by Grace Carter
One day, as summer was coming to an end, Ingrid was sitting in her grandmother’s garden by herself, trying to be ladylike and orderly. Suddenly, she heard a whistle that sounded a lot like the one her father used to find her in crowds. At first, she thought she was hearing things, wishing her father was near. “Then he whistled again, and I turned and there he was,” she said. “And I just flew. Such security. Such warmth. Papa was back. Life was suddenly all right again.”
When Ingrid and her father returned to Stockholm, Justus became absorbed with his work and social life again, often leaving Ingrid alone at home with Aunt Ellen. But in 1922, when she was seven, their lives changed dramatically when her father hired a housekeeper. The new maid was a lively eighteen-year-old named Greta Danielsson who, before long, was spending every day in their apartment - and every night in Justus’s bed.
Greta became yet another mother figure for young Ingrid, and the much-younger woman added a new dimension to family life. While Aunt Ellen was stern and somber, and Mutti was rich and entertaining, Greta mostly giggled a lot and held her father’s hand.
“I loved Greta,” Ingrid said. “She was so beautiful. My father painted her many times . . . When my aunts and uncles spoke badly about her in my presence, I tried to defend her. And they’d say, ‘Do you know where your father is? He’s not at home with you, is he?’ And I’d answer ‘No, he isn’t, but it doesn’t make any difference. I am very busy with all my homework. I know he’ll be along later.’”
Living with her fifty-one-year-old brother and his teenage lover was more than Aunt Ellen could bear. She moved back to her own apartment - only three blocks away - returning on Sunday mornings to take Ingrid to church.
Sitting in the pews, Ingrid would study the painting above the altar and listen to the sermons of Reverend Erik Bergman. The Reverend Bergman was no relation to Ingrid’s family, but – in a startling indication of what a small country it was – he was the father of Ingmar Bergman, three years younger than Ingrid, who would grow up to be a legendary director, writer, and producer and would one day put that little girl in the pew into one of his award-winning films.
Under the tutelage of Aunt Ellen and Pastor Bergman, Ingrid would develop a certain reverence for God and spiritual matters, though her father never fostered it. Justus and Greta lived a more libertine lifestyle. Greta even took Ingrid to the movies, to Aunt Ellen’s dismay, which she considered more disgraceful than if Greta had taken Ingrid to a brothel.
For Ingrid, going to the movies was far more fun than going to school. She was a good student, but Lyceum for Girls was not a very appealing or relaxed place when she enrolled as a first-grader in the fall of 1922. Over the next eleven years, she would sit on the school’s hard benches and study Swedish and German history, biology, chemistry, art, and music. While she excelled in German, thanks in part to her family background, she had a difficult time with science, which she found dull. Girls were expected to learn how to cook, too, but unlike her mother, Ingrid was never good in the kitchen.
Though Ingrid enjoyed school overall, her years at Lyceum for Girls offered a painful daily reminder of what was missing in her life: a mother. She sometimes stood outside after school and watched as other girls’ mothers - dressed in pretty dresses and fancy hats - arrived to take them home. Walking home alone, she felt an ache of longing.
That ache became even more pronounced when Ingrid began to feel that her father was making some basic parenting mistakes. When she was about eight years old, Justus suggested that she learn to play the piano and take singing lessons so she could become an opera singer. She agreed but didn’t like the piano very much. Even at that age, she felt her father was being too dreamy and impractical. “In fact, I kept telling him he was not educating me correctly,” she recalled.
That feeling deepened when it came to getting an allowance. Ingrid just wanted to be like the other kids, whose parents gave them one krona per week. But when she said, “Can I have my pocket money, Papa?” he would reach into his pocket and fish out a handful of money and say, “There, take as much as you want. Here, take it.”
“No, no, no,” Ingrid would reply, “that’s too much, too much. You mustn’t do that, you mustn’t spoil me. I should just have one krona a week.”
When he insisted that she take more, arguing that “money’s just there to be spent,” Ingrid refused. “Here, look. I’ll take two kronor. Put the rest away. You must learn to look after money.”
“So I had to educate him,” she recalled, “about educating me.”
These types of battles also happened over school. “What d’you want to go to school for?” he would tell Ingrid. “You can do your sums now and you can write. Now you’re wasting time. Much better you go straight into the opera. You’re having singing lessons, and you’re practicing music. That’s life. That’s the real stuff of life. Being an artist. Being creative. Much more important than sitting in school and learning about history and geography. I know people at the opera. Let’s give up school . . .”
Ingrid, ever sensible, would have none of it. Little did she know that her already non-traditional life was about to become even more fractured.
When Ingrid was nine, her father informed her he would be taking an extended trip to America to lead a choir of amateur singers, called The Swedes, on a tour of three American cities. Ingrid was devastated. What if his ship sank at sea? What if he never came home? What would she do then?
Greta, of course, could not accompany Justus when he left for America in early 1925; it would be unseemly for the teenager to travel with her much older lover. So she took a job across town. Ingrid moved in with her Uncle Otto, his wife Hulda, and their five children: Bill, Bengt, Bo, Margit, and the youngest, Britt, who was about Ingrid’s age.
Living with her five cousins was a rude awakening for Ingrid; as an only child, she had never had to compete for her father’s attention. She did her best to win her temporary family’s approval by doing what she had always done - playing her favorite characters and reenacting scenes from Swedish poems. The boys teased her about being clumsy; she was tall and gangly and not yet comfortable in her own skin. But despite their criticism, she carried on. She was passionate about her love for acting and would later say, in an often-quoted remark: “I didn’t choose acting. It chose me.”
At school, Ingrid’s poetry recitals were considered charming and delightful. The response from her classmates was not only warm but sometimes emotional. In fifth grade, Ingrid performed a dramatic reading of “Sveaborg” by Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the renowned Finnish poet; she recited the epic verse so poignantly, a fellow student recalled, that her classmates were left teary-eyed and shivering. It was no surprise to anyone at the Lyceum when Ingrid won a prize at a public poetry recital in the spring of 1925.
When her father returned home at last in August 1925, Ingrid was on her summer vacation with Aunt Mutti in Hamburg. They returned to Stockholm, and he rented an elegant apartment for the two of them at 34 Birger Jarlsgatan, in the business district, and re-dedicated himself to his musical career (Greta lived separately). He took up piano lessons again and signed ten-year-old Ingrid up for more voice lessons, still hoping she could become a great opera singer. Ingrid, however, considered opera boring and voice lessons tedious compared to the drama of acting. Home movies show her singing alongside her father at the piano but with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.
In the fall of 1926, Ingrid’s life was transformed by a night she would forever remember. Her father took her to the Royal Dramatic Theatre to see the play Patrasket (The Rabble), by Hjalmar Bergman, a Swedish playwright unrelated to either her father or her aunt’s pastor. Ingrid wore a red dress she had borrowed from her cousin and was so intent on looking perfect for the occasion that she asked Aunt Ellen to iron it three times that day.
The theater, located near Ingrid’s first home on the harbor, was an architecturally breathtaking shrine to the performing arts. Ingrid had spent many nights watching enviously from he
r apartment window as the exquisitely dressed patrons streamed through its doors and up the grand marble staircase.
Then, at last, it was her turn. Entering the magnificent theater, she looked up to see Carl Larsson’s painting, The Birth of Drama, on the ceiling, depicting a man crowning a maiden with laurel. The girl in the painting might as well have been Ingrid Bergman receiving the gift of theater for the first time, the day she discovered the meaning and purpose of her life.
“My eyes popped out,” she recalled. “Grownup people on that stage doing things which I did at home, all by myself, just for fun. And they were getting paid for it!” At the first intermission, Ingrid turned to her father and said – in a voice so loud that people all over the theater could probably hear – “Papa, Papa, that’s what I’m going to do!”
The play that inspired the eleven-year-old Ingrid Bergman to become an actress was not exactly children’s fare. In Patrasket (The Rabble), the playwright Hjalmar Bergman presented his usual dark view of humanity in his story of a family seeking help from a wealthy Jewish relative. Supposedly a comedy, the play exposed the corruption and hypocrisy of its characters and had unmistakable anti-Semitic overtones.
But Ingrid cared far less about the content of the play than the glorious theatrical experience itself - watching actors playing in a wondrous make-believe world of costumes, props, and scenery. After that mesmerizing night at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, her father took her to more plays, including several starring the great actor Gösta Ekman, whom Ingrid idolized and fantasized about performing with one day.
“I dreamed how one day I would stand at [Stockholm’s] Oscar Theater and the public would sit there and see this new Sarah Bernhardt,” she later said. “I never talked to anyone very much about my plans. I kept them to myself. I know I dreamed that perhaps one day I might be able to play against Gösta Ekman, who was my ideal.”
At Ingrid’s school, teachers and classmates were in awe of her ability to memorize lengthy monologues from the performances she saw and to repeat them flawlessly. Even to Ingrid, it seemed incongruous that someone so shy would love to perform so much. As she later wrote: “I was the shyest human being ever invented. I couldn’t come into a room without bumping into the furniture and then blushing. If people asked me what my name was, I’d blush bright scarlet.”
Still, by the time Ingrid was twelve, she had become a reliable source of entertainment for her classmates at the Lyceum. She would never forget her first “public” performance. One day, Ingrid and her fellow students were unable to use the gymnasium because a stage had been set up for a school play. “Now you’ve got this next hour free,” the teacher said. “Just sit quietly and I’ll come back and then we’ll go off to the next lesson.”
When the teacher left, some mysterious force seemed to take over Ingrid’s body and mind. “My first real stage and something happened to me,” she recalled later. “I flew up onto it. Standing there, I’d never felt so happy in my life.”
The week before, Ingrid had seen a play called The Green Elevator. She explained the plot to the other girls and asked if they would like to re-create the play. They did, though Ingrid was so enthusiastic about it, she recalled, “I think they all thought I’d gone mad.”
The Green Elevator was a bedroom farce with seven characters. Most of it was over the heads of the girls, but Ingrid remembered the whole story and much of the dialogue and taught it to her classmates. “It was about a husband with a hangover, and his involvement with his wife and girlfriend,” she recalled. Ingrid delivered the key speech by a drunken boy named Billy who was moaning over a lost love. “Tessi, Tessi, my little morning fairy queen . . .”
Her classmates were thrilled and roared with laughter. The ruckus was so loud that their teacher heard them and came running back into the room. “Whatever’s going on?” she demanded. “You’re making so much noise that you’re disturbing the class next door.”
“Ingrid Bergman’s acting a play for us,” the girls said. The teacher could not believe that shy Ingrid was capable of such a thing but had no time to quarrel. She shooed the girls outside, told them to go to the park, and to come back in a half-hour for their next class. Ingrid, by popular demand, finished the performance outside on a park bench.
By then, Ingrid was hooked. She also was insistent that she play many different types of roles. If she portrayed a tragic figure one time, she’d choose a comedic one the next; one week she followed a reenactment of Joan of Arc’s death with an impersonation of a drunken woman looking for her house key. The mythological romance of Tristan and Isolde, which she and her schoolmates read when she was twelve, also made a deep impression on her.
As a shy, awkward adolescent, it was fun to imagine herself as a romantic leading lady. One heroine she always wanted to play was Joan of Arc, who was idolized by girls around the world as the personification of Christian courage and perseverance. Ingrid felt a mysterious kinship with the teenaged saint, a timid girl who transformed herself into a brave warrior to lead the French army against its Anglican foes, ultimately becoming a martyr after being burned at the stake.
Outside of her games of make-believe, however, Ingrid was uncomfortable talking to people and was often lonely. Like many actors, she seemed to choose her profession to mask her insecurities and vulnerabilities. Her sheer physical size also made her feel different. At thirteen, she had already reached her adult height of five-foot-nine and towered over her petite classmates.
Ingrid’s father helped her manage such emotions and was a crucial stabilizing influence in her life. That would soon change, however. During the Christmas season of 1928, Justus took her to Berns Salonger, a decades-old restaurant in the heart of Stockholm that, in its heyday, had been a hotspot for Sweden’s illustrious artists and literati. In the Röda Rummet (Red Room), Ingrid and her papa sat in overstuffed chairs listening to the orchestra, studying the restaurant’s elaborate wood carvings, and dining on roast elk; Justus even permitted Ingrid a glass of champagne.
During dinner, Justus offered his daughter his best fatherly advice. “You can never do too much good,” he told her, adding, “The greatest victory that ever can be won is the victory over one’s self.”
Days later, Justus suddenly got sick. Pale and feverish and unable to eat, he stayed in bed for more than a week before calling a doctor, who suggested they run some tests. Because her Aunt Ellen was ill with the flu, Ingrid contacted her father’s girlfriend, Greta Danielsson, and asked if she could help. When the test results came back, Justus sat down with Ingrid and Greta and told them he had stomach cancer.
Justus showed his daughter the X-ray of his stomach. “You see, this is a cancer growing here,” he said, “and darling, pretty soon I won’t be able to get any food down into my stomach, so you see that’s serious.”
Ingrid looked at the X-ray plate and thought she must cheer him up. “But look, there’s lots of room down this way,” she said. “The food can get in this way, of course it can.”
To spare Ingrid that pain of having to watch him die, Justus told his daughter that he and Greta were going to Bavaria to consult a miracle doctor who might be able to save him. Some of Bergman’s biographers contend that Justus actually did nothing of the sort. Instead, he went to spend his remaining days on the outskirts of Munich with Greta, who made him soup and tea while he painted wildflowers.
But Ingrid, in her memoir, says her father and Greta did go to the miracle doctor in Bavaria. His family was shocked that he would travel with his mistress – but not his daughter. “She stayed there with him to help him die, and I loved her for it,” Ingrid said.
All agree that after his trip, Justus came home to die. Too weak to speak, he could only whisper, and he was no longer able to eat. Doing all she could to comfort him, Ingrid stayed at his bedside, sleeping only a few hours during the day; at night, she held his hand and hummed his favorite folk songs.
In his last days, Ingrid’s Aunt Mutti came up from Hamburg and said to the other rela
tives, “Greta has the right to come in and be by his side in these last hours of his life. So please allow it.”
The family relented. “She came back and we sat on either side of his bed, just the two of us,” Ingrid recalled. “I remember my father turned his head to look at Greta, and then he turned his head to look at me, and I smiled at him. And that was the end.”
In the early hours of July 29, 1929, Justus took his last breaths. He was fifty-eight. Ingrid was a month from her fourteenth birthday. The next day, Aunt Ellen and Uncle Otto wrote Justus’s obituary, which Ingrid signed. The notice read: “Peacefully and quietly, my dear father expired. He is mourned by his daughter, relatives, friends and staff of many years. Funeral at the North Cemetery, Saturday, August 3, at four o’clock.”
Ingrid was so overcome with grief that she barely functioned. She lost all interest in her favorite activities, including her dramatic performances, and rarely engaged in conversation. Greta stayed with her until school started, but Ingrid was so depressed she would not even go with Greta to the movies or the theater.
At times, Ingrid would pick up her father’s paintbrush and try to paint, but after a few strokes, the brush would fall from her fingers. She later remembered thinking she didn’t know how she could go on without him. Her melancholy would continue throughout her life. Her daughter Pia remembered her mother never ceasing to mourn the loss of both her parents.
Justus left an estate of almost half a million Swedish krona - approximately $150,000 today - a quarter of it secured as stocks in his company assigned to a trust fund for Ingrid. He left smaller amounts to family and friends.
That September, Ingrid moved in with Aunt Ellen. At the Lyceum for Girls, she struggled with physics, chemistry, mathematics, and cooking, as well as with teachers and school administrators who insisted she keep up with her assignments in spite of her loss.