by Grace Carter
Capa’s death may have been especially difficult for Ingrid because it reminded her of the stark contrast between her younger, halcyon days with the dashing photographer and her current, troubled life. With Rossellini’s wild spending habits, money was always tight, good film opportunities for Ingrid were increasingly rare, and her new husband was as controlling as ever, not only refusing to allow her to work with other directors but also unable to properly use her talent in his own films.
“We weren’t a good mix,” Ingrid admitted later. “The world hated the Rossellini version of me, so nothing worked. And he was stuck with me. What did he want with an international star? Nothing. He didn’t know what to write for me. And, of course, by this time we both knew it. It was something we did not talk about. But the silences between us grew longer - the silences when I didn’t dare to say anything because I would hurt his feelings.”
And yet, Ingrid could not even imagine life without her beloved Rossellini – at least not yet.
The slow crumbling of Ingrid’s marriage to Rossellini would become inextricably bound up with the disintegration of their creative relationship. They didn’t realize it at the time, but the beginning of the end was evident in the problems that began cropping up in their ambitious, sprawling oratorio, Joan of Arc at the Stake.
A big hit in Naples, the production did not make a successful transition into a road show traipsing around Europe. The biggest issue was that an entirely new cast and crew had to be assembled at each location, making it impossible to have a full rehearsal. Electricians had other jobs during the day; soloists and orchestra musicians were busy with other gigs. When the pianist could make it, the ballet dancers could not. As a result, the best the producers could manage was a full dress rehearsal the night of the show. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ingrid said. “I never want to see anything like it again.”
In each city, Ingrid would sit in her dressing room and talk to herself: “I must just behave like a horse, with blinkers, go forward in the way I know. Don’t look at anything technical. Don’t worry if half the scenery falls down. Just remember your lines, look at the conductor, and keep your talk in tempo with the music so that you end up in unison with the chorus.” Then she would realize, “But they haven’t been rehearsed properly . . . Oh, God!”
On opening night in Barcelona, Ingrid noticed a monk she had never seen before running around on stage during the show, pushing performers in one direction or another. As he came toward her, he looked up under his hood, grinning, and said, “By the way, you’re no good either!” It was Rossellini, directing the whole thing on stage. “More fortissimo!” he cried. “That’s better. Now ballet, ballet - animation, animation!”
The audience loved it, which Ingrid chalked up to the generous heart of the Spanish people. “But to me,” she recalled later, “it was pure agony.”
Between shows, Ingrid went sight-seeing with her children; after leaving Pia behind for so many years while she worked, she was not about to make the same mistake again. But photographers trailed them wherever they went – to museums, to shows, on the streets – making life miserable.
There were some high points, however. In Paris, Paul Claudel was delighted to see his work performed in such a strikingly original way. “My God, you play it like a peasant girl, you really play it like a simple peasant girl,” he told Ingrid. She replied, “But she was a peasant girl, a simple maid. She didn’t know she was going to be a saint. She never stepped outside her own character.” Claudel, who had been expecting the worst, said, “Oh, what a relief. Oh, how touching.”
Arthur Honegger, who was sick and living in Switzerland, also managed to see the show in Paris. “I love the natural voice you use,” he told Ingrid. “Every other actress has declaimed so heroically, but you talk like an ordinary girl. And you do that little dance and sing with the children. That is the real Joan.”
The production was a career highlight for Claudel and Honegger, who both passed away the following year. Ingrid said she treasured their friendship while they were alive and remained close to their families after their deaths.
But when the show reached England, it began to have even more problems. The text did not translate well from the original French into English, and much was lost. The sound in the enormous Stoll Theater was not good. Reviews were mixed, though Louis T. Stanley of The Sketch wrote glowingly of Ingrid: “In the engulfing darkness and piercing shafts of light at the Stoll, she suggests the spiritual statuesque calm of one who has climbed to the summit high above the gross world. She evokes the sadness of things supremely well . . . The quality she possesses is more than beauty: it is strangeness in beauty.”
The worst press reception of all, ironically, was in Ingrid’s native Sweden. She arrived there full of hope and excitement. “After all those years, when I finally came home to appear on the Swedish stage with this oratorio I loved, my joy was enormous,” she recalled later. “After the long journey we had made through Italy, France, England, and Spain, after working in three foreign languages, I would at last speak my own . . . During the sixteen years I had been abroad, I had never stopped loving Sweden, never stopped hoping to return one day.”
On opening night, Ingrid basked in the applause and felt the warmth and love from the audience. “My dream had been fulfilled,” she said later. Afterward, she said to Rossellini, “Now I can lie down peacefully and die.”
Other parts of Swedish society were welcoming as well. Ingrid and Rossellini went to a ball attended by the king of Sweden, who was eager to discuss Ferraris with Rossellini. Ingrid was invited to dinner by a music group called “The Swedes” that her father had sung with. “They talked about him, and they sang the songs that he had sung with them,” she recalled. “I was so moved I cried in my napkin.”
The critics, however, savaged her performance. “There wasn’t one day after the opening night that some newspaper or magazine wasn’t out to kill me,” she said. And the gossip columnists were vicious, perhaps playing upon a Swedish sense of abandonment because Ingrid had left their small country to become an international star.
The newspapers mocked Rossellini’s portly figure and receding hairline and called his direction of the oratorio superficial and banal. They trashed Ingrid: “This egocentric woman didn’t look for a moment as though she was suffering - but nor would I if I were paid as much as she is a night,” read one review. “She lacks magnetism and intensity,” read another. Stig Ahlgren, in Vecko-Journalen, wrote, “It just happened that, after making one film failure after another, nothing else remained for Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman but to travel from one city to another, from one country to another, showing Ingrid Bergman for money.”
It wasn’t the bad reviews that bothered Ingrid; she was used to it. What really upset her were the attacks on her personal life: the journalist who broke into her hotel suite and took pictures of her children; the criticism for not allowing the kids to be photographed, then being criticized again for showing off when she finally gave in to the pleas of photographers; being held up for ridicule because Rossellini was driving both a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce.
Everything Ingrid did was suspect. When she visited Anna Norrie, her old teacher from the Royal Dramatic School, on Norrie’s ninetieth birthday, she was accused of staging a publicity stunt. When she spoke a few words of mourning after the death of Claudel, dedicating the night’s performance to his memory, she was attacked, she said later, for having the “nerve to come out front with my crocodile tears, pretend I was sorry, and try to make a little extra personal publicity by showing off in front of the curtain. Really, it was unbelievable.”
When a Stockholm newspaper criticized her for appearing at a charity performance for polio victims, Ingrid reached her breaking point. At the event, she told the crowd filling an enormous concert hall, “What have I done to get such a beating? . . . Many of my colleagues say, ‘You shouldn’t care what the papers say about you,’ and ‘What is said today is forgotten tomorrow. No
one will remember.’ Well, I will remember. No one will stand up to them and say we’ve had enough. Well, I’ve had enough.”
From the stage, Ingrid could see that people in the front rows were crying. “Thank you very much for listening to me, but this is how I feel about coming back to Sweden, and probably I shall never come back ever again.”
Afterward, she was surprised to find that many in the press defended her, including an old friend, Mollie Faustman. “One of the most ridiculous claims is that Ingrid Bergman is a clever businesswoman,” she wrote. “If anyone is stupid in business, it’s her! I don’t think she can be blamed for accepting the high fee she is offered - it seems her slanderers would have acted otherwise in her situation - but the claim that she is avaricious is complete nonsense, which I feel ashamed even to mention . . . If all the people whom she had helped were to step forward, it would be a very long row, indeed.”
It is ironic that while Ingrid was being accused of being a greedy opportunist, a combination of the oratorio’s low pay scale and Rossellini’s free-spending ways resulted in her spending the tour constantly worried about money and desperate to find film or theater work to make ends meet. She was approached about possible projects with Gary Cooper, Billy Wilder, George Cukor, John Wayne, and Bob Hope, but none came to fruition, often because of Rossellini’s objections. She received many offers to perform in films and plays in Sweden, but as she put it, “the press is so disgusting that I don’t want to remain. I have made such a fuss that they don’t persecute me anymore, and the papers are full of how brave I am that I dared to tell them. But it is a rotten press atmosphere here.”
In December 1953, Rossellini filmed Joan at the Stake in Naples to preserve it for posterity and perhaps make some money. But he was not able to get it released until a year later, and the movie did not recoup its costs. While they were touring in 1954, they took a break to make another film, Fear, that not only did not help them financially but made Ingrid realize the time had come – she had to begin working with directors other than Rossellini.
Called La Paura in Italian and Angst in some releases, Fear was based on a story by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, financed with German money, and filmed in Munich. Ingrid played a married woman named Irene, who is having a secret affair. When her lover’s previous mistress begins to blackmail her, she is filled with remorse, but upon learning that her husband is behind the extortion, she flies into a suicidal-homicidal rage. Her husband ultimately prevents her from killing herself, and they forgive each other for their indiscretions.
Shooting the film was difficult because Ingrid had the children with her – and they were doing two language versions, in German and English. Plus, Ingrid was growing increasingly resentful that Rossellini was not letting her work with other directors. She said later, “There were all these wonderful Italian directors: Zeffirelli, Fellini, Visconti, De Sica; all wanted to work with me and I wanted to work with them; and they were furious with Roberto that he wouldn’t let me work for them . . . but in Roberto’s terms, I was his property.”
If not brilliant, Fear was one of Rossellini’s better works, noirish with echoes of Hitchcock and German expressionism, and Ingrid and the cast gave solid performances. But when it was released in November 1954, in Germany, and February 1955, in Italy, some critics concluded that the Rossellini-Bergman partnership had run its course.
“Roberto and Ingrid will either have to change their style of work radically - or retire into dignified silence,” wrote Angelo Solmi, one of Italy’s most respected critics. “The abyss into which Bergman and Rossellini have plunged can be measured by Fear. This is not because this film is any worse than their other recent motion pictures together but because half a dozen tries with negative results prove the inability of the couple to create anything acceptable to the public or the critics. Once the world’s unquestioned Number One star and successor to Greta Garbo, Miss Bergman in her latest pictures has only been a shadow of herself.”
Indeed, Fear ended up being the fifth – and final – film she would make with Rossellini. Though many commentators accused the erratic Italian director of ruining the career of the great Swedish actress, Ingrid saw it the other way around: She had ruined him. To work with a global Hollywood star – and make half-hearted attempts at commercial success – he had to violate his deepest artistic principles and compromise the neo-realist style that had made him a celebrated figure in world cinema. Regardless of who ruined whom, the truth seemed clear: By collaborating, neither was able to reach their fullest potential.
And yet, the idea of leaving Rossellini never occurred to Ingrid – until she had a conversation with the German actor Mathias Wiemann while working on Fear. Seeing how unhappy she was, one day he said quietly, “You are being torn to pieces. You’ll go insane if you continue like this. Why don’t you leave Roberto?”
Ingrid stared at him, incredulous. What an absurd question. Leave Rossellini? The man for whom she had abandoned her precious teenage daughter, ruined her Hollywood career, and touched off an international scandal? “How can I do that?” she said. “It’s impossible!”
At this point, what she really wanted was an artistic separation, so she quickly dismissed Wiemann’s suggestion. But when the famed French director Jean Renoir approached her about working together, she was all ears. The two had talked about doing a film for many years, but each time, the director would say, “No. The time is not yet ready, Ingrid. You’re too big a star for me now. But I shall wait until you are falling. It happens in all careers in Hollywood. You go up and you go down. Now you’ve gone up as high as you can possibly go and you will stay there. But I shall wait until you are falling, and then I shall be holding the net to catch you. I shall be there with the net.”
Renoir came to visit Ingrid in Santa Marinella after Fear had wrapped. “Ingrid, now is the time, and I have the net ready,” he said. “I want you to come and do a film in Paris with me.”
Flattered, Ingrid read the script of Elena et les Hommes (Elena and Her Men) and was charmed by the characters, the score, and the costumes, and she loved the idea of working with professional actors again. The comedic film tells the story of a princess who acts as a sponsor for a succession of men to boost their careers. A comedy was just what Ingrid needed – a complete change of pace from the films Rossellini had directed.
But her heart was heavy. “Jean, it is not possible,” Ingrid replied. “Roberto will not let me work with anybody else.”
Renoir smiled and said, “I shall talk to Roberto.” And to Ingrid’s surprise, this time, Rossellini agreed. Ingrid was never sure why but suspected it was because Renoir was one of the few directors her husband admired. Plus, Rossellini had already been making arrangements to be away, doing a film in India that did not involve Ingrid.
Back on the set of a well-organized film, Ingrid felt great waves of relief as if she had finally returned home after a long absence. She rented a small suite for herself and her three youngest children at the Raphael Hotel in Paris and production began in November 1955 at the Joinville studios just outside the city. Ingrid memorized her lines in both English and French. The movie was filmed in Technicolor in lavish period costumes, displaying her new maturity with elegance and grace, and she loved working with her co-stars Jean Marais, Mel Ferrer, and Jean Richard.
When the ninety-five-minute film came out in September 1956 in France, it earned critical raves. But when it was released in the United States the following March, under the title Paris Does Strange Things, Ingrid recalled, “The critics declared it a disaster.” (In subsequent years, the reviews were kinder, and critics said Ingrid’s performance transcended the uninspired plot about a Polish princess and the fate of France.)
Meanwhile, things were not going well for Rossellini. His film in India had been postponed, and his recent string of commercial failures made it hard for him to raise money. And his relationship with Ingrid was growing increasingly frayed.
While she was in Paris filming Elena and H
er Men, their relationship began to bottom out. One morning, in the heat of an argument, Rossellini demanded that Ingrid sign a letter agreeing to a separation and promising that their three children would not be allowed to live anywhere except Italy or France. If she refused, he would take the children away with him while she was off shooting that day. “I did not believe it, of course, but still when he gets like that I am afraid that lacking train tickets he will put them all in the car and drive off,” she wrote to Gigi Girosi, a close friend in Rome, in January 1956.
Ingrid, who was due at the studio, signed the document. Then she pleaded with him, got angry at him, put her head on his chest, and cried. When all that failed, she laughed, in his presence, at the absurdity of it all. “Thank God I never seem to lose my sense of humor even in the most tragic situations,” she told Girosi. Nothing worked. So she went off to work at the studio and Rossellini left for Italy, alone, saying he would never come back to her. He even took the children’s passports to prevent her from absconding with the kids.
“I am afraid of losing my children again,” she wrote to Girosi, explaining why she signed the document. “I am not afraid of being alone, but of having made four children and all taken away from me.”
For a while, tensions in the marriage subsided, as they had on other occasions. Rossellini finally got some work – the chance to direct a play about Judas at the Théâtre de Paris. He was thrilled and began studying the historical period of Jesus. He had never directed a theater play before - as an oratorio, Joan of Arc at the Stake did not qualify - but he was brimming with ideas. And Ingrid was elated at the idea of living in Paris, a city she adored.
Once rehearsals started, however, the leading actor didn’t like the director’s ideas. Finally, Rossellini was asked to leave the show to make room for another director. “Roberto was absolutely destroyed by this experience,” Ingrid said. “I just had to take him in my arms and say, ‘Something else is round the corner. I’m sure there’ll be something else.’”