by Grace Carter
Finally, the doctors convinced Ingrid that the most prudent course would be “to hell with the constellations,” as she put it. “It was just getting too dangerous.”
The next morning, the doctor arrived with his injection. It was June 18, 1952. “Do you think that’s a good day?” Ingrid asked Rossellini. “Eighteenth of June? Sure that’s a good day,” he replied. “Go ahead.”
Ingrid wanted a girl. After all, Rossellini had already had two sons previously with his first wife and one with Ingrid. She even had a name chosen: Isabella. She did not choose a name for the second child since it might be a boy.
When Ingrid was rolled into the delivery room, the miracle finally happened. The first baby came out – a girl! She was named Isabella Fiorella Elettra Giovanna Rossellini. The child’s father was notified, and he responded enthusiastically. Then the doctor sat down on a stool next to Ingrid and said, “Ah, well, now we just have to wait for the next one.”
“God, Almighty, do I have to go through that again!” Ingrid thought. Later, she would write to Pia, “It was like in the theater: intermission between the first and second acts.”
Finally, the second baby came, and Ingrid heard the shouts: “One more girl!” They were not identical. The second girl was named Isotta Ingrid Frieda Giuliana Rossellini, but everyone called her Ingrid. “The two girls look completely unalike,” Ingrid wrote to Pia, “and I think as they grow up they will prefer it that way, not always being compared and confused with each other.”
Ingrid’s letter to Pia was not received with an open heart, however. Now thirteen years old, the girl had suffered through a traumatic summer, triggered by her mother’s yearning to see her again.
Pia’s visit to London the year before had been such a disaster that Ingrid decided to bypass Lindstrom completely this time and go directly to the California courts. Since it would be nearly impossible for Ingrid to visit the United States with three young children – and the media scrutiny would be unbearable - her lawyer petitioned the Los Angeles court to allow Pia to quietly visit Ingrid in Santa Marinella during the summer holidays.
Lindstrom, not surprisingly, opposed the petition, composing a detailed twenty-one-page affidavit and arranging for a psychiatrist to testify that the trip would cause Pia unnecessary emotional harm. “To Ingrid, it seemed a simple, normal, maternal request,” wrote Burgess in Ingrid’s memoir. “To Petter, it appeared a possible first step to losing Pia altogether. He did not trust Roberto. How would he ever get Pia back once she set foot in Italy?”
The hearing was held in July. The judge’s decision rested on what Pia herself wanted. When the girl took the witness stand, it was a heartbreaking scene.
“Have you ever written your mother letters in which you told her that you loved her?” asked Ingrid’s lawyer, Gregson Bautzer.
“I always sign them ‘Love, Pia.’” she replied.
“And does that express the way you feel about her?”
“No, it’s just the way I end the letter.”
“Miss Lindstrom, you do understand what this case is all about as to what your mother seeks to do?”
“Yes. She wants me to come to Italy. And I don’t want to go to Italy.”
“But you must realize, do you not, that your mother is not asking you to come and live with her?”
“But I just saw her last summer.”
“But you realize, do you not, that your mother is not making a request of this court, or of you, to live with her?”
“Yes.”
“Now, I take it when you signed your letter, ‘Love Pia,’ you didn’t actually love her?”
“I don’t love my mother. I like her.”
“And you don’t miss her?”
“No.”
“And you don’t have any desire to see her?”
“No. I would rather live with my father.”
Later, Judge Mildred T. Lillie intervened to ask, “Do you feel that your mother doesn’t care about you now?”
“Well, I don’t think she cares about me too much,” Pia replied.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, she didn’t seem very interested in me when she left. It was only after she left and got married and had children that she suddenly decided she wanted me.”
In her conclusions, Judge Lillie deplored the worldwide publicity the family’s crisis had generated and faulted both Lindstrom and Ingrid for their pride and selfishness. She chastised Lindstrom for only doing what was required by law or ordered by the court and Ingrid for arguing that during the divorce proceedings she had “bought and bargained for” the right to see her daughter.
During the hearing, Pia expressed an unfavorable opinion of Rossellini, leading the judge to note that there was no legal reason why Ingrid could not visit her daughter in the United States. The court should be cautious before ordering a child to visit a parent in a foreign country, she said, particularly when the child is a minor who would be going against both her own will and the wishes of her father who had custody. “Children are not chattels to be passed back and forwards between parents to satisfy their pride, convenience, and desires at the expense of the welfare of the children,” the judge said. Ingrid’s motion was denied.
In her memoir, Ingrid does not describe how painful it was for her to hear Pia say those things about her. Perhaps she wanted to keep the focus away from her own feelings and avoid appearing to blame Pia for her own misery. But she did quote from a letter she wrote to Pia soon afterward:
“What you said to the judge couldn’t hurt me deep down in my heart, it hurts just on the surface for a time. Because a child can’t hurt its mother, for that love is too big and protecting. But I must continue to fight for my right to have you in my home. There is nothing I hate so much as injustice, and I’ll fight until my last drop of strength.”
Fortunately, mother and daughter continued to communicate by mail. Pia wrote that she and her father had moved to Pittsburgh, where he had been hired as chief of neurosurgery at Aspinwall Veterans Hospital. She did not want to go to Italy, she said, preferring to stay in Pittsburgh to get used to her new home. There was never any need for a court case, Pia said; she could have just told her mother that she did not want to come.
Looking back, many years later, Ingrid acknowledged that she could have gone to the United States earlier – to convince Lindstrom to get a divorce and to see Pia. “Of course you could have gone,” Marta Cohn, the wife of Stromboli screenwriter Art Cohn, once said to her. “You could have borrowed money, bought a plane ticket, and borrowed more money in America.” Ingrid conceded this was true, but she couldn’t bring herself to defy Rossellini’s commands. “Steal or borrow the money, yes, but what would have happened when I returned? Riots would have broken out. Of course, I would have come back to him. I had three children in Italy. But Roberto never believed that. Somehow if I left him and went to America, it would have been a deep act of unfaithfulness, and I would never return . . . or when I did return it would be to a situation I had damaged irreparably.”
When her petition was denied, Ingrid tried to console herself. “I was sad to know that Pia was not coming that summer because I missed her so much,” she wrote to Mollie Faustman, an old friend from Sweden. “It was a sort of agony of missing her, but I listened to other people who came to see me who all said, ‘Wait. Wait. The children come back; they come back.’”
She also tried to stay connected by sending gifts and urging Pia to save her letters for the future, perhaps hoping that when her daughter was grown up, she might understand her mother’s decisions better. Ingrid reminded Pia that she never had a mother of her own. “Would you tell me one day, sweetie, Pia, if you received the flowers at school-graduation and also the letter I wrote on your confirmation day? There are some letters you’ll be glad to have when you are big. I know because I had no mother at all, and when my mother’s friends send me the letters she wrote to them I am so happy. That way I have learned to know my mother.”
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p; Pia did eventually see things differently. In December 2003, at the age of sixty-five, long after her mother’s death, Pia appeared with her two half-sisters on the Larry King show on CNN and said, “I was crazy about her. I mean, I didn’t always - I certainly didn’t like the fact that she left us. I mean, that’s not something that you can like, but it was only because I loved her. And the great quality she had was the thing that many actresses have, a childishness, and I mean that in the best sense of the word, a playfulness.”
But things would get worse between Ingrid and Pia before they got better. Pia was feeling charitable enough toward her mother that she made her a needlework dish towel for her as a thirty-seventh birthday gift in August 1952. But early the following year, she wrote asking her mother to not “make any more noise in the paper” and to “stop with suits and lawyers” and end this “scandal against my father all the time.” Pia closed by suggesting that she focus on her three other children and leave Pia and her father alone.
In March, Ingrid responded with a confession, “It has taken me some time to get up enough courage to answer your last letter. It hurts to answer almost as much as it hurts to read it.”
She went on: “I shall not bother you again, Pia. It seems I am incapable of showing you that I won’t force you to do anything. If you had been younger, I might have tried. But now you are old enough to decide. You ask me to leave you alone. All right, I’ll do that. I have fought hard for almost four years just to be able to have the smallest part of you. I have never asked for much so as not to hurt Papa. But I have failed. Still, you are my child, and I love you as much as I love the others. One child can’t take the place of another, as you think. I love you, my funny monkey. I kiss your blond hair. I kiss your silly nose. With all my heart, I love you. I’ll always be near you even if you don’t see me.”
Later, Ingrid wrote to her lawyer, “I’ll go off into the woods and cry out my pain. She has rebuffed me. I shall not take that by falling on my face and pleading at her feet. She wants to be left alone. I shall leave her alone.”
In her memoir, Ingrid allowed Pia to explain how the whole situation nearly destroyed her father. Later, Lindstrom would marry a successful pediatrician, Agnes Rovnanek, twenty-one years his junior, and together they would have three sons and a daughter. But at this point in his life, Pia said, he was devastated: “And it was a very sad thing to see what he went through; I mean, it was just awful for him to somehow maintain himself, going to work, and the hospital, and operating and being a dignified surgeon on the one hand and, on the other hand, reading all of this in the papers: the worst kind of gossip and salacious journalism, and innuendoes . . . I saw the results when he came home; he was truly in a terrible depression, and it was just a tremendous blow to his whole life.”
Pia admitted that she could not help but see things from her father’s point of view: “I did happen to stay with him, and Mother left. A whole new life opened for her which was dramatic and glorious and a passionate love affair so romantic and marvelous. Well, that was grand for Mother. But on the other hand, what was left behind was not. I didn’t happen to live with the part that was all that glorious.”
What Pia at age fourteen could not understand, of course, is that her mother’s life was not all that glorious. Besides being consumed by maternal guilt, Ingrid was worried about money, busy caring for three small children, married to an extremely volatile, undependable, and manipulative man, and stuck in a career that was going nowhere.
To rectify at least some of those problems, Rossellini decided to try to make more commercial films that would also keep Ingrid artistically satisfied. This time, he ventured even further from his neo-realistic style and closer to Hollywood standards by hiring a well-known Hollywood leading man, George Sanders. The suave Russian-born actor had appeared in Ingrid’s third Hollywood film, Rage in Heaven and would later win an Oscar for playing the cynical theater critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve.
Rossellini had planned to make an adaptation of the French writer Colette’s novel Duo, about a vacationing married couple dealing with the wife’s unfaithfulness. But by the time Sanders arrived in Rome, Rossellini had discovered that the rights to Duo had already been sold. The director hardly seemed worried; he would just write another script on a similar theme, changing the story just enough to avoid legal problems.
“What is this?” Sanders asked Ingrid. “I’m coming here to do Duo and now it’s going to be something else? He’s changed his mind?”
Ingrid wasn’t too concerned at first, either – such behavior was par for the course with Rossellini. But she began having doubts, too, after spending the first two weeks of shooting trying to look fascinated staring at ancient statues in the Naples Museum while a guide droned on about the glories of ancient Greece and Rome.
Each day, Rossellini wrote the scenes that would be shot that day, leaving no time for the actors to prepare and rehearse. Sanders was outraged by Rossellini’s unprofessionalism. The director went fishing, played cards, or slept instead of coming to work, accomplishing nothing in three months. Sanders would show up on time only to have filming postponed until the next morning. Rather than work out the problems with the script and on the set, Rossellini would race off to Naples in his Ferrari.
Unnerved by the disarray, Sanders had a series of nervous breakdowns and called his Hollywood psychiatrist every night. Finally, Rossellini sent for Sanders’s wife, the temperamental Hungarian beauty, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, but her presence only added to the chaos. (They would divorce the following year.)
Like Ingrid, Sanders was used to the speedy, efficient Hollywood movie-making machinery of completed scripts, rehearsals, and shooting schedules. One day, Ingrid found him sitting in his dressing room, crying. “There’s no dialogue,” he wailed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s just impossible. I can’t take it.”
Sanders, who struggled with depression for much of his life, would commit suicide nineteen years later at sixty-five after suffering from dementia and other health problems. Ironically, however, the Rossellini film ended up being a high point in his life. Somehow, he got through the shooting and was shocked to discover that he actually enjoyed the experience. Despite everything, Rossellini had managed to charm him as he did so many others. “My friend, it isn’t the first bad movie you’ve been in,” Rossellini told him. “Nor will it be the last. So cheer up.”
When the film, entitled Journey to Italy, was finally released in September 1954 in the United States and Italy, the critics trashed it, calling it a dreary waste of time, and moviegoers stayed away. But the film was profoundly influential on directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Martin Scorsese. In 2002, it was ranked forty-first in a survey of film critics by Sight & Sound magazine under the auspices of the British Film Institute.
When Journey to Italy was completed, Ingrid and Rossellini jumped right into their next project, which was a departure for both of them. While in Naples, they had met poet Paul Claudel and composer Arthur Honegger, who in the 1930s had written an oratorio entitled, Joan of Arc at the Stake, which Ingrid was intimately familiar with. After hearing her praise their work, Claudel and Honegger suggested she join the production and tour with it throughout Europe. She would not have to sing - the choir would do that. Instead, she would play Joan speaking in verse. Rossellini would direct.
Both were was equally enthused by the idea. “I knew the piece well,” Ingrid recalled later. “I’d been given the whole set of five records by Joe Steele and Ruth Roberts while we were working on the film of Joan of Arc. I found it exciting then and exciting now. I could learn the words in Italian and learn to recognize every phrase of the music by ear.”
Rossellini seemed undaunted by the challenge of directing a cast of 100 performers, including ballet dancers, plus a choir of fifty. As rehearsal time approached, Ingrid kept saying, “Aren’t you going to think about the way you’re going to do it?”
“Sure, as soon as I have t
ime,” he replied.
Ingrid continued to pester him about his plans until Rossellini finally said, “Just give me one of those old envelopes, will you?” Ingrid did. On the back, he scrawled for a while, then said, “There’s my scenario.”
Ingrid could not make sense of his scribblings, but once rehearsals started, his vision became clear. Other ideas emerged, like using a back projector to show images of landscapes and churches. He also had a child tied to the stake, dying in flames, as the curtain opens and Ingrid rose up on an elevator, dressed in black with only her face showing, to represent the mind of Joan looking back on her life.
Both audiences and critics applauded the show when it opened in Naples in November 1953. For over a year, until the spring of 1955, they would perform Joan of Arc at the Stake in four languages in five countries – at the opera house in Palermo, Sicily; at La Scala in Milan; at the Paris and Stockholm opera houses; and in Barcelona and London.
Rossellini, ever the rebel, complained to Ingrid about the opera singers. “It’s all this talking about the voice and the notes and the tones - oh God, they’re so boring,” he said. “And they have no idea what’s going on in the world. They have no idea if a war is going on, or if we’re being attacked by the Martians. They just don’t care. It’s all this tra-la-la-la! The only thing in their lives is the sound of their voices and the next aria.”
In May 1954, while she was performing in the oratorio, Ingrid received some terrible news. Her soulmate Robert Capa had been killed while on assignment. He was forty years old. He had sat out the Korean War, but Life magazine lured him back to the battlefield by asking him to cover the French colonial war in Vietnam. Capa stepped on a landmine and was taken to a small field hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Though she hadn’t seen Capa in years, Ingrid mourned the loss deeply. In letters to friends, she wrote that because of Rossellini’s jealousy, she had no way to express her grief other than to her children. It hadn’t seemed so long ago that they were laughing together in Berlin during her postwar efforts to entertain the troops. “So strange and terrible he has gone,” Ingrid wrote to Ruth Roberts.