In the follow-up to Knock Wood—her bestselling “engaging,
intelligent, and wittily self-deprecating autobiography” (The New York
Times)—Candice Bergen shares the big events: her marriage to a famous French
director, the birth of her daughter, Murphy Brown, widowhood, falling in
love again, and watching her daughter blossom.
A Fine Romance begins with Bergen’s charming first husband, French director Louis Malle, whose huge appetite for life broadened her horizons and whose occasional darkness never diminished their love for each other. But her real romance begins when she discovers overpowering love for her daughter after years of ambivalence about motherhood. As Chloe grows up, Bergen finds her comic genius in the biggest TV role of the 80s, Murphy Brown, and makes unwanted headlines when Dan Quayle pulls her into the 1992 presidential campaign.
Fifteen years into their marriage, Malle is diagnosed with cancer, and Candice is unflinching in describing her and Chloe’s despair over his death. But after years of widowhood, she feels the sweet shock of finding a different kind of soulmate. Candice takes us through the first years of her new marriage and shares the bittersweetness of watching Chloe leave home and flourish—and the comedy of a losing battle against those damn wrinkles and extra pounds.
A natural writer, Candice is hilarious, brutally honest, down-to-earth, and wise. She may be a beautiful Hollywood actress with a charmed life, but Candice is someone who can talk frankly about extraordinary events. Readers who pull up a chair will feel like they’ve just made a best friend.
ALSO BY CANDICE BERGEN...
Candice Bergen’s bestselling 1984 memoir: an “engaging, intelligent, and
wittily self-deprecating autobiography” (The New York Times).
Candice Bergen was born into the heady Hollywood of the 1950s. Before
she became a celebrity in her own right and wrote her memoir, A Fine
Romance, she wrote this book about being the “celebrity offspring” of Edgar
Bergen, vaudeville and radio’s greatest dignitary/comedian. Her “sibling” was
Charlie McCarthy, the impudent dummy beloved of millions. Bergen, much as he
loved his daughter, was a man who “kept his emotions pressed and neatly hung,”
and was more comfortable speaking to—and through—his brainchild. Charlie always
had an answer. Charlie couldn’t let anyone down. Above all, Charlie never had to
leave the paradise that was childhood.
Knock Wood is a book about growing up—about the comedy of expectations that ruled Candice Bergen’s early life, about the ironies that attended her exotic rites of passage. The world offered her a wealth of options: adolescence in Swiss boarding schools; at nineteen, a plum role in Sidney Lumet’s The Group; quick entry into the profession of photojournalism; automatic acceptance among the esteemed company of the moment—be it the international jet set, Bel Air in the 1960s, or the world of radical politics in the 1970s. But always she carried the conviction that her gifts were untested, her luck unearned.
Told with wit, self-deprecation, and a rare degree of courage, Knock
Wood is the extraordinary record of Candice Bergen’s coming of age. It is at
once the moving fable of the love between a father and a daughter, of a woman’s
triumph over self-doubt, and a dazzling journal of American life and times over
the past four decades.
About the Author...
She was born blonde and beautiful, raised
like a princess in the magical world of Hollywood, an instant star. But such
easy victories weren't enough for Candy Bergen. With great wit, style, and
exceptional honesty, the daughter of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the "sister"
of famed talking dummy Charlie McCarthy tells the story of her struggle to come
to terms with herself.
Candice Bergen’s film credits include
The Sand Pebbles, Carnal Knowledge, Starting Over (for
which she received an Oscar nomination), and Miss Congeniality. On
television, she made headlines as the tough-talking broadcast journalist and
star of Murphy Brown, for which she won five Emmys and two Golden Globes.
She later starred with James Spader and William Shatner in the critically
acclaimed series Boston Legal.
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