Man was Candice Bergen beautiful. Here she is as a model on the cover of a corny Skitch Henderson e-z listening lp.

Candice Bergen was the daughter of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his wife Frances, a former Chesterfield girl. When Candice was born, many news stories noted that Bergen’s dummy Charlie McCarthy now had a sister. She displayed a gift early on for comedy when as a child she was a guest on her father’s radio show. She grew up privileged and was childhood friends with Gregory Peck’s and Judy Garland’s children and often spent time amusing herself at family friend Walt Disney’s home. She briefly attended the University of Pennsylvania in the mid 1960’s. She was named homecoming queen in her freshman year, but left to begin a career as a Ford model. Her earnings allowed her to indulge in her passion for photography; later shooting photographs for Life, Esquire and Playboy.

Throughout the 1960’s, she would attend lavish parties thrown by the likes of CBS president William Paley, but also hung out with the Black Panthers and got arrested for lying down on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Candice indulged in writing (her works appeared in Playboy and she also wrote a play titled “The Freezer”), photojournalism, and acting.

Candice was asked by director Sidney Lumet to play Lakey, an icy lesbian in “The Group”  Then she was cast as a missionary opposite Steve McQueen in Robert Wise’s “The Sand Pebbles”.  In 1971, she starred in Mike Nichols’ “Carnal Knowledge” with Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel. She was the first woman to host “Saturday Night Live”, and also contributed news stories for NBC news. All before Murphy Brown!

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