You'll fall for Bergen's 'Fine Romance'
You've got to love Candice Bergen.
Despite her patrician good looks, Swiss boarding school upbringing, Beverly Hills credentials and hefty collection of shiny Emmys, she's a regular woman who's hauling around the usual overflowing cartload of guilt, insecurities, disappointments and embarrassments.
In A Fine Romance (***1/2 out of four), her second stunningly candid autobiographical work (the first, Knock Wood, chronicled her early years), she describes life from her 30s — when she met and married the much-older French director Louis Malle — to current-day adventures and misadventures. With nearly every page you can almost see her, shoulders squared, eyes leveled directly at yours, taking a deep breath and letting loose with details and confessions most of us share with only our very closest girlfriends (and only after we've had two — or five — too many glasses of wine).
Bergen, 68, tells of her often-lonely years at Malle's lovely but remote French country house, living the life the decidedly unsociable Malle preferred, largely ignoring her own ambitions because, it seems, she regarded him as An Artiste and herself as something much less. She tells of the trials of having a later-years baby, Chloe, a peevish, demanding infant who quickly won Bergen over and with whom charming routines evolved, such as doggie costume parties and a private language for the two of them.
Bergen, it's clear, did not manage to deflect the heartache and second-guessing most women endure. Her independent, introverted, reserved self was often at war with her notions of how other women might have handled this thing or that.
She wondered, while living in L.A. with Chloe to work on the wildly successful TV show Murphy Brown, if this choice, which separated her from Malle for long periods of time, would be their undoing. It was not. Later, when Malle descended into hideous debilitation from a rare disease, she candidly acknowledged her occasional need to briefly absent Chloe and herself from that horror.
She fretted over becoming a wife again — years after Malle's death — to a gentle man more present and less bawdy than any she'd experienced, and she struggled to find a middle ground that would satisfy them both.
Bergen, who made headlines for joyfully admitting she's gained weight because she loves to eat, describes with high humor her perpetual surprise at the indignities aging slings at us. She writes of being stranded atop a bike after a spinning class when she couldn't figure out how to unlock from the pedals; of her post-age-60 hair, "which seems to be somebody else's hair: I think Golda Meir's"; and about her mouth "which has grown so thin it cannot be found by the naked eye."
Her writing and storytelling are superb throughout, but in these final chapters — about her life as an elder — she is undeniably brilliant.
Still, she never, ever whines. And she never lords the celebrity thing, which was, in fact, a minor piece of her variegated life, one suspects.
During the late 1980s and into the '90s, when Bergen's famously snarky, quirky character Murphy Brown was enthralling us every Monday night, most of us wished we had a friend like that fictional blonde. With this memoir, we're all likely to be wishing Bergen herself — funny, insightful, self-deprecating, flawed (and not especially concerned about that), and slugging her way through her older years with bemused determination — was living next door.
A Fine Romance
By Candice Bergen
Sharon Peters is author of Trusting Calvin: How A Dog Helped Heal A Holocaust Survivor's Heart.