Radio: Cultivated Groaner

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During the past seven years Edgar Bergen has made himself a national figure largely by talking to himself. He has done this with the aid of an apparatus called Charlie McCarthy, which has become an even more popular national figure, and probably more human to a larger number of people than any inanimate object in world history. It takes only the mildest indulgence in the world of fantasy to be persuaded that Charlie, a fellow of infinite and raucous wit, is actually alive.

Last week, as usual, millions of U.S. citizens gathered at their radios (NBC, 8 p.m., E.W.T.) to hear McCarthy confront and confound one of the nation’s names. This time it was Orson Welles. McCarthy (who, of course, always has Scriptwriter Bergen on his side) blithely opened up: “Oh, Orson! .. . Oh, Wellesie! . . . Where is old fatso?” Welles came out of the wings at NBC’s Manhattan studios, and McCarthy chirped: “Why don’t you release a blimp for active service?” Once before, Welles had taken even worse abuse from his radio host. That time the actor had asked “the Magnificent Splinter” what he thought of the weighty Welles efforts on the air. Said McCarthy: “At first I thought something had died in my radio.”

Welles took it handsomely, as do most of McCarthy’s targets, who are invariably delighted to be ribbed by such a supereminence. In his wooden insouciance,

Charlie gets away with a candid vein of comment which is unprecedented in radio. Via a small-boy character (which helps), Bergen manages a titillating form of malice-without-malice. To judge by his audiences, it is all hugely satisfying to the U.S. public. Charlie called Gossipist Louella Parsons an “old blabbermouth,” while confiding in an aside that “everything will be all over town tomorrow.” He referred to Emily Post as “a vulture for culture” and dismissed her with: “It’s been a charming evening. By the way, Miss Emily, you don’t have a toothpick on you?” He asked rippling Paulette Goddard with elaborate sweetness: “Take away your face and your figure and what have you got?” Of Beatrice (“Advice to the Lovelorn”) Fairfax he naughtily inquired: “Where do you learn all the things you tell the young folks not to do?”

Magic and Black Art. So irresistible is McCarthy’s personality—saucy, lethally precocious and irreverent—that it is all but impossible for listeners to remember that he is a ventriloquist’s dummy. The instinct to forget it is natural; no such coldly mechanical term could possibly describe the complex psychological relationship between Charlie McCarthy and Edgar John Bergen.

Charlie has supported Bergen most of his life. He began by putting Bergen through high school and almost through Northwestern University, and got him into Delta Upsilon. Charlie was whittled out 25 years ago by a Chicago barkeep named Mack (price: $35). He was modeled on a sketch Bergen made of a red headed Chicago newsboy. Bergen was then 16,the gawky, moody second son of a Swedish immigrant named Berggren who had run a retail dairy business in Chicago and a farm near Decatur, Mich.

At eleven, Edgar Bergen had found that he could throw his voice (his mother was forever answering the door in response to pleas of mysterious old men who begged to be let in). The boy was further in spired by Herrman’s Wizards Manual, Secrets of Magic, Black Art, Mind Reading and Ventriloquism (including a chap ter on “how to cut a man’s head off and put it into a platter a yard from his body”). Charlie McCarthy was just what Bergen needed. The little dummy was such a social success (unlike Bergen alone) that he lured Bergen from his university premedical studies into vaudeville. For ten years, through the decline of vaudeville, into the nightclubs of the middle ’30s”, they made a living, but that was all — ventriloquists were classed with jugglers and acrobats.

“I’ll Mow-w-w-w You Down.” The turn in their luck came in Chicago. Out of work and deeply discouraged, Charlie and Bergen got a week’s tryout at the Chez Paree nightclub. At 3 o’clock one morning they came on for their final per formance. The club was almost empty.

In the middle of their act, Charlie suddenly reared up, turned to Bergen and said: “Who the hell ever told you you were a good ventriloquist?” Bergen blushed, fidgeted, tried to put his hand over Charlie’s mouth. “Don’t shush me,” Charlie continued. “I’ll mow-w-w-w you down. You better go back to the farm and leave me alone. I’ll get by, but you’re all through, brother, all through.” Charlie then turned on the customers and told them they were a disgrace to civilization. Bergen put him on a chair and backed away. Charlie went right on giving the customers a piece of Bergen’s innermost thoughts. The management was getting nervous, but the patrons howled with laughter and pounded the tables.

Backstage later Bergen was saying: “I just had to get that off my chest.” But he was a hit and he stayed on, until Manhattan’s lofty Rainbow Room bought Charlie’s raillery. In keeping with this swank setting, McCarthy appeared in top hat & tails. Then Rudy Vallee put him on the air. Bergen had finally found his proper medium of communication: the microphone. Previously, many of Charlie’s asides and much of their patter had been lost to the audience. Swift give-and-take (mostly give) is the essence of McCarthy’s humor. Now everybody could hear it.

Who Made Whom? The McCarthy Bergen relationship has often caught the eye of psychologists who analyze it in such terms as split personality, inferiority complex, the subconscious expressing itself.

None of their analyses has satisfied Bergen.

Says he: “I will say that Charlie’s per sonality is as opposite from mine as .it can be, and -that I envy him. T wish” I could walk into a room like Charlie. . . . To me it’s quite remarkable that this carved piece of wood . . . should be so … important. He can be invited to the White House, consulted by OWI, received by the royalty of Europe. . . . It’s ridiculous, even, that my appearing any place without Charlie is a complete failure. I do think it’s a case of the tail wags the dog.

“But no matter what he says, no matter what he says about me, I have made him everything he is today. . . . The public insists I am a little eccentric. That is not for me to judge. I may be a little jealous of Charlie. Sometimes it is hard for me to explain why I have to have Charlie there to get the laughs. But he did a good show last Sunday and then I liked him.”

Edgar Bergen’s friends think they know why he has to have Charlie there. Pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, 41-year-old Bergen, as Scandinavian as a troll, is as shy as Charlie is brash (Charlie: “He’s an emotional hermit”). He is neat & clean to the point of obsession. He takes vitamin pills, daily exercises, Swedish baths, keeps fruit handy on a side table. His normal voice is soft and reminiscent of Charlie’s. His idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon is to go home alone and pore for hours over his suitcases of old magic tricks.

In public, he can be brilliantly witty—even bawdy, but without Charlie he is more likely to be musing, easily bored, prone to doze and dream. Charlie McCarthy is his sly vehicle for a set of highly irreverent opinions on society in general. Charlie has also been of considerable sentimental aid to the bachelor Bergen.

Their relationship, as profitably aired between them, has long since become one of the most public of properties. “What would you be without me?” asks Bergen, and Charlie answers: “Speechless.” They haggle over Charlie’s weekly stipend of 75¢. Bergen is sensitive about his balding head, but Charlie isn’t. Advised that Bergen has a girl friend who loves to run her fingers through his hair, Charlie adds: “Or pat the roots.”

Belly-Prophet. Charlie’s personality was real to many people almost from the first time he went on the air. Bergen did nothing to discourage this. Then the great W. C. Fields joined the program for a season and railed away at Charlie’s vital fabric (“blockhead, woodenhead, flophouse for termites”) with threats of axing him to death, otherwise treating him as a dummy. Despite such campaigns as Fields’s, the illusion that Charlie is a person remains. People often call Bergen Charlie. When Charlie greeted Eleanor Roosevelt for the first time, she spontaneously started to shake hands with him.

Other ventriloquists may be more technically adept than Bergen, but he has the great illusion-making power which springs out of imagination, taste and an accurate sense of comedy. He is a scholar as well as a student of his art, and wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on it. The Greeks called their ventriloquists “belly-prophets,” and Bergen feels that the art undoubtedly lay behind the ancient speaking statues and other temple oracles. As to the requirements, Bergen says: “Ventriloquism is a cultivated groan. It is as much of a gift as a good singing voice. If you have the gift and if you are a good mimic, then you have a start in the right direction. It is something you can learn as you can learn to be a good singer.” But once achieved, the ventriloquial quality can be lost. Bergen works hard on his vocal exercises, practicing high notes, keeping Charlie’s voice separate from his, etc.

“He Really Lives There.” Charlie lives the life of Riley now. He and Bergen are not millionaires (their belated success coincided with high income taxes and Charlie gets no income-tax exemption), but they are very well off. Chase & Sanborn pays them $7,500 weekly ($10,000 beginning next January); they now get $150,000 for a motion picture; and their toys, games, etc. yield another $75,000 annually.

Charlie travels in style — in a plush-lined trunk. His bedroom in Bergen’s comfortable home on a hilltop outside Hollywood is just a shade smaller than Bergen’s huge one. Bergen’s conceit is to give Charlie a bed, furniture, tile bathroom with built-in shower, an array of perfumes and toilet waters. Charlie also has a dresser to get him into his $75 suits (of which he has scores) and $15 shoes (18 pairs). Among his other appurtenances are his Boy Scout uniform, jockey’s silks, a grease-monkey’s zipper suit, a chamber pot of the proper size. A dirty shirt hangs over the back of a chair (Bergen: “To show he really lives there”). Charlie’s stationery bears his motto : E Pluribus Mow ‘Em Downus. On his desk is a letter written, Bergen swears, in Charlie’s own hand writing, addressed to his teacher: “Please excuse Charlie for being absent from school yesterday as he had lara laryn [crossed out] as he attended his grand mother’s funeral.” Alter Ego. If Edgar Bergen (with pressagent help) has made himself a totem, few men have ever had more provocation. Bergen, who is fond of children, is seldom far from Charlie. He hires several gagwriters now in order to get some time to himself. But what they contribute to the show is mainly situations. Bergen gives the copy his own flavor. With the possible exception of Fred Allen, he is the most original gagwriter in the U.S. He finds brief intervals for his workshop, where he builds steam engines; his desert ranch, where he likes to harvest the alfalfa; a ceramics business, a gold mine, a non-profit foundation to help girls who want to study nursing. Says he: “I have to try to convince myself that I can stand on my own feet without Charlie. That is why I go into these businesses.” Out of challenge to himself, as much as anything else, Bergen created the different character of Mortimer Snerd, Charlie’s gap-toothed, appleknocking pal. (Bergen: “Mortimer, how can you be so stupid?” Mortimer: “It ain’t easy.”) His still more recent helper, Effie Klinker, a lady and bachelor girl (“not an old maid . . . she turned down three offers and has an inde pendent income”), came into being for the same reason. There is also a stand-in dummy for “dangerous scenes” in Charlie’s pictures. “But,” says Bergen, “I have no love or sympathy for him.” Bergen has recently alleged a general restlessness: “I have reached rather an unfortunate time of my life. There is nothing more tiring than looking forward to five or six more years of radio. I am a creative artist and this is routine work now.” But it is a reasonably safe bet that his original alter ego will never seem routine to him. Bergen has always been touchy about the backflap through which he manipulates Charlie McCarthy’s move ments. Once an insensitive friend stuck his hand through the flap. Bergen remained impassive, but Charlie sharply protested: “My God, is nothing sacred?”