Age and weariness pulled at my father’s face, but not at the little guy’s. Charlie badgered him mercilessly, never seeming to know just when to stop, letting the old man have it right and left. “So help me, Bergen, I’ll kill you, I’ll mow ya down.” It was touching to see the two of them up there on stage, as if they’d traveled from another time and place—the thrill of vaudeville, swank supper clubs, the reassurance of radio. Closing his act to polite applause, Bergen would bow lightly and quickly push his dummy off the stage before the dancing girls came on.
It was like the end—and the beginning, back on the boards in vaudeville performing under the big tent. But there, an entertainer was worth something—there was a joy, an excitement, a camaraderie; that was the birth of show biz. Now, all these showgirls in sequins and feathers, German lion tamers, bad magicians … It was not now a world for white tie and tails, that much was sure. And I think my father felt old.
In spite of cockeyed, erratic choices, my career was in the ascendant while my father’s was in sharp decline. It was probably paternal pride that made my father half joke about being known as “Candice Bergen’s father”; but I knew that it hurt some, too. If it was hard on him to see his fame waning, he never actually complained about it; but it made me more uncomfortable about mine.
My success had a double edge for my mother as well. Long known as “Edgar Bergen’s wife,” she was now introduced as “Candice Bergen’s mother”; she had serious doubts that she alone had ever existed on her own. She was an extremely beautiful woman in her own right, but people now gushed to her about my looks, ignoring her in the process, or believing, perhaps, that they were flattering her indirectly through me. The effect, over the years, was that she felt forgotten, invisible—passed over in favor of her husband, his dummy, her daughter, and soon, she was sure, her son, who at eight was already turning heads. In complimenting her on her children, men would shake their heads and smile at her admiringly: “My God, Frances, you should have been a brood marel” That kind of talk could turn a woman’s head.
People’s insensitivity ceased to surprise her. Friends not heard from in years would suddenly call, make casual conversation, then announce that they were sending her a script for me. Others made no pretense at politeness, approaching her with projects for her daughter as if she were my agent instead of my mother. She had acted on television and was an accomplished singer—a woman of abilities and ambition; instead, she felt like Mildred Pierce.
At twenty-two or twenty-three, I too was insensitive to her feelings. It was a surprise to me when one day she came into the room with a telegram and said triumphantly, “This may not mean much to you but it means a lot to me. It’s an invitation to play in a celebrity tennis tournament and it’s addressed to ‘Frances Bergen.’ Not ’Mrs. Edgar Bergen’ or ’Candice’s mother,’ but ’Frances.’ For once, they just want me.”
When I perceived the depth of her resentment, I was hurt by it. But, in retrospect, I see that it was my attitude toward my success that bred the resentment rather than the success itself. If I had been able to accept the attention I received more graciously, more gratefully, instead of wisecracking constantly about it and diminishing it in public as well as in private, it might have been easier for my mother to accept—even to enjoy for my sake. She was a woman to whom manners mattered; and my father, even at the height of his career, was known for being a remarkably polite and unpretentious man. My rudeness was an embarrassment, a shame for them.
But something in me still could not resist taking compulsive cheap shots at opportunities others—including my mother—would have been glad for. My attitude was maddening to people, to my mother especially. When the Lelouch film Live for Life was released, the album of the score displayed my photograph prominently on the cover and featured “Thème de Candice” on the record inside. My mother found my apparent indifference, my airy dismissal, infuriating.
“How can you be so blasé, Candy? My God, most girls would be thrilled to have such a thing happen. Isn’t it ever enough?”
Yes, yes, it was enough. The trouble was it was too much, but I didn’t know how to say that then; I barely knew how to feel it. What I did know instinctively, deep down, was not to take it seriously—that there would be trouble if I began to believe in the attention, if I started to care about such things. So I continued to fight a misguided battle to keep my distance, maintain my indifference; to try to stay in control. It would be years before I could handle success any differently; years before I could feel I’d earned it.
Meanwhile my mother and I fought furiously, lashing out at each other, unwilling to give way, unable to be friends. I refused to admit, even to myself, that I baited her. Wistfully I would dream of having Betty Crocker for a mother: a benign blue-haired mammal dusted with flour who would love me unconditionally, wrap me in her lap, coo to me, comfort me, “There, there, my child,” give me a cookie, dry my tears with her apron and tuck me into bed.
When we fought, I felt a sense of shame and failure, guilt and anger at myself for my behavior. A terrible sense of sadness that we could not yet get it right. There was so much love between us, so much feeling—if only we could get at it. The few times when we were close left me feeling buoyant, euphoric, connected in the deepest way, as if some great cornerstone were set in place. I wanted to tell her I loved her; I wanted her to say she loved me. But neither of us yet had the courage, and the wasted caring left us both hurt and confused.
When I was a child and my father’s career was at its height, my parents traveled frequently. It was a measure of my father’s and my contrasting fortunes that it was now I who traveled, and he who stayed close to home. Yet I spent as much time near my family as I could, feeling still a sense of continuity there, and gratitude that they cared enough to disagree or disapprove.
My connection with my childhood was so strong that, when I finally decided to put down roots in Los Angeles instead of returning to New York, I chose to buy a house rich with childhood associations: the Aviary on the Barrymore estate where I had played often as a child. It certainly wasn’t a sure nose for real estate that clinched the deal: the tiny turretlike house had no grounds and no garage and was fairly short on heating. But it was a Hollywood house, a fairy-tale house with legends and mystery and history, and it had huge charm.
And that is what the Grimaldis charged me for—the same Grimaldis on whose property I had trespassed as a child. To whom I was “the Bergens’ little girl” who lived below at Bella Vista, disheveled, trailed by dogs; who would discover me roaming their property and take me on elaborate guided tours. Possibly they’d known even a six-year-old sucker when they saw one, and were softening me up for the kill they were planning years ahead. For when I returned as a prospective buyer, the milk and cookies had dried up, their largesse had disappeared. They had done their job well: I loved the romantic, impractical little house and would let nothing—not even their inflexible, outrageous asking price—stand in my way.
The Aviary was mine. Once again I prowled the property I had loved so well in my youth. While my parents no longer lived down the narrow winding road at Bella Vista, the nostalgia was overpowering, and I had the sense that I was home.
There were three houses on the Barrymore estate: the vast main house with its German rathskeller; the guest house with the Italian Renaissance sundial in the middle of the pool and the heated dog kennels; and the Aviary, which had also been a projection room.
Filled with fantasy and whimsy, the Aviary was the most impractical of the three, and this, of course, was the one I wanted. Katharine Hepburn had lived in the Aviary, and Marlon Brando; the little house was heavy with Hollywood history. It was almost a ruin when I bought it, a tiny Mediterranean tower high on the hillside, tucked into pine and cypress trees. The little living room, the size of most foyers, was sunken and shaped like a miniature chapel, its domed ceiling soaring twenty-five feet into a cupola studded with stained-glass windows of scenes from John Barrymore’s films. From the
very top of the dome hung a massive iron chandelier. I filled the living room with overstuffed tapestried sofas, Persian carpets, African chests, and a six-foot copy of a Norman Rockwell painting of Victor Mature as Samson, the original of which hangs in the Paramount commissary.
Up a small stair stretched a long, narrow room at the end of which sparkled an enormous wheel of fortune I had bought at auction. Whoever sat at the head of the long plank table could, with a flick of the wrist, send the wheel clattering and spinning red, blue, and silver flashes behind them. There were many and sundry clocks (none working), two phones in every room, each a different color—one, in the dining room, under glass, like pheasant. There were plaster cheeseburgers, toys and telescopes. Life in the Fun House. See Candy run.
The upstairs, a huge high-ceilinged open space all skylights and French windows, was more like a greenhouse than a bedroom. Katharine Hepburn had used it as a studio in which to paint, choosing the smaller, darker room adjacent as a place to sleep. Barrymore had designed the top floor originally as an aviary, covering the walls with fairy-tale frescoes and filling the rooms with brilliant birds as exotic as the fantasies on the walls. Until, so the story goes, he and his wife, Dolores Costello, separated, whereupon he had the birds killed and made into tiebacks for the draperies in the main house. Barrymore’s frescoes seemed pallid compared to his life.
The frescoes had been plastered over, and in redoing the upstairs I found a child’s archeological site—peeling away bits of plaster to find tiny mushroom houses topped with smokestacks, sultans in plumed turbans, jeweled princesses and fantastic birds trailing bright feathers.
As few fragments remained, I made my own fresco: a Stella-like rainbow splayed across the thirty-foot wall behind my bed, arcing and ending in pale pink clouds. In keeping with the huge scale of the room, the furniture was slightly oversized: at night I curled up in a brass bed of inordinate height, in a room pale with moonlight from the skylights overhead; each morning I woke early in a room the size of an airplane hangar to look out at the hills and the sea.
The Aviary had no need of all these fancy trimmings; it was magical enough on its own. In my youthful exuberance, I had turned my first house into a fullblown fantasyland. It was certainly a spectacular setting for whoever lived there—whoever that was. Clearly, I had no idea; I was too busy trying to invent her.
It wasn’t until after the bedroom was finished that I realized just what I had wrought. The enormous pastel rainbow shimmered over my big brass bed and the great chintz-covered chairs were strewn with stuffed bears and baby pillows. At twenty-three, I’d designed a bedroom resembling nothing so much as a nursery. In its great proportions, I was suddenly small, shrinking in size as I climbed up into bed and curled into chairs: like Thumbelina. A nursery made in heaven but a nursery all the same. I’m home, Ma, I’m home!
Life at the Aviary was sweet. I continued to spread myself thin—photographing, writing articles, making movies; Indians, ecology and politics; but the emphasis wasn’t on work. Many of my days were spent with my dog, Leonard, and a handsome horse I bought, an Arabian I named Herschel. With Leonard in the lead, we’d ride up canyons, splash through creeks and return along narrow mountain ridges, surprising quail, deer and occasional coyotes.
Living alone, owning my own house, gave me a chance to indulge my love for animals. In my twenties I was fascinated by pigs and I collected every conceivable likeness of them. I was unprepared but delighted when, one Christmas, a friend who knew of my fetish for pigs presented me with a baby live one to add to my collection. I named him “Officer” (remember—it was the sixties).
The Aviary grounds were inadequate for my new arrival so I boarded the pig with my close friend and neighbor, John Galley, who also lived on the Barrymore estate, in the guest house. John’s property included the electrically heated dog kennels built by Barrymore, and it was there that we housed Officer, who went right to work making a bed out of the bale of alfalfa that John, then a Warner Brothers executive, had requisitioned through the studio prop man.
John’s housekeeper at the time was Polish, and her eyes lit up when she saw a pig. Happily chanting, “Schwein! Schwein!” she zealously fed him potatoes and milk in porcelain serving dishes. In no time, Officer had doubled in size. Restless now—or possibly unable to stand the stench that had settled over the kennels—he struck out on his own. Soon he could be found peacefully rooting up John’s new landscaping, or terrorizing his two wolfhounds, eating their food as well, then reclining on a pad in the sun by the pool to digest and take a siesta.
Finally, John said, “Can’—the pig’s gotta go.” And go he did; but not to be made into bacon. He was relocated on a farm in the Valley, where he was found to be a she and renamed Rose. For years I paid twenty-five dollars a month to support her.
Nights at the Aviary were quiet when I was home, with a peaceful flow of good friends dropping by, sprawling around the Rainbow Room to watch the splashy sunset over the ocean or the lawn of lights below: Sue Mengers, who had become my agent, director Herbert Ross and his wife, Nora, screenwriter Joel Schumacher, director Peter Hyams and his wife George-Ann, producers Marty Elfand and Richard Roth. Hollywood is a one-company town, a close-knit community, and friendships came with particular ease to one born there: generational lines were commonly crossed; some of my friends were people whose children I’d grown up with.
While they were all people who figured prominently in the film industry, I had few close friends who were actors, perhaps because I did not feel like a bona fide actor myself, and probably also because I found most actors’ conversations revolved around little other than acting, an obsession with their careers—admittedly a concern I could have used more of, but one I found tedious as an exclusive topic of conversation.
Jack Nicholson was a notable exception. Like most of my friends, he was intensely involved in his work but had an infinite curiosity about everything around him. He had a deft way with words that earned him the nickname “the Weaver,” and he was never bored. With screenwriter Carol Eastman and director Henry Jaglom, we whiled away long evenings clustered around the fireplace of the Black Rabbit Inn, our favorite restaurant. I loved them for their wide frames of references and original turns of thought, for the heated and humorous discussions that ranged from Henry Wallace’s persistence to Madame Blavatsky’s astral post office. With all these friends there was an easy exuberance, a sense of camaraderie; this was what I wanted life to be.
Some of my finest times were spent with my brother. Kris was a joy: on that, as on few other points, my parents and I agreed. My father, now well into his sixties, became like a child around him, chuckling and beaming, tickling and hugging; inspecting the miniature cactus plants, checking the ant farm, the hamster run. The marble fountain in the atrium of my parents’ house now crawled with tiny dinosaurs and brontosauruses, balsa B-52s and little green Marines.
I would pick him up at school, take him on hikes, horseback rides, for ice cream at 31 Flavors, tacos at the Farmers’ Market, the roller coaster at Beverly Park. We were tight like spies and had special traditions of our own. One was our weekly dinner at the Luau, a restaurant on Rodeo Drive that was a cross between an opium den and Disneyland. Under fishing nets filled with conch shells, high-priced hookers worked the front bar area, while families gathered in the dining room in back, framed by fanned peacock chairs and tropical ferns.
Our ritual was to drive to the Luau, detouring past the Witches’ House (a Hollywood art director’s house in Beverly Hills, with elliptical roofs and crooked smokestacks) on our way; take a table near the waterfall and the miniature outrigger; and order appetizers and “Volcanos.” Even the drink was like Disney: a sweet green punch in a giant coconut filled with dry ice. It billowed with smoke as it was brought to the table, alarming diners nearby and clouding egg rolls, obscuring spare ribs, and blanketing the entire tabletop in a thick fog.
With Kris, age 9
When the smoke had cleared and we could find our f
ood, we discussed witches and monsters and protective spells against them, secrets to keep them at bay. One ancient anti-witch remedy, I once told him (by now he was nervous), was to put a piece of pork-fried rice in your ear—an idea inspired by his habitual order of rice. “Really?” he asked in the little cracking voice he had then, scrutinizing my face for signs of truth. I nodded sagely, and before I could stop him, he had picked up a grain of pork-fried rice and popped it in his ear.
The following day when he complained about an earache, it was awkward explaining to my mother the probable cause. “You what? You told him to put a piece of pork-fried rice in his ear? Candy, what’s gotten into you? If this is serious, I hope you remember whose fault it is; it might not seem so funny then.” Between my brother and me, only my greater height indicated that I was the more advanced in age.
He was aware of but unphased by my celebrity, remarking once, as we walked through Beverly Hills to get an ice cream after school, “You know, sometimes walking with you is like being with a giant banana.” When I looked puzzled, perhaps a little stricken (even Pauline Kael hadn’t called me that), he explained that he was talking about “the way some people stare.” At nine, he’d neatly defined the experience of having a public face.
The problem was finding grown men whose companionship I enjoyed half as much. If evenings were idyllic, mornings found me, alone, under the rainbow, fighting a slight case of what the decade identified as “anomie.” There was an emptiness in my life that slept fitfully and woke way before I did—a little furry ball of foreboding that made me vaguely afraid to face the day alone.
Mine was a solitude of my own making. It seemed to me that men came in two varieties: at best, I made safe, senseless choices, inane mismatches that posed no threat; at worst, I’d meet men who would shake awake the masochist in me, killers who thrill the victim in women lured by the gleam of vampire teeth. I went out often with men but I would date defensively, usually detached and difficult with potential suitors, as if to drive them away. Which, in most cases, I did. It took someone more skilled at the game than I to hold my interest; even better, someone who refused to play. A man who called my bluff had me in his pocket.
Knock Wood Page 17
