The Strange Relationship Of Candice And Edgar Bergen

Introduction

Before Candice Bergen had a career in Hollywood, she was essentially a prop in a home-based ventriloquist act in a town called Beverly Hills. Bergen was born in 1946 to Frances Westcott and Edgar Bergen. While Frances was an actress and model, Edgar was the most famous, renowned ventriloquist in the world. Edgar also had a “son” named Charlie McCarthy. However, Charlie was not made of flesh and blood, but of wood…he was a puppet.

Edgar and Charlie

Edgar Bergen was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1903. As a teenage boy in 1919, he was exposed to a famous ventriloquist, Harry Lester. Edgar begged Lester to teach him the ways of ventriloquism. Reluctantly, he agreed.

After three months of study, Edgar paid thirty-six dollars to Theodore Mack, a Chicago-based woodcarver, to craft him a head for a dummy. Edgar made the body of the dummy himself, out of a broom handle and rubber bands. Once completed, Edgar named the puppet Charlie McCarthy.

During his college years at Northwestern University, Edgar and Charlie performed at churches in town, as well as on the Chautauqua circuit and in vaudeville. Once his education was complete, the pair moved to New York City.

While performing at a swanky New York party, gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell enjoyed the act and recommend them to Noel Coward. He had them booked at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. Since NBC broadcasted radio shows from the building, it was not uncommon for producers and actors from the studio to be in attendance. This is how Edgar and Charlie were discovered.

“You find out your mistakes from an audience that pays admission.”

– Edgar Bergen

The duo first appeared on the network on December 17, 1936. It was so successful that they joined the cast of The Chase and Sanborn Hour soon after. They would appear regularly on the radio for the next nineteen years, from May 9, 1937, to July 1, 1956. It wouldn’t be long before they left New York behind for sunnier pastures in Hollywood, California.

Edgar and Charlie were also big at the movie theatre appearing in several movies together including You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939) opposite W.C. Fields. Edgar and Charlie were so popular at this point that they were given an Honorary Oscar – made of wood – in 1938.

In 1945, Edgar married Frances Westerman, a model, and actress twenty years his junior. The pair had met four years earlier while she was in attendance at one of his radio performances. The couple (and Charlie) soon moved to Beverly Grove Drive and started a real, non-dummy family with Candice arriving on May 9, 1946. A son, Kris, followed fifteen years later.

Young Candice

For the first several years of her life, Candice believed Charlie was a real person, her brother. He had his own bedroom (bigger than hers), and he had lengthy conversations with her during meals.

“For the first three years of her life, Candice had breakfast with Edgar and Charlie McCarthy…Charlie would sit there and talk to her: ‘drink your milk.’ her father never spoke directly to her. till one day she opened a closet she wasn’t supposed to open and found five of her ‘brothers’ hanging there.”

– Henry Jaglom

A few years later, Edgar would do a ventriloquist act with both of his kids at the breakfast table. He would place Charlie on one knee and Candice on the other.

Candice would go to birthday parties at Liza Minelli’s house, where a whole circus would perform, or to Walt Disney’s house with his rideable trainset. In 1958, at the age of twelve, Candice appeared on the Groucho Marx-hosted television show You Bet Your Life with her father. Over half a decade later they would appear together again on What’s My Line? as well as The Hollywood Palace with Burl Ives.

Eventually, she was shipped off to a boarding school in Switzerland. Candice was a wild child while abroad often causing mischief and getting into trouble. The most perfect example of this was once when her parents visited her, she offered them a Bloody Mary, mixed by Richard Burton, who also happened to be at the school that day as well. Candice was only fourteen years old at the time of this incident.

Candice briefly attended the University of Pennsylvania but flunked out. She turned to a career as a model, as well as acting. The latter of which she would be moderately successful, before the age of forty-two, when Murphy Brown made her a household name.

“Sometimes I have to give myself credit for being a functional human being.”

– Candice Bergen

Ice Cold Edgar

When Edgar Bergen died in 1978, he left Candice $0. He left Charlie $10,000.

“I make this provision for sentimental reasons which to me are vital due to the association with Charlie McCarthy who has been my constant companion and who has taken on the character of a real person and from whom I have never been separated even for a day.”

– Edgar Bergen’s Will

What happened to this $10,000 remains a mystery to this day.

“Edgar Bergen was an ice-cold fellow.”

– Orson Welles

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