Candice bergen autobiography

A Fine Romance 1


It was midway through October 1985, as I waddled in a huge plaid tent dress through the ground floor of Bergdorf’s. I’d put on almost fifty pounds since becoming pregnant. A woman kept peering at me, looking away, looking back. Finally she approached. “You know, you have Candice Bergen’s face.”

“But not her body,” I said.

Old friends saw me lurching along the street and burst out laughing. I scowled back. Would this baby be born in a hospital or at SeaWorld?

The due date was the second half of October. I’d been hoping she’d arrive on Halloween, which was the day after my husband Louis Malle’s birthday. As the date grew closer, then passed, I went in for a checkup. Whoever was in there, she was hyperactive, that much was sure. She somersaulted and flipped around. Then she landed wrong. Her feet were tangled in the umbilical cord and she was upside down and feet first. There was a high risk of her cutting off the supply of oxygen and nutrients. A risk of brain damage.

My obstetrician, the ironically named Dr. Cherry, was an affable, easygoing guy, but he grew concerned after the recent sonogram. “We need to think about scheduling a Cesarean,” he told me. Meanwhile, I was to go home and stay in bed with my feet up. No activity. That would be interesting, as Louis and I lived in a two-story loft and were having people for dinner that night.

That was the beginning of the real bonding. Until that point, I’d kept a bit of distance, thinking of the baby as a kind of invader in my comfortable routines. I’d dragged my feet about preparing her room. No longer. It was ready, wallpapered in tiny pink rosebuds. I’d bought a white rocker and a white crib with pink ticking on the mattress and bumpers and found a pink Kit-Cat clock whose eyes and tail moved rhythmically back and forth.

Now the Alien was in jeopardy. I could not lose her.

Louis and I had been invited to a state dinner at the White House in honor of Prince Charles and Prin

American actress (born 1946)

For the Canadian politician, see Candice Bergen (politician).

Candice Patricia Bergen (born May 9, 1946) is an American actress. She won five Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for her portrayal of the title character on the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown (1988–1998, 2018). She is also known for her role as Shirley Schmidt on the ABC drama Boston Legal (2005–2008). In films, Bergen was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Starting Over (1979) and for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Gandhi (1982).

Bergen began her career as a fashion model and appeared on the cover of Vogue before she made her screen debut in the film The Group (1966). She starred in The Sand Pebbles (1966), Soldier Blue (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and The Wind and the Lion (1975). She made her Broadway debut in the 1984 play Hurlyburly and starred in the revivals of The Best Man (2012) and Love Letters (2014). From 2002 to 2004, she appeared in three episodes of the HBO series Sex and the City. Her other film roles include Miss Congeniality (2000), Sweet Home Alabama (2002), The Women (2008), Bride Wars (2009), Book Club (2018) and Let Them All Talk (2020).

Early life

Candice Patricia Bergen was born May 9, 1946, at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, Frances Bergen (née Westerman), was a Powers model known professionally as Frances Westcott. Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor. Bergen's paternal grandparents were Swedish immigrants who anglicized their surname, which was originally Berggren ("mountain branch").

Bergen was raised in Beverly Hills, California, and attended the Westlake School for Girls. As a child, she was irritated when described as "Charlie McCarthy's little sister" (a reference to her father's star dummy). She

“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