Edgar Bergen

Edgar John Bergen (February 16 1903 – September 30 1978) was an Academy Award-winning American actor and radio performer, best known as a ventriloquist.

Biography

Early life

Bergen was born Edgar John Bergren in Chicago, Illinois, to a Swedish family and grew up in Decatur, Michigan. He taught himself ventriloquism from a pamphlet when he was eleven. A few years later he commissioned Chicago woodcarver Theodore Mack to sculpt a likeness of a rascally Irish newspaperboy he knew. The head went on a puppet named Charlie McCarthy, who became Bergen's lifelong sidekick. At age sixteen, he came to Chicago, where he attended Lake View High School and worked at a silent movie house.

Radio

His first performances were in vaudeville, at which point he legally changed his last name to the easier-to-pronounce "Bergen". He also worked in one-reel movie shorts, but his real success was on the radio. He and Charlie were seen at a New York party by Elsa Maxwell for Noël Coward, who recommended them for an engagement at the famous Rainbow Room. It was there that two producers saw Bergen and Charlie perform. They then recommended them for a guest appearance on Rudy Vallée's program. The appearance was so successful that the next year they were given their own show. Under various sponsors, they were on the air from December 17, 1937 to July 1, 1956. The popularity of a ventriloquist on radio, when one could see neither the dummies nor his skill, surprised and puzzled many critics, then and now. Even knowing that Bergen provided the voice, listeners perceived Charlie as a genuine person, but only through artwork, rather than photos, could the character be seen as truly lifelike. Thus, in 1947, Sam Berman caricatured Bergen and McCarthy for the network's glossy promotional book, NBC Parade of Stars: As Heard Over Your Favorite NBC Station.

It was Bergen's skill as an entertainer and vocal performer, and especially his characterization of Charlie, that carried the show. Luckily, many of the shows have survived and are available for audiences today to experience the phenomenon firsthand. Bergen's success on radio was paralleled in the United Kingdom by Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews.

For the radio program, Bergen developed other characters, notably the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd and the man-hungry Effie Klinker. The star, however, was Charlie, who was always presented as a highly precocious child (albeit in top hat, cape, and monocle) a debonair, girl-crazy, child-about-town. As a child, and a wooden one at that, Charlie could get away with double entendre that adult humans could not under broadcast standards of the day.

Charlie: "May I have a kiss good-bye?"

Dale Evans: "Well, I can't see any harm in that!"

Charlie: "Oh. I wish you could. A harmless kiss doesn't sound very thrilling."

Similar lines given to Mae West in a sketch on the show broadcast December 12, 1937, resulted in her fifteen-year broadcasting ban. "Charles, I remember our date and have the splinters to prove it."

Charlie's feud with W. C. Fields was a regular feature of the show.

W.C. Fields: "Well, Charlie McCarthy, the woodpecker's pinup boy!"

Charlie: "Well, if it isn't W.C. Fields, the man who keeps Seagram's in business!"

W.C. Fields: "I love children. I can remember when, with my own little unsteady legs, I toddled from room to room."

Charlie: "When was that? Last night?"

W.C. Fields: "Quiet, Wormwood, or I'll whittle you into a venetian blind."

Charlie: "Ooh, that makes me shutter!"

W.C. Fields: "Tell me, Charles, is it true that your father was a gate-leg table?"

Charlie: "If it is, your father was under it."

W.C. Fields: "Why, you stunted spruce, I'll throw a japanese beetle on you."

Charlie: "Why, you bar-fly you, I'll stick a wick in your mouth, and use you for an alcohol lamp!"

Charlie: "Pink elephants take aspirin to get rid of W. C. Fields."

W.C. Fields: "Step out of the sun Charles. You may come unglued.

Charlie: "Mind if I stand in the shade of your Nose?"

Bergen was not the most technically skilled ventriloquist Charlie McCarthy frequently twitted him for moving his lips—but Bergen's sense of comedic timing was superb, and he handled Charlie's snappy dialogue with aplomb. Bergen's wit in creating McCarthy's striking personality and that of his other characters was the making of the show. The fact that Bergen was widely popular for a ventriloquism act on radio (where the trick of "throwing his voice" was not visible) indicates that his appeal was primarily the personality he applied to his characters.

Bergen and McCarthy are sometimes credited with "saving the world" because, on the night of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles performed his War of the Worlds radio play that panicked many listeners, most of the American public had instead tuned in to Bergen and McCarthy on another station and never heard Welles's play. Conversely, it has also been theorized that Bergen inadvertently contributed to the hysteria. When the musical portion of Bergen's show, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, aired approximately twelve minutes into the show, many listeners switched stations and found the War of the Worlds presentation already underway, with a realistic sounding reporter detailing terrible events.

Ray Noble was the musical director and composer and teenage singer Anita Gordon provided the songs on his show. Gordon was said to have been discovered by Charlie, who had a crush on her.

Other media

In addition to his work as a ventriloquist, Bergen was also an actor and comic strip creator. He appeared as the shy Norwegian suitor in I Remember Mama (1948). He also appeared in Captain China (1949) and Don't Make Waves (1965). He created the syndicated comic strip Mortimer & Charlie, which ran in 1939.

Bergen and his alter-ego McCarthy appeared together with top billing in several films, including the Technicolor extravaganza The Goldwyn Follies (1938), opposite the Ritz Brothers. That year they also appeared in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man with W. C. Fields. At the height of their popularity in 1938, Bergen was presented an Honorary Oscar (in the form of a wooden Oscar stauette) for his creation of Charlie McCarthy.

Other film roles for the team include Look Who's Laughing (1941) and Here We Go Again (1942), both with Fibber McGee and Molly. Later, Bergen and McCarthy were featured in Fun and Fancy Free (1947), and much later in The Muppet Movie (1979). Bergen died shortly after completing his scenes in the latter film, marking it as his final public appearance; the film was subsequently dedicated to him.

Although his regular series never made the transition to television, Bergen made numerous appearances on the medium during his career. In a Thanksgiving special sponsored by Coca-Cola in 1950, the new character Podine Puffington was introduced. This saucy Southern belle was as tall as a real woman, in contrast to Bergen's other sit-on-the-knee sized characters. Bergen also hosted the television show Do You Trust Your Wife? in 1956, later to be replaced by Johnny Carson. Bergen continued to appear regularly on television in the 1960s. For example, he did a stint as one of the What's My Line? mystery guests on the popular Sunday night CBS TV program.

Bergen appeared as Grandpa Walton in the original Waltons movie, The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971). The part was played by Will Geer in the subsequent series. Throughout the run of The Waltons which took place in the late 1930s through the 1940s the voices of Bergen and Charlie McCarthy were sporadically heard from the Walton family's radio, as family members regularly tuned in for that program.

Death

On September 30, 1978, Edgar Bergen died in his sleep, of kidney disease in Las Vegas, Nevada, at age 75. Mr. Bergen died at Caesar's Palace Hotel, just three days after opening Wednesday September 27th, at Caesar's for a two-week engagement, that was to be part of his farewell to show business. It was in mid-September, that he had announced that he was retiring after 56 years in show business and sending his monocled, top-hatted partner to the Smithsonian Institution.

Today the iconic wooden 'Charlie McCarthy' rests in Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution. Bergen was interred with his parents (who are buried under their true surname of 'Bergren'), in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. Edgar Bergen's lovely model/actress wife of 33 years Frances Westerman Bergen (20 years his junior), died in 2006, and rest beside her husband in Inglewood Cemetery. In 1990 Bergen was elected to the Radio Hall of Fame, the same year that The Charlie McCarthy Show was selected as an honored program. It is said that Charlie McCarthy died along with Bergen: "Since retiring to the Smithsonian Institution in 1978, Charlie has uttered not one, single, solitary word." A message in the closing credits dedicates The Muppet Movie to the memory and magic of Edgar. In 1991, the United States Postal Service honored him with a 29 cent commemorative stamp in his honor.

Family

In 1941, Edgar Bergen met Frances Westerman after a radio program when he was 39 and she was only 19. Westerman, who graduated from Los Angeles High School the year before, was in the audience of Edgar Bergen's radio program as the guest of a member of his staff. Sitting in the front row, the the young fashion model's long legs caught the attention of the 39-year-old star, who asked to meet her, who was also known as Frances Westcott, a working model. The two were married in Mexico after years of long distance courtship, on June 28 1945. Frances had found the right person with Edgar, and together they built a loving and passionate relationship that was envy of Hollywood until Edgar's death in 1978 at age 75. They were the parents of actress Candice Bergen, whose first performances were on Bergen's radio show, and film and television editor Kris Bergen, whose famed father died just 2 weeks before his 17th birthday. Edgar Bergen's widow Frances Bergen died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on October 2, 2006, aged 84, from undisclosed causes.

References in popular culture

• The Looney Tunes character Beaky Buzzard, known for his goofy grin, was based on Mortimer Snerd. Bob Clampett often referred to Beaky as the "Snerd Bird."
• In Radio Days, young Joe's (Seth Green) 'Uncle Abe' (Josh Mostel) and 'Aunt Ceil' (Renee Lippin) have an argument over an unnamed Bergen's radio act; Abe is driven crazy by Ceil's fascination and delight of Bergen and his show, and the thought of the famed ventriloquist's success over a radio show ("How can you tell his lips aren't moving?!")
• A Charlie McCarthy doll figures into the storyline of The Rainmaker (1997), the film based on the John Grisham novel.
• In The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, p. 213, it is said that "Cheney's nickname inside CIA was 'Edgar.' As in Bergen. The President would, by implication, be in the Charlie McCarthy role. This isn't fair, but it is at least half true."
• In The Waltons pilot special "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story", Mary Ellen, in a sarcastic response to one of her younger sisters if there is a Santa Claus, curtly replies "Sure there is. AND I'M CHARLIE McCARTHY!!" McCarthy's partner, Edgar Bergen, was in that same TV film as Grandpa.
• Bill Cosby compared the students of special education to Mortimer Snerd in a monologue entitled "Special Class" from his 1966 album, Wonderfulness.
• In Little Tough Guys in Society, David Gorcey and Billy Benedict briefly do an act where they address each other as "Mr. Bergen" and "Charlie."

Listen to

• Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy radio shows (24 episodes)
• OTR Network Library: "Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy'' (six episodes)

Notes

References

• Grams, Jr., Martin. "The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show: An Episode Guide and Brief History"
• Strickler, Dave. Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists, 1924-1995: The Complete Index. Cambria, CA: Comics Access, 1995. ISBN 0-9700077-0-1.
• Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Logs: The Charlie McCarthy Show
• Funni, Arthur. "The Radio Years of Bergen and McCarthy." Thesis. The Margaret Herrick Library. 2000.

External links

• Edgar Bergen at the Internet Movie Database
• "Charlie's Big Night" by Elizabeth McLeod
• Knock On Wood: An Insider's View of Belly Speaking
• "A Pictorial History of Ventriloquism"
• "Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy"