by Grace Carter
A few weeks later, Kay Brown had decided that these two prominent Swedes in the Paris theatrical scene should have a proper meeting. So she had Schmidt invite Ingrid to dinner. “Oh dear,” said Ingrid, blushing when he reminded her that they had met before, “I thought you were the waiter!”
“I’d never seen anyone blush like it,” Schmidt recalled. “Then she looked at me with this most divine smile. And that night I called her again. And that broke the ice completely.”
Schmidt was tall, handsome, smart, and funny, and Ingrid enjoyed spending time with him. For the time being, however, that was enough. With a busy performing schedule, three children to care for, and still being married to Rossellini, Ingrid was not ready for any serious romantic commitments.
In fact, despite her deep marital problems, Ingrid was still not thinking about divorcing her husband. “I would have gone through hell and still stayed with him,” she said, “having had such hell to marry him in the first place.”
Ingrid, strangely, had another reason for staying. By her logic, she could not abandon the man she believed she had ruined by making such spectacularly unsuccessful films with him. “After all, who took the first step?” she said later. “I did. I was the one who wrote to him that I wanted to make a movie with him. It had all started with that. And I felt that when he came back from India we would pick up the situation and go on in the same way - or try to . . .”
By her logic, she could not abandon the man she believed she had ruined by making such spectacularly unsuccessful films with him. “After all, who took the first step?” she said later. “I did. I was the one who wrote to him that I wanted to make a movie with him. It had all started with that. And I felt that when he came back from India we would pick up the situation and go on in the same way - or try to . . .”
With Rossellini, Ingrid felt she had found a rare and magical world, one that most people never discover. “I did have marvelous happiness with Roberto as well as deep troubles,” she said later. “But trouble is part of one’s life. If you have never had any trouble, if you have never cried, if you have never been really miserable and thought that you could not go on, what kind of understanding would you have for other people who are in trouble?”
Yet Ingrid could not shake the feeling that she would never make Rossellini happy. Once, when they were having big money troubles, she said to him, “Look, let us go bankrupt. People go bankrupt, don’t they? What can happen? We don’t go to jail, do we? Let us just live on whatever we have. Let them take the house away. Give it all away, everything, everything. And we start from nothing. We take a small apartment. I shall do the cleaning, the scrubbing, cook the food. We won’t have any servants or anything.”
Rossellini looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “That life isn’t worth living,” he said.
The turning point came one night in the spring of 1957 when the phone rang in her bedroom at the Raphael Hotel. It was Rossellini, calling from India.
“How are things going?” she asked.
“Oh, fine, fine, but there are these newspaper stories going around about this woman. If any newspaper people call you regarding some romance of mine, you will deny it. Not a word of it is true! Not a word!”
“All right,” she said. “If you say so.” By now, Ingrid knew her husband well enough to know that he was lying. According to press reports, he was having an affair with twenty-seven-year-old Sonali Senroy DasGupta, the wife of his Indian producer, who was co-writing Rossellini’s script.
Ingrid and Rossellini chatted for a bit more, then hung up. Remarkably, when she set the phone down, she was not angry. Nor was she sad, or feeling betrayed. Instead, she was happy. “He had fallen in love again,” Ingrid said. “Certainly (Sonali) would be in love with him, and now she would look after him and make him happy. He had left me. As I sat on the bed, I could feel the smile spreading right around up to my ears. I was so pleased. For him. And for me. Now we had solved it.”
Ingrid found a peaceful resolution to another turbulent relationship that summer when Pia came to visit her in Paris.
On July 8, 1957, Ingrid finally got what she had fought so many years to get: Time alone with her youngest daughter. It had been six years since they had last seen each other at that disastrous meeting in London when Pia was just twelve.
“I knew it would be a very emotional meeting,” Ingrid recalled. “I knew I would weep. I expected that Pia would cry also. And I didn’t really want all this in front of the dozens of cameramen who were bound to be there.” So she worked out a plan with Scandinavian Airlines to meet Pia on the plane after all the other passengers had disembarked.
No sooner had Ingrid boarded, and they fell into each other’s arms, than a flashbulb went off. A photographer from Paris Match magazine, noticing that Pia was not getting off, had hid on the floor at the back of the plane. He was promptly tossed out. Pia looked at her mom and said, “How young you look.”
Pia, who ended up staying for two months, later remembered the visit well. “Meeting in Paris wasn’t a trauma,” she said. “It’s a trauma when things happen at age ten. As I look back on it, I found that Paris meeting very exciting; all that attention was very exciting. There were hundreds and hundreds of people at the airport just to see my mother and me. I mean, it was really a combination of being excited and being, I suppose, a little embarrassed and ill at ease because so many people are staring at you, and taking pictures of you.”
After sneaking out the back door of their hotel, they got to spend one night alone. After that, they were besieged everywhere they went. They toured Paris, visited Sicily, and Pia finally got to move into the room her mother had created for her back at Santa Marinella. The girl was excited to finally meet her seven-year-old half-brother, Robertino, and her five-year-old twin half-sisters, Isabella and Ingrid.
“She is lots of fun, sensible and intelligent,” Ingrid wrote to Irene Selznick. “She is so much more than I ever hoped for. I can’t tell you how happy I am these days. It seems impossible and still I can’t really believe it. I behave very casually - just as if the whole thing was natural - just not to scare her. I leave her much alone to be with the young ones or to read a book in a corner. I long for the moments we talk, but I won’t force myself on her.”
On her first day, Pia told her mother she could not come home to Europe next summer. By the second day, she had changed her mind. “Why in the world should I stay in America,” she said, “when it is so wonderful here?”
When Pia left, and with Rossellini still away in India, Ingrid realized that – almost for the first time in her life – she was free to make her own decisions. “I remember getting my first salary check for Tea and Sympathy,” she recalled. “I don’t think I’d held any money I’d earned since I was given the ten kronor for being an extra at sixteen! I didn’t know what to do with it.”
She bought a piece of art, a miniature painted by the father of the director Jean Renoir, the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. She was excited that she had bought it for herself. She wanted it, she bought it, and no man could tell her she could not have it. She was still living frugally, of course; with no income from the films she had made with Rossellini and all the money she had made before 1950 lost in her divorce from Lindstrom, she had little to spare.
In the fall of 1957, Rossellini finally came to Paris to see Ingrid. They had not seen each other since he left in a huff right after Tea and Sympathy opened ten months earlier and so much remained unresolved. He was sitting in an armchair in her suite at the Raphael Hotel, twisting a lock of his hair, when Ingrid thought, “Well, perhaps now’s the time.”
“Look, Roberto, would you like a divorce?” she asked. He leaned back in the chair, still playing with his hair, and looked at the ceiling light but didn’t answer.
What Rossellini did not know was that his wife had met his Indian mistress just a few days earlier. Sonali had contacted Ingrid through a mutual friend to set up the meeting. She arrived with a b
aby in her arms. It took some quick calculations for Ingrid to realize the baby could not possibly be Rossellini’s child – and later she learned that Sonali’s husband was the father. (Ingrid would also discover later that, in fact, the woman was already pregnant by Rossellini.)
In her memoir, Ingrid says Sonali didn’t want anything from her – she just wanted to meet – though biographies of Ingrid tell a different story. Sonali had requested the meeting to tell Ingrid she wanted to marry Rossellini, and Ingrid responded that she would not stand in their way.
Back in her hotel suite, Ingrid waited for Rossellini to answer her question. So she tried again, very quietly, “Roberto, do you think it a good idea if we get a divorce?”
That was a strange thing to say, Ingrid thought, since Rossellini had a big name in the film world and was his own man, hardly one to capitulate to others. But what she said was, “All right. I understand. We’ll get a divorce.”
“You must have the children,” he said. “They belong to their mother. But there are two things I must ask you.”
“Yes, what are they?”
“The children must never go to America,” Rossellini said. His hatred for the United States was absolute.
“Never go to America!” she cried. “How can I prevent my children when they grow up from going to America?”
“All right, all right,” he said. “When they’re eighteen.”
“So what’s the second thing?”
“That you’ll never marry again,” he said.
“I should never marry again?” she stammered.
“That’s right, not at your age.”
“My age!” Ingrid said. “Look, you’re almost ten years older than I am. You’re going out with a lovely young Indian woman. You’ve found someone else who is young and beautiful, but I’m not supposed to go out and find someone who is young and beautiful. I’m not to marry again. You have no right to prevent me.”
“You are supposed to take care of the children,” Rossellini said. “You have three children, four children with Pia. I mean, what more do you want?”
“I’m not going to promise you that,” she said. Then she began to laugh. “It was all very funny,” she recalled later. “I couldn’t help laughing. That was Roberto.”
On November 7, 1957, Ingrid and Rossellini signed an agreement in Rome that gave Ingrid temporary custody of their three children. Legally ending the marriage, however, would not be so easy. In Italy, divorce was still against the law.
Ingrid had no desire to keep Rossellini from his own children; they were all Italian citizens and would remain so. Rossellini’s terms were not as generous, however. If Ingrid intended to remarry, he said, he would declare her an unfit mother and take away her visitation rights. If she attempted to obtain a foreign divorce and marry outside Italy, she would be considered a bigamist.
Fortunately for Ingrid, her attorney, Ercole Graziadei, found a solution. Because Ingrid had never registered her Swedish proxy divorce before her Mexican proxy marriage to Rossellini, Italian law still viewed her as Lindstrom’s wife. Graziadei argued that the marriage between Ingrid and Rossellini must be annulled because it never legally existed. As for their children, no Italian child was considered illegitimate if the father claimed paternity.
Graziadei’s plea was approved with no reservations; the judge merely nodded his agreement and left for lunch. (Ingrid’s only complication was that after her Italian proxy marriage, Sweden no longer considered her a citizen. But after some legal wrangling with her home country in 1958, she was once again considered a Swede.)
Things could not have gone better for Ingrid, but there was still one rather large problem: She needed money. Throughout her marriages to Lindstrom and Rossellini, she had avoided the subject of taxes. She was learning the hard way that every country she had worked in wanted its fingers in her pockets. France had a lien on her theater earnings, and Italy had staked a claim of its own. Rossellini, as usual, had nothing to contribute but bills from India.
Fortunately, the success of Anastasia had made her a hot commodity again. The previous summer, as Tea and Sympathy was closing its successful run in Paris, director Stanley Donen had come to Europe to convince her to make the movie version of the 1953 comedy play, Kind Sir, with Cary Grant. The show had fared poorly on Broadway, but Donen insisted it would be better as a film, especially with her as his leading lady.
Ingrid agreed though she knew almost nothing about the project or its director. She gave her approval based on an article she had read about Donen, the fact that Grant trusted him, and, perhaps most important, the $125,000 she would earn. The story was about a bachelor (Grant) so terrified of commitment that he tells women he’s already married. When he meets actress Anna Kalman (Ingrid), she turns the tables on him, and, of course, they fall in love. Later, the film was renamed Indiscreet.
When it was over, her friend Sydney Bernstein drove them to the Connaught Hotel. They were all laughing, a good start to making a comedic film. Indiscreet was light fare - just what Ingrid needed.
And the film had a happy ending – just what Ingrid wanted in her own life, too. To that end, she decided to spend Christmas with Rossellini and their children at his apartment in Rome.
“We had such a good time,” Ingrid said later, remembering Rossellini lying with his head in her lap, sharing a laugh and drinking glogg, a strong Swedish drink made with red wine, schnapps, nuts, raisins, and cinnamon. She sent a bottle of it downstairs to the waiting press.
The divorced couple still had many battles ahead of them, especially over their children. But for now, Ingrid was happy. Her jovial spirits had something to do with her new boyfriend, the theatrical producer Lars Schmidt.
When it was clear to Ingrid that she would be divorcing her husband, her relationship with Schmidt picked up steam, and they began seeing a lot more of each other. She could tell he was getting serious a few months earlier when the couple went to the famous Sacré-Coeur Basilica at the summit of Montmartre, the highest point in Paris. In the church, they each lit a candle. Ingrid looked over and noticed that Schmidt had a solemn expression.
“Are you praying?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m praying that you will be mine.”
As Ingrid was beginning a promising new relationship with Lars Schmidt, the emotional fallout from her previous marriage to Rossellini continued to haunt her. Fortunately, during this period she was filming a comedy about the absurdities of romance and marriage that kept her laughing through it all.
Filming for Indiscreet wrapped on February 6, 1958, with an expected release date in June. Ingrid’s first American comedy was a success, and her onscreen interactions with Grant were tremendously funny. At one point, her character, Anna Kalman, says about Grant’s Philip Adams, “How dare he make love to me and not be a married man?”
Meanwhile, Ingrid’s real-life romance with Schmidt was intensifying. She liked his confidence and appreciated that, as a theater producer, he understood actors and felt no need to meddle in her career as both Lindstrom and Rossellini had done. As fellow Swedes, they richly enjoyed a commonality of language and history.
“I was in love with Lars,” Ingrid wrote in her memoir, “and we wanted to get married.”
The son of a Swedish army lieutenant, Schmidt was forty years old, nearly two years younger than Ingrid. As a young man, he had initially planned to obey his parents’ wishes that he go into the shipping business but got sidetracked by his love of the arts. By the 1940s, he was producing shows in Sweden and expanding into other European countries where he introduced audiences to plays by American playwrights Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and others.
Then World War II broke out, and Schmidt desperately wanted to move to New York, where theater was booming. Since there were no commercial aircraft flying across the Atlantic, he found a berth on a small Finnish ship. Near the Faeroe Islands, German bombers attacked his vessel. The cabin next to Schmidt’s was destroyed, but the flames and
smoke attracted the attention of a Swedish ship that came to the rescue. However, half the crew and passengers had been killed. Schmidt ended up on the Faeroe Islands, where he spent eight difficult weeks before getting passage to New York, arriving with nothing but the clothes on his back.
In New York, Schmidt took any theater job he could find – stage-hand, scene-shifter, and errand boy – until he scraped up enough money to buy the foreign rights to the farcical American comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. In 1942, he married a woman named Ingrid Hallner. (The marriage ended after only eight years, but they had a son who died in a tragic accident in 1950. An extremely private person, Schmidt did not discuss the details of his son’s death in public, but he would always carry with him a deep need to have another child.)
After establishing himself in New York, Schmidt resumed promoting and producing plays across Europe, settling in Paris in 1954, two years before Ingrid arrived, where he gained respect for his successful production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. (In the spring of 1957, as he was getting serious about Ingrid, Schmidt was negotiating to acquire the European rights to My Fair Lady.)
“Lars’s career was much like mine in that he, too, was born in Sweden, had a Swedish upbringing, and then spent his life as a foreigner, always speaking foreign languages,” Ingrid explained later. “That brought us very close; we understood each other. We didn’t even have to talk.”
As their relationship deepened, Schmidt made an unusual pronouncement: If Ingrid’s idea of an island getaway was St. Tropez, Capri, or Monte Carlo, the marriage was off. On the other hand, if she liked Danholmen, the small island off the coast of Sweden that he had recently bought, they could live happily ever after.
That’s how, during the frigid early months of 1958, Ingrid found herself aboard a fishing boat big enough to smash through the ice so they could reach the island. Both she and Schmidt were anxious about how she would react. In retrospect, they had nothing to worry about.