Candice Bergen and Murphy Brown – Talking Left and Living Right

Vice President Dan Quayle was in the throes of a reelection campaign back on May 19, 1992, when he highlighted the importance of fathers and ignited a cultural firestorm while doing so.

In a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Vice President Quayle stated:

 Murphy Brown, which starred Candice Bergen as a hard-hitting, no-nonsense investigative reporter and news anchor, was a popular sitcom on CBS that ran for 11 seasons between 1988 and 1998. A “re-boot” of the show was cancelled after one season in 2018.

Back in 1992, fans of the show and liberal antagonists immediately pounced on Quayle’s truth that has been understood for millennia.

Diane English, who was the show’s creator and producer, fired back, stating:

“If the Vice President thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.”

Never mind that Vice President Quayle said no such thing, but facts are often ignored by those who criticize conservative social policies and long-held traditions.

With the exception of a short on-air quip the next season, neither Candice Bergen the actress nor Murphy Brown the character said much about Quayle’s comments – until ten years later.

“His speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did,” acknowledged Bergen. Not surprisingly, it didn’t get much press. Media are famous for publishing distortions in huge print on the front page and corrections in small print on a page somewhere else.

In real life, Candice was married to Louis Malle, a French film director and screenwriter. In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, the now 78-year-old actress was reflecting on the circumstances that led to her own marriage and daughter.

Meeting Louis at a friend’s picnic in Connecticut, Bergen said she found Malle to be “one of the most fascinating men in the world.” They married in 1980. It would be five years before their daughter was born.

In short, Candice Bergen got married and then had a child, unlike Murphy Brown on the show who had a child but never got married.

“I was very ambivalent about having a child,” she told Rose. “Because I was a creature of my time which was the feminist movement. It was sort of turbulent at the time for women. And many women were missing the moment that they could have children.  And so, I suddenly thought, ‘Oh! … I thought I might have missed it.”

Candice Bergen was 39 when Chloe was born.

If it’s puzzling that a television star whose television show sparked an outrage eventually distanced herself from the controversy, well, then welcome to Hollywood hypocrisy.

It’s Dr. Brad Wilcox, University of Virginia sociologist and Institute for Family Studies founding research fellow, who has regularly pointed out that “elites talk left – but live right.” In other words, they publicly criticize conservative values but privately embrace and appreciate them in their own lives.

In a follow-up interview with Charlie Rose released just this week, Bergen said that she and the show’s producers relished pushing back at Vice President Quayle. It certainly fueled the ratings – but fooled fewer people than liberals may have wished.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s April 1993 Atlantic Monthly cover story, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” became the most discussed magazine cover in decades. Ten years later Bergen acknowledged Quayle was right – and over 20 years later, Charlie Rose was still asking her about the controversy.

Vice President Dan Quayle, age 77, is now Chairman of Cerberus Global Investments, and is a member of the firm’s senior leadership team. He and his wife have three grown children and seven grandchildren.

Image from Getty.