Candice Bergen’s take on growing older is refreshing

During lighting breaks, Bergen writes, she and Beatty, old pals, not to mention Hollywood royalty, sat talking about how beautiful they had once been, and what power it had given them: “It gives you total access, Warren said, and I agree. What you do with it is up to you. It’s an all-access backstage pass.”

Well, according to Bergen, her all-access pass based on her exquisite looks has expired: “Let me just come right out and say it: I am fat.”

This admission in her book made news even before its release, and threatened to overshadow anything else she might have to say in A Fine Romance. The book is an admirably intimate if not as trenchantly written follow up to Knock Wood, her poignant account of growing up as the daughter of famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and playing second fiddle to Dad’s wooden dummy Charlie McCarthy.

Tabloids ran with the fat thing — she’s put on 30 pounds! She eats bread and olive oil, chocolate ice cream, admits “no carb is safe!” Now in interviews, Bergen says, a little disingenuously, “why all the fuss?”

Come on. Of course people would glom onto the fact that a celebrity whose blond beauty once personified “glacial perfection” is, well, unrepentant about transgressing against Hollywood’s religion of thin — with even her own friends “routinely vomiting after major meals. I am incapable of this,” she writes.

Instead, about 15 years ago, she writes, she became one of the “mothers in their 50s—running to beefy now, the traditional thickening through the middle … compensating with wit, attention, intelligence, experience.”

Murphy Brown was one of my favourite shows and a groundbreaker. The lead character was a fiercely talented, ambitious journalist who stood second to no man in her profession even though she was deeply flawed—a recovering alcoholic, massively self-centred (current comedic darling Mindy Kaling’s self involved doctor character on The Mindy Project is a direct descendant of Murphy Brown) and hilariously assertive.

Murphy Brown, at its height, was watched by70 million viewers, publicly vilified by Dan Quayle, the stupidest vice-president in American history, who raked the show over the coals for glorifying single motherhood when Murphy, in her early 40s, gets pregnant without a father in sight.

It was also when Bergen in her 40s came into her own professionally, earning multiple Emmys for her comedic chops after years of bad reviews as a serious actress, including one memorable New York Times takedown: “Miss Bergen performs as though clubbed over the head…..the dialogue may simply have stunned her.”

Despite the current fat flap, Candice Bergen is so much more interesting than whatever she currently weighs.

As her memoir recounts, after years of being single, she married the great French film director Louis Malle (“Being with Louis upgraded me culturally”) with whom she had a loving but challenging 15-year long distance marriage until he died of cancer at 62.

At 39, she gave birth to the true love of her life, daughter Chloe Malle, who is now a successful editor at Vogue.

After Murphy Brown, Bergen regularly appeared in the series Boston Legal, performed in her first Broadway play, and in 2000 married New York financier and gazillionaire Marshall Rose.

With chefs and housekeepers, private planes and New York apartments to die for, Bergen’s life seems absurdly charmed.

As if to compensate for the glamour, she endearingly includes a little too much mundane detail in her book about raising Chloe. But her real message is that she almost missed motherhood, got in just under the wire, and is in awe of how much it brought to her life.

There’s a narrative thread running throughout Bergen’s life that is in direct contravention to her most famous character Murphy Brown. It’s about the need to please men — from her remote father, through her brilliant first husband to her loving but highly traditional second husband, who doesn’t like it when she stays out late after a theatre performance, and thinks that marriage means being together — in the same room — all the time, a rude shock for a woman whose first husband was away more than he was there.

Perhaps that’s why she seems almost wistful reminiscing about Murphy Brown being free of that need to please: “Not an ounce of submission, not a drop of passivity, no suggestion of shrivel.”

Murphy was right for the times, and the demographics are now with Bergen as like all her cohort, male and female, she confronts growing older — those changing looks, a broken pelvis from a fall, several mini strokes.

In fact, the story arc of her life and where she now finds herself, wondering how to professionally continue, keep her marriage vibrant and not be too overbearing toward “Bunny,” her adored daughter, could make a pretty good sitcom.

Of course they’d make her lose weight to star in it.