“From birth, I, my family, my life had seemed different, special,” five-time Emmy winner Candice Bergen writes in her 1984 autobiography Knock Wood. “And deep down, despite all my insecurity, I was convinced, paradoxically, that I was privileged—as by some divine right of queens.”
Even though she is most famous today for playing the brilliant, prickly news anchor Murphy Brown, Bergen—daughter of model Frances Bergen and comedian Edgar Bergen—was famous from the time she was born. She was a stiff, beautiful starlet in films like The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen and Carnal Knowledge with Jack Nicholson. And one gets the sense that like her great 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,” Bergen writes. “Most things had always come so easily for me that I had developed no discipline or patience for those which did not.”
But that is not how she would stay. In 1984’s Knock Wood and its 2015 follow-up, A Fine Romance, Bergen—a talented, sardonic yet empathic chronicler—charts her evolution from a restless, glacially intelligent brat (who once went on a “boring” blind date with Donald Trump) to a settled and loving mother, wife, daughter, friend, accomplished comedian, progressive activist, talented photojournalist, and a wise and witty grande dame who has known (and gossiped about) everybody since the age of zero.
Not only are her books fun and—a true rarity in celeb memoirs—clear-sighted, but they’re inspirations to those who are itchy in their own youthful skin. Bergen suggests that relief and wisdom come as fame and beauty fades. “People can get crazier as they get older,” she once said. “I can just be weird whenever I want, and there’s the freedom of not caring 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, brassy, and cocksure Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist dummy created by her father Edgar Bergen—a taciturn, moody, and polite man, except when he threw his voice and Charlie came to life. “The sibling rivalry…was certainly unique,” Bergen writes wryly in Knock Wood, “considering I was the only child and the sibling was, in truth, my father.”
Bergen’s sardonic eye for the absurd was well-earned. Charlie McCarthy (now in the Smithsonian) was an international superstar who often crashed the father-daughter Sunday breakfasts little Candice so loved:
My Dad would sit him on one knee and me on the other and he’d put a hand on both our necks, and when he squeezed my neck, I’d move my mouth, and when he squeezed Charlie’s neck, he’d move his. As Charlie and I yammered away at each other across my father, mouths flapping soundlessly, behind us, smiling politely, sat my Dad, happily speaking for both of us.
Bergen describes her love for her father as overwhelming. She desperately sought the distant Edgar’s approval, attempting to be the perfect “Hollywood Offspring” and debuting on the Edgar Bergen Show at age six with, who else, Charlie as her sparring partner.
“When Charlie protested as my father put him in the trunk after each show—’Oh please, Bergen, don’t lock me up! Please help me! Bergie, not the trunk!’ till the key clicked in the lock and the cries died out,” she writes, “I wondered if there was a chance my father might…forget him or lose him or something. Then I would have to fill in. It would just be me performing for my father, making him proud.”
The Hollywood Princess
“Mine were no run- of-the-mill delusions of grandeur; they had been reinforced at every turn,” Bergen writes. “The hundreds of likenesses of Charlie (a likeness of a likeness) flashed on everything from cuff links to clocks—deified, immortalized, like the head of some great if daffy dynasty.”
With her lush, tongue-in-cheek descriptions of her charmed childhood, Bergen transports the reader to the Hollywood of the 1950s. Her mother, Frances, a swan-like Southern belle twenty years her husband’s junior, seemed to her daughter “a fairy princess, far too beautiful to be a Mom.” There were rides on “Uncle Walt”’s model train, with Disney himself playing conductor” visits from “Santa,” a.k.a. David Niven; playdates with Liza Minnelli; solitary exploits in the hills; and playing cowboy on the grounds of the old John Barrymore estate.
“We were the children of Paradise, where nothing seemed beyond our reach,” Bergen writes. “Fantasy was, for us, familiar. The extraordinary, everyday. But reality remained a stranger, and most were pleased to leave it that way.”
But as the preteen Bergen’s undeniably rare beauty became a topic of conversation in Hollywood, she also became a target for predators. One night at the glamorous Chasen’s, the wife of a famous film producer came on to her in the powder room, bolting out the door when Bergen told her she was only thirteen.
Not everyone cared that Bergen was underage. In one heartbreaking passage, Bergen recounts how an unnamed 36-year-old movie star, blonde and boat-mad, convinced her—still 13 years old—to sneak out with him one night. He took Bergen to his secluded farm, where he sexually abused her as grapefruits pounded his car.
“Finally fed up with my ‘childish attitude,’ he soon agreed that I belonged back with my record collection, not with him,” Bergen writes. “We drove home in stony silence. I felt ashamed, relieved, apologetic. As we approached my house, all he said was, ’I wouldn’t mention this to your parents, okay? They might not approve.’ Mention it to my parents? Might not approve? Was he insane? Was I?”
Helter Skelter
Unique among celebrity memoirists is Bergen’s utter honesty about her insane privilege, her youthful cockiness, her entitled attitude and restless discontent. After stints at a Swiss boarding school and the University of Pennsylvania, where she developed a deep passion for photojournalism and a lifelong mentor in fellow student Mary Ellen Mark, Bergen found herself effortlessly pulled into the world of modeling and acting, making her film debut in 1966’s The Group. “The more the publicity, the greater my glibness,” she writes. “My arrogance seemed to increase in a direct ratio with my discomfort.”
The sophisticated Bergen also felt out of place with her hippie peers. She hilariously describes her first visit to the home of music producer Terry Melcher, her childhood sweetheart (and the son of Doris Day) at 10050 Cielo Drive, high in the hills of Benedict Canyon:
There were…boys who, not four years before, I’d had egg fights with: they looked like their hair had exploded and they were wearing beads and flowers and they weren’t kidding…Evidently the Sweet Bird of Youth had passed me by like a Boeing and I found myself, at twenty-one, peering at the generation gap like a tourist—from the far side.
Despite their differences, Melcher and Bergen soon rekindled their romance. She moved into Cielo Drive, which she lovingly recalls as a “never-never land” far from the chaos of the ‘60s. But madness soon appeared. The Beach Boys introduced Melcher to a man named Charles Manson. One day, Melcher came home praising Manson, whom he had recorded singing, surrounded by a naked female chorus. “Why can’t they sing dressed?” Bergen snapped.
Melcher and Bergen eventually moved to Doris Day’s beach house in Malibu, and Melcher ghosted the increasingly creepy Manson. Actress Sharon Tate and director Roman Polanski moved into Cielo Drive. According to Bergen, one day she noticed a telescope was missing from their Malibu veranda, and soon an intermediary appeared with a warning. Charlie Manson was angry with Melcher, and the telescope’s disappearance was intentional.
A week later, Sharon Tate and three others were slaughtered in the house on Cielo Drive. “Ropes swung from beams that were once hung with hearts and holly, words were written in blood on the door.”
The Ice Queen Thaws
Bergen was at her happiest when traveling the world, an intrepid wanderer taking pictures and reporting for the likes of Esquire, Vogue, and The Today Show. She saw modeling and acting as means to an end; her roles tended toward either “the cool, rich dilettante I so resembled” or “the woman men love to defile.” She endured so many on-screen assaults that she “fantasized a movie where the women do the raping and plundering for a change.”
Like many a relatable contrarian, Bergen honestly describes her deep imposter syndrome, as well as her admitted bad attitude. “It was not my fault if I could not bring a role to life,” she writes. “It was everyone else’s.” On the set of 1975’s Bite the Bullet, Gene Hackman finally exploded as she complained endlessly about the script. “I don’t need to hear any more of your wisecracks about how it can’t be done,” he told Bergen. “My job is to do it.”
In 1978, Edgar Bergen died. (“Charlie McCarthy was included in the will,” Bergen writes in A Fine Romance. “I was not.”) He was eulogized by Ronald Reagan, Johnny Carson, and Kermit the Frog. In 1979’s Starting Over, she discovered that her witty, deadpan, tough demeanor was perfect for comedy—and more importantly, that this was a genre she actually enjoyed. Her father had always encouraged her to do comedy, “perhaps because underneath our shared reserve were clowns eager to be called to play.”
After a series of disappointing romances, she also fell madly in love with controversial French director Louis Malle, whom she married in 1980. The last few chapters of Knock Wood touchingly reads like a beautiful fairy tale about two wary “loners” whose slow, courtly romance blossoms into blissful togetherness.
“I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options,” she writes. “That you had to be someone less to live with someone else… In marriage with this man, my options have only expanded. Everything about my life has been enhanced and enriched. I used to think that when you got married your life was over, but I feel like mine has just begun.”
Dan Quayle’s Worst Nightmare
If Knock Wood is a stylishly cynical and slightly tortured coming-of-age tome, Bergen’s sequel, A Fine Romance is the relatable and humorous memoir of a secure, accomplished woman with her feet planted firmly on the ground.
While Bergen’s love and admiration for the quirky, brilliant, and driven Malle never ended, she is honest that her enormous success on Murphy Brown, her move to Los Angeles, and her overwhelming, and surprisingly gushing, love for their daughter Chloe (born in 1985) left the restless, needy Malle feeling unmoored and unappreciated. He split his time between L.A., NYC, and France, his relationship with Chloe sporadic and wary. “Louis’s arrival,” Bergen writes frankly, “always interrupted the Two of Us.”
The simple fact that Bergen had come into her power as a comedian and modern self-determined woman also unsettled the American right. When her character Murphy Brown gave birth to a child (gasp) out of wedlock in 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle misogynistically accused the fictional journalist of “mocking the importance of fathers.”
Bergen and her beloved cast and crew were caught in a surreal firestorm, which included death threats, full-time security, a female stalker, and countless pompous think pieces on what made an “American family.” But in the end, it only made the show and Bergen’s popularity grow.
She won another Emmy that year for Murphy Brown. In her acceptance speech, she said “I’d like to thank the vice president,” as well as “the writers for their words and spelling them correctly” — a dig at Quayle’s much-publicized misspelling of “potato.”
You Can’t Have Everything
“Louis had been told he wouldn’t live a long life; I think that’s why he always galloped through it,” Bergen writes. “Some part of him knew the clock was ticking.”
In A Fine Romance, Bergen touchingly recounts the heartbreaking months of 1995 when she cared for Malle as he battled lymphoma and an incurable inflammation of the brain. “I realized that I had existed for two reasons: to see Chloe into this world and to see Louis out of it,” she writes.
In 2000, she married stylish, thoughtfully type-A, New York City-based businessman and philanthropist Marshall Rose. Their relationship seems cozy and playful. She also became the go-to for playing prickly bosses and smart toughies, bringing such characters to life in Boston Legal, Sex in the City, Miss Congeniality, and Book Club. Bergen refreshingly professes that she’s happy to no longer be thin, young, and “beautiful,” though she and Warren Beatty once reminisced that beauty was an “all access backstage pass.”
Perhaps this is because Bergen is now an utterly secure realist about her past, her present, and her honestly voiced fears for the inevitable end. “I am short-tempered and Chloe calls me on it,” Bergen writes, due to the effects of minor strokes and getting off Prozac. “I am impatient and judgmental. I am not nearly as nice to be around, that is true. I miss the other Kinder, Gentler Self, but I have recovered my ability to cry, and then some. You can’t have everything.”
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