Itinerant Italians and Arabs migrated to Gstaad in the school season, trekking into the Bernese Oberland—the fertile crescent of finishing schools—as if to a souk where young, nubile heiresses could be had for the asking—or the taking. Some found work as waiters in the schools themselves, and some found an heiress they could call their own—a result more often of an untimely pregnancy than of true love.
Montesano was staffed with loyal retainers and had no job openings, but the men were not so easily put off. Walking back from the main chalet to their own after dinner, girls took to traveling in packs as protection against the short, wiry commandos who would spring from the bushes along the footpaths at night to try to tackle an heiress and bring her down.
Theirs was not the subtle school of courtship but a more direct approach, acrobatic rather than romantic. One night, after lights out, as we sat huddled in a second-floor bedroom smoking a butt scavenged from the balcony, we looked up to see, neatly framed in the French doors, a naked male torso hanging from the ledge above. His head was blocked by the doorsill but his body swung slowly, triumphantly, suspended like a phantom ham, before us.
When we shrieked (as much in excitement as in fear, for the Alpine nights are long), he dropped without a sound into the snowdrift below and vanished into the forest. The next day it was reported to the headmaster and we were called in to give an account. Could we give a description? Well, not a traditional one. Was he tall? Was he dark? Oh, he was dark, Monsieur, and not too tall; well-built, though, and muscular, about one hundred forty-five pounds. Did we see his face? His face? Non, Monsieur, we saw him clearly, but we did not see his face.
On weekends, we would bike to nearby villages, hike the mountains, skate on frozen ponds or take the train to Lausanne and drink. On our own and far from home for the first time, we fanned out in search of bars where age was no object and where exotic names took on new meaning: “Stingers,” “Whiskey Sours,” “Grasshoppers,” “Martinis,” “Daiquiris,” “Negronis” were often downed one on top of another.
In the afternoon, when we met at the station to go back to school, some girls would invariably be missing, so we formed and deployed search parties to find them—their hair soaked with sweat, matted to faces the same color as the floor they were lying on, usually in the bathrooms of bars. Passed out after having thrown up, they lay happily on the cool, clean tile, still crisp in their no-iron knit travel suits.
Then one of us would call the house mother, announce ourselves briskly as mothers or aunts, apologize for keeping the girls too long in our suite for tea and promise to have the chauffeur put them on the next train.
In winter, Gstaad was in her glory. Glamorously swathed in snow, the village shone and glittered as people filled the once sleepy streets just to get a glimpse of her. Royalty arrived and behaved as such, gliding by in pale Pucci aprés-ski wear. The young Aga Khan seemed unpretentious, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton didn’t. Jingling down the snowy street in a horse-drawn sleigh, lavishly bundled in furs, heads thrown back in throaty laughter, they gave royalty a run for their money that year and won hands down.
As soon as the snow fell, we spent each afternoon skiing under the cynical gaze of ski instructors with tanned poker faces who had seen it all. Our brother school, Le Rosey, migrated to Gstaad from Lausanne for their winter term, a move preceded by weeks of frenzied preparations on our part: shaving of legs, washing of hair, stealing of clothes, skipping of meals.
There were thés dansants at the stately Palace Hotel, miniature hamburgers at Charlie’s Tea Room, fondue dinners at the Olden, and ski parties at the Eagle Club on the summit of the Wasserngratt. On moonlit nights we would stand on our balconies and watch as a string of lights weaved its way down the pale, distant mountain from the cozy restaurant on its peak. Skiers with torches floated silently down its face, au flambeau, till, one by one, the lights all disappeared.
A few parents came to Gstaad to spend Christmas with their children, and fortunately, mine could be numbered among them. December found me excitedly meeting my parents at the train station, eager to show off the effects of three months in Europe, the patina of refinement I had so proudly acquired abroad.
In Gstaad
But the first patina my mother saw was the one on my hair. “What do you have on your hair?” she gasped, eying the platinum rinse that had left it the color of old cutlery. “Moon Mist,” I replied proudly, grandly squiring them to a taxi to the hotel.
“Shall we go down and have a drink in the bar?” I suggested, once they had checked in. “The Burtons are here,” I rattled on, carrying the conversation so adroitly that I failed to notice as they slipped into shock, “and the Aga Khan. And I have to take you to the Eagle Club for lunch. …” Nonchalantly ordering “un Bloody Mary” from a waiter who smirked at my finishing-school French, I then proudly produced a pack of Salems, flipped my Zippo and expertly lit one up.
It was all un peu de trop. My mother looked as if she was going to faint and my father seemed frozen, turned to stone. In the fall they had left a fair fourteen-year-old; by winter, they returned to find Forever Amber. It was hardly the mastery of these skills that they had had in mind.
“Candy, is that all you’ve learned here in three months?” my mother asked. “Smoking and drinking and bleaching your hair?” It was, basically, all I’d learned, but I took great pride in having acquired these suave and sophisticated skills, as essential to Alpine survival as a Swiss army knife.
My parents were devastated by the pseudosophisticate they found. In only one semester away at school, I’d managed to become all they’d tried to protect me from at home. Asking me to their room the following day, they sat me down for a long and emotional talk that brought me back to my senses and my age. I was secretly relieved that they had come to rescue me, thrilled to be a child again—to stop playing Simone Signoret and go back to Sandra Dee. Sheepishly I cast Salems and stainless-steel Zippos aside, washed the platinum rinse from my hair, went on the wagon and returned to my beloved hot Ovaltine. The Prodigal Child had come home.
In fact, home was looking better and better when seen from afar. I had missed the security of my family, the familiarity of old friends. And in some ways, that Swiss Christmas, it seemed as if I’d never left it—-that Hollywood that year was here.
Ardis and Bill Holden—whose eldest son, West, was my Le Rosey boyfriend—gave a lunch at their house on Lake Geneva, and friends reunited at Jórdis and David Niven’s chalet near Gstaad for Christmas dinner. Jamie and David Junior were there. In childhood, we had been fast friends. The first Christmas we’d spent together I was five, and my father took all of us—dressed in our “Hoppy suits”—to a broadcast of his radio show to meet Hopalong Cassidy, dressed in his, who was appearing as a guest.
Once impatient to get away from home, I was now impatient to return to it. The rest of the school year sped by, and finally I arrived in Beverly Hills, chic in my chignon and Italian heels, quoting French and carrying Proust (whom I hadn’t yet read, only carried).
As summer at home wore on, I shed my European affectations and acquired some American ones in their place. I was learning to play parts in life with almost frightening aplomb, switching masks with alacrity; surprised and a little scared that so few seemed to notice or to challenge my assuming such sophisticated roles.
The fall of my fifteenth year, I gratefully surrendered my status as an only child. All my life I’d longed for a flesh-and-blood brother—a real one—wistfully watching “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Life with Father,” “Leave It to Beaver,” suburban fables that glorified the all-American home, where life is a situation comedy and brothers and sisters argue endearingly over record collections but defend each other to the death. The only brother I’d ever fought with was Charlie—scripted bickering on the radio—and the boundaries of that brother-sister relationship were blurry at best, as bogus as a Charlie McCarthy dollar bill.
As an official only child, I was accorded the privilege—and
it was considerable—of enjoying undivided parental attention. The downside was that I never knew attention came any other way; I’d never had to learn to share it. In the unique position of one and only child, I was, of course, the undisputed favorite, a title I clearly relished.
But I was also a lonely child, easiest with animals. I envied large, expressive families, and what I wished for most was a brother. A sister was an obvious second choice—less interesting to a tomboy like me (and also more threatening, especially a pretty one). No, what I wanted was a brother, someone I would fight to the death for; someone I would be willing to give my life for. And that is what I got.
If he arrived a little later than I expected, my parents hadn’t planned on it at all. One day, when I was home from Switzerland for Easter vacation, my mother had sat me down nervously for a talk: “Candy, I have something to tell you and I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it; I’m not sure how I feel about it myself. It was a surprise to your father and me; we hadn’t planned it and we—You see, I’m going to have a baby.”
It was some news. “Oh, Mom, that’s wonderful,” I managed, as we both swallowed hard and fought back the tears. “You mean you don’t mind?” she asked. “Things will be different after all this time; I could understand if you—” No, no, I assured her. Nothing could have thrilled—or surprised—me more. But what about her? A woman of thirty-nine, how did she feel about her unexpected pregnancy?
There were risks, she explained, for a woman her age; the possibility the baby might not be born “healthy” terrified her and gave her trouble sleeping. There was not yet the option of amniocentesis as a means to reassure her. There was, besides, a considerable risk to herself; she had had complications in the past, a history of miscarriages.
If she was concerned for herself, she never spoke of it further. When she first told me, her concern was for me and how I would accept this sudden, significant change in all our lives. It was an important talk between mother and daughter but it was also our first intimate conversation as friends. I had never felt closer to my mother than I did that day; she had taken me into her confidence, shared her feelings and fears. She had considered me as a daughter but also as an adult. Was I becoming an adult? Now that a new bird was coming into the nest—did that mean it would soon be time for me to leave?
On October 12, 1961, Kris Edgar Bergen was born. After visiting my mother, who had emerged from long labor weary but well, my father and I went to inspect him. We glanced at each other apprehensively: red and wriggling behind the glass, the Bergen baby looked old and scrawny, hairless and wizened; like a boiled shrimp. We spotted others we liked better but went back to make the best of things. It would take some getting used to.
It didn’t. If anyone had had reservations at first, no one remembered; Kris erased all doubt. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, he grew to be a golden boy who shone with love and spilled with laughter. Never, we thought, had there been a more beloved baby or one who brought more joy to those about him. He dazzled us all and we hovered around him like planets around the sun.
My mother radiated a new sense of serenity, and my father, at sixty, was born again with his new boy. For me, it was the beginning of a bond of such depth and intensity that I was often baffled by it, overwhelmed by the love I felt. Having waited years for my brother, I now made up for lost time, appointing myself his champion and protector. He unearthed the maternal in me: I bathed and changed him, fed and rocked him, caring for him like my own child. Impatient for him to wake, and sorry when he went to sleep, I loved him like a brother but also like a son.
Was I ever jealous? The question was beneath my dignity. A fifteen-year-old girl jealous of her long-awaited baby brother? The idea was offensive, contemptible… . Of course I was. What else could explain my warped behavior, slipping unnoticed into his nursery while my parents were having dinner to make the strange little choking sounds they heard coming from his room over the dining-room intercom.
After artfully interspersing tiny coughs with muttered curses in an aggravated baby voice, “Cough, cough, goddammit, cough, cough, oh, hell”—complaints that came straight from the crib—I returned innocently to the table. Looking up, alarmed, my mother said, “That’s not funny, Candy. You really have a sick sense of humor.” My father suppressed a grin. Where did she think I got it?
“A child of light”
It was a testament to my love for my brother that I swallowed my jealousy. He was a child of light, and I a child of shadows. I envied his courage and confidence, his openness and freedom from fear. It was clear to me, in comparing the two of us, that my brother was by far the better deal. How did he happen, this golden child, so giving and outgoing? How did I happen, the solitary, introspective child, afraid of feelings, who preferred to play alone?
First love fell before my sixteenth year. Johnny Mathis was still holding his own; Ray Charles was big and Stevie Wonder still “Little.” Movies were such melancholy, tragic romances that we weren’t certain romance came any other way: Splendor in the Grass, Strangers When We Meet, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I sequestered myself in my room, talking on the phone, usually to Connie, and lying in bed listening to maudlin love themes on my stereo. Pounded by the thundering, twin pianos of Ferrante and Teicher, pining for my prince to come, I would drift into sleep and dreams of romance.
The last place I expected to find it was on a blind date. A girlfriend fixed me up with Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, describing him as someone with “a beige Chrysler and a great sense of humor.”
“A beige Chrysler?” I asked, slightly horrified. “Isn’t that a little understated? What kind of shoes does he wear?”
As stated in my Shoe Code: Cordovans and wingtips could keep walking, traditional tennies would never lead you wrong, moccasins I’d follow anywhere, and Italian loafers could sweep me off my feet. Shoe fixation was but the first tiny weapon in a budding arsenal of defenses.
The first thing I saw, then, when I met my blind date was that he wore Italian loafers. Terry was twenty, had quit college, and now had a job at Columbia Records, where his mother was under contract. His resemblance to her was striking: he was tall, blond, blue-eyed and freckled, with a great infectious grin.
I liked him at once: he was special, someone whose luck would never run out. There was a touch of Tom Sawyer about him in spirit as well as in looks—a taste for tricks and trouble, an instinct for truth. He was funny and furtive, foxy and playful. There was a sweetness and innocence about our time together, a sense of safety. Our parents thought it was darling. At last I was in love.
Because of the size of my appetite and the impressive volume of my food intake, Terry took to calling me “The Sherman Tanker” (“Tanker” for short) as a term of endearment. If it wasn’t what Kirk Douglas called Kim Novak, well, that was OK. And when, parked in his car in my driveway, Terry turned and whispered to me tenderly, “I love you, Tanker, honest I do,” it was pure poetry to me, music to my ears.
Love was not quite like the movies—sometimes tortured, not yet tragic—but it was also full of fun: Number 11s at Hamburger Hamlet, malts at Wil Wright’s, Sammy Davis at the Coconut Grove, Lake Arrowhead with Terry’s parents, Newport Beach with mine, and the famous egg fights.
In time Terry got itchy. Terry’s friends were older, racier members of Beverly Hills’ Junior Rat Pack—Frank Sinatra’s kids, Dean Martin’s kids, Danny Thomas’s kids. Hollywood’s young elite. His life was just beginning, becoming his own. It was fast, it was free; I was not. This was no place for a high-school senior in saddle shoes who was flunking Latin and getting grounded. I saw him less and less; love was getting more and more like the movies.
Soon, I began to hear that he was driving around town in his convertible with a platinum blonde named Jackie de Shannon. She was twenty-four and a rock star. She wore a hot-pink sheath with matching high heels. She had a hit single. She did not have homework.
I received a hastily written farewell citing irreconcilable age differences
and hoping we’d always be friends. I thought I would die; I didn’t. But under my senior yearbook picture that year (as under hundreds of others inspired by Natalie Wood’s reading of it in the film) ran the quote “Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass… .” You know the rest.
That year, my last at Westlake, I was elected May Queen from the senior class. Since first grade I had watched wistfully as, year after year on May Day, the May Queen made her way, to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” down the Great Lawn. There, enthroned with her court, she received the homage of the rest of the school—maypole dances, Mexican hat dances, Philippine folk dances and modern dances in baggy leotards to the love theme from Romeo and Juliet. A true girls’ school tableau.
Though my past was hardly heaped with laurels, May Queen was not the only honor I reaped at school. I was student body vice-president, had received awards in sports and had made an occasional honors list. But this honor, oddly, I felt was mine to receive; the election struck my secret special self as a redundant procedure.
How was it I had come to feel so entitled?
From birth, I, my family, my life had seemed different, special. And deep down, despite all my insecurity, I was convinced, paradoxically, that I was privileged—as by some divine right of queens.
Mine were no run-of-the-mill delusions of grandeur; they had been reinforced at every turn, from my early appearances with my father on radio to the death of my turtle, who was buried like a head of state. Even my father’s office struck me as some eccentric throne room—swelling with regal memorabilia, rhinestone-studded medallions, gilded awards and trophies that, to a child’s eye, glittered like crown jewels. And the hundreds of likenesses of Charlie (a likeness of a likeness) flashed on everything from cuff links to clocks—deified, immortalized, like the head of some great if daffy dynasty.
Knock Wood Page 9