She once went on a date with Donald Trump and was home by 9:00. She raised a fictional child on television and triggered a speech from the vice president of the United States. She lost two husbands, one to cancer, one to Parkinson’s, and kept showing up at 80 with the same dry wit that made America fall in love with her in the first place. Her name is Candace Bergen.
And this is the story of a woman who lived in full. Candace Patricia Bergen was born on May 9th, 1946 in Los Angeles, California into a household that made ordinary childhoods look dull by comparison. Her father was Edgar Bergen. Not a politician, not a film producer, but a ventriloquist and one of the most famous in the world.
Known for his wooden alter ego, Charlie McCarthy, Candace grew up in the shadow of a dummy. She has said with the kind of delivered bluntness that would later make Murphy Brown a cultural landmark that she always suspected her father preferred Charlie. The dummy got the best lines. The dummy got the spotlight. The dummy slept in a satin lined case and was treated with a level of care that a human child could only observe from a respectful distance.
She spent her childhood in Beverly Hills, biking down to the Beverly Hills Hotel with her dogs, watching her father ride horses down Sunset Boulevard in an era when Sunset Boulevard still permitted horses. She would pedal to the hotel on streets that felt and genuinely were different from what they became.
The Los Angeles she grew up in was a softer, stranger place, slower in some ways, wilder in others, governed by informal rules that made room for a girl and her animals to move through the world without anyone thinking twice. She grew up knowing Liza Minnelli since she was seven. She knew Vincent Minnelli, Liza’s father, who used to have miniature versions of his film costumes made so that Liza and her friends could dress up in them.
Edith had miniatures for a child who would grow into Liza Minnelli. Bergen moved in those circles, going to coffee shops in Beverly Hills with friends whose fathers were writers and directors, belonging to a particular stratum of Los Angeles that no longer exactly exists. She went to the opening of Disneyland in 1956.
10 years old, wearing a crisp red Oxford cloth shirt with suspenders stitched on. She remembers exactly what she was wearing. She does not always remember what she had for breakfast. At 15, she started modeling. At 18, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. And it was there, bored one evening in her dormatory, that the phone rang.
The voice on the other end belonged to a young man named Donald Trump. He was attending the Wharton School. She was a freshman with nothing better to do. She said yes. What followed has since become one of the most reliably entertaining stories in Bergen’s repertoire. A story she has told on Watch What Happens Live, on Harry Kik Jr.
‘s talk show, on the Late Show with Steven Colbear, and at the American Song Book Gala. Each time with the same economy of language and the same surgical precision of the final line, “He picked me up,” Bergen told Conic in 2017. He was wearing a burgundy three-piece suit with burgundy patent leather boots, and he was in a burgundy limousine, so it was very colorcoordinated.
She delivered the detail the way a comedian delivers a setup with total neutrality, letting the image do its work. When Andy Cohen pressed her on the details of the evening itself, Bergen was unsparing. I was home very early. There was no physical contact whatsoever, and when asked directly for her overall assessment of the young Donald Trump, he was a good-looking guy and a douche.
Bergen left Penn in her sophomore year to pursue modeling and acting, a decision that by any external measure appears to have been correct. She appeared in films throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. She was photographed by Bert Stern for the cover of Vogue in 1967, a shoot that required 40 hairpieces, none of which she walked out wearing because they belonged to the magazine.
She worked alongside Richard Avdon in studio. She spent an evening at a small club on the east side with Avdon’s collaborator Bert Stern and his wife after a shoot. She moved through the world of that particular New York. The way certain people move through rooms they were built for without effort, without loudness, but also without going unnoticed.
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She dated over those years a series of men the tabloids found interesting. Terry Meltchure, a music producer and the son of Doris Day, was perhaps the most consequential. They lived together in a house on Cello Drive in Beverly Hills that shortly after they moved out became the site of the Manson murders. That proximity to one of the era’s defining acts of violence is a fact Bergen has always carried quietly.
without performing grief she is not entitled to. She was not there. She simply knew the address. She also went on a single date with Henry Kissinger, a fact she disclosed in interviews with the same matter-of-act quality she applied to the Trump story. Kissinger, she indicated, was marginally more promising company.
The date did not lead anywhere. Bergen’s judgment in these matters, the record would suggest, was impeccable. Meanwhile, she discovered photojournalism, a chapter of her life she speaks about with genuine warmth and characteristically genuine honesty about its limits. She spent 10 days with Jane Goodall at Lake Tangana in Tanzania, living in a hut with no sink, surviving largely on bananas that the baboons attempted to steal each morning by rattling her door.
Her solution was to open the door a crack and throw the bananas down the beach. And when the baboons ran for them, she ran in the opposite direction. She shot Muhammad Ali. She covered the Ku Klux Clan. She worked for the Today Show. And then she arrived at the honest conclusion, the kind of honest conclusion most people never quite manage, that she was not good enough to do it at the level she wanted.
So, she stopped. That is a harder thing to say than it sounds. Bergen said it and walked away from it. And that decision led her eventually to Lewis. She met him at a dinner party in the late 1970s when she was in her mid30s. He was Louis Mal, a French filmmaker of singular reputation who had made Atlantic City, Pretty Baby, and Oivvoir Leafon, who was known for working in subject matter that no one else would touch with the same combination of precision and compassion.
Their first meeting was not especially promising. Bergen was wearing a designer CF tan that kept sliding around and required constant adjustment. Maul was ill at ease. She was ill at ease. Nothing caught fire. But Bergen’s college friend, the photographer Mary Ellen Mark, looked at the situation from the outside and issued her verdict.
You’re going to marry Louis Maul. I know it. There’s just no question. She was right. They married in 1980, 6 months after they began seriously seeing each other. Bergen told that story with her characteristic self-awareness. She called it an unusually wise choice by both of us to not rush into a romantic relationship.
And when a CBS interviewer pointed out that they had in fact married within months, she laughed and said, “Yeah, 6 months. It was fast, but when you’ve dated a lot of people and you’re 34, you kind of know. The wedding took place at the Mao family estate in the French countryside. Lewis was 47, Candace was 34.
Whatever they had found in that first ill dinner party conversation, it held. The marriage was structurally speaking unusual. Louie was rooted in France and in his work. Candace was in Los Angeles and from 1988 onward she was on a CBS sound stage five days a week playing a woman named Murphy Brown. The show was created by Diane English and built around a premise that sounds simple and turned out to be radical.
A 40-some twice divorced investigative journalist and a fictional Washington newscast. a recovering alcoholic returning to the job she had built her identity around. Ferociously competent, constitutionally incapable of suffering fools, and profoundly alone in the specific way that enormously capable people are sometimes profoundly alone.
Bergen later said she had never seen a character like that on television before. Not because Murphy was extraordinary, but because she was recognizable. She reflected something real about a generation of women that the medium had been happy to ignore. Murphy smoked. Murphy drank. Murphy was mean to her assistant. So mean, in fact, that the show made a running joke of the revolving door of secretaries who could not survive her.
She was also, beneath all of it, someone trying very hard to do the right thing in a world that kept rearranging the rules. That combination, competence and difficulty, and genuine moral seriousness, was in 1988 genuinely new on American television. The show was a hit from its very first season. Bergen and Lewis maintained their marriage across an ocean.
He commuted between France and Los Angeles. She flew when the schedule allowed. They wrote letters. They called. They had dinner at Orso on weekends when they were in the same city. They made it work with the quiet determination of two people who understood that what they had was not easily replaced. We loved each other, Bergen told CBS News in 2015.
We had a wonderful time together. He was extremely brilliant. He knew everything about everything. He had this rampaging curiosity. He loved America. He loved American sports. It was thrilling to talk with him in bed at night about things. Khloe Mal was born in 1985, 5 years into the marriage. Bergen had been, by her own admission, in her memoir, A Fine Romance, deeply ambivalent about motherhood.
She once wrote that she had wondered whether she could love a baby as much as a dog. The sentence was intended as honesty, and it was, but the honesty stopped being relevant the moment Khloe arrived. Bergen has described her daughter as the greatest gift of her life. She calls her Bunny.
She still calls her bunny in podcasts and in print and in conversations with her grandchildren without any apparent self-consciousness. The writers of Murphy Brown worked Bergen’s real pregnancy into the show’s fourth season and in May 1992, Murphy gave birth to a child she chose to raise alone. Over 33 million people watched the episode.
Two days later, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a speech at the Commonwealth Club of California in which he named the fictional Murphy Brown by name. He said the show was mocking the importance of fathers and called Murphy’s choice just another lifestyle choice dressed up as acceptable behavior. The speech was intended as a moment in the broader family values platform of the 1992 presidential campaign.
What it became was a national argument that Quail lost in real time. Played out across the covers of magazines and the editorial pages of every major newspaper in the country. Bergen was by her own account frightened. It was just relentless, she said in a CNN retrospective decades later. I was really afraid to go out. There was such an energy coming that was so huge that I didn’t know how to manage it. She hid behind her curtain her word.
while Diane English made a single clean public statement and stepped back. The season 5 premiere opened with Murphy Brown addressing the nation from her news desk, telling viewers that families come in all shapes and sizes and that perhaps the vice president might consider expanding his definition. The episode was one of the most watched in the show’s entire run.
Murphy Brown won 18 Emmy awards over its 10 seasons. Bergen won five of them for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series. She was the highest paid actor on American television man or woman. At the 2024 Emmy Awards, now 78 years old, she walked on stage and delivered a joke about J. D. Vance’s childless catlady’s remark with the timing of someone who has been making this particular argument for 30 years and finds the necessity of continuing to make it both exhausting and darkly funny.
Oh, how far we’ve come. She said today, a Republican candidate would never attack a woman for having kids. So, as they say, my work here is done. >> Through all of it, Lewis was dying. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma that progressed slowly and then not so slowly through the later years of Murphy Brown’s run.
Louisie Mal died on Thanksgiving Day 1995 at their home in Beverly Hills. He was 63 years old. Khloe was 10. Bergen has spoken about what her daughter did in that final period with a precision that makes it almost unbearable to hear. Kloe took it upon herself to care for her father. She had not been asked. She simply understood what was needed and did it, Bergen said with courage and humor.
One day, Chloe went to Disneyland and came back with goofy slippers, large padded cartoonish things. Louie put them on. He would not take them off. He was buried in them. Khloe also read to him every night. Bergen described this as the most important thing her daughter has ever done. And in her 2015 memoir, A fine romance, she made explicit what the book was really about.
It was a love letter to the child who showed her what grace under grief actually looks like. After Louie died, Bergen did not date for three years. She worked. Murphy Brown ran until 1998. And working kept her sane, she said, and rich. and she grieved privately without performing it for anyone.
It was not until 1999 that she met Marshall Rose, brought together by 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt and his wife Marilyn Burgerer, who had decided that Bergen and Rose, a New York real estate developer and philanthropist who had also lost his spouse, were simply meant to find each other. They married in June 2000. Rose was a self-made man from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a lawyer and developer who had built some of the more significant landmarks of modern New York, including overseeing Frank Garry’s IA building and the renovation of Madison Square Garden.
He served for 30 years on the board of the New York Public Library. He loved the Knicks. He loved books. He loved his golden doodle, Jerry. His obituary described him as someone who consistently modeled a life worth emulating, a man of effortless gravitas paired with quick humor and genuine respect for all individuals.
Bergen, for her part, said in a 2015 interview that she prioritized her marriage above almost everything else in her life. I’m always grateful when I get offered something that engages me. It’s for the right amount of time and I don’t have to leave my husband for more than a week or two. That’s really all I ask.
Marshall Rose died on February 15th, 2025 at home in New York City, surrounded by his family from complications related to Parkinson’s disease. He was 88. Bergen and Rose had been 3 months shy of their 25th wedding anniversary. Candace Bergen turned 80 on May 9th, 2025. She had 50 people coming to a dinner club.
She didn’t quite know what she was doing for her actual birthday. In the podcast Conversation with Khloe recorded just before the celebration, she said that frankly just being in the country with her daughter and her grandchildren was the dream. She said she had never asked Khloe to have children, never would have.
She said she was so grateful that she did. She said she loved the grandchildren to death. That Alice was filled with love. That Arty, she paused, chose the word deliberately, was filled with explosives. She laughed and Chloe laughed. And the conversation moved on to Tom and Jerry cartoons and the price of French toast.
the way conversations do when two people have between them already said the important things. She has been called Charlie McCarthy’s sister. She has been called Murphy Brown. She has been called the highest paid actor on television. She has been called a feminist icon for a show that kept getting renewed and a character that kept winning.
and a moment in 1992 when a sitting vice president picked the wrong fictional woman to argue with. She is now mostly called Toto, the name her grandson Arty gave her when he was 18 months old. The name that stuck the way the names given by children always stick. She turned 80. She is still here. She still has the timing.
She still finds a way to make grief and joy sit in the same sentence without either canceling the other out. That, as it turns out, was the real thing Murphy Brown was trying to tell us all along. If this story moved you, if you’ve ever loved Murphy Brown or admired a woman who named her ceiling and kept walking, or simply wanted to spend time with someone who has genuinely, thoroughly lived, drop a comment and let us know what it is about Candace Bergen that stays with you.
