Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  It’s not hard to imagine that Ingrid’s crushes on her leading men gave her some measure of escape from her awful marriage. When she would come home from work to tell stories about her day, Lindstrom would say, “Don’t wrinkle your forehead” and “Sit up straight.” He barely heard a word she said. “Petter did me a lot of good by nagging me,” she admitted later, “but in those days it irritated me beyond measure.” At one point, she remarked sardonically, “You’ll be right by my bedside when I die, telling me not to wrinkle my forehead.”

  Lindstrom also would not relent on his policing of her diet and could not understand why she wasn’t losing weight. What he didn’t know was after eating salads and other sensible food at dinner, she would sneak upstairs to their bedroom to gobble up cookies she had hidden there. In the middle of the night, she would raid the refrigerator. One day, Lindstrom forced his wife to get on a scale in front of him; sure enough, she had gained weight. “I was so humiliated,” she recalled.

  From the outside, Ingrid seemed to have it all – Hollywood stardom, a beautiful home, a husband and daughter, a dog, a little car. But that façade hid the truth that she was always looking for a way to escape her bondage – a visit to New York, a savings bond tour, any excuse to get away. Once, just before coming home, she wrote to her friend Roberts, “Goodbye Freedom.”

  In the fall of 1944, Ingrid escaped on another USO tour with Steele through several states and Canada, then made a trip to Minnesota to visit the Swedish families she had met while filming the documentary about immigrants. She returned to California in time to celebrate Christmas, spending her time shopping for Pia and decorating their new house.

  The couple’s high expenses were paid for entirely by Ingrid’s salary: the house, wages for Mabel, a new nanny for Pia, and a part-time secretary. But Lindstrom controlled the money and kept a tight rein on her spending. Once, when Ingrid was preparing to attend a function with Steele, she said, “I don’t have anything to wear.” When Steele asked why, she said, “I can’t afford new clothes.”

  Steele was stunned. Knowing that she was making enormous amounts of money, he suggested they go out shopping. Ingrid was shocked by the idea; it had never occurred to her that she could just go out and buy clothes that she didn’t really need. But Steele insisted and off they went to Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue. That night, she screwed up her courage to call her husband and ask him to send money to pay for the new wardrobe she had just purchased. True to form, he wasn’t happy about it, but he did pay up. It was a small victory for Ingrid’s independence and a foreshadowing of more to come.

  The tension between Ingrid and Lindstrom accumulated, drip by drip, until they reached a breaking point one day when Ingrid scheduled a photo shoot in their home. “[Petter] had asked that I never mention him in an interview, never have an interview at home, never have any photographs taken of our home, and never let anyone photograph Pia.” Usually, Ingrid agreed, but this time it seemed so much easier to do the shoot at home rather than at a studio or hotel. It was only a head shot, after all, that would not even show the house at all.

  But when the photo was published, Lindstrom recognized the chair she was sitting in and exploded with anger. “All right, I made a mistake again,” Ingrid said. “But everybody makes mistakes. You make mistakes, I make mistakes.”

  “I . . . I make mistakes?” Lindstrom said incredulously.

  “Well, yes, don’t you make mistakes?”

  “No,” he replied. “Why should I? I think carefully before I do something. I weigh it. I ponder over it, and then I decide.”

  Ingrid couldn’t believe what Lindstrom was saying. “Here is going to be a divorce,” she thought. “I cannot live with a person who believes that he doesn’t make mistakes.” (Lindstrom later denied he ever made that statement.)

  “I’ll pull myself together and move out for some peace, go where I won’t be frightened,” she thought. “It was crazy to be married to the only person I was afraid of. I was never afraid of the people I worked with; there wasn’t a producer, director, or a leading man or anybody that I was afraid of. I had a good time; I could kid them, and they would laugh back. But then I would face going home to Petter.”

  By the end of 1944, Ingrid confronted Lindstrom – that is, her almost apologetic version of a confrontation: “I asked if Petter would mind if we had a divorce.”

  Lindstrom was stunned. “Why should we get a divorce?” he said. “We haven’t had a fight, we’ve never had a quarrel.”

  “No, we haven’t because it’s no use my starting a fight or a quarrel with you,” she said. “That would be absolutely useless because there isn’t any such thing as my ever having a discussion with you. You’re never going to see my side. So I won’t argue with you. I’ll go away.”

  After their conversation, however, Ingrid didn’t go away. “I thought it was ridiculous to pack up and start a big fight about our child and sit alone in one house while he sat alone in another.”

  So she stayed with Lindstrom, setting the stage for bigger dramas to come. As she said later, “I think I was just waiting for someone to come along and help me out of that marriage because I didn’t have the strength to go.”

  As her marriage deteriorated, Ingrid sought refuge in work. Fortunately, director Leo McCarey wanted to cast her in a promising film called The Bells of St. Mary’s, his sequel to Going My Way, the highest-grossing release of 1944. Like the original, The Bells of St. Mary’s would feature Bing Crosby, the biggest box-office attraction of the day and winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the unconventional Father O’Malley.

  In Going My Way, Crosby was cast opposite Barry Fitzgerald as the old-fashioned Father Fitzgibbon – but now McCarey wanted to team Crosby up with a sweet nun, Sister Mary Benedict. The character was based on a real nun McCarey had met, a spunky woman who adored children and enjoyed boxing and tennis. McCarey never forgot the sight of this nun in her long skirts and habit running around the tennis court, bashing the ball.

  To get Ingrid on board, McCarey – a man with “all the charm and blarney of an Irish ancestry,” as Ingrid described him – took out newspaper ads that read, “Wait till Ingrid Bergman hears the idea Leo McCarey has for her!”

  But first McCarey had to convince David Selznick to agree to loan Ingrid to the producer, RKO Pictures. “Absolutely not,” Selznick said, convinced that the sequel would compare poorly to the original as often happens in Hollywood. Depressed, McCarey appeared on Ingrid’s front doorstep with his script under his arm. He sat down in her living room and outlined the story. When she said she loved it, his mood brightened considerably.

  Ingrid then went to Selznick who told her the film would not be worthy of her talents. “What are you going to do while Bing Crosby is singing?” he demanded.

  “I’m going to look at him,” she said. “That’s all. I don’t have to do anything but look at him . . . I shall register radiance, adoration, perhaps perplexity.”

  But Selznick would not budge and Ingrid sank into despair. Thinking he’d won the argument, Selznick tried to shift the blame to McCarey. “If you’re so keen,” he said, “I’ll talk to McCarey about terms.” His strategy was to ask so much for Ingrid’s services that McCarey and RKO couldn’t possibly afford her. He started off the negotiations by doubling her normal rental fee.

  “Okay, yes,” said McCarey quietly.

  Shocked, Selznick ratcheted up his demands – free studio space from RKO for a year and the rights to several films. Each time, McCarey said yes.

  Finally, Selznick said, “Do you really want to pay out all this to buy Ingrid Bergman?”

  “I’m so happy that Ingrid is for sale,” said McCarey. In the end, Selznick agreed to loan Ingrid out to RKO Pictures for the tidy sum of $175,000.

  It would prove to be a wise move for all concerned. To research her character, Ingrid visited McCarey’s aunt, a nun at a Los Angeles convent. Ingrid sought to make Sister Mary Benedict a woman who approach
ed her vocation with devotion, a sense of purpose, a strong work ethic, and a gentle sense of humor. “I loved doing my first comedy scenes,” Ingrid said later, “because no one knew I could play comedy before this.”

  In early 1945, Ingrid attended a series of meetings with McCarey and Crosby, who usually sat there silently, thoughtfully sucking on his pipe. Wardrobe and makeup for her character were appropriately simple - the traditional black nuns’ garb and a little powder and lip color. (“The only really good thing I found about being a nun was that all I showed was my face,” Ingrid recalled. “. . . I could eat ice cream forever. No one worried about my weight.”)

  During the filming, Ingrid got to know Crosby about as well as she did Humphrey Bogart – which is to say, hardly at all. “He was very polite and nice and couldn’t have been more pleasant,” she recalled. But Crosby was always surrounded by a small group of men who seemed to be trying to protect him from everyone else. When Ingrid asked who they were, she was told they were his “gagmen” or joke writers. In the end, though, a distant, reserved relationship between the nun and the priest actually served the story well.

  About halfway through the filming, in March 1945, the Academy Awards were held at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The year before, Ingrid had received her first nomination, for Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but lost. Now she was nominated for her role as Paula in Gaslight. Before the best actress award was announced, her colleagues were having a big night: Bing Crosby and Leo McCarey won Oscars for best actor and best director, respectively, for Going My Way, which took home a total of seven statuettes that night.

  Ironically, Jennifer Jones, who beat Ingrid the previous year with her performance in The Song of Bernadette, was the one announcing the winner for Best Actress. And the winner was . . . Ingrid Bergman! “Your artistry has won our vote, and your graciousness has won our hearts,” Jones said before presenting her with the Oscar.

  It was Ingrid’s first Academy Award, a sign that she had truly made it. Wearing the same dress she wore to the ceremony the previous year, Ingrid said, “I am deeply grateful. In fact, I’m particularly glad to get it this time because tomorrow I go to work in a picture with Mr. Crosby and Mr. McCarey, and I’m afraid that if I went on the set without an award, neither of them would speak to me!”

  Back on the set, McCarey worked hard to keep The Bells of St. Mary’s from becoming overly sentimental or cliché; Ingrid’s Sister Mary was practical, devoted, and determined - making her performance memorable but not a caricature of religiosity. Ingrid added her own touches to the script, including a boxing lesson with a timid student, and a scene in which she sings a Swedish love song for the sisters.

  On the last day of filming, as cast and crew were shooting the final scene of the movie, Ingrid revealed a part of herself that only those closest to her knew about. In the scene, her character is unhappy because she is being sent away to a health resort, and she thinks it is because she is not good at her job working with children. Everybody else knows it’s really because she has tuberculosis. Finally, Crosby’s character, Father O’Malley, tells her the truth. Surprisingly, Ingrid lights up with joy. For Sister Mary, tuberculosis is nothing compared with thinking that she can’t look after the children.

  “Thank you, Father, thank you with all my heart,” she said as the cameras rolled. After a few more lines, McCarey shouted, “Fine. That’s it. That’s great. Wrap it up.” Then Ingrid stopped him to ask if she could do the scene once more: “I think I could do it just a little better.”

  Knowing the scene was as good as it could ever get, McCarey wanted to let everyone go home. But he also wanted to please Ingrid. “Okay, okay . . . if you want to,” he said. “All right, fellas. One more take, here we go . . .”

  As the cameras rolled, Ingrid said, “Thank you, Father, oh, thank you with all my heart.” Then she threw her arms around Crosby and kissed him right on the mouth. Crosby nearly fell down with shock. “Cut! Stop the cameras!” McCarey yelled.

  A priest serving as a consultant on the film came running over, highly agitated. “Now this is going too far!” he thundered. “Miss Bergman, we simply can’t allow that. A Catholic nun kissing a Catholic father . . . you can’t have such a thing in a movie . . .”

  As Ingrid laughed hard, people began to catch on – and finally, even the priest realized it was all a big joke. The moment was vintage Ingrid: saintly on the outside but mischievous inside.

  When The Bells of St. Mary’s was released in December 1945, critics and audiences alike lauded Ingrid’s performance. She made such a believable nun, in fact, that both Catholics and non-Catholics began to confuse her saintly onscreen persona with her personal life. Her portrayal was so impressive that she was nominated for an Academy Award for the third year in a row.

  The real Ingrid Bergman, of course, was no nun, much less a saint. She would later admit that while one side of her was, indeed, shy and obedient, the other was rebellious and untamed. It was the untamed Ingrid who arrived in Paris that summer, just as the war in Europe was coming to a close and she was approaching her thirtieth birthday.

  With Selznick’s permission, Ingrid had gone on tour with the USO and was staying at the Paris Ritz. She was awaiting transport to Germany where she would be entertaining the troops alongside comedian Jack Benny, pop singer Martha Tilton, and musician Larry Adler. “Paris was wonderful,” Ingrid recalled later. “In spite of all its shortages and black markets, it had such a spirit. I hadn’t been in Europe for eight whole years. It was like starting to live all over again.”

  Ingrid thought they were the first brave entertainers to arrive as the fighting subsided; then she ran into Marlene Dietrich, who was already on her way out. “Ah, now you’re coming, when the war’s over,” she said ruefully. The German-born film star, now a U.S. citizen, had been entertaining American and Allied troops while the war was still raging. She told Ingrid she had to wash her hair in gasoline in a helmet because there was no water.

  By comparison, Ingrid’s trip was a luxury vacation. On the day she arrived, she crossed the foyer of the opulent Ritz – the unofficial headquarters for the American press corps and entertainers – unaware that she was being admired by two men: the celebrated Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa, thirty-one, and his friend Irwin Shaw, thirty-two, a screenwriter who had enlisted in the Army and would go on to become a well-known novelist and author of Rich Man, Poor Man.

  That afternoon, she found a note that had been slipped under the door of her room:

  Subject: Dinner. 6.28.45. Paris. France.

  To: Miss Ingrid Bergman.

  Part 1. This is a community effort. The community consists of Bob Capa and Irwin Shaw.

  2. We were planning on sending you flowers with this note inviting you to dinner this evening - but after consultation, we discovered it was possible to pay for the flowers or the dinner, or the dinner or the flowers, not both. We took a vote and dinner won by a close margin.

  3. It was suggested that if you did not care for dinner, flowers might be sent. No decision has been reached on this so far.

  4. Besides flowers we have lots of doubtful qualities.

  5. If we write much more we will have no conversation left as our supply of charm is limited.

  6. We will call you at 6.15.

  7. We do not sleep. Signed: Worried.

  “I found it very funny,” Ingrid said later. “I’d never heard of Irwin Shaw or Bob Capa, but when they rang, I went down and met them in the bar . . . And I got on so well with both of them.”

  The three of them went out to eat at a little restaurant. Ingrid met their friends, and the group laughed and danced for hours. “It was a great evening,” she said. “From that very first evening, I liked Bob Capa very much.”

  When Ingrid’s group of entertainers set out on their tour to Germany and Czechoslovakia, their goal was “to be as funny as we could and get the boys laughing again,” she said, “because they hadn’t had much to laugh about for the past few years.
”

  They did generate laughs – but also catcalls. At one performance, rowdy servicemen began to heckle Ingrid because she was dressed too modestly for their tastes. Demanding to see some skin, they shouted her off the stage waving condoms. Adler came out to defend her and ridiculed the soldiers, telling them it was a shame they didn’t have anything better to do with their rubbers.

  And yet Ingrid continued her duties without complaint, refusing invitations from officers so she could eat with the troops, taking names and phone numbers so she could call their family members when she returned to the States. She even turned down an invitation to eat lunch with General Dwight Eisenhower, explaining honestly that she wouldn’t know what to say to him.

  In Berlin, Ingrid met Capa again. “The city had been blown to bits,” she recalled. “It was absolutely unbelievable. No roofs on the houses, everything outside.” Capa found a bathtub in the street and came up with an inspired photo concept: Ingrid Bergman in a bathtub. She laughed and agreed, climbing into the tub fully clothed. Capa was so excited about the shoot that when he rushed back to develop his film, he accidentally ruined the negatives. His big scoop never made the magazines.

  A far more somber and upsetting note was struck when General Eisenhower invited the touring entertainers to visit a Nazi concentration camp. Capa and others told Ingrid she should go to witness the horrors of genocide first hand. She refused.

  When the group returned, the participants were deeply upset, sick at what they had seen. Some refused to talk about it. “I just didn’t want to see it,” Ingrid recalled later. “I didn’t want to have it in my brain. There are certain things you wish people had never told you. I know they exist, but don’t put the picture in front of my eyes. It stops you even working again. It numbs you, it freezes you. You can no longer operate.” Many years later, Ingrid’s biographer Charlotte Chandler would conclude, “Ingrid felt guilty all the rest of her life” for not going on that tour.