of...logistics." Apparently the matter hasn't been resolved.

Bergen's diffidence complements Malle's own. Despite the life of luxury described in her memoir—the attention lavished on her as the daughter of the celebrated ventriloquist Edgar Bergen; a Beverly Hills childhood that featured rides on the miniature train Walt Disney had in his backyard and Christmas parties where Charlton Heston played Santa Claus; Swiss finishing schools; a successful career as a model and eventual stardom—Bergen is hesitant, withdrawn, the silent wife. She's reluctant to talk about herself; it's bad manners. She was off to London at the end of the month to star in a CBS TV movie produced by Lawrence Schiller (he put together the deal that resulted in Norman Mailer's nonfiction novel, *The Executioner's Song*), and she'd just been in *Hollywood Wives*, but she maintains that she "hasn't been doing much of anything," and feels guilty about it. "I know you're not supposed to say that."

Not only doesn't Bergen act like a movie star, she doesn't seem to like performing, and her reluctance comes through. Ever since her debut in *The Group*, she's gotten decidedly mixed reviews. Pauline Kael, who interviewed her for *Life* while *The Group* was being made, was not impressed. The young Bergen, she conceded, was "a golden lioness of a girl," but she simply wouldn't act: "Here she is, an intelligent young girl, beginning—despite her disclaimers—a career in the movies, and she doesn't appear interested enough even to stay awake and observe." Seven years later, she was still in a somewhat state: "Miss Bergen performs as though clubbed over the head," said the New York *Times* of her performance in *The Adventurers*. It still happens. "Miss Bergen does some acting," John Corry, a *Times* TV critic, wrote last February of *Hollywood Wives*, "but never again are you likely to see an actress look so uncomfortable while she does it."

No one is more disparaging about her career than Bergen herself. *Knock Wood* is a chronicle of missed opportunities and disastrous performances. "She was wonderfully confident, or seemed to be," Sidney Lumet recalls of her performance in *The Group*. "If she was unsure of herself, it didn't show." In Bergen's recollection, Lumet had to coax the part out of her; being in front of the camera was an ordeal: "I was playing enough parts in real life." It wasn't until the more freewheeling roles of her thirties—the frustrated housewife who tries to become a singer in *Starting Over*, the bitchy southern belle in *Rich and Famous*—that she learned to relax and enjoy herself.

What's remarkable about Bergen is her lack of vanity. "Being that rich, beautiful, talented, and famous is an occupational hazard," says Ed Victor's wife, Carol Ryan, a lawyer in the film industry who has known her for years. "It intimidates people, and Candy's worked hard to correct for it." Once you've gotten used to the face that was on the cover of *Vogue*, the face you remember from *Carnal Knowledge*, she becomes just another anxious writer, amazed that anyone would like her book.

I was sorry to leave Paris. I would have liked to stay on, hanging around the apartment on the quai aux Fleurs and watching the tourist barges float by down below on the Seine. But I had to get back. Loitering in a café on my last afternoon, I noticed a familiar name on the packet of sugar I was unwrapping. "Beghin," it said, "Sucre morceaux." ☐

60

SPOTLIGHT

# Henry the O.K.

Smile, please.

Say "geopolitical." Henry Kissinger is svelte and frisky these days, but his words are as weighty as ever; 224 pages are published this month by Little, Brown in *Observations*, a collection of what the peripatetic Metternich has been saying around the globe for the last two years in speeches and interviews on everything from apartheid to xenophobia. The London *Economist* presented him as "a private citizen, in New York," but we all know how grand he still is. The A list of politics and corporate America helicopters to and from his new house in Connecticut for consultations.

The theme of his new book is summed up in an enigmatic saying with which the Chinese nonplussed Nixon and Kissinger when they dropped in for tea in the early 1970s: "There is turmoil under the heavens, but the situation is excellent." "I must admit," writes Kissinger, "that on many visits to China, the meaning of that remark eluded me, but since I didn't want to admit there were limits to my capacity to comprehend, I nodded sagely."

His foreword notes that the leader of the Reagan administration "chose a rhetoric explicitly hostile to the premises of its Republican predecessors," but keeps the criticism slyly elliptical. "I have agreed with most of the policies of the Reagan administration even when I was less than ecstatic about the manner of their presentation and justification."

What next? More rising at dawn to the spiky pen and legal pads as this summer he sets out to complete his memoirs with the story of the Ford years? Machiavelli, after all, is remembered not for what he whispered to the Borgias but for the books he wrote in the long years of exile.

Photograph by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

Not only doesn't Bergen act like a movie star, she doesn't seem to like performing, and her reluctance comes through. Ever since her debut in *The Group*, she's gotten decidedly mixed reviews. Pauline Kael, who interviewed her for *Life* while *The Group* was being made, was not impressed. The young Bergen, she conceded, was "a golden lioness of a girl," but she simply wouldn't act: "Here she is, an intelligent young girl, beginning—despite her disclaimers—a career in the movies, and she doesn't appear interested enough even to stay awake and observe." Seven years later, she was still in a somewhat state: "Miss Bergen performs as though clubbed over the head," said the New York Times of her performance in *The Adventurers*. It still happens. "Miss Bergen does some acting," John Corry, a *Times* TV critic, wrote last February of *Hollywood Wives*, "but never again are you likely to see an actress look so uncomfortable while she does it."

60

SPOTLIGHT

# Henry the O.K.

S
mile, please.

Photograph by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ