Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  The Rainbow Room

  Not many like that came along, but when they did, an irrepressible urge to test was an indication of my interest; a pattern of gently pushing them close to the edge—hoping for someone who would push back. 1-2-3, testing … oops! Over he went. The chemistry of contempt: the greater my indifference, the greater their interest. Not that it should have surprised me—it was a dynamic I knew all too well; a game that two could play.

  In my search for the paternal slap on the hand, my quest for the assertive inaccessible man, I met a successful young novelist whose aloofness drew me like metal filings to a magnet, and I expressed interest by making critical observations of his work. Wasn’t it a tiny bit bloodless? Slightly sterile? The endings weak and unresolved?

  He was not inaccessible for nothing, and, after a few weeks with H. L. Mencken, he called to announce: “My analyst has advised me to stop seeing you; she says this relationship is destructive to my work, anxiety-provoking and counterproductive. You’re disruptive to my life.” Ah, well, at least he resolved that ending. Talk about a man who knows his own mind. And the Menace moved on… . Testing, testing, 1-2-3….

  There were others even less likely with whom I barely made it through dinner: a political satirist, a radical ecologist, a conceptual artist. Movie stars, real-estate czars and textile kings. Public figures in private planes. Eclectic tastes, but never realistic. How could they be? I was a girl who lived in an aviary under a rainbow; reality had no place with me.

  One night I was expecting the arrival of a rock star who changed cars as often as he did shirts. As one expert in movie entrances, I decided that night I would make mine as Esther Williams, emerging sirenlike from the shadows, glistening with droplets after a late-night swim. Sleek and shimmering like a seal.

  But rock stars know a thing or two about entrances themselves: they like to make theirs late. So I waited, shivering in the shadows, irrevocably committed to my choice of costume, jumping repeatedly in and out of the pool in order not to dry off. When the rock star finally arrived, he found me unaccountably standing outside—sneezing, dripping wet and blue with cold. An hour and a half of waiting wet in the wings had dampened, as it were, my “Esther” effect, and I was in bed all the following week with bronchitis.

  There were others, more earnest, who arrived on time. For weeks I’d been receiving letters from someone named Fletcher Jones, a wealthy businessman apparently, now divorced, with a fortune made in computers and a keen eye for pretty women and fine racehorses. Dogged in his pursuit, he was undaunted by either my silence or my curt refusals.

  The letters, handwritten on stationary highly embossed with his name or racing insignia, were oddly proper, strikingly polite, and arrived not in the morning mail but in the hand of a fastidious chauffeur at the wheel of either a large maroon Rolls-Royce or a black Bentley. They were unusual in their formality and framed various requests for dinner, lunch at the track and a tour of the stables (“I know of your fondness for and appreciation of horses… . ”) along with character references from the California racing world: the Burt Bacharachs, the Mervyn LeRoys.

  One morning, a letter arrived that was difficult to ignore. “Dear Candice,” it began, “I am appealing to your philanthropic instincts …” and went on to offer ten thousand dollars to any charity of my choice if I would kindly join him at his house for dinner. He had my philanthropic instincts in a corner; it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  Checking to make sure he existed at all and, if so, had no criminal record (I was willing to be bored for ten thousand dollars but not assaulted), I wrote him that I would be pleased to have dinner and asked that he make the checks payable to five separate organizations at two thousand dollars each: Friends of the Earth, Americans for Indian Opportunity, Save the Whales, a woman congressional candidate and East African Wildlife. A telltale compendium of causes to which he readily agreed.

  One evening, a week later, he arrived as planned. He was nice-looking, I saw as we shook hands, tall, well-built, and surprisingly young, perhaps in his late thirties. His prematurely gray hair was combed in a slight pompadour that gave him a fifties look, and a cream silk collar eased out over the shoulders of his black mohair suit; he dressed expensively but without style.

  There was no chauffeur that night, no Rolls or Bentley. Instead, a black Aston-Martin waited, sleekly gleaming, for him to smoothly shift and double-clutch us to the walls of his villa in Bel Air, its elegant gates mysteriously giving way as we approached.

  The house was huge, a Renaissance palazzo with a replica of the Tivoli fountain sprawling along four acres. Built by one of Chiang Kai-shek’s ministers after lifestyles changed on the China mainland, it now belonged to Fletcher Jones, son of a Texas dirt farmer, who had made $30 million in three years.

  The entire house and most of its contents were beige—a choice he felt best displayed his paintings, and he walked me past Turner, after Manet, Picasso upon Van Gogh, rapidly rattling off data on each, comprehensively, dispassionately, like a fine arts digital readout. No wonder he’s a computer king, I thought.

  A butler appeared bearing long-stemmed Baccarat glasses and two white wines which Fletcher tasted, taking one for himself and nodding toward the other, a Bernkasteler Doktor. “Yes, that’s fine for Madame,” whom I whipped around to see. It seemed that “Madame” was me, and I took the wine that had been specially selected.

  From the beige living room, we went to the beige dining room where the butler (in a beige jacket) served us beef Wellington and asparagus hollandaise. The dinner was delicious and he was a nice man; to my surprise, I had a fine time. While Fletcher seemed heavy and humorless, his goodness was genuine and his loneliness compelling. He looked lost in this life of his, standing ruddy-faced and silver-haired in his bland sea of beige, joyless and disconnected. He talked at length about his sudden wealth, explaining plans to build a kind of Boys’ Town, detailing altruistic dreams, sincere in his wish to help people. An earnest, well-intentioned man struggling against his isolation.

  After coffee and cognac were served in the study (beige), he closed me in the Aston-Martin and quietly drove me home. He saw me to the door, kissed me gently on the lips, handed me an envelope from inside his breast pocket, thanked me and said goodnight. Inside the envelope were five checks for $2,000, neatly typed to each organization and signed by Fletcher Jones.

  The next day, the chauffeur delivered a case of Bernkas-teler Doktor. Surprised and pleased, I called to thank him for the dinner, the checks, the wine, and to say I had sincerely enjoyed meeting him. He asked if I would visit his thoroughbred farm in the Santa Ynez Valley; he could fly me there in his plane, the French chef would prepare Cordon Bleu meals, and, if I didn’t want to stay the night, we could fly back after dinner. He was proper but persistent.

  I politely refused and left, a few weeks later, to make a film in Chicago, where he called me regularly, offering me his jet to visit my family in Los Angeles for the weekend, describing the Appaloosa colt just born on the ranch that he wanted me to have, sending me a beautiful book on the Bauhaus when he learned of my interest in architecture. Gratefully I kept the book, refusing the rest.

  That spring, Fletcher Jones was flying to his ranch north of Los Angeles when the twin-engine plane he was piloting mysteriously crashed into the hills. No explanation was found for the accident, in which he died alone.

  For weeks afterward, guards were posted in front of the villa and the gates bore stark warnings to trespassers. It sat empty a long time, the grounds shaggy and overgrown. Eventually it was bought by Rod Stewart and ringed with barbed wire to keep out admirers. Rod Stewart, evidently, has enough people in his life; he does not live alone.

  At twenty-five, after eleven films, I had still not studied acting, and it showed: a good review was a rare review, and as my awareness of my liabilities grew, so did my terror: each film was more frightening than the last. I seldom slept at night if I was shooting the next day, and yet somehow I was unaware of my fea
r. I concealed my anxiety, my lack of technique, by constant criticism of everything around me: the plastic flowers; the shabby script; the blatant toupees. Deflecting my terror onto my surroundings, I hid it even from myself.

  But ultimately, I could never hide it from others, and it hardly made for a body of work I could be proud of. As a 1970 story in Time magazine put it, “Candice has been bedded by Elliott Gould in Getting Straight, deflowered by Bekim Fehmiu in The Adventurers, and raped by Oliver Reed in The Hunting Party.” So went my image: When I wasn’t cast as the cool, rich dilettante I so resembled, I was the Snow Queen, a natural for rape scenes; the woman men love to defile.

  In The Hunting Party alone, which opened with me being raped by my husband (Gene Hackman), I was then kidnapped by a gang of outlaws, raped in the back of a fast-moving buckboard filled with grain, raped again by the bank of a river by the leader of the gang (Oliver Reed), who subdued me in an English accent with whispers of “Whoa, little filly”; almost raped again by the first guy in the buckboard—this time in a sleepy Mexican village—then saved by Oliver, the outlaws’ leader, who then gave me a slap so hard that I flew out of frame and we had to reshoot the scene. In the end, I was rescued by my sadistic husband, who then shot me in the stomach for going off with other men.

  In this film, Oliver Reed (accompanied to the location in Spain by his mistress and newborn baby) stayed in character off set as well as on—brawling drunkenly, flinging plates of food after fleeing waiters and presenting me with an ultimatum that he actually delivered straight-faced: either we had a sexual relationship during the film or we had no relationship at all; direct contact would abruptly cease and we would speak no further. After I declined his courtly offer, he immediately imposed a vow of silence, speaking to me only when necessary and then through intermediaries, referring to me succinctly as “The Girl” (“Tell ’The Girl’ to get off my mark”).

  At times like those, “The Girl” resented being one. But even my woman’s rage was rarefied and my dreams of revenge were of a particularly Hollywood sort. As a result of repeated movie maulings, I fantasized a movie where the women do the raping and plundering for a change, and even wrote a treatment for a women’s Western about a clandestine female gang that ended with the comely leader spraying the ground around the bruised and beaten bully with bullets, commanding him to “Dance!” till he begs for mercy, then scooping him onto her saddle and riding triumphantly into the sunset.

  But why would I make such movies? Had I no sense of responsibility? No social conscience? No moral stand? Well, yes and no. I was choosing the best of what was available to me, and any qualms I had about inferior or tasteless scripts were temporarily assuaged by lucrative salaries. Feminism was only just beginning to take root and consciousness-raising was still a thing of the future; when it came to roles for women in films, there weren’t many that were much better than the ones offered me. The few roles of substance and dimension were offered to actresses with “serious” reputations—Julie Christie (still), Faye Dunaway (suddenly, since Bonnie and Clyde), Jane Fonda (increasingly, with They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Klute); my reputation was one of decorative appeal. But if I continued to deny being an actress, what could I expect? People took me as seriously as I took myself.

  And sometimes even my physical assets were inadequate. The woman’s part in Soldier Blue was strong-willed and gutsy; it was for this, as well as for the film’s political stance, that I wanted to play it. But the role also called for a lusty, busty lass; I, of course, was neither. The director decided that makeup should try their hand at the problem.

  I was shown into the makup room and told to undress, put on a smock and lie back in the reclining chair. A white-coated, cherub-faced man entered, explaining cheerfully that they were going to make a mold of my breasts so larger rubber breasts could be made to fit over them. They would be flesh-colored and pliant, and would stay on with surgical adhesive. The outline under my costume would look natural, and if I needed to do a nude scene, some makeup, carefully applied, would make it impossible to tell the difference.

  He then asked me to open my smock: he was going to put Vaseline on my breasts, he said, so the casting clay would remove easily. To my amazement, this he did, while I stared beseechingly at the ceiling, wondering, Am I allowed to say “No” here? Am I overreacting? Behaving hysterically? Is one of us crazy?

  He took an impression of my breasts, let the plaster harden and pried it off with neat, sucking sounds. I stared blankly at the impression of my breasts. It looked like a detail of the lunar surface. “Does anyone see this?” I asked. That’s all I need—on the wall next to Jane Russell at the Hollywood Wax Museum, or the Universal Tour.

  “Don’t worry, sweetie.” He patted my shoulder. “A lot of the girls do it. They glue them on and wear thin shirts and no bras and everyone thinks they’re stacked. Once you put ’em on I bet you’ll never want to take ’em off.” He winked.

  If they weren’t padding me in person, they were padding me in posters. When the ad for one of my later films was submitted to the studio heads for approval, they said, “Great—just make Bergen’s tits bigger and the rifles longer and you got it.”

  Sex and violence, violence and sex. Thanks to the public’s current preference for graphic cruelty, the threatened nude scene in Soldier Blue was never shot, and at the last minute I was saved from frontal nudity wearing lifelike plastic breasts. (Would that constitute a nude scene?)

  A movie whose heart, if nothing else, was in the right place, Soldier Blue was based on the white man’s massacre of the Indians at Sand Creek, and was one of the first films to sympathize with the Indian side of our history.

  Recent market research had indicated audience preferences now favored violence over sex, and studio executives arrived on the Indian Village set in Mexico for a powwow with the director. The decision was quickly taken to emphasize the violence in the film, making the massacre scenes even more explicit.

  There was a “prosthetics truck” on the set specifically for the bloody battle scenes, the inside stocked with artificial limbs and every conceivable extremity. Wooden legs swung from the top of the truck and arms were stacked along the sides. Heads stared from stands in wispy dark wigs, headbands and Indian braids, their necks severed clean, arteries dangling, ready for decapitation by the cavalry. Rubber breasts lay neatly in drawers, fitted with blood bags that would burst when lobbed off by the soldiers’ bayonets; and some artificial legs were wired electrically, specially rigged to simulate spasm when run over and severed by wagon wheels. Paraplegics and amputees were bused in from Mexico City for the massacre scene—men and women missing arms or legs, who were fitted with the prosthetic devices and instructed to watch in horror as the limbs were hacked from their bodies, spurting blood and twitching in the dust.

  Though the violence represented was based on but a fraction of recorded history, in the end, when the film was released, it proved too much even for America’s voracious appetite—and possibly for her conscience as well. The film was a success everywhere but in this country; perhaps Americans enjoy watching cruelty on the screen, but dislike being reminded of their own.

  In contrast to most of the films I made, Carnal Knowledge was the perfect experience, one that increased my sense of self-respect instead of diminishing it. It is the film I have always been proudest to be in. Directed by Mike Nichols from a screenplay by Jules Pfeiffer and starring Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margaret and me, it was shot mostly in Vancouver and it was like working in Valhalla.

  Carnal Knowledge has always been in a class by itself. From the moment it was announced, there was the sense that something special would follow, an eagerness to see what Mike Nichols (after The Graduate and Catch-22) would do next. There was some unspoken honor attached to being a part of this film, a feeling of privilege.

  The film was, to simplify considerably, a tale of the wars between men and women. It was divided into two time slots, the late forties and the late sixties. T
he early sequences, set at Smith and Amherst colleges, were designed as strong, spare images, with a deliberate absence of detail, as in a dream. And the entire making of Carnal Knowledge was dreamlike, idyllic—like working in a state of grace.

  For all of us there was an effortlessness about the work, an ease to the acting that came from the precision and generosity of Mike’s direction and the intelligence of the script. The difference showed especially in my work.

  This was a challenge to rise to, not to avoid, and I was good in Carnal Knowledge, the best I’d ever been. And all it took was a great director, a great script, great actors, and a great cinematographer.

  To an actor, some directors are generals and some directors are lovers. The generals are those more at home with epic spectaculars, electronic wizardry, special effects and the coordination of vast logistics than with the subtler, more intricate maneuvers of human relationships. The generals are usually too busy running the war to spend quiet time with the troops.

  I was a washout with the generals. Alone, I was not one to go confidently into battle; my guard went up and I defended myself against the camera with excessive control, desperately hanging onto my dignity in a profession which I felt threatened it. In material with which I was uncomfortable, my embarrassment was especially transparent. And I was long used to provoking directors’ impatience, from early appearances in my father’s first home movies (“Candy, wipe that sick smile off your face”) to subsequent starring roles (“Let’s go again. Jesus, honey, do you have to look so depressed? Just relax, okay, and”—through clenched teeth—“have fun with it.”).