by Grace Carter
Since Reissar was based in London, Selznick instructed her to go to Stockholm, acquire the rights to Intermezzo, and persuade both Ingrid and Gustaf Molander to sign contracts. When she arrived, Molander declined to direct; his English was not good, and he was quite content to raise his family in Sweden. Ingrid, who had made the appointment with Reissar several weeks beforehand, decided to keep it even after delivering Pia the day before. She was definitely interested, but with a new baby, said that she was not yet ready to commit.
A few days later, Ingrid invited Reissar to their apartment. Her interest deepened when Reissar told her that she would co-star with actor Leslie Howard, who would soon appear as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. But Lindstrom didn’t think they were offering enough money and Ingrid wasn’t ready to leave her baby so soon.
Reissar let her know that there was no pressure, but she could offer Ingrid a standard seven-year studio contract. After several more meetings - in which Lindstrom went over the contract with a fine-toothed comb and had several objections - Ingrid finally agreed to make Intermezzo, but only if she could wait before signing a long-term contract.
In mid-October, frustrated that Reissar had been unable to get Ingrid to commit to more than one movie, Selznick sent Kay Brown from New York to Stockholm with orders not to return without a contract signed by Ingrid Bergman. At that point, Selznick was considering hiring another actress to make the film - perhaps Loretta Young.
Brown was the perfect intermediary to woo Ingrid to the United States. After a decade of working in and around the film industry - she had made her reputation reading and acquiring literary properties to adapt to the screen - the Wellesley graduate knew the business inside and out. Brown’s taste was exceptional and her judgment unquestionable; she was the first to read Gone with the Wind, the novel by Margaret Mitchell, and had encouraged Selznick to secure the rights for an unprecedented $50,000. She had also encouraged Selznick to hire England’s popular director Alfred Hitchcock.
“We fly to Stockholm through the most horrible snowstorm,” Brown recalled later, “and, of course, those little planes weren’t pressurized in those days, and it was very very cold, and my ears won’t stand it. My face and neck swell up, and I’m sitting in my hotel room and I’m so sick I’m just ready to die. Then there’s a knock at my door and I go to open it and there are those two lovely people, Petter and Ingrid.”
Ingrid was wearing a dark beaver coat and hat and carrying a small bouquet of yellow and blue flowers - the colors of the Swedish flag. “Welcome to Sweden!” she said. The couple told Brown they could not stay for dinner because they had other plans. Later, when she got to know Brown better, Ingrid admitted that had been a lie; they were just a bundle of nerves and intimidated by the idea of spending time with a big-shot Hollywood talent scout.
The next day, Brown went to the Lindstrom home where they begin discussing the contract with Selznick’s lawyer and Ingrid’s agent Enwall. “Ingrid doesn’t say a word but sits in the chair and smiles and goes on knitting clothes for the new baby,” Brown recalled.
Lindstrom was vehemently against his wife signing a seven-year contract – and Ingrid did not like the idea of being tied down either – so they agreed on a one-picture deal with an option to do another picture if everything worked out. For Intermezzo, Selznick would pay Ingrid the astronomical sum of $2,500 per week ($42,000 in today’s dollars), double what he had paid Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind.
To encourage her to make more films with his studio, Selznick created some incentives in her contract: If she made two movies a year, he would bump up her pay to $2,812.50 per week, with a guarantee of sixteen working weeks, as well as annual increases; by year six, she’d be making $5,000 a week or $80,000 per year ($1 million today). As a “resident alien,” however, she had to pay a whopping 90 percent of her income in taxes. Despite earning astronomical wages - more than $750,000 between 1939 and 1946 – she only got to keep about $20,000 per year ($338,000 today).
Near the end of her visit, Brown became consumed with guilt that she was luring the young actress away from her family. “You can’t conceive that childlike air of innocence which surrounded her,” she recalled. So Brown decided to be honest with Ingrid, then still just twenty-three years old. “You know you’ve got a lovely home and a lovely baby,” she said. “You’re happy here. If I were you, I would think it over very carefully.”
Touched, Ingrid said, “Well, if there are people as nice as you in America and in Hollywood, then I’m sure I shall like it, so I shall go, and take the risk.” From that moment on, Brown became Ingrid’s great friend.
The plan was set: Ingrid and Brown would sail to New York in the spring of 1939, then take a train to Los Angeles, leaving Lindstrom and baby Pia behind for a few months while she made her first Hollywood film. “I always thought it a bit strange because Petter wanted me to go so much,” Ingrid said later. “He was very generous and insistent about the whole thing. If he had said, ‘I don’t want you to go,’ I certainly wouldn’t have gone because I could never make up my mind in those days without him. I just didn’t have an opinion.
“Or if he’d said, ‘Stay here. If war breaks out, you may be needed as a nurse or something,’ I would have stayed. Or if he’d said, ‘We’re married, we should stay together. You don’t really want to go to Hollywood, do you?’ I certainly wouldn’t have gone. But he said the opposite. He wanted me to go to Hollywood to film Intermezzo - yes, he’d manage with Pia, and his mother would look after her for the months I would be away.”
What Lindstrom could not have imagined is that his steadfast support of his wife’s career, which would keep them apart for long stretches at a time, would have the perverse effect of damaging an already delicate union of two very different people.
In the spring of 1939, Ingrid crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary. When the majestic ocean liner docked in New York on May 6, Ingrid’s new friend, Kay Brown, was there to greet the young star, who was beside herself with excitement about her first trip to America.
Brown helped Ingrid settle in at Manhattan’s Chatham Hotel and suggested that, before heading on to California, she spend a couple of weeks in New York brushing up on her English – “or rather brush up my American,” Ingrid recalled later. Because as soon as she arrived, she realized she had made a terrible mistake. “In Stockholm, I’d taken lessons from a language teacher from England,” she said. “Now I was a Swede with an English accent, and I almost died when I arrived in New York and didn’t understand one word the Americans were saying.”
So Ingrid resolved to go to the theater every night to get a crash course in American English. Her hotel suggested Tobacco Road and then Abraham Lincoln, but Ingrid did not understand a word of either play – the first saturated with a thick southern, hillbilly accent and the second an impenetrable mid-nineteenth century dialect. “At this rate,” she fretted, “I’m going to arrive in Hollywood speaking in sign language.”
In a panic, Ingrid rushed to tell Brown of her quandary. “She laughed her head off, but she did choose a few plays for me after that, and I began to understand the words,” Ingrid recalled, “but even Kay was quite worried about my accent and my general lack of English.” She could understand slow, simple sentences, but the rapid-fire dialogue in Broadway shows was impossible to follow. With only a month before the filming of Intermezzo, Brown and Selznick realized she would need more extensive lessons when she arrived in Hollywood.
During her time in New York, Ingrid enjoyed sampling American cuisine. Though she found a diet of steak and hamburgers monotonous, she loved American ice cream - particularly ice cream sundaes with hot fudge and whipped cream. At home, Lindstrom restricted her food portions, leaving her frequently hungry; but here, away from his watchful eye, she could eat as much as she liked. She also drank wine and an assortment of cocktails, sampling them from the menu in alphabetical order.
Even before Ingrid arrived in California, Selznick was worrying that she would be perceived as too fo
reign. So he sent Brown a memo suggesting she change her last name, considering and then rejecting Berjman, Berriman, and Lindstrom. Selznick was also concerned about “the possibility of resentment against us as a company for importing another foreigner” after the controversy that followed his casting of the British actress Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with The Wind.
Finally, it was time for Ingrid and Brown to make the week-long train trip across America to California. When they arrived at the Pasadena station, Ingrid was disappointed that Selznick was not on the platform to greet her. “In my foolishness, I thought he would be waiting there to meet me with open arms,” she recalled. “I mean, I’ve come all the way from Sweden and now this long journey across America, and no Mr. Selznick, only some publicity man who puts us in a limousine, and we’re driven out to Hollywood to the Selznick home.”
The plan was for Ingrid to stay at Irene and David Selznick’s mansion for a day or two. It was an unusually hospitable gesture for the studio chief to extend to a young actress still largely unknown in the United States. When they arrived, Ingrid and Brown walked across the lawn to where Irene Selznick was sitting, listening to a horse race on the radio.
“How do you do?” Ingrid said in her best English. “Ssssshh,” Irene said, trying to listen to the race. Ingrid sat down grumpily and thought, “I’ve come halfway round the world to listen to a horse race and get shushed when I open my mouth.”
When the race was over, Irene turned around and said, “How do you do?” and “Would you like something to eat?”
Irene explained that her husband was in nearby Culver City working on Gone with the Wind and showed Ingrid to her guest room. It was the most lavish residence Ingrid had ever seen. The seven-bedroom, nine-bath home featured a pool, film screening room, library, walk-in bar, billiards room, and a separate three-room guest suite where Ingrid would be staying.
As Ingrid was carrying her single suitcase up the stairs, Irene said, “Are your trunks coming later?” Ingrid, who always carried a dictionary, quickly looked up this strange word and figured it had nothing to do with elephants or trees. “I have no trunks. This is my luggage,” she said.
“But you’re coming to stay for three months?” Irene said. “Do you think you have enough clothes with you?”
“But what do I need clothes for?” Ingrid replied, explaining that she would have costumes to wear during the six days of shooting each week and, for Sunday, she had a bathing suit and a pair of slacks.
“Well, I’m giving a party for you tomorrow night where I’m going to introduce you to all our friends in Hollywood,” Irene said. “Do you have an evening dress?”
“Oh, yes. In my last picture I wore a very nice evening dress and after the film I bought it from the film company secondhand. I have it in my suitcase.”
“Good, and you have your makeup box?”
“Makeup box? What is that?” She checked her dictionary again and could not find the term but finally figured it out. “I don’t have a makeup box because I do not use makeup.”
“You mean you have nothing on your face?” Irene said, shocked. “Oh, Welcome to Hollywood.”
That evening, Irene took Ingrid out to the Beachcomber restaurant in Los Angeles to meet the actresses Miriam Hopkins and Grace Moore and silent-film star Richard Barthelmess. Ingrid was amazed to meet these American celebrities and to be drinking liquor from pineapples and coconuts. She had a hard time keeping up with the conversation but used her acting skills to communicate her thoughts, and even managed - after a particularly strong daiquiri - to make a joke about her height, which charmed them instantly. “I realized that they were all very short,” she recalled. “I also realized that this was going to be a shock to everybody - that I was so tall.”
After dinner, the group went back to Hopkins’s house to screen a movie with some other guests in her private projection room. At about one o’clock in the morning, Ingrid felt a hand on her shoulder and heard a male servant’s voice saying: “Mr. Selznick has arrived and he’s in the kitchen eating, and he’d like to see you.” As she entered the kitchen, Ingrid was surprised to find the Hollywood mogul eating, but leaning so far onto the table that it looked like he was practically lying on it as he shoveled leftovers of cold lamb into his mouth.
Selznick glanced up at Ingrid and, dispensing with the pleasantries, snarled, “God! Take your shoes off.”
Already feeling self-conscious about her height, she said, “It won’t help. I’m wearing very flat-heeled shoes.”
“He made a sort of groan,” Ingrid recalled, “and I thought, Here we go again. I’m going to be some sort of freak.”
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Ingrid said.
Suddenly remembering his manners, Selznick said, “Of course not. How was your trip?”
Then Selznick returned to form, letting loose with a diatribe about everything that was wrong with Ingrid, starting with her name.
“Of course you realize your name’s impossible,” he said. “We can’t pronounce it. You’d be called Ein-grid, and Bergman is impossible, too. Far too German. There’s obviously trouble with Germany coming up, and we don’t want anybody to think we’ve hired a German actress.” He then suggested she modify Lindstrom to “Lindy,” like the nickname of Charles Lindberg.
“I don’t want anybody else’s nickname,” she shot back. “In fact, I don’t want to change my name at all. My name is Ingrid Bergman. That’s the name I was born with, and that’s what I’m going to be called in America, and people will just have to learn how to pronounce it. If I change it and they don’t like me in America, how foolish I shall look going home to Sweden with a new name.”
Selznick went back to his plate of lamb and changed the subject back to her appearance. “Now what about makeup because your eyebrows are too thick, and your teeth are no good, and there are lots of other things . . . I’ll take you to the makeup department in the morning and we’ll see what they can do . . .”
Ingrid glowered at him. “I think you’ve made a big mistake, Mr. Selznick,” she replied. “You shouldn’t have bought the pig in the sack. I thought you saw me in the movie Intermezzo and liked me and sent Kay Brown across to Sweden to get me. Now you’ve seen me, you want to change everything. So I’d rather not do the movie. We’ll say no more about it. No trouble of any kind. We’ll just forget it. I’ll take the next train and go back home.”
Selznick persuaded Ingrid to stay at least long enough to finish the conversation, which turned to publicity. She said she didn’t want to be sold like Hollywood had marketed so many other actresses from Europe – raising expectations so high that they could not possibly meet them. And then they disappear, never to be heard from again. “Why don’t we just make a movie?” Ingrid said. “Let the movie come out, and then if people decide they like me, you can do the publicity and I’ll give interviews. But let me try and creep into the affection of the American public, not crash in like a brass band.”
By now, Selznick had stopped eating. He was not used to being talked to that way. Six feet tall, with dark glossy hair, he stared at Ingrid through thick glasses with his bright blue eyes. She knew some of his back story: Selznick worked his way up through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, and Paramount before forming his own independent film company, Selznick International, in 1936. He was an infamous micromanager who rewrote scripts, lectured directors, nagged actors, and drove everyone he worked with insane.
At thirty-seven, he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. At the moment, he was producing not only Gone with The Wind – which remains the highest-grossing movie of all time, adjusted for inflation – but also Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film, Rebecca, which would likewise become a huge hit. Selznick was a firm believer in the old Hollywood tradition of not “discovering” stars as much as “making” them by manipulating their names, physical appearance, and media image.
Now here was a tall, young, unknown Swedish actress telling him that he was all wrong – and refusi
ng to play his game. For a long while, they just sat there, staring at each other. Then inspiration struck.
“I’ve got an idea that’s so simple and yet no one in Hollywood has ever tried it before,” Selznick said. “Nothing about you is going to be touched. Nothing altered. You remain yourself. You are going to be the first ‘natural’ actress. Tomorrow morning I’m taking you to the makeup department myself, and we’re going to work this all out.”
The next day, Ingrid sat in a chair as the makeup artist evaluated her, muttering lots of “ums” and “ahs” about eyebrows that needed plucking, wrinkles that cried out for smoothing, and teeth that should get caps. Meanwhile, the publicity men were observing her and dreaming up new promotional gimmicks.
When he came upon this scene, Selznick went ballistic. “Understand this, you are not going to take one eyebrow or one hair away,” he thundered. “You are not going to do anything. If you alter anything at all, I’ll kill you . . . Her name’s going to be her real name because no one in Hollywood’s history has ever used their real name before. And above all, there are going to be no interviews . . . no interviews. And no pictures! She’s under wraps. You understand?”
Selznick instructed his makeup artists to use only enough makeup to prevent Ingrid’s face from flushing under the glare of the hot lights on the movie set. He would promote her as the Swedish “girl next door,” whose hair was not only its natural color but so soft that it actually blew in the breeze. In the all-too-artificial world of Hollywood, this was a highly unusual strategy, and Selznick planned to make the most of it.
His brainstorm was fortunate because Ingrid was serious when she told him she would be just as happy returning to Sweden. While she was excited to be in Hollywood where money and fame seemed limitless, she wasn’t going to change her appearance or her lifestyle to appease anyone, no matter how powerful. Beauty, she knew, was fleeting. And becoming too glamorous might limit how audiences and the industry perceived her, costing her challenging roles and good scripts that could stretch her talents. She knew she was a good actress but wanted to be better and fully intended to have a long, diverse, and fruitful career.