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All-world mom too. She quit work for three years to raise a "dynamic, bossy social activist" named Chloe. "She's a soft touch," her m a movie star -- the Vassar vamp Lakey in The Group -- at 19, before she knew how to act or whether she wanted to. It is said people turn to acting in hopes of becoming other people: fuller, more dynamic and coherent fictions of themselves. No wonder Bergen looked uncomfortable at role playing. Who else in the world could she care to be? And what misery could she possibly reproduce? In a scene for The Group, Bergen was asked to cry. She tried to think of some traumatic event whose emotional veracity she could put on film. "The problem there, of course," she wrote in Knock Wood, "was that my past was short and perfect, unblemished even by bad luck."
Pauline Kael tried to make her cry. The film critic wrote that Bergen's ; "onpretensions, but typically it hits right-wing targets. In a 1989 episode, Murphy's Myrmidon mom (Colleen Dewhurst) explained that she made a fuss in a restaurant because "you can't let people get away with shoddy service. It begins with overcookepretensions, but typically it hits right-wing targets. In a 1989 episode, Murphy's Myrmidon mom (Colleen Dewhurst) explained that she made a fuss in a restaurant because "you can't let people get away with shoddy service. It begins with overcookepretensions, but typically it hits right-wing targets. In a 1989 episode, Murphy's Myrmidon mom (Colleen Dewhurst) explained that she made a fuss in a restaurant because "you can't let people get away with shoddy service. It begins with overcooked meat and ends with President Quayle."
"We're journalists on a comedy show," Bergen says. "If the Democrats were in the White House, we'd be taking shots at them. They just haven't given us the fodder the Republicans have, notably Quayle." She might also have said that the show's tone -- brittle and bang-on -- deflects its satire. The F.Y.I. folks are not, by and large, reasonable people. They are a gaggle of Mensa hysterics whose banter too easily turns to bullying. But this very stridency distances the audience from identifying with the characters or their prejudices. These are cartoon characters swapping gags about cartoon politicians.
For the real skinny on Dan Quayle, then, turn not to Brown but to Bergen. "I don't know what goes on inside Dan Quayle's mind," Bergen says, "and I'm very happy for that mystery to stay intact. It's a landscape I don't especially want to explore." Then she dons her polemical safari jacket and goes Quayle hunting.
"Until his Murphy Brown speech in May," she says, "Quayle had no national identity, other than being Bush's buffoon. Meanwhile, the extreme right of the Republican Party was begging for a leader. None of us bargained on the size of the fire storm that was going to follow. It's been a surrealistic episode in this country's political life. As Ross Perot said, only in America could this become a campaign issue."