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Candice Bergen's competition for her dad's affection was not with a sibling - it was with his iconic sidekick dummy Charlie McCarthy
'Charlie had his own bedroom next to mine – and his was bigger'
She and French director Louis Malle had been 'crazy in love'
Her role on Murphy Brown made her a fortune
Real estate developer second husband was suffocating and she reacted with tiny tantrums.
She's packed on 30 pound and says ‘No carb is safe – no fat either’

Published: 17:22 EST, 6 April 2015 | Updated: 02:45 EST, 7 April 2015

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Five time Emmy-winning actress Candice Bergen, now 68, confesses she was the highest paid actor in television for a lot of years after playing the title role in the hit CBS sitcom, Murphy Brown that ran for ten years starting in 1988.

‘The job security was incredible. And I never wanted it to end; doing Murphy Brown was insanely fun’.

‘I have made a lot of money. Most of this is the incomparable TV Money. Nothing like it’.

After the first year of the hit TV show, when she won the Golden Globe and Emmy for best actress, her salary headed skyward for over ten years and she kept that fact a secret.

Financial secrets prevailed in her upbringing by her model/ actress mother and her famous father, Edgar Bergen, best known for as ventriloquist who's sidekick was dummy Charlie McCarthy.

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Puppet envy: In her new memoir, Candice Bergen writes that her father belittled her looks and favored his dummy. She reveals that she would sit on one of her father’s knees at the breakfast table and Charlie McCarthy sat on the other.‘A gentle squeeze on the back of my neck was my cue to open and shut my mouth so he could ventriloquize me. Charlie and I would chatter together silently, while behind us Dad would supply the snappy repartee for both of us'

Success: Candice starred in the long-running TV hit Murphy Brown, here with costar Grant Shaud

Happy at last: Candice Bergen and husband Marshall Rose t the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscar Party

Edgar spent more time with the dummy than his first-born child, Candice. And when he died in 1978, her penurious father left his only daughter out of his will - but not Charlie..

Charlie McCarthy was willed $10,000 with the proviso that the funds be managed, invested and reinvested to fund ventriloquist performances in the future.

Edgar wrote ‘I make this provision for sentimental reasons which to me are vital due to the association with Charlie McCarthy who has been my constant companion and who has taken on the character of a real person and from whom I have never been separated even for a day’.

‘I’d chased my father’s approval all my life and here was proof I’d never get it’, the actress candidly reveals in her new memoir, A Fine Romance, published by Simon & Schuster.

Charlie McCarthy dominated Candy’s childhood.

She sat on one of her father’s knees at the breakfast table and Charlie sat on the other.

‘A gentle squeeze on the back of my neck was my cue to open and shut my mouth so he could ventriloquize me. Charlie and I would chatter together silently, while behind us Dad would supply the snappy repartee for both of us.

Charlie had his own bedroom next to mine – and his was bigger.

Candy's competition for her dad's affections was not with a sibling - it was with her ventriloquist EdBound to give Charlie McCarthy

‘Those were unique circumstances to grow up in. Sometimes I have to give myself credit for being a functional human being,' she writes

‘Those were unique circumstances to grow up in. Sometimes I have to give myself credit for being a functional human being’.

‘I knew my father loved me, but with his Swedish reserve, it wasn’t his nature to tell me’, Bergen writes.

He was not physically affectionate and when the young girl decided to get over her own terror of trying to say she loved him, his response to her declaration was a pat on the hand.

But the two would go up in his plane together and he’d prop the young girl up on phonebooks and let her fly the plane. They also went on fishing outings together and took long breakfast rides on horseback when visiting Palm Springs.

‘Still I was hurt, shocked when I discovered he had left me out of his will’. She didn’t need the money but it was an emotional slight.

Edgar also kept secrets from his wife – the contents of a safe in his study.

When Candice and her mother finally figured out the combination after his death, the name ‘Charlie’ transposed into numbers, the door opened to reveal fabulous pieces of jewelry that Edgar had purchased and stowed away as investments and also to avoid paying taxes on them.

Mrs. Frances Bergen, known professionally as Frances Westcott after becoming ‘the Chesterfield Girl’ and the ‘Ipana (toothpaste) Girl’ in newspaper ads and on billboards, had no clue as to the existence of the large marquis diamond ring or the beautiful diamond necklace with an aquamarine the size of an egg.

Edgar never included her in any financial discussion but after his death, she became the ‘stock witch’, cleverly quadrupling the value of the estate over twenty years.

Charlie McCarthy always dominated Candice’s life.

She compared playing her award-winning title role on Murphy Brown to channeling her inner Charlie.

The Murphy Brown character fit her like a glove and ‘gave me permission to be my brattiest, bawdiest self’.

Her father was schizophrenic in the same way -- buttoned-down, quiet, and introverted– unless he was with friends or had Charlie with him, an invitation to be risqué and tell dirty jokes.

Director Louis Malle and actress Candice Bergen attend the 'Dangerous Liaisons' premier in 1988

Candice Bergen attends the 1989 Emmy Awards

‘He belonged to a men’s group called the Rancheros Visitadores. They would go on weekend horseback rides and camp out and tell stories and fart around a campfire’.

Then he would revert to his introverted self when back at home.

Candice married the brilliant French film director, screenwriter and producer Louis Malle in 1980. When she became pregnant with their first and only child, Chloe Malle, Candice agonized over whether or not she would be able to tell the baby still in her womb that she loved her.

She had never heard those words growing up and had never been able to tell her parents she loved them until late in their lives and well into her thirties.

For thirty-nine years, those feelings were suppressed until Chloe was born in 1985 and then the infant hijacked Candice’s feelings and turned her into a lunatic if she was separated from the child.

The little girl became the love of her life distancing her from Malle. He escaped Los Angeles to work in France and New York. But the couple remained devoted and thought about having a second child until Louis was diagnosed with myelofibrosis that morphed into lymphoma and inflammation of the brain.

The illness was fatal.'

‘I was in a black anger. I felt that my life, which had always been blessed, had suddenly been hijacked by this completely other force.’

Candice's daughter Chloe is engaged and will marry in France, as her mother did Chloe's father, this summer

‘I felt like my heart was breaking’.

She hid in the housekeeper’s room and cried at night. She sought out primal scream therapy and was angry that that her life was being taken away from her and that she had become caretaker.

Louis died in November 1995 at age sixty-three and Bergen confesses she still thinks about him all the time.

‘We loved each other completely, then were pulled apart by distance’.

Three years later in 1998, she met Marshall Rose, who had been chairman of the New York Public Library, a real estate developer, philanthropist and a billionaire.

They married in June 2000 and writes that she found this new married life claustrophobic. She and Louis had lived together and apart with his work in Europe. Now ‘Marsh’ was reaching out for a closeness she found excessive and suffocating and reacted to with tiny tantrums.

Back to analysis that helped her open up to the continued tenderness of her second husband.

Feeling too old for movies, feeling like a cliché, a middle-aged actress with no job offers, she was suffering from empty nest syndrome until the offer to act in Boston Legal in 2005 came along and rescued her from her anxieties.

These days Bergen accepts the thirty pounds she’s packed on since her marriage to Marsh. She accepts that she is ‘a champion eater. ‘No carb is safe – no fat either’.

Always a compulsive eater, when she was a young girl, she consumed twelve peanut butter and jelly sandwich halves in less than ten minutes. She no longer overeats past gratification but still indulges in cookies and ice cream if she can find where the housekeeper has hidden them and Parmesan cheese.

She writes there is so much fat in her face that the skin is stretched to the max while hanging in folds under her chin.

She’s on meds for mini-strokes she first suffered while taping Boston Legal, but she’s off the Prozac that had been prescribed.

She’s given up chasing plastic surgery or fills to look younger and has settled in a loving and devoted relationship with Marsh.

A Fine Romance by Candice Bergen and published by Simon & Schuster is available on Amazon tomorrow.