Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  For reasons she could never explain, Ingrid never sent the letters to Father Doncoeur or Breen. Perhaps she sensed they would not do any good - and that merely the act of writing them was somehow enough, at least helping her sort through her sharply conflicted feelings.

  Not all the arriving envelopes judged her harshly; some offered support and love. The songwriter J. Fred Coots, who composed the music for some of the best-known American songs (Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, You Go To My Head, and For All We Know), wrote to assure Ingrid that the “hostility to your apparent romantic sympathies with each other are not condemned by millions of us.” He said he was composing a song for them called, “My Sicilian is One in a Million No wonder I love him so.”

  Her friend Ernest Hemingway also wrote, saying he had read about the affair:

  “Now I’ve had time to think it over (still knowing nothing of what goes on) and I do know I love you very much and am your same solid true friend no matter what you ever do, or decide or where you ever go. . . . If you love Roberto truly, give him our love and tell him he better be a damned good boy for you or Mister Papa will kill him some morning when he has a morning free.”

  She was encouraged by those letters but still felt stuck, with nowhere to hide. “I cried so much I thought there couldn’t be any tears left. I felt the newspapers were right. I’d abandoned my husband and child. I was an awful woman.”

  Ingrid even got a visit from her longtime friend Kay Brown, who was now a talent agent with MCA, which represented Ingrid. The agency had become concerned about her, so Brown arrived at Stromboli on a fishing boat in her high heels and mink coat and had to be carried ashore over the shoulder of one of the crewmen.

  “When I see Ingrid, she’s not the girl I know,” Brown recalled later. “She’s very remote, she’s not happy to see me.” Brown told her, “Ingrid, this is ridiculous, you’ll lose your husband and your daughter and your career and everything.” Ingrid replied, “Yes, I know.” Said Brown, “To me, she looked so lost and wan and bewildered.”

  Finally, after many letters and cables, Lindstrom decided to come to Italy; Ingrid agreed to meet him in Messina, Sicily. “Petter’s idea was that I should finish the picture to which I was committed and then go back to America so we could talk this whole thing out,” Ingrid recalled. “And, of course, from a commonsense point of view I agreed with that.”

  But she also understood Rossellini’s argument that Ingrid should not meet with someone she was afraid of. She was less persuaded by his insistence that Lindstrom would somehow spirit her away – or convince her to come back to him. But she could not stand up to Rossellini’s strong will any more than she could to Lindstrom when they were together. “Of course I know now that this was foolish,” she said later. “If I had gotten together with Petter and we had talked it out like two reasonable people, so much drama and unhappiness could have been prevented.”

  On April 29, Lindstrom arrived in Italy. Kay Brown was enlisted by Rossellini and his associates to secretly bring him to Ingrid’s hotel room in Messina to avoid the press. “It was so dreadful that I can’t remember all of it,” Ingrid said of their afternoon meeting. “I have blacked it out of my mind, drawn a curtain down.” But she did recall, “There was this immediate confrontation because when I talked to Roberto he argued one thing, and when I talked to Petter, he argued another, and I thought, ‘I can’t cope with them both!’ And I said, ‘Can’t we three talk together, sit down and see who’s saying what?’”

  Lindstrom, understandably, wanted to speak with his wife alone. So they met and talked privately that night. A mercurial character even in the best of circumstances, Rossellini appeared to be sent over the edge by Lindstrom’s visit.

  Long fearful of her own husband, she was now also terrified of her new lover. Once, Rossellini suggested that the next time he became enraged, she should throw her arms around him and hold him close so he could feel her love. So she tried that and “bang, he threw me against the wall so hard I almost broke in pieces,” she recalled. “Even to get near him was to risk your life.”

  So there was Ingrid with two manipulative, volcanic men fighting over her in an Italian hotel. Ever paranoid, Rossellini stationed friends at each of the three exits from the hotel to keep Lindstrom from kidnapping her. Then he climbed into his sports car and began circling the block, ready to give chase if they tried to escape.

  In their conversation, Ingrid told Lindstrom she could not possibly leave Italy now. “I must finish the picture because RKO has all this money in it.” Lindstrom said he understood: “Immediately after the picture you must promise to come back to America,” he said, “and we’ll talk the whole thing out.”

  Ingrid agreed. But when Lindstrom left Messina, nothing had really been resolved, and Ingrid and Rossellini got on the boat to return to Stromboli. “I hated everything about that meeting in Messina,” Ingrid said later, “and I was just as mad at Roberto because I thought he behaved very badly, too.”

  Ingrid had made it clear to Lindstrom that she intended to marry Rossellini. Though upset to hear that, Lindstrom promised that if Ingrid returned to America and still felt the same way – and explained the situation to Pia – he would divorce her.

  Lindstrom remained in Europe, writing Ingrid letters from London, Paris, and Rome. He apologized for being in such a depressed state for the past few weeks when she needed his affection and help. He hoped they could maintain their friendship and be able to discuss things privately and sensibly, adding that he felt “lost and numb.”

  Ingrid wrote back, saying she was unhappy to read in the newspapers that he had said, “No divorce now or in the future.” (Lindstrom later told her the quote was fabricated.)

  She also said she could not keep some of the promises she had just made to him. “I know we discussed not to break our relationship until I had thought it over, until after the picture, but it seems useless and unnecessarily cruel for all concerned,” she wrote. “I don’t like to be hard because I know you suffer, but I must fight with your weapons. I am sending a lawyer to London to ask for a separation. I have thought, Petter, I have figured, and I see no other way out of it.”

  Ingrid considered going back to the United States to talk Lindstrom into getting a divorce. “I hate just to run away and never come back,” she told Rossellini. But she was afraid that she would break down if she saw Pia, rendering her unable to leave her marriage. Perhaps Lindstrom was counting on that. “So I thought, best thing is to stay [in Italy], and sooner or later I’ll get a divorce,” she said.

  But her husband refused to go back to the United States. He continued writing her letters from London, asking why they couldn’t meet. “And I wrote letters back,” Ingrid said, “and it was all hell . . . hell.”

  Through it all, Ingrid was upset that Pia had neither parent with her while Lindstrom remained in Europe – and she still felt horribly guilty about abandoning her daughter. She wrote to Pia once or twice a week. The letters were poignant. “Darling, I wish I could take a big bird and fly home to talk to you instead of writing,” read one. “But I’ll have to talk to your photo which is in front of me.”

  Ingrid tried to explain the situation in a way a ten-year-old would understand – that their life would be changing; that she would be far away, as before, but for a longer time. “You remember Mr. Rossellini and that we liked him so much when he lived with us,” she wrote. “During this picture, I realized I liked him more and more and I wanted to stay with him.”

  This did not mean they would never see each other, she wrote – Pia would visit during school vacations, and they would take fun trips together. “You must never forget that I love Papa and I love you and I will always be with you,” she said. “After all, we belong together and that cannot be changed. . . . Write to me and I’ll write to you, and the time will go so fast - I hope - until we meet again. Love, Mama.”

  While Ingrid was being overwhelmed by her turbulent personal life, the shooting of Stromboli was reaching
a crisis point. In late June 1949, RKO became impatient that the film, originally scheduled to take six weeks, had gone on more than ten weeks. Howard Hughes wanted to wrap things up quickly to take advantage of the avalanche of publicity generated by their affair, even releasing promotional materials featuring Ingrid with the volcano erupting behind her. Time magazine ran a story entitled, “Fantasy on the Black Island,” which pointed out that in ancient times, Stromboli’s crater was thought to be a gateway to purgatory.

  By the middle of July, the studio had had enough. The ultimatum came from Harold Lewis, a production manager RKO had sent to keep Rossellini focused: “Finish the picture in one week or funds will be cut off and the picture abandoned.”

  In a reply cable to RKO’s lawyer, Ingrid – with writing assistance from Rossellini and others – blamed the delays on bad weather, illness, and injuries, noting that conditions were so difficult and dangerous that one crew member died after inhaling sulfur fumes on the volcano.

  RKO gave them a little more time, and on August 2, Ingrid made this entry in her diary: “Left Stromboli.” She had never been so glad to finish a shoot. But she didn’t forget the poverty-stricken citizens of the island whose tribulations had so moved her. Among her many financial contributions were a 600,000 lira fund she created for the family of the crew member who died; she also bought clothes for children (70,000 lira), a wood leg for a man (30,000), and paid for a child’s eye operation (30,000).

  Back on the mainland, Ingrid had been so traumatized by the scandal she declared publicly that, with the release of Stromboli, her movie career was over – “to save the world from disaster,” she wrote in her memoir, “for it seemed that I had corrupted everybody in the world.” The announcement was made on August 5 by her publicist Joe Steele, who issued a press release that also announced her impending divorce.

  Actresses often retire, then un-retire when it suits them. But there was another, well-hidden reason her announcement might actually be true: Ingrid was pregnant.

  This exciting, confusing, explosive fact changed everything. Now there was no way she could face her daughter. How could she explain that she had become pregnant by a man Pia barely knew, who, like her mother, was also married to another person? Their divorces would take months to finalize, perhaps even years. And if the public was scandalized by their love affair, Ingrid could only imagine the outcry when this news broke.

  The day after Steele issued Ingrid’s press release, the Rome newspaper Giornale Delia Sera reported that Ingrid Bergman was pregnant. The world’s reaction can probably be best summed up by a brief scene the author and playwright Robert Anderson noticed in New York. When the baby was born, he saw a man standing at a New York newsstand reading about it. Suddenly, the man yelled out, to no one in particular, “So she was just a goddamned whore!”

  Three days after the Giornale Delia Sera story broke, the well-known gossip columnist Hedda Hopper flew to Rome and demanded an interview with Ingrid. She agreed. They met at Rossellini’s ten-room apartment on Bruno Buozzi in Rome, where the couple lived. Ingrid smiled cheerfully while tactfully answering all of Hopper’s questions, saying she hoped for a prompt and amicable divorce from Lindstrom. Just before she left, Hopper casually dropped the question that she had flown all the way across the Atlantic to ask: “What’s all this I hear about a pregnancy, Ingrid?”

  Laughing politely and standing up to say goodbye, revealing her slender figure, Ingrid answered, “Good heavens, Hedda. Do I look like it?”

  Hopper returned to Hollywood and wrote that there was no truth in the rumor. In fact, Ingrid and Rossellini were about to sue the papers that published such nonsense (at least that’s what Steele was advising, since even he had not been told it was true). Ingrid rationalized that her artful evasion of Hopper’s question was not actually a lie – and later, she said her goal was to keep things secret until she finalized her divorce before the baby was born in late January or early February when it would be impossible to hide the news from her husband or anyone else.

  Rossellini, with long experience at litigation, suggested that hiring a divorce lawyer would spur Lindstrom to act far more quickly than trying to persuade him, which hadn’t worked so far. “All right,” said Ingrid, “let’s get things moving through a lawyer.”

  But that created another problem. The American lawyer they found in Rome, Munroe MacDonald, met with Ingrid and Rossellini and then, as soon as he got back to New York, spilled the beans to syndicated gossip columnist Igor Cassini, who went by the pen name Cholly Knickerbocker. Within a day, on September 21, hundreds of Hearst newspapers were blasting “Ingrid’s Real Love Story” across their pages. Based on a long document Ingrid had prepared for MacDonald for the divorce case, the story revealed the confidences, intimacies, and, in some cases, outright fabrications of Ingrid’s life with Lindstrom and Rossellini.

  McDonald also spoke to gossip reporter Louella Parsons, who wrote a story headlined, “Ingrid Offering Fortune to Gain Marital Freedom.” Once again, MacDonald’s accounts of the Lindstroms’ private conversations and correspondence were quoted. “Probably [my lawyers] think I am a fool to give you all I have,” Ingrid wrote to her husband. “Half of what I have earned is mine. But I want to leave it for you and Pia.”

  Ingrid was being exceedingly generous to her husband despite the fact that finances were extremely tight for her and Rossellini. She had already given her RKO salary for Stromboli to Lindstrom to support Pia, and the IRS had previously put a lien on her wages to cover unpaid income taxes from 1946 to 1948. Rossellini’s salary from RKO was gone, too – spent on support for his family and ex-mistresses, as well as the mechanics who serviced his expensive sports cars.

  Lindstrom was enraged by the stories generated by MacDonald, who lamely protested to Rossellini that he had only been trying to help his client. Ingrid promptly fired him. But those were hardly the only negative stories about Lindstrom. Between late 1949 and the end of 1950, more than 38,000 articles were published on the subject, many of them focused on the way he dominated and mistreated his wife.

  “From now on, officially and privately, he was to treat Ingrid and Roberto Rossellini with the maximum caution,” wrote Burgess. “Petter believed that they were making untrue and malicious statements about him and conducting a trial by newspaper.”

  When Lindstrom complained to Ingrid about the articles, she wrote back expressing her own anger at where things stood. “Is it MY FAULT ALONE, Petter?” she wrote. “After six months of trying to get a divorce, after all I have written and all I have warned you of, you are on the phone with your laugh and sarcastic answer, ‘Sure I’ll see your lawyer.’ You know very well we can’t afford the expense of these men traveling all over the world trying to talk to you while you play hide and seek.”

  On October 28, Lindstrom became a U.S. citizen, which gave him an advantage in divorce proceedings over Ingrid, a nonresident alien. Through his attorneys, he began negotiations. He demanded two-thirds of the value of their house in Benedict Canyon, as well as other assets totaling approximately $50,000. He also requested full custody of Pia and asked that Ingrid be permitted to see their daughter only in the United States.

  Ingrid also got the feeling that the letters she was receiving from her daughter had been manipulated by Lindstrom. Pia wrote that she was sad when she looked at the world map at school and saw Italy and asked why the film was taking so long; her mother could record the English version in Hollywood instead of Rome, couldn’t she?

  During this time, only a few people knew for sure that Ingrid was pregnant. Steele was not among them, which made him extremely agitated about all the rumors being published. When he got back to Hollywood, he kept saying that he would sue anybody who published these falsehoods. Finally, Ingrid felt that he should know the truth. She explained the facts in a letter, adding that she was not open to suggestions that she have an abortion. Whatever happened, she would trust God to get her through it. She also asked him not to share the news. “Just say
, ‘I don’t know. All is possible.’” she wrote. “After all you didn’t know when you left Italy.”

  Steele was stunned. “It was,” he said, “like having my leg blown off.”

  As Ingrid’s publicist, Steele was now in an awful position. Journalists and radio commentators were constantly pestering him to confirm or deny the rumors. But he also wanted to help Ingrid, who was almost out of money. Unsure about where to turn, he called Howard Hughes. Steele told Hughes the news on the condition that it be kept in the strictest of confidence. Once the baby was born – probably in March, he guessed – the world would find out, and their movie would probably be banned, destroying their work and causing everyone to lose money. Since Ingrid and Rossellini were broke, he said, could Hughes rush the film to completion and release it before the child was born so the star and director could make some money?

  Hughes promised to follow his advice. The next morning, Steele realized what a colossal mistake he had made. On the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner of December 12, 1949, a gossipy story by Parsons carried the screaming headline, “Ingrid Bergman Baby Due in Three Months at Rome.” Next was the Herald Express’s “Report Ingrid Bergman to Have Baby Shocks Filmdom” and the Examiner’s follow-up: “Rossellini Says Baby Story Invades Rights.”