I ask Ms. Bergen what she thought of Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” released last year.
“The feeling of it,’’ she said, “was very close.”
In the late 1960s, she and her boyfriend at the time, Terry Melcher, a record producer and the son of Doris Day, had lived in the house on Cielo Drive before Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. It has been said that a reason Manson targeted that house was because he was angry Mr. Melcher didn’t give him a record contract.
“Terry was very stupid and he went out there to record Manson’s group singing,’’ Ms. Bergen said. “He knew it was very loaded, and one of Manson’s people came to the door once when I was at the house. Then one day, Terry just said, ‘We’re moving.’ I said, ‘When?’ He said, ‘Tomorrow.’ His mother had a house in Malibu that became David Geffen’s house where we went. Then they took the telescope off our balcony at the beach house. It was like Manson saying, ‘Don’t try to hide from me.’”
And about that famous date with Donald Trump, when she was at the University of Pennsylvania?
He was shy, quiet and introspective, one presumes?
“Yes, in fact his knowledge of philosophy goes way beyond,” she said, laughing. “We went to, I think, a steakhouse but he picked me up from school in a limousine, which was unusual, and it was a burgundy limousine and he was wearing a burgundy suit and burgundy patent leather boots. I just thought, this guy can color coordinate with the best of them. I think I was home by 9. I remember it being just very slow going and heavy lifting, it was just like pulling a sledge. And then I was home early.”
There was another renowned date in the 1970s, with Henry Kissinger, arranged by family friends. Ms. Bergen went ahead with it at the puckish urging of her counterculture boyfriend, Bert Schneider, and his pal, Abbie Hoffman, who wanted intel on the Vietnam War.
