by Grace Carter
“I loved every minute of the journey and the island itself,” Ingrid said later. “So lonely. Huge skies, immense seas. An island full of enormous rounded boulders and little coves - the sea everywhere. In the summer, everything so bright and shining - sea and rocks, and sky. And such a feeling of isolation.”
Schmidt’s saltbox cottage on the island was a small rectangular structure with a little kitchen, one bedroom, and a combination living-dining room. It had a contraption that converted salt water into drinking water but had no plumbing, electricity, or phone. They pumped their own fresh water, rummaged for wood to make fires, and caught fish themselves with nets.
On her first visit, they sat on the big round rocks near the house and Ingrid said, “I love your island.”
Schmidt replied, “Right, let’s get married.”
“It all sounded very simple,” Ingrid said later, “but it wasn’t as simple as all that.”
She would have to deal with Rossellini’s inevitable opposition, of course, and how her children would react. First, she had to get the kids on board. Pia was immediately resistant. She wrote her mother a stern letter warning her about jumping right into another marriage because “you are not good at choosing your husbands.” She should take her time before making up her mind, Pia advised, reminding her of her responsibility to her children, who are often judged by what their famous mother does. But, she added, “I’m behind you whatever you decide.”
Later, Pia came to visit them in Paris and quickly abandoned all her misgivings. One night, she and Schmidt sent Ingrid out of the room to check on dinner while they carried on, laughing and chatting and making fun of her. Later that night, alone with her mom, Pia said, “Mother, if you don’t marry that man, I shall marry him. We must keep him in the family.”
The younger children would be more of a challenge. Before that delicate process could unfold, however, Ingrid had to tend to her career, which was flourishing again. Fox would offer her $1 million, an unprecedented sum at the time, to sign with its studios, but she declined. As long as she could make a comfortable living and provide for her children, she preferred to remain independent.
Her next film project was based a book called The Small Woman, based on the life of a real British missionary in China named Gladys Aylward. It was written by Alan Burgess, who decades later would coauthor her memoir. Twentieth Century Fox had bought the rights to Burgess’s book, changed the title to The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and persuaded Ingrid to star.
Ingrid’s character Aylward is given the job of inspecting the feet of children to make sure the ancient Chinese tradition of foot-binding was no longer being practiced. When Japan invades the town where she is living, the people quickly evacuate and Aylward has to lead 100 children to safety.
During the making of the film, Ingrid traveled to North Wales – the walled town of Yangcheng where Aylward lived was re-created on a Welsh mountaintop – and brought her six-year-old twins with her. One night while she was blow-drying their hair, sitting on the floor in their bathrobes, she thought it would be a good time to talk about her friend Lars.
“What do you think?” she asked Ingrid and Isabella. “How would you like it if Mama got married again?”
“That would be great,” they cried. “Have you found somebody?”
“Yes, you remember that nice person, Lars, who came to visit us here in Wales?” Ingrid said.
“Oh, yes,” the twins said. “We liked him. When can you marry him?”
Eight-year-old Robertino would not be so easy. He had already heard about the impending marriage through the family grapevine. When Ingrid returned to Paris, where Robertino was visiting, the boy began to cry. That upset his younger sisters, too, ruining a newspaper photo shoot they did that day in a park in Paris.
Afterward, Ingrid said to Robertino, “But you’ve met Lars. You’ve been to the zoo with Lars.”
“I like Lars,” he replied, “but that doesn’t mean you have to marry him. I don’t mind him living with us, but why must you marry him?”
When Schmidt picked them up at the park that day, Robertino sat in the front passenger seat and would not speak to him or even look at him. He just stared out the window.
Little Ingrid, concerned that her mother’s boyfriend had not yet made up his mind, piped up from the backseat: “Lars, would you like to marry my mother?” she asked, adding, “My mother is still young.”
“I almost cried,” Ingrid said later, “because I thought it was the sweetest proposal that any little girl of six could make on behalf of her mama.”
“Well, if you want me to marry your mother,” Schmidt said, “maybe I will.”
“Yes,” Isabella said. “We would like very much if you would marry our mother. And don’t worry about Robertino because we will talk to him and make him understand.”
They were driving to a country house that Ingrid and Schmidt were interested in buying, located in the village of Choisel, about an hour outside of Paris.
When they arrived, the saw a long, gray stone wall with a huge green painted door in front. When they stepped through the door, there was a wide green lawn and the most beautiful and unusual cedar trees Ingrid had ever seen, like enormous Walt Disney creations with feathery branches that swept down to touch the lawn. Then they saw the small, gray, 300-year-old stone farmhouse that would be their home.
Immediately, as with Schmidt’s Swedish island, Ingrid knew that this was the right place for them. Living in the French countryside suited her affinity for Joan of Arc while its nearness to Paris would also give her access to all the exciting amenities of the beautiful city she loved.
When the newspapers discovered that Ingrid and Schmidt had bought a house together, she figured that she might as well dispel the various rumors in circulation by announcing their engagement. But that only set off a new round of speculation, including where and when the nuptials would occur. “Now I wish I’d never said anything,” she wrote to Liana Ferri in Rome in July.
With her children’s approval of the marriage still tenuous, she asked Rossellini to tell them everything will be all right and that he is not unhappy about it. “But does he say it?” Ingrid wrote to Ferri. “He has promised to do all he can, but I think he is worried the children will like Lars too much.”
Even Rossellini’s intransigence could not damper her spirits, however. “I am confident and serene,” she told Ferri. “I am sure this is the best thing that ever happened to me. This man is the only one who has ever understood me with both the good and the bad in me. I have never in my life felt such complete understanding with any human being.”
But there was trouble in paradise. It soon became clear that Rossellini would do everything in his power to make Ingrid’s life with Schmidt as miserable as possible. When her children were with their father, they told her by phone, “Poor Papa, he has been crying all night.” This infuriated Ingrid. “It makes me mad that instead of making it natural and easy for them, Roberto must play it out in true Italian dramatic style,” she wrote to Ferri.
Worse, Rossellini was trying to gain legal custody of the children. She refused, proposing a fifty-fifty split. Rossellini said “no,” even though he already had his hands quite full. He had married his girlfriend Sonali, adopted her two-year-old son Arjun and then had a daughter with her named Raffaella. “His basis for all this is that I intend to get married,” she wrote to Ferri. “He knows in his heart I would never separate him from the children, nor them from Italy. I really don’t know what more I can do for him. It seems he just likes to fight and wants to get to court.”
As she planned her wedding with Schmidt, Ingrid had her hands full staving off the press. She had yet to meet Schmidt’s parents, who lived just outside Gothenburg, Sweden, but knew that traveling there would create a media circus. So she flew to Copenhagen to throw them off, but that didn’t work. They were waiting for her at the home of her Aunt Mutti, who now lived in Copenhagen in retirement. “Drive on, drive on!” she yelled to
the driver, a friend of Schmidt’s, as the photographers gave chase. “Make a quick turn left. Slow down. I’ll roll out and hide. Let them chase you.”
When the car swung left into a narrow road, Ingrid opened the door, rolled out across the snow and into a ditch and crouched there until the photographers went past. Then she walked back to Aunt Mutti’s house where she got into a car with Schmidt and headed for the Swedish border. Tipped off that photographers were waiting at the home of Schmidt’s parents, they took an alternate route, stopping at a graveyard and stumbling in the dark past the gravestones. They climbed over a wall into a field full of snow and mud, then crawled over a gate where Ingrid ripped her stockings. They climbed over another high wall, where the family butler had left a ladder, and finally made it to the Schmidt property.
“It was like a concentration camp scene with these spotlights playing backwards and forwards over the snow and through the trees,” Ingrid recalled. “We lay flat in the snow till the lights passed over us, then we dashed forward and threw ourselves flat again, and finally we reached the back door.”
Few entrances in her acting career were as memorable as the one she made into the Schmidt home. “I was muddy and dirty and my stockings were torn and that was the way I met my prospective parents-in-law,” she recalled. The first thing she said to her fiancé’s mother was, “Can I please borrow a pair of stockings to wear for dinner?”
The next problem was where to get married. Since France did not recognize Ingrid’s divorce from Rossellini, they decided to wed in England. On December 21, 1958, with a few close friends in attendance, Ingrid and Schmidt said their vows in the Register Office of Caxton Hall, London. Somehow, they managed to avoid the press. (But the registrar asked to take a photograph – just for his private collection, he assured them. The next day, the picture appeared in the newspapers.)
Afterward, the wedding party stopped at a Swedish church for a blessing and then enjoyed a champagne luncheon at the Connaught Hotel. When Ingrid and Schmidt got back home to Choisel, French cameramen and photographers climbed over the walls, broke through the hedges, and tried to pry open shutters. Marianne von Essen, one of Schmidt’s oldest friends from Sweden, was in a guest bedroom when the shutters burst open and a flashbulb popped. Later, she laughed, “All they got was my big behind bending over my suitcase!” Finally, the police arrived and the photographers scattered.
Soon after the wedding, Rossellini began an all-out legal offensive against her to gain custody of the children. He made his mother and sister Marcella sign a declaration that they would live in his house in Rome to take care of the children. Both loved Ingrid and felt terrible about getting caught in the middle of the dispute. “Ingrid, I didn’t want to sign that paper and neither did Marcella,” Rossellini’s mother told her.
Rossellini “brought in every weapon he could find,” Ingrid recalled later. “I was a Protestant; I had no family - no grandmother, no aunts, no uncles - and I was married to a Swede, so who was I to look after his children? He played that up very big. He also brought up the fact that my name was not on Robertino’s birth certificate at all; so who was I to claim custody of his son? Besides, was I legally married or had I committed bigamy? I was never quite certain that Roberto wouldn’t try to have me thrown into prison every time I visited Italy.”
At the end of January 1959, a Paris judge gave Ingrid temporary custody of the three children, decreeing that they must attend an Italian school in Paris; Rossellini was given visitation rights on weekends. In retaliation, Rossellini went to the Italian courts to block the decision, arguing that France did not have jurisdiction.
“You are an actress,” Ferri told Ingrid. “You can go in front of the Italian judge and you can weep and you will get the children. I know Italians.” Ingrid replied, “I am an actress when I am on the stage, but I cannot do those things in life.”
Their court battle would drag on for nearly a year. “These were his children,” Ingrid once said, “blood of his blood, taken away from his beloved country and placed under the care of this Swedish ‘what’s-his-name’ whom I had married.”
Amid the emotional family battles, Ingrid’s life went on. In April of that year, she traveled at the invitation of the Motion Picture Academy to Los Angeles for the 1959 Academy Awards - her first trip to the city in a decade. Her return was celebrated with parties hosted by Buddy Adler and her dear old friend Alfred Hitchcock. When Cary Grant introduced her at the Pantages Theater, where she was to announce the award for best picture, she received a standing ovation. “It is so heart-warming to receive such a welcome,” she said. “I feel that I am home. I am so deeply grateful.” During this trip, she was also able to spend time with Pia.
Back in France, Ingrid had all three children living with her and Schmidt in their new home in Choisel. Every day, a chauffeur drove them for nearly an hour to an Italian school in Paris. “Roberto had the right to see them any time he wanted to; that’s the agreement I made,” she said later. But Rossellini kept complaining to the Italian judge that the drive to school was too long. So Ingrid gave in and rented an apartment in Paris for the children to live with a housekeeper, Elena di Montis. Ingrid was there almost every day and drove home to Schmidt in Choisel at night.
Still not satisfied, Rossellini decided to come to Paris every weekend and bring the kids to his room at the Raphael Hotel. This upset Ingrid, who wanted them at her home in Choisel where there was fresh air and they could play with the dogs and run in the woods. But Rossellini was relentless and usually got his way.
Once, after the children had been with him in Italy, Ingrid came to pick them up at the train station and found Rossellini there. He had flown to France to beat the train so he could take them to his hotel.
“But I’m here with the car,” Ingrid protested. “I haven’t had them for so long. I want to take them out to the country.”
When the children arrived, Rossellini allowed Ingrid to have the twin girls but took Robertino with him and asked her to follow him to his hotel to discuss the situation. Instead, she drove to Choisel with the girls and called Rossellini to say, “Now I’m coming in to pick up Robertino.”
“By the time I got back to Paris, Robertino had disappeared,” Ingrid recalled later. “Roberto had hidden him. For three days I didn’t know where he was.”
Finally, she got permission to pick up her son, who was crying. “Papa said you stole Ingrid and Isabella, you stole them . . .”
“Well, let him call it stealing,” said Ingrid, “but it was my period to have you.”
“Yes,” he said, “But, Mama, why didn’t you steal me?”
When she wasn’t fighting with Rossellini over the children, Ingrid was looking for new projects, and Schmidt was helping by trying to acquire the rights for film and television productions. She had never worked in the relatively new medium of television, but at forty-four, she had reached a point where she might be considered for character roles better suited to the small screen. She accepted an offer to play a governess in an abbreviated version of the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
In this ghost story about two young children being influenced by evil spirits, Ingrid’s character tries to protect the children from the supernatural forces that eventually cause the little boy to die in her arms. When the program aired on NBC in October 1959, she was rewarded with an Emmy for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress.
As the year went on, Ingrid’s arguments with Roberto deepened and she began to worry about how it was affecting the children. When the phone rang, they jumped and cried, “The lawyer! Is it the lawyer?” Ingrid overheard the children whispering among themselves about their mother’s new husband: “You’re not going to kiss him, are you?” one said. “You’re not going to play with him, are you?” said another.
Ingrid attempted to resolve the issue once and for all by asking her three children to vote by secret ballot whether they wanted to live in Choisel with her or in Italy with their father. Uncomfortab
le with the choice, the kids refused to vote.
Both parents thought they knew what was best for their children. “You are always making mistakes,” Roberto scolded Ingrid in a letter. “Last year the children had to make a long trip to go to school in Paris, and it was cold and they were sick so many times, and here when they are in Rome with me they don’t see this stranger [Schmidt] and they are happier and they are always more comfortable with me.”
When Rossellini wanted to take the children to Sicily with him while he made a film there, Ingrid objected, complaining that “they live too much as adults” with all their traveling and staying up late and going to movie sets. “Our children are eight and ten and should live quietly and organized and play the games eight-and-ten-year-olds play,” she wrote to Rossellini, chastising him for telling them stories about how the Germans used to throw babies in the air and fire guns at them. “Can’t you understand that these things stay in their minds and hurt them? Their brains can’t take all you put in them of horrors and hatred.”
After Rossellini took the children to Sicily for three months, Ingrid wanted to take them to Paris that summer, then Sweden. So she went to court in Italy, and the judge agreed. At that point, she still had legal custody. “All right,” Rossellini said, looking dejected. “Take the children, have them.”
So Ingrid packed up and asked Rossellini for their passports. “Ah,” he said, slyly, “the judge never said anything about the passports!”
When he refused to hand over the passports, Ingrid went to a friend in the Swedish embassy. Even though it was after hours, he opened the office and issued them Swedish passports on the grounds that their mother was Swedish.
The next day, Ingrid took the children to the airport, but a friend of Rossellini’s saw them. He called Rossellini, who flew into a rage and called the police. “Police cars came screaming out to the tarmac toward the plane, sirens going, lights flashing,” Ingrid recalled. “Just give the Italians a chance for drama and they take it with both hands.”