Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  When Selznick received a copy of Lindstrom’s letter, he was livid. He told O’Melveny that Lindstrom was out of his mind - Ingrid already had free reign to work on any project she chose, and he had no intention of kowtowing to Lindstrom’s financial demands. When Ingrid’s contact expired, Selznick did not renew it. After seven years, their professional relationship was suddenly over.

  This rupture was not all Lindstrom’s doing, however. After many years of saying she didn’t care about the money her boss was making from her, Ingrid had begun to grow resentful of Selznick. “. . . when my contract with David expired,” she wrote in her memoir, “I felt I had a right to some of the money he was making by renting me out.”

  Ingrid told Selznick the same thing directly: “Now the contract’s up, David, I’d like to earn some of that money myself,” she said. Selznick became angry. He had always felt, as he once wrote to Ingrid in a memo, that he was responsible for lifting her from “obscurity to great stardom.” Selznick stopped speaking to her and told people how ungrateful she was. This attitude deeply upset Ingrid who saw Selznick as another in a long line of father figures.

  During this time, Selznick was having personal and financial troubles of his own. He had separated from his wife Irene in 1945 and had dissolved Selznick International two years before that. Selznick was so meticulous with each project that his studio only turned out two or three films per year. While many of them became classics and were hugely profitable – from Gone with the Wind and Rebecca to A Star is Born and Spellbound – he did not own a major studio to re-invest the profits. That created tax problems that led to an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service that required him to break up Selznick International.

  Selznick continued producing and distributing films through his new companies, Vanguard Films and the Selznick Releasing Organization. But by 1948, he would take a long break from filmmaking, discouraged that he could never duplicate the success of blockbusters like Gone with the Wind and threatened by the growing popularity of television. After that, he focused mostly on nurturing the career of his second wife, the actress Jennifer Jones.

  A few months after breaking off her relationship with Selznick, Ingrid saw him at a big party. He was sitting alone at a table while everyone else was up dancing. Ingrid sat down next to him and said she would be heading to New York soon to start rehearsals for Joan of Lorraine. “I hate to leave Hollywood knowing that you are angry with me,” she said. “I want you to wish me good luck before I go off to do Joan.”

  Selznick glanced at her and said, “Good luck.” The following week, he announced that he would be producing a Joan of Arc film with Jennifer Jones. Though that project never came to fruition, his maneuverings further soured Ingrid on Selznick.

  Later, the two made up. After he had cooled off, Selznick wrote Ingrid a note expressing “my sorrow over our ‘divorce’ after so many years of happy marriage. You once said you had ‘two husbands.’ But Petter was the senior, and, of course, he knew all the time that his will would prevail. I do regret all the futile gestures and elaborate ‘negotiations’ but that is all I do regret in a relationship which will always be a source of pride to me. I am sure you know that I have the greatest confidence that your career will go steadily up to new heights, achieving in full the promise of your great talent; and that my good wishes will always be yours no matter what you do. So long, Ingrid! May all the New Years beyond bring you everything of which you dream.”

  Finally free from her contract with Selznick – and with rehearsals for Joan of Lorraine not scheduled to start until October – Ingrid was ready to plan her first film as an independent artist. She met with David Lewis, a producer from the independently run Enterprise Pictures. Lewis had recently acquired the rights to Arch of Triumph, a popular book by Erich Maria Remarque (author of the bestselling All Quiet on the Western Front) and had hired Oscar winner Lewis Milestone to write the screenplay and direct.

  “Arch of Triumph was one of the few films in my life that I felt ‘wrong’ about,” Ingrid said later. “I really didn’t want to do it.” Expecting that the all-star cast, including Charles Boyer, her Gaslight co-star, and Charles Laughton would deliver a commercially successful film, Ingrid signed a contract guaranteeing her $175,000 in wages and 25 percent of the film’s net profits.

  With production still several months away, Milestone, with the help of writers Harry Brown and Irwin Shaw, got to work on the screenplay while Ingrid went on a ski trip to Nevada with her husband and daughter. After that, she flew to New York City with Joe Steele, now her publicist, to meet with Anderson about Joan of Lorraine.

  Ingrid was happy to be away from Hollywood, far from the suffocating gossip and the obsession with money and box-office receipts. To Steele’s consternation and Ingrid’s delight, Capa was also in New York, and the two spent many evenings together, frequenting Greenwich Village jazz bars, watching movies from theater balconies, and taking long walks in the wee hours of the morning.

  Over drinks a few months later, Ingrid shared with Hitchcock her disappointment and heartache that her romance with Capa seemed doomed. The director had a hard time understanding how anyone would not seize the chance to marry his beloved Ingrid but tucked the story away for future use. Seven years later, his film Rear Window, starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, would mirror Ingrid’s problematic relationship with the elusive photographer.

  While in New York, Ingrid also visited Kay Brown and her family at their home on Long Island. With the dissolution of Selznick International, Kay had moved to MCA, the largest talent agency in the world, where she continued to scour the landscape for the best and brightest, a roster that included Montgomery Clift, Lillian Hellman, Fredric March, Arthur Miller, and Laurence Olivier. Ingrid spent so much time with Kay’s family that she ended up helping with spring cleaning. Kay’s husband, Jim Barrett, asked his wife how it happened that the loveliest woman on Earth was helping them vacuum their stairs.

  By the time she arrived on the set of Arch of Triumph, Ingrid, after dining out often with Capa and other friends in New York, had gained twenty pounds. Milestone joked that Lindstrom should put a lock on their refrigerator door. Ingrid was also eating to quell her anxiety about her affair with Capa, who had come to Hollywood and asked her if she could get him a job taking photographs for her film’s production company. She did.

  Having Capa around quickly became uncomfortable for Ingrid and her coworkers; after work, the hard-drinking photographer would join them for drinks and overindulge, and his moodiness and hangovers put a damper on their relationship. She also had little time to escape to Malibu with him, so she saw him alone less and less.

  Both Ingrid and Capa, so devoted to truth in their work, felt guilty about the lies they had to tell to sustain their affair. “But I wanted very much to be with him,” she said later. “He was an adventurous, freedom-loving man.”

  And yet the affair could not last. “I cannot marry you,” he told her. “I cannot tie myself down. If they say ‘Korea tomorrow,’ and we’re married and we have a child, I won’t be able to go to Korea. And that’s impossible. I’m not the marrying kind.”

  To take her mind off her deteriorating relationships with both Capa and her husband, Ingrid channeled her frustrations into her work. The sad atmosphere of Arch of Triumph suited her mood. Set in Paris just before the start of World War II, the film tells the story of Dr. Ravic (Charles Boyer), an Austrian surgeon who fled Nazi Germany and is illegally treating fellow refugees without a license. After he saves the Romanian-Italian singer Joan Madou (Ingrid) from attempting suicide over the death of her lover, the two become romantically involved, but he is deported. In his long absence, she becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, who winds up shooting her. Dr. Ravic tries to save her, but cannot; after watching her die, he is deported again, this time for good.

  Both Boyer and Ingrid gave expert performances, but when the movie was finally released in 1948 after more than a year of editing – it was cut from four h
ours to two – the gloomy final product was panned by the critics. It was also roundly rejected by the viewing public, causing Enterprise Pictures to lose the entire $4 million it had invested. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote: “. . . we can only say that too much of a good thing - even of Bergman and Boyer - is too much.”

  Because Arch of Triumph had taken longer than expected to make, production had to be rushed to ensure that Ingrid could make it back to New York in time to start rehearsals for Joan of Fontaine. At the cast party in September, Milestone noticed how uncomfortable Ingrid seemed with her husband and was offended by Lindstrom’s condescending attitude toward her as if Lindstrom were responsible for Ingrid’s success. The tension between husband and wife was palpable. As she left for New York, Ingrid asked him for a divorce once more. Again, he said no; again, she did not insist.

  On October 1, Ingrid checked into New York’s Hampshire House, only blocks away from the Alvin Theater on Fifty-Second Street. She began to diligently prepare for the two parts she would play – Joan of Arc and Mary Grey, an actress who portrays Joan in the play-within-a-play. As Joan of Lorraine begins, Mary and her director clash over how Joan should be played. This conceit allowed the playwright to weave the characters together across the centuries and let Mary become inspired by Joan about the need for faith in a secular world.

  Ingrid read everything she could find about the young warrior Joan in an attempt to plumb the depths of her character. She was inspired by Joan’s overriding faith in her mission and in her God and especially admired her courage in opposing such powerful men until she finally met her fiery death at the stake.

  As they began work on the play, Ingrid appealed to Anderson repeatedly to stay true to the actual events and refrain from making alterations to express his political convictions. Every day, she had lunch with the playwright, a large, mustachioed man of nearly sixty with a shy, gentle manner. She would pull out her book of notes and say, “Look Max, at this nice thing Joan said here. That’s not in your play is it? Don’t you think that little bit would be wonderful in your play, Max?”

  “Well, I haven’t heard about that,” Max would say. “Where did you discover it? Did you! I see. Well, I guess we could find room for it here, couldn’t we? Yes, we could definitely put it in here.” Through her persistence and charm, the play went from 30 percent Joan of Arc and 70 percent political talk to the opposite ratio, Ingrid estimated. When the rewrites were over, Joan dominated the play.

  Before making its Broadway debut, Joan of Lorraine opened at the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. When she arrived in Washington, Ingrid heard that black people were not allowed into the theater. “I couldn’t believe that a man could come up with money in his hand, put it on the desk and not be able to buy a ticket,” Ingrid said later. “It made me furious.”

  “Shame on you,” she told Anderson, “coming with this play to Washington, knowing this would happen. If I’d known black people weren’t allowed in, I’d never have put my feet in this town.”

  “I know, I know. It’s too bad, too bad, but you can’t alter things overnight,” he replied. “It will alter eventually. Now don’t go on about it in your interviews . . .”

  “I certainly will if I get the chance,” she said.

  The day before the opening, Ingrid appeared at a press conference, ready to talk about it, but the question didn’t come up. As the reporters thanked her and got up to leave, she said, “Thank you, too, gentlemen, but I shall never come back to Washington again.”

  Startled, the reporters asked why. “Because I would not have set foot in this place and performed had I known that black people were not allowed into the theater. I am bound by my contract, so I must continue. But I will not come back here again until black people, just like white people, can come to the theater. We play for everybody. Everybody!”

  When the newspapers reported her comments, Ingrid was hailed and criticized. Anderson was “nearly hysterical,” she recalled. Outside the stage door, people spat at her and called her a “nigger lover.”

  Ingrid could not imagine how she could fail to speak up and then go onstage to recite the words of the play: “Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Some people believe in little or nothing; nevertheless, they give up their lives for that little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we live it, and we believe in living it, and then it’s gone. But to surrender what you are and to live without belief - that’s more terrible than dying - more terrible than dying young.”

  As Ingrid pointed out later, “Joan was eighteen years old and was burned to death. All I had to put up with was a bit of spit.” It would take seven more years before black people were allowed into Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University.

  When opening night arrived, there was considerable tension and worry that, as Ingrid put it, “I’d put the kiss of death on the play” with her comments. But the crowds arrived, and the play became a huge success. Capa, who had accepted an assignment in Turkey, even sent Ingrid a white rose.

  When the show was over, Ingrid went off to bed. Then there was a knock on her door. “It’s Maxwell,” a voice said. She opened the door to find the playwright, his wife, and their son Allan, the stage manager. “Sorry to disturb you,” Anderson said, “but we thought you ought to know. We’ve just sacked the director.”

  Ingrid was stunned. She thought Margo Jones had been doing a very good job. But Anderson said, “We were not pleased at all with her.” Ingrid thought, “How cruel can you be? On opening night to fire someone just like that.” Then she remembered Irene Selznick’s warning when she first arrived in Hollywood: “Be wary of all of them. It can happen to you . . . to anyone.”

  The new director, Sam Wanamaker, was also an actor who had two parts in the play – the stage director and Joan’s inquisitor. Though he was young and had never directed a play before, he arrogantly lectured the other actors on how to improve the play. “Listen, Sam, you’re only twenty-seven and you mustn’t talk like that to all those older actors out there,” Ingrid told him. “They won’t like it.”

  “I can see what’s wrong,” Wanamaker replied, “and a lot’s wrong.” Later, Ingrid had to admit that he had a point - and that he got results. The play “was floating out and disappearing and Sam put life back into it and vitality,” she said. Ingrid herself delivered one bravura performance after another. During the run, Anderson wrote that Ingrid possessed “the incandescent genius that transcends technique.”

  After its Washington, D.C., run ended, Joan of Lorraine opened on Broadway on November 18, 1946. Critics raved about Ingrid’s portrayal of the martyred saint. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson cooed: “There is no doubt about the splendor of Miss Bergman’s acting . . . [she] has brought into the theatre a rare purity of spirit [and] matchless magnificence.” Atkinson went on to hail Ingrid’s Joan as a “rapturously attractive maiden with pride, grace and a singularly luminous smile,” and called her performance “a theatrical event of major importance.” The New Yorker chimed in that Ingrid’s performance “may be incomparable in the theatre of our day.”

  Ingrid was thrilled by the reviews because New York critics and patrons of the theater have always been notorious snobs. To them, acting on the stage is far superior to acting in films – and woe to any film star who is not prepared for Broadway. Stage acting did present a greater challenge for Ingrid – having to perform before a live audience eight times a week, sans microphone – but night after night, she rose to the challenge.

  In the play, when Mary Grey expressed her gratification at finally having the opportunity to play Joan, Ingrid may as well have been talking about herself: “I have always wanted to play Joan,” Ingrid-as-Mary enthused. “I have studied her and read about her all my life. She has a meaning for me. She means that the great things in this world are brought about by faith - that all the leaders who count are dreamers and people who see
visions. The realists and the common-sense people can never begin anything.”

  After her opening night triumph, telegrams and letters of congratulation flooded in. Lindstrom, who had come to New York for the opening night but was now back in Los Angeles on hospital duty, sent a rare outburst of praise in his telegram: “You made me cry.” Another telegram, this one from her far-away daughter, now eight years old, was heartbreaking: “Lucky you, lucky Joan, lucky me. Pia.”

  She also heard from Capa, who knew she was slipping away from him. “Do not go away,” he wrote to her. “There are very few precious things in life - not life itself - but the merry mind. It was, it is, your merry mind that I love, and there are very few merry minds in a man’s life. Loving, loving, Capa.”

  About opening night, Ingrid said, “I suppose that was one of the greatest theatrical nights of my life . . . I’ve never forgotten that evening. It was just glorious, unbelievable.”

  It was also overwhelming. At times, this sensitive actress felt such powerfully churning waves of emotion – about Joan of Arc, her skyrocketing career, her far-away lover, her daughter growing up without her, her decaying marriage – that she was overcome. “I remember getting ready to go to the party at the Astor Hotel,” she wrote in her memoir. “I put on my evening dress, left my dressing room, arrived at the hotel, and went into the ladies’ room. There, I sat down on a chair and cried and cried and cried. I said to myself, ‘Is this it? Is this the reaction to success? I sit in the ladies’ room and I cry?’ And everybody went by me and said, ‘What’s the matter with you? You have a big success tonight?’ But I went on crying.”

  Fortunately, she felt warmly supported by the crowds who came to see her perform. Many actors fear that audiences are judging them, waiting for them to fail, hoping to laugh at them. To Ingrid’s delight, she found out during Joan of Lorraine, it’s just the opposite. One night, she was dressed in her armor, talking to her heavenly voices, when she had to sit down on a narrow wooden bench with four small legs. Either she miscalculated or the bench was in the wrong place. In any case, when she sat down on the end of the bench, it tipped up and tossed her to the floor with a loud, metallic crash.