Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  As he planned to move to Rochester, Lindstrom decided that Pia, who would turn three that year, would be better off with him since Ingrid would not be able to give the toddler much attention. Selznick had arranged for his rising star to appear in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie at his new Selznick Summer Theater season, opening in Santa Barbara in July 1941, and then go on tour to San Francisco and New Jersey. Ingrid would visit them in Rochester but continue to live in California, concentrating on her career, which seemed to be taking off.

  Leaving Pia with her father was the right thing to do, Ingrid knew, but she still had desperate pangs of guilt when she came home to Rochester. As she wrote to her friend Ruth Roberts: “Oh dear! I got qualms!” But then it was on with the show - and her career.

  Anna Christie, directed by John Houseman, is set in the 1920s and centers on O’Neill’s famous title character, a prostitute who falls in love and tries to turn her life around. Though Ingrid was tall and fair-haired like Anna, she faced the same resistance that arose when she pleaded to play the barmaid Ivy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Everyone said she looked too innocent to pull it off. Still, she managed to persuade Houseman that her Anna would be just as compelling as Ivy.

  It was a star-studded opening night, chronicled breathlessly by the local Santa Barbara News: “Pretty blond Lana Turner was there on the arm of singer Tony Martin. Sophisticated George Raft came alone. Samuel Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer led a parade of producers; Alfred Hitchcock and Rouben Mamoulian, famous directors were there. So was Robert Benchley with his famous smile, tall brunette Kay Francis, charming Olivia De Havilland, handsome Alan Marshal, sparkling Geraldine Fitzgerald and Richard Barthelmess.”

  The crowds were so large, the theater had to stuff the orchestra pit and every corner of the theater with chairs – and still had to turn people away every night. For many, it was Ingrid they wanted to see. “The autograph hunters not only stormed every window and door, they even tried the roof,” she wrote to Selznick executive Jock Whitney. “I felt like a real star!”

  But during the first minutes of opening night, Ingrid had trouble convincing the audience that she was the disreputable Anna. “Before I make my first entrance as Anna Christie, the audience has heard the father explain what a lovely daughter he has, and this wonderful daughter is now coming to see him,” he recalled, “and then the audience sees what’s coming in - the obvious whore. So I come in and call out to the barman, ‘Gimme a whiskey and make it a double!’”

  At that, the audience, heavily stocked with Ingrid’s friends and colleagues, burst into laughter. Could that really be their wholesome Ingrid? “They expected, I suppose, for me to say, ‘Give me a glass of milk,’” Ingrid said later, able to enjoy a laugh at her own expense. “Oh, well, we got over that.”

  As different as she may have been from her character, while on stage, Ingrid focused on her similarities with Anna. Both women were trying to live up to expectations imposed on them by others. Neither remembered her mother. At the end of the play, Ingrid brought an unexpected hopefulness to the character’s final lines, signifying Anna’s redemption. “Cut out the gloom,” Anna says, as she pours them all a beer. “We’re all fixed now, ain’t we, me and you? Come on!” she exhorts them, “Here’s to the sea, no matter what! Be a game sport and drink to that!” Reviewers remarked about the new life she breathed into O’Neill’s play, cementing her reputation as an accomplished stage actress.

  While she was performing Anna Christie in San Francisco, Eugene O’Neill’s wife, Carlotta, invited Ingrid to join them for Sunday dinner at their house in nearby Danville. She eagerly accepted, and when she arrived, the famous author asked if she would consider touring with a larger repertory company that was performing a variety of O’Neill’s plays. Ingrid, though deeply flattered, had to decline; the job required a four-year commitment, and she was only two years into a seven-year contract with Selznick.

  As Ingrid toured with Anna Christie, critics raved about the new star. “Miss Bergman is every reporter’s dream of the most wonderful girl in the world,” wrote New York’s PM newspaper in August 1941, “a female who uses no makeup and still looks beautiful; who retains a capacity to blush; who hasn’t even a personal press agent; who stands in line at the box office when she wants to go to a movie, who, in short, behaves like a human being. And when in addition to her other virtues the lady has talent, they’ve really got something.”

  At the completion of the tour, Ingrid was twenty-six. She had completed three films and two plays in the United States over the past two years but was hungry for more. In the fall of 1941, she traveled to Rochester to await word from Selznick about her next picture, hoping and expecting that it would come soon. In the meantime, she tried to stay occupied doing housework and caring for Pia, but with Mabel on hand, there was little to do. So she spent her time reading biographies of the legendary actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse and wishing she was working. Ingrid had no friends in Rochester, and their only visitors were Lindstrom’s colleagues whose tedious medical discussions bored her.

  In a letter to Roberts, she reflected on how little she had seen her husband since they were married. “In all our married life through 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941 we have been together only for about twelve months,” she said, “and now perhaps with me having to run backwards and forwards to Hollywood it will be the same thing all over again.”

  Though she enjoyed spending time with her daughter, motherhood was still foreign to her, and she had few role models to emulate; she had no memories of her own mother, and Greta Danielsson, her father’s young girlfriend, had been more like a sister. After her father’s death, she had lived with Aunt Ellen only a few months before Ellen died and had received little parenting from Uncle Otto and Aunt Hulda. Kay Brown may have been more of a mother to her than anyone, but she was also a colleague whose primary obligation was to her boss, Selznick. Just as she did when playing a character, Ingrid relied on her intuition to figure out how to act and what to do.

  Through it all, she was worried about her appetite. At any moment she might be called to test as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Since arriving in Rochester, she had been “eating like a fool,” as she put it, and was now nearly as heavy as she was when she left Hollywood in the spring. She had planned to go on a diet, but when she got home, there were apples, knäckbröd, and goat cheese to tempt her. “I do think I am insane,” she wrote to Ruth. “I can go on and on as if I have a barrel to fill.”

  During the more than eight months that Ingrid remained in Rochester, she also had to deal with the invasion of privacy that came with being a film star. People gathered outside her house, asking for autographs or looking for advice on how to make it in Hollywood. When Ingrid switched to an unlisted number and could no longer be reached by phone, fans boldly knocked on the front door. Finally, Lindstrom had to ask the police to patrol the street in front of the house; Ingrid’s home had become a virtual prison.

  To break the monotony, she visited Kay in Manhattan, where she browsed museums and attended the theater. She also sought and landed short acting jobs, like the radio play A Man’s Castle with Spencer Tracy, recorded in New York.

  Despite those diversions, she still longed for Hollywood and felt trapped when she returned home. “I have plenty to do as usual, and having a home, husband and child ought to be enough for any woman’s life,” she wrote in her journal. “I mean, that’s what we are meant for, isn’t it? But still I think every day is a lost day. As if only half of me is alive. The other half is pressed down in a bag and suffocated. What shall I do? If only I saw some light in the offing.”

  But there was no light – only bad news in the form of a telegram from Selznick saying that Paramount had decided to cast a relatively unknown actress named Vera Zorina as Maria in For Whom the Bells Toll. Though Hemingway wanted Ingrid, he had already used up his influence in demanding that his friend Gary Cooper play the part of Robert Jordan, the idealistic American college professor who falls in
love with Maria.

  Because it took many deals for Paramount to get Cooper from MGM, the studio saw no point in continuing its spending spree by borrowing Ingrid from Selznick at a cost of $150,000 when it already had Zorina under contract. A beautiful Norwegian actress and ballerina, Zorina had appeared in several films and stage musicals and was eager for the job. Director Sam Wood preferred Ingrid but understood Paramount’s reasons and thought it might be for the best since Ingrid was so tall. Yes, Zorina was not a household name, but neither was Vivien Leigh when Selznick cast her as Scarlett O’Hara.

  Ingrid was devastated. “I am grateful to know exactly how the situation is,” she wrote to Selznick. “I’m sorry I lost it, not only because it would have been an interesting part, but because to win it would have been a feather in our hat, and I know you wanted that.”

  Ingrid was clearly depressed. Stuck in upstate New York in the dead of winter, she wrote to Ruth in February 1942, “I am so fed up with Rochester and Main Street I am ready to cry. I have moments when I am all right and love a small town and married life. But for four days I have been sitting in a corner without talking much to Pia or Petter. He is home so little he does not notice my moods as much as the rest of the crew. I haven’t been to the park with Pia, and Mabel is pretty mad she has to go twice a day. Petter is mad I don’t exercise half an hour every day and get slim. I don’t care about anything . . .”

  Selznick, she felt, was partly to blame for her situation; what had been a wonderfully close relationship was now badly fraying. “I’m down now, deep down,” she wrote to him. “Month after month I have been told by you, by Dan or by Kay, that you at last were going to start a production again. I cannot stand being idle. In these days more than ever, I feel one has to work. One must accomplish something. I feel very sad.”

  It was a stunning turnabout for Ingrid. In August 1941, when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was released, she was feeling on top of the world and much sought after. By the spring of 1942, she was angry and depressed, feeling forgotten and abandoned by Hollywood and believing her career was over.

  Lindstrom, tired of Ingrid’s moping, began searching for an American agent for her. He had been fulfilling some of those functions himself but realized she needed a professional. After careful consideration, he contacted the Feldman-Blum Agency in Hollywood, and after meeting with its charming and persuasive co-founder, Charles K. Feldman, insisted that Ingrid sign with him.

  This created problems for Selznick, who did not understand the need for Feldman - or Lindstrom, for that matter; the studio chief wanted to be the one in charge of Ingrid’s career. Lindstrom, meanwhile, considered that his job; he wanted to manage every aspect of her life - not only the contracts she signed but the clothing she would wear and how she would behave.

  Selznick and Lindstrom were constantly at loggerheads: When Petter arranged for Ingrid to do a radio play in New York that April and refused to split the proceeds with Selznick, the producer denied her permission as allowed by her contract. When Lindstrom wrote to Daniel O’Shea, Selznick’s second-in-command, informing him that he and Ingrid would be the ones to decide whether or not Ingrid would do a stage production, Selznick was not pleased. He was aware, however, that as Ingrid’s husband, Lindstrom was entitled to a certain amount of deference, if only to keep his star happy.

  Finally, in late April, Selznick notified Ingrid that he had, at long last, scheduled another project for her. She was so excited that she actually got sick – getting body chills and a bad headache. She tried to celebrate by getting drunk at dinner but could not. “I tried to cry. I tried to laugh, but I could do nothing,” she wrote to Ruth. “But now it is morning and I am calmed down. The picture is called Casablanca, and I really don’t know what it’s all about . . .”

  In fact, no one seemed to know much about the film. Selznick could only tell Ingrid what he knew: It was set in present-day Morocco and was being produced by Hal Wallis for Warner Brothers, which had contracted to pay Selznick $125,000 to borrow Ingrid, of which $35,000 would go to her.

  And so, on May 2, Ingrid left her husband and Pia in Rochester and headed back to Hollywood. She had no way of knowing, of course, that after a long hiatus that had made her feel like she was all washed up, she was about to make the iconic film for which she would forever be remembered.

  The original play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, had been written by the American playwright Murray Burnett with his partner and then-wife, Joan Alison. Together, they had visited a nightclub in France that reminded him of the Broadway musical Everybody’s Welcome, featuring the Herman Hupfeld song “As Time Goes By.” Everybody Comes to Rick’s never made it to the stage, but Wallis liked it enough to pay $20,000 for the rights - at the time, the most ever paid for an unproduced play.

  Wallis then brought the material to the screenwriting twins Julius and Philip Epstein – who got help from the playwright and screenwriter Howard Koch – and they renamed it Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart would co-star, and the Hungarian director Michael Curtiz was slated to direct. In April, a third draft had been written, but Curtiz was busy working on another project and could not begin until the following month. When Ingrid arrived in early May, she was given a fourth draft of the script that was bewildering at best.

  Casablanca started off disastrously. Wallis argued with the Epstein brothers about the script, and Curtiz had daily fights with Wallis over the direction of the film. Each day, the actors were handed out new scenes to learn. Because nobody knew where the story was going or how it was going to end, the actors struggled with their characterizations.

  The Epsteins and Koch were still at it on May 25 when production began. The now-famous story centers on Rick Blaine (Bogart), an American expatriate who owns a nightclub in Casablanca, and his former lover, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid), who, with her husband, the freedom fighter Victor Lazlow (Paul Henreid), come to his establishment in search of exit visas to escape the Nazis. The plot is full of intrigue, with a cast of suspicious characters whose loyalties are constantly shifting.

  The chaos on set was extreme as the actors bumbled through their scenes. “Well, who are we?” they demanded of Curtiz. “What are we doing here?”

  “We’re not quite sure,” Curtiz would say, “but let’s get through this scene today, and we’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  “It was ridiculous,” Ingrid recalled. “Just awful. Michael Curtiz didn’t know what he was doing because he didn’t know the story either. Humphrey Bogart was mad because he didn’t know what was going on, so he retired to his trailer.”

  Ingrid kept asking, “Who am I supposed to be in love with, Paul Henreid or Humphrey Bogart?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Curtiz would say, “just play it, well . . . in-between.”

  Astonishingly, Ingrid hardly got to know Bogart at all during the filming – even though their characters had supposedly had a torrid affair in Paris previously. “Oh, I’d kissed him,” Ingrid said of Bogart, “but I didn’t know him.” Bogart was polite to her, she said, “but I always felt there was a distance; he was behind a wall. I was intimidated by him.”

  To add to the confusion, the producers couldn’t figure out how to end the film. “They were going to shoot two endings because they couldn’t work out whether I should fly off by airplane with my husband or stay with Humphrey Bogart,” Ingrid said. “So the first ending we shot was that I say goodbye to Humphrey Bogart and fly off with Paul Henreid.” In that scene, Bogart delivers his classic speech: “Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor . . . If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

  Having Bogey put Ingrid on the plane was so heart-wrenching that they never did shoot the alternate ending. Bogart’s famous last line, spoken in the final scene to Claude Rains as police captain Louis Renault, wasn’t added until filming wrapped several weeks later. That, of course, ended up being one of the most-quoted lines in the film: “
Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  As it happened, Ingrid’s performance was made better by her uncertainty about how the movie would end. In his 1996 review of the film, critic Roger Ebert wrote: “In her close-ups during this [final] scene, Bergman’s face reflects confusing emotions . . . since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane . . . this had the subtle effect of making all her scenes more emotionally convincing; she would not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.”

  The movie opened on November 8, 1942, by coincidence the same day British and American forces landed in Casablanca. Not only were all the theaters sold out, so were the showings for the rest of the year. By February, Casablanca was showing on 200 screens across the United States. President Franklin Roosevelt, who in January had traveled to North Africa for a conference, was such a fan that he handed out prints of the movie poster as party favors to guests at the White House.

  In the spring of 1943, Casablanca received eight Oscar nominations and won three: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. By 1977, Casablanca had become the most frequently broadcast film on American television. On the film’s 50th anniversary in 1992, Bob Strauss of the Los Angeles Times praised “the enduring craftsmanship of its resonantly-hokey dialogue” and celebrated the film for achieving a “near-perfect entertainment balance” of comedy, romance, and suspense.

  Looking back in her later years, Ingrid said, “I feel about Casablanca that it has a life of its own. There is something mystical about it. It seems to have filled a need, a need that was there before the film, a need that the film filled.”