by Grace Carter
At this point, there were several things Ingrid did not know: that Rossellini was having bitter legal battles with Minerva Films and that, on the night her letter arrived, the film company had burned down, leaving nothing but ashes. Fortunately, as Minerva employees were clearing away the debris, they found her letter, read it with amusement, and called Rossellini.
“I’m not talking to you!” Rossellini said, slamming down the phone.
The persistent office worker tried three more times, and each time Rossellini hung up. But they knew it was important, so they hand-delivered the letter on May 8, 1948, which happened to be Rossellini’s forty-second birthday. Since the director did not speak a word of English, he asked his film translator, Liana Ferri, what it said. After Ferri finished reading, Rossellini said, “Well, who is this Ingrid Bergman?”
Another thing Ingrid did not know when she wrote the letter is that Rossellini did not like actors. In fact, he didn’t like most movies and rarely went to the cinema. In his films, he preferred to cast ordinary people from the crowd that gathered whenever he set up to shoot at a given location. He also did not rely heavily on scripts, preferring to let the non-actors create much of the dialogue.
As Ferri tried to explain who Ingrid Bergman was, Rossellini gave her blank looks. Casablanca? Nope. Notorious? Nothing. Spellbound? Zero. Then she mentioned Intermezzo, with Leslie Howard, the film that launched her Hollywood career.
“Ah,” Rossellini said, finally lighting up. He had seen the Swedish version of Intermezzo in a small town in Northern Italy during the war. There was a bombing raid – whether the Americans or Germans were dropping the bombs, he wasn’t sure – and he ran into a movie theater to escape the shelling. “And they were showing this film, Intermezzo, yes,” he said. “I saw it through three times - not because I liked the girl or the picture . . . but because it was a very long bombing raid. That was her was it . . . the blond girl?”
“Yes,” Ferri said, “that was her, the blond girl. Better send a cable.”
Had a letter from a glamorous Hollywood star arrived during an earlier period of his life, Rossellini may not have responded at all. But at this moment, with the help of writer Federico Fellini – who would become one of Italy’s greatest directors himself – Rossellini had begun shifting his focus toward telling a story, rather than allowing the story to shape itself – becoming more of a composer rather than an improvising jazz musician. Rossellini’s attorney, Ercole Graziadei, and the actress Arabella Le Maitre were also making him rethink his practice of using amateur actors. Professionals, they argued, had much more leverage in the film business.
Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini’s advisers told him, had more than enough clout to raise the huge funds needed to make a movie. So Rossellini sent a cable to Ingrid at her Beverly Hills home that showed the rich imagination he was well known for:
I JUST RECEIVED WITH GREAT EMOTION YOUR LETTER WHICH HAPPENS TO ARRIVE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY BIRTHDAY AS THE MOST PRECIOUS GIFT. IT IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE THAT I DREAMED TO MAKE A FILM WITH YOU AND FROM THIS MOMENT I WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE. I WILL WRITE YOU A LONG LETTER TO SUBMIT TO YOU MY IDEAS. WITH MY ADMIRATION PLEASE ACCEPT THE EXPRESSION OF MY GRATITUDE TOGETHER WITH MY BEST REGARDS. ROBERTO ROSSELLINI, HOTEL EXCELSIOR, ROME.
Ingrid was excited to get the telegram, but Lindstrom took a wait-and-see attitude. Rossellini, meanwhile, was already approaching bankers in Rome to raise the money for a film starring the world’s top box-office draw, Ingrid Bergman. Ironically, Rossellini had previously been in negotiations with David Selznick to make a neo-realist version of Joan of Arc starring Jennifer Jones. They abandoned the project when Ingrid’s film began production, but Selznick and Rossellini were still discussing other ideas. Now, Rossellini told Selznick, perhaps they could create something starring the great Ingrid Bergman.
Selznick, wary of the mercurial Rossellini, sent his European casting director Jenia Reissar to meet with the director in Milan. Rossellini needed to know how much Ingrid was expecting to be paid – and wanted her to know that he could not afford her usual fees. Rossellini had hoped that Selznick would be footing the bill for the project, or at least loan him some of the actors he had under contract. He told Reissar he would sign with Selznick, but it would soon be clear that contracts meant little to him since Rossellini was notoriously undependable.
Rossellini’s first priority was getting financing from Hollywood and didn’t really care which actress - be it Jennifer Jones or Ingrid Bergman - joined his project. The woman Rossellini was most concerned about at this time was actress Anna Magnani, his mistress, and he insisted she take part in the negotiations. In his typically inscrutable fashion, however, Rossellini also downplayed Magnani’s influence, calling her a madwoman who thought she knew more about moviemaking than she actually did.
Meanwhile, the letter Rossellini had promised Ingrid finally arrived in the mail. In it, he described his way of working, which he called “extremely personal,” and told the story about how he recently came upon the idea for the movie he wanted to make with her: He was driving through the Sabina region of central Italy when he came upon a group of European woman in a refugee camp. The women had been “driven from their native countries by war,” he explained, and were “the easy prey of the soldiers of twenty different nations.”
One young Latvian woman, in particular, drew his attention. “In her clear eyes, one could read a mute intense despair,” he wrote. “I put my hand through the barbed wires and she seized my arm, just like a shipwrecked person would clutch at a floating board. The guard drew near, quite menacing. I got back to my car.”
Haunted by the image of this woman, Rossellini returned to the camp, this time with authorization, but she was gone. All he could learn was that she had run away with an Italian soldier from the Lipari Islands. “Shall we go together and look for her?” he wrote to Ingrid. “Shall we together visualize her life in the little village near Stromboli, where the soldier took her?”
Ingrid was charmed by Rossellini’s letter. A trip to Italy? Work with a brilliant director in a completely different setting, away from the superficial glitz of Hollywood? That sounded like exactly what she needed. Ingrid wrote back proposing to meet that summer when she would be filming a Hitchcock film in England. Rather than come to Italy, as he had suggested, Ingrid offered to split the difference and get together in France instead. Rossellini agreed; they would meet, along with her husband, in Paris.
Ingrid may have believed she was simply setting up a meeting to discuss a film. But she was actually embarking on the biggest chapter of her life, one predicated on a false idea: that a movie star famous around the world, whose fans felt she belonged to them, could do as she liked with her private life. Over the next several years, she would learn, painfully, just how wrong she was.
When Ingrid arrived in London in June 1948, she was dismayed to learn that production of Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn was delayed about a month due to labor disputes and difficulties with the script. In a letter to Ruth Roberts, she complained of boredom, said she was smoking and drinking more than ever and had gained ten pounds. She knew she could lose the weight, but giving up smoking was not so easy. When Petter finds out, she said facetiously, “I’m going to be in trouble.”
While in England, Ingrid was approached by Gabriel Pascal, a producer and director who worked with the legendary playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wanted to know if she would consider making a film version of Shaw’s play Candida. Though Ingrid had to decline because of scheduling conflicts, she was honored to accept Shaw’s invitation to visit him at his country home in the village of Ayot St. Lawrence.
When her car pulled up to Shaw’s cottage, Ingrid’s characteristic bluntness was on full display. The ninety-two-year-old playwright was already outside “grinning like a leprechaun, already hanging over the gate, waiting,” Ingrid recalled. She got out of the car but hadn’t even reached the gate when he said, “Why didn’t you do my play?”
Earlier, Sh
aw had sent Ingrid a copy of his play, Saint Joan, but she had declined to perform in it. “I didn’t do your play,” she replied, “because I didn’t like it.”
Shaw was stunned. Ingrid had the feeling that nobody had ever said such a thing to him. Once inside, she explained that the words of his play had too much George Bernard Shaw and not enough of the real Joan of Arc.
Remarkably, Shaw was not offended. In fact, when it came time to say goodbye, Shaw walked her to the car and said, “Will you come and see me again?” Ingrid replied that she would love to, adding that she would bring her husband, who was coming to visit soon. “I am not a bit interested in seeing your husband,” Shaw said, with a gleam in his eye. “It’s you I want to see again.”
“He was ninety-two!” Ingrid said later. “I’m so sorry I never saw him again.”
At last, on July 19, filming for Under Capricorn began. From the beginning, the production was plagued with problems. All the actors had different accents, none of them Irish, as the script required. Ingrid took dialect lessons, but her Irish brogue lasted only as long as her opening scene. After that, the cast members returned to their regular speaking voices.
Another source of tension was that Hitchcock’s players became exasperated by the director’s insistence on filming long, continuous takes, some as lengthy as ten minutes. He had pioneered this technique with his previous film, Rope, to create the illusion that the action on screen takes place in real time. But it was a slow, tedious process, and even the typically unflappable Ingrid was irritated. “How I hate this new technique of his,” she wrote to Ruth. “How I suffer and loathe every moment on the set.”
Hitchcock’s unusual methods required furniture and walls to be raised and lowered to make way for the camera, making concentration difficult as props appeared and disappeared. By far the most frustrating aspect of these long takes was that regardless of how far along they were in a scene, if someone forgot their lines, or a prop was out of place, the director would demand they start over.
In one scene, the camera followed Ingrid’s character so closely as she recited a lengthy monologue that Ingrid, in tears, told Hitchcock he was asking the impossible, then stormed off to her dressing room. The following day, she returned to the set and completed the scene flawlessly. Years later, Ingrid would admit that his technique was effective, as would many other viewers who studied the scene specifically to watch Ingrid’s moving performance.
In mid-August, Lindstrom arrived in London with Pia. Ingrid had wanted Pia to sail from New York, rather than fly, so she could watch the Statue of Liberty fade into the distance and see the cliffs of Dover appearing upon arrival. It was a grueling trip for a nine-year-old – a train from Los Angeles to New York, an eight-day journey across the Atlantic to Liverpool, and another five-hour train ride to London. “I wanted her to know how big the world is,” Ingrid said. “Now she knows.”
Lindstrom told Ingrid he had heard from Selznick that Rossellini was being difficult and would not come to any kind of agreement. Ingrid was not concerned. If Selznick lost interest in Rossellini, someone else - Howard Hughes or Samuel Goldwyn, perhaps - would surely seize the opportunity.
What Ingrid did not know was that Rossellini’s mistress Anna Magnani – his leading lady in Open City – had caught wind of his plans to meet with Ingrid and discuss the role in his next film that he had already promised to Magnani. When the head porter at a hotel in Amalfi brought Rossellini a letter from Ingrid, Magnani flew into a jealous rage and threw an entire plate of spaghetti in his face.
For her part, Ingrid says she was not thinking about romance at all. “I simply thought he was a great director and I wanted to do a picture with him,” she said.
Ingrid told Hitchcock she needed a getaway to Paris with her husband, not telling him about the meeting with Rossellini. Already jealous of her romantic relationships, Hitchcock certainly would have been unhappy about her artistic infatuation with another director.
At the appointed time, Ingrid and Lindstrom met Rossellini at the luxury Hotel George V in a suite belonging to the international film distributor Ilya Lopert, who also provided a translator.
At forty-two, Rossellini was nine years older than Ingrid. Dressed in a wrinkled, oversized suit, he seemed very shy. But the attraction was immediate. “We were introduced and Petter said something to me and I didn’t hear him,” Ingrid recalled later. “I was looking at those dark eyes of Roberto’s.”
Rossellini was the opposite of the fast-talking movie types she usually encountered in Hollywood. “You couldn’t say he was a strikingly handsome man,” Ingrid recalled. “More than anything else, I liked what he said: those words and the images he inspired were so different from the words of anybody else.”
But, she had to admit, it was a peculiar conversation. When Rossellini said it would take four or five weeks to make the film, Ingrid said, “How is that possible?” explaining that Hollywood movies usually take at least three months.
“Well, if you want me to, I can try and prolong the picture and make it last that long,” he replied. “I don’t know how to do that, but I can try.”
Puzzled by that answer, Ingrid asked what language she would speak in the film. “Any language you feel at ease with,” he replied. “Wouldn’t Swedish be the easiest thing?”
That answer only produced more confusion, along with a dollop of irritation. “But how can I do it in Swedish?” she said. “You don’t even understand what I say then.” Rossellini replied that it didn’t matter what language she spoke because the movie would be dubbed anyway.
When the conversation turned to financial matters, Ingrid saw her husband starting to get tough with Rossellini. So she asked him, in Swedish, to please step into the next room. “I beg you. Don’t make the deal too hard on him,” she said. “Don’t make me lose the picture.”
Lindstrom assured her he would not lose the deal - but he was already learning that any negotiation with Rossellini was treacherous. Selznick arrived at the same conclusion; seeing that Rossellini was likely to cause nothing but trouble, he would soon put a halt to all negotiations.
In fact, all of Rossellini’s relationships were complex, to say the least – especially his romantic ones. He had five lovers that summer, including the passionate Anna Magnani: Marilyn Buferd, Miss America 1946, who was appearing in the movie he was currently making; the German actress Roswita Schmidt; a Hungarian woman named Ava; and his estranged wife, Marcella de Marchis.
To all his relationships, Rossellini brought his hyperactive imagination and penchant for stretching the truth beyond all recognition. Years earlier, he had taken up with the Russian actress Assia Noris, who refused to sleep with him unless he married her. So Rossellini arranged an elaborate church wedding and reception, but within a year, the relationship had deteriorated. When Noris told Rossellini she wanted their marriage annulled, he told her that wouldn’t be necessary since they were never actually married. The wedding had been a farce, he explained, and all the participants were actors - from the archbishop to the choir and the organist.
While Ingrid was attracted to Rossellini, she wasn’t falling in love just yet. But after the Paris meeting, she was inspired by the prospect of making movies with him – even though they still hadn’t figured out who would finance the film. When she returned to the set of Under Capricorn, Ingrid could not hide her excitement. Though she didn’t give Hitchcock any of the specifics, he and the rest of the company had already heard about the real reason she went to Paris. As she had surmised, Hitchcock was not happy that she wanted to work with another director; he was also hurt that she had not told him the truth.
After Under Capricorn wrapped at the end of September, Ingrid traveled to Sweden with her husband and child – her first visit home in nine years. The press and the public turned out in force to greet her at the airport, among them Gustaf Molander, the director with whom she had made six films so many years ago, and other respected members of the film community. The press wasted no time
in asking if she planned to make a movie with Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid responded that she was a fan of his work and would like to discuss the possibilities, but that it would be difficult because they didn’t speak the same language. She failed to mention that they had already met and were actively seeking a producing partner.
In Stockholm, it was impossible to completely escape the inquisitive press that recorded her every movement. But once in Stöde, at the Lindstrom’s family home, Ingrid had the privacy to take Pia on walks through the countryside, where they savored the golden plums that Pia’s grandfather was famous for growing.
While Ingrid was in Europe, the producers of Joan of Arc set up a publicity tour in which the actress would follow the exact journey Joan made, starting in France at Domrémy where she was born. During the trip, she was overwhelmed to find that schools were closed and children lined the streets throwing flowers. Ingrid visited Joan’s home and church and traveled the road she took to Reims and Orléans, where the fighting took place. At Rouen, she got down on her knees and placed flowers on a slab of stone where St. Joan was burned.
“It was unbelievable,” Ingrid recalled. “Wherever I went, they treated me as if I were the reincarnation of Joan of Arc - as if they were waiting for her to return. And maybe they were.”
For many years afterward, when she came back to France, customs and immigration officers would look at her and say, “Ah, Jeanne d’Arc . . . welcome home.” The experience made Ingrid realize how deeply moviegoers had confused her with the saintly images she had created on screen – not only in Joan of Arc but in other films, such as The Bells of St. Mary’s.
Ingrid and her family returned to California in late October, but she had little time to get settled in; she was expected in New York for the release of Joan of Arc. On November 11, she was escorted to the premier by Victor Fleming, with whom she spent one night – but both knew their relationship was over. (Ingrid told him she hoped they could remain friends, but Fleming replied that was unlikely - friendship with beautiful women wasn’t his strong suit.)