Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  COPYRIGHT © 1984 BY CANDICE BERGEN

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION

  IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

  PUBLISHED BY LINDEN PRESS/SIMON & SCHUSTER

  A DIVISION OF SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BUILDING

  ROCKEFELLER CENTER

  1230 AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  LINDEN PRESS/SIMON & SCHUSTER AND COLOPHON ARE

  TRADEMARKS OF SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.

  DESIGNED BY KAROLINA HARRIS

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  BERGEN, CANDICE, DATE.

  KNOCK WOOD.

  1. BERGEN, CANDICE, DATE. 2. MOVING-PICTURE ACTORS AND ACTRESSES—UNITED STATES—BIOGRAPHY. I. TITLE.

  PN2287.B434A34 1984 % 791.43’028’0924 [B] 83-25139

  ISBN 0-671-25294-1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6712-5294-6

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5174-4

  Contents

  Charlie’s Sister

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Under the Rainbow

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Starting Over

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Photo Credits

  Acknowledgments

  THANKS to my friends for their help and generosity: Luis San Jurjo, Rusty Unger, Mary Ellen Mark, Connie Freiberg, John Calley, and, in particular, Henry Jaglom, who encouraged me to begin this book and stuck fast for years to make sure he saw its end. Thanks also to my publisher, Joni Evans, and my editor, Marjorie Williams, for their attention and persistent prodding, and to my agent, Lynn Nesbit.

  I am especially grateful to my mother for her friendship and support, and most of all to my husband for giving me a happy ending.

  For my family

  Knock Wood

  Prologue

  1952

  “We are gathered here today to say farewell to our little turtle, Toby, who is now departed. He was a brave, good little turtle and he died—How did he die, Candy?”

  A pause. “He was supposed to get food once a week and he didn’t get it at all.”

  “I see, he died because you forgot to feed him and so he has gone to turtle heaven, and we will say a prayer for him today. Candy?”

  “Dear God, please bless my turtle, Toby, and keep him safe and please forgive me for not feeding him. Amen.”

  It is the morning of the turtle funeral. I am six. We are standing in the rose garden; a light rain is falling. The day is pale and gray. My mother, eyes respectfully downcast, is wrapped in a trench coat and carries a calla lily; I wear a hat, veil and shawl over jeans and sneakers and carry a toffee tin containing the deceased. Dena, my governess, wears a coat over her uniform, and clusters with Kay, the cook, who holds an umbrella. Mickey, the gardener, his head bowed, stands silently by with a tiny hoe and shovel to break the earth. There is a man shooting 16 mm. sound and another shooting stills. They are filming my father, splendid and somber in top hat and overcoat, who holds the Northwestern telephone directory, from which he pretends to read the eulogy.

  Though it is a solemn occasion, my father is making us all laugh, and I am trying hard to keep a straight face. I am also trying to remember the words to my song; my father has arranged that I will sing at the service and I am nervous at the thought. It is not so much the singing itself that makes me nervous, nor the presence of the cameras; I am used to appearing with my parents in public, accustomed to cameras. I am nervous about performing well for my father. More than anything, I want to please my father.

  In the elaborate, frenzied preparations and excitement of the funeral, the turtle has all but been forgotten. In my preoccupation with performing well, Toby has almost slipped my mind.

  My governess and I plucked him from the seething turtle tank at the Farmers’ Market. Hundreds of turtles writhed and squirmed in the tank, some whose backs were covered with brightly colored decals of beach scenes and hula girls. Those with the decals died quickly, Dena explained (though ours died fast enough), unable to breathe through the tropical scenes on their shells, so we chose a traditional green one and then selected a home. We settled on a custom turtle dish with an island in its center, shaded by a curving plastic palm, to which we added a Chinese bridge and a porcelain pagoda.

  It was a policy at our house that people took responsibility for their pets—a policy pointedly aimed at me, as I was the only one who wanted them. But a turtle was a kind of “para” pet, resembling a pet only in that it moved from time to time and required scant quantities of food. So scant was the amount required, in fact, that in no time I forgot his food completely. As turtles are the lowest and most sedentary form of pet—popular only for that reason—death does not come to them dramatically, and days went by before anyone realized that Toby had passed on.

  “Candy, do you have a song you’d like to sing for Toby?”

  “Yes.”

  “What song is that?”

  “ ‘The Tennessee Waltz.’ ”

  “Go ahead then. And project.”

  I give it all I have:

  I was dancin’ with my loved one

  As the music was playin’

  When an old friend I happened to see…

  “I think the turtle’s turning over now,” my father says, peering into the tin. Doggedly, I continue:

  I introduced her to my darlin’

  And while they were swayin’

  My friend stole my sweetheart from me…

  “Well, if the turtle’s not dead yet,” my father chuckles, “I’m sure that would really kill him.”

  But I can see that my father is pleased. The funeral has gone well. My father is happy; I am happy. Toby is put to rest in the rose garden. The photographs run in the Saturday Evening Post.

  1978

  It is the morning of the funeral. I am thirty-two. The day is brilliant, warm and sunny. My mother is weeping and wears a pearl-gray suit. My brother, blond head bent, is weeping too. I am wearing a dark-green dress; I do not weep. I am composed, controlled, and I perceive the events as if from a great distance. There are hundreds of people attending the funeral. It is covered by all the press. I am used to appearing with my family in public, accustomed to cameras. I smile at them as I enter the church; it is an unexpected gesture. I am nervous. Once again, I am performing for my father. Wanting more than anything to please. But it is the morning of his funeral, and I will never know if I succeed.

  Charlie’s Sister

  1

  MY Dad and I would spend Sunday mornings in the breakfast room. Me and my Dad: it was our time together and usually it was just the two of us. And occasionally Charlie.

  There we’d be, in the gentle morning light, with the sun slipping through the colored circles in the bottle-glass windows, tossing brilliant spots of blues and greens across the gleaming oakwood floor. From the kitchen floated whiffs of waffles, smells of sausage and, on Sundays, Swedish pancakes heaped with lingonberries twinkling like rubies. My father was a lifelong Swedish loyalist, and the Swedish pancakes arrived in the hands of Simon, the Swedish houseman, hot off the griddle of Aina, the Swedish cook.

  Life was good for me and my Dad in that breakfast room: big, blond people moving softly, reassuri
ngly through a string of golden mornings. And there we were, in our secret Scandinavia, just like a perfect couple, you know, unless Charlie or someone was there.

  When Charlie was there, my Dad would sit him on one knee and me on the other and he’d put a hand on both our necks, and when he squeezed my neck, I’d move my mouth, and when he squeezed Charlie’s neck, he’d move his. As Charlie and I yammered away at each other across my father, mouths flapping soundlessly, behind us, smiling politely, sat my Dad, happily speaking for both of us.

  And whether or not Charlie was there, my father would often spend these Sunday mornings talking—rhapsodizing, really—about vaudeville. About the “Chautauqua circuit,” about “playing the Palace.” His face would fill with light and his eyes would dance, and though I had no idea what vaudeville was and cared less, the way he looked when he talked about those days, like a man remembering a first love, made me think vaudeville was something special. Certainly it was to him.

  Vaudeville: vau de vire, voix de ville. Music halls and minstrel shows, circuses and showboats. In 1903, when my father was born, vaudeville was about to reach its fullest flower, its shining hour. It would be America’s Golden Age too, and for a time the two grew up in tandem—the unself-conscious, wild and woolly spectacle of vaudeville a perfect mirror for the country’s most expansive, sprawling era.

  Theodore Roosevelt cried out against “the malefactors of great wealth” as vast fortunes formed in flashes and huge empires were built overnight by Rockefellers, Fricks and Carnegies—ruthless, iron-fisted, adventurous Americans who knew the knack of spinning straw into gold.

  Vaudeville’s features were as flamboyant as those fortunes: Madame Chester and her Educated Statue Dog; Babu Abdulle—the Hindu Conjurer; Herr Strassel and his Wonder Seals; Isham’s Octaroons—Colored Singers; and W. C. Fields—Unique Comedy Juggler.

  In vaudeville, there were big-time circuits and small-time circuits. The big-time, or “first,” circuits showcased the hot acts, two shows a day, and the small-time, or “second,” circuits three shows a day with entertainment geared to the rural, unsophisticated mentality of the farmer and his family in America’s middle.

  At the turn of the century, much of midwest America was settled by Scandinavians; they headed straight for those parts of the country that resembled most closely their own and duplicated communities of fair-haired crisp efficiency on the lush, rich land so scarce at home.

  Towns of towheads with bright blue eyes were strung across new states like Michigan and Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. These were people from the land of Ibsen and Strindberg, Munch and Grieg—tall, pale people, stern and strong. Without so much as a backward glance at the fjords and the midnight sun, they resumed the productive severity of their spare and structured lives. Weathering the sub-zero winters in gleaming kitchens by wood-burning stoves, patiently waiting till spring to turn spotless cows out into tidy green pastures, they were a race of industrious introverts, controlled and uncomplaining.

  It was people like these who were my grandparents, Nell and John Berggren, who left their life in Sweden for America’s Midwest, bought a dairy farm in Michigan and raised two boys, Clarence and Edgar.

  And it was people like Nell and John Berggren who made up the audience out in front of the stage under the tents of vaudeville: hard-working, religious farmers and their families, who wanted their entertainment cheap and wanted it clean. And it was these shows, these second-circuit stops for the hicks and rubes in the heartland, that Edgar Bergen and his brother went to see—sometimes sneaking in under the crackling canvas of the tent, sometimes paying a nickel for a seat on the splintered benches inside to watch, with wide eyes, the world of vaudeville.

  From 1875 to 1925—for half a century—vaudeville was America’s favorite form of entertainment and a vital part of the middle-class life. Then, perhaps more than at any other time, America was a land of magic. Hocus-pocus, razzle-dazzle. It was ragtime, the Jazz Age, when everything was believed possible and its people proved it so: the radio (or wireless) was invented, the North Pole was discovered, the Titanic was sunk and the world went to its first war.

  “The players are coming! The players are coming!” cried the tidy, small towns as the vaudeville troupe pulled in, hot and dusty, to “haul up the rag” and hustle the hick, to find beds for themselves and barns for their animals. Outside the tent, sharp-eyed hucksters hawked their wares and stalked their prey, selling cure-alls to suckers, “liver bags” and “electric rheumatism belts,” sneaking snootfuls of “nose-paint.”

  Vaudeville was a paradise for quacks and the nimble-footed and light-fingered con men who slipped smoothly through the bobbing sea of straw hats called “katys,” past men chafing in their “iron” shirt collars, and happily picked pockets.

  Many of the performers were orphans, kids from broken homes, who came from grim, big-city tenements and slums and turned to show business as one of the few ways out. Tough-talking, fast-moving, they started as street entertainers—singing and dancing on corners and in back rooms of bars—and escaped from their neighborhoods into a troupe and a tent.

  And the hotels hung up the signs warning, “No Dogs or Actors” and the “towners” locked up their daughters and hid their valuables and the rubes nailed shut their barns because these players were tricky and had sticky fingers; it was common sense and common knowledge.

  If vaudeville was an escape for the performers, it was for the audience as well. Comedy was the essence of vaudeville and the tents rang with raucous laughter at jokesters, jugglers, hobos, tramps, tumblers, tank acts, midgets and magicians. “LaBelle Titcomb” sang opera arias while riding a white horse, “Monsieur Marno” played the piano standing on his head, “The Human Tank” swallowed frogs and emitted them alive. These performers took life and turned it upside down and inside out, and this, when he crawled under the tent to peek, is what Edgar Berggren saw. He saw an enchanted land where anything was possible, where people were paid to practice magic.

  Edgar was the younger son, the gawky one: moody, maladroit, self-conscious and shy. The dazed dreamer. For him, sitting spellbound under the tent, vaudeville was Valhalla. At eleven, thinking he might try to make his own magic, he sent off a quarter and received “The Wizard’s Manual” in the mail. It taught “Secrets of Magic, Black Art, Mind-reading, Ventriloquism and Hypnotism” (including a chapter on how to cut a man’s head off and put it in a platter a yard from his body), and Edgar went right to work.

  The first place he tried throwing his voice was into an apple pie his mother was taking from the stove: the pie, in a tiny, high-pitched voice, shrieked, “Help, help! Let me out! Oh, thank you, thank you.” This, to a Swedish Lutheran from the Old Country, a woman with a neat blond bun and wire spectacles, in dark dresses lit by pale lace collars. A good and fastidious woman whose pies were now talking.

  Soon the house, the farm were alive with voices. Nell would jump as she grabbed a babbling broom, start at disembodied chuckles, open the door at cries for help, to find no one. The house was full of phantoms; it was enchanted, filled with mystery and magic, as Edgar tried to read his mother’s mind, make the dogs disappear, pull his father’s rabbits out of hats.

  Edgar was practicing, and getting pretty good, too.

  John Berggren died when Edgar was sixteen, the family moved from Michigan to Illinois, and the two boys went to work, Clarence as an apprentice accountant, and Edgar in a silent-movie house where he stoked the furnace, operated the player piano and ran the projector. But Edgar’s real world had become one of illusions—deceptions of hand and voice—and he would disappear for hours on end to study magic tricks and practice ventriloquism, developing his diction, projecting his voice, controlling his diaphragm and the flexibility of his lips. Creating a character.

  The character he created—and the companion with whom he would spend the rest of his life—was based on a quick-witted, redheaded Irish boy, close in age to Edgar, who sold newspapers on a corner in Decatur. The boy’s name w
as Charlie, and he was a bright and brassy kid, confident, cocksure. Edgar passed him every day and then made sketches, which he gave to a barkeeper called Mack, who was also something of a woodcarver. First working with Edgar on a clay head which would serve as a model, Mack then carved a dummy whom Edgar christened “Charlie,” after his inspiration, and “McCarthy” after Mr. Mack. “Charlie McCarthy” had come alive.

  The head, made of pine, was empty but for a rubber band that ran from the inside top of the skull to the back of the neck. The backbone was a broomstick, nine inches long, that terminated in a semidisc hinged to the neck. Along the hickory spine, trail cords were attached to the lower jaw. The dummy weighed forty pounds, wore a perfect size 4, and took size 2AAAshoes. A simple enough piece of construction, hardly a work of genius, and yet…

  Soon the dummy was putting Edgar through high school, answering roll calls for missing classmates. Their first public appearance was in Chicago in an amateur tryout paying five dollars a night. Edgar was doing a ventriloquism-and-magic act; the manager said, “Berggren, you can stay if you cut the magic out.” He did, at the same time neatening his name, which soon appeared in tiny print, minus an r and a g at the bottom of a second-circuit vaudeville bill. “Edgar Bergen—Voice Illusionist” was preceded by “The Great Chandor—Armenian Strongman.”

  Ventriloquists (also known as “belly-talkers”), strongmen, jugglers and gymnasts—hung from the lowest rung in vaudeville, were more common in carnivals and sideshows. But Charlie’s fine pine hand began changing the established order of things and soon Chandor—who lifted pianos—received less pay and less applause than this dummy, McCarthy, who also made merciless fun of him.

  Reluctantly returning from his first summer on the second circuit, Edgar switched from vaudeville “vent” to freshman at Northwestern, where, to his mother’s great relief, he dutifully enrolled as a premed student. But he continued giving shows with Charlie, as much for an excuse to perform as to pay his way, and soon transferred to the school of speech. In the end, lured by Charlie’s growing success, moving closer to his destiny with a dummy, he left without completing his studies, dashing his mother’s dreams of his becoming a doctor.