Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  Ingrid walked down the steps of the plane and said, “There is no way you can take me off this plane with these children. Our passports are in order. Here they are. I am their mother. I have legal custody of these children. They have spent three months in Italy here with their father . . . We are going. Goodbye.”

  The police said, “We are very sorry. We were only trying to do our duty.”

  Later, Ingrid said, “Roberto always said that caused his first heart attack.”

  Finally, after a year of fighting, Ingrid decided that enough was enough. On New Year’s Eve – always an important day for her – she became very sentimental. The year 1960 was about to dawn. “I think, another year gone and what have I done? To whom have I brought happiness? What have I done wrong? Next year, can I be kinder and nicer? And all the time the bells are caroling peace and goodwill across the countryside. And here I was fighting over the three children as I’d fought over Pia!”

  Ingrid began to wonder how much of the problem was her fault: “I could never abandon my children, but between us we were tearing them to pieces. Someone had to give way if we were to preserve their happiness.”

  So she called Rossellini and said, “All right, you can have the children. I give up. You can have the children in Italy and bring them up there. I’m bringing them down to you right away.”

  And she did, saying to the judge, “Thank you very much, I’m not waiting for your verdict.”

  Her lawyer was aghast. “But you’re going to win,” he said. “We have information about Roberto Rossellini. It isn’t enough that he’s the father, and he’s Italian and says he has a big family to look after the children. This Italian court will not reverse the French court’s decision. You are going to win this case and be granted custody.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Ingrid replied. “I’m not going on. No one’s going to win this case, least of all the children.”

  After that, the rancor subsided. Once Rossellini gets what he wants, Ingrid always said, he becomes the nicest, most gracious person in the world. He told Ingrid she could visit them anytime. After that, she did not have a serious disagreement with him, and they always stayed in touch. Perhaps now Ingrid and her children could live in peace.

  With her custody battles over, Ingrid settled into a routine that would last for the next dozen years: Living in France for three or four weeks with her new husband then traveling to Rome to see her children for ten days or so. “I did everything I could to stay as close as I possibly could to the children under these conditions,” she said later. “And they were very difficult.”

  Fortunately, she had support from an Italian woman named Argenide Pascolini, the housekeeper who took over when Elena di Montis left. Pascolini became a second mother to the three children. Whenever a problem arose or the kids were very worried or unhappy about something, Pascolini would be on the phone to Ingrid. “You’d better come back and sort it out,” she would say, and Ingrid would hustle back to Rome.

  “She was the rock in the storm, and I don’t know what I would have done without her,” Ingrid said of Pascolini. Even when her children grew up, they stayed close to the woman they considered their second mom, who served as a witness at Isabella’s wedding, was the first person the younger Ingrid would run to in times of trouble, and became a mandatory stop for Robertino (by then called Robin) during his visits to Rome.

  “In many ways those years of the late fifties and early sixties were tough years for Ingrid,” Schmidt said later. “With her honesty, she would talk to Roberto about absolutely everything, and she was so determined that her children’s upbringing should be right. On the other hand, she didn’t want to disturb the new-found happiness we had discovered.” He called their union “a complete marriage, mentally and physically.”

  Though they lived in Italy, the children always came to Danholmen Island during their summer holidays. “If there was a cloud in the sky, it was the children - not the children as such, they were marvelous - but the traumas Roberto was always likely to start,” Schmidt said. “But we always had those wonderful summers together. Our summers on the island were sacred. Work stopped. We all went to the island. We got there by the end of June and stayed right through July.”

  For Ingrid and Schmidt, finding time for each other was extremely difficult since both of them were married to their work. Schmidt owned the European rights to My Fair Lady and was staging performances across the Continent. Though Ingrid made fewer films during this period, she was always working hard to find and get hired for good parts in theater, television, or film – not easy for a woman in her mid-forties with a scandalous past. “There were sometimes weeks, even months, when we didn’t see each other while we went through our own respective work traumas,” Schmidt recalled.

  Despite the success of Anastasia, producers were still worried about how Ingrid’s reputation would affect the films she appeared in. When she played a missionary in her last film, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, the executives at Twentieth Century Fox omitted details that would identify her character as a Christian. It’s impossible to know what effect those changes had on the minds of audiences, but the film did well at the box office – becoming England’s second-most-popular movie of 1959 – and lauded by the critics.

  As she was trying to keep her career on track, Ingrid also had her distant eldest child to worry about. In early 1960, she was surprised to learn that Pia, then twenty-one and attending Mills College near San Francisco, had impulsively decided to marry Fuller E. Callaway III, a handsome businessman eight years her senior. The union lasted less than two years. At the end of 1961, Pia sued for divorce on charges that included extreme cruelty and domestic abuse. In a tragic coda, Callaway would eventually take his own life.

  It’s natural for a mother with a history of marital problems to worry that her children may be inheriting her penchant for domestic unhappiness. And so it was with Ingrid as she watched Pia struggle in her first marriage. It was especially troubling because Ingrid knew she was continuing to set a bad example. Being away from Schmidt so much was taking its toll on their relationship. That was an ironic development given that her career was not exactly skyrocketing. For the next four years, from 1960 to 1964, she would appear in a series of mostly forgettable films.

  The first was Goodbye, Again, adapted by Samuel Taylor from a novel by Françoise Sagan. In the fall of 1960, after almost two years without appearing on screen, Ingrid accepted Anatole Litvak’s offer to play the miserable and desperate Paula Tessier. She was excited about working once again with Litvak after their hit Anastasia. And she was drawn to her character, a forty-year-old woman who turns to a man fifteen years younger (Anthony Perkins) when she discovers her lover (Yves Montand) has strayed.

  When filming started, Ingrid was happy to be working with Montand and Perkins, who was on his way to international stardom as Norman Bates in the Hitchcock classic, Psycho, which came out that year.

  When production began in Paris, rumors circulated that Ingrid was having affairs with both men. Perkins seemed to encourage the idea when he told an interviewer that Ingrid was “a little too persistent” in trying to get him to rehearse their kissing scenes. She would have welcomed an affair with him, he added later. This rumor did not hold up well to scrutiny, however, not least because it was well known in Hollywood circles that Perkins was gay (though he did marry a woman many years later, with whom he had two sons).

  When Goodbye Again was released in June 1961 – titled Aimez-vous Brahms? (“Do you like Brahms?”) in Europe – it did not do well at the box office or with critics. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times opined that Ingrid’s Paula “is neither that interesting nor is she sufficiently well played by Miss Bergman to cause an old reviewer of regenerate heroines to care. Neither passion nor wildness seems to seize her. She is just a nice, comfortable, unhappy woman.”

  Despite the film’s poor reception, Ingrid did manage to relax that summer when all four of her children came to Danholmen. The fa
mily spent the days swimming, lying in the sun, fishing, sailing, and reading. A sad interruption occurred, however, with news that her good friends Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway had died: Cooper in May of cancer at the age of sixty, and Hemingway in July, by suicide shortly before his sixty-second birthday.

  “As you say, let’s not talk about Gary’s and Hemingway’s going,” Ingrid wrote to Ruth Roberts in August. “It hurts so. It’s strange how they went together. I think they had planned it. I heard from a mutual friend that the two used to telephone each other all the time through their sickness and laugh, ‘I’ll race you to the grave.’”

  Around this time, Ingrid was delighted to learn that Pia had decided to move to Paris. With a college degree and freshly divorced from Callaway, she was feeling lonely and had become intrigued by the many books she read that romanticized the life of American expatriates in Paris – Hemingway, the cafés, the joie de vivre. “And it wasn’t like that when I got there,” she said later. “I worked for a time for UNESCO [the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization]. I went to school and studied French; I really couldn’t find a job I liked.”

  Pia moved in with her mother and Schmidt in Choisel. “I was going to make up for the time I hadn’t lived with them,” she said. After six months, she got her own apartment in Paris. “Of course I got to know mother in an entirely different way, and I loved her,” she recalled. “For a young person, she was such an extraordinary mother to have. She was so gay and funny, and she always wanted to go out and do things - see this, and go to the movies and the theater, go to dinners and run around, and get up early and shop. She was so full of energy. It was just wonderful. And I wanted to be around and I wanted to be like she was. I thought she was just - beautiful.”

  Between visits with Pia, Ingrid continued to look for fulfilling work. In November 1961, she performed in another television role for CBS, a ninety-minute program based on a Stefan Zweig novella called Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life, adapted to the screen by John Mortimer. Though Ingrid got to try something new - playing an older woman who is seen in flashbacks with a handsome man, played by Rip Torn - the film itself was tedious. After it was broadcast, she told reporters how frustrating and time-consuming it was to find good roles. Waiting was not her strong suit. With restlessness came anxiety and heavier smoking.

  In an attempt to jump-start her career, Ingrid and Schmidt decided to take matters into their own hands by negotiating a contract for her to star in various plays produced by America’s CBS and England’s BBC. Schmidt and future TV talk-show host David Susskind would act as co-producers. Their first effort looked promising – an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic, Hedda Gabler, that would also star Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, and Trevor Howard.

  Schmidt was “immensely helpful” during each of these TV productions, Ingrid said. He would tell her, “At that point, you have to be more forceful, give it a lot more voice” and “Now you’re moving too much, being too theatrical, don’t move your hands as if you’re talking in Italian. This is an English play” and “Ah, now that’s very good when you turn your head and pause: that establishes a completely new situation . . .”

  Ingrid had always been intrigued by the character of Hedda Gabler, one of the iconic roles in the history of theater. “Such an interesting part, and Hedda is such a strange woman,” she said later. “The play is a classic, and I wanted to try a classic for a change. And I liked TV even though at this time I was rationing myself to one TV performance a year” to leave time for big-screen films and theatrical roles.

  One of those theatrical roles would be a stage version of Hedda Gabler in Paris, where Schmidt had been so successful with his other productions. Not only would she have to portray one of the vilest characters in literature, but she would have to do it in French. Pre-production lasted from spring to summer of 1962 as she studied the play and its French translation.

  On December 10, 1962, Hedda Gabler opened at the Théâtre Montparnasse in Paris. Ingrid struggled with her French that first night, but after each performance, she got better, and soon the critics were praising her portrait of evil. “One loves almost everything Ingrid Bergman does,” a critic wrote in Le Figaro, complimenting her “special voice, her artistic presentation - it’s an experience to see and hear her.” According to France-Soir, “never has Ibsen been played so magnificently.”

  Ingrid’s film version of Ibsen’s play was broadcast on BBC shortly thereafter to critical acclaim. In the United States, the CBS broadcast also drew raves. “It was Ingrid’s night, wrote Cecil Smith in the Los Angeles Times. “Cold, mocking, arrogant, cowardly, vengeful, poisonous, charming, exalted, her Hedda was a portrayal that seared the brain.”

  After that success, however, Ingrid went back to doing films that few would remember. Next up was The Visit, based on a play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt that had been a big success on Broadway in 1958, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Twentieth-Century Fox had obtained the rights to the screenplay but had no idea what to do with it because of its difficult subject matter.

  “The world made me a whore. Now I will turn the world into a brothel,” says Ingrid’s character, Countess Karla Zachanassian. The wealthiest woman in the world, Karla returns to the tiny European town of Guellen to get revenge on Serge Miller (played by Anthony Quinn). When she was seventeen, Miller had seduced her, renounced their child, hired perjurers to testify to her depravity, and finally forced her into prostitution. She had fled the town in disgrace.

  In the play, Karla offers to make the poverty-stricken citizens of Guellen rich – but only if they find Miller guilty and execute him. Needing the money, the townspeople convince themselves that bringing Miller to justice is the right thing to do. Dürrenmatt’s theme was that both people and their lofty ideas of “justice” can be bought and that every human being has a price. It was called “a stunning chiller” and “a grisly horror story of greed and betrayal.”

  Fascinated by the story, Ingrid had pleaded with Buddy Adler, the producer of Anastasia, to buy it to give her something different to do. He did but then passed away shortly thereafter, leaving the project in limbo.

  Finally, a script was completed, and Ingrid arrived to shoot in Rome in the autumn of 1963. But the producers, not keen on having Ingrid play a woman bribing people to kill her ex-lover, insisted on modifying the ending so Karla has a change of character and the terrified Miller is allowed to go free. “They would have nothing to do with black comedy in the movie,” Ingrid recalled. “It became just a straight picture, and they refused to kill Anthony Quinn at the end.”

  Since Dürrenmatt was Swiss, The Visit opened in Geneva in the spring of 1964, but the author refused to attend, saying that the producers had destroyed his play. He also thought Ingrid was wrong for the part, preferring Bette Davis. Critics in the United States were equally displeased upon the film’s release there in October, finding it somber and stolid, a trivial story of a woman’s vengeance. “The new Bergman is less assured than she has been in other films,” wrote the critic Kate Cameron. “She seems to have lost some of her former confidence.”

  During this time, Schmidt was having more success, launching European theatrical productions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Annie Get Your Gun, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Barefoot in the Park.

  His wife, meanwhile, was stuck in a strange limbo of appearing in two consecutive “composite films” – movies with two or more episodes linked by a common theme. The fist was 1964’s The Yellow Rolls-Royce, three sequences tied together by the yellow Rolls-Royce featured in each segment. An all-star line-up of actors also appeared, including Shirley Maclaine, George C. Scott, Rex Harrison, and Omar Sharif.

  The next was a Swedish project called Stimulantia, which would feature seven different episodes, each one by a different, famous director including the legendary Ingmar Bergman and Gustav Molander, who had given Ingrid her very first screen test thirty years earlier.

>   Her piece was Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace and an old friend of Ingrid’s from the Royal Dramatic School, Gunnar Björnstrand, played opposite her.

  Nearly deaf, Molander soldiered through the production, and the critics loved the film when it was finally released three years later, in 1967. At the wrap party, Ingrid and Björnstrand told reporters about the movies and plays they wanted to do. Asked what his plans were for the future, Molander deadpanned, “The graveyard.” (The Necklace would be his last film; he died nine years later.)

  Though Ingrid planned to stay in her native city for a while after filming was finished, she was forced to leave early for Rome because all the Rossellinis and their staff had the flu. At Christmas in 1964, Pia came to help out, too. She had moved to London by then but couldn’t find a job. She tried acting but realized she wasn’t any good at it. So her mother suggested she live with the Rossellini family in Rome.

  Roberto’s mother had died, and the director was busy with his various projects, so the three children were being cared for mostly by a cook and a nurse. This bothered Ingrid, who felt Pia could fill a gaping need in the lives of her children. Without many other options, Pia agreed – and ended up spending three happy years there with her half-siblings Isabel, Ingrid, and Robin. She organized the chaotic household and took the children, then entering their teenage years, wherever they needed to go - to the dentist, horseback riding, skiing – all the while learning Italian. Rossellini was very depressed during this period, Pia recalled later. His movies were failures, and he struggled to support his children and pay for the various houses he owned.

  After a string of mediocre films, Ingrid was realizing that her most successful project during this period, by far, was the stage play Hedda Gabler. So when Michael Redgrave, Ingrid’s co-star in the televised version, called from London, she was eager to hear his pitch: A new theater was opening in nearby Guildford, and he wanted the first production to be Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Would she play Natalya Petrovna with Redgrave as Mikhail Rakitin?