By Judith Newman
The first thing you notice about Candice Bergen is her astonishing beauty. The second thing you notice is the dog hair. "Uh, you may be sorry you wore black," Bergen says as Lois, her white basset hound-terrier mix does her best to make me as tuft-covered as Bergen herself. We are sipping tea in the sunroom of her Spanish-style villa deep in the canyons of Beverly Hills, a Shangri-la for her and her fourteen-year-old daughter Chloe. The interiors are all dark wood and plush, overstuffed furniture. And dog beds -- lots of dog beds. "There are dog beds in every room -- forty in all," Bergen says. "Naturally, [the dogs] sleep on the furniture."
Dressed with crisp simplicity in dark Gap pants and a white Lacoste shirt, Bergen, fifty-three, has a complex face that invites study. There is, perhaps, a trace of melancholy, the residual effect of the loss of her husband, Louis Malle, in 1995. But there is sly humor, too: At Bergen's most composed and serious, a bemused smile is forever playing about her lips. "What people don't know about Candice is that she's not just a little bit funny -- she's hilarious," says her longtime friend, Diane Sawyer, co-anchor of 20/20 and Good Morning America. "She is also an incredible mimic. She can do a great impersonation of me and Mike Wallace, for instance."
She won't be merely impersonating journalists for long. For ten years, as Murphy Brown, she got to play one on TV; now, she gets to be one on TV. In February she will host Exhale, a four-nights-a-week talk show on Oxygen, the new cable network for women. Exhale will feature conversations with men and women -- but mostly women -- Bergen wants to learn about. One of the first shows, on the issues facing women fifty and over, will include writers Erica Jong and Gail Sheehy, and restaurateur B. Smith.
Bergen knows people will be tuning in expecting to see Murphy Brown's patented brand of "gotcha" journalism. "Murphy was a television character," she says, in patient tones. "I am not." Admittedly, the woman who took on Dan Quayle in 1992, when he tried to make Murphy Brown's single motherhood an example of America's "loss of family values," does regret having to curb her own political impulses this campaign season. She needs to remain impartial, because she wants all the candidates to appear on her show. But she can't resist a Murphyesque swipe at Donald Trump. "Did you see him with his model du jour today?" she says gleefully. "It's a potent campaign tool, I suppose, to have your girlfriend at you side in her Manolo Blahnik stilettos."
The child of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and model Frances Westerman, Bergen wrote perceptively about life in the limelight, as the privileged "sister" of wooden dummy Charlie McCarthy, in her 1984 autobiography Knock Wood. The sunny, picture-perfect exterior, so suitable for Dad's photo ops, belied a solitary and introspective little girl who both counted on and was terrified by her own beauty. by the time she was thirteen, she was a magnet for the lecherous attentions of Hollywood types -- both male and female.
Bergen's beauty and privilege gave her an early sense of entitlement -- everything just came to easily. Flunking out of college (for failing her gut courses, art and opera) was something of a wake-up call, though she didn't exactly have to work at Denny's: Modeling and acting jobs followed. While she was growing up, Bergen said she wanted to be Brenda Starr -- "a crack reporter in high-fashion clothes on dangerous assignments" -- and she did work occasionally as a photographer and journalist for magazines like Life and Esquire. But she always returned to the movies, often cast as -- according to her description -- "the Snow Queen, a natural for rape scenes: the woman men love to defile." But even though she won acclaim for meaty roles like the lesbian Lakey in The Group (contributing to a lifelong rumor about her own sexuality), the dream girl in Carnal Knowledge, and the aspiring singer who couldn't carry a tune in Starting Over (for which she won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress), her impassive beauty often worked against her. As the film critic Pauline Kael once said, "[Candice Bergen's] only flair is in her nostrils."
If she wasn't capturing critics' hearts, Bergen wasn't wanting for male attention. But marriage was never a goal. "I didn't have a financial need, and I wasn't very gifted at relationships. I probably was more like what we think of boys as being: hard to pin down and wary of commitment."
Until, that is, she met French director Louis Malle, a man whose films, from Murmur of the Heart to Pretty Baby to Atlantic City, were some of the greatest film works of the past thirty years. In Knock Wood, Bergen's description of the first night Malle held her in his arms says it all: "I felt like a small, frightened animal who had spent its life curled up in the back of a cave snarling at intruders when suddenly, someone turned on the light and said, 'It's okay, it's safe -- you can come out now.'"
After marrying Malle in 1980 and having their daughter at thirty-nine, Bergen was content not acting. Reportedly it was Bergen's mother who nudged her into auditioning for the title role in Mayflower Madam, a 1987 made-for-TV movie. The film was forgettable, but it got her out of the house and back in front of a camera. When Diane English decided to cast against type for her creation Murphy Brown (the network had wanted Heather Locklear), she sought Bergen, who was by then in her early forties. "I got the role I loved the most at a point in my career when most women are being phased out," Bergen says.
The sitcom gig, which lasted ten years, allowed Bergen to be home with her daughter -- and, finally, to be close to her husband during his last year. Bergen has not spoken openly about Malle's death. Friends say his was a brutal and incapacitating form of lymphoma. "She was faced with the fact that he did not have a great chance of survival," says her close friend, photographer Mary Ellen Mark. "I think you never get over a tragedy like your husband's death. But she's also a constructive, positive person who would not let his death distort her life."
Bergen's career decisions have revolved around being available to her child. "Most of the kids I grew up with, their parents were in show business -- they were away a lot," Bergen explains. "Not that we didn't have close relationships with our parents -- I'm very close to my mom -- but parents didn't think anything of going off for a few weeks and leaving their kids. I guess I was a mom so late in life, my daughter was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I remember being in tears at the hospital after Chloe was born, at the thought that someday she would have to leave home." Bergen's face lights up at the mere mention of her daughter. But as she is first to admit, she's having a wee problem adjusting to her child's tentative steps towards independence. A couple of years ago, Chloe went away to tennis camp. After a week she called and said, "Mom, I've homesick, and I miss you so much." "I know all these parents who'd say 'Why don't you stick it out?'" Bergen continues. "Not me! I was on that plane so fast; God, I couldn't get there fast enough!"
Chloe is an exotic dark beauty in her own right, resembling her late father much more than her mother. So far, Bergen hasn't had to deal with her daughter falling for a particular boy. ("She still sits on my lap.") But she is all too aware that her child is growing up in a society that's more looks-conscious than ever. For a woman whose appearance was very much a double-edged sword, this is a worry. "I've been vigilant about this issue," Bergen says quietly. "Chloe feels confident about her looks, but they're not important to her. Not at all. She's the kind of kid," adds Bergen proudly, "who looks out for the kid nobody's having lunch with."
They spend a great deal of time at Bergen's home in rural France, where Chloe is close to her half-brother and -sister, children Malle had with his mistress before meeting Bergen. In fact, Alexandra Stewart, the mother of Malle's other daughter, is one of Bergen's close friends, though they're not as close as a recent 60 Minutes profile of Bergen suggested: Viewers might have been left with the idea that Bergen lived with Stewart, and that Stewart was Malle's mistress during his marriage to Bergen. "ah, I certainly would not have been okay with that!" Bergen says with a laugh. "I believe a lot in monogamy, let me tell you."
If it is a time of great transition for her daughter, it is no less for Bergen herself. Not only is she taking on a talk show for the first time, she is also in another serious relationship. For the past year she has been quietly seeing New York real estate magnate and philanthropist Marshall Rose, sixty-three.
"I'm seeing someone. I'm very lucky -- I have a wonderful time with him. It's altogether a good thing," she says. Rose and Bergen were introduced by their mutual friend, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt. While their backgrounds could not be more different (Rose was the son of a Brooklyn furrier), they share tastes, interests (both are passionate about architecture), and a life of great fortune marred by tragedy. Like Bergen, Rose lost a spouse to cancer a few years ago. Friends say he was devastated; Bergen is helping him heal the wound.
There are other similarities, too. "Marshall is very special in that he's truly a wise man, with a great sense of humor," says architect and town planner Jacquelin Robertson, a longtime friend of Rose who built Rose's house in East Hampton, New York. "And in a business filled with a lot of super-egos, and people who are not enormously sensitive to others, he is thoughtful and kind. It's the same with Candy. She's desperately real, she's quiet, she's shy, she's refined -- and she's deeply nice."
Not that dating after a certain age has come easily to Bergen. "On my show I want to talk about aging. Nobody's really dealt with it," Bergen exclaims. "You hit fifty and everything falls apart. You can't see, you have no muscle tone, you can't get out of a chair. And as a woman, you disappear! You just become invisible on a certain level." Oh, please. One of the most famous beauties in the world, complaining about being invisible? "It's absolutely true," she insists. "It's like someone turns off a switch. And I was never someone who reveled in my 'magnetism.' But when I disappeared, it sort of pissed me off, that guys get to go on being sexual until they're seventy or eighty, and we disappear at forty-five or fifty."
At the same time, Bergen is adamant that many things about getting older are perfectly to her liking. "It's a cliché, but its true. You are much more comfortable in your skin; you appreciate things much more. I enjoy eating a perfect peach. I'll just have a perfect moment with that peach! You're grounded; you have a better focus."
Staying grounded has been Bergen's secret to living a life that's real -- a life where you know who your friends are. "When I think of Candice, I think of tenderness," says Diane Sawyer. "She's the call you get when you need consoling, and nobody in the galaxy noticed but her."