Candice Bergen to Appear on CBS SUNDAY MORNING This Weekend

When Candice Bergen's father, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, died in 1978, he left his daughter out of the will, though he did leave something behind for his puppet, Charlie McCarthy, she tells Jane Pauley in an interview for CBS SUNDAY MORNING WITH CHARLES OSGOOD to be broadcast April 5 (9:00 AM, ET) on the CBS Television Network.

Bergen doesn't know exactly why she was left out of her father's will, but she speculates it had to do with her behavior at a younger age.

"I was acting out of adolescence in print at a very early age and I often embarrassed my parents," Bergen tells Pauley. "But I said something that was very hurtful to my father and I think he just slid the bolt."

Her father told her she would get nothing until she turned 30. Then he moved it to when she turned 35, and later 39. Eventually she was cut out altogether, though McCarthy, the famed ventriloquist's puppet her father performed with for decades, was mentioned. Bergen describes that painful time in her life in her new book, A Fine Romance, published by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS, and with Pauley.

"Charley McCarthy was not a puppet to my father," Bergen tells Pauley. "He was an alter ego and he was also a separate entity. And my father, I quoted that part of the will that - I can never get over because he said, 'To Charlie McCarthy, from whom I have never been separated even for a day."

Bergen tells Pauley she has a "perverse kind of pride that I have the weirdest upbringing of anyone I know."

Bergen talks with Pauley about her book, her success on "Murphy Brown," her childhood, her marriages, motherhood, and her life today.

CBS SUNDAY MORNING is broadcast Sundays (9:00-10:30 AM, ET) on the CBS Television Network. Rand Morrison is the executive producer.

To post a comment, you must register and login.