Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  Hughes had apparently decided that the publicity would actually help the film, especially if the press put a positive spin on it. “Few women in history, or men either, have made the sacrifice the Swedish star has made for love,” Parsons wrote, comparing Ingrid and Rossellini to other famously illicit couples: Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Bothwell, Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, and the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

  The seismic news that Ingrid was expecting made the earlier scandal seem like a routine weather report. Other events of the day – like President Truman’s announcement of the invention of the hydrogen bomb – were relegated to the bottom of front pages to make room for the astonishing details of this latest chapter in the gripping melodrama starring Ingrid Bergman.

  In the midst of this maelstrom, Ernest Hemingway called. “What’s this?” he said. “America’s gone crazy. Scandal because of a baby! Ridiculous! I hope you have twins. I’ll be their godfather, and promise to carry them into St. Peter’s, one on each arm. Now what can I do for you?”

  Ingrid replied, “Can you put that in the paper, Ernest? Because every newspaper is full of such hatred and dark things. Say it to a newspaper. Nobody else does.”

  “I will. I will,” he said. The following week, Papa Hemingway was quoted as saying, “What is all this nonsense? She’s going to have a child. So what? Women are always having children. I’m proud of her and happy for her. She loves Roberto, and he loves her, and they want the child. We should celebrate with her not condemn her.”

  A crucial bit of support came from an unexpected source – Rossellini’s wife, Marcella de Marchis. She obtained an annulment in Austria by signing a document stating that she had not been in her right mind when she married Rossellini. The document was quickly validated in an Italian court, and the couple agreed that Marcella would retain custody of their eleven-year-old son, Renzo.

  With Rossellini’s marriage annulled, the last remaining obstacle keeping him from marrying Ingrid was Lindstrom – and they faced a tight deadline. When the baby is born, if Ingrid put her name on the Italian birth certificate as the mother, Lindstrom – as Ingrid’s husband – would be listed as the father. If that happened, Ingrid said, “Roberto would have torn the office down.”

  The obvious solution was to get divorced before the child was born. But Lindstrom was, once again, dragging his feet. On January 25, 1950 – with the baby due any day – Ingrid’s lawyer filed divorce papers in Juarez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, citing cruelty, nonsupport, and incompatibility. But she was too late. Before the court could make a ruling, Ingrid got her first labor pains.

  Sometime before noon on February 2, 1950, Ingrid received a phone call in the Rome apartment she shared with Rossellini. It was Lydia Vernon, the wife of her business manager, calling from Beverly Hills. “What’s the matter with you?” Vernon demanded. “You really must pull yourself together and come back and see Pia. Do you understand that? You have to come back to America to see Pia. She is crying for you all the time. She’s dreadfully unhappy. Get on a plane and come back at once.”

  Ingrid began to weep. She tried but failed to interrupt Vernon’s harangue, saying, “But I can’t come now. Don’t you understand? As soon as I can, I’ll arrange something.”

  No sooner had she hung up the phone than Ingrid felt her first contractions. The pain was so intense that she became convinced her moment of atonement had arrived – now she would pay for her sins. She became obsessed with the need to write to Pia in case she didn’t survive – “to tell her I loved her, that even at this moment, if it should be my last, she would know I had been thinking about her.”

  Ingrid sat down at her typewriter, stumped. How to explain this complex situation to a girl who only wanted her mama to come home? Her reverie was interrupted by her maid, Elena Di Montis, who demanded that she call the doctor immediately. “No, No,” Ingrid replied, “I must write this letter first.”

  Between the contractions that doubled her over with pain every four minutes, Ingrid typed. “Pia, I want you to know that all the stories about what I have said and so on are invented,” she wrote. “I have NEVER NEVER said that I would give up my child, that means you, and that I would never see you again. They write that I don’t know why, to show what a silly mother I am or something. I love you Pia, sweetiepie . . . I am going to have a little house here and I am going to have a little room called Pia’s room, and whenever you come, it is there ready for you, with your things, and you will see that after a while it won’t seem so strange to you to have two homes, one with Papa and one with Mama. And we will make trips together because now you are so big you can travel with me like a grown-up person and we will see much of the world. I will also come to America so you don’t have to do all the traveling. We will share it.”

  By the time the spasms came every three minutes, Di Montis was apoplectic. “Signora, the doctor, the doctor! Please call the doctor! I can’t help you . . . I have no experience.”

  “I haven’t finished the letter yet!” Ingrid cried. “I must finish the letter.”

  As the pain subsided, she went back to the typewriter. “I think you will find it very interesting to have two homes,” she wrote. “I don’t say, darling, that it is better than one. Oh no, I realize that for you, one home with Papa and Mama is the very best. But as the very best did not come our way, this we have to see with the best light and discover what good things there are. Believe me, it is not all so terrible. You will find friends here. There is an English school with only English children. So you won’t feel so alone. And when I have another child, you will play with it and we will teach ‘it’ good English. My Italian is worse than my French, and you know how bad my French is!”

  Di Montis interrupted Ingrid again. “But you’ll have the baby here, and I don’t know what to do,” she cried. “Let me call the doctor. I’ll call the doctor?”

  Ingrid refused, determined to finish the letter to Pia: “Please write me. Don’t be afraid to talk to me openly as you do with Mrs. Vernon. She is of great help, but some things you might like to hear directly from Mama. I am so so sorry that you have to go through all this. But Life is long and this is only a short period in the shadow. The sun will shine again and we will all be happy. With all my love and kisses, Mama.”

  By now, the pain was so intense that Ingrid was literally hanging over the chair. Finally, she wiped away the sweat and said, “All right, call the doctor now.”

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Rossellini was summoned as he was shooting his next film, Flowers of St. Francis, in the mountains outside Rome. He jumped into his sports car and raced to the Villa Margherita clinic. Somehow, Ingrid managed to sneak out of her apartment without being noticed by the press and got into a car. Halfway there, she realized she wasn’t wearing the green emerald ring Rossellini had given her. At the hospital, she called Di Montis. “I can’t have this baby without that green ring on my finger!” she cried. “It is in the bathroom! Throw yourself in a taxi and rush it to the hospital . . . Hurry! Hurry!”

  Di Monti arrived to slip the ring on Ingrid’s finger just before the baby made its grand entrance into the world. At 7:00 p.m., with Rossellini by her side, she delivered a healthy boy, Renato Roberto Giusto Giuseppe. Ingrid and Rossellini felt their child needed four given names to cover the most important people in their lives: Renato after Rossellini’s cousin; Roberto after the baby’s father; Giusto - Italian for Justus - after Ingrid’s beloved dad; and Giuseppe after Rossellini’s father. To simplify things, most of the time they would just call him Robertino.

  By coincidence, the baby was born just before the gala première of Volcano!, Anna Magnani’s first film since her breakup with Rossellini and a bold assertion of her independence from the director who had defined her career. The Fiamma Cinema was crowded with journalists, but a bulb in the projector burned out during the opening credits and a boy had to be sent on a bicycle to fetch a new one. Once the film started again, a
ll the journalists began leaving. “What’s going on?” asked Magnani, distressed.

  “Ingrid Bergman’s just had a son,” whispered one of her friends. “The press are all rushing off to the hospital.”

  “It’s sabotage,” the actress muttered. Unwilling to compete for publicity with a famous newborn baby, she made a hasty departure. Both the premiere and the film itself were flops.

  Meanwhile, reporters swarmed the gates of the Villa Margherita clinic. One asked a nun if she would swear on the Bible that Miss Bergman was not registered there. The sister truthfully replied, “No.” Ingrid had registered under a pseudonym.

  Around midnight, reporters began to climb the gate, so the hospital director called the riot police. Lights flashing and sirens screaming, they arrived on the scene wearing steel helmets, adding a surreal element to the proceedings. In the cold February night, reporters and photographers collected wood from a nearby park, lit bonfires, and invited the police officers to come warm up with them.

  With Rossellini’s permission, the superintendent of the clinic made an official announcement the following morning, giving the baby’s sex and weight and time of birth. He then made the mistake of inviting a few reporters inside to see the public rooms and chapel. With concealed cameras, they popped into rooms and snapped photos in hopes of capturing a shot of Ingrid and the baby. Fortunately, police were stationed outside Ingrid’s suite, barring them from entering. Some of the more ingenious photographers rented rooms in a neighboring hotel, where they hung out their windows with cameras, scanning windows and waiting for a good shot. Ingrid could not even open the blinds in her room without being spied upon.

  Other members of the press attempted to bribe nuns to take pictures of Ingrid and her son. One journalist brought his pregnant wife to the clinic, but the suspicious nuns quickly determined she was several weeks away from delivery. Photos from Ingrid’s movies were used to feign news coverage - such as a scene from Notorious, in which she’s shown in bed, ill from poison. Photos of Ingrid looking startled as she arrived in Rome the previous year were posted with captions suggesting they had been taken on the way to the hospital.

  Though newspapers in Sweden did not publish photographs, the articles written about Ingrid called her a talented actress who was destroyed by a mad Italian. Only one paper in Stockholm defended her, pointing out the hypocrisy in criticizing someone who had accepted responsibility for her actions.

  Finally, Rossellini had had enough of the intrusions. At four o’clock in the morning, he suddenly said, “We go!” Ingrid picked up Robertino and raced down the stairs. Not even the nurses knew they were leaving. They ran after the family, crying, “Oh, you can’t go! You can’t go!”

  The fleeing family jumped into Rossellini’s car and sped off. A friend, driving behind them, swerved and stopped his car in the middle of the road to block the photographers. Miraculously, Ingrid managed to get back home without a single photograph being taken.

  When it came time to fill out Robertino’s birth certificate, Rossellini registered himself as the father. Because he was not yet Ingrid’s husband, Italian law required that the mother remain anonymous, listed simply as someone “whose identity will be revealed later” – an ironic turn of phrase, given that most of modern civilization knew by now that the boy’s mother was Ingrid Bergman.

  Around the time Robertino was entering the world, Ingrid and Rossellini had another birth of sorts. The first version of Stromboli, in Italian, was being shown to an audience of Catholic priests and bishops. Rossellini wanted to show the churchmen that the film had an uplifting ending with religious themes, especially since those themes were being cut in the version that would be released in American theaters.

  According to Rossellini’s contract with RKO, he was required to turn over all film footage to the studio. But RKO did not consult with Rossellini while doing the edit and the director vehemently protested that the resulting eighty-one-minute U.S. version was inferior and vastly different than his original 105-minute film. That led to a legal dispute over international distribution rights, which, Ingrid indicates in her memoir, Rossellini lost.

  During this period, Ingrid wrote to her talent agency, MCA, saying that she had no need for representation anymore because she would not be visiting or working in America anytime in the near future. “Nobody at RKO has had the courtesy to inform me or Mr. Rossellini about their opinion of Stromboli,” she wrote, “but through the grapevine we hear that they think the film great and at the same time they are cutting and changing and chopping it up to a fine ‘Grade A’ RKO hamburger . . .”

  When Stromboli finally opened in New York on February 15, 1950 – a version totally disowned by Rossellini – it was roundly panned by the critics. The New York Times called it “incredibly feeble, inarticulate, uninspiring, and painfully banal.” The New York Herald Tribune opined, “There is no depth to Ingrid Bergman’s performance, no vitality in Roberto Rossellini’s direction . . . Stromboli profits only from notoriety: as a film drama it is a waste of talent and a waste of time.”

  In its review, Variety seemed to almost feel bad for Ingrid: “Given elementary-school dialogue to recite and impossible scenes to act, Ingrid Bergman’s never able to make the lines real nor the emotion sufficiently motivated to seem more than an exercise.” The review did praise the documentary-like portrayal of life on the island. “Rossellini’s penchant for realism, however, does not extend to Bergman,” the piece concluded. “She’s always fresh, clean, and well-groomed.”

  History’s assessment has been kinder. The Venice Film Festival ranked Stromboli as one of the 100 most important Italian films from 1942-1978 and the British Film Institute in 2012 listed it as one of the 250 greatest films of all time. “Like many of cinema’s masterpieces, Stromboli is fully explained only in a final scene that brings into harmony the protagonist’s state of mind and the imagery,” wrote the critic Fred Camper in 2000. By movie’s end, he said, Ingrid’s character Karin is “reduced – or elevated – to the condition of a crying child, a kind of first human being who, divested of the trappings of self, must learn to see and speak again from a personal ‘year zero’ (to borrow from another Rossellini film title).”

  In 1950, however, the cards were stacked heavily against Stromboli succeeding, either artistically or commercially. American exhibitors announced that if the film made money, they would continue to show it. But if it was not profitable, they added, with a startling absence of logic or scruples, they would ban it “upon grounds of morality.” In the censorship race, however, the businessmen were often beaten to the punch by fire-breathing politicians. Georgia Senator Frank Lunsford introduced a resolution to ban the film because its star “glamorized free love.” Bellingham, Washington, and Memphis, Tennessee, followed suit, due to the powerful influence of the Council of Churches.

  Scathing words and angry voices resounded across America. A fanatical minister in Los Angeles described Ingrid as a foul stench in the nostrils of decent people. Famed religious author Dr. Norman Vincent Peale declared Ingrid unfit for American movie screens. The Salvation Army, which had paid Ingrid to promote its 1949 charity campaign, withdrew her public messages. The Pilot, the official Catholic newspaper in Boston, was especially harsh, saying, “Some people have tried to make a romance out of a cheap, sordid, immoral affair . . . Miss Bergman has openly and brazenly flouted the laws of God, and decent, moral Americans should stay away from these practitioners of moral filth.”

  On the surface, it may have been surprising that the Vatican itself did not denounce Stromboli. But Rossellini had a long and deep relationship with the Catholic Church in Italy. Though not a practicing Catholic, he had always been inspired by the church’s teachings and its emphasis on the life of the spirit, which he felt were neglected in the materialistic world. For years, Rossellini had been working with the church on Flowers of St. Francis – employing two priests to help develop the project, casting Franciscan monks, and securing funding from the Vatican. Filming f
inally began in January, shortly before Robertino was born.

  So when Stromboli was released, Il Popolo, the Catholic newspaper in Rome, wrote that America’s criticism of the film was “a pre-ordained plan of cannibalistic aggression against Miss Bergman.” Even the Catholic-sponsored National Legion of Decency displayed leniency, issuing a statement that said Stromboli was suitable for public viewing. They preferred to judge the movie, not the people in it.

  While Stromboli initially attracted curious crowds in the United States, within weeks, it had lost its news value. Ingrid, however, had not. Somehow, she fully retained her power to offend. On March 14, 1950, U.S. Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado launched one of the most vicious attacks ever launched on the floor of the Senate against non-criminal civilians, calling Rossellini “vile” and Ingrid a “free-love cultist” who is “one of the most powerful women on earth today - I regret to say, a powerful influence for evil . . .” The senator wondered if Ingrid was suffering from “the dreaded mental disease schizophrenia” or the victim “of some kind of hypnotic influence . . . Her unnatural attitude toward her own little girl surely indicates a mental abnormality . . .”

  Unsatisfied with merely making speeches, Johnson introduced a bill requesting that the Department of Commerce issue licenses to actresses, producers, and films according to moral decency. The bill never went to a vote, but Ingrid’s rights were challenged nonetheless. When asked if Ingrid Bergman should be banned from the United States for “moral turpitude” (based on 1907 immigration laws), as Johnson demanded, the Immigration and Naturalization Service pointed out that Ingrid was not a United States citizen; her visa had expired the previous year.

  “So there I was,” Ingrid recalled later. “Holy Year in Rome with a newborn baby. And everywhere - especially in America - these waves of hatred generated against Roberto and me.” Faced with what she called “a matter of sheer physical and mental survival,” Ingrid was determined to be an ordinary woman taking care of her home and child. She had also become part of Roberto’s family, which included his sister Marcella and Marcella’s daughter Fiorella, who was a bit older than Pia and became like a daughter to Ingrid. (The girl did her part to help by hurling stones at snooping photographers with unerring accuracy.)