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She had inherited stunning beauty from her mother Frances, a lovely Southerner who married the middle-aged Bergen when she was little more than a girl. But Candy had some of her father's stiffness as well, and Pauline Kael's article in LIFE about The Group reported that "as an actress, her only flair is in her nostrils." The author admits that Kael was right, but the chastisement did not send her running to acting school. She began a period in which she had an affair with an Austrian count, learning to speak English with the slightest of accents, as if it were a second language. She found it difficult to explain to titled dinner companions, whose parents did nothing but shoot animals, precisely what it was that her own father did for a living. She chose her films because the locations appealed to her, and it is clear to her on hindsight that she might have paid more attention to the scripts. Her chilly beauty aroused thoughts of ravishment, at least in the minds of directors, and for one torrid scene, in Soldier Blue, it was determined that she required larger breasts. To her amazement, she recalls, her thorax was coated with Vaseline, a cast was made, and a jumbo rubber bosom was prepared. Nude scenes embarrassed her, but she found herself wondering whether, with rubber breasts glued on, she would really be nude. Alas, the footage was not shot.
Her manner as she recounts such imponderables is graceful and funny. It is also ladylike: she never entangles former companions in rueful confessions. She tells of an unsatisfactory long affair with a well-known director, and although there must be 25,000 people in show business who know his name, she gives him a discreet pseudonym (Robin, for Robin Hood, because of his left-wing politics). She has a good eye for the bizarre and plenty of material to use it on, including a strange dinner date with Henry Kissinger and several Secret Service agents. She spent a good part of the evening, she says, lecturing the patient Henry on the evils of the Viet Nam War.
This is a book about growing up, and at some point after she turned 30, Candice began to settle down, study acting, stop dating Secretaries of State, and make her peace with her father. Her account of Bergen's decline and death is touching, and the reader feels a real victory when at last she is able to tell the old entertainer she loves him. Her marriage four years ago to French Director Louis Malle (Lacombe Lucien, Pretty Baby) was the act of an adult, not a rebellious daughter, and fittingly she says little more than that it is warm and strong. —By John Skow