In the early twenties, recovering from the many privations of World War I, America was entering an era of great expansion: Harding’s election in 1920 was less historic than the radio program announcing it, which marked the beginning of broadcasting. In the same year, the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors; and the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote.
Most of these events had scant effect on Edgar, too young to vote, indifferent to drink, inept with women; but throughout the twenties great developments in radio continued, and its ether waves would pull America under its spell and make Edgar Bergen one of its own.
My father—while not himself the perfect hero—had by now created someone who was. Awkward, silent, socially unsuccessful, Edgar created someone who caught people’s fancies when he, most often, could not. Gradually he began leaving things to this dummy—so saucy, witty, self-assured—and learned to let him take over while behind his left shoulder, bashful, sort of beautiful, stood Edgar, as if by accident, listening in amusement while Charlie just wowed ’em. Absolutely knocked ’em dead.
For ten years, Edgar and Charlie traveled “the Sawdust Trail” by rail, moving up from the second circuit to the prized Chautauqua circuit, crisscrossing the country with troupes toppling over with trunks and teeming with animals.
Edgar and Charlie spent the twenties with trunks, their own and others. Shoving them onto trains, tugging them up backstage stairs, wedging them into closets called dressing rooms, lugging them through snowdrifts. For ten years, the two partners lived out of a trunk, Edgar eating, often sleeping, on it, Charlie sleeping in it.
Naturally, not everyone had to live in and lug his own trunk; vaudeville’s female legends now traveled with thirty pieces of luggage, an entourage of chauffeur, footman, perhaps two French maids, and requested that their hotel suites and dressing rooms be redecorated in time for their arrival. Sarah Bernhardt (“the Divine Sarah”) lived not in a trunk but in a favorite coffin—a quite expensive one she wished to be buried in, claiming she slept inside to accustom herself to it.
Lyceum, Chautauqua, Red Path—for ten years Edgar and Charlie worked these circuits, learning on their feet (well, Edgar’s feet) how to dress, move on stage, write and deliver material, shape an act, sense an audience. Become performers. Vaudeville artistes. This they did, and they did it quickly, having only seconds to win over what Oscar Hammerstein II called “the Big, Black Giant”—the audience that waited impatiently under the tent. Restless and ornery, steely and mean: Show me a thing or two and make it snappy, growled the many-headed monster. Miners, mill workers, farmers—they all sat, waiting to be shown a thing or two.
Charlie’s name was now prominently displayed alongside that of his boss. Not that Bergen didn’t tire of being part of a duo, didn’t dream of working solo. He even went so far as to try his own act one afternoon show, walking bravely out on stage alone, without the comfort of his customary sidekick, and performing a mild mixture of magic and illusion and the popular tramp character, waiting, hopefully, for applause. But the Big, Black Giant wasn’t buying: they chewed it up, spit it out, and Bergen was fired by the manager after the matinee.
It was Charlie or nothing, so “Bergen and McCarthy” it stayed. Snapshots show them clowning across the country, posing proudly next to their names on circuit bills. Edgar stands stiffly before “the Big Brown Tent”—stunningly young, slender and fair. Not quite elegant, delicately handsome.
They must have been some days, those ten years of coal-crusted trains and big brown tents and tight-knit troupes, of menacing mine workers (“Here live the most dangerous people I ever met,” Edgar wrote on a postcard home from a town in Kentucky) and blushing Southern belles. It was that moment in time when life is at its most lighthearted and spirits their most carefree, a moment Edgar—not a carefree man by nature—gazed back on many times later, missing the company of clowns.
Those years were finally topped in 1930 by Edgar and Charlie “playing the Palace”—the pot of gold at the end of the Sawdust Trail. Having come from big tents loudly flapping in dust storms and town halls deep in snowdrifts, they stood, speechless, before the splendor of the Palace, variety’s Versailles.
Shimmering majestically on 47th and Broadway, beckoning the brightest stars, the Palace showcased some of the greatest performers of the era: Jack Benny performed there (as the violin-playing half of an act) as well as Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers, Houdini, Al Jolson, the Barrymores, Will Rogers, Adele and Fred Astaire. “The Divine Sarah”—then well past seventy—played the Palace, established it, in fact, and thick-piled bear rugs were laid from her dressing room to the stage to muffle the sound of her wooden leg. She refused to play on the same bill with animal or blackface acts, considering them cruel and degrading, and she demanded that she be paid five hundred dollars in gold after each night’s performance.
This was more like it: no sharing of dressing rooms with animal acts here; this was class. And when Edgar and Charlie stepped out onto the vast, waxed, gleaming stage, trembling more than in all their past ten years, they were blinded by the glare of footlights, lost and little in this great and gilded space. The big time was nothing like the big tent; performers who had gone before tried to tell you but there just was no preparing. Years of training and an entertainer’s instincts took over while the eyes and heart adjusted and sight and sound returned.
Jesus, it was huge out there and packed with more people than the circuit ever saw. This audience sprawled in fat, soft seats upholstered in flowered cretonne, not broken chairs or splintered benches, and overhead hung crystal chandeliers that burst into light like fireworks. The hall was cooled by Siena marble, the fixtures cast from bronze trimmed in ivory.
This was the Palace and it rang with laughter, roared for more of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, who giddily, gratefully took their bows and fairly floated into the wings.
They’d come a long way from the days when lowly “belly-talkers” were barely legible at the bottom of a bill to being the first ventriloquist act booked at the Palace; it was high praise indeed. And that was why, one time in New York when I was nine, he took me to the corner of 47th and Broadway, pointed proudly, and sighed, “Candy, this used to be the Palace. Your father played here years ago.”
No wonder he looked like that, smiling and wistful, gazing dreamily at his past. But / didn’t see any palace filled with magic there on that Broadway block, and I patted a policeman’s horse impatiently, anxious to get to Schrafft’s.
It takes time to know another’s dreams and only now do I understand why we stood there staring at that corner. It was my father’s first, fine dream, and it had come true. I think he never got over that.
Edgar had realized his dream just in time. The closing of the Palace in 1932 symbolized vaudeville’s death. Limping from the blow dealt by silent moving pictures, then crumpling from radio’s coup de grace, vaudeville was finished; its Golden Age had passed.
But the Golden Age of radio was just beginning. Having robbed vaudeville of her brightest stars, her biggest income, radio overwhelmed America with its infinite possibilities, scope and reach. Movie stars and Broadway actors tried a turn on this newfangled, lucrative format whose sophistication and popularity grew at a dazzling pace, despite critics who claimed radio was becoming “moronic” and rendering children “psychopathic” by its bedtime stories.”
The early days of radio saw an awkward age of adjustment: performers panicked at the unfamiliar sight of those tall, thin things called microphones, which were sometimes disguised with lampshades to put early radio guests at ease. Vaudeville and Broadway stars not only had to accustom themselves to working with microphones but to the strangeness of performing in eerily empty studios. Not only actors were thrown off; stepping up nervously to what looked like a floor lamp and singing their hearts out, singers soon discovered that their high notes blew out the delicate tubes of the transmitters, and so the style of “crooning” was born
.
Early radio listeners tuned in to soap operas, mystery shows, singing commercials, crooners, comedians, and quizzes. Under fire from the critics, networks were forced to establish specific codes of behavior, eliminating from children’s programs “torture, horror, use of the supernatural or superstition likely to arouse fear” and banning profanity, vulgarity, kidnapping and “cliff-hanging.” A model program: “Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy.” Of course.
It was the thirties—the Depression. In living rooms and kitchens across the country, families, often hungry, clustered around their radio receiving sets to hear Roosevelt chat by a fireside, Hitler become Chancellor of Germany, Haile Selassie plead for help for Ethiopia, and the Duke of Windsor abdicate his throne.
It was not a world that made much room for unemployed entertainers, for those refugees from vaudeville whose tents had finally folded. Some—-clowns and jugglers, bareback riders, tightrope walkers—could return to the circus. But what about a ventriloquist and his dummy, too young to be washed up, and wondering what to do?
“Everybody looked down on ventriloquism. Vaudeville was dying,” my father told me years later. “We thought we were through, Charlie and I. Then I decided on desperate measures. I revamped my whole act. I had a dress suit and a monocle made for Charlie, and the same for myself.”
Unemployed but resplendent in white tie and tails, they slowly broke into Chicago’s supper-club circuit, getting a week’s tryout at the Chez Paree nightclub. Coming onstage at three o’clock in the morning for their final performance before an almost empty club, Charlie suddenly turned on his master, asking, “Who the hell ever told you you were a good ventriloquist?” Telling Edgar to go back to the farm, the dummy refused to be shushed by a blushing Bergen; Charlie was confident of getting by alone. He then spun on the stunned customers, declaring them a disgrace to civilization, rattling on as Bergen propped him on a chair and slowly backed away.
The management was catatonic, but the customers collapsed in laughter, hooting, howling, pounding the tables. Later, a serene Bergen was found backstage saying, “I simply had to get that off my chest.”
Their tryout became an extended engagement during which they were seen by Elsa Maxwell, then America’s social arbiter, who asked the twosome to entertain at one of her legendary parties. Noel Coward happened to be one of the guests, and after their performance demanded of Bergen, “Who wrote your material?” “I did,” Bergen replied. “Well, it’s damned good,” Coward said and recommended Bergen for an engagement at Manhattan’s swank Rainbow Room, where they were an overnight sensation.
Their success at the Rainbow Room led them cross-country to California for a guest appearance on Rudy (“the Vagabond Lover”) Vallee’s radio show, which was so well received by radio listeners that their one appearance on the show was extended to three months.
Radio Review, 1936:
Standard in vaudeville and now doing his stuff in nightclubs, Edgar Bergen makes the jump into radio with nonchalant ease. He talks to himself and the replies make for amusing entertainment. His dummy bears the name of Charlie McCarthy and is a saucy little fellow. Humor is situational and character-bred rather than gaggy.
Style and delivery are natural and ingratiating. Bergen and the dummy discuss various matters in joshing idiom with vocal mannerisms thrown in. It represents the culmination of years of theater-trained work. An artiste—in the old and best meaning.
Charlie caught the country’s ear and by 1936 Edgar found himself in Hollywood with a radio show of his own, first known as “The Chase and Sanborn Hour.” The season’s guest star was W. C. Fields, and much of the show’s fast banter was based on a feud between Fields (who genuinely hated the dummy) and McCarthy—timidly mediated by the ever avuncular Bergen:
FIELDS: Tell me, Charles, is it true your father was a gateleg table?
CHARLIE: Well, if it is, your father was under it.
FIELDS: Quiet, you flophouse for termites or I’ll sic a beaver on you.
BERGEN: Now, Bill…
CHARLIE: Mr. Fields, is that a flame thrower I see or is it your nose?
FIELDS: Why, you little blockhead, I’ll whittle you down to a coat hanger… .
Edgar bought Bella Vista, a sprawling whitewashed Spanish house that hung high over Beverly Hills, and brought his mother west to live. Nell Berggren, who had hoped to see her younger son become a doctor, or even a dairy farmer, was still somewhat embarrassed by her son’s unusual yet lucrative choice of vocation. In the thirties and forties America rewarded its favorite radio stars handsomely, and her son’s salary—wisely invested in California land—far exceeded the earnings of the doctor she had dreamed he would become.
He was perceived as fairly eccentric by those in the Hollywood community: an odd outsider, soft-spoken, polite—certainly for a show-biz type—a scholarly man, now in his late thirties, never married, who lived quietly and cleanly with his mother and his dummy and whose idea of a perfect Saturday was to stay home alone and spend hours poring over his suitcases of old magic tricks. He tended to be taciturn, uneasy and withdrawn; in every interview, it was always Charlie who did the talking.
With W.C Fields and Don Ameche
Charlie’s room
By 1938, Edgar and Charlie’s popularity was such that they received a lion’s share of the radio audience, their “Chase and Sanborn Hour” being the most widely listened to show in the 8 to 9 P.M. time slot on Sunday evenings. To celebrate their new number one place in the ratings, Edgar and Charlie gave a costume party, instructing guests to come “as your childhood ambition.” And so they did: Edgar as a seventeenth-century magician in top hat, goatee and cape, Charlie in a sultan’s outfit with turban (and harem), Bob Hope as a Keystone Kop, Bette Davis as a cancan girl, Tyrone Power as a pirate, Betty Grable as a belly dancer, Roz Russell as a Gibson girl and Dick Powell as a railroad conductor.
With Marilyn Monroe
Radio was by now so big that it set the pattern for all other fields of entertainment. Radio stars were better known than most stage and screen stars, and Hollywood was paying large sums to sign radio personalities like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and Edgar Bergen for motion pictures.
In 1938, newsreels and front pages featured Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy—or sometimes simply Charlie, neglecting to mention the man standing conscientiously, inconspicuously behind the dummy.
At Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, where celebrities are immortalized by sticking their hands and feet in wet cement, newsreels showed Edgar and Charlie, traditional in their white tie and tails, recording their hand- and footprints in the famous star-stamped court. Charlie’s tiny feet firmly embedded, attendants detach his hands, holding the little extremities high for the cameras as Edgar looks on, somewhat distraught. “Hey Charlie! Over here!” yells a photographer and a publicity man lunges to stick his hand through the dummy’s backflap to turn him. “My God, is nothing sacred?” Charlie snaps sharply, the man jumps back and Bergen moves in, silent and steely, gently picks up his partner and obediently obliges the press, turning Charlie left and right, the two of them responding as one. “Hey, Charlie! Over here!” Edgar, Charlie—it’s all the same.
As their success grew, so did the psychological speculation on the phenomenon of a ventriloquist on radio whose fame was dramatically overshadowed by that of his dummy. Newspapers and magazines tripped over one another in a frenzy to crack the case.
New York Times, 1939:
Psychologists say that Charlie differs from other dummies because he has definite spiritual qualities. His throaty, almost lecherous chuckle is a haunting thing; his whole attitude of Weltschmerz is astonishingly real. He says things that a human actor would never dare to say in public and gets away with them…
New York Herald Tribune:
On the one hand, there is a gay, irrepressible Charlie, through whom, by some strange alchemy, the shy and pallid Bergen is transformed into a brilliant comedian. On the other hand, ther
e is an imperious and dominating Charlie, whose almost-human personality has so eclipsed his creator that Bergen cannot function as an artist alone. “Charlie is famous,” says Bergen glumly, “and I am the forgotten man. I am really jealous of the way Charlie makes friends,” Bergen complains wistfully. “People are at ease with Charlie. He is so uncomplicated.”
For, of course, Charlie is that friendly, sociable side of Bergen that craves companionship and affection. In real life, when people start to respond to Bergen’s friendliness, he may suddenly switch to reserve and restraint—often bewildering and disconcerting to those who know him.
The speculation went on, “BERGEN JEALOUS OF DUMMY…” and on,“BERGEN BUILDS FRANKENSTEIN OF MIRTH AND WIT…” and on.
Edgar himself had little time and less patience with endless ruminations of his exotic relationship with Charlie; he didn’t—well, he couldn’t—hold much with motivational meanderings, with postulations on his life profession in catchy clinical turns of phrase. “Split personality,” “inferiority complex,” “alter ego,” “subconscious expression …” For God’s sake, he’d only created Charlie as a tool in the first place—as a simple steppingstone to success from which he hoped to move into musical comedy, become a young leading man. The trouble was, the tool was too damned good; the tail was wagging the dog.
The ventriloquist, dumbfounded by his dummy, was the outsmarted shadow at the helm, smiling pleasantly, even paternally, one hand discreetly hidden in the hollow of Charlie’s back, the other hand resting lightly, gracefully on the little dummy’s shoulder to steady him as he sailed ahead. Indelibly planting his impression on the country’s consciousness, Charlie would sit back each Sunday evening and in his cocky cackle vow, “I’ll mow you down, Bergen, so help me, I’ll mmooww ya’ down.”
Knock Wood Page 2