Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

“That’s not the problem,” Steinman said.

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Billy,” Herb said slowly, “I know what you mean when you say the word ‘half.’ But suddenly, I don’t know what you mean when you say the word ‘all.’ ”

  Near the end of that year’s festival, Edy Williams had to worry about how to ship herself home. She’d received a publicity bonanza by taking off her clothes while standing on a roulette table at the Casino des Fleurs, but her appearances were pro bono, and she was broke. She had been flown to Cannes by a Japanese syndicate hopeful that an Edy Williams poster would run up sales to equal Farrah Fawcett’s best seller, but the poster proved too racy for the teenage boy market, and the Japanese fled town. Billy got wind of this development. “She’s a sweet kid,” he said. “I told her to meet me at Félix and we’d have a little chat.” I went along, having known Edy since the fateful day in 1969 when I introduced her to Russ Meyer in the Twentieth Century–Fox commissary. Billy commandeered booth #1 in the window at the cost of a silver dollar, and greeted Edy when she arrived in full starlet regalia.

  “Hi, handsome,” she said to Billy.

  “Sit down right here and tell me about your problems,” Billy said. “I got you sitting in the window, you might be discovered.”

  “Oooooh, Billy!” she said, running her long red nails up the sleeve of his blazer and teasing the nape of his neck. Edy not only spoke like a starlet in the movies, she had been a starlet in the movies. She was now being profiled as the Last Hollywood Starlet, which was true. There was a time when Hollywood studios had dozens of starlets under contract. Fox was the last studio to continue that tradition, and Edy had been their last starlet.

  “Irving,” said Baxter, “brang Miss Boop-a-Doop here some champagne. None of that French crap. Look at this joint. Last year, you couldn’t fight your way in here, with all the Iranians. Now they’re at home with the Allhetoldya Cockamamie. Irving! And the menu! What do you recommend, apart from another restaurant?”

  “Oh, Billy, you always know what to say,” Edy said.

  “Always thinking of you, sweetheart,” said Baxter. “What’d you spill all over your boobs?”

  “Gold sparkle. It’s the latest thing. But, Billy, I was thinking. You know, I’m not in my twenties anymore. I was wondering if maybe my bikini routine is getting a little dated.”

  “What bikini routine? You mean where you walk outside and take off your bikini?”

  “I was thinking of a new image for my thirties.”

  “I can’t believe my ears,” Billy said. “We’re talking about the girl who jumped into the ring before the Ali-Spinks fight and took off her clothes in front of seventy thousand people in the Superdome.”

  “They were caught completely by surprise,” Edy said.

  “What did it feel like?” asked Baxter. “I’ll bet you are the only person in history to take off her clothes in front of seventy thousand people. At the same time, anyway.”

  “The worst part was right before I did it,” Edy said. “I was standing at ringside, and I was scared. What if they didn’t like it? What if everybody booed? Or didn’t pay any attention!”

  “That’s gotta be every girl’s nightmare,” said Baxter.

  “But it was the most unbelievable sensation, when I was in the ring and they were all cheering,” she said. “I knew what Ali must feel like.”

  “Irving,” said Silver Dollar Baxter, “look at these flowers on the table. It looks like you picked them up off of the street.”

  Edy brushed at her glitter absentmindedly. “I’m stranded and heartbroken,” she said. “When the Japanese left, they took my airplane ticket with them. What am I gonna doooo, Billy?”

  “You’re gonna hold a sale.”

  “A sale? Of what?”

  “Answer me this. How much you need to fly home?”

  “There’s a cheap fare for nine hundred dollars.”

  “You got any posters left?”

  “Almost all of them.”

  “Okay. You had a sale. You marked them down to one dollar, and you sold me nine hundred of them.”

  “Ooooo, Billy!”

  The next morning, the phone in my room rang. “Ro-jay Eggplant! Get over here to the Majestic lobby. I’m holding my ceremonial departure.”

  Half an hour later, I found Billy waiting in the American Bar.

  “Irving! Talk to the concerturdgie. Tell him I want the staff all lined up in the lobby so I can leave them with a little forget-me-not.”

  He went upstairs to his room. A line of waiters, barmen, cooks, and doormen formed. The elevator doors opened. A bellboy emerged with a luggage cart, followed by Billy Baxter, who presented every one of them with an Edy Williams poster.

  34 INGMAR BERGMAN

  WHEN I WAS finally home for good from the hospital, I recalled Norman Cousins’s famous account of how he was healed by laughing at Marx Brothers movies. I found I was cheered by the existential dread of Ingmar Bergman. My shoulder hurt too much for me to sit at my desktop computer, and Chaz found me a “zero gravity” chair where I could sit effortlessly for hours. I rested a thin wooden lap desk on the arms, and it became my workstation and still is.

  I began to watch Bergman movies. I began with the Death of God trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, Winter Light) and continued through The Passion of Anna and Hour of the Wolf. These were on DVDs from the Criterion Collection, playing on an HD television, and although I’d seen them all at least two or three times, I had never seen such a clear picture. I knew what the stories contained and how they were told, but the startling clarity of the black-and-white images caused me to admire more than ever the cinematography of Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s longtime collaborator.

  I froze frames, advanced slowly, noticed the care with which he controlled the light on human faces to a precision of fractions of an inch. The films of the trilogy were more than ever things of beauty. To see them in color would be unthinkable. Although he later made many color films, I wondered if Bergman would have been perceived as a master if he had started that way. The same might be said of Fellini. By losing the choice of black and white, modern directors have been forced to surrender half their palette.

  I felt a kinship with Bergman. In his compulsion to ask fundamental questions I sensed the intensity I struggled with in my childhood debates with Catholicism. His father had been a Lutheran pastor, his childhood apparently spare and forbidding, his guilt deep. As an adult he sought completion through women but was not long faithful. Women were like a sacrament he turned to in his state of sin.

  Recently hauled back from the jaws of death, I was immune to laughter as a medicine and found some solace in his desperate seekers who confronted profound matters. This was a new stage in my relationship with Bergman. In college I went to the Art Theater to see The Virgin Spring and the trilogy in their first runs. I wasn’t a prodigy raised on the Internet and DVDs; I learned about film mostly from the reviews in TIME magazine and Dwight Macdonald’s column in Esquire and watched Bergman’s films in solemn half comprehension, sure he was asking important questions, unsure exactly what they were. Perhaps they were versions of mankind’s original question: Why?

  In 1967, new in my job at the Sun-Times, I walked into the Clark Theater and saw Persona. I didn’t have a clue how to write about it. I began with a simple description: “At first the screen is black. Then, very slowly, an area of dark grey transforms itself into blinding white. This is light projected through film onto the screen, the first basic principle of the movies. The light flickers and jumps around, finally resolving itself into a crude cartoon of a fat lady.” And so on. I was discovering a method that would work with impenetrable films: Focus on what you saw and how it affected you. Don’t fake it.

  Bergman produced a film a year, writing every winter, filming every summer, working always with the same close-knit family of collaborators. I heard about him firsthand from Ernie Anderson, an old-style publicist who worked only for the cl
ients of Paul Kohner, the legendary independent agent. I met Ernie on a frigid New York location for Death Wish, after Esquire assigned me to write a profile on Charles Bronson. Curiously, Ernie spent most of two days talking to me about Bergman. Both Bergman and Bronson were Kohner clients, as were Liv Ullmann, John Huston, Nykvist, Max von Sydow, Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland, Huston’s daughter Anjelica, and so on.

  “Ingmar would like to meet you,” Ernie said—unlikely because he had probably never heard of me. Ernie, who established Burl Ives as “the most popular folk singer in history,” was an expert in creating factoids. On his word the media learned that Bronson was the biggest movie star on earth, and there was a billboard with him on it that stretched for two blocks in Tokyo. Remove “biggest” and “two” and who could argue? Ernie was middle-aged, conservatively dressed, a gentleman, a press agent suitable for the clients of the courtly Kohner from Vienna, who would not subject his clients to the vulgarities of studio publicists. He was old world. He represented John Huston on the basis of a handshake.

  Bergman was in the news after he fell into conflict with Sweden’s tax laws. I don’t recall the details. As the greatest living Swede he was outraged by threats of criminal prosecution, and he went into exile, appearing at a press conference in Rome with Fellini to announce they would make a film together. What I would have given to witness one of their story conferences. Then I read that Bergman was making his first trip to America, and would visit Hollywood.

  Ernie called me one day. “You can’t repeat this,” he said. “Ingmar wanted to visit a working set. Charlie is out here shooting Breakheart Pass, and I got Tom Gries to invite him onto the lot. I introduce him to Charlie. They both know I work for them through Kohner. Charlie says, ‘This is just an action picture, Mr. Bergman. Nothing like what you make.’ Ingmar says, ‘No, no! I am fascinated! Tell me what you are doing today.’ Charlie says, ‘Well, I get shot.’ He takes off his shirt and shows his trick vest. ‘This vest has these little squibs that explode and release fake blood. But you know all this stuff. You make movies.’ Ingmar says, ‘No, no! I’ve never seen this before.’ Charlie says, ‘You mean… you don’t use machine guns in your pictures?’ ”

  Bergman returned to Sweden, the tax business was settled, and in the summer of 1975 Ernie called me from Stockholm with an invitation to visit the set of Face to Face. I watched Bergman at work with Nykvist, I spoke to him and Liv Ullmann in their “cells” at the Swedish Film Institute’s Film House, and those alone were experiences for a lifetime. But it was Ernie who elevated my trip to another level. He was a priest in the church of Bergman. He pumped me full of observations: How Ingmar had used the same carpenter on every film, how the same woman served tea and biscuits every afternoon on the set, where he lived in Stockholm when he wasn’t on his island home of Fårö, how his annual routine was inviolable, how he also directed for the stage, what he ate, how he liked his coffee.

  When he is in Stockholm, Ernie lectured me, Bergman lives in an apartment he considers not a home but a dormitory to sleep in while he’s making a film. His wife, Ingrid, prepares meals there, but if the Bergmans entertain it is more likely to be at his table in the Theater Grill, a restaurant directly across the street from the back door of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. The table is not easily seen; Ernie took me for lunch there and revealed it behind a large mirrored post, so that Bergman, who could see everyone in the room, would be all but invisible.

  During the eight or ten weeks it takes him to direct a film, Ernie said, Bergman awakens around eight and drives to Film House, five minutes’ drive from the center of Stockholm. The building is always filled with discussion and activity, much of it centered on the bar of the Laurel and Hardy Pub on the second level, but when Bergman is in residence a certain self-consciousness seems to descend on Film House. It’s the same, Ernie said, as when the pope is in the Vatican.

  Bergman joins his actors and technicians for breakfast. It is served in a cluttered little room presided over by the hostess, whose job is to make coffee and serve afternoon tea and fuss over people in a motherly sort of way. When you are making a picture about the silence of God, it helps if everyone feels right at home and there’s a pot of coffee brewing.

  Bergman that summer had directed a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Drottningholm Court Theatre, a restored two-hundred-year-old jewel box. We took a steamer through the archipelago to the royal palace, embarking from the pier in front of the Grand Hôtel, dining on what Ernie explained was “the famous steamer steak,” also famous for being the only thing on the menu except for herring. What I saw was essentially what Bergman shot for his 1976 film, right down to the wooden waves and the rotating boxes filled with stones to make the sound of thunder.

  The next day I visited the set. Face to Face was about an attempted suicide by a tormented psychiatrist, played by Liv Ullmann. “For some time now,” Bergman wrote in a letter to his cast and crew, just before production began, “I have been living with an anxiety which has had no tangible cause.” His attempt to work it out led to the screenplay for Face to Face, in which the woman faces her terrible dread (common enough in Bergman), attempted to surrender to it (also nothing new), but then transcended it in a small victory over her darker nature. “Ingmar had grown more hopeful lately,” Ernie said. “His friends all speculate about it.”

  The company joined him for coffee. Liv Ullmann was dressed in an old cotton shirt and a full blue denim skirt; she wore no makeup and her hair was tossed back from her forehead as if to make the declaration that she’d been asleep until fifteen minutes earlier. Bergman had met her on a street corner talking to her friend Bibi Andersson, just at the moment he was casting Persona. He liked the way the two women fit together and cast them both, on the spot. He and Liv also had a daughter, Linn. That morning she was friendly and plainspoken, more like a mother than a star.

  Gunnar Björnstrand, tall and stately in his sixties, gravely considered the room and leafed through his script. He was the squire in The Seventh Seal and the father in Through a Glass Darkly and was one of the familiar figures in Bergman’s repertory company. “He’s been ill,” Ernie whispered, “but he came out of retirement to play Ullmann’s grandfather. He’s responded so well that Bergman has expanded his role.”

  Katinka Farago, the production manager, a robust woman in her thirties, had no time for coffee; she wanted a moment to speak with Bergman about the next week’s production schedule. Katinka came to Stockholm from Hungary in 1956, a refugee, and got a job as Bergman’s script girl. He made her production manager a few years later, in charge of all the logistics of time, space, and money. “This is her seventeenth film with Ingmar,” Ernie said.

  Sven Nykvist was a tall, strong fifty-two, with a beard and a quick smile. He was better dressed than Bergman, but then everyone was. “His friends say Ingmar doesn’t spend a hundred dollars a year for personal haberdashery,” his publicist Ernie Anderson told me. Nykvist first worked for Bergman on The Naked Night in 1953 and had been with him steadily since The Virgin Spring in 1959. The two of them together engineered Bergman’s long-delayed transition from black and white to color, unhappily in All These Women and then triumphantly in The Passion of Anna and Cries and Whispers.

  Nykvist was in demand all over the world, but he always left his schedule open for Bergman. “We’ve already discussed the new film the year before,” he told me, “and then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we start to shoot, usually about the fifteenth of April. Usually we are the same eighteen people working with him, year after year, one film a year. At the Cannes Film Festival one year, Ingmar was talking with David Lean. ‘What kind of crew do you use?’ Lean asked him. ‘I make my films with eighteen good friends,’ said Ingmar. ‘That’s interesting,’ said Lean. ‘I make mine with one hundred and fifty enemies.’ ”

  It is rare for Bergman to invite outsiders to one of his sets. It is much more common, during a difficult scene, for him to send one te
chnician after another out to wait in the hall, until the actors are alone with Bergman, Nykvist, a sound man, an electrician, and the scene. “When we were making Cries and Whispers,” Liv Ullmann told me, “none of the rest of us knew what Harriet Andersson was doing in those scenes of suffering and death. Ingmar would send away everyone except just those few who must be there. When we saw the completed film, we were overwhelmed. It was almost as if those great scenes had been Harriet’s secret—which, in a way, they were supposed to be, since in the film she died so much alone.”

  There was a lunch break precisely at noon. The director retired to his tiny cell across from the sound stage to eat fresh fruit and think about the afternoon’s filming. Liv Ullmann had lunch brought to her dressing room. It was like a co-ed’s dorm, with paperback novels turned down to mark the place, letters meant to be answered, and her award as best actress from the New York film critics. She’d ordered open-faced sandwiches and fresh radishes.

  “We must close the door and not talk very loudly,” she said, “because Ingmar has been edgy this morning. He doesn’t want his leading lady talking to some writer during the lunch hour. It’s a terrible scene today. It’s a scene in which my character has just tried to commit suicide. Now she must face her child. The girl who plays my daughter is so trusting, so sensitive, she reminds me of my daughter. It’s hell to get through, this scene.

  “The film goes a long way down. It goes to the very bottom, she really does think she’s killed herself, and then it comes back up again. It ends with real hope. That’s something that Ingmar had hardly ever shown in his films, until quite recently. He was always such a pessimist, and now he begins to see a little light. In the last scene of Scenes from a Marriage, for example, when the two people cling to each other in the middle of the night, maybe that’s not much, but it’s something.”

  Ullmann, who lived with him for several years, said he didn’t look the same on the set these days: “He’s mellowed, in a nice way. He’s sweeter. Isn’t that a funny thing to say about Ingmar Bergman! He’s more tolerant. We’ve all been through some rough times with him, we’ve had some fights on the set, but if he was wrong, he apologizes. And if one has been wrong oneself, he takes one’s hand. Ingmar, they give him a tough time in Sweden. Some of the younger critics, they’re so political, they won’t praise any film that doesn’t reflect their politics. Ingmar is hardly political at all; he’s more interested in the insides of people. When we go abroad, we hear all the praise and recognition for his films, and he hardly receives it at all here. We eat the cake and he sits here reading the Swedish papers.”