For Frances Bergen, the Taste of Success : Movies: Edgar’s widow and Candice’s mother gets her own sweet revenge in ‘Eating,’ Henry Jaglom’s new film.

For 33 years she was married to the man once affectionately dubbed “Charlie McCarthy’s stooge.” Then, as her beautiful, willful daughter became a movie star, the ventriloquist’s wife turned into Candy Bergen’s mom.

“(My mother) had serious doubts that she alone had ever existed on her own,” Candice Bergen wrote in her 1984 autobiography. “She had acted on television and was an accomplished singer--a woman of abilities and ambition; instead she felt like Mildred Pierce.”

Today, Frances Bergen has made it in show business on her own--starring as the lone sane voice in “Eating,” Henry Jaglom’s new film about women and their obsessions with food that opened Friday in Los Angeles. And forget about playing third fiddle to Edgar and his dummy, forget about Candice’s two consecutive Emmys for “Murphy Brown,” Frances Bergen steals this show.

“Oh, you bet it was impossible to have your own identity,” says Bergen, who, as a 20-year-old model in 1945, married the beloved Edgar Bergen and became mother to the world’s most famous wooden smart aleck. “The reaction to my husband was astounding. We’d be out to dinner or dancing and people would come up and tap him on the shoulder and ask, ‘Where’s Charlie? Where’s Charlie?’ I must admit at one point I thought, ‘If I hear the name Charlie one more time, I’ll. . . .’ I was so proud of my husband, he was so talented, but selfishly, once in awhile you do feel, ‘What about me?’

“Then I was Candy’s mother and I did have this complex about going on auditions because I thought the casting director would be thinking, ‘Oh, I wish it was her daughter but instead here comes Mother Bergen.’ ”

In a way, “Eating” has given “Mother Bergen” her own sweet revenge. In the film she plays a woman in her 60s baffled by the “food demon” that has consumed the life, thoughts and eating habits of the 37 younger women gathered at a party. And at last week’s Hollywood premiere, her famous daughter Candice was, for once, forced to listen to the likes of Lee Grant, Bonnie Bedelia and Gena Rowlands effusively praising the talent and beauty of her mother.

“I walked up and said, ‘Well this is a switch,’ ” Bergen says, chuckling and fiddling with the purple amethyst parrot she wears on a necklace. “This whole thing has been such a high. Maybe I’ve finally proven to people that I can deliver on my own.”

Living in the shadow of extraordinary talent and fame can be a bit rough on the ego, but Bergen said that she wouldn’t trade her life for anything. Edgar Bergen was twice her age and at the height of his popularity when he saw her long legs poking out of the first row at one of his performances. He married her a year later and suddenly the young “Chesterfield Girl” from Birmingham, Ala., was sipping champagne at dinner parties with Cary Grant, Cole Porter, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, Walt Disney, Vincente Minnelli--everyone who was anyone in the aristocracy of old Hollywood.

She aspired to a career as a chanteuse, but instead she spent most of her time working in the family business, playing the pretty foil for her husband and Charlie McCarthy.

Bergen also sang several engagements in big city supper clubs, but when she was offered a six-week gig at a prestigious club in London, she says, “I had to go ask my husband. And his reaction to my great enthusiasm was, ‘You mean you would leave me and the baby!’

“Candy, ‘the baby,’ was 10 at the time. He carried on so about it that I didn’t take the job. But I was raised by a Southern lady in a mid-Victorian manner and that’s the way it was in those days. I didn’t talk back to my husband. I was taught that you do have to compromise and not assert yourself as much as you might want.”

In the ‘50s, Bergen, who also has a 29-year-old son named Kris, did accept a few small roles in films such as “Titanic,” but she didn’t really pursue a career of her own until the casting director for “American Gigolo” called three months after Edgar Bergen died in 1978 and offered her a role as one of Richard Gere’s clients.

“I thought, ‘Who is this crazy man? Doesn’t he know what I’m going through?’ ” Bergen says. “But it was good to get back to work, and that just seemed to get the ball rolling.”

During the last 10 years, she has appeared in a number of films and TV shows including “The Muppets Take Manhattan,” “The Morning After,” “MacGyver,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Hollywood Wives” and “Murphy Brown.”

“Eating” came her way because Jaglom, who has been a friend of Candice’s for many years, needed “a parent” who would be incredulous at these young women’s obsession with eating and not eating, and yet someone who would be compassionate and funny about the problem as well. And for the climatic scene, in which Bergen’s character serenades her daughter with “The Way You Look Tonight,” he needed a singer.

“She is so charming and so elegant, yet so witty and open to what is happening around her,” says Jaglom. “There is something so triumphant about her that audiences at screenings have actually applauded after the song. And what they are applauding, I think, is the whole quality of the woman, her compassion, her strength, her beauty, something about her entire history as a woman fighting to survive.”

Jaglom says that initially he was afraid to ask the classically graceful mother of one of his best pals, Candice, to work with him in his eccentric, half-scripted, half-let’s-see-what-happens-and-I’ll-piece-it-together-in-editing style of film making. But he says Bergen enthusiastically plunged into the work.

In one scene, Bergen sits by a pool amazed that a gorgeous young Frenchwoman could fret over her perfect, statuesque figure. Jaglom said he instructed Bergen to appear shocked to learn that they also have neuroses about food in France. And then, with comedic timing even Charlie McCarthy would admire, Bergen, on her own, punctuated the idea with, “Of course, you have such wonderful food in France.”

“I could never have written that line,” Jaglom says. “That’s the terrific thing you get when you work with somebody who is so rich in life.”