by Grace Carter
The play was rewarding for Monterey as well. At her urging, O’Neill’s widow came one night and ventured backstage afterward to thank Ingrid, tears pouring down her cheeks. “I couldn’t see you much,” said Monterey, who had vision problems. “But I could hear you.” Speaking of O’Neill, she added, “Oh, how I wish that he could have heard you.”
When More Stately Mansions closed in early 1968, Ingrid went back to Choisel to ponder the state of her marriage. “From the time we were married, both Lars and I will admit it, we were certainly not a normal married couple,” she recalled. While he traveled around the world producing plays, she was in London doing A Month in the Country, then in Rome taking care of Isabella, and then off to Los Angeles and New York for the O’Neill play. There were lots of letters, phone calls, and visits whenever they could manage it, “but it wasn’t really a married existence,” she admitted. “I think we both accepted that, but I don’t think we took into account the dangers.”
Liana Ferri was the first to bluntly state the obvious. “Ingrid, you’re putting a terrible strain on your marriage,” she said. “Are you sure that you want to work that much?”
“I’ve got to work,” Ingrid replied. “It’s my life!”
But, deep down, she knew the arrangement was not sustainable. It broke her heart to read Schmidt’s letters. “I’m so lonely,” he wrote. “You are always away from me, and it’s no fun to sit here alone, and I can’t wait for you to come back . . . Please stay with me.”
But Schmidt himself would rarely be home for more than a week before rushing off to companies he ran in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark. When she returned from doing the O’Neill play in New York, it was Ingrid’s turn to be lonely in their beautiful French country home.
“I thought it out very carefully,” she said later. “I knew I had to decide what I really wanted in my life. Was it really to sit in Choisel and wait for Lars to come home from his work, or was it to go to the theater and perform? Well, I am one of those performing dogs. So I decided that for the next job I would go again.”
Soon enough, the next job came, and Ingrid was back on the career fast track that kept her away from Schmidt for months at a time, with calamitous effects on her marriage. This time, the job came from producer Mike Frankovich, who called Ingrid saying he had obtained the rights to the comedic play Cactus Flower. He wanted her to star with Walter Matthau, who had recently won raves for the stage and film versions of The Odd Couple. The other co-star would be Goldie Hawn, a twenty-three-year-old newcomer from the hit TV show Laugh-In.
Ingrid knew the play well, having previously turned down a London production to stay near her husband. But now she was too eager for work to turn it down again. Still, she hesitated, not sure that at age fifty-four she could play the role of a thirty-five-year-old dentist’s assistant. Frankovich and his director, Gene Saks, came to visit Ingrid and told her not to worry. She would be perfect for the part of Stephanie Dickinson, who poses as the wife of her dentist boss (Matthau). The boss had lied to a younger woman (Hawn), telling her that he was married, and now had to pretend to divorce his bogus wife to marry Hawn’s character. On stage, the hilarious complications that ensued brought the house down.
The producers needed an answer quickly since the film was scheduled to begin shooting in a few weeks. They could offer Ingrid $800,000 - $5.3 million in today’s dollars. She said “yes” and – despite her jitters about making a Hollywood movie after such a long absence – worked well with both Matthau and Hawn. “The three of them, Ingrid, Goldie, and Walter got on like a house on fire,” recalled Frankovich.
Perhaps it would have been better for her marriage if the film had bombed. If the risks of working outweighed the rewards, perhaps she would have started spending more time with her husband. But Cactus Flower got rave reviews when it came out in December 1969 and did well at the box office, too, ranking as the eighth-highest grossing movie of the year. Ingrid won a Golden Globe award, and Hawn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
That resounding success led to more film roles that kept Ingrid happily employed, with Schmidt receding farther into the rear-view mirror. She went right into A Walk in the Spring Rain, based on a novel by Rachel Maddux. Ingrid was glad to finally play a woman her own age. Her character, Libby Meredith, is fifty, her husband is fifty-two, and she falls in love with Will Cade, played by Anthony Quinn, who appears to be older still.
The film was shot on location in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, and Ingrid looked forward to working again with Quinn, her friend and co-star of The Visit. But despite their high regard for each other, Ingrid and Quinn clashed repeatedly on the set. Ingrid was being bossy again, telling the actor how to play his scenes, and Quinn threatened to quit. Realizing she had misbehaved – again – she approached Quinn and said, “I’m sorry. I am so terribly sorry. I shall never ever open my mouth again about how you should play a scene. Let’s just go on shooting because we want this picture in the can.”
From Tennessee, she wrote a letter to Schmidt. “I can understand now that I can be very tiresome,” she said. “When you say it, I think it is because you are tired and irritated and you’ve been alone so long and have got used to making the decisions yourself. But now both Tony Quinn and [director] Guy Green say it and have helped me understand what was wrong. I never listen, and I talk about something else right in the middle of somebody else’s conversation. You know that well. That Tony Quinn has taken out of me. He looks at me without saying a word until I’ve asked his forgiveness. My little old man, I’m much kinder now. You wait and see.”
In retrospect, it was poignant that Ingrid believed being far away, working on films, would give her enough insight into her own behavior to ease tensions with her husband. But deep down, she knew the bottom line: Work was her priority, not her marriage. Even the bad reviews generated by A Walk in the Spring when it premiered in April 1970 did not dampen her zeal to keep working as much as possible. Variety called the film a “dreary sudser for older femmes” and for Howard Thompson of The New York Times, it was “a dreary, tedious, unconvincing drama of middle-aged love.”
After the premiere, Ingrid flew back to Paris. It was a glorious summer day when her flight landed. Schmidt was waiting for her. They had seen each other only once in six months.
Driving back to Choisel, Ingrid did most of the talking, bemoaning the changes she’d seen in Hollywood. The traditional studio system had been replaced by a loosely knit coalition of less-experienced personnel, she told her husband. Although the technological advancements were impressive, the storylines were weak and relied too heavily on sex, violence, and earsplitting soundtracks. Movies like Casablanca and Notorious would never have been made under the current Hollywood system, she said.
Schmidt listened politely. Later that evening, he shared some news of his own. He had fallen in love with a young woman in Paris. Ingrid was shocked, hurt, upset. But, she said later, “I realized I had given myself this blow. It was my own fault, and Liana had warned me long ago.”
Ingrid took the news of her husband’s infidelity hard. Schmidt told her the name of his new love: Kristina Belfrage, a young woman in Paris. Still grieving the loss of his son decades earlier, Schmidt desperately wanted another child – something that Ingrid, at age fifty-five, could not give him.
“I knew I couldn’t blame Lars, but at first I didn’t accept it with much patience,” Ingrid said later. “I was angry with him. We discussed divorce, but it was only discussion. I thought I would leave. I would go away. Then I thought, maybe this other relationship will end. There was so much that Lars and I had between us. Perhaps we could make up and go on as we had before – which, of course, is not possible. You make up, but it’s not the same as it was before.”
Once more, Ingrid was faced with a familiar dilemma: “Was it more important to keep my marriage going or - and I know it sounds selfish - to keep my acting going? Was it better to make films, entertain people in the theater, or sit at home and be a goo
d-but-bored wife? So far we had managed to live with that problem - but suddenly it was all different.”
After lots of discussion, Schmidt and Ingrid were no closer to a resolution. So they did nothing. They remained together, at least for now, with young Kristina in the background.
Then the phone rang with another offer for Ingrid. Binkie Beaumont, a friend and one of the most successful producers in London, wanted her to appear in a revival of a 1900 George Bernard Shaw play, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. Ingrid read the play and didn’t like it much. But it had a fabulous part in Lacy Waynflete, the only woman in a cast of twenty-five. “She’s very original, quick-witted, intelligent, and funny, and set against twenty-four not-so-clever men,” she recalled. “I mean, how lucky can you get?”
As she debated whether to accept the part, Ingrid knew that continuing to work so much would not be good for her marriage. But it was a paradox: The more her marriage foundered, the more important her work became to her. Even Schmidt encouraged her to take the part. So Ingrid called Beaumont back to say “yes,” later negotiating a deal though her agent Laurence Evans that would pay her 10 percent of the gross box office receipts.
Near the end of 1970, Ingrid left for London to begin rehearsals. For the time being, her crumbling marriage was kept out of the public eye. In interviews with the English press, she made no mention of it, and once in London, she quietly settled into the Connaught Hotel and prepared for her role in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.
Though the play itself is sometimes unwieldy and lumbering, Ingrid’s character Lacy is captivating and beguiling. A well-known explorer, Lacy travels to Morocco with her brother-in-law, Sir Howard Hallam, and they encounter a notorious smuggler known as “Black Paquito,” A.K.A. Captain Brassbound. Lacy uses her charm and good sense to diffuse a dangerous confrontation between Hallam and Brassbound and sets everyone on the path to a more reasonable justice.
Ingrid relied heavily on director Frith Banbury during rehearsals and took instruction well. But, as usual, she spoke her mind. When Banbury told her not to react to another actor’s lines because it would draw attention to herself and away from him, she reminded him that reactions were equally important - something Alfred Hitchcock had taught her long ago.
Captain Brassbound’s Conversation ran for two weeks in Brighton before opening at the Cambridge Theatre in February 1971. Reviews were mixed, with critics finding it curious that a foreigner like Ingrid had been chosen to play Lacy, a British aristocrat. Though Ingrid struggled the first week or so, Beaumont knew audiences would eventually embrace her, and they did; the show ran successfully for nine months.
In December 1971, after Captain Brassbound had wrapped in London, Ingrid happily traveled to New York for Pia’s wedding - this one more traditional than the first - to Joseph Daly, a real-estate broker. Ingrid was overjoyed to see her eldest daughter find domestic happiness. She would later be proud of Pia’s long and successful career as an anchorwoman and arts critic for local television stations in New York City, where she won two Emmy awards.
Captain Brassbound’s Conversation had been so successful in London that its producers decided to move it to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1972. It then went on to New York, where it received good reviews and turned out to be the only play that season - out of fifty-six - that earned a profit.
A highlight of Ingrid’s trip to America came in April when Senator Charles Percy of Illinois read a statement on the Senate floor apologizing to Ingrid for Senator Johnson’s cruel remarks more than twenty years earlier. Apparently, it was now acceptable for a politician to curry favor by praising, rather than condemning, Ingrid. In his apology, which was recorded in the Congressional Record, he addressed the president, saying: “One of the world’s loveliest, most-gracious and most-talented women was made the victim of bitter attack in this Chamber twenty-two years ago. Today, I would like to pay long overdue tribute to Ingrid Bergman, a true star in every sense of the word.”
Ingrid wrote Percy to thank him. “My war with America was over long ago,” she wrote. “The wounds however remained. Now, because of your gallant gesture with your generous and understanding address to the Senate, they are healed forever.”
In the summer and fall of 1972, with the American run of Captain Brassbound over, Ingrid spent her time in Danholmen and Choisel, occasionally journeying to London to talk about plays she might do. To her dismay, the press had finally caught on that her marriage to Schmidt was in trouble. When asked about it, she would only say that she was, indeed, still married and wanted to stay that way. The ever-private Schmidt remained mute on the subject.
In many ways, their relationships got better, Ingrid said, “and little by little I didn’t feel so hurt anymore” by her husband’s affair. But their relationship was fundamentally broken. Schmidt continued to see Kristina, and they were talking about getting married and starting a family. “We tried, but it didn’t work,” Ingrid said simply. “The marriage was over.”
Fortunately, Ingrid continued to find great roles she wanted to play. Some arrived through circuitous routes. Her next theatrical production came by way of a children’s film she made in 1973, called From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Adapted from an award-winning children’s book by E.L. Konigsburg, the movie tells the story of a brother and sister who run away from home and use New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as their hideout. Though not a major cinematic event, the film was well-reviewed.
While shooting in New York, Ingrid became re-acquainted with Arthur Cantor, who had been a page at the Alvin Theater when she performed in Joan of Lorraine a quarter-century earlier. Cantor had moved up in the world and was now helping Captain Brassbound producer Binkie Beaumont raise money for various productions. One day, Cantor called Ingrid to offer her a role in Somerset Maugham’s 1926 comedy of manners, The Constant Wife, in London. “Binkie likes it,” he said. “I’m sending it to you to see if you like it.”
Ingrid would play the lead character, Constance Middleton. Married for fifteen years to a doctor who has been sleeping with her best friend, Constance lets everyone think she knows nothing of the affair. When she “discovers” his infidelity, instead of leaving him, she tells him she doesn’t love him anymore and proceeds to get a job, paying him rent until she leaves town with an admirer on an extended Italian vacation.
“I did like it, but I thought it was a bit old-fashioned,” Ingrid said. When she expressed her misgivings to the director, John Gielgud, he replied, “What is old-fashioned about this play, Ingrid, is its charm.”
That sold Ingrid, and they went to work. In March 1973, she traveled to London with Gielgud to talk to Beaumont about the costumes. Since the producer was bedridden with back pain, they sat by his bed and talked until he left to see the doctor – or, depending on which version of the story you believe, he left to attend a party where he did a spot-on impersonation of Marlene Dietrich. In either case, they would never see him again. Beaumont died of heart failure two days later.
Ingrid was shocked and saddened that her witty, ebullient friend was gone so suddenly. Eventually, Gielgud said to her, “You know, Ingrid, we have to go on. Binkie would never forgive us if he knew we had quit when he had everything going so well.”
On September 29, The Constant Wife opened at the Albery Theatre in London. Most nights, the play came off without a hitch, but there were some rough spots. One night, Ingrid was talking with stage manager Griff James backstage – by now they had become great friends – and missed her cue. James pushed her onstage, where she excused herself by saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry - I was talking to Griff!”
Despite the critics’ complaints (once again) that a Swede was playing an Englishwoman, The Constant Wife was an enormous success. The Daily Telegraph said it was “unusually entertaining” while another writer called it “the wittiest play in London.” Every show was a sell-out, which, thanks to her agent’s handiwork, paid Ingrid well, at 12 percent of the gross receipts for e
ight full months.
There were some unpleasant moments, however. In late October 1973, Ingrid returned to her Mount Street apartment after a Monday night show and found that it had been ransacked and burglarized. The monetary loss - $25,000 in jewelry and a mink coat - was covered by insurance, but the sentimental items were unrecoverable as was her sense of security.
Also that fall, Anna Magnani, Rossellini’s former partner, on-screen and off, died of cancer at sixty-five. Rossellini, with whom Ingrid had restored a friendly relationship, visited Magnani’s bedside often in her painful final weeks and kept Ingrid informed about the actress’s health. Because no one else had purchased a burial plot for her, Rossellini arranged for Magnani’s body to be interred in his family’s mausoleum.
Increasingly concerned that so many people she knew had succumbed to cancer, Ingrid, after reading an article about doing breast self-examinations, performed one on herself. Her right breast felt fine, but on the underside of her left breast, she found a small lump. “Then my hand stopped and I thought, Oh God! Oh God! No, it can’t happen to me!” she recalled later. “It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s like having twins - it will happen to other people.”
Immediately, she called Schmidt in France. “You must go to the doctor,” he said. “Go tomorrow. At once.”
“But I’m in the play, and we’ve got a long run ahead,” she protested. “I can’t do anything for the moment.”
For a few days, she didn’t do anything except to ask James what would happen to the play if she could not perform for some reason. “No Ingrid Bergman, no play,” he replied. “If you’re not in the play, the play comes off.”
A few days later, Ingrid went to see Dr. David Handley who said she would need a biopsy to tell whether the lump was benign or malignant and urged her to get it done quickly. For the sake of the show, Ingrid decided to put it off.