KNOCK WOOD Candice Bergen Simon & Schuster; 356 pages; $15.95
Memoirs of movie actresses are expected to be long on gossip, short on wit and veracity, and inferior in humility to the autobiographies of deposed presidential aides. They are also expected to be ghostwritten, or catered: you call the service, and they do the book. So much for expectations. Candice Bergen's account of her first 38 years not only is handwritten, it is one of the better books of the season so far: a shrewd, funny, loving and sometimes appalling account of how it felt to grow up in a family that was singular even in Hollywood.
Young Candy was, of course, the daughter of Edgar Bergen, the enormously popular ventriloquist who delighted the country Sunday evenings on radio's Chase & Sanborn show. But that meant that she was also the little sister of Charlie McCarthy, Bergen's cheeky, insulting, wise-guy dummy. A peculiar sibling rivalry existed, in fact, that went far beyond the obvious joke kept alive by newspaper feature writers. Charlie was a startling alter ego for the dour Swedish ventriloquist—that was what Candice Bergen made the act work so well—and he was already a star when Candy was tiny. She remembers that her father would put her on one of his knees, with Charlie sitting on the other, and squeeze the back of her neck, imitating the way he worked Charlie's mouth. She would open and close her own mouth without speaking, and her father would improvise a dialogue, talking first in Charlie's voice and then in a little-girl voice.
When she was five, Candy made her first appearance on the radio show, and when she got applause, the jealous Charlie said, "That's enough, folks. That's enough. Let's not let things get out of hand. Goodbye, little girl, get outta here." (The sly title of her book is a modest exaction of vengeance against such abuse from the wooden-headed dummy.) She said her lines perfectly, and she thought her father was pleased. But Bergen was a stiff, inarticulate man who found it nearly impossible to express affection physically or verbally. And Charlie, who made jokes about not wanting her around, was not really a mocking older brother, he was part of her father. It was difficult for her to know whether what she had done was good enough.
The patterns persisted: trying very hard to please her father, and doing star turns before she, and others, felt she had earned them. In her late teens she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study photojournalism, dashing up to New York to become, without visible effort, a top model. Director Sidney Lumet gave her the small but P highly important role of the lesbian Lakey in his film of Mary McCarthy's novel The T Group. Playing at moviemak-sing, the blond 19-year-old would waft on set without "sleep after a night on the town, and further outrage the intense young actresses in the cast by taking notes for a "what I did on my summer vacation" article to be published in Esquire.