Knock Wood

Download or read book Knock Wood written by Candice Bergen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Candice Bergen's bestselling 1984 memoir: an “engaging, intelligent, and wittily self-deprecating autobiography” (The New York Times). Candice Bergen was born into the heady Hollywood of the 1950s, where “celebrity offspring” were celebrities unto themselves. And because she was the daughter of Edgar Bergen, vaudeville and radio's greatest dignitary/comedian, her “sibling” was Charlie McCarthy, the impudent dummy beloved of millions. Bergen—much as he loved his daughter—was a man who “kept his emotions pressed and neatly hung,” and was more comfortable speaking to—and through—his brainchild who never had to grow up and leave the paradise that was childhood. Knock Wood is a book all about growing up—about the comedy of expectations that ruled Candice Bergen's early life, about the ironies that attended her exotic rites of passage. She stepped out into a world that offered her a wealth of options: adolescence in Swiss boarding schools; at nineteen, costarring opposite Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles; quick entry into the profession of photojournalism; automatic acceptance among the esteemed company of the moment—be it the international jet set, Bel Air in the 1960s, or the world that was radical politics in the 1970s. But always she carried the conviction that her gifts were untested, her luck unearned. Told with wit, self-deprecation, and a rare degree of courage, Knock Wood is the extraordinary record of Candice Bergen's coming of age. It is at once the moving fable of the love between a father and a daughter, of a woman's triumph over self-doubt, and a dazzling journal of America's life and times over the past four decades.