films such as The sand pebbles with Steve McQueen and Lust for flesh with Jack Nicholson. And one gets the feeling that, like her good friend Ali MacGraw, she was both too smart for Hollywood and too “perfect” to be anywhere else. “I had no idea how to make an effort,” writes Bergen. “Most things had always come so easily to me that I had developed neither discipline nor patience for the things that didn’t come so easily.”
But it was not to remain that way. In the 1984s Knock on wood and its successor from 2015, A beautiful romance, Bergen—a talented, sarcastic yet insightful chronicler—traces her evolution from a restless brat with ice-cold intelligence (who once went on a “boring” blind date with Donald Trump) to a calm and loving mother, wife, daughter, friend, successful comedian, progressive activist, talented photojournalist, and a wise and witty grande dame who has known (and gossiped about) everyone since she was a child.
Her books are not only entertaining and – a real rarity in celebrity memoirs – sharp, but they are also an inspiration to those uncomfortable in their own youthful skin. Bergen says relief and wisdom come when fame and beauty fade. “People can get crazier as they get older,” she once said. “I can just be weird whenever I want, and I don’t care what people think.”
Charlie’s sister
From the minute Candice Patricia Bergen was born in Los Angeles on May 19, 1946, she had competition. Her “brother” was the brash, sassy and cocky Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist’s dummy created by her father, Edgar Bergen – a taciturn, moody and polite man, except when he disguised his voice and Charlie came to life. “The sibling rivalry … was certainly unique,” Bergen writes wryly in Knock on wood“considering that I was the only child and the sibling was actually my father.”
Bergen’s sarcastic eye for the absurd was well deserved. Charlie McCarthy (now at the Smithsonian) was an international superstar who often appeared at the father-daughter Sunday breakfasts that little Candice loved so much:
My father got down on one knee and I on the other, and he put his hand on both our necks. When he squeezed my neck, I moved my mouth, and when he squeezed Charlie’s neck, he moved his. While Charlie and I chattered over my father, mouths flapping silently, my father sat behind us, smiling politely, and speaking cheerfully for both of us.
Bergen describes her love for her father as overwhelming. She desperately sought the recognition of the distant Edgar, tried to be the perfect “Hollywood newcomer” and made her debut on the Edgar Bergen Show at the age of six with, who else, Charlie as a sparring partner.
“When Charlie protested when my father put him in the trunk after every show – ‘Oh please, Bergen, don’t lock me! Please help me! Bergie, not the trunk!’ until the key clicked in the lock and the screams stopped,” she writes, “I thought if it was possible that my father would… forget him or lose him or something. Then I would have to step in. Then I would just perform for my father and make him proud.”
The Hollywood Princess
“My delusions of grandeur were no ordinary ones; they were reinforced at every turn,” Bergen writes. “Hundreds of images of Charlie (an image of an image) flashed on everything from cufflinks to watches – deified, immortalized, like the head of a great, if mad, dynasty.”
