by Grace Carter
For a moment, she sat there waiting for the audience to laugh. It didn’t. All she heard was the sound of genuine concern – “Oooohh” – then silence. “I learned at that moment that the audience doesn’t want anything to happen to you,” she recalled. “They’re sorry for you; they’re on your side; they don’t laugh at you; they weep for you. Yes, they laugh when it’s funny - when you ask them to laugh - but when it’s serious, they hold their breath waiting for you to take hold again.”
Ingrid would play Joan for 199 performances through May 1947. During the run, writers John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway came to see the show, with Hemingway coming backstage afterward to tell her that she was the greatest actress in the world. But Ingrid was not happy. Between the fatigue of performing eight shows a week, and the tumult in her personal life, she was tired and depressed. Her increasing anxiety actually made her sick. The usually robust actress came down with the flu, which, accompanied by severe bouts of laryngitis, caused her to miss several performances.
While she recuperated, she got word that her star was rising ever higher: The King of Sweden was awarding her the country’s highest honor, the “Litteris et Artibus,” a gold medal given to those who have made significant contributions to music, literature, and the dramatic arts. She received other honors as well, including a Tony award for Joan of Fontaine, and New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Spellbound and The Bells of St. Mary’s. A Philadelphia priest even asked Joe Steele if Ingrid would be willing to pose for a bust of Joan of Arc that he wanted to put near the door of his church, a request Ingrid considered ridiculous. She knew she was no saint – and if anyone found out about her affair with Capa, her career would be in ruins.
From afar, Capa was keeping in touch. He had gone to France to write a memoir about his wartime experiences, entitled Slightly Out of Focus. From France, he wrote to Ingrid: “Please write one word and say that you will be good and heartbreakingly pretty and that you will cool a bottle of champagne for the fifteenth of March [when he planned to visit her in New York] . . . I hope you did not sign hundreds of contracts to become less and less of a human being and more and more of an institution. You have to be very careful because success is much more dangerous and corrupting than disaster, and I would hate . . . Now I stop.
“That was emerging as a very difficult and nearly pompous sentence. My ink is dry and I have just talked to you on the phone, you dear maid from Hollywood via Sweden. I’ll see Joan around the middle of March if the Gods and your guardians allow it. I do love you very much.”
One of Ingrid’s “guardians” found out about Capa in 1947 and was none too happy about it. It happened when Lindstrom and Ingrid took a short skiing vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho – and Capa showed up, too. Lindstrom knew they knew one another but did not know about the affair.
On the slopes, Ingrid fell and twisted her ankle. After she went back to her hotel room, Lindstrom came in to report that Capa was gambling in the hotel casino and losing a lot of money. For someone as frugal and upright as Lindstrom, this was a cardinal sin. “He’s just going mad down there,” Lindstrom said. “Someone really should stop him.”
So in the early hours of the morning, Ingrid hobbled down to the casino on one foot. But Capa would not listen to her. “I’m going to win it all or lose it all,” he said. She went back to bed. In the morning, Capa looked like a wreck and had lost his entire $2,000 in savings ($22,000 in today’s dollars). “What difference does it make?” he told Ingrid. “It’s very good for me. Now I have to work harder.”
After the skiing, Lindstrom could not help but notice how natural and familiar Capa and Ingrid seemed as they laughed and drank together. When he confronted his wife, she did not deny it. Now it was the infuriated Lindstrom’s turn to demand a divorce – but Ingrid refused. She was not strong enough to bear the loss of both Capa and her husband at the same time. The affair would end, she told him, and promised to be faithful.
By then, Capa was finally ready to move ahead with a project he had been planning for some time – going behind the Iron Curtain with John Steinbeck to photograph and chronicle life in the Soviet Union after World War II. The result was A Russian Journal, now considered a classic. When the idea first came up, Ingrid said in a letter to Ruth, “I am happy because I am sure it is the right thing for both of them.”
Now the two famous artists were really going. With Lindstrom aware of their affair and Capa leaving in the fall, Ingrid decided now was the time to follow through on what she promised: She would break off the romance – for good this time. Capa agreed.
“I know the Hungarian influence,” Ingrid wrote to Ruth, referring to Capa. “I’ll always be grateful for it. I don’t know, but I feel sure that it changed much in me. . . . We are drinking our last bottles of champagne. I am tearing a very dear piece away from my life, but we are learning and also making a clean operation so that both patients will live happily ever after . . .”
Capa and Ingrid would remain friends, and he would occasionally drop back into her life. But the love affair that had transformed both of them – and would inspire films and novels in the years to come - was finally over.
After her relationship with Capa ended, Ingrid’s fidelity proved temporary.
The new man in her life was Victor Fleming, the director she had fallen in love with during the making of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He did not return her affections then – but suddenly, there he was, six years later, appearing uninvited at her dressing room door one evening in New York after a performance of Joan of Lorraine.
“He came sweeping in . . . grabbed me in his arms, embraced me and said, ‘This is it. You should play Joan forever and ever . . . You must play Joan on the screen,’” Ingrid recalled. Though pleased by the obvious romantic overtones of the encounter, what really got her excited was the chance to finally turn the story of Joan into a cinematic spectacle.
Over dinner, Fleming told her all the plans he had for her. If they wanted to make the film, they’d have to hurry, he said, because there were already several other producers considering the idea. Soon thereafter, Fleming teamed up with producer Walter Wanger to create an independent production company, Sierra Films, that would make Ingrid a partner and pay her $175,000 plus a significant chunk of the film’s profits.
Fleming took a room at the Hampshire House, a few floors above Ingrid’s, to hammer out the production schedule. To beat the competition to the punch, before any contracts had been signed or the rights to the play purchased, he sent out a news release announcing that Ingrid would be starring in the movie version of Joan of Lorraine, which he would direct.
Amid the planning sessions, the married, fifty-eight-year-old Fleming and the married, thirty-one-year-old Ingrid began their affair. Here was yet another older, father figure in her life – and yet another long-distance love, since Fleming had to constantly travel back and forth between New York and his home in Los Angeles.
Fleming first declared his feelings for Ingrid in letters sent when they were apart: “Just a note to tell you . . . boldly like a lover that I love you - cry across the miles and hours of darkness that I love you - that you flood across my mind like waves across the sand.”
While Ingrid “cared very much for this tall, handsome, vital man,” her coauthor Alan Burgess wrote in Ingrid’s memoir, she was not nearly as smitten as he was. “Being half in love,” as Burgess called it, made Ingrid look upon his advances as “all part of the flood of creation.” In fact, Ingrid seemed to view the affair almost entirely in terms of creating the Joan of Arc film.
For Fleming, on the other hand, the affair was an all-consuming, often dark experience. He was ravaged by guilt, calling himself “the snake” for cheating on his wife and betraying his religious faith for a woman young enough to be his daughter. “I was putting more trust in alcohol than in the Lord,” he wrote in one letter. “And now I am putting all my trust in you . . .”
The physical distance between them made it worse. “Dear and darling A
ngel,” he wrote from Los Angeles. “How good to hear your voice. How tongue-tied and stupid I become. How sad for you. Then when you put the phone down, the click is like a bullet.”
Back in New York, Ingrid was exhausted, just trying to hang on for a few more weeks until the grind of performing Joan of Lorraine eight times per week was over. “I am very tired,” she wrote to her friend Ruth Roberts. “Too many people. Too much food and drink lately. Maybe that’s what kills the feeling.”
Meanwhile, Ingrid – in her new role as co-producer – struggled with Anderson as he adapted the play for the screen. The script wasn’t working, but Ingrid didn’t know how to fix it. “If only I knew what I wanted, Ruth, I am sure I could drive it through,” she wrote. “I don’t know how to put ideas into dialogue and scenes.” Fleming was also unsure about how to improve the script, which he agreed needed a great deal of work.
Finally, Joan of Lorraine closed and Ingrid was overjoyed to have her life back. The very next day - May 11, 1947 – she flew back to California to resume her faux domestic arrangement with Lindstrom.
After an uneventful summer that made her itch to work again, Ingrid began work on the film Joan of Arc in mid-September. The production - shot at Hal Roach Studios in Culver City - was a massive undertaking, one that would ultimately cost $5 million, a full million more than Gone with the Wind. It featured dozens of cannons, hundreds of crossbows, and more than a hundred horses and suits of armor. Fleming had removed Anderson’s play-within-a-play conceit, rendering the screenplay more like a history lesson than a dramatic work.
During the shoot, Ingrid and Fleming worked closely together every day – but the work was so intense and all-consuming, there was little time for romance. “Vic Fleming wore himself out on the picture,” Ingrid recalled. “He was here and there and everywhere.”
Fleming also had to battle the naysayers in Hollywood who were convinced he was on a fool’s errand. Though the play had been a success, few believed the story of a young girl trying to save her country could make a successful film, especially since there was no love story. “I think the pressures got to Victor Fleming,” Ingrid said. “He was so anxious to make this a great success because he knew I was in love with Joan and her story.”
The fact that Ingrid was in love with Joan - and Fleming was in love with Ingrid - explains why the movie got made at all. But as hints about their affair began to pile up, both Ingrid’s husband and Fleming’s wife grew suspicious. Lindstrom discovered Ingrid’s infidelity when she claimed that she was staying at her friend Ruth Roberts’s apartment to study her lines. When Lindstrom showed up unannounced at Ruth’s place, Ruth reluctantly admitted that Ingrid was with Fleming. Fleming’s wife went so far as to contact Lindstrom and ask for his help in putting an end to their spouses’ affair.
When Joan of Arc was completed, Ingrid knew the film would not rank among her best – but she would have to wait for the final verdict until it was released the following November. Shortly after ringing in the new year of 1948, she began to turn to her next project. Hitchcock invited Ingrid to lunch and gave her the script for Under Capricorn, their next film together, along with the 1937 novel of the same name that it was based upon.
In addition to directing, Hitchcock was producing the film himself through his new company, Transatlantic Pictures, after Hitchcock’s contract with David Selznick ended the year before. Taking advantage of Hitchcock’s loyalty to Ingrid, Lindstrom negotiated a deal that he and his wife would each be paid salaries of $200,000 plus nearly 42 percent of the movie’s profits. Lindstrom would also handle publicity for the film when it was released in Europe, allowing him to visit Sweden.
Such financial arrangements may help explain why Lindstrom remained with Ingrid so long after their marriage had fallen apart; being her partner was a profitable endeavor. By now, their relationship was based mostly on such business transactions plus caring for their daughter Pia.
And yet neither Ingrid nor her husband was prepared for the seismic shift in their lives that began in the spring of 1948 when they performed the seemingly innocuous ritual of going to a movie. The film, Rome, Open City by the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, would change their lives forever.
In the darkened theater, Ingrid recalled later, she began to feel puzzled by what she was seeing, then anxious. Near the end, she began to cry. When the film faded to black, she said, it was one of the most emotional experiences of her career.
“The realism and simplicity of Open City was heart-shocking,” Ingrid recalled later. “No one looked like an actor and no one talked like an actor. There was darkness and shadows, and sometimes you couldn’t hear, and sometimes you couldn’t even see it. But that’s the way it is in life . . . you can’t always see and hear, but you know that something almost beyond understanding is going on. It was as if they’d removed the walls from the houses and rooms, and you could see inside them. And it was more than that. It was as if you were there, involved in what was going on, and you wept and bled for them.”
As Ingrid and her husband emerged from the theater onto Hollywood’s La Cienega Boulevard, she felt dazed and told Lindstrom: “If there is such a man who can put this on the screen, he must be an absolutely heavenly human being!”
At the time, Ingrid knew little about Rossellini. But Italian film lovers knew his story well. Born in Rome, he started his career as a sound technician, then went on to become a film editor and assistant director and by 1941 had made six short documentaries. He had teamed up with Vittorio Mussolini, the son of Italy’s former fascist dictator, to produce The White Ship, the first in a trilogy of propagandist films sponsored by the Italian Navy. In 1945, he secretly began work on Open City, an anti-fascist film that introduced neo-realism to the Italian cinema and launched his reputation as a revolutionary.
But Rossellini was not well known in America. When Ingrid began raving to friends about Rome, Open City and its genius director, she got mostly blank stares. A few months later, Ingrid was in New York performing in a radio adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina when she saw Rossellini’s name again – this time outside a tiny theater on Broadway playing his subsequent film, Paisan. She went in alone. Once more, she sat there riveted and could not believe the theater was nearly deserted. “What was going on?” she recalled thinking. “This man had made two great films and he was playing to empty houses.”
That’s when Ingrid got an idea: He needed a Hollywood “name” in his films, someone who could fill those empty seats. Ingrid certainly fit the bill. She was thirty-two years old and at the peak of her career. A nationwide poll of industry professionals by Daily Variety had recently named her the best actress since the dawn of talking pictures, even above such legends as Spencer Tracy and Greta Garbo (who was named best silent-film star).
But, especially after the unsatisfying experience of Joan of Arc, Ingrid felt restless and unfulfilled. She was irritated by the artifice of American movies, the constant pressure to play the same type of roles over and over. Ingrid longed for more realistic art – and part of the key to that, she believed, was getting off the back lot of Hollywood studios.
“I suppose when I look back, this is where my instinctive rebellion and resentment began - where I began to change my vision,” she said later. “Arch of Triumph looked beautiful on the set, but it was still not real. With Joan I would have liked to go to France and have done it there.”
When she agreed to do Notorious, in fact, she had asked Hitchcock, “Couldn’t we go to South America where it is set and film there?” He said no, but she tried again when they agreed to do Under Capricorn. “Now look, it’s set in Australia,” she told him. “Let’s go to Australia and do it there.” Once again, he declined, but she was somewhat mollified when his production company wanted to film in England.
After seeing Paisan, Ingrid said, “This immense feeling grew inside me that movies like this simply must be seen by millions, not only by the Italians but by millions all over the world.”
A
s she walked back to her hotel, Ingrid decided to write Rossellini a letter – which she knew immediately was ridiculous. But after a dinner with good friend Irene Selznick, she did just that.
So Ingrid wrote the letter:
Dear Mr. Rossellini,
I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who, in Italian knows only “ti amo” I am ready to come and make a film with you.
Ingrid Bergman
Later, the press would criticize Ingrid for being inappropriately flirtatious by using the phrase, “ti amo” – making her out to be a “sexual predator,” according to her daughter Isabella Rossellini. But in her memoir, Ingrid said that was simply a reference to a line by her character in Arch of Triumph who whispered those words to Charles Boyer on her deathbed. After all, Ingrid points out, she showed the letter to her husband: “I thought it was a light-hearted letter, and when I showed it to Petter back in Hollywood, he thought it was all right, too.”
But Ingrid did not mail the letter right away because she had no address for Rossellini. Then a few weeks later, a man stopped her on the street in Hollywood to ask for her autograph. When he mentioned that he was Italian, Ingrid said, “Then do you know someone called Roberto Rossellini?”
“Of course, yes, he’s our great film director,” the man replied, informing her that Rossellini often worked for Minerva Films in Rome. Ingrid went home, changed the date on the letter, wrote “Minerva Films, Rome, Italy,” on the envelope, and posted it on April 30.