Tribal traditions were sadly tattered. I had become friends with a Navajo called Chief Rolling Thunder, a great old man who was the leader of his tribe on a reservation in the Southwest.
One night I invited him for dinner. As we finished eating, he asked me if I had any fresh meat that he could have. Well, no, I said, but there were some chicken legs and ground sirloin in the freezer. No, no, it was a whole animal he needed. Fresh, if possible. Didn’t we at least have a whole frozen chicken? I was sorry but we didn’t and the market was closed. What did he need it for? Wouldn’t ground sirloin do?
He sat silently awhile, pulling at his waist-long braid, then nodded, yes, that would have to do. He got up and pulled on his jacket; I gave him the sirloin and the chicken legs. He took them quietly, stepped out into the night and slowly climbed to the top of the mountain above the house. There he built a fire, knelt in prayer and chanted, offering up the ground sirloin and frozen chicken legs as a sacrifice. Soon rain began to pour, dousing his fire, and he returned looking defeated. It’s not easy being an Indian anymore.
In the sixties, it wasn’t easy being a parent, either. In six months, mine had seen me go from socialite to socialist; had listened to my sermonizing them on American militarism and materialism, the massacre of the American Indian, their destruction of the ecosystem, their invention of plastics and their introduction of pesticides and preservatives.
During my visits to my parents’, my father and I would invariably get into deadlocked debates of old and new value systems. My father had no patience for, and less understanding of, the accusations and demands of the Young on the Old. What, he wanted to know, were they making such a fuss about? How in God’s name could they be unhappy? What more did they want? What was their platform? he would snap repeatedly. “Do they have a platform?”
A reasonable question that left me enraged. “Their platform is not to have a platform,” I would answer, exasperated. “Their platform is to rediscover the spiritual values lost for so long in this country consumed with consumerism. Their platform is a respect for the natural order of things, a return to the earth before it’s too late.”
And I would explain that the reason I had not touched the lamb chop on my plate was that, because of my love for animals, I had decided to become a vegetarian; that never again would I wear furs. In the same breath I urged my father to give up hunting; how could he inflict unnecessary pain on living things?
This is too much; this time I have gone too far. He loves duck shooting and is being lectured by his own daughter on the evils of the hunt two years after she herself stood under skies that rained pheasant and partridge, eating steak tartare in her tailored mink.
My mother, too, can stand no more. “What about shoes, then?” she wants to know, pointing to my Indian sandals, which she hates. “Aren’t you being a little hypocritical—or aren’t they made of leather?”
It is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for. “Yes!” I leap up. “They are made of leather, Mom, nonviolent leather from cows that have died a natural death—cows with good karma—and I’ve invested in a nonviolent leather company; my yoga teacher started it.”
My father’s hand claps his forehead, his face is flushed; my inheritance moves up from twenty-five to thirty. “You’ve invested your money in a—” The idea is unimaginable on every possible level. “Oh, Jesus,” he says, disgusted and despondent, and pushes his chair from the table to stalk angrily from the room muttering, “One week it’s Indians, the next it’s ducks. Now, this—”
Stalemated again, I would turn on my heel and head bitterly up the hill.
At Christmastime I turned elf and hung the beams with holly, trimmed the tree with gingerbread and candy canes, stuffed stockings and stoked fires. We dressed up in mufflers and overcoats, piled the old, open Rolls high with presents and chugged along under a hot sun and rustling palms to deliver gifts, pretending it was winter.
Christmas Eve, we borrowed my parents’ station wagon, went around to friends’ houses, loaded the wagon with turkeys, toys and clothing, and drove downtown to give them to the Salvation Army on Skid Row. We sang carols in their Christmas Eve service and sat silently during the drive home.
The closer we got to it, the greater our shame at leaving the East L.A. slums behind us and heading straight for the safety of home. We didn’t know quite what to do about that part; we hated the suffering but we loved our life. So both continued, and there we stayed, guilty and grateful, and tried to figure out how we drew the longest straws.
Yet even our dreamlike life on the hill was daily growing less idyllic; dreams are, by definition, cursed with short life-spans. As our differences grew more pronounced, our life turned testy and tense. It was passive versus active; Terry, older, wanted contemplation, meditation, introspection; I wanted conversation, participation, discussion. “Laid back” was boring, “be cool” was killing me. He wanted stillness; I never stopped moving. Denouncing life at a distance, an armchair social critic, he stayed aloof, while I, fired by his oratory, felt drawn into the thick of it, finding comfort in the contact, exhilaration in the connection.
He saw less and less of the world, and I missed seeing more of it. The security of our make-believe world had its limitations; Terry’s life was too circumscribed and narrow, too confining for me. My professional absences were a strain on a relationship already overloaded with tensions. It was one of the reasons I worked so little, and when I did work, my independence sometimes appeared as threatening, an intrusion on our insular lifestyle; my ability to pack, pick up and leave was perceived more as abandonment than absence.
More threatening still was the nature of the work. When I went to Majorca to film The Magus, Terry came to visit halfway into the shooting. I had rented a tiny villa on the rocks above the sea, beautiful but isolated; I was picked up at six in the morning and returned at seven at night. During the day, Terry was marooned with nothing to do, and we saw little of each other.
One afternoon, when he came to the location to pick me up, I was inside on the set shooting, locked in a love scene with Michael Caine. I liked Michael: he was great fun to be with, wonderful in his work. But my heart was with Terry, who was, at that moment, pacing impatiently back and forth outside. All in a day’s work, perhaps, but it felt like a fine line between love scenes and infidelity.
Long absences; intimate scenes with attractive actors; confusing rules of a complicated game. It bred resentment, created distance, destroyed trust. Making movies could stack an impossibly loaded deck. As if relationships weren’t tough enough.
If I sometimes resented Terry’s anger toward my work, Terry resented social conventions and traditions and ridiculed my meticulous observance of them, the often obsessive attention I paid them. To him, it was sheer dishonesty. To me, it was mere manners. Manners? In the sixties? Bullshit.
“Your problem is you have no soul,” he said to me simply one day. “I do too,” I wailed in protest, while wondering what he meant. Soul, I suppose, as in “I have suffered,” soul, as in Ray Charles or Bessie Smith. Where I would have gotten such a soul was beyond me. Still, it stung—the shoe fit.
When it came to souls, Terry’s was acknowledged to be spiritual, while mine—if I had one—was trapped in the physical world, shopping hungrily on the materialist plane. Disgusted by the greed and hypocrisy he saw everywhere, a disillusioned idealist, Terry sought people whose values he could respect, who lived honestly and simply by their own rules and tried to find a better way.
One night Terry went out with one of the Beach Boys and came back talking enthusiastically about the commune they’d visited: an abandoned ranch where, in the soft sunlight, a group of kids ran naked and free. They were shepherded by a man some years older than they, who took them in and cared for them. They, in turn, were devoted to him, surrounding him in sleep and clustering adoringly at his feet by day where, together, they would write and sing songs.
Terry was intrigued by this man, by his apparent spirituality and lack o
f materialism. He admired the naturalness of their life on the ranch, the simplicity, the closeness. He returned and recorded them singing, coming home to tell of these “soft, simple girls” sitting naked around this Christlike guy, all singing sweetly together.
I felt my eyes turn cold and squinty, my mouth pinched and tense. “Why can’t they sing dressed?” I snapped. (I hated the sixties.) He asked politely if I would like to come out and see the ranch. It was a rhetorical question: we both knew I’d hate it and they—beatific and bare-assed and peering into the hole where my soul should have been—would hate me, so I sulked and said no thanks. Anyway, by then I’d heard enough about Charlie Manson and his minstrels.
That winter, Terry’s stepfather died—the man who had legally adopted Terry and raised him strictly and lovingly for fourteen years. He had been a father to Terry and a devoted husband and producer to his wife, dedicating his life to them both. Which made it tough to write off as mere oversight the discovery that he had left his wife some twenty million dollars short.
Besides their money—forever vanished in a puff of smoke and secret Swiss bank accounts—there was the betrayal. Terry, reeling from the double shock of the death and the deceit, decided to tackle the financial fiasco himself—hoping, perhaps, to find answers and to help ease the anguish of his mother. So he disappeared into endless daily legal meetings for months on end, slowly unraveling the threads of the swindle, unable to fathom the depths of the dishonesty.
He decided abruptly to leave the house on the hill, announcing on a Monday that we were moving that Friday to his mother’s weekend house at the beach. I was stunned; he gave no explanation, saying only that it was all arranged. By the end of the week, we were living in Malibu. Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski moved into the house on the hill.
For months we hardly saw each other. He was buried in financial briefs he struggled to understand, exhausted by the intricacies and the tedium, and seemed beaten by the betrayal. He never arrived at the beach before ten o’clock at night after the debilitating days of meetings and began taking sleeping pills for a few hours’ unconsciousness before morning came and he got up to start again. He began to drink.
I spent my day walking with Nana, the Saint Bernard, filling the house with flowers that were never seen and making dinners that were never eaten. We saw each other less and less, until finally he confessed that he now saw me as yet another responsibility in his life, when he was collapsing under the weight of those he had just taken on. We agreed that I would soon move out.
The pills and the drinking increased, blotting out the painful confusion of a golden boy whose life had turned against him, who knew now there was no going back. That confusion ripped out the child from inside him, destroying the joy as well. The golden days were dying, the fairy tale had come to an end.
In one of our last weeks together during that slow Malibu summer, we woke to find the telescope missing from the veranda on the beach. And some days after that, a friend arrived with a message from Charlie Manson, who had been looking for Terry since we moved to Malibu.
Terry had been avoiding Manson, fed up with the Apostle of Peace and Love’s constant badgering to help him cut a record and sign him to a recording contract. The Eddie Fisher of flower children. Terry had asked that no one tell Manson where we were living. Charlie, for his part, felt that Terry’s behavior was less than brotherly; the essence of his message was that Terry shouldn’t mess with Manson and, to prove the point, he added that if we were missing a telescope, he had borrowed it off our veranda one night last week.
A week later, Sharon Tate and three others were brutally murdered in the house on the hill. Ropes swung from beams that were once hung with hearts and holly, words were written in blood on the door.
It was hard to find anyone in the L.A. Basin who didn’t boast about being invited to drop by the house that night, mystically deciding, at the last minute, not to go. Most of Southern California claimed some connection with the slaughter, marveling at their karma, shuddering at having stared death in the face.
Los Angeles was in shock. For months, no one talked of anything else. Gates and guard dogs went up everywhere overnight. Speculation spread about the mysterious murders and who the killers might be. Were they drug dealers or black militants? The righteous roared about sex and drugs and decadence and the dangers therein.
I turned on Terry, shaken and scared. “But it could have been me! I could have been killed!” He looked at me levelly and said, “But we could have been killed—why don’t you say we?”
Because by that point, there was no “we” anymore. I was only thinking of myself.
Soon after, I moved out. I signed to do a film in Mexico, went to the pound and got a spindly black dog I named Leonard, and left with him a month later for three months’ location. Once more on my own in the world, I felt the months of sadness and tension slowly fall away, and soon it began to look exciting. I liked it out there; I was glad to be back.
Terry and I hadn’t spoken in two months when, one night in Mexico, I had the impulse to call him. I finally found him at his mother’s house, where, he said, the police were waiting in the next room. They had just arrived to tell him they had found the Tate murderer: it was Charlie Manson.
Manson’s arrest and the publication of his prospective “hit list” revealed the random brutality of the killings, the shocking senselessness of murders with no motive. The public’s righteous posture disappeared overnight. Suddenly, no one felt safe; many lived in paranoia and fear.
Terry sold the house at the beach and rented one in town, where he lived with a pistol by his bed, a shotgun by the door, and a twenty-four-hour armed guard. No one could convince him he wasn’t in some way the connection for the murders.
A year and a half later I met Vince Bugliosi, then the State’s chief prosecuting attorney, at the courthouse downtown; the Manson Family trial was underway. I had been shown photos earlier in the year to see if I recognized Charles Watson, one member of the Manson Family, later convicted for the murders; the police believed he might have been at the house on the hill while I was there. I looked at the photos; I didn’t think so.
When I received a subpoena to appear in court, Bugliosi arranged for me not to testify publicly, and instead sat with me in the back of the courtroom when Watson—tall, raw-boned, with sallow skin and dark, deep-set eyes—was brought out to the defense table.
Did I recognize that man? Bugliosi asked.
No, I said, I didn’t.
All flower children look alike.
10
EDGAR and Charlie began to work less in the sixties; much of it work for work’s sake, some of it shoddy, undistinguished. Radio had died a slow and peaceful death, eclipsed by the arrival of television, and they never really found a place in this new medium. In spite of ten successful appearances in films (three with their old sparring partner, W. C. Fields) and a show of their own on television, “Do You Trust Your Wife?” (in which their role as hosts was later filled by a young comedian named Johnny Carson), the boys’ real home always remained the refuge provided by radio. In an ironic way, they were all about radio, having taken a medium totally at odds with their act and made it theirs to keep.
There was little room in the sixties for a man and his dummy in white tie and tails. The dummy’s special appeal was that he spoke the unspeakable: He said what people were thinking but were afraid to say. But in the sixties there was very little we did not say or do; sacred cows were roasted. Charlie’s popularity with the public was rooted in structure, standards, manners, rituals; and in the sixties it was those things, or what they represented, that we set out to destroy.
As the decade drew to a close, Edgar and Charlie, who loved and missed performing, found themselves playing country fairs, benefits, Republican conventions, taking third position on the bill at Las Vegas, where they were excavated, like an ancient artifact, and charitably reexamined by the trades. Where the audience might look up, surprised and pleased to see
them. “Oh, it’s Edgar Bergen,” they’d say, smiling, as if finding an old forgotten friend. “Whatever happened to him?”
While passionate about performing, my father was now less than enthusiastic about his preparation, and he rarely rehearsed routines, seldom practiced technique. He got a little lazy, using the same material he’d written in the past. Perhaps this was from fear of reentering the arena after increasing absences away; or perhaps his slow fall from favor dulled his usual sense of professionalism.
My mother, who knew all his material as well as he, urged him to write new skits; but he did not take kindly to these suggestions and often rebuffed her for making them. And so she watched her “stubborn Swede” as he went on stage to perform routines she’d heard for twenty years.
And you could hear it all again, because it was good. It was good and it was funny, and it was, in its way, magical. No matter how many times we’d seen them perform together, we still looked from one to the other when “they” spoke. Dad to Charlie to Dad—even with the old routines and rusty technique, with his lips moving for all to see (a license he’d been able to afford on radio), he—they—could still make magic on that stage.
But God, it made us sad. And him, too, though he’d never admit it—carrying his suitcases from fairs in Saint Paul to conventions in Minneapolis. A smallish, graying man lugging his dummies across the country with him; dummies that had met Roosevelt, Churchill, kings and queens; dummies that now played to empty rooms or to people eating, drinking, talking.
Impeccably dressed in the white tie and tails that he so loved to perform in, proudly erect, his little dummy in top hat and tails perched pluckily at his side, he joked that he had once been known “as the father of Charlie McCarthy,” and that now he was known as “the father of Candice Bergen. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to make it on my own.”
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