Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  That night’s performances went just as well, and my father went to sleep in good spirits. My mother stayed awake most of the night and rose early, tiptoeing from the bedroom, dressing quietly in the other room and, going back in to wake him, proud of her head start on the day. She half-opened the blinds and called to him softly. It was not for several moments that she realized he was dead. His heart had stopped; he had gone peacefully while he slept.

  For my father, there could have been no better ending; it was one he might have written himself. And who can say that he didn’t? That, somehow, he hadn’t made his choice? There was the supreme sense of timing ingrained over sixty years of performing. Just as in vaudeville, he knew when to close.

  I was in Los Angeles, where Kris was in school, but my mother was unsuccessful in her first attempts to reach us. Worried that it would get into the press before she could notify Kris or me, she called Pat Kingsley, a close family friend and my publicist, asking her to help keep it quiet until we could be found. It was Pat who reached me, hours later, and I heard it in her voice on the phone.

  “Candy, your mother’s been trying to reach you; it’s urgent. Please call her right away.”

  Suddenly, I found it hard to breathe. “What happened? Is it all right?”

  “It’s your father. He’s gone.”

  “Does Kris know?” I asked at once, worried about his feelings, deferring the panic of my own.

  “Not yet. We’re trying to reach him.”

  He was not home when I called and I went immediately to the house. They had notified him at school and he had arrived by the time I got there. I found him standing alone in the living room, his head bent, hands hanging helplessly at his sides, weeping. As we hugged, I began to cry.

  That afternoon a friend provided a private plane to fly me to Las Vegas and bring back my mother. The pilot offered me a Scotch before takeoff and, while I hardly drank, I downed it, then another. By the time we landed in Las Vegas, it all seemed a dream.

  My mother was waiting at the airport, looking delicate and dazed. While she’d gotten through the day on her own like a general, she now seemed like a little girl lost. We held each other, then quickly took off, holding hands on the way home. The shock of it had settled on her and she shook softly, telling, over and over, how she found him, the peacefulness of his face.

  The days preceding the funeral were oddly energized, highly efficient, moving at a fever pitch. Family friends stuck fast and there was a gentleness about the house, a loving generosity, with welcome bursts of humor to puncture the tension. Undaunted by the tasks of organization, my mother and I instead found solace in them.

  All my life I had dreaded the death of my father. That will be the Big One, I thought, uncertain that I could cope. But here it was happening, and for me it held no reality. I watched as from a great distance, concerned for others’ pain while allowing none of my own. I was aware of the irony of my surroundings—the replica of the gates of Buckingham Palace at the entrance of the funeral home, the bronzed Bambi drinking at the Pool of Eternal Life; and I knew that somewhere deep inside that building lay the body of my father, which I did not want to see.

  The moment had come, but I kept myself a stranger to it. My clarity and composure were unsettling to me and I felt guilty over the absence of what I always assumed would be crippling grief. In the face of this long-dreaded death, I felt emotionally defective and I waited edgily for the shock to hit. The clinical name for it could be “denial”; or perhaps, under constant public scrutiny as a child, I had learned too well to perform in public, to mask my feelings—even from myself—with crisp manners and an eager, even smile.

  Hollywood funerals, like most of its milestones, are accompanied by the same flamboyance and flashbulbs that glamorize gayer occasions like parties and premieres. Here, even death is larger than life. The funeral is an ennobling event; there is the same indefatigable “the show must go on” spirit, and, hand in glove, the press is there to capture it, swelling the performer’s self-awareness in his moment of mourning, snapping muted studies of grief. The church, while grateful for the publicity, has a hard time holding its own against such savvy icons, such golden gods, and it struggles—often unsuccessfully—not to be upstaged.

  My father, though he called himself a religious man, was offhanded in the practice of his faith, which he would have described as Swedish Lutheran. Having always resented the lugubriousness of many funerals with their open caskets and dismal dirges, finding them mawkish and punishing for those in attendance, he himself wanted no such pomp and ceremony, preferring cremation and a memorial service that celebrated life instead of death, reflecting the spirit of the deceased rather than a religious recruiting campaign.

  My mother and I well knew how he felt; we had discussed and planned the service, arranged for who would speak, and I went off with friends to All Saints’ Church in Beverly Hills to describe it to the minister. I may have tipped my hand upon entering by announcing that we were “here to discuss the Edgar Bergen Show—sorry, service—” correcting myself too late and reminding myself that we were in a House of God, not Caesars Palace. (You can take the child out of Hollywood …)

  Then I got down to business, cautiously broaching the subject of music, explaining that it was being taken care of by a friend of my father’s who was himself writing the arrangements of music we had selected from my father’s life. What hymns were we having? he wondered. Hymns? Well, we preferred no hymns, actually (they would sandbag the show). And the sermon? Oh, the sermon—was a sermon mandatory? He paled. Perhaps a short sermon, I ventured (and hold the brimstone). Why didn’t we just hire a hall?

  Then I named the four family friends who .had kindly agreed to give brief eulogies: ex-Governor Ronald Reagan, Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom, Johnny Carson and Jim Henson, who would be bringing a frog. A frog? Well, Kermit the Frog, I explained. Jim Henson had created the Muppets and my father had been his inspiration (he later dedicated the first Muppet movie “to the magic of Edgar Bergen”); he was closing down production just to be present.

  The minister took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. There’s no people like show people. What’s a man of God to do? Nervously, he gave the go-ahead.

  It was not until later that I realized how well I had been trained for this particular task. What I was giving my father, on the grandest scale, was the Turtle Funeral he had produced for me when I was six.

  “EDGAR BERGEN: VOICES STILLED, Ventriloquist Dies In Sleep at Age of 75” was announced on the front page of the Los Angeles newspapers. “Charlie McCarthy will go to the Smithsonian Museum, the national museum in Washington, sooner than he expected. Edgar Bergen, the man who breathed life into him for 56 years to the delight of Americans of all ages, is dead.” Variety ran a cartoon, bordered in black, of Charlie with a tear on his cheek.

  The day of the funeral, my father had a full house. His was an ending others envied, and perhaps only a true entertainer could understand what it meant. At the service, well attended by his peers, one was overheard saying to another as they entered the church, “You know, I envy Edgar, he went out performing at his peak. I hope it can be the same for me.”

  The service itself went smoothly. The men spoke simply and affectionately, giving short, personal speeches with warmth and wit. Praising his gentleness and humor, Ronald Reagan said, “He was a puckish, pixielike destroyer of the pompous.” Johnny Carson said, “He was probably the most unpretentious man I ever met.”

  Dominic Frontiere, who had begun his career conducting for my father, oversaw the music, arranging the medley of songs for strings—violins, cellos and harp. He conducted it himself, for my father, one last time: a Swedish folk song, the radio show theme, “Charlie My Boy,” and “September Song,” which was sung by Andy Williams. It was a loving, lavish tribute that left many in tears. It paid honor and humor to a man who gave amply to the world of both. It was the farewell he deserved.

  After my father’s death, I stayed a few days a
t the house with my mother. She was still in a state of shock, running on adrenaline, and it would be some time before the reality of it would hit. A closeness had sprung up between us that had only existed sporadically before, and we were easier, more intimate with each other than I could ever remember. One evening the two of us were stretched out side by side on the bed like two best friends at a sleep-over—smiling, sharing secrets, reading over old love letters she had come across in my father’s file. She found a packet tied with ribbon, a collection of her letters to him during their courtship; she was touched that he had kept them and surprised, in reading one to me aloud, at the spunk and humor of their author. “Gee,” she said, smiling at a smartly turned phrase, “did I say that? That’s pretty funny.” And she slipped the letter back into its envelope, musing mostly to herself, “Maybe I wasn’t such a bad kid after all.”

  We went through the family photographs Mary Ellen Mark had, for some reason, insisted on taking, pestering me for months until we had arranged a sitting in June. They were for no professional purpose—she had made them as a gift—but looking through them you could see what had inspired her to persist. There were the four of us in the garden, the five of us; then, each of us, separately, with my father, me holding Charlie in my arms, and, finally, my father, alone, with Charlie, tenderly putting him to rest in his trunk.

  My father had left the memorabilia of a sixty-year career stacked in his office storerooms and it fell to my mother to sort them through. One day I went with her. She had warned me about the amount and variety of what waited there, but there was no preparing for it. The huge room was piled high with one man’s past, and an eccentric past it was.

  For the better part of a day we sifted through magic books, sleight-of-hand manuals, rabbits in hats, crystal balls, magic wands, steam-engine models, hand-tooled Western saddles, variety bills, vaudeville scrapbooks, high-school yearbooks, radio acetates and cases of cameras. There were steamer trunks of dummies’ wardrobes: countless pairs of tiny (size 3) socks, Mortimer’s Boy Scout uniform, Charlie’s cowboy suit, his Indian headdress, a jeweled turban, an embroidered sombrero, and a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap and cape.

  Strewn piecemeal about, as in the scene of some macabre crime, were odd and unattached wooden extremities: a small hand here, a foot there, loose legs, headless torsos—the surrealistic rubble of dismembered dummies.

  My mother picked up a tiny turtleneck with a slit sewn in the back through which my father could reach to manipulate the mouth lever on the head stalk. We shook our heads, laughing, crying and marveling at it all—at this man, his life and all its crazy contradictions—and wondering who he was.

  Clues to that mystery might be locked in the huge, heavy safe in his office upstairs. It was more of a vault, really—massive, well above shoulder height, with a combination wheel like the kind used in caper movies. There was no evidence of a combination and, short of a blowtorch, apparently no access to its contents.

  My mother tried his old combinations—birth dates, addresses, phone numbers—but none of them worked. Rifling through papers and files for a clue to the contents, we found nothing. We were there for hours, like inept safecrackers, my mother racking her memory for ancient numbers, formulas, passwords, secret codes—none of which corresponded. The safe stayed sealed, impregnable, its mysterious contents a secret.

  The very presence of the safe was puzzling, and curiously compelling to us both. The will had been read, the estate was being settled—what more could be locked up inside a safe whose contents my father had failed to mention. Inside a vault whose existence was left unacknowledged, unexplained.

  Suddenly my mother gasped. “I have it!” Rapidly making notations on a pad, transposing letters into numerals, she looked at me. “It’s Charlie!” she said, excited. “The combination is C-H-A-R-L-I-E! Of course. Why didn’t I think of that in the first place?” Reading from the series of numbers as she slowly turned the dial, she paused and looked at me. “You know, your father and Charlie were the same person.”

  The combination clicked softly, the door swung easily free and we held our breath as the inside was revealed. Would it be stacked with neat new bills? Crisply lined with cash? Would there be treasure, secret documents, uncut stones? Living with my father had prepared us for virtually anything, yet my mother and I both leaped back when, at last, we looked inside.

  There—spaced on a shelf on stands—stood three Charlie heads: the cocky, monocled, much-loved original; the angry Charlie, its face grimacing grotesquely; and the old Charlie, the red hair receded to a silver fringe framing the hearing aid, the once-sharp features faded and weary with age.

  16

  A month later I returned to New York to begin work on a film called, appropriately, Starting Over, in a role I’d been reluctant to take. The one I’d wanted was the starring, sympathetic, funny part that later went to Jill Clayburgh; the smaller role of the vain and venal wife of Burt Reynolds who goes down in feminist flames was the one they offered me.

  I’d been dumbfounded, offended. How did they think that I a person of substance, could even begin to play someone so silly, shallow and self-absorbed? How could I possibly understand such an abrasive human being? Not since Tony Curtis in The Vikings had there been such classic miscasting.

  Jill’s role, on the other hand, was wonderful. The Lovable Underdog. Witty, winning, charming, disarming. A woman of thirty-one who lived alone and tried to make a meaningful life without a relationship—both afraid of, and yearning for, emotional commitment. Now there was a role I could relate to. Not the simpering siren offered me—a parody of a character I found pathetic. That woman had nothing to do with me. Did she?

  What if people concluded that I, too, was feebleminded and contemptible? I, who had spent my life insisting otherwise—even when no one was asking. Was all that work to go down the drain now? Worse still, would I be unmasked in the process? That was the problem, of course—the possibility that in playing a fool I would somehow be revealed as one as well.

  But as much as I disliked the part, I loved the script and had always wanted to work with the director, Alan Pakula, whose work (Klute, All the President’s Men) I respected and who had a reputation for getting fine performances from his actors. In keeping with my new resolve to start selecting work for the work itself—not for salaries or locations—I convinced myself to look upon Starting Over as a challenge. Reluctantly, I agreed to do it.

  In the role of a woman who abandons a happy marriage to pursue, with a singular lack of talent, a recording career, I was called on at two points in the script to sing. Very badly. This in itself was not a reach for me, as I sing very badly under any circumstances. But as I worked on the songs in the weeks before shooting, I realized with a sense of dread that in order for the songs to work and be funny I had to be willing to make a complete fool of myself. It only succeeded when done honestly, with no editorializing, no holding back. The second I worried about seeming stupid and pulled back in fear, it fizzled. Pretending to sing badly was not only redundant; it was hedging my bets. I could not sit back, wink at the audience and disclaim my character. I had done that before. Here, I saw that as soon as I played it safe, I was sunk. I had to be committed and unself-conscious. Committed, in this case, to unmasking the fool in myself. Nothing less would do.

  Once I understood this elementary lesson, I began to sing like a bird. Some kind of bird, anyway. A monster had been created, and once I started, I didn’t want to stop. I arrived at my lessons early; my coach graciously braced himself for my exuberant braying; and when, during these sieges, he quickly shifted his look from the sheet music and took a sudden interest in the papaya stand across the street to conceal his laughter, I knew I was on the right track.

  Once I had dreaded the first day’s shooting because it was then that I was meant to sing my first song; but when the time came, I burst on the set like Ethel Merman, eager to strut my stuff. Worried earlier about the abject humiliation such a display before the crew would b
ring, I now shrieked happily while they grinned—holding pillows over their ears—and waited good-naturedly for me to stop.

  I had two scenes in the movie with Jill Clayburgh, and had anticipated feeling intimidated to work with her: I’d seen her in An Unmarried Woman and been so struck by the sureness of her work that my first impulse was simply to back off, to say, in effect, “Oh, never mind me—you just go on ahead.” But I found that I had an unfamiliar confidence: Wait a minute, I’m here too. I’ve made movies for more than ten years, for Christ’s sake—I must have learned something. Alan and Burt, in turn, provided a safe place to take chances, a safety net of security and good will. I had never worked with an actor more generous or supportive than Burt, who worked as hard for my performance as he did for his own. And working with Alan was its own reward; he was everything I’d hoped. It was a set that gave you courage to stick your neck out. And so I switched from “absent” to “present,” and threw my hat into the ring.

  I had been afraid that people would laugh at me. Instead, I found the joy of making people laugh. And I was willing to sacrifice people’s opinions for the freedom that came with my unmasking and the relief of admitting it: Finally, I could stop worrying about whether people thought I was a fool or not. And with the freedom from fear came great exhilaration—the pride of having fought a phantom and won.

  The windfall was that it worked. Reviews of the movie were mixed, but most agreed that as an actress I’d come of age. Wrote David Denby in New York magazine, “She seems finally to have understood what people have always resented in her—the glacé perfection—and she parodies herself mercilessly.” Backhanded at best, but considering my record, this could be construed as a rave.