Word: bergen
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KNOCK WOOD Candice Bergen Simon & Schuster; 356 pages...
...movie actresses are expected to be long on gossip, short on wit and veracity, and inferior in humility to the autobiographies of deposed presidential aides. They are also expected to be ghostwritten, or catered: you call the service, and they do the book. So much for expectations. Candice Bergen's account of her first 38 years not only is handwritten, it is one of the better books of the season so far: a shrewd, funny, loving and sometimes appalling account of how it felt to grow up in a family that was singular even in Hollywood...
Young Candy was, of course, the daughter of Edgar Bergen, the enormously popular ventriloquist who delighted the country Sunday evenings on radio's Chase & Sanborn show. But that meant that she was also the little sister of Charlie McCarthy, Bergen's cheeky, insulting, wise-guy dummy. A peculiar sibling rivalry existed, in fact, that went far beyond the obvious joke kept alive by newspaper feature writers. Charlie was a startling alter ego for the dour Swedish ventriloquist-that was what Candice Bergen made the act work so well-and he was already a star when Candy was tiny...
...things get out of hand. Goodbye, little girl, get outta here." (The sly title of her book is a modest exaction of vengeance against such abuse from the wooden-headed dummy.) She said her lines perfectly, and she thought her father was pleased. But Bergen was a stiff, inarticulate man who found it nearly impossible to express affection physically or verbally. And Charlie, who made jokes about not wanting her around, was not really a mocking older brother, he was part of her father. It was difficult for her to know whether what she had done was good enough...
...inherited stunning beauty from her mother Frances, a lovely Southerner who married the middle-aged Bergen when she was little more than a girl. But Candy had some of her father's stiffness as well, and Pauline Kael's article in LIFE about The Group reported that "as an actress, her only flair is in her nostrils." The author admits that Kael was right, but the chastisement did not send her running to acting school. She began a period in which she had an affair with an Austrian count, learning to speak English with the slightest of accents...