by Grace Carter
Aunt Ellen encouraged her to turn to God and embrace religion – but by early 1930, Ellen was increasingly unable to attend church herself. She was having trouble breathing. To prevent arrhythmia, her doctor encouraged her to stay inside as much as possible to avoid the stress of climbing up and down the six flights of stairs to her apartment. One afternoon, Ellen stood up and felt so dizzy she nearly fainted.
Then, around Easter, Ingrid awoke one night to the sound of Ellen calling out. Ingrid went into her bedroom and found her aunt’s breathing was labored. “I feel really ill,” Ellen gasped. “Will you call Uncle Otto?”
Ingrid rushed to the phone. Her cousin Bill answered and said he would come right away from their house just around the corner.
“Cousin Bill’s on his way,” Ingrid told her aunt.
“Read the Bible to me,” Aunt Ellen whispered.
So Ingrid opened the Bible and began to read, not really knowing what she was saying, and Ellen’s condition worsened. “I’m going to die,” Ellen said. “I’m going to die. Oh, why don’t they come, why don’t they come?”
Then she gasped, “Key-key.”
Ingrid understood immediately what she meant. Because her apartment was on a top floor, instead of running down the stairs to unlock the door, they would throw the key down so visitors could let themselves in. In her panic, Ingrid had forgotten all about that. Bill must be waiting outside.
Ingrid rushed to the window. There was Bill – he had been calling out to her, but she hadn’t heard. Coincidentally, two nurses were walking by and stopped to help. Ingrid threw the key out the window, and all three raced upstairs.
When Ingrid got back to Ellen, “she could hardly breathe now, and her face was black,” she recalled. “I took her in my arms and held her, and then the nurses came in and pulled me away. But it was too late, and they couldn’t have done anything anyway. Bill put a coat around my shoulders and said, ‘Come on, come on home with me.’”
Ingrid was devastated – again. After Aunt Ellen’s death, Ingrid’s depression deepened to the point that she withdrew into herself and walked around in a daze - blank and emotionless. When she finished the school year - how she managed, she wasn’t sure - she moved in with Uncle Otto Bergman, Aunt Hulda, and her five cousins in their second-floor apartment at 43 Artillerigatan, a short walk from Strandvägen.
The Bergmans were a hard-working, middle-class family, Ingrid recalled later. To pay for Ingrid’s upkeep, her father’s attorney gave a portion of the proceeds from Justus’s camera shop to Uncle Otto. The money allowed Ingrid to have a room of her own in Otto’s apartment, a brightly lit and airy space that she filled with her mother’s piano, her father’s desk, and some of his paintings. The extra income also allowed Otto to quit his job and spend his days tinkering with his inventions, leaving the responsibility of running the camera shop - and tending to six children - to Aunt Hulda.
While her five children shared the other bedrooms, Aunt Hulda slept in the corridor in a collapsible bed that she pushed up and out of the way every morning. “It was a most uncomfortable corridor with no windows,” Ingrid recalled. “Aunt Hulda was the first one up in the morning - to do the shopping, and prepare the food, and get us children off to school. As I grew older, I realized that it was Aunt Hulda who was the strong one in that family; she sacrificed herself for those five children and for me.”
Ingrid befriended her youngest cousin, Britt; the others were much older. In the winter, they would take nighttime walks together. In the summer and during school holidays, the girls went to a little summerhouse, about an hour’s boat ride from Stockholm, that Ingrid had inherited from her Aunt Ellen.
Aunt Hulda, meanwhile, insisted that all of her children – and that included Ingrid – get a good education. “I don’t care if my children hate me for what I do,” she would say, “but you’re all going to get an education.” None of the other children were artistic like Ingrid, but the three boys ended up having successful careers: One became an army colonel, another a professor, and the third a dentist.
When she went back to school in the fall of 1931, sixteen-year-old Ingrid had a firmly established reputation as the girl who could transform herself into any number of characters. She spent hours at school daydreaming about traveling the world and living a grand adventure as a movie star. Acting became her escape, she later said, a mask she could hide behind and disappear into a safe and trouble-free world.
Ingrid was encouraged by her father’s best friend, Gunnar Spangberg, who ran a florist shop often frequented by theater people. Nearly every Sunday, he would invite his friends over for supper – “and being a wonderfully wise man, as well as a lovable one, he’d ask me along as well,” Ingrid recalled. He would request that she read a poem or perform a dramatic piece of theater.
So Ingrid would put on a one-girl show, changing her voice and acting out all the parts, gesticulating madly. Gunnar’s friends, all in their fifties and sixties, seemed terribly old to the teenager, but they were captivated by her performances, laughing and crying at just the right moments, always inviting her back the following week. “I had a whole repertoire of stories and scenes I’d made up,” Ingrid said later, “and they were so lovely - they applauded everything I did.”
Around that time, Uncle Gunnar gave her a precious gift: a thick, leather-bound journal, about four inches square, with a metal lock and key and her name embossed on the cover. The very first entry established how serious she was about devoting herself to acting.
“Dear Book,” she wrote. “Ever since I was a child I loved the theater but I never thought that maybe I could become an actress. It was in the fall of 1929 that I realized that I wanted to give myself absolutely to the theater. Uncle Gunnar said I should be an actress; there was no question about it. He told me to learn more poems, and it was then I decided to the Muses I must go, to Thalia, one of the goddesses of the theater.”
Though her father had always pushed for her to go into opera, Ingrid felt he would have ultimately supported her decision to become an actress.
In early 1932, Ingrid was thrilled to get her first exposure to a movie set – all thanks to Greta. A music and singing student, the beautiful Greta earned money as a film extra, lounging about at a railway station, sitting at a dinner party, or walking across a hotel lobby. Ingrid would beg her, “Please let me come with you one day so that I can see how a movie is made.”
Greta did better than that – she got the girl hired as an extra. On a frigid January morning, Ingrid arrived at the Svensk Filmindustri studio, beside herself with excitement, and found a dozen other young girls there, too, most of them much older.
The director, the actor and screenwriter Gunnar Skoglund, told them to look frozen and hungry and miserable. Then the camera went past them a couple of times, and the director said, “That’s it. Thanks very much, girls. You can go now.”
“Go!” Ingrid thought. “At ten fifteen in the morning? I’d only just arrived! They couldn’t get rid of me that easily.”
With her face still covered with thick yellow makeup, Ingrid realized that everyone would think she was waiting for her shoot and let her stay. “So there I was, the girl with the yellow face, marching from set to set, absolutely enthralled.”
At six o’clock, everyone started going home. Ingrid was the last to leave, still wearing what she called “my magic yellow face.” When she got to the front door, she was greeted by a man who looked puzzled. “Where’ve you been all day?” he said. “I’ve been waiting here with your money. We looked everywhere for you.”
The man handed Ingrid the money: ten kronor. She couldn’t believe they were paying her for what she later called “one of the very best days in my life.” It was her first-ever movie role; she would be listed in the credits as “Girl Waiting In Line” in the 1932 Swedish film, Landskamp.
Ingrid was thrilled. After completing her school year at the Lyceum, she was ready to carry out the plan she used to tell her father about – applying to t
he Dramatens elevskova, the drama program offered by Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre. Being accepted into the Dramaten didn’t guarantee a successful acting career, but the program did provide some of the best training in Europe; alumni included Greta Garbo, ten years older than Ingrid, silent screen star Lars Hanson, and the popular Signe Hasso, who attended classes with Ingrid. The school also provided instruction in French and English, as well as classes on the history of theater and classical literature.
But first, she had to convince Uncle Otto, who believed actresses were little different from prostitutes. “You can’t tell me, young lady,” he told her. “I’ve seen those love scenes they do on the stage and in those films; you can’t tell me they don’t go on doing the same thing - afterwards!”
Ingrid didn’t even try to argue with him. She knew that he was doing the best he could as a stand-in for her father to see that she received a good education and was brought up properly. And Otto was not an unreasonable man. He knew that to dismiss her dream would leave her heartbroken and be unfair. He also knew that his family’s budget depended on the trust fund Justus had set up for Ingrid.
So Otto decided to give her one chance to audition. If she failed, her dreams would be over. “Understand that,” he told Ingrid. “No more of this actress nonsense. And I want your promise, because I know you will keep that promise. Do you accept this?”
Ingrid accepted, overjoyed. It was inconceivable to her that she might not succeed, even though there would be seventy-five applicants and only a very few would be selected. After her promise to Uncle Otto, she knew deep down that if she failed her audition, she could easily end up as a salesperson or somebody’s secretary, and her dreams of theatrical fame would be over.
On the day of her audition, Ingrid hurried to the Royal Dramatic Theater wearing a tweed skirt and a beige-colored sweater that she had knitted herself. She paused in front of the building’s massive, pale gray façade and breathed in deeply. She felt very much at home. Nearly eighteen years earlier, she had been born less than 100 yards away, in the apartment above her father’s photographic shop on the busy Strandvägen.
On either side of the theater doors were gilded statues of male and female figures representing the Muses, including her beloved Thalia, goddess of the theater. Ingrid went around to the stage door and crossed to the office where the porter was holding a list of applicants to be auditioned that morning.
“Miss Bergman? You’re number sixteen which means you’ve got quite a while to wait before they’re ready for you.”
Ingrid went outside, crossed the road to a small park, and mentally rehearsed her lines. Some weeks before, she had delivered to the theater a big brown envelope containing the three pieces she had chosen for her audition.
Ingrid had discussed her choice of material with her drama teacher, the Swedish actor Gabriel Alw. “The first audition must be the most important,” Ingrid told him. “Practically everybody else will be doing heavy dramatic pieces, Camille or Lady Macbeth, wailing and weeping all over the stage. I think the jury will be so bored having to watch a procession of young girls breaking their hearts. Can’t we make the jury laugh?”
Alw agreed. He suggested a scene from a Hungarian play featuring a peasant girl who is teasing a country boy who had been trying to flirt with her. Even bolder than he is, she makes her entrance by leaping toward him, across a small stream, and stands there in a dramatic pose, laughing at him. “You make a flying jump out of the wings onto the stage,” Alw said, “and you stand there, legs apart, hands on hips, as if to say, ‘Here I am. Look at me! Are you paying attention?’”
Ingrid was excited about this audacious choice. In the park, she made one or two tentative leaps to prepare for her magnificent entrance, then wandered around a bit, looked at the passing seagulls, and returned to the theater still fifteen minutes ahead of time.
Waiting in the wings, she knew the stakes: If she failed, the porter would give her back the big brown envelope, and that would be the end of it. If she passed, she would get a smaller white envelope that would tell her the date of her next audition and which audition piece the jury wished to hear.
Finally, Ingrid’s name was called. Just as she had practiced, she ran and leapt into the air, “and there I am in the middle of the stage with that big gay laugh that’s supposed to stop them dead in their tracks.”
She paused and let loose with her first line. Then she stole a quick glance over the footlights at the jury. “And I can’t believe it!” she recalled. “They are paying not the slightest attention to me. In fact the jury members in the front row are chatting to the others in the second row. I dry up in absolute horror. I simply can’t remember the next line.”
In the wings was a boy whose job was to recite the lines of the country lad – and also act as prompter if she forgot her own lines. So he threw her a cue, and Ingrid got the next line out. But it seemed to have little effect, as the jury continued talking in loud voices and gesturing. Ingrid’s mind went blank again. All she could think about was, “Let me finish the scene!”
“What’s my next line?” she hissed to the boy. But before he could respond, she heard the voice of the chairman of the jury: “Stop it, stop it. That’s enough. Thank you, thank you, miss . . . next please, next please.”
Ingrid shuffled off the stage, devastated. As she walked through the foyer and out onto the street, she thought, “Now I have to go home and face Uncle Otto. Now I have to tell him that I’m thrown off the stage after about thirty seconds. I have to say, ‘They didn’t listen to me. They didn’t even think I was worth listening to.’ Now I can’t think of becoming an actress ever again. So life isn’t worth living.” She walked straight across to the waterfront and could think of only one solution: Throw herself into the water and end it all.
She stood near the kiosk where the ferry tickets to Djurgården and Skansen were sold. Except for the seagulls, she was alone. She stared into the dirty water and imagined what she would look like, covered with silt, when they pulled her out. But suicide would have to wait until after she had a chance to wallow in her misery for a while. She began the uphill walk through the shops and main streets up to the apartment block where she lived.
Her two girl cousins, Britt and Margit, were waiting for her. “What’s taken you so long?”
She ignored them, wishing only to head for the privacy of her room, where she could throw herself on the bed, weeping, and wonder why her mother and father had to die. Why could they not be here to comfort her?
“Lars Seligman has been on the phone . . .” one of the girls said.
“Lars? What could he want?” Ingrid wondered. They were close friends and he was also trying to pass his auditions.
“He said he’d been down to the office to collect his white envelope . . . And he asked what sort of envelope you’d got . . . And they said you got a white envelope, too . . .”
A white envelope? She’d gotten a white envelope? Could they be telling the truth? Ingrid raced down the stairs and into the street. It was downhill all the way, but she would swear her feet never touched the ground until she reached the theater.
She arrived at the office in a desperate state. “What sort of envelope have I got?” she demanded. “Please tell me what sort of envelope I’ve got?”
The porter smiled. “A white one, Miss Bergman . . . we wondered where you’d been. Here it is. Good luck . . .”
She tore it open. She had passed to the next round, where she would audition with a piece she had chosen from the play L’Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. Ingrid floated out into the sweet summer air. “Oh, how wonderful life is,” she thought.
Ingrid was so happy to be accepted that she didn’t bother to ask why they had ignored her after she leapt onto the stage. But many years later, when she was in Rome, she ran into Alf Sjöberg, who was on the jury. “Tell me, please tell me, why at that first audition did you all treat me so badly?” she asked him. “I could have committed suicide, you treated me so nastily, an
d disliked me so much.”
Alf stared at her as if she’d gone mad. “Disliked you so much! Dear girl, you’re crazy! The minute you leapt out of the wings onto the stage, and stood there laughing at us, we turned round and said to each other, ‘Well, we don’t have to listen to her, she’s in! Look at that security. Look at that stage presence. Look at that impertinence.’ You jumped out onto the stage like a tigress. You weren’t afraid of us. ‘No need to waste another second, we’ve got dozens more to look at. Next please.’ So what are you talking about? You might never make as good an entrance in your life again.”
From L’Aiglon, a play based on the life of Napoleon’s son, Napoleon II, she performed the part of a crazy boy. The third selection she had offered, which the jury did not choose, was a sequence from Strindberg’s A Dream Play, the Swedish playwright’s attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious. The eclectic collection of material was designed to demonstrate to the jury her ability at comedy, madness, and tragedy.
It worked. Ingrid passed her second round of auditions and, in the autumn of 1933, began her studies in the drama program at the Royal Dramatic Theater.
She arrived at the “stage door of the majestic theater and just stood there for a while, reveling in her ecstasy, thinking, “I belong!” This would be her new home, she mused, where she could walk down the hallways and people would say, “Hello, Ingrid!”
It was a heady time for Sweden, too. Unlike the majority of the world’s industrialized nations, still struggling with the economic crisis created by the Great Depression, Sweden’s economy was on the upswing. The country exported iron, sewing machines, and surgical and dental implements, and tourism was at an all-time high. As the Social Democrat Party grew more powerful, the Swedish government instituted progressive healthcare and educational systems heralded by the Roosevelt administration as models upon which the United States could base its recovery program.