Candice Bergen on "60 Minutes"

60 Minutes Interview

This interview is from July, 1999. All voice-overs are done by Mike Wallace and were usually done while photographs or film clips were shown.

Mike Wallace: We don’t remember having a better time than the time we spent with Candice Bergen a little over a year ago. She was just winding up her ten years as Murphy Brown, getting laughs out of politics and single motherhood, breast cancer and of course family values. But she’d had it after ten years, she was tired of the weekly grind and wanted to move on to something different. First though, there was the final bow.
(Clips of the final bow and party)
Voice-over: What do you do after you shed the skin of a character you inhabited for a decade? A smart, tough woman who played to rave reviews and five Emmy awards? Well, if you’re Candice Bergen, finally leaving Murphy Brown, you go far away, to a hideaway in rural France.
(Candice in France with two dogs. Mike Wallace drives up to her in a car.)
Candice Bergen: Hi, Mike.
MW: I don’t believe it! You really live a million miles away from...
CB: I know, I told you! It probably took you longer that it did to Vietnam. Thank you for coming.
VO: This is a sacred place for Bergen, the sixteenth century farm house owned by her late husband, French film director, Louis Malle. They’d been married for fifteen years when he died of cancer in 1995. She still spends as much time here as she can with their daughter, twelve-year-old Chloe Malle. Madame Malle, as Bergen is known here, gave me a tour of the medieval town just five minutes away.
CB: I love coming here, you can relax totally.
MW: You were married here?
CB: Yes. And all the villagers came.
MW: They did?
CB: Yes. Louis invited all the villagers because he always felt so connected to all the people in this area.
(They pause while Candice has a conversation, in French, with a villager)
MW: Here’s what you wrote about your marriage to Louis: “I felt like a small, frightened animal who had spent my life curled up in the back of a cave, snarling at intruders when suddenly someone turned on a light and said ‘It’s okay, its safe, you can come out now.’” Really?
CB: Yeah, I did. It was really like the beginning of my life in a way.
VO: Why did it take her so long to find her way? Bergen says that growing up, her blessings, beauty and fame, backfired on her. She was born into one of Hollywood’s first families, daughter of Edgar Bergen, world renown ventriloquist, who’s dummy, Charlie McCarthy, was, in the gold age of radio in the ’40s, more popular than Mickey Mouse. When Candice was only nine, her dad brought her on his hit radio show to spar with Charlie McCarthy.

(Radio clip playing while showing pictures of Edgar and Charlie or Candice and Edgar)
Edgar Bergen: Tonight, my little girl steps out into the footlights of life.
CB: Down, Daddy, down!
Charlie McCarthy: Watch it kid, there’s only one star on this show.

Frances Bergen: It was difficult for her, I can understand that.
VO: Candice’s mother, Frances admits her daughter was upstaged.
FB: She couldn’t understand all this fuss being mad over Charlie McCarthy.
MW: A piece of wood.
FB: A piece of wood, exactly. She was referred to as Charlie McCarthy’s sister. It was rather unique.
CB: There were Charlie McCarthy dolls and clocks and glasses and radios.
MW: And that really must have been tough to live with, honest?
CB: It was very hard to make sense of because you knew he wasn’t real and yet he was treated so much better than most humans. He had his own room, he had lots of heads with different expressions, and he had this power. This doll had this incredible power. I still don’t think of him as a doll, really.
VO: And it was sometimes painful because she felt she had to compete with this puppet for her father’s love and she resented it.
MW: I got the feeling that you and your dad somehow were not close.
CB: No, we were not as close as I think either of us wanted to be and that was really both of our responsibility. I think certainly I made things incredibly difficult when he was older. I said things that were so hurtful to him and there was just never any way I could backtrack from that.
VO: Her rebellion started at the age of fourteen when she went abroad to school in Switzerland and did more drinking and smoking there than studying. And her study habits didn’t improve at the University of Pennsylvania.
MW: You got thrown out of college?
CB: That’s right.
MW: Flunk art, flunked...
CB: Opera. Yes. They said it couldn’t be done.... And yet, I did.
MW: I was about to say, how could you flunk art and opera?!? And why were you throw out of college?
CB: Well, I applied myself.

FB: She gave us some rough times, but I tried to look at it as growing pains.
MW: What did you do about it?
FB: What couldn’t we do about it? She was old enough by then to live her own life and do what she was about to do.
VO: And Bergen didn’t have to do much. Her good looks lead people to give her things she never worked for and felt she didn’t deserve; modeling jobs, and movie roles. Plus a succession of stormy love affairs.
CB: I received so much attention, so quickly, for so little. For doing basically nothing.
MW: I want you to read something aloud.
CB: Aloud? Oh, dear. (Reads from a piece of paper.) “I have always traded on my beauty. It brings me the flowers that fill this room. Every bouquet here arrived with a hopeful note from an admirer.” (Candice laughs and says “Oh god”) “I am a totally insecure person and my beauty was my only security. It opened doors. It turned people on without my having to do a thing but show my face.” Oh god!
MW: It was in McCall’s magazine 20 years ago. You were in your thirties. You poor thing. To suffer being beautiful!
CB: (Fake crying) It has been hell. What can I say, it completely screwed my head on backwards. I just had to get past it.
MW: Was this because of the way that you grew up?
CB: No, it was the people’s response to me. It was so out of whack and I didn’t know how to deal with it.
VO: She dealt with it for a while by dabbling in radical politics and experimenting with drugs. But finally she found something she was good at -- photography. And people took her pictures seriously. She traveled the world on assignments for magazines like Esquire and Life. But Hollywood was pushing Bergen to be on camera, not behind it.
CB: I fell into doing movies. I didn’t even especially want to be doing movies.
VO: And it showed. After her debut in Sidney Lumet’s The Group, one critic wrote “As an actress, Bergen’s only flare is in her nostrils.”

(Clip from “The Group,” Candice in a taxi)

CB: You might spare me the cliché like heart of hearts, Dotty. Let me off here please.

VO: But she got better. Carnal Knowledge with Jack Nicholson was the first film she says that she was proud of.

(Clip of “Carnal Knowledge,” Candice and Jack Nicholson in a car)

Jack Nicholson: Where’d you go to high school?
CB: What are you doing this summer?
JN: Do you always answer a question with a question?
CB: Do you always date your best friend’s girlfriends?

VO: And then she discovered her true strength, her family inheritance, comedy. In Starting Over, with Burt Reynolds, she played a pop song writer who cannot carry a tune.

(Clip, Candice singing in front of a mirror with Burt Reynolds standing next to her)

CB: “Better than ever... Better than ever.. Hey, hey, hey, its got to be better....
Burt Reynolds: Have you lost your marbles?

VO: It got her an Academy Award nomination and suddenly she was a comedian...

(Clip, Candice Bergen on “Saturday Night Live,” speaking in a French accent with a Chanel bottle on the side of her head)

CB: It’s not easy being Kathleen Denueve.

VO: ...And the first female host of Saturday Night Live.
CB: And then Murphy, which was really for me a professional dream job.

(Clip of Murphy Brown)

CB: How did Murphy Brown manage to get so deep inside the KGB? Well, just lucky I guess. How do I do it?!

MW: How’d you get the job? Did you have to audition for it?
CB: Oh yeah. And I failed.
MW: What are you talking about?
CB: They didn’t want me. They wanted Heather Locklear. I had to read for the head of CBS then and he pushed a button and the electric drapes whirred closed. So I was sitting in a darkened office with one light above my head, for two or three people and then I had to read this comedy scene and I just went right into the tank.
VO: She was saved by Diane English, the show’s creator who was sure Bergen was perfect for the part.

Diane English: I think that in this situation, who she is and who the character was, it was just the perfect match, it was an explosion. And that’s the reason, I think, why this series worked, we cast exactly the right person. America loved seeing this gorgeous woman go for it, go for the jugular, allow herself to fall on her tush.

MW: How much of you, in fact, is Murphy Brown?
CB: Not as much as I would like. I think a lot of women would like to be more like Murphy Brown, which is why I think the show resonated so well with women. I think women love her fearlessness. Well you know she was always described as Mike Wallace in a dress, which was my favorite description of Murphy Brown.
VO: And of course we all remember when Murphy became a single mom and so Dan Quayle’s example of declining family values. The irony is no one values family more than Bergen, although her family is not what you’d call conventional.
MW: A couple of your children are Louis’ kids right? The daughter of his mistress, who lives with you?
(Candice laughs)
MW: If you don’t want to talk about it...
CB: I’m very happy to talk about it. Louis was very unconventional. He had his son with the German actress and he had Justine with this wonderful woman, Alexander Stuart, who is here with us now. This is not to say that in the beginning, when I had first married, for the first time in my life, I was not so thrilled to have all of these other past women in my life, so there was a considerably bumpy period in there where these things were smoothed out.
VO: Today they all gather in France for holidays and enjoy lazy days together.

Chloe Malle: She’s like a big kid, you know?
MW: She is like a big kid.
CM: Having time with her is like being with a friend from school. She’s sillier than I am.

MW: Your friend Mike Nichols has said that you have never spoken about how hard it was for you in Louis’ declining days.
CB: No, I haven’t and I won’t. It was hard for Louis, it was awful for us, but it was all about Louis.
VO: And it was because of Malle’s illness, she says, that she stayed with Murphy Brown for as long as she did. She said she needed it -- the stability, and the friendship of the rest of the cast. But now she is ready to let it go. After the last rehearsal is done, the last touch of makeup, the last run-through of the last script. And one last song.

(Clip, rehearsal of Candice singing “Natural Woman” for the finale)

CB: ’Cause you make me feel.... You make me feel... (screams)

CB: I have never savored life with such gusto as I do now. I have never appreciated a quiet moment with a friend as much, a quiet moment with a book and I think part of that is my obsession with being older and time going faster and it’s very increasingly sweeter for me and I think part of that is Louis had an unbelievable appetite for life and I feel like I have to enjoy it for him, but I’ve never felt more comfortable in my skin, I’ve never enjoyed life as much and I feel so lucky.

MW: And luckier still, because she says she’s in love now for the first time since Louis Malle died. And beyond that she’s got a new job lined up. After the first of the year, she’ll be doing a talk show for a yet to be launched cable network called “Oxygen.”

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