After a series of disappointing romances, she also fell madly in love with controversial French director Louis Malle, whom she married in 1980. The last few chapters of Knock Wood touchingly reads like a beautiful fairy tale about two wary “loners” whose slow, courtly romance blossoms into blissful togetherness.
“I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options,” she writes. “That you had to be someone less to live with someone else… In marriage with this man, my options have only expanded. Everything about my life has been enhanced and enriched. I used to think that when you got married your life was over, but I feel like mine has just begun.”
Dan Quayle’s Worst Nightmare
If Knock Wood is a stylishly cynical and slightly tortured coming-of-age tome, Bergen’s sequel, A Fine Romance is the relatable and humorous memoir of a secure, accomplished woman with her feet planted firmly on the ground.
While Bergen’s love and admiration for the quirky, brilliant, and driven Malle never ended, she is honest that her enormous success on Murphy Brown, her move to Los Angeles, and her overwhelming, and surprisingly gushing, love for their daughter Chloe (born in 1985) left the restless, needy Malle feeling unmoored and unappreciated. He split his time between L.A., NYC, and France, his relationship with Chloe sporadic and wary. “Louis’s arrival,” Bergen writes frankly, “always interrupted the Two of Us.”
The simple fact that Bergen had come into her power as a comedian and modern self-determined woman also unsettled the American right. When her character Murphy Brown gave birth to a child (gasp) out of wedlock in 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle misogynistically accused the fictional journalist of “mocking the importance of fathers.”
Bergen and her beloved cast and crew were caught in a surreal firestorm, which included death threats, full-time security, a female stalker, and countless pompous think pieces on what made an “American family.” But in the end, it only made the show and Bergen’s popularity grow.
She won another Emmy that year for Murphy Brown. In her acceptance speech, she said “I’d like to thank the vice president,” as well as “the writers for their words and spelling them correctly” — a dig at Quayle’s much-publicized misspelling of “potato.”
You Can’t Have Everything
“Louis had been told he wouldn’t live a long life; I think that’s why he always galloped through it,” Bergen writes. “Some part of him knew the clock was ticking.”
In A Fine Romance, Bergen touchingly recounts the heartbreaking months of 1995 when she cared for Malle as he battled lymphoma and an incurable inflammation of the brain. “I realized that I had existed for two reasons: to see Chloe into this world and to see Louis out of it,” she writes.
In 2000, she married stylish, thoughtfully type-A, New York City-based businessman and philanthropist Marshall Rose. Their relationship seems cozy and playful. She also became the go-to for playing prickly bosses and smart toughies, bringing such characters to life in Boston Legal, Sex in the City, Miss Congeniality, and Book Club. Bergen refreshingly professes that she’s happy to no longer be thin, young, and “beautiful,” though she and Warren Beatty once reminisced that beauty was an “all access backstage pass.”
Perhaps this is because Bergen is now an utterly secure realist about her past, her present, and her honestly voiced fears for the inevitable end. “I am short-tempered and Chloe calls me on it,” Bergen writes, due to the effects of minor strokes and getting off Prozac. “I am impatient and judgmental. I am not nearly as nice to be around, that is true. I miss the other Kinder, Gentler Self, but I have recovered my ability to cry, and then some. You can’t have everything.”
