by Grace Carter
Aboard the Rex, Ingrid received a telegram from David Selznick saying that she would be playing the lead role in the film Joan of Arc and to broadcast the news to the press when she reached New York. She could hardly believe it. Ever since she was a child, she had always wanted to play Joan. But when she got off the boat in New York, she was met by a Selznick publicity man who whispered, “Don’t talk too much about Joan of Arc - yes?”
“What do you mean?” Ingrid replied, shocked.
“Well, we’re not going to make it, not just yet anyway, but we’ll tell you about that later. You just smile and say there’s a movie coming up and you’re going out to California.”
As she waited to hear what Selznick had in mind for her, Ingrid and Pia and their nanny stayed with Brown and her family at their Park Avenue apartment. Bored and at loose ends, Ingrid gained fifteen pounds, drowning her sorrows in her favorite American vice: ice cream sundaes.
“They never had any of that kind of ice cream in Sweden,” she recalled. “They didn’t even have ice cream parlors, and certainly not hot fudge sundaes and banana splits. I’d never seen such things. So the first time I tasted them I lost my head, and I ate and ate and ate. But I couldn’t order more than two ice creams in one drugstore. It was too embarrassing to ask for a third, so I used to go to another drugstore and order two more ice creams there.”
She knew that she was gaining weight but figured that if she binged enough, she would get so sick that she would stop completely. She tried to lose the weight by taking long walks through Central Park and browsing through Harlem’s flea markets and the exhibits at the World’s Fair, but that wasn’t enough; she needed more activity. Actually, she knew that what she really needed was acting work.
Ingrid was sometimes recognized by fans who had seen her in Intermezzo, and though she politely signed autographs, she was uncomfortable with their flattery. Brown ran interference for her, warding off admirers who became too intrusive, and pestered Selznick to find Ingrid a suitable project. The only thing he had to offer her at the moment was a radio production of Intermezzo, which she would record in California in late January, leaving Pia in New York with Brown and a new Swedish nanny. (Their first nanny had fallen in with a drug crowd in New York and had to be replaced.)
When Ingrid reached Hollywood, Selznick informed her that Joan of Arc was being postponed indefinitely. With the war raging in Europe, it wasn’t a good time to be making movies about armed conflicts, even one that took place 500 years ago. Closer to the truth was that his studio had spent an astronomical $3.9 million making Gone with the Wind and had yet to reap the box office receipts. He couldn’t afford another costly epic.
In the meantime, he would try to find something else for her and continued his careful marketing of his precious Swedish ingénue. When she returned to New York, Selznick scheduled an exclusive interview for her with Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who was smitten: “Picture the sweetheart of a Viking, freshly scrubbed with Ivory soap, eating peaches and cream from a Dresden china bowl on the first warm day of Spring atop a sea-scarred cliff and you have a fair impression of Ingrid Bergman.” Crowther labeled Ingrid “a Scandinavian dream girl” and babbled on about her simplicity and lack of pretension and compared her talent to the legendary Greta Garbo’s. He concluded: “This reporter would like to go on record that he has never met a star who compares in the slightest degree with this incredible newcomer from Sweden.”
In another glowing review, the Swedish writer Åke Sandler raved about Ingrid’s innocent face and saintly charm. But all this emphasis on her innocence and purity made Ingrid nervous. Not only would it be difficult to live up to such an angelic image, but it could prevent her from being cast in more diverse, less wholesome roles. Selznick told her not to worry: Play by the rules and do what I say, he advised. Ingrid said she would try.
Back in New York after her trip to Hollywood, Ingrid was pleased to see Pia thriving and settling in with Brown’s daughters, Kate and Laurinda. With still no work to occupy her time and energies, however, Ingrid was restless. Brown, seeing her agitation, set out to find her a project. She knew producer Vinton Freedley was planning a revival of Hungarian dramatist Ferenc Molnár’s 1908 play Liliom, which had inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel.
The story centers around Liliom, a rough-around-the-edges fairground worker who marries a young maid named Julie, who becomes pregnant. Though Liliom is delighted that Julie is expecting, when they both lose their jobs, he takes his frustration out on her, even striking her. Desperate to provide for his expectant wife and child, he and a friend plan a robbery. When the robbery ends in disaster, Liliom is captured and kills himself to avoid going to jail. After being sent to Purgatory for sixteen years, he’s given a chance to return to earth to redeem himself.
Ingrid was perfect for the part of Julie, Brown told Selznick, and convinced him to allow her to work on the Broadway production while she waited for him to find her a movie. Brown set up an audition for Ingrid with director Benno Schneider and arranged additional English lessons.
Freedley was thrilled to work with Selznick’s new protégé, and Ingrid, after a flawless audition, got the part. After two weeks of rehearsal, however, Freedley wore a puzzled look as he watched Brown and one of Selznick’s executives sit in the top balcony listening to Ingrid run through her lines to make sure they could hear her voice.
“Why are you doing this?” Freedley asked Ingrid.
“Because I’ve played so little on the professional stage - a couple of months. That’s all,” she said, adding that she had never performed in English onstage.
“What are you talking about?” Freedley said. “You’ve done Mary Queen of Scots, you’ve done Mädchen in Uniform . . . you’ve done . . .”
“No, I haven’t,” Ingrid said, “that was Signe Hasso.”
Suddenly, Ingrid realized what had happened. Hasso had arrived in America about six months after her and received a lot of publicity that had caught Freedley’s attention.
After what seemed like a lifetime of silence, Freedley said, furious, “Oh, my God, I’ve got the wrong girl.”
“Well, how were we supposed to know who you wanted?” Brown said. “You asked for Ingrid. Signe is working out in California, and you asked for Ingrid . . .”
“Oh my God!” said Freedley. “Oh my God! And it’s too late to change now.”
“So there I was,” Ingrid recalled later, “with a big New York opening coming up, and I’m the wrong girl, and my English is really not very good.”
To make matters worse, the playwright Molnár, now in his seventies, arrived and took a long look at Ingrid, who had gained weight during her stay in New York. Noticing that she was four inches taller than her co-star, Burgess Meredith, he said, “He’s playing Liliom?” Then he turned to Ingrid and joked, “Why don’t you play Liliom?”
Liliom opened in late March at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre. “I go out and face my first American theater audience,” Ingrid recalled. “Vinton Freedley is not sure whether or not he’s got the great American disaster on his hands, and I wasn’t sure either . . . Acting in your own tongue is one thing; you recognize every little mistake you make and cover it. But I could make a terrible mistake in English and not know that I’d done it.”
Ingrid was also prone to stage fright. But she needn’t have worried. She was a hit. In the play’s finals scenes, as Julie wept over her dead lover and read scripture from Saint Matthew, extolling the importance of forgiveness, many in the audience wept. When the final curtain came down, Molnár announced that he was absolutely delighted with Miss Bergman’s performance.
The reviews were mostly good, some rapturous. Walter Winchell wrote, “Ingrid’s poise, restraint, and magnetism reach out over the bulbs to touch you . . .” Another critic said: “Mr. Meredith and Miss Bergman can make you cry as easily as not. The two of them in the second act provide some of the loveliest moments brought to the theater by any play of this century.�
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Brooks Atkinson, a notoriously difficult critic to impress, wrote in The New York Times, “The part of Julie introduces us to a young actress of extraordinary gifts and ability. She has a slight accent. She also has a clean-cut beauty of figure and manner, responsive eyes, a sensitive mouth, a pleasant voice that can be heard and modulated. And more than that, she seems to have complete command of the part she is playing . . . Miss Bergman keeps the part wholly alive and lightens it from within with luminous beauty.”
That spring of 1940, Ingrid won over her castmates and the media with her frank and impromptu exchanges, a unique trait at a time when so many stars’ remarks were scripted - both on and off the set. She told the New York Journal-American, “Put it down that I love New York. I love the drug stores and next the [double-decker] buses. There is nothing like that in Stockholm. There are only two disagreeable things in New York. The subway goes too fast, and they close the doors on your neck. And the air is not good. It is so full of motor car gasoline it stinks!” Selznick instructed his publicist to caution Ms. Bergman about her candor, which he feared some filmgoers might find offensive.
When Liliom had finished its six-week run in May, Ingrid and Pia and their nanny moved to Brown’s summer cottage in Amagansett, Long Island. In June, Lindstrom made the long voyage to New York by way of Italy, aboard the SS Washington luxury liner. “It is unbelievable that the time has come when he soon will be here . . .” she wrote to her friend Ruth Roberts.
Leaving Pia with the nanny, Ingrid greeted him at the dock, and the two stayed on the thirty-fourth floor of a hotel Ingrid had booked for them in the city, overlooking Central Park. She was ecstatic. “I want to see his face when he sees that wonderful town down below, the town with 8 million people, the town I never get tired of,” she wrote to Roberts.
But things didn’t work out quite the way she planned. Lindstrom complained of being so high up in the tall building and how dirty New York was. He walked around the room in his stocking feet saying, “Look, the carpets are filthy and my socks are filthy!” Ingrid said, “Look out of the window. Look at this beautiful town. This is the most exciting town in the world.” But Lindstrom was not impressed. “So that was not a success,” she said later.
After three weeks in New York, Lindstrom went back to Sweden. The visit had done nothing to improve their relationship; the couple was living two entirely separate lives, with only a child in common. After much discussion, they agreed that the only solution was for the whole family to live together in America, far from war-torn Europe. Lindstrom, who had been studying medicine on the side for years, would attempt to earn a medical degree from an Ivy League institution like Harvard or Yale.
Ingrid, in the meantime, was now unhappy in New York. “I feel very lonesome since Petter left, and Long Island bores me no end,” she wrote to Roberts. “Dear God, if I could only make Joan come to life instead of this disgusting idleness and ice cream eating.” Her English was better, but besides Brown, Ingrid had no close friends, and at twenty-five, she worried that her career was already on the wane. She also had to endure gossip and rumors about her personal life since no one could understand why such a charming and successful woman would not be surrounded by men.
By fall, she was at her wit’s end and decided to head out to Hollywood with Pia so she could beg Selznick for a job in person. When she arrived, Selznick said the studio no longer wanted to make Joan of Arc. “There’s no love story in it,” he told her, “and now the English and the French are allies and fighting against the Nazis, so [a movie showing the allies fighting one another] would be bad propaganda for them, and anyway, it’s a boring story - the whole thing.”
Ingrid was disappointed, but at least she was in Hollywood, the best place on earth to find work in films. “David has to do something about me or else I will camp on his front porch,” she told Roberts. For her, acting was as natural – and as necessary – as breathing. And she was suffocating.
In the fall of 1940, with Ingrid climbing the walls, David Selznick finally agreed to loan her out to Columbia Pictures for a film called Adam Had Four Sons, directed by Gregory Ratoff, her Intermezzo director who had specifically requested her for his new project.
Based on the novel Legacy by American author Charles Bonner, the film told the story of a French governess, Emilie Gallatan, who worked for a wealthy family caring for four boys. When their mother dies and the father loses much of his fortune in a stock market crash, the widower sends the boys to boarding school and is forced to part with Emilie, with whom he has fallen in love. Ingrid wasn’t thrilled with the part – “at last something my teeth could bite into, but it was not such a good apple,” she said – but she was far too desperate to work to even consider turning it down.
Back in Hollywood, Selznick’s staff helped Ingrid find an apartment - a sunny, furnished, two-bedroom in Beverly Hills - and hired a housekeeper and cook named Mabel, who won Pia over immediately by making her an angel cake with two pink candles for her second birthday. Within days, Ingrid was on the set of Adam Had Four Sons, being stuffed into an early twentieth-century corset and an equally uncomfortable wig.
“We had a script to work with but the dialogue was made up minute by minute as we went along, and they had no idea how to end the picture,” she complained in her journal. Still, Ingrid did everything she could to make Emilie believable and even asked Ratoff to beef up the part by adding scenes of her playing basketball and doing gymnastics with the four boys to make her character more real and less cloying.
“It wasn’t a very good picture,” Ingrid said later. “But as long as a part makes sense, and the character is a human being, I will try because I can’t do artificial people on the screen. Nothing done with such a character can make it real to audiences.” Fay Wray, who played the family matriarch in the film, said that Ingrid’s portrayal of the young governess was so convincing that she never appeared to be acting.
When Adam Had Four Sons opened in theaters in February 1941, both critics and audiences lauded Ingrid’s performance as the best part of the film. “Somehow,” said Mary Ellen Leary in the San Francisco News, “you believe in her.”
Two important non-critics liked her performance as well. One was Kay Brown, who said, “Anybody who could get away with a stinker like Adam Had Four Sons must have a great future ahead of her.” The other was Ingrid herself, who had to admit her English was improving: “It is very good,” she said. “I myself can understand myself when I talk.”
Ingrid finished Adam Had Four Sons at three o’clock in the morning, and seven hours later was working on her next film, Rage in Heaven. Clearly, Selznick realized that, until he could find the right film for her, the only way to keep her happy would be to continue loaning her out – in this case, to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
But Rage in Heaven was about to give Ingrid a crash course in how the bizarre personalities of Hollywood can make filmmaking a torturous endeavor. The production was troubled from the very start. Based on a 1925 novel by James Hilton, the film noir was a psychological thriller co-starring Robert Montgomery as Philip, a paranoid schizophrenic who terrorizes his wife Stella, played by Ingrid. Montgomery had already been nominated for an Academy Award for playing a psychopath in MGM’s 1937 chiller, Night Must Fall, so the studio hoped to repeat that film’s success.
Montgomery, however, had other plans. On the first day of shooting, he came into Ingrid’s dressing room and informed her that while he would be appearing in the film, he would not be acting in it.
“I didn’t understand what he meant,” Ingrid recalled later. “He was an actor, and he wasn’t going to act?”
“But how does that work?” she asked him.
“I don’t know how it works. I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not going to do what they tell me to do. I’ll listen, but I shan’t take any notice. I’ll just say the lines blah-blah-blah, but I shan’t act.”
Montgomery explained that he was bound to MGM by one of those typically oppressive seven
-year contracts that were the norm in those days of the old studio system. In return for his monthly paycheck, the studio was allowed to stipulate which films he would appear in, and how many movies he would make. “Now Robert was very popular, a superb comedian and much in demand,” Ingrid recalled, “so as soon as he finished one movie, he was pushed into another. It was a conveyor-belt system and he was exhausted.”
MGM was not moved. The penalty for refusing to make Rage in Heaven would be suspension without pay. At the time, Montgomery was married (to the actress Elizabeth Bryan Allen) and had two young children, a big house, and a swimming pool. (Their daughter Elizabeth Montgomery would grow up to star in the 1960s sitcom Bewitched.) “I need the money,” he said. “But I’m going to make my protest.”
Ingrid and their other co-star, George Sanders, couldn’t fathom how an actor could appear in a film but not act – until shooting started. “Then we understood,” she recalled. “The director would explain what he wanted to Bob, and Bob would look up at the sky as if he wasn’t hearing a word, and the director would say, ‘Now Bob, have you understood what I’m talking about?’ and Bob would answer, ‘Now are we going to shoot this scene? Right, let’s get going.’ And he’d go straight into this blah-blah-blah act of his, no inflections, nothing, same speed, same pace.”
When the film’s director, Robert Sinclair, quit in frustration, MGM decided that the only way to get this movie made was to bring in a ruthless dictator of a director named W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke II.
At fifty-one, Van Dyke was already a highly successful director, having been nominated for Academy Awards for The Thin Man (1934) and San Francisco (1936). But he was known derisively as “One Take Woody” because his primary goal was not to make the best picture possible but to get it done fast and bring it in under budget.
