Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  Ingrid’s performance was so commanding that Molander gave her top billing, even above Edvin Adolphson. Again, the Swedish critics raved. “Owing to her superb comedy timing and her lustrous appearance,” one wrote, “Ingrid Bergman overshadows them all.”

  Ingrid and Lindstrom had planned to get married immediately after Dollar was completed, at a Lutheran church in his hometown of Stöde. But when shooting ran later than expected, the date was moved from July 7 to July 10 – the seventh month of 1937 – meaning the superstitious Ingrid would get only two sevens in her matrimonial date instead of three.

  Until then, Ingrid said, she had enjoyed her single life. Her acting income paid for a small rental apartment she loved in the center of Stockholm on a modern block of flats with little red sun-awnings over the windows. “When I think about it,” she recalled, “I suppose I only had about a year of freedom, on my own, in my whole life.”

  But Ingrid was happy to give all that up because she was madly in love. Shortly before their wedding, she wrote to Lindstrom, “My golden one, my everything on earth, my wonderful only love. If you could only be here in the dressing room and I could sit on your lap, how fine that would be because it is so devilishly dull without you. It is going to be five hours before I can see you, and eleven days before we marry. That is terribly long. How can I bear it? If I could only kiss you and really kiss you again. You will never leave me, will you? I shall never leave you.”

  The wedding itself gave Lindstrom his first taste of what life would be like as the husband of Sweden’s most popular movie star. “Petter was very much against any kind of publicity,” she recalled. “He wanted a nice, quiet, private ceremony.” That illusion was shattered when Lindstrom found someone hiding in the bushes in his father’s front garden, ready to snap pictures and write an article.

  The reporter was Barbro Alving, who went on to become a well-known journalist, pacifist, and feminist who covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II, always under the name Bang. “I discovered it was her very first writing assignment, and my very first wedding, so we had something in common,” Bergman recalled. “We chatted away and became good friends, and we’ve been good friends ever since.”

  After honeymooning in Norway and England, the newlyweds moved into Lindstrom’s penthouse in the same Stockholm neighborhood where Ingrid had grown up. “We lived very happily together,” she recalled, and entertained Swedish artists, such as the well-known cartoonist Einar Nerman, Bang and others from the literary world and many colleagues in films and the theater.

  In October, Ingrid went back to work. Her eighth film, Only One Night, directed once again by her mentor Gustav Molander, told the story of Eva Beckman, a woman pursued by the illegitimate son of an aristocratic landowner.

  Ingrid hated the script – “a piece of junk,” she called it – but accepted the part only when studio executives agreed to also cast her in another role, one she was desperate to play – Anna Holm in the film A Woman’s Face, scheduled to begin in January.

  Anna was a tragic figure, a young girl whose face had been badly burned in a fire, leaving her hideously disfigured. “I adored the story and pleaded with Swedish Films to let me do it,” Ingrid recalled.

  “No, we can’t,” the executives said. “Your audience won’t accept it - a beautiful girl with a disfigured face. No, definitely not. Besides, we have this marvelous movie called Only One Night, which we want you to do next.”

  So Ingrid proposed the swap, which they accepted, and she wrapped up Only One Night just before Christmas. Lindstrom’s work schedule forced them to cancel a ski trip to Norway, but he did give her a fur coat for Christmas and promised they’d take a long vacation that summer. Ingrid got two other welcome gifts that holiday season: News that she ranked ahead of Greta Garbo in a Swedish popularity poll and the release of Intermezzo in New York on Christmas Eve, which was so popular that theaters had to add more screenings.

  The reviews were glowing, and she was getting closer to breaking into the American movie industry. Variety called Ingrid “a talented, beautiful actress [whose] star is destined for Hollywood.” The Los Angeles Daily News went further, saying that Intermezzo was not merely the best picture ever sent by Sweden to the United States but as good if not better than anything Hollywood was offering: “Miss Bergman not only has beauty, a quality common enough in Hollywood, but she is endowed with an emotional intensity which is extremely rare. This combination makes her a person who could easily develop into a great actress: even a star. Hollywood producers ought to form a pool to bring her out to this country, if only to keep her out of Swedish pictures which are getting altogether too good.”

  Many years later, Gustav Molander acknowledged that it would be easy for him to take the credit for having discovered Ingrid Bergman. After all, he had made her first film test, encouraged her to leave school to begin a movie career, directed some of her early Swedish films, and co-written and directed Intermezzo, the film that would attract the attention of Hollywood producers. But, he said, “The truth is, nobody discovered her. Nobody launched her. She discovered herself.”

  Ingrid, he said, always moved “with wonderful grace and self-control. She spoke her lines beautifully and her radiant beauty struck me the first time I saw her. She appreciated compliments, accepted them shyly, but they never altered the three totally original characteristics of her work: truth, naturalness, and fantasy. I created Intermezzo for her, but I was not responsible for its success. Ingrid herself made it successful through her performance.”

  In January, Ingrid was devastated by the news that her beloved Gösta Ekman had died at age forty-seven after a long-term drug addiction had caused his health to deteriorate. (“How is it possible that I shall never see him again, never talk to him again?” Ingrid wrote in her journal.)

  That same month, Ingrid’s mood swung back in the opposite direction with some delightfully unexpected news. Shortly after rehearsals began for A Woman’s Face, she learned that she was pregnant. Ingrid and Lindstrom were thrilled and celebrated with champagne and dancing at Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel.

  The news would not, however, slow down her career. Of that period in her life, Ingrid said later, “We both worked very hard. We were deeply in love, and in the natural course of events, I became pregnant. Not that I intended something as normal as the ‘natural course of events’ to stop me making films.”

  So back to work she went. The role of Anna Holm was by far the most complex character Ingrid had ever played. Embittered by her hideous face, Anna enters a life of crime, intent on inflicting pain on others she perceives to be spoiled or overly happy. When she sets out to blackmail a faithless wife, her victim’s husband, a plastic surgeon, offers to operate on Anna to restore her beauty. After the surgery is successful, Anna becomes a governess to a young boy and is transformed by her love for him – but, by then, she has already become deeply involved with a sinister blackmailer, the aristocrat Torsten Barring.

  Ingrid’s face was sufficiently horrifying, but Molander struggled with the film’s ending. “Plastic surgery repairs her face so we have the original Ingrid back again and she looks lovely,” he said, “but the blackmailer [Torsten Barring] manages to keep his grip upon her and insists in involving her in a plan to murder a young boy and steal his fortune. To save the boy Anna shoots the blackmailer dead. Now how - in those days, when films needed, if not happy endings, then at least repentance - did we solve that problem and leave Anna Holm facing a happy future?”

  Molander suspended shooting for two days but failed to come up with a solution. So he asked Ingrid her opinion. “She thought about it for a couple of minutes, then without hesitation, she gave me her answer,” he said. “And it was the right answer. It was Anna Holm’s answer for she had become Anna Holm. ‘I shall go on trial for murder,’ said Ingrid, ‘and that’s the end of the film. What happens next, whether I receive clemency or not, we leave to the audience to guess.’” (In the 1941 MGM remake starring Joan Crawford, Hollywood’
s code of ethics ensured that the defendant Anna, utterly repentant, would be free by the end of the film.)

  After Ingrid completed A Woman’s Face at the end of March 1938, she traveled to Germany to begin what would become a troubling period of involvement with the Nazi government. Ingrid had come to the attention of the German movie industry when her Aunt Mutti had mentioned her to a studio executive who quickly arranged a screening of one of her films for Joseph Goebbels. It was immediately clear to Goebbels that Ingrid’s talents - and popularity - would be an asset to the Third Reich.

  So she went to Berlin for a screen test, and Lindstrom surprised her by appearing at her hotel. “I suddenly realized how lonely you’d be on your own and how nervous because you don’t know how to handle people,” he told her. “So I thought I’d better be around just in case.”

  Though Lindstrom undoubtedly thought he was being helpful, he was also demonstrating his penchant for trying to control nearly every aspect of Ingrid’s life, which would become more pronounced as the years went by. Part of Ingrid welcomed the idea of having Lindstrom to lean on. “I was so happy,” Ingrid recalled. “He had come down to take care of me.” But she also realized how unhealthy her dependence on him was becoming. “Because, in fact, he so tied me down by being helpful that for the rest of my life I’ve been helpless without a man to tell me what to do.”

  Except when she was working, that is. Her acting instincts were so sophisticated that whenever she was on stage or in front of the camera, nobody but the director could tell her what to do – and even then an argument would often break out. But in her private life, she wanted the man to decide everything, even down to what to order in a restaurant. “It’s not important to me,” she would say. “You choose for me.”

  Ingrid also resisted Lindstrom’s attempt to control which projects she should accept. When Germany’s national film company, Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), offered her a contract after her screen test, Lindstrom objected. He saw no good coming from working with the barbarous Nazi regime. But Ingrid insisted and signed a deal to make three movies in Berlin. In early 1938, UFA released an announcement to the international press: “With this contract, Ingrid Bergman begins a new artistic development in her career.”

  When it came to her attitude toward Germany, Ingrid was not a typical Swede. While her countrymen had long appreciated German ingenuity and artistic achievements, most were offended by Hitler’s anti-Semitic rhetoric and his plans to expand the Third Reich. Hitler, meanwhile, resented Sweden’s insistence on neutrality but could do little about it: He needed Sweden’s iron to build his weapons of war.

  Ingrid, oblivious to the political turmoil swirling around her, thought nothing of making movies in Germany - after all, she was half-German and spoke the language, so what was the harm? Later, she realized how naïve she had been. She told one interviewer that, had she been more aware, she “would have had more sense than to go to Germany to make a picture in 1938.”

  Her first German film would be The Four Companions. After wrapping up A Woman’s Face, Ingrid realized that her pregnancy would soon be obvious and asked the UFA to move up her production schedule. The studio agreed, and Ingrid immediately flew to Berlin and moved into a rented house with her three female German castmates. In mid-April, they went to work.

  Only when she arrived did Ingrid realize what a frightening situation she was in. Karl Fröhlich, director of The Four Companions, took Ingrid to a Nazi rally in Berlin – “to impress me, I suppose,” she said. They entered an enormous stadium and watched a scene unfold that is familiar to anyone who has watched the old newsreels: floodlights, bands, steel-helmeted storm troopers, and Adolph Hitler marching in as dozens of little girls ran up to him carrying flowers. Then everyone in the crowd stretched their arms out in the Nazi salute and thundered, “Sieg Heil!”

  Everyone, that is, except Ingrid, who looked around in amazement. Fröhlich was apoplectic that she was not playing along: “My God, you’re not doing the Heil Hitler salute!”

  Ingrid replied cheekily, “Why should I? You’re all doing it so well without me.”

  “You’re crazy!” Fröhlich said. “You must do it. We’re being watched.”

  “Who’s watching us?” Ingrid said, bemused. “They’re all watching Hitler.”

  “I’m being watched. Everybody knows who I am. I can’t get into trouble because of you. We’re under all sorts of pressures. You’ve got to be very careful how and when you talk. We do not make jokes here. It’s all very serious . . .”

  Ingrid says she never did raise her arm in the Nazi salute. Later, in the privacy of Fröhlich’s office, she protested, “But I’m a Swedish actress only here for a few weeks.”

  “That won’t help you if it comes to a showdown,” he replied. “You’re half-German. These people are ruthless and dangerous. They’ve got spies and ‘ears’ everywhere. And another thing, if you get an invitation from Dr. Joseph Goebbels to tea - and you’re pretty certain to get one - you just say ‘Yes.’ You don’t argue or have a headache. You go! He likes young actresses, and there’s no question of discussion. You go!”

  Ingrid said she had no intention of ever having tea with Goebbels – and this made Fröhlich even more nervous. She couldn’t believe a man of his stature was behaving like this. “If you refuse to go and have tea with him, I shall get into terrible trouble,” he said. “I really mean that. Don’t you understand?”

  Fortunately, Ingrid never got any sort of invitation from Goebbels. “I wasn’t his type,” she surmised. “So poor Karl Fröhlich got nervous all for nothing.”

  Ingrid’s co-star, Hans Sohnker, was also terrified. “Now listen, Ingrid,” he told her one day, “listen carefully to me. Do you think we like this situation any more than you do? But what are we to do? Where do we start? People are disappearing all the time. We protest, and we risk not only our own lives, but those of our family and friends. We know the Jews are in a terrible position, but so is anyone else who dares to oppose them. People are sent to these camps. We’ve no information about them. People whisper, ‘Where? What camps? What are we talking about?’ But we don’t dare to question what they’re doing . . . All Germany is scared to death.”

  During shooting of The Four Companions, Ingrid was anxious about her ability to perform in German. Suffering from morning sickness, she wasn’t her usual cheery self and was frustrated that Fröhlich continually interrupted her scenes to correct her German. Ingrid argued that moviegoers knew she was Swedish, but Fröhlich insisted that her German be perfect.

  Seeing Ingrid’s swelling belly that threatened to burst her dresses, Fröhlich hurried the last scenes along. The film, a story of four young women who form an advertising agency and get into trouble with men, was a flop when it was released in October 1938. Billed as a romantic comedy, it was blatantly sexist and not funny at all.

  By the time production of The Four Companions wrapped at the end of May, Ingrid was five months pregnant. Lindstrom joined her in Berlin and made good on his promise to take her on a summer vacation. They made an extended trip to Paris and Monte Carlo before returning to Stockholm in late July.

  Once they were back home, Lindstrom paid a visit to Ingrid’s agent, Helmer Enwall, and told him that the UFA contract - committing Ingrid to two more films - had to be pushed onto the back burner or, if possible, canceled. Under no circumstances, he said, were contracts with Nazi Germany to be sought or exchanged. Lindstrom beseeched Helmer to find her jobs in England or America - anywhere, in fact, outside of central Europe, which was hurtling toward war.

  By then, Ingrid had already received offers from some of the biggest Hollywood studios – Paramount, 20th Century Fox, RKO, and others – but not for specific roles, or to work with certain directors. Instead, they were oppressive seven-year contracts that would have rendered her nearly powerless to choose her parts, films, and directors. Under this system, Ingrid said, actors were “shot off to Hollywood, where they might be stuffed into any old film or
any old part that the movie bosses thought fit for them. They might spend the entire seven years playing bit-parts as housemaids or butlers.” So she turned down all such offers.

  Meanwhile, Ingrid was preparing for motherhood. “Having a baby seemed to me the most natural thing about being married,” she said. “It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t have a child, or that it would interfere with my career.” (Later, when she arrived in America, she was surprised that people were shocked that she was a mother. “A child!” they said. “You’ve ruined your figure! You’ve ruined your image as a beautiful young movie star!”)

  On September 20, 1938, Friedel Pia Lindstrom was born. Her first name was a tribute to Ingrid’s mother, and Pia was a combination of the initials of Petter, Ingrid, and Aron. Ingrid and Lindstrom took their newborn baby to be baptized by Pastor Bergman at the Lutheran parish.

  The day after Pia was born, Ingrid went back at work on her most important project: getting to Hollywood. A London talent scout named Jenia Reissar, sent by the American producer David O. Selznick, visited Ingrid in the hospital. Selznick, who was about to make film history with his 1939 production, Gone with The Wind, had heard about Ingrid from another of his scouts, the New York-based Katharine (Kay) Brown, who, in turn, learned about Ingrid from a Swedish elevator operator in her office building. The young man told Brown’s assistant Elsa Neuberger that his parents had just seen Intermezzo and were wonderstruck by its young star.

  Brown watched the film and was deeply impressed by Ingrid’s performance, saying “I thought she was the beginning and end of all things wonderful.” So she set in motion a chain of events that led to Selznick deciding to make his own American version of Intermezzo – but only if he could get its young Swedish star as well.