by Grace Carter
“I’m so sorry, Michael, but Lars and I always leave the summers free - we promised each other that - and we go to our island,” she told him. “We work in the winter if anything comes up but never in the middle of the summer.”
Then Schmidt came into the room, took the phone and said, “Michael, send her the play because it fits her like a glove. It’s a marvelous part for her.”
Ingrid was surprised. “But we promised each other we’d have these three months in the summer without work,” she said. “Now you want me to go to England and work in this play?”
“Yes,” Schmidt said, “I don’t want to be accused of having been an obstacle in your life. This is a marvelous play and after Guildford you might well go to London. How shall I feel later in life if you say, ‘But for you I would have appeared in the West End’?”
Ingrid wasn’t familiar with the Russian classic but quickly fell in love with the play and her character Natalya, a beautiful, middle-aged, married woman who finds love for the first time in her life with a young man of twenty-one. “I adored it,” she said.
As touched as she was by Schmidt’s generosity, Ingrid had the uneasy feeling the play would devour far more of her life than either of them expected. “A movie only takes two or three months, but if a play’s a success, you can be sure it’s going to be seven months,” she said. “Lars himself had said he would never accept any actor who asked for a contract for less than six months.”
She was right. The play was such a hit that it ran for nine months, from June 1965 to March 1966. With only four weeks of rehearsal before opening night, Ingrid wasn’t entirely comfortable with the language or the character when the show began, but soon, she came to understand Natalya and made the character unforgettable.
Some of the reviews were rapturous. “Just before the curtain went up on Guildford’s island theatre last night, a swan rose from the River Wey and flew past in the evening sunshine,” wrote Felix Barker in London’s Evening News. “This was as always a beautiful sight, and it was to be repeated on the stage toward the end of the first act. As graceful and almost as long-necked as a swan, Ingrid Bergman dressed in pure white threw back her head and as Turgenev’s heroine Natalya Petrovna cried to herself, ‘What is happening? Poor unhappy woman. For the first time you are in love.’ At that moment the play, carried on her wings, also rose and took off.”
Some critics disagreed. The London Times said, “In appearance, she is the picture of the part, but her performance hardly goes beyond the pictorial.”
Because production lasted through the summer, Ingrid was unable to spend the season with Schmidt on Danholmen, a bitter disappointment to them both. She did, however, escape for her fiftieth birthday party, celebrated that August on the island. Though the guest list was limited, people came from all over the world to toast Ingrid, who talked about her remarkable life and her even more remarkable ability to forget the bad parts.
Despite some tepid reviews, the play was a clear success. The only question left: Should A Month in the Country be taken to London? Once again, Schmidt said yes, absolutely. And once again, the show was a smash hit, filling the Cambridge Theatre for months. London theatergoers remembered Ingrid for her iconic roles in films such as Casablanca and wanted to get a glimpse of the legend. Pia brought Ingrid’s other three children from Rome to see the show. Even the Queen of England stopped by, sitting at the end of a row during her once-a-month night off.
But Ingrid still had nagging worries about what these long theatrical runs were doing to her marriage. “When I look back now at what I was doing then, I can recognize all the danger signs,” she said later. “The theater took me away from Choisel and Lars for months on end and that wasn’t good for any marriage.”
Even early on, when she was considering the part of Natalya Petrovna, Ingrid said, she knew she should listen to her instincts reminding her of the promise she made to her husband about always returning to the island together, no matter what. “Still,” she said, “I pushed such thoughts into the background.”
Not long after A Month in the Country closed in March 1966, Ingrid was in Rome visiting her children when she got a message that their school doctor wanted to see her. Thirteen-year-old Isabella had been examined to see whether she was fit for gymnastics and the doctor found that her spine had a slight S shape – scoliosis.
When the curvature worsened, Ingrid and Rossellini took Isabella to a specialist in Florence, who took X-rays and concluded, “It could be the beginning of hunchback.” He recommended surgery as soon as possible. Ingrid and Rossellini, who held hands and clung to each other anxiously, wanted to investigate other options, including having Isabella wear a corset, but the girl finally said, “I want the operation.”
On April 21, Isabella entered the Trauma Center in Careggi, Italy. Ingrid pre-paid for the girl’s treatment, including the procedures she would need over the next couple of years. This was above and beyond the money she had been paying Rossellini for their children’s care.
Before Isabella could have surgery, however, she had to be fitted into a plaster cast that extended from her neck to her pelvis. She was also required to perform painful stretching exercises for six months. Isabella was not allowed any anesthesia; her level of pain would inform the doctors how well her treatment was working. This approach was designed to keep her from becoming addicted to narcotics over the two years she would need to withstand the excruciating exercises.
Except for one mandatory two-week assignment in London, Ingrid did not leave her daughter’s side from the spring of 1966 until the summer of 1967. “Mama stopped work,” Isabella recalled later, “and I was very touched by that because I know how she loves her work, and I love her working. I was very touched that she didn’t work for that whole eighteen months . . .”
Ingrid was present for all of Isabella’s agonizing stretching exercises, crying along with her as Isabella was tied to what looked like a medieval torture rack and Ingrid and a nurse pulled on her neck. “I tried to be brave, but I couldn’t help myself,” Ingrid recalled later. “She was in pain, and I was in pain. I fought my tears, but they streamed down my face.” Schmidt visited often to provide moral support.
Miraculously, Isabella recovered quickly from the stretching ordeal. Soon, she was eating, laughing, and playing cards with other girls who were also in body casts at the facility. Clothes had to be made to fit over Isabella’s cast. One day, one of her friends from the hospital called to invite her to a dance. Despite Isabella’s protestations, Ingrid insisted that she go, got her a pretty dress, and was not at all surprised when a young man at the dance fell in love with her daughter.
After more excruciatingly painful and traumatic pulling sessions, Isabella finally underwent a six-hour surgery to keep her spine from reverting back to its crooked state. Dr. Alberto Ponte, supervised by Dr. Oscar Scaglietti, removed bone from Isabella’s tibia, cut it into matchstick-sized pieces, and inserted them into various points in her vertebrae so the spine would retain its proper position.
As her daughter was being operated upon, Ingrid went to the hospital chapel to pray. “I am uneasy praying to a God I need only when things go wrong,” she said later. “Why don’t I pray when thing go well?” When Dr. Ponte finally said the surgery was over and she could see her child, Ingrid raced down the stairs and into the operating room. “What have you done to my child?” she screamed. “She’s so short! You’ve shortened her! Good heavens, what have you done?”
Dr. Ponte put his arm around her shoulder, “Signora, you are in the wrong room. This is not your child.”
He led her into another room, where Isabella was asleep, pale, and full of tubes. Ingrid and Rossellini began to sob. Later, Ingrid fainted. During her daughter’s painful recovery, she often went out into the corridor to hide her tears. But Isabella knew what her mom was doing out there. “Mother, don’t cry so much,” she said. “I’m not sorry this has happened to me. In the future when people talk about pain, I will know what it means
. It might help me to help others who suffer.” That sent Ingrid back into the corridor to weep some more.
At one point, a boy came to Isabella’s room, saying he had driven from Rome to Florence with a friend just to see her. It was the same boy who had fallen in love with her at the dance when she wore a body cast. Isabella’s whole face lit up. Ingrid left them alone. When she was well enough to go home, the boy visited again and brought a Beatles record that Isabella played constantly.
Back in Rome, Isabella remained in a full-body cast for six months, unable to walk. Then she was put in a shorter cast that allowed her to go back to school and even dance. Six months later, the last cast finally came off. Her body was frail and thin, but at least she could now take a bath and swim.
When Isabella got home, there were endless celebrations; relatives and friends visited, and the apartment was full of laughter. The boy who had fallen in love with her called to ask if he could come over. He had never known her without a cast. When he arrived, he and Isabella just stood there and stared at each other. “I had to rush away,” Ingrid recalled, “so they wouldn’t see that once again I was in tears.”
Isabella Rossellini grew up to become a famous model for Lancôme and acted in dozens of films, including Blue Velvet (1986) and Death Becomes Her (1992). She also wrote three books and became a noted philanthropist. After her mother died, she underwent a second spine operation in 2012, and looking back, realized how much having her mom by her side had meant to her. “I missed her terribly and realized even more what a marvelous mama she had been,” she told People magazine in 2015.
Being separated from her husband while she was in Rome with Isabella was not easy for Ingrid – or for Schmidt. “It was a lonely time for Lars also because I saw so little of him during this long period in Rome and Florence,” Ingrid recalled. One unexpected benefit was that Ingrid grew closer to Rossellini as they suffered through the trauma together, with her ex-husband finally accepting her re-marriage.
Ingrid and Schmidt did work on one short project together while Isabella was enduring her medical procedures. It was Schmidt’s idea for Ingrid to appear in a 1967 television film called The Human Voice, for which she had signed a contract long before she knew her daughter would need an operation.
Ingrid was tense and exhausted when she arrived in London to begin rehearsals for the film. The Human Voice was based on a 1930 play by French writer Jean Cocteau that, coincidentally, Rossellini had filmed with Anna Magnani in 1948, the same year Ingrid first wrote to him suggesting they work together. Television producer David Susskind and Schmidt were co-producers for the unusual one-woman story that featured a solo Ingrid talking on the telephone for fifty minutes, smoking, crying, and railing at her lover, who has fallen in love with another woman.
Unhappy with the English translation of the script, she badgered the young director, Ted Kotcheff, with complaints that the lines were awkward or unsuitable. Kotcheff assured her he would make the necessary changes if she would only stay calm. When Ingrid continued her tirade, he lost his patience and yelled back at her. What Kotcheff didn’t realize until later was that Ingrid had been testing him. Since working with the haphazard Rossellini, she wanted to be sure her directors were competent to give her the direction she needed.
The film was shot in just two days, and the result was extraordinary. “Miss Bergman’s delicate playing was a tour-de-force, a brilliant portrait of the woman whose life is wrenched out of joint by the fates of the heart,” gushed The New York Times. The Times of London said, “She imparted great dramatic power to this harrowing monologue on the telephone, reflecting the depths of despair.”
Immediately after the filming, Ingrid went back to Rome to care for Isabella. When her daughter was finally back in good health, Ingrid made plans to go back to work. She and Schmidt had talked about producing a play in Paris based on Anna Karenina, but because Greta Garbo’s earlier portrayal of that iconic character would be so hard to top, Ingrid decided to look for something else. She enjoyed acting on the stage, but it was challenging to find something appropriate for a fifty-two-year-old.
That something turned out to be More Stately Mansions by Eugene O’Neill, directed by José Quintero, one of Broadway’s most celebrated interpreters of O’Neill’s work. When Quintero approached her, Ingrid had the eerie feeling she was being haunted by the ghost of the great playwright himself. After all, a quarter-century earlier, O’Neill had asked her to appear in the very same play as he was working on it.
It was 1942 and Ingrid was appearing in O’Neill’s Anna Christie in San Francisco. O’Neill was too ill to see the show, so he sent his wife, Carlotta Monterey, to invite her to their home near San Francisco for lunch. When she arrived, Ingrid was mesmerized by the legendary author. “So handsome you couldn’t believe it,” she recalled. “He had burning eyes, dark black eyes, a beautiful face, and he was very thin and very tall.”
O’Neill told Ingrid he had heard how good she was in Anna Christie and invited her into his studio to see the cycle of nine plays he was working on, A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed. He told Ingrid he wanted to create a repertory company to perform the entire cycle of plays, which covered 150 years in the life of an Irish-American family. Each actor would play different family members through the centuries. Then he popped the question: Would Ingrid be interested in joining the company? It would require a four-year commitment.
“Four years!” she cried. “That is impossible. I am under contract to David Selznick.”
Ingrid left and never saw him again. O’Neill died twelve years later, in 1953. Though he never finished the play cycle – and left instructions that it should be destroyed upon his death – Monterey gave permission for the incomplete plays to be translated into Swedish. Portions of A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed were performed in Sweden in 1962 as More Stately Mansions.
Now Quintero wanted to stage it in America. Excited at the chance to sink her teeth into a big, meaty stage play by an American master, Ingrid said yes. More Stately Mansions would be a challenge, however, because the manuscript was in such poor shape. Quintero painstakingly went through O’Neill’s originals and his notes, editing and cutting the play to a manageable length while trying to preserve the essence of the playwright’s vision. The stakes were high. It would be the first production in the new, 2,000 seat Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. Then it would move to Broadway. Ingrid would play the elegant and manipulative Deborah Harford, and Colleen Dewhurst would be her Irish daughter-in-law, Sara.
Since she would have to spend six months in the United States, Ingrid decided to take her daughter Ingrid with her. The girl had a terribly difficult time when her twin sister was going through her medical traumas, always being asked, “How is Isabella?” No one seemed to care, “How is Ingrid?” “She was healthy and running around and no one gave her a second thought,” her mother said later, “so now more and more I tried to concentrate on her.” The fifteen-year-old girl stayed through the entire run of More Stately Mansions and was schooled by a private teacher.
When she arrived in Los Angeles in early August 1967, Ingrid was ecstatic – her first time working in the United States in nearly two decades. She clashed with Quintero over his direction but eventually made peace with him. “I drove poor José crazy,” she confessed in a letter to Schmidt.
When opening night arrived, Ingrid was “absolutely petrified,” she recalled later. Not only was this a play by Eugene O’Neill – a difficult playwright under even the best circumstances – but it was an unknown and unfinished work. It seemed that all of Hollywood was coming to see her, including Sam Goldwyn sitting in the front row.
“It was hard even to put a foot on the stage,” she recalled. “I stood in the wings and José was right with me. He held my hand and said, ‘Do it for him!’ – which meant, of course, Eugene O’Neill. Then he gave me a little push.”
Ingrid ran onto the stage, just as she had rehearsed, and the audience applauded. Then they clapped some m
ore. The ovation seemed to last forever. “To me, it seemed the applause would never end,” she said. “All the years came back to me . . . all the tears of Stromboli, all the agony, all the despair, everything. I kept saying to myself, ‘You mustn’t cry, you mustn’t cry, you’ll lose your eyelashes and the mascara will run, you mustn’t cry. . . .’ And I could feel the tears coming down as I stood there, under that enormous applause, and then it died down . . . and I couldn’t remember one word - not one word.”
In the wings, Ruth Roberts whispered her line. Ingrid heard it but was so muddle-headed, she couldn’t make sense of it. Finally, the stage manager loudly threw her the line. “I know the audience heard it, but they understood that I was completely speechless - that everything had left my brain,” she said. “I started, and then it rolled and rolled - thank God!”
After a six-week run in Los Angeles, the play moved to the Broadhurst Theater in New York on October 31, 1967. The critics were unanimous: The play stunk. The New York Times wrote that the production “does O’Neill’s memory a disservice.” Of Ingrid, he said, she is “a woman so beautiful that she is herself a work of art . . . she seemed strangely gauche. She trades heavily on her natural charm [but] makes less of the character than you might have hoped.” Though other critics were kinder, they, too, thought the play was dark and dull. One called it “Creaking melodrama complete with soliloquies, brow-clutching, incest, hatred . . . starchy with rhetoric and exposition.”
By then, Ingrid had grown more or less immune to bad reviews. For her, it was a success: She got back on stage, her first love, tackled a difficult O’Neill play, got to spend special time with her daughter Ingrid as she was growing into an independent woman, and the sixteen-week run was turning a profit.