Candice Bergen had quite the rebellious youth!
The “Murphy Brown” star revealed on Ted Danson’s “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast that she accidently set fire to a restaurant in Switzerland while attending boarding school.
“It was the Olden in Gstaad in a ski resort where the school I was going to was set,” she said. “I had snuck out. Because I was only 14, I wasn’t allowed to go out at night, so I’d snuck out.”
Olden wasn’t “just any restaurant, it was the nicest restaurant,” Bergen noted.
She snuck out along with some older schoolmates for a snack at Olden, as well as some wine, “which you could do in Switzerland because there was no age restriction.”
They opted for a snack of meat fondue, where pieces of meat are cooked in boiling oil or fat at the table. All was going well until Bergen got an idea.
“I said, ‘Oh, let’s flavor the fat. Let’s put some wine in the fat,’” she recalled. “So, I jauntily dumped my glass in the fat, and this flame went up onto the ceiling of the restaurant. And we were all evacuated, it was snowing outside.”
Bergen did face some consequences for the incident. “I was not allowed out for the rest of the year—and quite rightly,” the 80-year-old said.
Olden was restored and has been running ever since, but Bergen became somewhat infamous in town.
“I went back to Staad with my second husband, Marshall Rose, we were walking in the village, and a very nice, older-looking ski instructor said, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Candice Bergen?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’”
She continued, “And he said, ‘Aren’t you the woman who burned down the Olden?’” she continued. “And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ So, my name had lived on.”
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