In a recent interview, Candice Bergen recalled the trouble she caused after being sent to a boarding school in Gstaad, Switzerland.
During an interview on the podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name, the “Murphy Brown” star shared several stories about her youth and revealed that she accidentally set fire to a renowned European restaurant when she was 14.
“It wasn’t just any restaurant. It was the best restaurant,” Bergen told host Ted Danson. “It was the Olden in Gstaad, at a ski resort where the school I attended was located, and I had sneaked out because I was only 14. I wasn’t allowed to go out at night, so I would sneak out.”
According to Bergen, she and a few older girls were at the restaurant eating fondue when she thought it would be a good idea to pour some wine into the fat used to cook the cubes of meat.
According to the actress, flames then shot up to the ceiling and the curtains caught fire. “We were all evacuated. It was snowing outside,” she recalled. “I wasn’t allowed to go out for the rest of the year, and rightly so,” she told Danson.
Bergen, 80, explained that the Olden was repaired and eventually reopened, and that the night the restaurant nearly burned down is still remembered in Gstaad. The actress told Danson that she returned to the town with her husband four decades after the incident and, during a walk, someone asked whether she had been responsible for the fire at the Olden.
“We were walking through the village, and an older ski instructor who looked very friendly said, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Candice Bergen?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ And he said, ‘Aren’t you the woman who set fire to the Olden?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ So my name lived on. Infamously,” she joked with Danson.
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