by Grace Carter
They continued down to the Amalfi coast, where Life magazine took a photo, printed in late April, that would become famous: Ingrid and her new lover climbing the steps toward one of the area’s iconic cylindrical tower fortresses. “We were hand in hand,” she said, “and that went all over the world showing what a loose woman I was . . .”
In Amalfi, they checked into one of Rossellini’s favorite hotels, the Albergo Luna Convento (Convent of the Moon), which served as a Capuchin monastery from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries – and more recently the scene of Anna Magnani’s tantrum when she hurled the plate of spaghetti into Rossellini’s face. From Ingrid’s window, she could see the bay, hemmed in by mountains and lit at night by a full moon.
It was while they were in Amalfi that Ingrid decided to write to her husband and tell him, once and for all, that their marriage was over. Burgess called the letter “the most painful and difficult she ever had to write.” After several drafts, she finished the letter on hotel stationery:
It will be very difficult for you to read this letter and it is difficult for me to write. But I believe it is the only way. I would like to explain everything from the beginning, but you know enough. I would ask forgiveness, but that seems ridiculous. It is not altogether my fault, and how can you forgive that I want to stay with Roberto?
It was not my intention to fall in love and go to Italy forever. After all our plans and dreams, you know that is true. But how can I help it or change it? You saw in Hollywood how my enthusiasm for Roberto grew and how much alike we are with the same desire for the same kind of work, the same understanding of life. I thought maybe I could conquer the feeling I had for him, when I saw him in his own milieu, so different from mine. But it is only the opposite. I had not the courage to talk about him more than I did with you; I didn’t know the depth of his feelings.
My Petter, I know how this letter falls like a bomb on our house, our Pia, our future, our past so filled with sacrifice and help on your part. And now you stand alone in the ruins and I can’t help you. I ask only more sacrifice and more help.
Dear, I never thought this moment would come after all we have gone through together, and now I don’t know what to do. Poor little Papa, but also poor little Mama.
Given the news reports, it’s hard to imagine that Lindstrom didn’t already know, or at least suspect, that his wife was having an affair with Rossellini. But she had had flings before and always eventually broke them off. She had even asked for a divorce more than once but backed down each time. Perhaps that explains why, in Ingrid’s memoir, her coauthor Burgess says that when Lindstrom read the letter, he could simply not believe it.
“It was not that he did not want to believe it; he did not believe it,” Burgess wrote. “Ten years of good marriage - with ups and downs, but who doesn’t have them? . . . Something must have gone wrong with Ingrid. He knew his own wife. He had to see her. If she was truthful in what she said, then she had to come back and tell Pia herself that it was all over. Then he would accept it.”
Later, Ingrid wrote a second letter meant to convince him that she meant what she said. “I have found the place where I want to live. These are my people, and I want to stay here, and I’m sorry . . .”
In her memoir, Ingrid said that after writing those letters, “I felt that I was free. That was my divorce.” She added: “There were so many years when I was just waiting to find somebody who would make me leave,” she wrote. “Roberto did that.”
As for Pia, well, Ingrid hadn’t thought that part through. For her, acting always came first, and she had often left her daughter for months at a time. Once again, she was far away making a film and having an affair. This was an extreme version of a recurring pattern, to be sure, but Ingrid didn’t spend too much time dwelling on that. And she knew that had she been a man, nobody would have questioned her absence from her child’s life.
Now that she had honestly explained the situation to her husband, Ingrid thought, she could get back to focusing on the film – and her exciting new life with Rossellini. After leaving Amalfi, the smitten couple headed south to the coastal town of Salerno. Rossellini pulled the car over near a beach where fishermen were working and said, in his broken English, that she should wait in the car while he went to find her a leading man. Twenty minutes later, he got back into the car. “I got you two,” he said, “a tall, good-looking young man and a short one. You can take your pick when we get to Stromboli.”
Ingrid thought he was kidding until she discovered later that he had put both young men on the payroll and told them to join the camera crew at a hotel in Salerno that night. That’s how Rossellini did his casting. Later, when shooting began, the one who got the leading role, Mario Vitale, was so excited he asked, “And when do I kiss her?” Rossellini gave him a sour look. “You don’t,” he said. “But you get seventy-five dollars a week. So that should be good enough.”
On Monday, April 4, Rossellini, Ingrid, and their film crew boarded the forty-foot schooner, the San Lorenzo, loaded with fresh fruit, camera equipment, and necessities such as flour and toilet paper that were hard to find on the island. The foul-smelling fishing rig sailed into the Tyrrhenian Sea heading for the Lipari Islands and the most northerly of them all - Stromboli.
It was only a four-hour journey, but Stromboli was remarkably isolated. Not yet a tourist destination easily reached with modern high-powered boats, it had no telephones and its only regular contact with the mainland was a weekly mail boat from Naples.
As the San Lorenzo drew near to the island, Ingrid had a stunning view of the enormous volcano it was known for. The volcano had been continuously erupting for 20,000 years, and on that day, lava spilled out from its peak. “Good God, who would want to live in this desolate and dangerous spot?” Ingrid thought. More to the point, who would want to film there?
When they arrived, the boat’s passengers were lowered into small rowboats and taken ashore. Soon, they reached the village of Stromboli, a cluster of square, white houses, with short chimneys and barred windows alongside narrow streets just a few feet wide. The volcano so dominated the village that at certain parts of the day and night it blocked out both sun and stars. The visitors could hear gurgling and muffled explosions coming from within. The volcano cooperated by erupting during the filming, keeping the film crew busy one night until dawn.
No sooner had Ingrid arrived than the Italian press came ashore, too - reporters disguised as fishermen, tourists, even a monk – followed by the British and American press. They hunted for gossip wherever they could find it, with one intrepid writer stooping to counting the number of toothbrushes in Ingrid’s bathroom.
Soon, Lindstrom’s reply to Ingrid’s break-up letter arrived, written to “Katt,” his pet name for her. He had been sick to his soul since receiving her note, he said, and insisted she come back to America to discuss the matter. He was particularly upset about the publicity. He had to close his office to get away from what he called the “hyenas”; to spare Pia, he had to send her to Minnesota with the wife of Ingrid’s business manager.
In his letter, Lindstrom essentially called Rossellini a liar, swearing on his mother’s memory that during his Beverly Hills visit, “the Italian,” as he called him, had assured Lindstrom his only concern was to make a great film; he could be trusted with Ingrid and would protect her from any possible gossip. Rossellini said Lindstrom was like “his own brother” and promised to introduce Ingrid to Anna as soon as possible.
The woman having this very public affair, Lindstrom wrote, did not sound like the person he knew, who was “originally good and fair.” She should think about how it affects other people, he said, adding that it was “about time you grew up.” He reminded her how much he had tried to help her and her career – “No man that loved his wife gave her more freedom than I gave you” – and how happy and excited they were to be planning the “new arrival” of a second child.
Now, after just two weeks in Italy, how could she destroy all that? As his
friend Ake Sandler would say later, he felt “jilted before the whole world.”
When Ingrid read the letter, she wept. She desperately wanted her husband to understand that this was the most difficult and heartbreaking thing she had ever done. She did not want to hurt him – and the thought of hurting Pia was even more agonizing.
In her memoir, Ingrid is forthright about her absence from her daughter’s life, and the heavy toll it took on the girl. She even quoted an adult Pia looking back on her childhood: “I really don’t remember seeing my mother much,” Pia said. “I think she went to work very early in the morning, at six o’clock when they started, and I think she came home in the evening and then said good night to me or something. I don’t think we spent too much time together. At least I’m assuming that, because I don’t have any memory of it . . .
“I remember there was a woman who looked after me. But by and large, I was alone . . . I had no brothers or sisters, nor did I live in an area where I was likely to have children around . . . It was like an empty house somehow: there were very few people there . . . Someone drove me to school, or I took the school bus, and I went to school all day. When I came home, there wasn’t anybody there and I would play outside and then I would go to bed.”
After her mother left for Italy, Pia said, “I can remember my father in some sort of discussion telling me that she wasn’t going to come back. It was a tremendous shock. I don’t remember the sequence of events after that very much. I remember I had a governess who left at exactly the same time. I had the feeling that everybody was leaving.”
Rossellini himself wrote to Lindstrom, hoping to make the best of an awful situation (though Lindstrom later said he never got the letter): “What to do? If I didn’t have the deep estimation and respect for you, all would be very easy. But Ingrid and I are above all preoccupied not to betray you and do not want to hurt you more than is necessary. To tell you nothing? Take time - no, that would surely betray you and be inhuman. Between the lines in your letter and telegram, your doubt and torment is clear. It is therefore good that you know everything right away. It is good for you and for us. I know that I give you great sorrow, but believe me, your sorrow is also for me a great torment.”
As news of the affair broke, the Italian press had a field day. The magazine Travaso carried a cartoon of Ingrid as Joan of Arc, dressed in armor and tied to the stake above a heap of celluloid film, with Rossellini trying to prevent Magnani from lighting the bonfire.
As their personal drama was raging, in private and in public, Ingrid and Rossellini were not just trying to make a film but doing it in a place utterly inhospitable to outsiders. Stromboli had little sanitation, no running water, and a small population consisting mainly of the very young and the very old. (Most of the young men were trying to earn a living on the mainland, or elsewhere in Europe, and sending money home.) Ingrid stayed in a small, crude stucco house that they had rented from a teacher in the village. To bathe, an assistant would pour a bucket of sea water on her through a hole in the ceiling. The crew ate canned foods and pasta, shipped from the mainland, prepared by local women.
Adding to the challenge was a constant stream of interference from RKO Pictures, which was alarmed enough by the scandal – and Rossellini’s unorthodox filmmaking techniques – to send small armies of writers, publicity men, and production managers to protect its investment. Rossellini had little use for any of them. He didn’t need writers because he didn’t use a script. Publicists were merely an annoyance. And production managers were the greatest threat of all – they could only hamper the great director’s independence and artistic vision – so he kept them distracted by creating useless tasks for them to do.
Their biggest clashes came over Rossellini’s use of non-actors in his films. The director selected his performers in the random and haphazard way he always had - by visual inspection. If he saw someone he thought looked appropriate, he’d ask him or her to stand in a certain spot and look a certain way. In a similar vein, he encouraged Ingrid not to act but to blend in with the inhospitable surroundings. There were no costumes or stunt doubles: She wore whatever clothing a villager would lend her that fit. “The fact that Roberto disliked actors was now made clear to me,” Ingrid said later.
At first, Ingrid worked well with her new director. When he had trouble explaining something, she said, she looked into his eyes and could feel what he wanted. But soon, Ingrid got tired of standing around as Rossellini tried to get some vaguely articulated result from the rest of the cast.
“You can have these realistic pictures,” Ingrid shouted at Rossellini, shaking with rage. “To hell with them! These people don’t even know what dialogue is. They don’t know where to stand; they don’t even care what they’re doing. I can’t bear to work another day with you!”
To solve the problem, Rossellini decided to tie a string to the big toe of each actor, inside their shoes. When he pulled the string, that actor would speak. Then he would pull the string attached to another actor. “I didn’t have a string on my toe, so I didn’t know when I was supposed to speak,” Ingrid said later. “And this was realistic filmmaking! The dialogue was never ready, or there never was any dialogue. I thought I was going crazy.”
Then there was the volcano. It took the cast and crew four hours to climb it. After two hours, Ingrid sat down and gasped, “I’m sorry, I can’t make it.” When she did finally reach the top, she felt like she wanted to just lie down and die. On May 12, she wrote to her friend Joe Steele, complaining that any difficulties she had had making other films paled in comparison to this.
Rossellini accepted Ingrid’s outbursts as a normal part of the creative process – and both were glad that their on-set conflicts did not disrupt their love affair. By the end of each difficult day, his charm won her over. Ingrid was also buoyed by her feeling, shared by many in the art-cinema world, that she had the privilege of working with one of the century’s great film pioneers whose documentary techniques had worked so well in his masterpiece, Open City. (In a strange foreshadowing, long before he even knew her name, Rossellini had named one character in that film Ingrid and another Bergman.)
As the shoot progressed, it became apparent that Ingrid and her character, Karin, were living parallel lives. A displaced Lithuanian, Karin leaves her internment-camp prison and places her hopes in one man in a strange and barren land. Eventually, she grows despondent and wants to escape.
“You see, I fell in love with him because he was so rare,” Ingrid said about Rossellini later. “I’d never met anyone like him before; I’d never met anybody with his kind of freedom. He made everything larger than life; life took on new dimensions, new excitement, new horizons. And he gave me courage which I never had before. I was always frightened of everything, and he said, ‘Frightened of what? What is there to be frightened about?’ Roberto wasn’t frightened of anybody or anything . . .”
As Ingrid and Rossellini filmed Stromboli, they were fortunate to be so far removed from the breathless news accounts of their scandalous affair. But that did not stop the outside world from crashing onto the shores of their island sanctuary, courtesy of the weekly mail boat from Naples that brought batches of letters from friends and foes alike.
One missive in particular shocked Ingrid. It came from Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association of America, which monitored the moral fiber of the films the industry produced and did not hesitate to censor them when necessary. It was signed by Joseph I. Breen, vice president and director of the group’s enforcement wing, the Production Code Administration:
In recent days, the American newspapers have carried, rather widely, a story to the effect that you are about to divorce your husband, forsake your child, and marry Roberto Rossellini.
It goes without saying that these reports are the cause of great consternation among large numbers of our people who have come to look upon you as the first lady of the screen - both individually and artistically. On all hands, I hear nothing but expressions of profound shock th
at you have any such plans . . .
Such stories will not only not react favorably to your picture but may very well destroy your career as a motion picture artist. They may result in the American public becoming so thoroughly enraged that your pictures will be ignored, and your box-office value ruined.
This condition has become so serious that I am constrained to suggest that you find occasion, at the earliest possible moment, to issue a denial of these rumors - to state, quite frankly, that they are not true, that you have no intention to desert your child or to divorce your husband, and that you have no plans to marry anyone.
Not only did Breen’s letter threaten Ingrid’s film career and livelihood but also the success of her last two pictures – Joan of Arc and Under Capricorn (scheduled for release in the fall) – as well as the film they were working on now, Stromboli. In fact, it was entirely possible that all three films might be banned or withdrawn from distribution.
Ingrid also got this frantic cable from Walter Wanger, the producer of Joan of Arc:
THE MALICIOUS STORIES ABOUT YOUR BEHAVIOR NEED IMMEDIATE CONTRADICTION FROM YOU. IF YOU ARE NOT CONCERNED ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY, YOU SHOULD REALIZE THAT BECAUSE I BELIEVED IN YOU AND YOUR HONESTY, I HAVE MADE A HUGE INVESTMENT ENDANGERING MY FUTURE AND THAT OF MY FAMILY WHICH YOU ARE JEOPARDIZING IF YOU DO NOT BEHAVE IN A WAY WHICH WILL DISPROVE THESE UGLY RUMORS BROADCAST OVER RADIO AND PRESS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
WE BOTH HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO VICTOR FLEMING’S MEMORY AND TO ALL THE PEOPLE THAT BELIEVE IN US. ASSUME YOU ARE UNAWARE, OR NOT BEING INFORMED OF, THE MAGNITUDE OF THE NEWSPAPER STORIES, AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES, AND THAT YOU ARE BEING COMPLETELY MISLED. DO NOT FOOL YOURSELF BY THINKING THAT WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS OF SUCH COURAGEOUS PROPORTIONS OR SO ARTISTIC TO EXCUSE WHAT ORDINARY PEOPLE BELIEVE.
After getting these letters, Ingrid became deeply upset that people did not understand her true position. In a letter to Father Paul Doncoeur, the French priest who had acted as adviser on Joan of Arc, Ingrid revealed how wracked with guilt she was: “I am heartbroken over the tragedy I have brought upon my family and the people involved in my films. I realize how I have hurt our Joan. It is impossible to deny these rumors, impossible to keep peoples’ respect. It is too difficult for me to solve the problem; too difficult to be in the public eye. I therefore hope that if I give up my movie career and I disappear, I might be able to save Joan my disgrace. I have written to Mr. Breen in Hollywood about my decision, hoping that the pictures I have already made will not be banned and the people concerned with those films will not suffer because of me.”