Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  “How does it feel?”

  “Oh, God, it feels great. You know, it just feels great.”

  In truth, I didn’t have many close women friends. Several times, Robin had pointed out the “significant” fact that most of my best friends were men—Mike Nichols, John Calley, Herbert Allen and Henry Jaglom. I would hold up Connie, Rusty, Mary Ellen, and my college roommate, Marcia Weiss; but Connie was by now a fixture in my life, more family than friend, and the others, Robin was quick to point out, all lived in the East and dated back to college. His implication was partly that I was threatened by friendship with women; and even if privately I thought I noted an edge of jealousy in his comments, his point was well-taken and I set out to broaden my field of female friends.

  This was typical of Robin’s character-renewal efforts; an abundance of criticism and a nugget of truth. And it was Robin who introduced me to my next great friend, Tessa Kennedy, who lived with Elliot Kastner, the producer of a film I worked on in London. It was love at first sight: Here was this woman who looked like one of her five children and spoke, hardly moving her mouth, in a low deep voice that seemed to come from the soles of her feet. A talented and successful interior designer, she was one of those women—one of those Englishwomen—who did it all and made it look effortless. I felt a total sense of ease with Tessa and with her family, and over the years our friendship would only deepen. Spending time together in L.A. and in London; taking trips together—Morocco, the Middle East—we were easy and physically affectionate together, holding hands, hugging, laughing bawdily at each other’s bad jokes. To this day I love Tessa and I love showing it. Women are supposed to hold hands.

  Months were passing quickly for the star-crossed couple, days ripping off the calendar, scattering in the wind like a movie time dissolve: an August of Big Sur weekends had fluttered by; September, too, had passed, a shimmering ten days together in Martha’s Vineyard. October was New York and November—November was Paris.

  Robin had, with a partner, bought the rights worldwide to the films of Charlie Chaplin. The premiere of these was a showing of Modern Times in Paris. Robin was going and asked me to come. At my suggestion, we stayed at L’Hotel, a tiny, jewellike townhouse on the Left Bank. Romantic, exotic, quaint.

  This was a considerable concession for Robin, who was not tiny and jewellike but a man six feet four who liked room to roam and space to stretch. Ducking doorways, denting his head on them, he muttered, “Quaint, my ass.”

  The narrow walls of the suite were upholstered in deep-green tapestried forests of fabric. The furnishings were flawless: art nouveau, leatherbound books, Chinese porcelain on the mantel over the fireplace. It looked like it had been done by a gay French hobbit.

  Our second night in Paris, we met the Chaplins in their suite at the Ritz. Charlie and Oona had come from their house in Vevey, Geraldine and her husband, Carlos Saura, had arrived from Madrid, and the rest of the family would join them in time for the press conference and the premiere the following night.

  The idea of meeting Chaplin was completely overwhelming, but needn’t have been. Oona and Charlie seemed as uncomfortable and timid as those they met. At once courteous and shy, neither had acquired the protective finish of social shellac. Their love for each other was palpable: it was good to see them together, impossible to imagine them otherwise. Oona walked by Charlie’s chair, gently smoothing his hair, and Charlie smiled wistfully, clasping her hand. “She looks just the same as the day I met her. Just as beautiful. She hasn’t changed at all. Not like me.”

  We all went to dinner, Le Grand Chariot entering Le Grand Vefour, causing hushed but high commotion. I was seated next to Charlie, whose sight was not all it once was but surprisingly sharp when his eyes fell on pretty girls. Waiters hovered happily, reverently, and even the discreet reserve of the sleek Paris clientele was fractured by his presence.

  The next night, a reception and press conference at the Ritz. Guests hung around him in busy clusters, jewels and teeth flashing, jostling for position, waiting to received. Being eighty-three years old and on the end of a receiving line, Charlie began, after a blur of outstretched arms, to operate on conditioned reflex. His little hand rose quickly, almost mechanically, to shake hands whenever anyone approached, going out even to Oona until he saw who it was, and once to a waiter serving him a drink.

  Unlike most people in that unnatural context, Chaplin never assumed an attitude of holding court. Despite his exhaustion, he was always interested, polite, almost ingenuous—far more so than the people who came to meet him, who made the Chaplins conspicuous in their simplicity, their absence of props, their lack of preoccupation with fashion.

  Modern Times was a great success, but the Chaplins’ visit to Paris had been exhausting, and they returned eagerly to the quiet seclusion of Vevey.

  In April they were coaxed out once again—this time for a far more taxing and emotional journey, to America: to New York, to attend another screening of his films at a gala at Lincoln Center, and then on to Los Angeles, where he would be presented with a special Oscar. It would be the first time the Chaplins had returned to America since Charlie, a national hero, was driven out in 1952, a casualty of Cold War conservatism. He had not been back in twenty years and had grave doubts about returning, making up and changing his mind many times before constant urging by family and friends finally convinced him to go.

  It was Robin and his partner who were largely responsible for bringing Chaplin back to America, who orchestrated events, organized the awards. And it was Robin’s idea that I should be given exclusive photo rights to the Chaplins’ visit to America. He presold the story to Life, who thought it insane not to have a backup photographer for such an event. White-faced, wild-eyed with terror at the thought of such an assignment, I was the first to agree. I knew I lacked the experience to cover that kind of story, and I felt paralyzed by the pressure.

  Robin had little patience with that kind of paralysis and prodded, “In that case, Bergen, you’ll have to learn fast because Life has agreed and the deal is made. Oona and Charlie like you and trust you; these ten days will be a tremendous strain on them and you’re someone whose presence they accept.”

  And the Chaplins’ jet was landing at a special runway at Kennedy and there I was, pushing for a place in the crazed crush of photographers and news teams stampeding through the gate. And the door of the plane swung back, and long, slow moments passed, and suddenly, there was Chaplin, shell-pink face working with emotion, tottering slightly, held fast by Oona, and the tiny pale hand went up in a tentative wave and the crowd roared and cheered and surged forward and I was crying and clicking and everyone was saying Charlie Chaplin had come home.

  Life, since they had no other choice, wanted me to do a cover try on Chaplin, a portrait shot into which they would insert a photo of “The Little Tramp.” As long as I was going for a Life cover, I wasn’t wild about their adding an insert to chop it up. Since they wanted the idea of “The Little Tramp” included somehow, I suggested photographing Charlie in front of the huge banner of “The Little Tramp” that hung outside Lincoln Center.

  This would have been acceptable had the weather not been cold and raw and Charlie not been obsessed with keeping warm. Life then arranged to borrow the twenty-foot banner, rigged it to hang in the ballroom of the Plaza and sent two photo assistants to set up umbrellas and strobe.

  I was nervous, he was nervous; in the first few shots Charlie looked stiff and uncomfortable. He tired easily, and there was time for just a few more. I asked Oona if she wouldn’t stand with him; Charlie relaxed only with her near, and for me the real story was the two of them. She disliked having her picture taken, but she loved Charlie and she stepped in smiling and gently hugged his arm. He looked at her and lit up, and that, as they say, is the shot.

  Charlie boarded the plane to Los Angeles with great ambivalence. After agreeing in January to come for the Academy Awards, he felt, as the time grew closer, that he could not go through with it. The memories
of what he had been put through there were too painful; the thought of returning terrified him.

  During the flight, he crossed to the other side of the plane to see the Grand Canyon. His face lit up. “Oh, yes, this is the place where Doug Fairbanks did a handstand on the precipice. He told me about it.” But as they got nearer Los Angeles, he grew more and more nervous, sure he shouldn’t have come. He looked fearful and trapped but made a brave attempt to fight it. “Oh, well,” he sighed, “it wasn’t so bad. After all, I met Oona there.”

  We all went off to the Awards in a long line of limos, a police escort leading the way. There had been threats, talk of protests, and Robin had arranged with the Academy for a special security force. Charlie and Oona watched most of the Oscar show on TV backstage in a dressing room, pointing excitedly to friends in the huge audience. He was relieved. He had been afraid nobody would come.

  Afterward, as he talked about the ceremony, his eyes were bright and childlike, wide with wonder, round with glee. “It almost made me weep—and this one—” he cocked his head toward a beaming Oona—“this one kept saying, ’Now don’t snivel.’

  “It was so emotional, and the audience—I felt their emotion. I thought some of them might hiss, but they were so sweet—all those famous people, all those artists. You know, they haven’t done this to me before. It surpasses everything.”

  He looked around for his Oscar and did not see it. “Oh, no,” he wailed, “all those sweet people and I’ve lost it.” It was retrieved and he sat back serenely. More and more he began to look like a little English schoolboy, grinning impishly, rolling his eyes up innocently, pointing a freckled finger to himself, announcing playfully, “The little genius… .”

  Then, pulling himself to his feet, he took Oona’s hand and, humming “Smile”—his theme from Limelight—led her gently out the door.

  The excitement and force of this time could always be traced back to Robin, and more and more I deferred my life—now pallid by contrast—to his, stepping happily on his shadow, trotting eagerly at his heels.

  I had little interest in doing films, and while I wrote for Esquire—an article on Bernie Cornfeld, and another on Oscar Levant—my work seemed frivolous, unfocused, compared to Robin’s.

  There seemed always to be a duality about his dealings—-boosting my confidence with one hand while dismantling it with the other. Convincing me I could do anything and criticizing me constantly. Confusing. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

  It was around this time that I began to understand the meaning of the word “anxiety,” a word I rarely used. For one phrase I heard a lot from Robin was something he seemed to bring up more and more. I’d never heard it before, myself; the expression was “sexual non-exclusivity.” Pronounced trippingly on the tongue. I didn’t, at first, know what it meant. In time, it would come to mean so much. Skin rashes, mild hyperventilation, loss of appetite, chills, slight disorientation, eroded self-confidence and severe fear. Put them together and they spell symptomatic anxiety. Or sexual non-exclusivity.

  “The only realistic base for any love relationship is sexual non-exclusivity,” declares Robin.

  “What do you mean by that exactly?”

  “Where two people feel secure enough and free enough to explore sexually with other people.”

  “What do you mean, ’other people’? What does that mean, ’explore sexually’?”

  “I’m sorry it’s so threatening to you, Bergen, but you have to understand that I’m a love object for every woman who walks into my office. And so are you, only you’re too insecure to see it. Start dealing with that—it’s time you began growing up.”

  This was not the way things were supposed to go here. They were supposed to carry you off to the castle where you grew old together. Not theorize on sex over dinner. Wait a minute. Hello, Walt?

  I lie stiff and still, in the darkness. The reflection of my house, pale and empty, hangs suspended in the mirror on the wall. During the night a heavy fog rolls in, and by dawn my house has disappeared.

  12

  “… TALL, manly, wears long hair, mod clothing, and has outspoken nature … is frequently seen in company of brunette starlet…“Robin’s FBI file read in part.

  Brunette?

  Starlet?

  It was springtime for the starlet and the manly radical. Our birthdays came—four days apart, twenty-six and thirty-nine—and went, and this had been no ordinary year.

  The war had escalated to its highest peak, and Daniel Ells-berg, for his efforts to stop it, was on trial for the theft of the Pentagon Papers. As usual, Robin was in the thick of things, participating in the Pentagon Papers Peace Project, Ells-berg’s defense fund. Eventually he decided he could best serve the cause by making a film on America’s involvement in the war.

  At the same time, the Panthers were running Bobby Seale for mayor of Oakland. Huey—whose new title was Supreme Servant of the People, or the Servant, for short—was at the house for days at a time going over campaign strategy with Robin while I gave “Big Man,” his bodyguard, chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. In their new tactics of working for change within the system, the Panthers, Robin explained, “would hold massive rallies called Survival Conferences, where we will organize a giant giveaway of free food and shoes…” for which Robin footed the bill of $300,000. Which more than earned him his Panther first person plural.

  The house fairly hummed with activity, and through our sauna passed some of the best and the brightest our country’s Left had to offer: sitting in sweaty summits, shuffling out to cool off and continue in the pool. Pat and Dan Ells-berg came often; the trial was approaching and Nixon closing in. Together with Robin and their chief defense attorney, Leonard Weinglass, they would map out, explore defense strategies for the historic trial to come.

  Pat was an intelligent and generous woman. Dan was intense, obsessive, implosive, a brilliant man with a mind that sped so far, so fast that his speech often stuttered in an attempt to catch up.

  They were times of tension. People were wary, phone calls cautious. Huey would arrive unexpectedly at times, hiding from someone—rival black factions or the FBI. He would go for days without sleeping, wild-eyed, unshaven, almost incoherent. Pacing relentlessly back and forth, thrashing out some theory, dealing with some demon, knocking at three and four in the morning on the bedroom door wanting to speak to Robin, who would sit with him in the living room, where Huey would talk feverishly till dawn.

  This was often more than I had signed on for and I would sit for hours as at a tennis final, head whipping back and forth from one to the other, listening, not often understanding, imagining Feds in the ferns and wondering when I would get Huey’s bullet. Reality was difficult to recognize. One evening we took Dan and Pat, Huey and Big Man to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. Eyes running, gasping after the dumplings in red and spicy beef, we drank our tea and passed the fortune cookies. Mine read, “You will receive a message in the mail; destroy it at once before the FBI sees it.”

  Political fund-raisers were legion that year, and, with Jane Fonda, Robin decided we should give one of our own for Indochina Relief. We met at the house to plan it. Jane, bare-breasted under a sheer black peasant blouse—taut, intense, stunning—was fierce in her dedication to the Revolution and spoke rapid-fire of “Stalinists and Trots” and the difficulty of resolving her own “internal contradictions.”

  Robin was more philosophical about his, knowing that he was equally committed politically. He did, after all, devote his considerable resources, financial and intellectual, to the cause, and passed off as humorous the contrast between his politics and his lifestyle. He even seemed to enjoy the irony, wryly cracking that with any luck the Revolution would come after his death—meanwhile allowing him to hang onto his sauna, pool and Porsche.

  But what about me? Everyone, it seemed, was in jeopardy. Everyone had something to lose. Except me. She who risks nothing. It did not pass unnoticed. Where, Robin wondered, was my commitment? What had be
come of the plucky political animal he so admired? My zeal didn’t quite match up.

  My old friends, who still employed the traditional handshake in greeting instead of the Black Power salute, had already been stamped with the seal of the ruling class, condemned to wear a large letter E for Establishment across their chests. Robin had already reviewed and rejected them as enemies of the Revolution, irrelevant, politically unfit, and such was my strength of character that I hardly saw them anymore.

  Not sufficient proof, apparently, of my commitment. Perhaps, it occurred to Robin, I wasn’t all my publicity promised. Perhaps it was a simple case of mistaken identity. He had fallen in love with someone else, a psychic explorer committed to change; instead, I seemed committed to little more than preparing his dinner. What were my values, anyway? What did I believe in? Where was Life’s “Activist Actress” when the going got rough?

  She was creeping along in the fast lane, trying hard to keep up, pretending to be someone she wasn’t. She was missing her family, her friends, her house; she no longer laughed or had fun.

  “The difference between you and me, Bergen,” Robin declared to me one day, “is that if it were the Russian Revolution you would be inside dancing with the nobility and I’d be outside with the peasants, with my face pressed against the window.” Possibly. But I’d be guilty about dancing with the nobility, and he’d drive away from the peasants in a Porsche.

  “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” he would now announce pointedly. Clearly I was part of the problem. He was right. It was true—I was not doing my share. I sat up, started listening, went to more slide shows on Indochina, spoke at rallies, attended meetings, and marched in Washington. Political homework.

  In Washington, protesters were tripping over each other in their efforts to make themselves heard—group after group, day after day; at times the city seemed too small to contain its country’s grievances. In an effort to show the sweeping spectrum of Americans in opposition to the war, a group called REDRESS organized its second demonstration of civil disobedience by successful, proven members of the country’s Establishment. The strategy was to create media impact through the mass arrests of short-haired, tied-and-suited, middle-aged solid citizens—among them Joe Papp, George Plimpton, Dr. Spock, Robin and me—to broaden the image of the antiwar base largely known as acid freaks in gas masks.