But for most of us the burning issue was boys. We were on the cusp between childhood and womanhood, that period known as adolescence. Not everyone was ready for it when the time came, but most who weren’t masked reluctance with bravado as we lurched into our metamorphosis. Dressed like young women, we still played hide-and-seek like little girls; but there was a sexual tension to the game now, as if our playing were a kind of training for the mating games that lay ahead. We set our hair laboriously, wore lipstick, moved out of undershirts triumphantly into padded bras, cast aside flats with socks for our first pair of heels and wobbled out on them into the world awaiting us.
And like all adolescent girls since time began, we were learning that parents—hitherto beloved, venerated parents—were a different species: at worst the enemy, often the jailor, at best an embarrassment to the uncertain new sophisticate. I was luckier than some of my classmates in the way I continued to get along with my parents; but in Edgar Bergen’s household, predictably, there were new realms of embarrassment to be explored.
My first boyfriend was a Harvard School boy whose grandmother was Gloria Swanson, and one evening I was busy getting ready to go out with him to a school dance. Robe on, hair in curlers, a nervous thirteen-year-old, I jumped when the doorbell rang an hour early. My father opened it, exclaiming loudly, “Well, hellooo, Larry!” A young man’s voice said, “How do you do, Mr. Bergen?” Dad asked him in, the two of them talking easily in the hall outside my room. “Candy’s just getting ready,” Dad said gaily. ’Why don’t we see how she’s doing?” And I froze as he opened the door to my room, asking Larry to follow him in. Near panic in my robe and rollers, I waved frantically at my father to go back, flapping my arms furiously to stop him, hissing, “No, Dad! I’m not ready!” But he was coming in my room and I could hear Larry chuckling at his heels. Then my father’s face flushed and he doubled over with laughter, and I knew: There was no one with him but his larynx. He had simply been throwing his voice and, well pleased with himself at having gotten me again, he smiled broadly and left the room.
In general, my parents observed my adolescence with more caution and apprehension than most. They were well aware from the first of the dangers of my growing up who I was and where I did—overprivileged and overexposed. They fought the odds against my emerging unspoiled with strictness and structure, hammering at my “sense of values.” This struck me at the time as needless hardship: I was given earlier curfews, a smaller allowance, lower heels, fewer clothes and “pale pink lipstick on special occasions only.”
My parents saw me getting ahead of myself, saw my looks mature before I did. At thirteen, I looked the part of a young woman and even played it convincingly too. In my spaghetti-strap Lanz dresses and my tiny new heels, I handled myself with poise and assurance with adults. I did a young girl’s imitation of a grownup that some mistook for real. But while I had the wardrobe and the looks and the attitude, I was new at this grownup game—though I could hardly wait to play it—and had had no time to learn the ropes.
If my parents worried about my being thrust into more than I could handle, they saw that at most times I handled myself well. And, while anxious about my looking so sophisticated so soon, they were reassured that in most ways I was still my age. So much so, in fact, that my more mature girlfriends were always telling me, as one of the youngest in my class, “Bergen, why don’t you grow up?”
My steady bending of school rules, clowning, wisecracking and throwing my voice in class found me frequently held after school, cleaning blackboards or confined to study hall, but I never overstepped the line into real trouble. And though I experimented secretly and unsuccessfully with smoking, my parents, who firmly forbade it, understood it as peer pressure and were confident that it would pass. My father even joked to friends that “You could smoke a ham in Candy’s bathroom.” If I was getting ahead of myself in some ways, I was still a kid in others.
But that began to change.
My coming of age seemed to coincide with changes in the world around me—or perhaps I perceived those changes more acutely as my eyes adjusted to the world that was suddenly available to me—and certain people in it began assuming sinister and seductive shapes.
For others, whose interest was more predatory than paternal, watched my coming of age. Not those in the traditional family circle of friends, which was close and safe and cozy, but slick newcomers to Hollywood, casual acquaintances and occasional hangers-on who clung fast to its periphery.
They were a younger, brasher bunch of show folk, failures in film, successes on television; tough-talking, hard-drinking men and women who contrasted sharply with my parents’ conservative coterie of soft-spoken, meticulously mannered friends. A new generation was taking over now and they had new—or no—rules.
Every year at Christmas my parents gave a large party, the centerpiece of which was a lavish smorgasbord washed down with glasses of icy akvavit or mugs of hot, spiced glögg. The patio was tented in, a dance floor laid down and a trio played while people toasted the holidays and the New Year.
The year I was thirteen, I remember, the smorgasbord was particularly glamorous. Old family friends were there: the Justin Darts, Jimmy Stewarts, Leonard Firestones, Freeman Gosdens, Ronald Reagans. Fred Astaire danced with my mother and Rex Harrison sang from My Fair Lady accompanied by Henry Mancini on the piano. Even for a child of Hollywood, it was pretty heady stuff.
That night, it was confusing. Newcomers arrived as well—strangers with familiar, famous faces, friends of friends who were welcomed in—quick to make themselves at home, slow to leave.
Jack Warner came to our house for the first time as part of a cluster of guests, wheezing in and wedging his bulk into an overstuffed chair. A plate of food was served him, but before he had a chance at it, a young woman whom I took to be an actress (she had arrived on the arm of an agent) lurched up to Warner and landed on his lap. I was watching from a sofa nearby as the old mogul tried to make out what had suddenly come between him and his food. He did not appear to know this woman—though he knew hundreds like her—and he was a man used to having women on his own terms. As she murmured small talk in his ear, he reached absentmindedly for his glass, turning in my direction to ask what was in it.
“It’s glögg,” I piped up a hair too eagerly, “a hot spiced wine—”
“Shut up, kid,” she snapped at me and resumed with Warner’s ear.
“But I was just—”
“Beat it,” she snarled, and pulled his head to her mouth so ferociously that I thought she might swallow him whole, gnawing at him with sharp, capped teeth as her tight sheath rode up her thighs. (I could see the headlines, STUDIO HEAD EATEN ALIVE AT SMORGASBORD.) She was hungry for something, though I’m not sure it was him.
Maybe this was the Movie Mogul’s Handshake, I thought, the Studio Head’s Salute—for Warner, sprawled like a beached whale as she wriggled on his paunch, seemed indifferent to the effusive greeting from this starving stranger—more eager to get to the dish on the table in front of him than the one on his lap. And after a moment he shoved her aside, heaving himself forward in his chair and, happily seizing his plate, began popping Swedish meatballs into his mouth with his fingers, one by one.
This was my first glimpse of a Hollywood I’d never seen. A mysterious netherworld, a treacherous terrain with doomed and desperate people whom I found frightening but fascinating—the sirens on the rocks of make-believe, who soon began calling out to me. First they approached my parents with offers for me to appear in movies, on television. Offers my parents reluctantly passed onto me, trusting in my judgment even at thirteen and confident I would stay in school. I was flattered and mystified by such attention, but above all, unprepared. Thank you, no. My parents were pleased and relieved.
But then came offers that were more confusing. A few of the older cynics of this fast, flashy crowd—people I did know, but who had never been close friends of my parents—hovered over Hollywood like aging birds of prey and swooped dow
n on our house to hunt. Bitter at being past their prime and drinking hard to forget it, they compensated by cracking loud jokes about my budding maturity, snappy one-liners on puberty and menstruation and bee-sting breasts that made me redden with self-consciousness, while my father seemed not to hear and my mother looked away in embarrassment, apologizing to me later.
They were people who made short work of others and moved on quickly in search of fresh kill. That year it seemed to occur to a few of them that now I might be fair game, and they were suddenly attentive and alert. Men—and occasionally women as well—who had once dismissed me as a polite and pigtailed child now sized me up with narrowed eyes for reappraisal.
In the powder room of Chasen’s, during a Sunday dinner with my parents, the restless wife of a famous producer took my face in her hands and brought it close to her own. “I’d like to see you,” she said huskily. “Where do you live?” “With my parents,” I said blithely. She recoiled in horror. “How old are you?” “Thirteen.” “Jesus!” she gasped, and bolted out the door, like a vampire confronted by a crucifix. Men, on occasion, had had similar reactions to the same question, but I was puzzled now. When I told my parents about the strange exchange, I realized from their expressions that there was more to this woman than mere maternal interest.
Everywhere there seemed to be more to life than met the eye.
While we dated fourteen-year-old boys in white bucks and braces, “making out” in parking lots, angora fluff rising from our sweaters, we dreamed of men in movies—screen stars of the moment. Invariably, for me, it was the tall, tan, blond, blue-eyed ones—-Aryan icons in khakis and crew necks, not the sensual and swarthy types worshipped by most others in the class. (George Chakiris I was willing to go halfway on but Elvis Presley was a heartthrob I never understood.) Engulfed in teenage crushes, consumed by fantasies of romance, I prepared for the time when I would find Him, planning my wardrobe for the day He came to carry me away.
It happened sooner than I expected. My parents now owned a weekend house at Newport Beach, and there people made easy, unannounced visits, some by land, some by sea, sidling up to the slip in sailboats or motorboats as simply as they might park their cars at the curb. It was a close-knit coastal community, a sort of Show Biz-by-the-Sea, and every day was a buoyant buffet, a floating cocktail hour that shuttled from ship to shore.
One afternoon, I saw a boat making for our slip below the house: a sailboat, a racer, docking under power. I ran down the gangway to meet her and help tie her off. She was edging up to the slip—a scrubbed teak deck and a pearl-gray hull—and I stood ready to catch the line. I was not ready for who was tossing it.
There, holding out the line to me and grinning as I gasped, was the heartthrob who hung on my bulletin board, the movie star I dreamed of while drifting off to sleep at night—now, just at arm’s reach, arriving by sea. Friends of my parents waved gaily from the stern and we tied the boat off neatly, leaving it bobbing gently at the dock. It was his boat, they explained, needlessly introducing him; they had decided to drop by for a visit.
Well, my ship sure came in, I thought, following them along the dock. Wait till the gang hears about this.… I sat in a corner on the terrace, at a total loss for words, dumbstruck by the descent of this presence off whom I could not take my eyes for a second.
Seeing his part in my undoing, he came over and sat next to me, asking me simple questions which I answered with great difficulty. Finally, I managed one of my own. “That’s a beautiful boat,” I said. “Do you race her?” Oh, yes—he’d raced her south to Mexico and north up the coast; she was qualified sixth in her class. “She looks awfully fast,” I said. “Sleek hull, narrow-beamed. How many do you carry in crew?” Three, said he, but he could get by on two. Did I race? “Just a few times by myself but I’ve crewed a lot for others.” Would I like to go for a sail on her now? he asked.
Sail with him? I’d seen him sailing in a movie—into the sunset, tanned hands light and steady at the helm, blond hair blowing across bright-blue eyes as he squinted far, far out to sea. I loved that movie. I loved him. “Just the two of us?” I asked, hoping. No problem, he said. He’d taken her out often alone; we wouldn’t be gone long and would stay in the harbor. Just to the jetty and back.
Seeing my excitement, my parents said yes, thanking him for giving me such a treat. He backed out of the slip, I helped him haul up the sails, and soon we were flying. The afternoon wind was picking up and we shot through the water, tacking back and forth across the bay.
This is the greatest moment of my life, I thought, proudly trimming the jibsail, stealing looks at him as the sinking sun turned him copper. Just like he was in the movie, I thought: sailing into the sunset, blond hair whipped by the wind. Blond hair that was strangely dark at the roots, I noticed, buffeted as it was by the breeze, but I thought no more about it as he met my adoring gaze and said, smiling, “It’ll be dark soon—we better go in. You’re a good ship’s hand; next time, I’ll promote you to co-captain.”
Easing alongside the slip below the house, we dropped the sails with their loud rustling, furled the main and stowed the others in their bags. I was blue from the wind and the chill but I did not want that moment to be over. Tying off the mooring lines as slowly as I could, looping layers of figure eights around the cleat, I found I could draw it out no longer. “Thank you a lot,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand, “it was just great.” “Anytime, sailor.” He smiled and pressed a folded piece of paper into my palm. “Keep this between us.” He winked. “I’d like to hear from you. Call me.”
Call me, he said. I watched him take the steps in his Topsiders easily, three at a time. Loose and lithe on long, strong legs. Call me. I quickly peeked at the paper. His telephone. Nothing more. Our secret. Call me.
Monday found me back in school, unusually distracted. Call me. By the end of the day, his name covered my notebooks and my name now merged with his. Pages were filled with endless scrawling to perfect my new signature plus countless designs of our mutual monogram: our initials combined in block gothic.
The piece of paper was limp from repeated folding and unfolding; from fondling. Our secret. I imagined him watching me and I preened accordingly, strutting and self-aware in my movements, showing off and laughing louder; occasionally glancing over my shoulder in case he had slipped into study hall unobserved; playing volleyball with uncommon ardor on the off chance he might wander by the field.
After school, I barricaded myself in my room with supplies of milk and chocolate doughnuts, turning up the radio full blast: “White Tennis Sneakers That Are Black.” Jan and Dean. My favorite. Once more, I took out the piece of paper, reaching for the aqua Princess phone I had gotten for my thirteenth birthday. Call me. And so I did.
He wasn’t home at first; there was no answer. Heart pounding, I dialed nonstop until there was.
“Hello?”
My heart was coming to a standstill. “Hi, it’s—”
“Who? I can’t hear you. Turn the music down.” I dived for the volume knob, and announced myself again.
“Well, hello there, sailor. Glad you called.”
“Hi” had been a lot for me to manage; I had no idea where to go from there. He did. He was shooting, he said, just got back from the set, in fact, and was busy working late every day with a difficult co-star. How would I like him to take me for a drive one night?
How would I like him to … ? “Oh, sure, that would be neat,” I stammered nonchalantly.
“Tomorrow night?” Tomorrow night was no good: my parents would be home. Sailing was one thing; this was another.
“What about Wednesday?” I asked. They would be away for two days.
“Okay then, Wednesday. I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty; I’ll be waiting in the car. Take care of yourself—”
Wednesday. He’ll be waiting in the car. Take care of myself. Oh, my God.
Wednesday afternoon was spent showering and changing. Hours of showers, frenzied setting and spraying o
f hair. As soon as I was ready, I began again, finally settling on the large man’s shirt that billowed over blue jeans with painstakingly rolled cuffs, bobby socks and penny loafers that I always changed into after school. I didn’t want to overdo it: after all, it was just a drive.
Time crept; I added a little more lipstick, a touch of eyeshadow, another dab of perfume. I’d locked the door to my room and unhinged the screen from my window. Now I sat and watched and waited. It was seven-thirty.
At a few minutes past, a pair of headlights appeared through the low fog that sometimes hugs the ground at night in Los Angeles. I wondered what kind of car he had and if I was going to faint. I wondered what would happen if my parents found out; this they would never forgive. I lowered myself out the window, down the vine and darted, crouched like a commando, from palm to palm, zigzagging across the driveway in a bid for cover.
His big black car hovered like a giant manta ray out of the circle of street lamps. As I came alongside, the door swung open: a Cadillac convertible.
Duck tail stiff with hairs pray, redolent of Madame Rochas, I slid across the smooth upholstery, banging my knee on something and sending it clattering. “Oh, a phone!” I exclaimed (relieved at such a handy conversation piece). “You have a phone in your car?”
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