COVER STORY : Rewriting Murphy’s Law : Everything that can go right seems to have gone right for Candice Bergen. : Even her show is enjoying a renaissance. But then there’s this thing called reality.

Candice Bergen has fleas. Not a lot of them, probably. There is a good chance it is only one flea, one very ambitious parasite with a map of the stars’ dermises and a dream, but the effect is still the same. For the past five minutes Bergen has been scratching her stomach as if she were strumming a banjo, pawing at herself with the absent-minded contentment of a hound dog, while rehearsing a scene for her long-running Monday night hit “Murphy Brown.”

This Wednesday morning run-through is the first opportunity for the writers and the cast to see the script up on its feet, and as the actors hit their marks and deliver their lines, the writers sit on chairs at the front of the set and laugh at their own jokes with a kind of desperate hysteria, as if hoping to start a contagion. Bergen is laughing on the outside, but itching on the inside. “I think I have a fleabite,” she affirms to co-star Grant Shaud.

An hour earlier, Bergen is in the middle of a scene on the set of the fictional “Dick and Dottie Show,” when a small black and white dog strolls onto the set, plants himself at her feet and begins to scratch himself. Wooden crates have been placed under the furniture to boost it to a better level for the camera, but this has raised Bergen’s feet completely off the ground. As she sits there, her feet dangling in the air and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looks very much like the little girl who was once Charlie McCarthy’s sister.

“She has a wonderful way of being like a little kid,” says Garry Marshall, the veteran writer-producer of such hit series as “The Odd Couple” and “Happy Days,” who now plays Murphy’s boss. “She just gets into being that bad little girl. Many years ago, I was at Debbie Reynolds’ house doing some work, and Candice was there because she used to hang around with Carrie Fisher. They were making a little noise, so Debbie went into their room and said, ‘What are you girls doing?’ She’s yelling at them! They’re having a slumber party! And they said, ‘We’re bad. We’re being bad .’ And I think Candice still has a lot of that in her.”

This little girl most often reveals herself when she is with her 10-year-old daughter Chloe (the product of her marriage to French film director Louis Malle) or the family dogs Larry and Lois. Larry is a stray she adopted, who has evidently repaid Bergen’s kindness by sharing his fleas with her, and Lois is the patrician bitch who maintains her own corner in Bergen’s closet.

“She has a few outfits,” Bergen says modestly, “mostly for Halloween, plus a few for special occasions.” One of these is a pink ball gown, another a taffeta tutu. Larry’s costume this Halloween was a hound dog outfit with a guitar and a portrait of Elvis appliqued across the front.

“I was sort of ironically carping about my childhood a long time ago,” she says, referring to “Knock Wood,” the 1984 memoir in which she detailed the emotional estrangement she felt from her father, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. “But now I just think it was so wonderfully eccentric. I probably feel closer to my father now than I did when he was alive. And I feel very grateful for that sense of wonder that pervaded my childhood, the sense of whimsy and fantasy that I’m incredibly nostalgic for now.

“I think I’m trying to infuse my daughter’s upbringing with some of that too,” she says. “There are certain things I do for her now that I think, while we may not have done a lot of cooking together, she’ll have this bank of stored memories of dog birthday parties and dog valentine parties, things that were really fun for her.”

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For the show’s final rehearsal on Friday afternoon, Bergen is turned out in a set of khaki coveralls that make her look more like a member of the Navy SEALs than the reigning diva of the American sitcom. As Murphy, she is all arched eyebrows and hair spray, less a lineal descendant of Mary Richards than a pre-menopausal Maude.

Bergen has won five Emmy Awards in the show’s seven seasons, the last two of those coming after--even by Bergen’s own reckoning--the show’s writing had slipped. Murphy’s predictable hyper-liberalism and fire-breathing feminism, mixed with weak stories, made her the one thing no woman is ever allowed to be for very long on network television: shrill.

“Sometimes it lapsed into a kind of shrillness and cruelty,” Bergen says. “There were certain periods of the show when Murphy’s edge was arbitrary and unpleasant. In a lot of shows we just tended to yell a lot.”

Bergen was so convinced that Helen Hunt would win two years ago for her state-of-the-art performance in “Mad About You” that she spent more time thanking Hunt in her acceptance speech than anyone at “Murphy Brown.” The two actresses don’t know each other, but they now send each other flowers every year after Bergen has won another Emmy.

“In a sense, I’m not sure it’s a level playing field,” Bergen says. “For someone like Helen Hunt, the format of her show is that they’re partners, so there’s always equal freight on the two of them. Most of the characters in a half-hour series are very realistically drawn. Murphy is so larger than life that I get all kinds of extremes to play. And, of course, I put those shows up for the Emmy.”

Though she has been known to prattle on endlessly about her unworthiness for such honors, it is the telltale calculation of remarks like that last one that occasionally serves as a tantalizing reminder that it is Bergen’s own cunning and aggressiveness that inform Murphy Brown’s, not the other way around.

“I’m probably a lot more like Murphy than anyone ever thought,” she says, “and not anywhere near enough like Murphy for my taste. I wish that I had the singularity of focus that she has, the unshakable self-confidence that she has, really bordering on the absurd.”

“Candice doesn’t suffer fools any more gladly than Murphy Brown does,” says Shaud, who plays the show’s neurasthenic executive producer, Miles Silverberg. “The fact that she plays that so well doesn’t come from nowhere.”

“I do know people who really are like Murphy, and it’s very heavy going,” Bergen says. “People who are really like Murphy are unbearable. If they’re not written endearingly for 22 minutes in sitcom format, you just go staggering out the door and into the street.”

By the time the Friday run-through is finished, it is clear that among the usual heavy roster of guest stars--this week it is Shelley Long and Fred Willard as the frighteningly Regis and Kathie Lee-like Dick and Dottie, Dom DeLuise and gossip columnists Liz Smith and Army Archerd as, frighteningly, themselves--Murphy’s 3-year-old son Avery is once again nowhere to be found. In fact, you are far more likely to see Dan Quayle on the show this season than Murphy’s own child.

As it turns out, Quayle may have been right about that kid after all.

“I thought it would be too tragic if Murphy didn’t have a child,” Bergen says. “Going into her late 40s in a career in which she was an aging success, with no friends, no relationship and no child, I thought there was not too much funny stuff to be gotten out of that. Of course, we didn’t get too much funny stuff out of the baby either. But we’ve dealt with it now. We just don’t talk about it. It’s great. I don’t think we’ve mentioned the baby this season, and everybody’s thrilled. I’m telling you, that baby came out, and you just felt the audience. . . .” She grinds her teeth. “Murphy fans hated seeing Murphy have a softer side. It’s really odd. They really hated that kid.”

T hough the show is now in its eighth season, it was only a week ago that Bergen brought her daughter Chloe to see it being filmed for the first time.

“Up until I had done the show for a couple of years, she thought I worked in an office where there were cameras,” Bergen says. “She has such a strong sense of herself, not at all like me. It took me a long time to acquire even some of what she has now at 10.

“I woke her up one morning and she hadn’t gotten much sleep. I said, ‘Honey, are you going to be OK? Do you think you’ll make it?’ And she suddenly snapped to attention, and she went, ‘Yes! I am Chloe Malle. I can do it!’ And I thought, ‘Well, what more do you need than that?’ ”

Bergen softens visibly when she is talking about her daughter, but at other times there can be a brittle quality about her that burnishes her beauty with a kind of fierceness. Like many persons of choler, she stands vigilant guard at the threshold of a great hearth, a place whose glow can be more easily seen than its warmth is felt.

“She has the most beautiful eyes,” Marshall says, “and not being a trained actor, I’ll go right into her eyes when I’m lost. I look at them, and I say the words. It’s a wonderful thing. There’s just a calmness there.”

There is also a lively intelligence behind those sapphire eyes that informs her comedy with a subtext that the current wave of stand-ups-turned-sitcom stars cannot match.

“Even after all the Emmys, people somehow look at the physical, and I’m not sure the first thing they think of is funny,” says co-star Shaud. “They think of beautiful, they think of cultured, but Candice Bergen is the funniest person I’ve ever met. And that’s a function of her intelligence, which is constantly going.”

When “Murphy Brown” premiered in the fall of 1988, Bergen so quickly and thoroughly inhabited the title role that it is easy to forget that it was not written with her in mind. She had been nominated for an Academy Award in 1980 for her performance as Burt Reynolds’ singing-impaired ex-wife in “Starting Over,” then that same year married Louis Malle. At the age of 39 she had a baby, then she took the next three years off from acting to spend time with Chloe.

“I didn’t want to leave my child, I was just so addicted to her,” Bergen says. “Everybody was sort of nudging me to go back to work, and I thought, ‘I’ve found total happiness, why should I rush to leave it?’ I felt like this magic circle had been created around me, and I didn’t want to break it.”

I f the charmed nature of Ber gen’s life appears to others as an unbroken landmass, it is clear that she views the periods of contentment in her life as a series of isolated atolls, an archipelago of small happinesses cast upon a vast, roiling sea.

“It’s been a really gilded period in my life,” she says, “and I’m under no illusions that I’ll have another one like it.”

She was not supposed to have this one.

“When I agreed to do ‘Murphy,’ it really was not considered an appropriate choice,” Bergen says. “I was discouraged by everyone from doing it. Not that I had a thriving film career, you understand, but you just didn’t cross over. It was like violating the caste system.”

Once Bergen had decided to take the part, she was stunned to learn that getting it would involve more than a regal wave of her hand. “Oh no, it was more humiliating than that,” she recalls. She had to read for the part in the office of Kim LeMasters, who was then the head of CBS programming. “He had electric drapes, and he pushed a button, and they closed, zzzzzzzttt , and then the room was dark,” Bergen says. “And then I had to do a comedy scene in front of two people in a darkened room. So it was horrible, really. It just went into the toilet, then he thanked me and I left.”

As Bergen was being dismissed, series creator Diane English doubled back and told LeMasters she wanted to speak to him alone. “I saw him really pale visibly,” Bergen recalls. When the two emerged five minutes later, Bergen had the part. But she remained a 41-year-old actress whose Oscar nomination was several years behind her and who had hardly seen a sitcom, much less carried one.

“At the time, I was such a gamble,” she says. “Well, it was beyond a gamble, it was just insane. People simply couldn’t understand that I had been cast in that role.”

Says Charles Kimbrough, who had been cast as anchorman Jim Dial: “I never imagined she was someone who could stamp around in Murphy Brown’s boots. The kind of ferocity, the kind of size she brought to that character, was a total surprise.”

Bergen was a little surprised herself: “I didn’t watch television. I had never watched sitcoms, and I especially didn’t like them. I didn’t find them that interesting. I knew ‘Lucy,’ but really just kind of subliminally, almost osmotically, because you can’t not and be in this culture. I had absolutely no frame of reference for the format.

“I sort of still don’t understand people who follow sitcoms, frankly. I’m always surprised at the caliber of people who sometimes come up to me and say that they watch the show. And I think, ‘My God, you watch the show? Don’t you have a life?’ I mean, people of celebrated intellect and achievement!”

She was not surprised by the show’s immediate success, but she was stunned by the workload she had taken on.

“I was in shock for the first couple of years,” Bergen says. “It’s not just like ‘Cheers,’ where you’re sitting on a bar stool, getting to write your lines on an olive or something. We were sort of bouncing off the walls all the time. So it was incredibly depleting. I just had nothing between me and my nerve endings. And the pressure was on me in a way that it never had been.”

Says Kimbrough: “We were aware of the strain that was on her. After the taping on Friday night, she’d go home and she’d just lie down and mouth-breathe the entire weekend. I think it was thrilling for her to be recognized as a comic actress, but it was also a mountain for her to climb every week.”

A fter English left at the end of the fourth season, the mountains became less formidable, and so did the show. As Bergen watched the comedy vehicle she had driven hard for so many years suddenly become obsolete, it did not occur to her to throw screaming hissy fits at the writers.

“First of all, I am not a person who kicks ass,” she says. “I’m not Roseanne, in case you confused the two of us. I had been very unhappy with the show [last year] and tried very hard to change it. It was really sort of me against them. Every show was exhausting.”

Just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse, Bergen began to feel that the network was showing her the door. CBS’ now departed head of programming, Jeff Sagansky, suggested that “what they needed at CBS was a signature comedy at 9 o’clock on Mondays,” Bergen says. “Don’t think I’m going to forget that quote. ‘Something that really defined CBS.’ I just read it over and over again, and I thought, ‘I don’t know, there must be a typo here.’ We weren’t doing so well last season, but talk about a short-term memory. What about the other six years?”

She announced that she would end the show this season, quit while she was more or less ahead. But under the new executive producing team of Rob Bragin, Bill Diamond and Michael Saltzman, “Murphy Brown” has enjoyed a renaissance this season, both in quality and the ratings, where it is now consistently the Tiffany showpiece at the Price Club network--CBS’ highest-rated entertainment series.

“I do think it’s really time to leave the party,” Bergen says, “but then when you have everyone begging you to stay at the party--well, not everyone. It’s not like I have people beating on my car as I drive along.”

Bergen says she would not return for another season without the same producing team, the producers wring their hands and ask how they are supposed to come up with 24 more stories, Shaud says maybe he would come back for another year and maybe he wouldn’t, and meanwhile everybody’s agent is up to his gills in contract renegotiations.

“What Candice and ‘Murphy Brown’ mean to CBS is indescribable,” says Leslie Moonves, the network’s current programming head. “She represents exactly what I want people to think about CBS. ‘Murphy Brown’ is the absolute signature comedy for CBS, and I hope it continues to be that for many years to come.”

Bergen seems eager not to let the show turn into “Murphy, She Wrote,” but she has grown increasingly ambivalent about the decision to break up her television family, just as a tragedy is unfolding at home.

“For me now, just because of the circumstance I’m in, it really is a blessing,” she says. The “circumstance” in which she finds herself is watching helplessly as her husband has battled low-grade T-cell lymphoma for the past six months, a cancer of the lymph glands that weakens the immune system and leaves Malle weakened and vulnerable to disease.

“He is very ill,” Bergen says. “It’s been very long and difficult for all of us, but certainly for Louis, and he has dealt with a horribly difficult time with constant courage and has never complained. It just stuns all of us.” She is crying now but continues to speak of the “miracle” of her 15-year marriage to Malle. At the end of her book, she had described him as a prince on a white horse. Her prince.

“We got together so relatively late in the game, and neither of us was especially good at it,” she says, referring to the time it took her to “find her way” into a happy relationship at 34. “Not that it hasn’t been difficult, and not that we both haven’t been difficult, but underneath it there has always been a kind of sacred priority, one so clear that it was never spoken about. It was clearly the anchor for both of us, and neither of us ever took it for granted, and [we] valued it above all else. Everything else was sort of informed by that.”

B ergen will be 50 years old in May, and despite the uncer tainty that seems to await her at that crossroad, she sees herself as something of a late bloomer.

“At this point, women my age are supposed to be packing it in,” she says. “And instead, I sort of started going. I won’t have another success like ‘Murphy Brown.’ The odds against it are overwhelming. And I don’t need another success like that.

“I’m not worried about the future, but I’m paying attention to it,” she goes on. “Between marrying, having a child and ‘Murphy,’ this past 10- or 15-year period has been so rich. And I just know enough to know that those things can’t go on forever. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t think it gets easier now. I think you have to put some real thought and resources into making it creative and productive.”

She will make a TV movie called “Tim” in the spring, and then, who knows?

“If somebody came and said, ‘Would you like to study gorillas for a few months in Rwanda?’ I would certainly go with that,” she says, not entirely convincingly. Then she suddenly recalls a night at the Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills. “We gave my brother [Kris] a 21st birthday party there, and all his friends and I dressed up in gorilla suits,” she says, brightening. “We were all sitting around this long table, 14 people in gorilla suits, when he walked in. It was a very nice moment.”

No fleas on her.*