Edgar John Bergen was an American actor, comedian, vaudevillian and radio performer, best known for his proficiency in ventriloquism and his characters Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. He was the father of actress Candice Bergen.
Early life
Bergen was born in Chicago, Illinois, one of five children and the younger of two sons of Swedish immigrants Nilla Svensdotter and Johan Henriksson Berggren. He lived on a farm near Decatur, Michigan until he was four, when his family returned to Sweden, where he learned the language. After his family had returned to Chicago, when he was eleven, he taught himself ventriloquism from a pamphlet called "The Wizard's Manual". He attended Lake View High School. After his father died, when Edgar was 16, he went out to work as an apprentice accountant, a furnace stoker, a playerpiano operator, and a projectionist in a silentmovie house.

Edgar so impressed the famous ventriloquist Harry Lester that he gave the teenager almost daily lessons for three months in the fundamentals of ventriloquism. In the fall of 1919, Edgar paid Chicago woodcarver Theodore Mack $36 to sculpt a likeness of a rascally redheaded Irish newspaper boy he knew. The head went on a dummy named Charlie McCarthy, which became Bergen's lifelong sidekick. He had created the body himself, using a nineinch length of broomstick for the backbone, and rubber bands and cords to control the lower jaw mechanism of the mouth.