Key Points
Candice Bergen is looking back on the time she burned down “the nicest restaurant” in Switzerland.
While at a boarding school in Gstaad, the 14-year-old snuck out for a night at the Olden.
Bergen decided to “flavor” her fondue with wine “and this flame went up onto the ceiling of the restaurant.”
Before she lit up Hollywood, Candice Bergen nearly burned down a landmark in Switzerland.
The Murphy Brown star looked back on memorable moments from her life in a new interview for Ted Danson‘s podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name, like the time she set fire to a restaurant in 1960.
“It wasn’t just any restaurant either. It was the nicest restaurant,” Bergen told Danson. “It was the Olden in Gstaad in a ski resort where the school I was going to was set, and I had snuck out because I was only 14. I wasn’t allowed to go out at night, so I’d snuck out.”
As she recalled, Bergen was sitting at a long table and drinking wine with older girls from her school, “which you could do in Switzerland because there was no age restriction.” For their meal, the group was dining on meat fondue, “which is meat flavored in fat,” she explained. “And I said, ‘Oh, let’s flavor the fat. Let’s put some wine in the fat.'”
She did just that, “and this flame went up onto the ceiling of the restaurant” and set the curtain on fire, recounted Bergen. “We were all evacuated. It was snowing outside.”
The Olden was repaired and eventually reopened, but Bergen’s punishment was harsh: “I was not allowed out for the rest of the year, and quite rightly,” she told Danson.
The night the Olden nearly burned down wasn’t quickly forgotten in Gstaad. Four decades later, the actress returned to the ski resort town in the Swiss Alps with her second husband, Marshall Rose, whom she married in 2000.
“We were walking in the village, and a very nice-looking older ski instructor said, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Candice Bergen?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ And he said, ‘Aren’t you the woman who burned down the Olden?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ So my name had lived on. Infamous,” she joked to Danson.
Bergen, the daughter of comedian Edgar Bergen and model Frances Westcott, wrote about her time at Montesano boarding school in her 1985 memoir, Knock Wood. At Christmas, her Beverly Hills parents came to visit and were shocked by the “effects of three months in Europe.”
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
The teen suggested they all “have a drink at the bar” and nonchalantly ordered a Bloody Mary.
“I then proudly produced a pack of Salems, flipped my Zippo, and expertly lit one up,” Bergen wrote. “My mother looked as if she was going to faint and my father seemed frozen, turned to stone.”
The next day, they called “Candy” into their hotel room for “a long emotional talk that brought me back to my senses and my age.” The Bergens ultimately removed their daughter from the Swiss boarding school and brought her home to Beverly Hills.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aol.com ’
