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Edgar Bergen: Charlie Mccarthy
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One night in December, 1936 Edgar Bergen got played a party at which Noel Coward happened to be one of the guests. Coward was so impressed by Bergen's dialogue that he got him an engagement at Manhattan's Rainbow Room. This show led to an invitation by Rudy Vallee to appear, for $150, as a guest artist on Vallee's radio show on December 17th in California. Bergen and McCarthy were an instant success. The one appearance was extended to three months.
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Edgar Bergen died of kidney disease in Las Vegas, Nevada, aged 75. He is interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. He was elected to the Radio Hall of Fame in 1990, the same year that The Charlie McCarthy Show was selected as an honored program. It is said that Charlie McCarthy died along with Bergen: "Since retiring to the Smithsonian Institution in 1978, Charlie has uttered not one, single, solitary word." [1]
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Over the course of the first 56-year partnership, Edgar Bergen and his little dummy became so close that Bergen gave Charlie a bedroom of his own. Bergen died in his sleep at the age of 75; Charlie still has his own room-a display case at the Smithsonian.
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The Edgar Bergen show, featuring the impish ways of Charlie McCarthy, is reported to have been purchased by the Coca-Cola Company for sponsorship on a network still to be decided. The program's present sponsor, Standard Brands, previously had indicated a desire to relinquish the offering because of a change in advertising plans.
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Bergen was born Edgar John Bergen in Chicago, Illinois, to a Swedish family and grew up in Decatur, Michigan. He taught himself ventriloquism from a pamphlet when he was eleven. A few years later he commissioned Chicago woodcarver Theodore Mack to sculpt a likeness of a rascally Irish newspaperboy he knew. The head went on a puppet named Charlie McCarthy, who became Bergen's lifelong sidekick. At age sixteen, he came to Chicago, where he attended Lake View High School and worked at a silent movie house.
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Candice Bergen was the first of two children born to celebrated ventroloquist Edgar Bergen and his wife Frances (nee Easterham), a former Chesterfield girl. When Candice was born, many news stories noted that Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy now had a sister. Interestingly, the dummy's room was larger than that of his flesh-and-blood sibling. Fifteen years later, her "real" brother, Kris, was born.
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