by Grace Carter
Joan of Arc opened to mixed reviews. The critics had kind words for Ingrid – “Bergman’s passionate fidelity to her part saves the day,” Time magazine wrote – but showed less enthusiasm about the film as a whole. Even Ingrid, after watching the film many years later on television, felt it had too much Hollywood glitz and not enough realism – from her physical appearance to the battle scenes done in the studio rather than on location. “I didn’t think I looked like a peasant girl at all,” she said. “I just looked like a movie star playing the part of Joan.”
When the premier was over, both Ingrid and Fleming knew they had failed to achieve their highest ambition. Joan of Arc also sank at the box office. With its bloated $5 million budget, it lost $2.5 million. The film did, however, receive seven Oscar nominations – including one for Ingrid, who did not win – and took home Academy Awards for best cinematography and costume design.
Less than two months after the premier, Fleming was sitting in a chair at home when he suddenly slumped forward. He was rushed by car to the hospital and was dead before he reached the emergency room, the victim of a severe heart attack. His years of hard living - chain-smoking, heavy drinking, and stress - had clearly taken their toll. He was fifty-nine.
In November, Rossellini sent Ingrid a synopsis of the film he wanted to make with her. “I want you to know how deeply I wish to translate those ideas into images,” he wrote, “just to quiet down the turmoil of my brain.”
As 1948 came to a close, Ingrid felt, more strongly than ever, that it was time to leave Hollywood behind. Though she had made fourteen American films, her three most recent - Arch of Triumph, Joan of Arc, and Under Capricorn - had not fared as she had hoped. She desperately wanted to make a movie in Italy with Rossellini.
In January, she saw another chance to discuss the film directly with Rossellini when he came to the United States to receive the New York Film Critics Award for Paisan as the best foreign film of 1948. “By this time I still didn’t know who was to put up the money, who was going to do what,” Ingrid recalled later, “so I felt that the best thing would be that when Roberto came to Hollywood, we could discuss everything.”
Lindstrom graciously told Rossellini that he should be their guest, which could help draw the attention of Hollywood producers. It also would give Rossellini Ingrid’s stamp of approval, letting the industry know she planned to collaborate with the controversial, trailblazing director.
When he arrived in Hollywood, Rossellini went directly to Ingrid’s home and then to a party at the house of Billy Wilder, the famous director, producer, and screenwriter. Though a translator was on hand, Rossellini mostly smiled and nodded, ignoring the Hollywood VIPs who attempted to win him over. Wilder’s guests saw him as shy and embarrassed by all the attention rather than what he was – an impetuous man who loathed Hollywood culture.
This subtext made Ingrid exceedingly anxious. By now, she had realized that without the backing of these industry heavyweights, her dream of working with Rossellini might never happen. As she flitted about at the party, she was so nervous that her shaking hands could not light a cigarette.
The party concluded without incident – but without generating enough sparks to ignite a deal, either. And Ingrid was happy to have Rossellini staying in their home, feeling rejuvenated by his attention. By then, the promiscuous director had become intensely attracted to Ingrid and told a friend that even at this early point, he wanted her for a lover more than he wanted to make a film with her. As for his current lover, Anna Magnani, Rossellini had left her behind in Italy without a word of explanation. He told her he was taking her dogs for a walk, then left them with the porter of a nearby hotel to return to Magnani after he had gone.
During Rossellini’s visit, Ingrid used every lever of power she had to find a producer for him – starting with the legendary Sam Goldwyn, who often talked about making a film with her but could never find the right story. When she arranged a meeting with Rossellini, Goldwyn “fell absolutely in love with him,” Ingrid recalled. Excited by the idea of basking in the glow of a prestige project, Goldwyn agreed to produce his next film starring Ingrid.
Goldwyn then invited the Hollywood illuminati to a party to screen Rossellini’s latest film, Germany Year Zero, a depiction of life in Berlin after World War II. When it was over, the lights came up, and nobody said a word. “No applause,” Ingrid recalled. “Twenty people. Not a sound. This freezing cold silence . . .”
Ingrid liked the film but understood the reaction. In her memoir, she called it “very cold, very brutal, but extremely interesting.” A couple of days after the screening, Goldwyn called Ingrid to back out of the deal. “I’m sorry. I can’t do the movie,” he said. “I can’t understand the man; I don’t know what he’s doing, what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know anything about budgets; he doesn’t know anything about schedules. This kind of movie, I won’t put money into it.”
Rossellini was crushed, especially since his career was on a downward spiral; none of his recent films matched the power of Open City. But Ingrid was not about to give up. At Lindstrom’s suggestion, she contacted Howard Hughes of RKO Pictures.
Ingrid had met the famously eccentric tycoon in New York the previous year through Cary Grant and Irene Selznick, who suggested the four of them go out to the chic El Morocco nightclub. They danced and talked the night away, and at one point, Hughes said to Ingrid, “I’m so lonely. I’m so terribly lonely. You know, I have no friends.”
After that night, Ingrid kept getting calls from Grant saying, “He’s just dying to see you again.” She was not interested, but Hughes was persistent. Hearing that Ingrid was flying from New York to Los Angeles, he bought up every available ticket on her travel day so she would have no choice but to accept his invitation to fly on his private plane. Ingrid agreed but slept through most of the trip. “I was simply not at ease with him,” she said later. “I knew what he was after. Everyone was trying to make me more interested. I wasn’t. And I didn’t intend to be.”
Hughes, who had started his career in the film business and produced Oscar-worthy films in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, approached her to offer to produce any film Ingrid wanted to make. He told her to “give me the names of the scriptwriters and directors you want, and I’ll get them.”
Ingrid recalled that conversation as she was looking for backers for Rossellini’s film. So she called Hughes, who lived in a bungalow next door to Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, about fifteen minutes from Ingrid’s home. That’s about how long it took him to show up at her door wearing white tennis clothes and white shoes.
Ingrid introduced him to Rossellini, but Hughes ignored the director. The gorgeous Swedish movie star was the only one he cared about. “Sure, okay, I’ll do the picture,” he said. “How much money do you need?”
“Listen,” Ingrid said. “Don’t you want to hear the story?”
“No, I don’t want to hear the story,” Hughes replied. “I’m not interested. I don’t care what sort of story it is. Are you beautiful in it? Are you going to have wonderful clothes?”
Ingrid laughed and said no. “I’m going to wear the worst and cheapest things you ever saw.”
“Too bad,” Hughes said. “The next picture you’re going to do, you’ll look great. It’s to be a marvelous picture with RKO, and you can make it with whatever director you like. But have your little fun, and then you’ll come back to me, and we’ll make a great movie.”
Ingrid never would come back to Hughes to make that second movie, but she didn’t care. She had the financing they needed: Hughes gave Ingrid and Lindstrom $175,000 and Rossellini $150,000 for the rights to the picture and a portion of its foreign profits.
Finally, Ingrid and Rossellini would be able to work together – and, by now, it was becoming clear that theirs would be far more than a professional relationship.
“Ingrid had known in her heart for a long time that if the right man came along and said the right words, she was ready and willing to
go,” wrote Burgess in Ingrid’s memoir. “In one short month, Roberto Rossellini did that. He did not equivocate. He did not seek justification. He did not say, ‘We must think of Petter and Anna Magnani.’ He said simply, ‘Come away with me.’”
According to Ingrid’s diary, on Tuesday, January 25, 1949, she and Rossellini had dinner together, and the following day they drove to the Pacific Ocean and had dinner with Billy Wilder. There were more lunches, dinners, and drives along the coastline, usually alone, plus meetings, parties, and script conferences. It was thrilling for Ingrid, but she was already starting to feel guilty. Work had finally begun on a long-planned renovation of her family home, leading her to confess later to her friend Kay Brown that “every time a workman hit the roof with a hammer, it was like a nail going into my head.”
At the end of February, Rossellini returned to Italy to finish preparations for their film, which would be called Stromboli, Land of God, named for the volcanic Italian island where the story takes place. As Ingrid prepared to join him a month later, her image as the saintly Joan still resonated with American audiences, and the wholesome reputation Selznick had carved for her a decade before was very much intact. All that, however, was about to change.
After their house guest went back home to Italy, Ingrid and Lindstrom took a ski holiday in the mountain resort of Aspen. The plan was for her to travel to Italy in March 1949, with her husband meeting her there in May when filming of Stromboli was completed. Lindstrom, despite all evidence to the contrary, later said that he thought his marriage was strong and that Ingrid was faithful.
In Aspen, Ingrid pleaded with her husband to let her leave for Rome early. “But you’re not going to start the picture for weeks,” he said. Ingrid replied that she wanted to spend some time learning the language and traveling around the country with her director to get a feel for the place. (She said later: “I was just longing to listen to Roberto, to hear what he had to say, and how he said it.”)
In early March, Ingrid wrote to Rossellini: “I told him about our trip - Capri, Amalfi, Messina - but Petter got angry and said I was not going out to make a pleasure trip. It was out of the question that I travel with you.”
A few days later, she wrote again, “When I get home, I can wire you. I eat all the time and will become as fat as you like. If I don’t work soon, I’ll go crazy.”
By the time Ingrid returned home from her ski trip, the press had already begun to speculate about an affair; industry people had noticed her and Rossellini spending a great deal of time together in the weeks before he had gone back home. Two days later, she left for New York by train and would depart for Rome the next week. After checking into Hampshire House on Central Park South, she became angry at Rossellini for calling her at the hotel.
“For God’s sake telephone ten times a day if you want to be that stupid!” she wrote him on March 12. “It is also stupid to call a hotel that is in close contact with the press. There has already been so much written about us, I discovered when I came back from the mountain. My marriage was finished - from now on all my pictures are to be made by you - we hear in town. I followed you to New York, people say - a new triangle drama has hit Hollywood. On and on went the gossip columnists. I am very unhappy about it and don’t want to add any daily telephone calls. Please understand me and help me.”
Though Ingrid could not have known what lay in store for her, she seemed to feel that her life was changing. “I didn’t have time to say goodbye to people and get sentimental - not until I saw Petter stand at the airport, so lonely and silent,” she wrote to Rossellini.
Much later, Pia remembered the day her mother left for Italy. She was ten years old. “I remember her driving down the driveway because it was a long driveway,” Pia said, “and I remember her waving, and it was very sad. I thought she was coming back. I’m not sure she didn’t think she was coming back herself.”
On March 20, Ingrid arrived in Rome. She had taken few clothes and little cash with her, according to Art Cohn, who was working with Rossellini on the film’s screenplay – nothing, in other words, to indicate that she planned to leave her husband and child behind. Working on location was not new - she had left Lindstrom and Pia to perform on Broadway and make Under Capricorn in London and had left them in Sweden when she first came to Hollywood ten years before. Not only were there no clues that she was planning to start a new life in Italy with Rossellini – but she and Lindstrom had talked about having another child later that year and had already begun renovating their home to make room.
And yet, Ingrid admitted later that her true motives for wanting to be with Rossellini in Italy might have been lurking below even her own conscious understanding. “Probably, subconsciously, he offered a way out from both my problems: my marriage and my life in Hollywood,” she wrote in her memoir. “But it wasn’t clear to me at that time even though I wrote those letters [to him]. If people had looked suspicious when I mentioned Italy, I would certainly have said quite indignantly, ‘I’m going to make a movie - that’s all I’m going for.’”
When she got off her flight in Rome, Ingrid was stunned by the reception she received – like something out of a dream, she said later. There was a huge crowd waiting for her at the airport, laughing and shouting and waving. Rossellini shoved a big bouquet of flowers into her arms, and they pushed through the crowd and into his red Cisitalia sports car.
When they arrived at the Excelsior Hotel, the crowds were so thick they could not reach the front door. Rossellini immediately began fighting with the photographers, flailing away with his fists and at one point ripping the jacket off one of them. (The next day, he sent the man a new jacket.) Finally, they managed to get inside Rossellini’s suite where the director’s friends and colleagues were waiting. Frederico Fellini, then working with Rossellini as a writer, had placed on the walls his caricatures of Ingrid and Rossellini on the island of Stromboli. There were champagne and gifts and lots of laughing and chattering. “I was simply overwhelmed,” Ingrid recalled.
If Rossellini was not already of a hero in Italy, he definitely was now that he had brought home the world’s biggest movie star. Italy had a desperate need to celebrate something – anything. The war had devastated the country, and the people in Rome had endured months of starvation when food supply lines were cut. American soldiers, first welcomed, were later bitterly resented as “overfed, overpaid, oversexed and over here,” according to Ferri. “The Roman women went to bed with every American soldier; every woman in Rome was in love, it seemed, with an American soldier.”
So when Rossellini stole the beautiful Swedish star from the Americans, the nation rejoiced. “She had left that cold Nordic husband of hers,” said Ferri. “Now she would find the true meaning of life and love. It was compensation for all we’d gone through, all the hunger and humiliations.”
But Ferri herself did not join in the cheering; she knew Rossellini – and his back story – too well. In 1936, Rossellini had married costume designer Marcella de Marchis, who bore him two sons, Marco and Renzo. (Marco died at the age of eight from peritonitis in 1946.) Only three years into their marriage, he began seeing the tempestuous Magnani – and now other women as well. Twice, de Marchis had initiated annulment proceedings with the Catholic Church.
“I know your story with your wife, with the Greek-Russian girl, the German dancer, and with Anna Magnani,” Ferri told him, according to Ingrid’s memoir. “I know your tricks . . . if you treat Ingrid badly . . . I shall not be your friend, and I shall not speak to you anymore because it is not allowed for a person like you, shrewd as you are, foxy as you are, to take advantage of a woman who is completely harmless, completely without defense. That I won’t stand, and I am very clear!”
Ferri wasn’t the only one concerned. Ingrid’s friend Leo McCarey, her director on The Bells of St. Mary’s, was also aware of Rossellini’s instability and suggested that perhaps Ingrid was attracted to Rossellini because he was her husband’s opposite. If she was looking for passion,
he argued, there were many other romantic men in Europe.
But Ingrid was not swayed – it was all too fun and exciting. She did not yet know that Rossellini was, on many levels, a troubled soul who could simply not live without drama and conflict. “He was always involved with problems: money problems, contract problems, women problems,” Ferri said. “He was always in a turmoil, he couldn’t live without turmoil. If he lived in peace, he was dead . . . Life was a battle: Films were a battle. He didn’t get out of bed unless he had to fight a battle. Without one, he just stayed in bed complaining, ‘I have a headache, my stomach hurts, I feel sick.’”
The day after she arrived in Rome, the crowds outside the Excelsior Hotel were so thick it was nearly impossible to get through the front doors, leaving Ingrid marooned in her room. Finally, she slipped out the back door with Rossellini and into a narrow street where they walked for a bit in peace before being discovered again by the photographers and crowds.
By the end of the week, Ingrid and Rossellini got into his little red sports car and headed down the Appian Way, past the ancient shrines of pagan Rome. As they drove, Rossellini narrated the colorful history of Italy - “and if he didn’t know it,” Ingrid said, “I think he made it up.”
When they reached Naples, they took a ferry to Capri. Ingrid was in heaven. “I have a sweet photograph in which I look so happy it is unbelievable,” she said later. They went to a small club where people were dancing. Usually, Rossellini had no interest in dancing, but this time, he indulged her and began hoofing it – the only time Ingrid recalled him ever dancing with her. “I think he was doing everything to win me over,” she said later.