The Princess Who Belched

"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. 'Its full of--" I hesitated.

"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl . . .

--The Great Gatsby

Candice Bergen is not the daughter of a king, but a ventriloquist. Otherwise she conveys all the insouciance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's fabled Daisy Buchanan. Beautiful, rich, intelligent and flippant, Candice can well afford drawing-room sallies and wry self-deprecation. Recalling growing up as Edgar Bergen's daughter, she says: "One may not turn out exactly normal when you have two wooden dummies for brothers, each with his own room." Or her days with the jet set: "That was a valuable exposure to the ultimate in boredom." Or her screen performances: "I'm great at the physical stuff: running, riding, jumping. Acting--that's another story."

Indeed it is, but Candice's limited talent has not restrained runaway demands for her services. Now 24, she has starred in eight motion pictures, most of them (The Group, The Sand Pebbles, The Adventurers, Soldier Blue) requiring beauty, a Trojan endurance and little artistry. Offscreen, her talents are so plentiful that they almost drive her to dilettantism. She has modeled, shot photos for Playboy, and written articles for Vogue, Esquire, Cosmopolitan and the Los Angeles Times. In Getting Straight, Co-star Elliott Gould helped unearth a tantalizing shard of acting ability. She received $200,000 for a western. The Hunting Party, which she has recently finished shooting in Spain with Oliver Reed (Women in Love). She has just finished filming Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge in Vancouver, B.C.

Demure Deflowering. Candice is generally hailed as heiress apparent to Grace Kelly, but the princess role does not quite fit. Says she: "Basically I'm the klutz who makes a terrific entrance to the party and then trips and falls and walks around with food in her hair. That ice-maiden stuff is a big defense--it's protection. It keeps a lot of Shriners and creeps away." She greets friends with a breezy "How's your ass anyway?" In casual conversation she may burp, giggle uncontrollably and then tell about the time at Westlake School when she and several girls tried to sing Happy Birthday on one protracted belch.

Princess Grace may have dallied with Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. But Candice has been bedded by Elliott Gould in Getting Straight, deflowered by Bekim Fehmiu in The Adventurers and raped by Oliver Reed in The Hunting Party. Recalling TIME'S review of The Adventurers (March 30), she predicts more of the same for Hunting Party. "I can see the reviews now: 'Candice Bergen grimaces as she loses her virginity.' All I do in this film is get raped and have orgasms. But I've got the orgasms down pat now. It's your token ten seconds of heavy breathing, followed by my baroque expression, eyes heavenward."

Persuasive Offer. The daughter of that radio favorite who gave you Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, Candice grew up in a Bel Air environment that could have made Little Candy a child star any time she wanted. Little Candy did not want, and instead went to nearby Westlake and to school in Switzerland and eventually to the University of Pennsylvania. College social life bored her (she neither smokes nor drinks), and she spent much of her extracurricular time modeling in New York. Eventually she caught the eye of Director Sidney Lumet, who was casting the film version of Mary McCarthy's The Group.

The offer was persuasive. "The people were so bright and articulate," she says, "so unlike the kind of Hollywood film making I detested. Playing the part of a lesbian was the kind of rebellious gesture I enjoyed then." She is equally candid about her attitude toward later roles. She chose Sand Pebbles primarily because she wanted to go to the Orient, and confesses: "If I'm hard to take now, I must have been unbearable then. I had this tremendous disdain for my profession and this huge arrogance." She airily admits that she agreed to a role in that $10 million bomb, The Adventurers, "purely for money." She adds: "Selling out wasn't as hard as I thought it would be." Anyway, making movies "is a layaway plan for my forties, a means of financing my twilight years."

Heavy Radicals. She is already enjoying the spoils of success. She now owns a kind of fun house, the aviary on the old John Barrymore estate in Beverly Hills, complete with six telephones, no working clocks, a zoo of stuffed animals and a desk full of middle-class repair bills. She has taken up the signal causes of her generation--sleeping-in with the Indians at Alcatraz, demonstrating against the ABM. But just as she has nagging doubts about her acting, she is not sure she is going about her reformist duties in quite the right way. During the shooting of Soldier Blue she organized a Moratorium Day demonstration in Mexico. She recalls comically: "We met in a drugstore, hatching plans over sundaes. Oh, we were heavy radicals all right."

Self-deprecators are often disillusioned romantics, and Candice is no exception. A true Fitzgerald fan, she makes herself weep in films by thinking of Zelda. And like a good Fitzgerald heroine, she has an otherworldly attitude toward beauty, wealth and success. Enchanted dreams are more piquant than fulfilled realities, after all. "My favorite fantasy is Snow White," she muses. "The guy comes riding up on his white charger, and they play, Some Day My Prince Will Come, and I just go crazy. In real life, the guy comes up on his white horse and has terrible acne. The fantasy is more fun."

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