Candice Bergen sits in a striped armchair on an otherwise bare stage at UCLA, waiting to accept the Jack Benny Award for outstanding achievement in the field of comedy. It is an honor that in prior years has gone to the likes of Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, and Whoopi Goldberg.

The actress is slighter than she seems on TV, where her performance as the lumbering journalist-cum-single-mother, Murphy Brown, has earned her three Emmys, two Golden Globes, and the wrath of a former Vice President of the United States. The lacerating, self-deprecating wit and keen sense of timing she exhibits take those not acquainted with her by surprise. "People assume a beautiful woman has no need to develop a sense of humor," explains Diane English, creator of the Murphy Brown series. "Often, that's true. But Candice was sick of being put on a pedestal. I wrote a character with fault lines and fissures, and she found it refreshing to be more than a pretty face."

Calling Bergen a "pretty face" is a little like observing that Streisand sings well. For most of her forty-seven years, Bergen acknowledges, her appearance has terrified men and caused women to hate her. Professionally, too, beauty got in the way. Frozen in the mold of an ice queen until 1971, when Mike Nichols cast her as Art Garfunkel's wife in Carnal Knowledge, she went on to win an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Burt Reynolds's newly liberated, slightly foolish wife in Starting Over and received good reviews as the abrasive, overdressed junk-novelist in Rich and Famous. But only after taking on a character as flamboyant and "W.C. Fields-like" as Murphy Brown, Bergen maintains, was she able to break out of herself and establish her comedy credentials. "Dad once told me that happiness is achieved despite beauty, rather than because of it." she recalls of the renowned ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. "I've come to realize he's right. Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior. Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening - and threatening - to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while."

Bergen is now sitting barefoot on the patio of her Beverly Hills house, an airy bungalow more reminiscent of Los Angeles in the 1940s than of the baronial mansions featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. "Finding a place this unpretentious wasn't easy," she says of the one-story, two-bedroom hillside structure sans den or dining room. Books by such authors as Isak Dinesen, V. S. Naipaul, and Jay McInerney line the shelves of a vaulted-ceiling living room-a space filled with floral-patterned and wicker furniture, antique chests, and family photographs. Pearl, a tabby cat, and Lois, a terrier-and-basset-hound mix, have the run of the house and garden, which is enclosed by eucalyptus trees.

The Beverly Hills address is home to Bergen, eight-year-old daughter, Chloe, and, on occasion, French director Louis Malle, Bergen's husband of thirteen years. By any standard, theirs is an unorthodox marriage. From August through March, Bergen shoots Murphy Brown by day and segues into parenthood at night. Malle, whose films include Atlantic City and Murmur of the Heart, resides in Paris most of that time, punctuated by stretches in Los Angeles every other month. Only in the summer can the family count on dwelling under one roof - at Le Coual (French for "the raven's cry"), their farmhouse in southwestern France. (They also keep an apartment in New York.) Such a life-style has toppled many a relationship, but Bergen's has managed to prevail. "People who don't know better think it's a glamorous arrangement," she suggests. "But long-distance communication puts a strain on the marriage. I used to make the greater effort, traveling to Louis. But with the TV show and Chloe in school, the burden is more on him. That we've made it at all is a testament to how much we both wanted it."

Bergen was in her midthirties when she met Malle, fourteen years her senior. What ensued, she says, was a welcome relief from the "insane, B-movie" relationships with "men who are trouble" to which she was inevitably drawn. "Louis and I are great loners," Bergen says, slipping off the jacket to her tailored navy pantsuit. The stand-up collar of her blue-and-white-striped blouse frames a face lightly accented with cocoa lipstick and beige eye shadow and blush. "Neither of us had much luck with romance. I wasn't afraid of losing my freedom so much as losing my solitude.

"I used to be high-maintenance,'" she continues, "but I don't take up much room or demand a lot of emotional comfort anymore. We look out for ourselves and then come together. We give each other a lot of freedom neither of us ends up wanting."

Malle, Bergen claims, is the more intellectual of the two and, despite his open-heart surgery last year, surpasses her in the energy department. She's attracted to his relentless curiosity, he to her sense of humor. "I can act as a fool and he finds it in him to laugh," she says. "Not every man would - most especially a French new-wave director."

If it seems like a fairy-tale romance befitting a fairy-tale life, reading Bergen's 1984 memoir, Knock Wood, should set the record straight. In the upper-crust showbusiness world of her childhood, fantasy was familiar. (Uncle Walt sent a three-foot-tall Disney package every Christmas, while David Niven and Charlton Heston took turns playing Santa.) Yet young Candice found herself lonely much of the time. Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen's wooden sidekick, had his own room in the house. "Charlie's sister," as Candice was dubbed in the press, had to compete with him for what little affection her moody, often remote father doled out.

In the midsixties, Bergen enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where, after failing art and music, she received a letter requesting that she leave. Academics, it seems, held less allure than lucrative modeling assignments, which were feeding her photography habit. With the money from a Revlon magazine ad, she bought the two Nikons with which she later shot photo essays for The Today Show and Esquire and Life magazines. Equally important, a talented graduate student named Mary Ellen Mark, who, Bergen notes in her book, is widely considered to be "this generation's [Margaret] Bourke-White," became a good friend and mentor. "If Candice had wanted to, she could've become a brilliant photographer," Mark had told this reporter. "Her pictures are strong, with an edge that emerges out of her social conscience, her curiosity, her wit. One of her photographs was of a pet pig named Officer lounging at the Beverly Hills estate of a friend. She has-a great, ironic eye."

The irony, the wit, not to mention the trademark cool, Bergen recalls in her memoir, were an integral part of her armor - defenses erected by an internally tarnished Golden Girl to keep the world at bay. Large gatherings still terrify her and bring out her worst. Someone to whom honesty is paramount turns into someone "glib and arch," she says. "I don't suffer fools gladly. And in a desperate attempt to make party conversation, I can throw people and principles to the wolves. I don't like the person those situations bring out, and, since behavioral change doesn't seem to have worked, I avoid them whenever possible."

Director Henry Jaglom, a close friend of twenty-five years, insists the perception of Bergen doesn't match the reality. "Candice can seem cold until you get to know her," he would later explain over lunch at a West Hollywood restaurant. "But cool' is a way of being safe rather than an indication of conceit. People can't compute shyness, so they frequently misjudge her. Because she's not good at small talk, they think she's standoffish or aloof - which isn't at all the case."

Indeed, one of Bergen's more defining characteristics is a marked lack of pretentiousness - a determination to stay sane in an insane profession. Phoning from planes still strikes her as excessive. Driving a forest green BMW sedan required a period of adjustment. And it's Bergen, not her housekeeper, who whips up an iced cappuccino for her guest.

Keeping a lid on celebrity is an ongoing challenge. "Around the third or fourth year of Murphy Brown, people started treating me differently," Bergen recalls. "Things were a little headier than I felt comfortable with, and I sensed demons springing to life. If I began to assume certain monsterisms, I told a couple of friends, please put up a red flag. The individual is often the last to know, so I want to stay vigilant."

Ali MacGraw, a longtime friend, finds Bergen decidedly un-Hollywood. "Candice isn't gushy, out to make people like her," MacGraw would later say, on the phone from New York, where she was borrowing Bergen's apartment for the week. "She gives a lot to a wide circle of people and is tremendously sentimental when it counts. She throws birthday parties, dog parties, Easter-egg parties, and she does it all by herself, rather than call dial-a-party-thrower. There's a lot of the child in Candice."

Yet in a town - and profession - fixated on youth, Bergen is a notable exception. Memory, the actress had confided to the UCLA crowd, is the first casualty of middle age (and Post-its - note sheets that adhere to virtually any surface - are her substitute of choice for retention). Though others rely on cosmetic surgery to stop the clock, for her that's not an option. "In trying to look gorgeous and ageless," she says, people "turn into ghouls, creatures out of The Night of the Living Dead. Pictures of them twenty years ago show them with no breasts, yet they're very voluptuous now. Have they no shame? Hollywood feeds into the pattern, of course. No one gives you credit for not doing it. And without a face-lift, actresses usually don't work."

When it comes to appearance, says Bergen, less is more. In a city overrun with nail salons, Bergen's nails go unpolished. Wearing hats, she feels, makes too much of a statement. That the world considers her beautiful the actress finds both amusing and slightly suspect. She rarely glances in the mirror - on the set or off.

The Bergen beauty regimen, she admits, is a spotty one, aimed at "holding things together with as little time and energy as possible." Workouts are only semiregular. Food is a constant temptation. Diet meals on the set are capped off by doughnuts from the snack table. For the past few years, she tells a disbelieving observer, she's been five to ten pounds overweight. "I'm a terrible overeater, an animal when it comes to food," Bergen confesses. "Though I don't smoke and rarely drink, I sure do love my cookies. Discipline has never been my strong suit."

For twenty-five years, however, Bergen has sworn off red meat. She attributes her resolve to "animal solidarity" - a notion the French find hard to grasp. In the late seventies, when she first met the Malles ("A vast clan, very tribal, cultivated - and, fortunately, welcoming"), they served her a healthy portion of rare steak for dinner. Face-to-face with her principles but reluctant to offend, she kept moving the meat around her plate, covering it as much as possible with some lettuce. "In France, saying you're a vegetarian is tantamount to announcing you're a Californian wimp," says Bergen. "It's all very basic over there. Most of the chickens you buy have their head and feet attached. Chloe has the same problem as I. She has to be frisked as she leaves the table, because she puts things in her shoe."

If marriage to Malle was a breakthrough for Bergen, motherhood, at thirty-nine, was an epiphany. Chloe has not only brought Bergen closer to her own mother, Frances, an actress with, among other films, American Gigolo, Her Twelve Men, and Made in America to her credit, she's also the major focus of Bergen's very full life. When the workday is over, she generally heads home to put her daughter to bed, after which it's often too late to go out. Weekends - except in summertime - are more about parenting than socializing. "Before Chloe, I was very hamstrung," the actress admits. "But having a child grows you up. You're so much larger emotionally, so much more forgiving of your own parents and of yourself. I'm only sorry I couldn't have given my father me as a parent - I would have been a much better daughter."

Being a mother was never a goal, she says. Like Murphy Brown in her initial days of parenthood, Bergen wasn't sure she was up to the task. Traveling alone, saddling a horse, loading a camera, posed no problems. But being a parent was a plunge into the unknown. Henry Jaglom would later describe at lunch how, over the years, he'd confess that he longed for a child, while she'd wax euphoric about her animals. Her conflict, according to Jaglom, was palpable: "A day after the baby was born, I called her at the hospital, and she was sobbing so hard you could barely understand her. ‘I can't believe how close I got to not doing this,' she cried. Chloe has been the big love affair of her life."

Well aware of the pitfalls of being a celebrity's child, Bergen is as strict as the parents against whom she rebelled. Unlike her classmates with their Thunderbirds and Jaguars, young Candice would arrive at school in a borrowed station wagon. Wearing heels was prohibited, curfew a sad fact of life. "I hated it at the time," she says now, "but it probably saved my ass. Many of my friends overdosed or threw themselves off balconies. Those who made it weren't in great shape."

For three years after Chloe's birth, Bergen was a full-time parent. Though Murphy Brown has been the realization of a dream, career still runs second to motherhood. "I have a tough time taking myself seriously in acting," says Bergen, a woman in whom the traditionalist and the feminist peacefully coexist. "The only time it becomes joyous is when I do comedy. Like my father, whom many people mistook for a banker, I'm really very reserved a lot of the time. Comedy allows me to overcome my self-consciousness to a large degree. Comedy frees you from worrying whether people think you're a fool."

Parallels between Murphy and Bergen are evident. Both are journalists: Murphy of the TV variety, Bergen a frustrated one. ("I'm utterly proud of everything I've ever written," she says in a rare burst of immodesty.) Both are the kind of women Bergen describes in Knock Wood as lucky enough to lead a man's life in a man's world - not penalized by their sex but rewarded for it.

Casting close to the character is crucial in a television series - much more so than in a feature film. according to Diane English. When a performer enters the home once a week for years on end, the real person is bound to come through. As English had explained to this observer, "With Candice, we got lucky. She's tough as well as funny and smart as a whip - a fighter with an endearing, vulnerable side. Since Candice fought back from bad periods in her own life, she has the ability to play the underdog."

Still, the early days of the series stretched her to capacity. TV, Bergen says, was "like Lichtenstein" - alien turf. The dialogue flew fast as the speed of sound. And, unlike in Cheers, an ensemble show, just about every scene in Murphy Brown was driven by Murphy. The actress, as much out of self-interest as generosity, asked English to spread the wealth-and was promptly turned down. "I was tired in a way that made me crazy," Bergen recalls. "It was the sharpest fatigue and sleep deprivation. I'd be learning pages of dialogue late into the night. Chloe would be getting up at 5:30 A.M. Other cast members could stay in bed on Saturdays. Without live-in help, which I've always avoided, I didn't have a second to relax. When I'm on overload, my fuse gets short. I try not to get cranky and unload on the people around me - but occasionally, unfortunately, I lose it."

Downtime is still a rarity for Bergen - probably the great trade-off in what, from the outside, at least, seems a close-to-perfect life. Shooting Murphy, she says, "is like boarding a speeding train in August and not getting off until March." Compounding the chaos is her three-year stint as the spokesperson for Sprint, the telecommunications maverick. Taking on the account was a milestone for Bergen, who'd earlier turned down many more-lucrative commercials and infomercials. One misstep, she knew, and people would pounce. Success, so long in coming, could evaporate overnight. "Sprint was different, though," Bergen explains. "Like Murphy Brown's, the writing was good. And, since it was a prestige product with no political conflicts, I knew I could survive handily, not to mention profitably."

After considerable market testing with various personalities, Sprint was equally convinced. "Women relate to Candice and everyone finds her savvy," says Wendy Wiseman, group manager of advertising for the company. "The fit is good. Just as the traditional Cliff Robertson used to represent AT&T, Candice conveys the scrappiness of our company - the sense there's a new, better way."

Bergen's profile soared even higher when she - or her television persona, at least - became a Presidential-campaign issue last year. By mocking the importance of fathers and espousing single motherhood as "just another life-style choice," charged Vice President Dan Quayle, Murphy Brown was a testament to America's "poverty of values." The furor that erupted was jokingly referred to as "Murphygate." Quayle to Murphy Brown - You Tramp! blasted the New York Daily News. Quayle: Murphy No Role Model chimed in USA Today. Even so eminent a publication as the New York Times featured a front-page photo of Murphy and her baby with a shot of President Bush and Quayle on either side.

Quayle's comment was calculated, designed to create controversy," Bergen says in retrospect. "His handlers deleted that charge from his script. He insisted on putting it back. The Vice President had no identity before that and it put him on some kind of political map. We took the high road - maybe too high - but Quayle was too broad a target. TV does blur the line between fact and fiction, but I'd hoped that the Vice President of the United States could distinguish between the two."

Not that Quayle didn't have a point, says Bergen. Fathers aren't "disposable," and single motherhood is far from ideal. Maturity, it seems, has brought with it a sense of the "gray." Though she's no less passionate about her causes, the woman who addressed pro-choice rallies and hobnobbed with Black Panther Huey Newton in the seventies is now wary of abusing her fame.

Jaglom told Bergen when she took on Murphy Brown that it would propel her into the ranks of Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore. Though some would say she's got a way to go, a good many already accord her icon status. Yet "with all that success, Candice never once carries on like a princess," Ali MacGraw would later say. "Some superstars get stalled in the trailer-measuring stage [concerned with their on-set amenities], but she's never been about that. The more famous Candice becomes, the clearer she is about what matters."

According to talent agent Sue Mengers, who represented the actress for more than a decade, Bergen is nicer, less brittle now: "Murphy Brown's been a validation, a way of saying, ‘Hey, guys, I'm one of the most watched people in the world.' Candice is no longer angry and frustrated. She's more giving these days, one of the few for whom success has brought positive change."

Bergen herself admits to being more confident now. "At an age when most actresses are being phased out," she says, "I've been phased in - with a vengeance." Self-acceptance, she contends, has been a blessed by-product of middle age. "My character is what it is. I don't need to keep testing myself." Still, it's a mistake to think she's got her act totally together, she stresses. Insecurities, however latent, never go away. "For the first year or Murphy Brown," Bergen remembers, "I had what Patty Hearst called that deer-in-the-headlights look. I was in a mild state of shock. Since I don't have a vast reserve of talent, that syndrome would probably reassert itself if I began something new. Murphy is a cocoon in which I feel loved and protected. A different cast and director might be considerably less forgiving. If I ever decided to take on a role in a feature film again, it would scare me."

Socially, too, the demons resurface. A few years back, Bergen was in the French countryside, attending an elegant ball at a chateau owned by friends of Malle's. Candles lined the walls. Women wore pearls entwined in their hair. Not since her teens, recalls Bergen, had she felt so insecure. "When I'm in France, I try to behave well, to be dignified and put on my grown-up suit, but even so, I felt out of my league. Though it wasn't necessarily one I wanted to belong to, I felt unsophisticated - terrified of making a gaffe.

"At home, it was like Cinderella after the ball," Bergen adds, switching into a slightly preposterous Murphy, Brown tone. "I stood up my borrowed Christian Lacroix gown, stiff as a board, in a corner of the room and wondered why, at this point in my life, I was capable of being so intimidated. Maybe it's because I feel so lucky. Murphy Brown has gone on longer than I expected. Personally, I've never been happier. But I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop."

End.

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