Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  Obviously, directors often hadn’t the time or the patience to cajole me out of my self-consciousness. My fears were not their problem, and I was paid to perform in the production, not to editorialize about it. Besides, directors had problems of their own. But it was undeniable that I did better work with directors of the other breed—the lovers.

  With Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in Carnal Knowledge

  Mike Nichols was a legend, not as a general among filmmakers but as an actor’s ideal—a director who was attuned to the observation of behavior; who was supportive of and encouraging to actors.

  He was the first director to identify the concern with control that had always impeded me and to address the fear that lay behind it. He cracked my control when a scene required him to, and capitalized on it when it was consistent with the character. In an early scene in which I met Artie at a mixer, Mike told me to try taking my skirt off for the tight two-shot and playing the scene in my slip. It produced just the right edge of discomfort, the precise note of nervousness the scene demanded.

  Mike liked the cloistered atmosphere of Vancouver, which kept us a unit and focused our energies, our concentration on our work. Under normal conditions our close-knit enclave could have been a nightmare, but these were idyllic conditions; many of us had been friends before the shooting, and those who weren’t became friends during it. You couldn’t have asked for better company, and we rarely left each other’s sight.

  Jack and Artie and I shared a large house in Vancouver that came to resemble the set of the Amherst dorm. We traipsed home at the end of a day still in our forties college wardrobe of crew cuts and crew necks, pigtails and pleated skirts, white bucks, saddle shoes and bow ties, bounding in to greet the housekeeper, who cooked and cared for us like a mother as we badgered her for snacks after school.

  Mike had created a tiny utopia there in Vancouver, and when, after two months, my part was done, it was terrible to have to leave. My sadness was evident to Mike, who saw to it that I had a souvenir to take home. As I opened the door to my dressing room that last day on the set, soft colors glowed in the darkness and I heard the sound of Glen Miller’s “String of Pearls.” There, waiting for me as a remembrance, was the big old Wurlitzer jukebox with revolving neon rainbow whose music we had danced to in the roadhouse scene.

  I dreaded coming home to my empty house after such happy times, and I found the silence of my life deafening. I hated leaving the closeness and comfort ironically found in a company making a film about the alienation between men and women to return to my life alone: a tiny testament to the film. The Wurlitzer followed me to the Aviary, assuming a place of honor in the dining room, where it glowed with warmth like a multicolored hearth and helped me fill the empty house with soft swing sounds for quiet dinners with friends.

  When I turned twenty-five, I got a new passport and wrote myself a sober warning:

  “Today I got my new passport and with it an implied deadline to get my life in order. By that, I mean that if in the next five years till its expiration date, I have not yet found someone to share my life with and see no family in my future, then I will have been beaten by my own defenses, my efforts to dismantle them a failure.”

  As yet, my efforts had been slight. And the longer I waited, the more sophisticated my defenses became. Locked in my tower ringed with heat-seeking missiles, like Rapunzel pleading for someone to get through her radar screen, I waited wistfully under the rainbow, secured against all intruders, shouldering flame throwers and machine guns, humming “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

  11

  IN my bedroom was a telescope with which I scanned the skies, the seas and the neighbors. There was a new flurry of activity in the house across from mine and so the focus was set on the pool area and backyard. The distance between that house and mine was small—perhaps two hundred yards—but they were separated by a narrow canyon. The telescope was almost superfluous, helping only to read lips and labels, and—if the wind was right or the conversation heated—even that became unnecessary. The dialogue drifted across the canyon and in through my windows.

  I was fascinated by the new people in this house, and I watched their movements constantly—not only because the girls who sunbathed by the pool did so topless, indifferent to poolmen, gardeners or occasional cars, but because I had met and knew slightly the man who had recently moved in.

  He was a film producer whose father had run one of the major studios, but he had broken with tradition to become Hollywood’s first countercultural filmmaker. This he did with astounding success and bravado—actually revolutionizing film production in Hollywood, finding new formulas for making low-cost films, giving everyone on the crew participation and becoming a millionaire in his own right in the process.

  His company became a Hollywood legend—the only place where new filmmakers were welcome to work and explore. The films they made were audacious in form and content, high in quality and stunning in profit. They were young, tough, smart and totally independent of any studio structure. And he was the romantic lead of the company, its founder, its force, its fair-haired boy—a Robin Hood from New Rochelle.

  In deference to his privacy, I will call him “Robin” here.

  We first met at the preview of one of his films. I was moved by it and wanted to congratulate the man who produced it, and he was pointed out to me—the very tall, very thin man who slouched in deceptive shyness against the wall. I went over, introduced myself, and thanked him for the movie. He was gracious and surprisingly modest about his triumph. He introduced his wife, who stood next to him, and we all shook hands and said goodnight.

  Months later, while doing a film in Los Angeles at Columbia, I saw him in the dining room at a table with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. Dennis in denim, ponytail and headband, Peter in fringed jacket and rawhide moccasins, Jack grizzled and grinning, and Robin, sandy hair short and tousled, boyish and well-behaved in sports shirt, loafers and slacks—his dress and demeanor almost shocking in contrast.

  Around them munched the Ruling Class, the old guard studio elite, burly, graying executives who had watched him grow up—the president’s prodigal son. And now he was making this chozzerai; turning everything upside down and inside out, and they didn’t know from Dylan and marijuana, they didn’t understand movies with scenes of nude actors on acid trips in cemeteries that made as much money as Airport and cost a fifth as much.

  And this was who now had moved across from me, whose conversations I eavesdropped on so intently; snatches about “psychotropic plants,” “Gurdjieffian logic,” “applied Maoist theory… .” This was not your basic poolside banter. Especially in Beverly Hills, where it was unusual to hear exchanges more global than European grosses.

  Robin and I had several friends in common, among them Jack Nicholson, Carol Eastman, Henry Jaglom and Brooke Hayward. Peering into his backyard, I remembered Brooke saying, one day, as she made me an omelette, “I think he may be the perfect man.” His assets ranged from blond good looks to intelligence and perception; and “He’s also happily married for fifteen years and has two children.” Well, sure, I nodded, the perfect ones were always happily married, and we both sighed and swore that we would just give up looking; what we were panning was fool’s gold.

  The perfect man was now separated from his wife. When he called asking if we could have breakfast or coffee, I was intrigued but wary. He was insistent until I agreed, one night, to come over for coffee. “Coffee” sounded safe, short, flexible; the advantage of going to his house was that I would be free to leave when I liked. Nicely positioned for a quick getaway.

  He opened the door himself: they didn’t come any handsomer. Very tall, very thin, in an old sweatshirt and khakis. He didn’t seem to care what he wore, beyond indifference and the awareness that on him it hardly mattered.

  As we sat in the living room I stole furtive looks around the house: a rambling one-story, wood floors, zebra rug, used brick, suede sofas, pool table—pool table?�
��a glimpse of yellow-and-black swirly wallpaper in the bedroom. Beverly Hills Bachelor.

  Seeing my smirk, he explained with a grin that he had just rented the house furnished, because he and his wife had recently agreed to separate. It was hard to see how raw the separation had left him, so deftly did he camouflage the shock.

  While we talked, I was guarded and glib. I could always count on myself for that. He chose, instead, a good offense—and an excessive seductiveness as added protection. He was honest, direct, he wouldn’t be drawn in, refused to fence. Calmly watching my flailing, he said softly, when I finally stopped for breath, “You know, Bergen, underneath your bullshit, you’re an incredible person. Why do you make it so difficult for people to try to get to you?”

  Because no one had ever called me on it before, I guess. Because I never believed I was an incredible person. He was good at this—whatever it was.

  He seemed so sure of himself—too sure, I thought, and I backed off and began to leave. I wasn’t attracted to him, I told myself; he had no physical substance. It was like holding a cloud. He was too willowy and lanky. / wanted to be willowy and lanky. He was too skinny. I felt too fat.

  He followed me outside, and once more, Why are you leaving? I don’t know. Because it’s too soon. Because you’re too sure. Because I don’t want to stay. And I went home and climbed into my brass bed under the rainbow and wrote in my diary, “Robin’s—for coffee and confusion.”

  We moved on to dinners. Talking and more talking, until five in the morning. He was charming, sweet, persistent, overpowering, and smart. Extremely smart. I’d never been with anyone like him before. He listened with a ferociousness, an appreciation, an enjoyment; with intelligence. It made me feel more interesting, made me say words more worth hearing. I began saying how I felt, thinking for the first time, how I felt. And he pushed me to be “open” with my feelings, tried to make me secure enough to put aside my armor.

  A radical in politics as well as in films, he seemed to know something about everything and was always learning more, surrounded by a sea of papers and periodicals: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Black Panther Paper, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Screw, Esquire, Playboy, Newsweek and sheaves of political papers and pamphlets. Current events swirled furiously around him, spilling off the bed and piling up on every table, and he snacked on them any second he got.

  Because of his appearance of tremendous strength and success and his very real abilities and generosity, people clung to him for support—emotional and financial. I seldom saw a situation he couldn’t handle, from friends in accidents to friends in jail. They came to him and called him at all hours for help and advice of every kind and he was there in a flash, dealing adroitly, soothing, reassuring. Robin Hood saves the day.

  He was all about “taking care of things”—or controlling things. He was not a crack producer for nothing, and taking care of things was what he did best. He loved it; I loved it. I would wonder later if he was capable of friendship not predicated by need. If he didn’t manipulate the market a little. But I’d spent years fantasizing about a man who “took care of everything,” protected his princess, carried her off. That’s what I wanted; that’s what I got.

  Soon he began to take care of me, to make me feel that I was a vital part of his life. Too quickly, perhaps, but at the time I took no notice. I was too busy fighting to stay on my feet as day by day he kept sweeping me off them. It was tough stuff to resist: beyond his attractiveness, his energy, his competence, there was a sweetness I hadn’t counted on—an incredible charm.

  So I talked resistance, but in fact I was hurtling along head over heels, knowing for the first time that This Was It. Just as I was giving up, neatly tucked into my gold-and-crystal casket, surrounded by sobbing, grief-stricken dwarfs—when who should appear in a Porsche but the Prince himself. The very guy we were looking for.

  Except: while suspicious by nature, for starters, I could have sworn it was all happening too fast. Too easily. I was sure it took a little longer to become such a fast and integral part of someone’s life. Maybe it didn’t always take years, but three weeks seemed strangely short. We never stopped nuzzling. And I could have sworn, every so often, that a look of concern, even skepticism, flickered for an instant in the eyes of his friends.

  I could not, at the time, guess what they were thinking: that these displays of instant togetherness seemed oddly misdirected or displaced on Robin’s part, that they struck the observer as slightly excessive for a man who, they knew, was deeply in love with his wife and was devastated by their separation. As were his friends. For he and his wife had always been the model marriage, the golden couple—one marriage you could put your money on. It was a marriage that mattered to people, that still held that possibility, that promise. If I couldn’t interpret the worried glances of his friends, I was certainly too naive to guess at the mixture of hurt, fear and perhaps even vengeance that went into Robin’s urgent courtship. He had been married for fifteen years; he had been separated barely a month. He had never lived alone. It was a wonder he was walking upright.

  A few weeks into this whirlwind, Robin took me to San Francisco for the weekend, trying, unsuccessfully, to explain dialectical materialism to me during the hour’s flight in first class. After checking into a suite at the Fairmont, we took a car and drove to Oakland to meet the man who was his best friend.

  It was 1971 and Oakland’s blacks—a large percent of the population—were angry and organized, following the politics of revolution as set down by the Black Panthers, whose battle cry and slogan was “All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

  We pulled up to an elegant building overlooking the lake: a high-rent, high-security high-rise with nattily uniformed doormen and television cameras that monitored the entrances, sending tight two-shots of visitors to the resident requested, neatly weeding out unwelcome guests. They ran a tight ship there on the lake, protecting wealthy Oakland whites from the incursion of the black population, from the barrels of their guns.

  Ironically, we were waiting in the gleaming lobby for security clearance to the building’s penthouse apartment, in which there lived a black man under twenty-four-hour guard against the white man’s gun. His was a name that struck terror in the hearts of many whites—including those in this building. He was a target of the FBI, the local police and rival black political factions, and had just been released from prison on charges of attempted manslaughter. He was Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton.

  We were shown to the elevator, pushed “PH,” and arrived at the Panther penthouse to be let in by a black man wider than the door he opened. He was introduced as “Big Man,” full-time bodyguard to the Panthers’ legendary leader.

  Inside the apartment, someone sprang up to greet us, a beautiful man with almond-shaped eyes, a splash of a smile. Like some strong creature, muscular and fine-boned, he leaped at Robin, and they disappeared in a fierce bear hug, grabbing and slapping each other with all the passion of two men come together from opposite points on the planet.

  For their own and different reasons, they loved each other deeply. Huey made Robin an “Honorary Panther,” gave him a gold Panther ring, considered him his “white brother.” Robin, in turn, was there for Huey in the crunches and close calls, and there were many: giving him money, finding him shelter, working with lawyers. At times, I thought he financed the Panthers single-handedly, indirectly dispatching agents of the revolution from behind his desk or beside the pool table of his Hollywood Office of Operations.

  Huey gave Robin a front-row seat at the Revolution, took him away from New Rochelle, gave him, as a member of the overprivileged class, political credibility, a means to live out political fantasies. Most of all, he gave him a pass to the people; the best access, the strongest connection he would ever have. And Robin—who referred to the Panthers always as “we” (as in “We want to overthrow the white ruling class”)—never let him down.

>   The previous year, Life magazine had featured me on the cover as “Activist Actress Candice Bergen.” But it was a title I knew I hadn’t earned: I had played it safe, made my protests tastefully and discreetly, without offending others’ sensibilities. While some put public opinion, jobs, even lives, on the line, I had risked nothing for what I professed to believe in so strongly. The magazine had even praised me for this restraint—which made me feel, secretly, even guiltier.

  I glanced around the Panther penthouse: wall-to-wall carpeting, black-leather sofas, teak tables, Swedish glass (my people), a new quadrophonic sound system. Maybe the Revolution wouldn’t be so bad. In front of the sliding doors to the balcony, a telescope stood on a tripod, trained on a cell in the Oakland County Courthouse across the lake where Huey had done twelve months in solitary confinement. That was where he got the muscles, Robin told me—doing pushups in solitary. I watched them busily talking, high on each other, energized.

  Huey’s leg twitched nervously in well-cut slacks, his feet tapping constantly in soft black-leather boots. A knit shirt stretched over swelling arms and shoulders. I never saw him when he wasn’t moving, quietly kinetic; his energy seemed endless. But what struck me was how gentle he seemed—polite, soft-spoken, in confusing contrast to the image of him from the famous photograph with Bobby Seale in their Panther berets and black-leather jackets, cradling a machine gun while sitting casually cross-legged in the large fragile fan of a peacock chair.

  We spent the next day with Baba Ram Dass—or Richard Alpert, as he’d been known as a professor at Harvard before studying in India and becoming provisional head of the Spiritual Movement in America. It was Ram Dass’s tapes on “non-attachment” that Robin played on long drives to Big Sur. It was Ram Dass’s book, BEHERENOWBEHERENOWBEHERENOW, that could always be found on Robin’s and his friends’ coffee tables. The Gideon of the Seventies. And it was Ram Dass who drove us, in his bright-orange Pinto, sucking serenely on a Sugar Daddy, his long beard blowing, to our hotel, where Robin, who relished the role of catalyst, had arranged for him to see Huey.