This was true—-and there were others who were even more at a loss. I was a publicist’s nightmare, and there were many who would have been thrilled never to see me or my shiny new prospects again. The more the publicity, the greater my glibness; my arrogance seemed to increase in a direct ratio with my discomfort. Perspiring publicists would interrupt me hastily, nervously explaining to an interviewer, “I think what Miss Bergen means is … “—anxious lest I offend yet another segment of the population or, worse still, his boss.
A study in graciousness I was, nary a stone left unturned as I went through late adolescence in print, taking petty potshots in the press. I sideswiped everything from where I grew up—sniping at the surrealism of my hometown, describing Beverly Hills as “a modest suburb of Bel Air with vinyl trees and artificial grass and no garbage cans on the street”—to where I went to school—lamenting “the provincialism of my college campus,” and declaring that “the only good thing to come out of Philadelphia is the cream cheese”; to acting—announcing that “actress is synonymous with fool”; to God—forsaking even the Almighty by attacking the hypocrisy of the church, declaring my half-baked atheism in a cover article of a family weekly, of all places, titled “Poor Little Rich Girl,” which brought a flood of letters and pamphlets saving my soul.
They weren’t the only ones worried about my soul; my parents were hurt and incensed. What had gotten into me? Why was I saying such things? How could I, of all people, be so bitter? So negative? Had my childhood been so miserable? My parents that cruel? Being born in Beverly Hills such a burden? No, no, I would mumble, eyes downcast, head drooping in shame; I didn’t know why I did it, I was sorry. It was only that all these people were suddenly listening to me, taking notes; my tongue took off without telling me, there seemed to be no stopping it.
It was not as if I were unused to the public eye; but this was my first exposure to the kind of lacerating publicity Pauline Kael wrote in Life and it was devastating, perhaps all the more so because I knew her harsh appraisal was astute. Another testy passage said, “She doesn’t know how to move, she cannot say her lines so that one sounds different from the one before. As an actress, her only flair is in her nostrils.” Kael was on the nose. Nevertheless, I was stunned to be punished so severely on my tentative first time out.
“The Golden Girl,” “the new Grace Kelly,” “Edgar’s daughter,” and “Charlie’s sister” was “cool,” “poised,” “candid,” and “outspoken.” They seemed to have a better idea of who she was than I did, and I met their expectations with a studied indifference that must have been infuriating. It was a bad unconscious choice, a misguided attempt to try to control a destiny that was suddenly getting out of hand. I was being pulled away from myself before I had a chance to find out who that was; furious with myself for caving in so easily to something that had seemed inevitable, defeated in the desire to be someone better.
Ponderously proclaiming my interest in “the intellectual side of the camera,” lamely insisting that I wanted to “succeed as a person, not as an actress,” I went on, to anyone still awake, “I want to retain my curiosity about everything. Anyone who’s not concerned about how they develop as a person is doomed.”
Spoken like a true Calvinist. Clearly, I was not merely concerned but obsessed; wondering, perhaps, if I were not doomed already—lost in Movieland, where there were few known survivors. For not only had I made one not-so-“little” film; I’d just accepted an offer to do another. The publicity for The Group had caught the eye of producer-director Robert Wise, whose films included West Side Story and The Sound of Music; he was preparing to shoot The Sand Pebbles, a best-selling novel about American gunboat diplomacy in China in the 1920s. It was a major and prestigious production, due to start in Taiwan in the late fall, starring Steve McQueen. Would I test for the part of the missionary to co-star opposite him?
Would I? Well, since it’s only temporary … one more couldn’t kill me. Could it? This was Taiwan—the mystery of the Orient. This was travel. This was Steve McQueen.
This was fate. My atheistic natterings in the press aside, I did worry about my salvation, strongly suspecting that there was no small truth in the ancient belief that the camera steals the soul. The forces pulling me into closer and closer proximity with cameras were clearly stronger than any opposing ones of my own, and still I swore I was not going to let them get me. They were not going to steal my soul, by God, and, like a woman with her purse in midtown, I clutched it fiercely to my chest.
“Tell me, what’s it like being so beautiful? Is it hard to be so beautiful?” grins the generous, genial talk-show host. Turning to the audience, gesturing to me, “Isn’t she beautiful? How did you get to be so beautiful?”
“Oh, gee, Merv, I don’t know. I’m not beautiful”—flushed, self-conscious. Eyes modestly averted, demurely downcast.
“Do you ever get tired of hearing it though? You know, the constant compliments, people always telling you how beautiful you are … .”
“Oh, gosh, I don’t know, I don’t really think about it all that much. …”
When my article on The Group ran in Esquire, people refused to believe I wrote it and persistently asked who the real author was. Hold it, pal, quit patronizing. There’s someone in here, you know.
Something about the way I looked seemed to matter so much to other people; in fact, for a time, it seemed to be the only thing that mattered, leaving me to feel beside the point, practically an intruder on my looks.
In photos of me taken then, I see something of what made them take notice: a confused young woman, posing ridiculously, eyes heavenward, nostrils flared, already beginning to believe them. A girl growing armored and arrogant, trying too successfully to hide her terror. Trying to be whatever people expected of her, trying to take her looks as seriously as they did—and doing pretty well at it, too.
Men seemed to want me to be more than I was, and women to want me to be less. That how I looked made so much difference to people completely confounded me, and I developed a round-shouldered, head-ducked shamble to discourage attention I knew I didn’t deserve.
Yet, in no time, I was hooked on the flattery habit. It was reassuring to a girl of nineteen, insecure and eager to be liked. In New York I’d quickly fallen in with a glib and glamorous crowd on whose periphery I hovered apprehensively in my Puccis, self-conscious about shaky social credentials in a tough and tony crowd. They were that cross section of jet set, haute monde, café society and art world that would come to be known in the seventies as the Beautiful People. Or B.P.
My qualifications—my looks and my small portion of fame—seemed tenuous next to theirs. For this crowd was comprised of European nobility (Hohenloes, von Furstenburgs, Poniatowskis, Pignatellis) and American dynasty (Kennedys, Cushings, Vanderbilts, Fords); of Greek tycoons and Italian industrialists; of high-strung or strung-out heirs and heiresses; and of a few celebrity artists—Dali, Capote, Mailer and Warhol.
I was dazzled dumb by all of it, flattered to run in such fast company, thrilled even to have a peek. Here was acting: if I was over my head in work that summer, unsure how to perform my part, it may have been partly because I was working so hard at the role I’d selected in real life.
When during this string of social summer nights I was introduced to a tall and elegant Austrian count, an “older man” of thirty-seven, I was riveted as much by his innate sense of superiority as by his strong resemblance to Stewart Granger. He was intelligent and refined, and my insecurity was the perfect complement to his sense of droit du seigneur. When he peered at me across a crowded dinner table and exclaimed, “Good God, what have you done to your hair? You look positively bovine,” I blushed the color of my scampi and slid down in my chair. Who could resist such a man?
In no time I was putty in his hands—in the hands of this older, assertive man; in the hands that looked so much like my father’s, I noticed at once. Even in attitude, they were much the same. Formal in manner, distant and dignified at times
, affectionate and approachable at others.
He swept me off my feet, and then off to Europe. The Group and its nerve-racking publicity were over; The Sand Pebbles wasn’t to begin until November. So off we went to the continent, first for a visit to the count’s ancestral home, then for the fall bird-shooting season.
This was my introduction to real aristocracy, in droves: people of title, the distinguished issue of some of Europe’s oldest families. “Old” is the operative word here; one would have thought they had been alive for hundreds of years, rather than just their family names. Their voices were strained with chronic boredom, their features frozen with eternal fatigue.
Even their houses were remarkably, unrelievedly ancient; the very air was humid, heavy with age. Their interiors seemed to indicate that the families within them went back to before the beginning of time; for these were rooms where time had obediently stopped somewhere just before the Industrial Revolution, where high-ceilinged rooms were quiet and cryptlike, musty with the dust of ages. The heavy fringed drapes, swagged back with silken cords, shut out the present and enclosed the past, making the rooms even more oppressive—even more impressive—in their cool and stately gloom.
Especially impressive to one from sunny southern California, where it was difficult to distinguish the interiors of houses from the outsides—the rooms were so bright and airy, so flooded with light, pale and pastel, open and new. There was not much in those rooms one could point to and say, “Oh, that’s been in my family for years.”
Being a ventriloquist’s daughter from Beverly Hills didn’t get you very far in this crowd. These were legitimate aristocrats, not Hollywood royalty; not imposters, like me, who had grown up under the delusion that I was a princess, who was only crowned Queen of the May. This crowd knew the difference; these princesses were real.
And these people looked sideways at show-biz folk, a colorful but shifty bunch toward whom the proper attitude was cautious curiosity. The American West was, to them, Fron-tierland (though they found San Francisco “charming”); a place with no past, devoid of culture, filled with movie stars and cattle rustlers. When, during dinner parties in these houses, guests were introduced—“The Prince of This,” “Le Baron de That,” Tu connais la Comtesse” “Have you met the Princess?”—I fumbled with my French and my forks, stung with the shame of being “Miss Bergen from Hollywood,” whose father was in the “show” business, famous for his dealings with dummies.
Then there was the especially unfortunate part of having to explain to European nobility what my father did, when most of theirs had never done anything except shoot animals—the sole subject for which they showed any enthusiasm.
“Bergens had McCarthys and Snerds in their family tree”
“My father is a ventriloquist,” I would begin.
“What on earth is that?”
Oh, God. “Well, he has these dummies—large dolls, sort of—and he talks to them, or makes them talk; well, they talk to each other, actually—”
“Really! How amusing. And where does he do that?”
“On the radio.”
“Talks to dolls on radio. How extraordinary.”
After a while, I just said he was in real estate.
I am ashamed now of my shame then, and it never occurred to me that my background might be more exotic than theirs—that Bergens had McCarthys and Snerds in their family tree, rabbits in hats, cards up sleeves, and spoke, if not in many languages, in many voices.
And I had a tad of that talent as well. Arch and eager, unbelievably affected, I now spoke with just a trace of transatlantic lisp—in a voice that had nothing whatever to do with who I was or where I came from. I don’t know where I dredged it up—it was just a ridiculous social accessory of the time. That’s how those people talked and, having inherited a talent for mimicry, that is soon how I talked, too.
In no time at all I had mastered it. The sibilant s, the phlegmatic intonation, the veneer of contempt. I was very good at it, sounding as if I’d learned English from nannies at a very young age, as a second language, with hardly a trace of accent. Which was precisely the effect I was aiming for—except it was somewhat awkward when people asked me how it was that I spoke such excellent English and I answered, “I’m from California.”
In the same spirit of adventure, I accompanied the count on the annual shoot, covering inner terror with outer composure, wondering desperately what one wore to kill birds in. Pheasant, it seemed, were found in Austria and Czechoslovakia, partridge in Spain. But hunting them were the rarest birds of all—aristocrats on a shoot. In the whole period over which I had observed them, it seemed the only time I saw them truly happy. Driven by a sense of God-given purpose, swelling with manliness, they were One with their guns and the world.
Here in the dark, cold, early air before dawn, waiting expectantly behind their blinds for the moment when day would break and the beaters would begin flushing the birds toward them—here the world was as it had always been, before it careened off course. Not a feeling easy to come by for people who still believed, in the sixties, in the divine right of kings. And so they sat stoically in the dampness and the chill, shotguns at their sides, and waited for the birds to fly overhead.
As the sky began to lighten and the beaters began to move slowly forward, I noticed a trembling in the hands of some of the hunters. In some, it was so marked that I wondered how they managed to take accurate aim. (In fact, they didn’t always—elsewhere that year, I’d heard, Franco’s daughter-in-law was wounded in the rear end by a shotgun that discharged by accident.) Later, someone identified the trembling I had seen as “hunter’s passion,” or, I suppose, the fever of the hunt. And it was this short, sweet rush of adrenaline for which they really waited there in the darkness. Hunter’s passion. Hunter’s rush. It all looked like killing to me.
The birds burst suddenly from the brush, whooshing overhead in a last bid for freedom. The hunters let fly, blasting away. Pheasant fell right and left, crashing like weird, exotic aircraft, tiny planes with tail feathers. The doomed and luckless birds bit the dust all around us where they lay, ruffled copper breasts heaving wildly, feet flicking in farewell.
The loaders piled the richly plumed birds into sacks, carried them back to camp and neatly laid them out, dozens of them, row upon row, in a kind of plumed Persian carpet. Behind them posed the solemn hunters, shotguns crooked through elbows, in khakis and tweeds and Tyrolean hats and custom-made boots (broken in by valets), flanked by their loaders and beaters—taciturn local peasants in berets and tattered turtlenecks.
Pheasant near Vienna and Prague, then on to partridge in Madrid, where we moved in a motorcade. Here the birds were small—soft gray mousy things that rained like hail in a steady patter on the heads of hunters below. The loaders deftly scooped up the fallen panting heaps of fluff, neatly wringing their necks and slipping their heads into the wire loops fastened to their belts in one quick, clean movement. The number of birds swinging from the loops on their waists increased as the men moved efficiently, noiselessly—but for the small clicks of tiny necks snapping—as they went about their methodical harvest.
Their spirits high, their shells and energies spent, the hunters returned to camp, where they gently cleaned their guns, lovingly oiling the slate-gray barrels (using sometimes the finer oil from the skin around their noses), sensuously caressing the cool blue steel with a tenderness absent in their relations with people.
In Madrid, the camp was an endless empty field outside the city where, in the few hours after our arrival before dawn, there miraculously materialized an enormous snow-white tent that gave shade to banquet tables set with silver salvers, gleaming tureens, flatware and crystal. Tablecloths fluttered prettily in the breeze; immaculate waiters in crisp white jackets and stiff bow ties stood sentinel at the tables, helping the guests to their seats, filling their goblets with wine and serving them delicate dishes brought in great haste from fine restaurants in Madrid. Then we would return, in caravan, to the c
ity; nap, shop, and reconvene for dinner
In spite of such a grueling schedule, the count and his kind all made time to chuckle about finding someone “suitable” to marry, a woman who could hope to qualify as a “country countess,” their euphemism for a wife. Did I want to be a “country countess”? The proposal was obliquely put to me.
No, certainly I did not. I could see me now, sedated by the life of an ersatz noblewoman, confined to the country in cashmere sweater sets and English tweeds, doomed to roam the land alone in a subtle loden green. Drawling out to my husband through the mist, “Did you have a good shoot, dear?” as he trudged home, shotgun still smoking, at the end of a long day killing deer. Though I had flirted with the fantasy of me in a photo sprawled on a watered-silk sofa across the pages of Town and Country, “Countess” Candice of Paris and New York,” these were not people to spend a lifetime with. They were to be observed in the spirit of Margaret Mead in Samoa, and moved beyond. No, the answer was no.
That suited everyone just fine, in the end; especially the count’s mother, a princess from a tiny principality (like me) who seemed more like the Queen in Snow White. I was a match made in Hollywood rather than a heaven for her wellborn, inbred son, and I could see her dispatching her royal huntsman to bring her back my heart.
My jet set days were over.
Modeling, movies, appraising stares, seductive smiles, suspicious looks, eager men and wary women, declarations of love too soon in coming, proposals of marriage from men who wore monograms over their hearts, French chocolates, floral offerings. Once again, it was too much, too fast.
The last time I’d felt this way, I had begged to be sent to Switzerland. This time, I already had my ticket in hand.
Knock Wood Page 12