Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  Van Dyke was a military man who paraded about in breeches and knee boots, barking orders. Montgomery didn’t let this faze him and recited his lines with the same lifeless quality. Sanders, meanwhile, slept-walked through his role, too.

  Ingrid was miserable, unable to adopt the cynical attitude of her co-stars but equally unable to work creatively with the nasty Van Dyke. She begged Selznick for help. “You always told me that you’d help me if I had difficulties,” she told him. “Now would you please ask them to change the director again or please take me out of the picture altogether. I can’t work with this man. He should be commanding soldiers not actors; he’s got no idea how to handle human beings with feelings.”

  Selznick replied that he had no power to interfere with another studio’s personnel decisions. “It’s only a movie after all, and in a couple of weeks you’ll be through with the whole thing,” he said. “It’ll be better next time. I’ve got lots of ideas for you after that, you’ll see.”

  Ingrid would never walk out on a movie, so she struggled through the filming as best she could. But one day she had to let Van Dyke know how she felt. “Why didn’t you stay with the army, the way you go on marching and yelling?” she yelled when he appeared in her dressing room. “You don’t know anything about people’s feelings. You certainly can’t direct a woman. You are certainly not interested in anything but ‘Finish the picture,’ no matter what sort of picture it is. You don’t give us any possibility of acting; you don’t give us any advice on that at all. Why don’t you put on roller skates so you can go quicker from one place to another?”

  Van Dyke was shocked. “Well, my girl,” he said, “if you think you are going to talk to your director like that, I’ll tell you what. You are going to be fired.”

  “That will be great,” Ingrid replied. “That’s all I want. That is what I was hoping when I went to see Mr. Selznick. But he won’t take me off the picture. So will you be so kind as to fire me straight away.”

  Van Dyke left but soon came back to her dressing room. “Am I really so hard, really so brusque with people, and so unpleasant?” he asked.

  “Yes, you are. I’ve never worked with anybody that is so unpleasant.”

  “Oh! All right,” he said, “I don’t know how, but I will try and change. You know, you are very good in this part.”

  “I’m trying to do my best,” she replied, “but I’m very unhappy.”

  Ironically, when the film was released, Montgomery received glowing reviews for what critics considered a highly original performance, so different from the light comedy he was known for. His flat characterization worked perfectly for his character, an escapee from a French hospital trying to conceal his mental illnesses.

  While the film itself was panned, Ingrid received good notices. Howard Barnes in the Herald Tribune said, “Ingrid Bergman creates something of a mood of terror single-handed. If our [movie industry] keeps overlooking her great talent much longer, it will be a really black mark against it.”

  One Hollywood columnist, Louella Parsons, even suggested Ingrid was pushing aside that other Swedish star, Greta Carbo. “Ingrid Bergman is a fine actress,” Parsons wrote. “I wonder why Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bother about Garbo’s idiosyncrasies when there is a Swedish actress of her ability and commonsense available.”

  Parsons’s article was yet another attempt to create a competition between Ingrid and Garbo which, as far as Ingrid was concerned, did not exist. She had admired the legendary actress while growing up in Stockholm and was thrilled to see Garbo’s among the names famous alumni had carved into a big table at the Royal Dramatic Theatre.

  When she first arrived in Hollywood, Ingrid had tried to make contact with Garbo, sending her flowers as a small gesture of friendship. Three months later, as Ingrid was preparing to head back to Sweden, she received a telegram from Garbo saying that she would like to see her and asking for her phone number.

  Many years later, Ingrid mentioned the missed opportunity to director George Cukor, a friend who was also very close to Garbo. How kind it was of Garbo to send that telegram, she said, and what a shame that it had not arrived earlier. Cukor laughed and said, “But, of course, Greta wouldn’t have sent the telegram unless she were certain you were leaving.”

  While at the MGM studios making Rage in Heaven, Ingrid saw another chance to finally meet the famously reclusive star, who was working on the romantic comedy Two-Faced Woman, directed by Cukor. Two large black limousines were parked in the lot each morning to take the actresses to their respective sets. (Ingrid didn’t want a limousine – she preferred to walk – but agreed to ride after being told that the chauffeur could lose his job if she declined the service.)

  “Of course, the first morning, Garbo and I both being Swedes, and so punctual, came out of our dressing rooms at exactly nine o’clock,” Ingrid recalled, “and there we were getting into our cars no more than a few feet away from each other. But she didn’t take the slightest notice of me, so I decided I’d better not smile and say, ‘good morning’ either, and I realized I must be embarrassing her. After that I used to sit at my window and see her go off, and then I’d run down and get into my car.”

  The two actresses nearly met again later when Einar Nerman, the Swedish cartoonist who knew them both, tried to arrange a lunch in Hollywood with the three of them plus his wife. But Nerman told Ingrid that Garbo said she was not ready to meet her yet. “That stunned me a bit . . . wasn’t ready to meet me,” Ingrid said. “I didn’t know what that meant.”

  On another occasion, Ingrid was visiting Einar when he said, “Now don’t you go yet. Garbo’s arriving here to meet me in a few minutes. Stay. You must meet her. You’re so alike. You’re going to have such a good time together.”

  “Einar, I can’t do that,” Ingrid said. “I know she doesn’t want to meet me. It would be too embarrassing for words.” So she left.

  On that day in 1940 when they got into limousines on the MGM lot and headed in different directions, Ingrid’s star was rising, and Garbo’s was falling. The reviews for Two-Faced Woman were the worst of her career - “Garbo’s Folly,” as John Mosher of The New Yorker put it - and her MGM contract was terminated two years later. Even though Garbo lived another fifty years, she never made another film. “Can you imagine that?” Ingrid wrote in her memoir. “She was only thirty-five years old and a most beautiful and talented actress, and she never worked again from that day on. Can you imagine all those years, and you get up in the morning and what do you do?” To Ingrid, such a move was unfathomable.

  As 1940 came to a close, Ingrid and Pia were back in New York, where Lindstrom soon joined them - not just to visit this time, but permanently. They stayed at the Carlyle Hotel and prepared to move to Hollywood. After his six-week journey across the Atlantic on a Portuguese freighter, Lindstrom was eager to know how Ingrid’s career was progressing, and he sought her advice about what medical school he should attend.

  By this point, Ingrid knew that their marriage was crumbling. The couple had spent nearly two years living apart and had grown even more distant, underscoring the differences in their personalities. Ingrid was becoming more sophisticated and outspoken while Lindstrom remained serious and reserved. She was increasingly resentful that he considered her incapable of managing her own career, an issue that would remain a serious point of contention in the years to come.

  In late January 1941, Ingrid and Lindstrom packed up their belongings, and with Pia in tow, moved to California. Ingrid spent her downtime reading film industry magazines and searching for parts the studios might be casting. When she learned that Paramount had acquired the rights to Ernest Hemingway’s recent novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, she immediately went to see Selznick.

  Ingrid had read the book, set during the Spanish Civil War, and desperately wanted to play the leading lady, a young Spanish woman named Maria, whose life has been shattered by the brutalities of war. She also wanted to work with Gary Cooper, already a big star, who had been hired to play R
obert Jordan, an American explosives expert working with the Spanish guerillas. She knew she did not look remotely Spanish, but as she reminded Selznick, that could be fixed with makeup.

  What Selznick didn’t tell her was he was already working to get her the part and had even spoken to Hemingway on her behalf. He had also asked his brother, the agent Myron Selznick, to put out feelers at Paramount to see if the studio was considering her for the role of Maria.

  In the interim, Ingrid and Lindstrom went skiing at June Lake, on the California-Nevada border, where Selznick had arranged a photo shoot for Life magazine entitled, “Ingrid Bergman Takes a Short Holiday From Hollywood.” As his Swedish star and her husband playfully threw snowballs at each other, Selznick worked to get Paramount to agree to cast her as Maria. It turns out that Hemingway had already seen Ingrid in Intermezzo and wanted her to play Maria. But Paramount, calling Ingrid “wooden” and untalented, had told the author that studio executives were not interested.

  Selznick refused to give up. He asked Ingrid whether it would be possible for her to meet Hemingway in San Francisco before the author sailed for China. “Possible?” she said excitedly. “I am already on my way.”

  That evening, Ingrid and Lindstrom drove to Reno; in the morning, they hopped a flight to San Francisco, where they lunched with Hemingway and his new wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn, eating salads and drinking wine as they listened to the author effusively describe his literary characters.

  “It’s very strange that you want me because I’m Nordic,” Bergman told the author. “I never thought you’d choose me for a Spanish girl.”

  “I’ve seen Spaniards just like you,” Hemingway replied. “They’re tall and blond, many of them. You’ll get the part, don’t worry.”

  At one point, Hemingway grabbed Ingrid’s hair and told her she would have to cut it if she played Maria; in the book, her character had “blond hair cropped short like a boy.” In parting, Hemingway gave Ingrid a copy of the novel, which he had inscribed, “To Ingrid Bergman, who is the Maria of this book.”

  Paramount, however, was still not convinced. The studio announced it would be auditioning the actress Betty Field, who had recently made Of Mice and Men. They were in no hurry. Writer Dudley Nichols, who had written the screenplays for the successful screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby and the western Stagecoach (which made John Wayne a star), was still working on adapting Hemingway’s epic novel to the screen. To her dismay, Ingrid was again forced to wait.

  In the meantime, Selznick had worked out a deal to lend Ingrid to MGM again – this time to co-star with Spencer Tracy and newcomer Lana Turner in Robert Louis Stevenson’s thriller Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It would be directed by Victor Fleming, who had made two iconic films, both released the previous year, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

  Ingrid was slated to play Jekyll’s sweet but insipid fiancée, Beatrix Emery, but she was far more intrigued by the part of Ivy, a Cockney prostitute who falls in love with Jekyll and is ultimately killed by Hyde. Both Fleming and Selznick rejected the idea: Selznick didn’t want to taint Ingrid’s pristine image, and Fleming didn’t think she could handle the part. Furthermore, the actress cast as Ivy, the twenty-one-year-old Turner, was Hollywood’s newest sex symbol, seemingly a more-obvious choice.

  But Ingrid was insistent. “In Intermezzo, I played the nice piano teacher,” she recalled, “in Adam, the nice housekeeper, in Rage in Heaven, I was a nice refugee. Now they gave me the part of another sweet girl in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and I really was fed up having to play it again.”

  So Ingrid went to Fleming and said, “Couldn’t we switch, and let Lana Turner play the fiancée, and I play the little tart in the bar, the naughty little Ivy?”

  “That’s impossible,” Fleming replied, laughing. “How can you with your looks? It’s not to be believed.”

  “What do you know?” Ingrid shot back. “You look at me and you look at the three pictures I’ve done and you know it’s the same part I’m playing, but I am an actress!”

  After much back-and-forth, Ingrid asked if she could do a screen test as Ivy. Fleming said Selznick would never allow that.

  “Can we make a test without telling him?” Fleming looked shocked. “You mean you’d really do that?”

  “Of course I would,” she said. “I’m dying to play that part. Come on, let’s run a test.”

  With great secrecy, Fleming gathered a cameraman and crew and Ingrid did the test. “A lot of people afterwards asked me why,” she said. “To begin with, I loved this girl, this barmaid Ivy. I thought about her all the time. I thought how she would react, how she would behave. Besides, I simply had to get different parts; I could not remain typed as a Hollywood peaches-and-cream girl.”

  Fleming was very impressed by the test and called Selznick. “David, I’m going to switch the parts,” he said. “Ingrid is going to play Ivy.”

  “But she just can’t play that sort of role!” Selznick thundered.

  “Yes she can,” Fleming said. “I’ve done a test. You want to see it? I’ll send it over.”

  Selznick watched the test and found himself in a difficult position. He was a firm believer in the Hollywood formula of making actors play essentially the same character over and over again since that’s what audiences expect and feel comfortable with. On the other hand, Ingrid was absolutely marvelous as Ivy – somehow exuding innocence, pathos, and blatant sexuality, all at the same time. “Well,” Selznick said, finally. “Okay.”

  Getting to work with both Spencer Tracy and Victor Fleming was a dream come true for Ingrid. While she admired her handsome co-star, it was the married, fifty-two-year-old Victor Fleming who truly stirred her passions. “By the time the film was over, I was deeply in love with Victor Fleming,” Ingrid confessed in her memoir. “But, he wasn’t in love with me. I was just part of another picture he’d directed.”

  Unbeknownst to him, Fleming was providing the same sort of fatherly mentorship that drew her to Lindstrom and her former lover, Edvin Adolphson, all older and more experienced than she was. Throughout production, he took to calling Ingrid “Angel,” which she misinterpreted as a sign of affection.

  But Fleming was not an affectionate man. He was a callous, abusive taskmaster who liked racecars and carousing with his buddies, including the hard-drinking Tracy and Clark Gable. He was cruel to his wife and enjoyed subjugating her; at premieres, he forced her to walk ten paces behind him as he walked the red carpet with his leading ladies; he was known to actually eat flies at the dinner table, just to make her disgusted enough to leave.

  Ingrid was unaware of the sordid details of Fleming’s personal life. On the set, he was attentive and concerned, a refreshing contrast to her husband’s obvious disinterest in a film he considered vulgar. She appreciated Fleming’s authoritative nature and was captivated by his rough charm and, paradoxically, his inaccessibility. And his skill as a director was unmatched.

  “Victor Fleming was marvelous,” she said later. “This man added another dimension to what I’d known before. As soon as he came close to me, I could tell by his eyes what he wanted me to do, and this has happened with very few directors in my career.”

  One scene in particular showed how abusive – and effective – Fleming could be. Ingrid was having trouble becoming as frightened and hysterical as Ivy needed to be when confronted by the terrifying Mr. Hyde. “I just couldn’t do it,” she recalled. So Fleming came up from behind her, spun her around, and slapped her across the face, back and forth, so hard that it hurt. “I could feel the tears of what? - surprise, shame - running down my cheeks,” she said.

  Shattered, Ingrid stood there sobbing while Fleming strode back to the camera and shouted “Action!” “Even the camera crew were struck dumb as I wept my way through the scene,” Ingrid said. “But he’d got the performance he wanted.”

  Whether it was her passion for Fleming or her excitement about the chance to play a vastly different character, Ingrid came alive on the set. E
ven when she was not needed, she would arrive at seven in the morning just to watch Fleming work and immerse herself in her role, learning all she could about women of the Victorian era. Ruth Roberts remembered that Ingrid once asked her to stay up all night with her so that she could appear appropriately haggard for a scene. The next day, Ingrid was still lively and animated while Ruth needed a nap.

  As Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was being prepared for release, word of Ingrid’s amazing performance spread throughout Hollywood. When the movie was finally released in August 1941, critics joined in a chorus of praise. Tracy, considered one of Hollywood’s greatest actors, exclaimed, “. . . no one is going to know that I’m in the picture. She’s that good!”

  Ingrid was thrilled. Though Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would not rank as one of her greatest films – The New York Times called it “two hours of pompous symbolism” – it changed Ingrid’s life in a profound way, setting her on a path to true artistry. “For the first time,” she said, “I have broken out from the cage which encloses me.”

  As Ingrid’s fame grew, she caught the attention of the English director Alfred Hitchcock, whose first film in the States with David Selznick, Rebecca, earned the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941. Hitchcock was fascinated by Ingrid and searched diligently for a suitable project for her, a process that would take several years.

  Meanwhile, Hitchcock pursued a friendship with Ingrid and Lindstrom, inviting the couple to dinner parties at his modest home in Bel-Air Estates where he entertained his guests with suspenseful stories, bawdy jokes, and cooking tips. When his guests had finished eating, Alfred and his wife Alma liked to roll back the carpet, turn on their record player, and encourage their guests to spend the rest of the evening dancing. No one could dance as long as Ingrid; if she tired, she would splash her face with water and dab on a little makeup to refresh herself.

  As the months passed, however, Lindstrom had less time for dance parties. He was hard at work finding the right medical school. Selznick and Kay Brown helped; Kay set up an interview for him at Yale, and Selznick put him in touch with the dean of the University of Rochester, a personal friend. Lindstrom ultimately chose the latter, even though it was far from Hollywood, in upstate New York, because he could earn his degree in sixteen months as opposed to the two years required at other institutions.