Polly Bergen

While she had a six-decade career few could deny that it was one of the most unusual.  She began her entertainment career as a singer and then became a staple on TV game shows.  She took up movie acting in 1951 and dabbled in it for the rest of her life.  She became a name in the cosmetic business, wrote three books on beauty, and launched lines in jewelry and shoe brands.  A whirling dervish if there ever was one. She liked to push herself. She wanted to know her limits and what she was made of.

Polly Bergen was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1930.  The family led a nomadic life as the father needed to grab what construction jobs he could, no matter where they were located.  Her occasional loneliness was made more bearable when she watched movies, particularly those starring Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin.  They inspired her... not so much for acting but singing.  She'd been singing around the house or for anyone she could corral for some time.  People were always telling her she had a good voice.  (I particularly enjoyed Bergen the songstress.)

It was at an Indiana radio station when she was 14 that she had her first professional singing engagement alongside her guitar-strumming father.  It opened her eyes to the fact that she could make something of herself, that it was actually possible.  People made fun of her hillbilly accent wherever she went and she was determined to rid herself of her background.  Anyone who knows much of anything about Polly Bergen knows that she certainly accomplished that in time.  Few in her profession radiated the sophistication this woman did... and that is saying a mouthful.

She got more radio gigs and branched out to singing with bands while she was still a teenager.  She was popular with her strong, smoky voice, her no-nonsense approach was considered kind of sexy and she was getting better-looking all the time.  A mirror and makeup were her constant companions and she was learning how she looked the best.

Unfortunately as a 17-year old band singer she got pregnant and had an abortion, a procedure that prevented her from having children in the future. The entire event, however, served to turn her into an ardent feminist and a strong, capable and savvy person.  Throughout her lifetime, there was little she was more passionate about than the Equal Rights Amendment and women's reproductive rights.  She was outspoken from the get-go and excited when she could chat up her favorite causes.

Shortly after her 18th birthday, Paramount producer Hal Wallis saw Bergen at one of her singing engagements and was enchanted.  He thought she was sassy.  She signed a contract with him.  In her first three movies, she appeared strictly as a singer... Champion and Across the Rio Grande, both 1949, and The Men (1950).  It was a start.

It was at Columbia that she met handsome 6'4" Jerome Courtland.  He was also born in Knoxville but it's not likely they knew one another.  The pair enjoyed a love of nightlife and getting their pretty mugs in the papers and magazines.  Jerry and Polly.  Polly and Jerry.  Everyone was sucked into their space.

Then good ol' Wallis brightened her future by having her be one of the girlfriends in not one but three Martin and Lewis movies, At War with the Army, That's My Boy and The Stooge in the early fifties.  It may be an indication why her film career never went anywhere after so many starts and stops.  No serious actress made three M & L flicks and came out alive.

As if that weren't bad enough, she added three B westerns to her slate.  Warpath (1951) and Arena (1953) flew under most folks' radar although Escape from Fort Bravo, also 1953, with William Holden and Eleanor Parker, had some success.  Bergen's role as a cavalry wife was brief.

The chase drama Cry of the Hunted (1953) found her as little more than a cop's worried wife, and the comedy Fast Company (1953) opposite Howard Keel sees her in a showy role as a temperamental horse owner.  Both were flops.  Not particularly unsurprising, she wouldn't make another big screen movie for nine years.  Also in '53 she made her Broadway debut opposite Harry Belafonte in the short-lived John Murray Anderson's Almanac.

The following year she hosted an anthology series, The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse and in 1955 released her first album, Little Girl Blue.  In the following years she made several more albums.

In 1955 she and Courtland divorced and their vitriol was spread across the pages of newspapers' movie columns for months. Never again would she have a nice thing to say about him.  It was surprising considering their lovey-dovey beginning.

She joined the television game show To Tell the Truth in 1956 as a bright and spunky panelist and did 165 shows.  She became a well-known and crafty panelist on I've Got a Secret, What's My Line? and several others.

In 1957 she married Freddie Fields, one of Hollywood's super agents.  The union, which would last for 19 years, saw her convert to Judaism and the adoption of two children.  The power couple threw some of both coasts' most legendary parties.  They were never out of the limelight.

She spent her time on television.  She must have wanted to because her husband certainly could have found her movie work.  In 1957 she won a well-deserved Emmy for playing troubled torch singer Helen Morgan on the prestigious Playhouse 90.  Also in 1957, she had her own television variety show which lasted one season.

She returned to the big screen in 1962 giving the best performance in the best film she ever made, the thriller Cape Fear (1962).  Playing Gregory Peck's wife, she is physically and psychologically terrorized

by his pursuer, the very scary Robert Mitchum.  On a houseboat he smashes an egg on her upper chest and knocks her around.  It is an edge-of-your-seat thrill-a-minute scene.

The big scene with Mitchum

Mitchum got so into it that the crew had to physically restrain him.  Afterwards he apologized to Bergen who said aw, no big deal.  Don't apologize.  I kinda dug it.  Astonished, Mitchum said now you tell me at the end of the scene.  She said she did really dig Mitchum... thought he was a fabulous actor and a great human being.  This was just the beginning for the pair.  He would prove to be her lucky rabbit's foot.

Sad that she would go from her best performance to her absolute worst.  Playing a mental patient in The Caretakers (1963) was certainly beyond her ken.  Nonetheless, it featured an all-star cast with Robert Stack, Joan Crawford and Janis Paige plus such Warner Brothers contract players as Diane McBain, Van Williams, Constance Ford and Sharon Hugueny.  If Crawford wanted to cringe at Bergen's hysterics, she certainly embraced her as a fellow Pepsi girl.

A tussle with Constance Ford

Move Over, Darling (1963) became the movie that Marilyn Monroe was making when she died.  Here Bergen plays the haughty new wife of James Garner whose long-missing first wife Doris Day returns on the day of the Garner-Bergen nuptials.  If you're into cutesy comedy, you'll like it.

Bergen closed out her early 60s return to the big screen with a disappointment.  She plays the first female president in Kisses for My President (1964) which might have been an anthem to feminism had it not been so silly and tailored to the comedic talents of Fred MacMurray.  Interestingly it costarred Arlene Dahl, another future cosmetics and beauty expert.  Again Bergen would take a sabbatical from the big screen... this time for 23 years.

This was also the time period where she jumped into authoring her beauty books and developed her own jewelry and shoe lines.  Most notably is her cosmetics line that featured her famous Oil of the Turtle which years later she sold to Fabergé.

During this same time period she started experiencing voice problems and gave up singing.  She lamented I had a choice of quitting smoking or singing another chorus of 'Night and Day' and I chose to continue smoking and give up singing.  And it was a decision I regretted from that day forward.

In 1975 Bergen and Fields were divorced.  I was surprised because, I suppose, the press always had them bound at the hips.  They were touchy-feely and such an elegant couple.  And hey, a cohost at one of your own galas is always appreciated.  One moves on...

And she did.  In 1982 Bergen married another entrepreneurial type, although someone not in the business.  But the brainy business couple couldn't keep the home fires burning and they divorced in 1990.  

I have always thought Mitchum was behind Bergen's hiring to play his wife in the gargantuan miniseries The Winds of War (1983).  I could think of many actresses who were more in than she was.  She hadn't done anything important for years.  But there she was and a compelling performance she gave, too.  

It is Herman Wouk's tale of two families at the start of WWII.  Despite the three leads (Mitchum, Ali MacGraw and Jan-Michael Vincent) being too old for their parts and MacGraw giving one of the worst performances ever, it is a compelling piece of entertainment.

Hard-hit by the financial crisis of 1987, Bergen sold off her 4,000 square foot Park Avenue apartment and other such luxuries.  She said she was so humiliated that she moved to Montana and went into hiding, only coming out to accept any TV gig that was offered to her.  

She returned to the big screen in John Malkovich's Making Mr. Right (1987) in a small role.  It's just as well because I found it lacking.

War and Remembrance (1988-89) became an even bigger miniseries, if not event, than its predecessor and as Mitchum's alcoholic wife, Bergen nabbed any Emmy nomination.  It would seem she could have taken this experience and gotten more important roles, but one would hardly expect to find her playing with Johnny Depp in John Waters's Cry-Baby (1998).  Honest, I'm not kiddin'.

She sought a vocal coach to help restore her ability to sing.   In 1999 she appeared in Miami for a benefit performance of Sondheim's Company.  Two years later she was on Broadway playing Carlotta in Sondheim's Follies.  She not only got to sing the showstopper, I'm Still Here... she lived it.  And she got a Tony nomination to boot.

She was a regular for a while in three TV series... Baby Talk (1991), Commander in Chief (2005) and Desperate Housewives (2007-11).  The latter is the last time I saw her work.  She played Felicity Huffman's outspoken mother.  (Ah, there's that word again-- outspoken-- and she wore it well until the end of her life.)  She was a great broad, said Huffman, and a wonderful actress and lovely woman.  I will miss her fire, her courage and her irreverence.

Polly Bergen died at her home in Southbury, Connecticut at age 84 in 2014.   Although it was listed as natural causes, it is noted that she suffered from emphysema and circulatory problems for years which she attributed to 50 years of smoking.

Career-wise she seemed to me to be one of Hollywood's most versatile inhabitants.  It was certainly difficult finding a niche for her in the entertainment business.  Her entrepreneurial skills seemed razor sharp.  I was taken by a quote of hers... I don't want to spend the rest of my life earning a living.  I want to do what's fulfilling for me.  I want to play out my life doing what I enjoy, not just showing up for work.  

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Two exciting Frenchwomen