Word: bergen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Charlie gets away with a candid vein of comment which is unprecedented in radio. Via a small-boy character (which helps), Bergen manages a titillating form of malice-without-malice. To judge by his audiences, it is all hugely satisfying to the U.S. public. Charlie called Gossipist Louella Parsons an "old blabbermouth," while confiding in an aside that "everything will be all over town tomorrow." He referred to Emily Post as "a vulture for culture" and dismissed her with: "It's been a charming evening. By the way, Miss Emily, you don't have a toothpick...
...personality-saucy, lethally precocious and irreverent-that it is all but impossible for listeners to remember that he is a ventriloquist's dummy. The instinct to forget it is natural; no such coldly mechanical term could possibly describe the complex psychological relationship between Charlie McCarthy and Edgar John Bergen...
Charlie has supported Bergen most of his life. He began by putting Bergen through high school and almost through Northwestern University, and got him into Delta Upsilon. Charlie was whittled out 25 years ago by a Chicago barkeep named Mack (price: $35). He was modeled on a sketch Bergen made of a red headed Chicago newsboy. Bergen was then 16, the gawky, moody second son of a Swedish immigrant named Berggren who had run a retail dairy business in Chicago and a farm near Decatur, Mich...
...eleven, Edgar Bergen had found that he could throw his voice (his mother was forever answering the door in response to pleas of mysterious old men who begged to be let in). The boy was further in spired by Herrman's Wizards Manual, Secrets of Magic, Black Art, Mind Reading and Ventriloquism (including a chap ter on "how to cut a man's head off and put it into a platter a yard from his body"). Charlie McCarthy was just what Bergen needed. The little dummy was such a social success (unlike Bergen alone) that he lured Bergen...
...Down." The turn in their luck came in Chicago. Out of work and deeply discouraged, Charlie and Bergen got a week's tryout at the Chez Paree nightclub. At 3 o'clock one morning they came on for their final per formance. The club was almost empty...