Edgar tried twice more to go out on his own but admitted, “I fell flat on my face.” He created two new characters to introduce some competition for Charlie, perhaps regain some ground: the low-chuckling, slow-thinking Mortimer Snerd and an eager spinster called Effie Klinker. Both were substantially successful, especially the dimwitted Mortimer, but they were never comparable to Charlie, never even came close in the nation’s eyes.
America had grown more sentimental than the ventriloquist about his dummy.
In 1943, when Edgar and Charlie were broadcasting from New York, Nell Berggren died; her younger son left for Los Angeles immediately, missing a show for the first time in six years on the air.
While typically tight-lipped about the loss, Edgar was deeply shaken by the death of his mother. Bella Vista was now abandoned to bachelors: Bergen, now thirty-eight and still unwed, the Swedish butler and Charlie. It occurred to some that even his single status might not be a question of free will for Bergen:
WILL CHARLIE LET BERGEN WED? IS HE A PROBLEM CHILD?
Charlie McCarthy’s pappy, Edgar Bergen, is definitely the man of the moment in Hollywood and they are now inviting Charlie to the better parties so the dynamo behind the dummy will come. Being Mrs. B, I am told, is the goal among most unattached Hollywood gals today. Edgar, provided Charlie doesn’t become a problem child and break up attachments, is the most attractive catch on the Hollywood horizon.
—Los Angeles Times
Except for a few studio-arranged dates (with Deanna Durbin and Ava Gardner), Edgar was still a loner; it was Charlie who was having all the fun—posing for fan magazines in camel’s-hair coat and ascot, surrounded by shimmering starlets.
One of the shows people talked most about guest-starred Mae West. During rehearsals the week before the show, Bergen and his writers haggled with West, pleading with her to tone down the suggestiveness of her material to meet the strict FCC standards. After a standoff of sorts, a script was agreed upon for Sunday’s show. But she was not, after all, Mae West for nothing. When she cooed over the air to Charlie, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” to which Charlie answered innocently, “And what would I do?,” no one had bargained on her reading of the reply, “I’d let you play around in my woodpile.” It made Monday morning’s headlines:
“NBC’S MAE WEST-CHARLIE MCCARTHY BROADCAST WIDELY CONDEMNED AS OBSCENE … FCC sent strong letter to NBC.”
NBC apologized publicly, Edgar Bergen went into hiding in Palm Springs, and the show’s rating went up two points.
Charlie now seemed to be everywhere at once: on the airwaves, in motion pictures with old pal W. C. Fields, in comic strips and coloring books, magazines and newsreels, on tie tacks and toys, radio sets and watches, pendants and pins. Stores sold out their Charlie McCarthy dolls and had them on back order.
One was given to a young girl of fourteen to cheer her up, keep her company while she recovered from a skull fracture suffered in an auto accident. Her name was Frances Westerman, and she was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where she had spent the happiest hours of her childhood curled snugly in her daddy’s lap, or hanging on to his knee—this tall and handsome man who was her sun and moon, who smoothed her hair with long, loving hands, smiling softly at her and calling her his “little lamb.”
Frances was a daddy’s girl. An only child, she had a less strong bond with her mother, Lillie Mae, who was one in two sets of pale-skinned, flame-haired twin sisters.
People died of tuberculosis then, and William Westerman was one of them, spending the last three months of his life in a sanitarium where his little daughter would come to visit, legs dangling as she perched on his bed, just her daddy and his little lamb. That was where she saw him last, pale against his pillow, as he waved to her through his open window.
And after family and friends had come and gone, leaving casseroles and condolences, as they carried his casket from the house, Frances threw herself upon it, sobbing, because inside lay the love of her life, and she was only ten.
It was the thirties: families’ fortunes fizzled, the plenty of the twenties had dried up and disappeared. Lillie Mae took her daughter’s hand and headed west, where poverty was more appealing, prosperity a breath away.
In Los Angeles, Lillie Mae met and married Parry Boyd (of the Boyds of Bangor, Maine), a handsome devil from a fine family who was (as Lillie Mae would say) just a tad short. He was a man of opinions and had a low one of work, and so was always a tad short of money as well, though he did have a job as an iceman. Lillie Mae began supporting him and Parry put down his ice and took up the flute. Soon, what William Westerman had left them was gone; and so, in short order, was Parry.
Lillie went to work, and Frances went to school, and the mother—devastated by the death of one husband and the disappearance of another—slid into silence which her daughter faced every afternoon, the two of them spending their evenings alone together, staring soundlessly at each other across the cool white porcelain of the kitchen table in the tiny stucco cottage in the motor court on the street lined with tall palms.
Alabama accents drip with honey, and Frances, when she spoke, brought hoots to the lips of her California classmates. By the time she graduated Los Angeles High School (a peppy “pom-pom girl”), she had drained the last drop of magnolia from her voice and at least that possibility of embarrassment.
But Frances was beautiful. Tall and sleek, fresh and windswept, hers was the look American women were famous for. And that look took her racing down mirrored runways in L.A.’s I. Magnin, pirouetting in bugle beads and broad shoulders, gliding down ramps in navy gab suits and spectator shoes. Graceful and gleaming and gay.
And that is what Edgar Bergen saw when he looked out into the studio audience one night: long legs looming out of the darkness, stretching out at him endlessly from the front row. And later, he asked to meet her—for she had come as the guest of a member of his staff—because he wondered who the, ah, the one with the, ah, you know her legs were very long… .
And that is how they met—this now nineteen-year-old blossom from the Deep South and this thirty-nine-year-old ventriloquist from the Midwest. He courted her for over a year—writing her, phoning her in New York, where she’d gone on to be a successful Powers model, driving past her on billboards as “the Chesterfield Girl,” flipping to her in magazines as “the Ipana Girl”—a confused, confirmed bachelor scratching his head at the crossroads.
He wasn’t the only one who was confused:
BERGEN WEDDING PUZZLES CHARLIE … his boss is rumored to marry pretty model… . Best Man Charlie McCarthy… .
—Los Angeles Mirror
Then one morning in June 1945, the headlines read,
CHARLIE GETS STEPMOTHER… . Edgar Bergen and Frances Westerman married in Mexico.
—Los Angeles Herald Examiner
The bachelor had finally caved in.
In photos taken at the time of her marriage, my mother looks like a new young fawn. Hovering in a pale, fine haze like a startled creature at the edge of the forest, peering, wide-eyed, ready for flight. Long-legged, auburn-haired, bright-eyed, she is a woman whose grace and beauty catch your breath. There is a softness about her, an innocence, a willingness to please. An eagerness in her eyes.
She was twenty when she married, my father, forty. It took a lot to hold your own against celebrity like Edgar Bergen’s. Frances Westerman from Birmingham found herself swept up in the rushing tide of being Mrs. Bergen and simply hung on for dear life.
Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Bergen
AT LEFT : Frances at Bella Vista
The person she clung tightest to was her husband. She turned to him to teach her, looked up to him in all things. Open and innocent, worshipful and adoring, she depended on him totally—like a daughter, sort of. Depended on this forty-year-old, first-time-married “emotional hermit,” as his own dummy referred to him—a man most comfortable when he did not seem to be speaking, or when flying alone in his plane, or when tinkering with magical, me
chanical gadgetry. He was not a man comfortable with feelings, especially the kind that run strong or deep. It’s not that he didn’t have them; he just didn’t know what to do with them except brush them aside, sweep them under a rug and edgily look the other way.
But his new bride was full of feelings. She was young and in love, brimming over with love for a middle-aged man who, one morning, woke up married.
So when on their first mornings at Bella Vista she would climb, shining, sparkling with dew, into his lap and circle him with her arms to give him all the affection, all the hope she’d held so long for someone—it was overwhelming to this shy remote man. She offered him more than he knew how to take, and it terrified him. Here was his young bride, folded up in his arms, sighing, “Oh Edgar, I love you so much,” and he would pat her quickly and say gruffly, “Now, now, we don’t talk about things like that,” and lower her from his lap like a long lanky child.
The moment passed in the blink of an eye, but Frances Bergen never forgot it. Because this was not how it was supposed to happen. Not in Margaret Mitchell or the movies. This was not what newlyweds did—dismiss as inappropriate talk of love.
So Frances learned some of those lessons it takes a lifetime to unlearn again. She learned not to curl up in her husband’s lap and to hang back from hugging him and to swallow “I love you’s.” And that is how loneliness grows.
2
EDGAR BERGEN—FATHER OF A GIRL
Wooden-bodied Charlie McCarthy—the redwood half of the famed radio team—today had a flesh and blood rival for the affections of Edgar Bergen since the arrival of a 7 lb. 13½ oz. daughter last night at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Mrs. Bergen, who was married to Charlie’s “stooge” last June, was reported “doing well.”
—Variety, May 10, 1946
Doing well she was—especially when faced with the fact that Charlie’s “stooge” tended to disappear at life’s more intense moments, taking off in his plane and landing at some sand-swept airstrip in the desert to down a beer with the locals and put up at the nearest motel. A farm boy forever, eager to establish an identity separate from his dummy, he bought up obscure patches of land and farmed them: alfalfa, dates, citrus, bell peppers. In cowboy hat, frontier pants and Western boots, he’d stalk the crops with his foremen, probing the earth with the toe of his boot, swapping theories on irrigation and cross-pollinating techniques. This walking the land and talking with “folks” was comforting, familiar, his favorite way of ducking out when life was overwhelming. In fact, that’s just where he was headed as Frances arrived at the hospital already in labor: Edgar was finally found in his plane somewhere over Palm Springs; the control tower radioed him to come home.
My mother had by now adjusted to the comings and goings of the “moody Swede” she had married, accepting his absences philosophically, as essentials for the solitary soul. New to his world, she walked in it unsteadily for a time. But gradually, with ever-increasing confidence, she learned to play hostess at Bella Vista. By the time of my birth, she had brought a special grace to her husband’s life, and the hermits on the hill found their closed house opened, spilling with flowers, filled with light.
My father—remote but devoted to his bride, delighted with his new daughter—found his bachelor days abruptly over and was faced with some changes himself. The house on the hill now had room for only one hermit; one of them, my parents told the press, would have to go.
“Charlie’s room,” with its view of the rose garden and its entrance off the patio, was redecorated and renamed “the nursery”; I moved in with my Dutch governess, Dena.
“It was a major operation when we had to take Charlie’s room away from him and make it into a nursery,” declared Bergen. “He had to move all his pictures of Dorothy Lamour, his West Point Cadet’s hat, his Indian headdress, and all his stuff.”
“Yes, it looks quite different in pink and blue and without Charlie’s special, low-cut furniture. I rather miss seeing his shorts, with the initials, hanging over the chair,” Frances said nostalgically.
—Silver Screen
My mother learned fast.
When I was born, it was only natural that I would be known in the press as “Charlie’s sister.” The sibling rivalry thus established was certainly unique, considering I was the only child and the sibling was, in truth, my father. Of course, even when I was very young, I knew Charlie wasn’t real. Although we always called him “Charlie.” And though he lived, or was kept, I should say, in a velvet-lined trunk. And though at my birth, he was simply moved to the guest room, next to the nursery, and soon everyone began again referring to “Charlie’s room.”
To me, Bella Vista was like a magic kingdom. Its red tile roof eased gently over the mountaintop and gave way to gardens that tumbled their way into canyons below: the rose garden, the cut-flower garden, the cactus forest, the citrus orchard, the strawberry patch. Honeysuckle ran wild and smelled sweet, mammoth magnolias shaded the croquet course on the lower lawn, and pine lined the pool. Bougainvillea burst over the roof like fireworks and camellias hung like starched organdy dresses from their bushes along the driveway. You could see the house down on Sunset, if you knew just where to look. And if the flag was flying from the flagpole or Christmas lights were twirled around the giant pine, it was a cinch to spot. “The old house on the hill,” we call it now, wishing that we’d never left it.
High on a mountain, at the end of a steep, twisting road banked with toothpicked cactus clumps and towering stands of eucalyptus, Bella Vista was not readily accessible to the timid or fainthearted. Playmates had to be imported for the Bergens’ daughter on Beverly Grove, transportation arranged, troop movements coordinated; cars would creep cautiously up the canyon bearing buddies. Mothers and governesses would arrive hunched over the wheel, wild-eyed and white-knuckled, deposit their cargo and brace themselves for the ride down. So most afternoons I played alone with my three dogs—a collie named Boy, a beagle named Martha, and a fox terrier called Susan: my gang.
Each afternoon when I got home from school, I’d change out of my powder-blue uniform and saddle shoes into a flannel cowboy shirt and jeans, grab my snack in a wax-paper bag and take oil with my dogs, wandering the hills until it was time for dinner. Down the hill, up the treehouse, scan the canyon, then up to explore the big mountain.
AT LEFT: Out for a drive. Back seat: Effie Klinker, Podine, Edgar, Mortimer Snerd. Front seat: Frances, Charlie McCarthy and Candy. BELOW: A family Christmas
On the mountain that loomed above us lay the John Barrymore estate. Katharine Hepburn lived in the old Aviary, a couple named Grimaldi in the large main house, and the conductor Lukas Foss in the guest house. My dogs and I would sneak up on the huge main house, scurrying over rocks above the waterfall that splashed into the pool, and lie in wait for the Grimaldi poodles. When caught, I was invited in for cookies and talk of the Old Country. The Grimaldis showed me sketches deftly drawn by Barrymore on closet walls, massive monastery doors shipped from France, chandeliers from Vienna, and Cyprus trees brought from Italy. Mrs. Grimaldi—round, blond, and fluffy, much like her poodles—spoke in strange cooing sounds. Mr. Grimaldi, who was a director, wore a pencil moustache and an ascot, and claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne of Monaco; he railed to me about that impostor, Prince Rainier.
Another king lived across the canyon, in a gleaming white castle enclosed by high walls. King Vidor, they called him, and though he was said to be one of Hollywood’s great directors, to me he was yet another monarch. It seemed that when things went sour for royalty at home, they all came to Hollywood and became directors while they waited for things to sort themselves out.
Halfway up the mountain to the Barrymore estate, at a point that hung high over our driveway, was a natural dirt perch, a balcony, screened from view by trees. This became my hideout where I would sit for hours with my gang of dogs, eating my Fritos, guarding the house against all invaders. I was not entirely defenseless. Bobby, the Western Union delivery man, lived do
wn the road over the Barrymore garage, and he was my friend. Sometimes he’d take me with him on deliveries, chugging along in his beetle-green Nash, and I’d charge out proudly to present the crisp yellow envelopes to strangers framed in foyers. Bobby made me a slingshot, carved it by hand, and it never left my hip pocket. Tiptoeing stealthily through the trees like Tonto, I would stalk an enemy bush, fish out a carefully selected pebble from my shirt pocket, center it in the leather square and release the taut elastic with a snap that sent the pebble flying in a feeble arc to land a few feet from my sneakers. As darkness closed in and the coast looked clear, I’d wave my posse from the hills, untie my pony, swing my leg over the broomstick with the stuffed sock head, felt eyes, and yarn mane, pick up the plastic reins and head happily for home.
Of course, as a cowboy, what I needed, pleaded for, dreamed of, was a horse. A real horse. By the time I was eight, the nursery already overflowed with toy ones: wood horses, copper horses, plastic horses, glass horses, china horses, horse books, horse paintings, horse photographs, horse clippings in horse scrapbooks. I sent for horse coupons on cereal boxes, filled out forms to win a pony; I never wanted anything as much as I wanted a horse.
My parents, wondering rightly if this was a whim, finally agreed to get me a donkey, which was not unlike a horse. And so, one Sunday, off I went to a burro ranch with my governess, Dee, and her boyfriend, Don, where we picked out the biggest burro I could find (more like a horse), loaded him onto the back of Don’s pickup and took him home.
My mother, expecting an adorable little Sicilian donkey with a hand-painted cart, was struck dumb when we pulled up with a “moth-eaten mule.” He was, in fact, on the aged, ratty side, but I, of course, was blinded by love. I called him Pronto, and he was my horse—my Trigger, my Lucky, my Champion, my Silver: we would ride the range and gallop the trails together.
Knock Wood Page 3
