by Grace Carter
Though Casablanca may have fulfilled the yearnings of a nation as deeply torn as Bogart’s character – between self-preservation and a moral obligation to a larger cause – ironically, it did not satisfy Ingrid’s soul the way her other performances did. “I made so many films which were more important,” she said ruefully, “but the only one people ever want to talk about is that one with Bogart.”
As Ingrid neared the end of filming Casablanca in late July 1942, she was already feeling anxious that Selznick had not yet found her another project. What she didn’t know was that Sam Wood, the director of For Whom the Bell Tolls, had been quietly lobbying to bring her in to replace Vera Zorina.
Though Paramount had hired Zorina partly to save money, the studio was losing out in the long run. It should not have come as a shock that such an accomplished ballerina, married to famed choreographer George Balanchine, would move with a delicate, lyrical grace. Or that the same qualities that made her so lovely to watch on a ballet stage would make her look ridiculous when she was running around the Sierra Nevada mountains playing a tough guerilla fighter during the Spanish Civil War. In many of her scenes, Zorina was mostly worried about damaging her legs.
Both Wood and Gary Cooper, the male lead, told B. G. De Sylva, chief of production at Paramount, that Ingrid would make a much better Maria, even threatening to quit if the studio did not give her the part. Only days before Casablanca wrapped, De Sylva sat down with Zorina and gave her the bad news. He then called Selznick to ask Ingrid if she’d be willing to cut her hair, as Hemingway had demanded. Ingrid was elated. “To get that part,” she said, “I’d cut my head off.”
First, though, the studio needed to do a screen test to see how she would look with short hair. So Ingrid back-combed her hair and pinned it up. Wood said he was arriving on Sunday to look at the test and would call her immediately to offer his thoughts.
All day Sunday, Ingrid stared at the phone. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, couldn’t relax. “I looked at the telephone as if it were a snake waiting to strike,” she said later. When it rang, Ingrid snatched it up, but Wood was never on the other end. At midnight, she finally gave up. “I could draw only the obvious conclusions,” she said. “He hadn’t liked the test.”
The next day, Ingrid was back at the Warner studios being photographed for the Casablanca publicity campaign when someone told her she had a phone call. It was Selznick’s deep voice: “Ingrid, you are Maria!”
Overjoyed, Ingrid left immediately, driving the 450 miles to the Sierra Nevada Mountains with her friend and voice coach Ruth Roberts. They passed through the small town of Sonora, crossed the Sonora Pass, and reached a group of cabins specially built on the location by the studio.
Ingrid got out and looked around, a bit disoriented and trying to get her bearings. “Then I see this beautiful man coming down the mountainside toward me,” she recalled. “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and I blushed naturally.”
“Hello, Maria?” said Gary Cooper. She blushed again. There was a significant age difference between them – he was forty-one, she was twenty-seven – but the chemistry was instant and unmistakable. After settling into her cabin, Ingrid was outside with her script when Cooper approached again. “Well, shall we work a bit on the dialogue between us?” he asked.
She said, of course, but since he hadn’t received his script yet, he had to lean over to read hers. Then a funny thing happened. When Cooper spoke, Ingrid kept thinking he was talking to her as Gary Cooper. She kept saying, “Excuse me. What did you say? I can’t understand what you’re talking about.” He replied, a little reprovingly, “I’m reading the dialogue, that’s the dialogue.” She was shocked; his acting was so natural, she didn’t realize that he was in character. Ingrid blushed again and said, “Oh, that’s the dialogue.”
When they began shooting, Ingrid was convinced it would be terrible – Cooper wasn’t doing anything. “Then I saw the rushes, and there he was . . . The personality of this man was so enormous, so overpowering - and that expression in his eyes and his face, it was so delicate and so underplayed. You just didn’t notice it until you saw it on the screen. I thought he was marvelous - the most underplaying and most natural actor I ever worked with.”
Cooper returned the compliment. “She is one of the easiest actresses to do a scene with,” he told a reporter. “I don’t feel I am just standing there while she is wondering if her makeup is right. Or her hair right. She has absolutely no thought of it. She lifts the scene. That’s because she is so completely natural.”
Her feelings for Cooper were so strong that Roberts finally had to say, “Really, Ingrid, you must stop looking at him like that. You sit there just looking! I know you are supposed to be in love with him in the picture but not too much in love with him!”
For twelve weeks, the actors worked in forbidding mountain terrain; the previous winter, Wood and his crew endured freezing temperatures while filming battle scenes and shots of pack animals and exhausted men trudging along icy trails. By now, the summer and fall weather was far more pleasant but still challenging. It was chilly in the morning, hot in the afternoon, and freezing at night. But Ingrid loved every minute of it, including the ragged clothes her character wore – an old shirt and a pair of men’s trousers tied around her waist with a string.
Though they were far from civilization in their mountain refuge, the cast could not forget the war raging in Europe and the Pacific during that summer of 1942 – which the United States had entered the previous December with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Many of the actors were Russian, Polish, French, Greek, and Yugoslavian, anxiously awaiting news from the front. “I was also worried about Sweden,” Ingrid said. “What would happen if my country should be overrun by the Nazis?”
When For Whom the Bells Toll was released in July 1943 in Technicolor – Ingrid’s first color film – Selznick seized on some early good reviews to congratulate Ingrid via telegram: “On Sunday night I advised twenty-five people that before the year is up you will be finally recognized as the greatest actress of all time. Now, if that doesn’t swell your pretty Swedish head, nothing ever will. But then I have been trying in vain to do that for years.”
In fact, reviews of the film were mixed. While the New York Herald Tribune said, “The screen has met the challenge of fine literature triumphantly,” Kate Cameron in the Daily News was less impressed: “There is so much that is beautiful, stirring, and profoundly interesting . . . that it grieves me to report the picture has been drawn out to an inordinate length, making it a wearisome rather than an inspiring experience in the theater.”
But Time magazine summed up the glowing praise heaped on Ingrid: “Whoever else may have fumbled at the rope or muffled the clapper, the twenty-seven-year-old Swedish actress hit the bell such a valiant clang that there has been nothing like it since her great compatriot Greta Garbo enchanted half the world.”
While Hemingway’s novel, set in 1930s Spain, focused on the brutality of the country’s civil war, the film did not have anywhere near the same gravitas because it confined itself mostly to the relationship between Cooper’s character, the revolutionary guerilla Robert Jordan, and his young lover, Maria. Because a real war was being fought outside the theaters, the studio thought it best to remove the political content, leaving only a tame romance with none of the fire of the original story.
The next time she saw Hemingway, Ingrid asked if he had seen the movie. “Yes,” he said, “five times.”
“Ah,” I said. “Five times! You liked it that much!”
“No, I did not,” Hemingway said. “I went in to see it. After I’d seen the first five minutes I couldn’t stand it any longer so I walked out. They’d cut all my best scenes, and there was no point to it. Later I went back again because I thought I must see the whole movie, and I saw a bit more, and again I walked out. It took me five visits to see that movie. That’s how much I liked it!”
Despite its tediousness, the film would garner nine Acad
emy Award nominations – including the first of Ingrid’s career, for Best Actress. She did not win, which may have had less to do with her performance than with a script that stripped Maria of her fiery passion, leaving Ingrid little to work with. In fact, some of the dialogue between Ingrid and Cooper was so convoluted it was laughable: When admonishing Maria to flee for her life, Jordan insisted: “You must go because you are me and I am you, and where you go, I go. Don’t you see? And if you stay, I cannot go because we can never be separated because I go only where you go, and if you go, then I am free to go even though I stay because I am you and you are me.”
Ingrid also did not receive much guidance from her director. Sam Wood was difficult to work with, Ingrid said later; he preferred the scenery to his characters, and in his anger over the lousy script, shouted a lot, which made her extremely uncomfortable. The bright spot was working with her leading man. Though Cooper was known to have slept with many of his leading ladies – and had asked his wife, Veronica Balfe, for a divorce (she refused), there is no evidence that he and Ingrid actually had an affair. And yet she readily admitted she was so attracted to Cooper that her performance in the film suffered. “What was wrong was that my happiness showed on the screen,” Ingrid wrote in her journal. “I was far too happy to honestly portray Maria’s tragic figure.”
On balance, Ingrid’s partnership with Wood and Cooper went well enough to make her want to team up with them again. During the filming, Wood had read Edna Ferber’s novel Saratoga Trunk, about Clio Dulaine, a Creole woman who returns to her native New Orleans and marries a Texas gambler. He gave it to Ingrid to read, and she liked it so much, she gave it to Cooper. “We’d had so much fun on For Whom the Bell Tolls and got on so well,” Ingrid reasoned, “Why shouldn’t we make another film together?”
So when the shooting was over, she asked Selznick to loan her out to Warner Brothers again to co-star with Cooper in the film version of the novel that Wood was planning. What Ingrid didn’t know was that she was only one of the director’s choices for leading lady; others included Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, and Hedy Lamarr.
In the meantime, Alfred Hitchcock was still searching for a project that would showcase his friend Ingrid’s talents. He understood her need to stay busy and her desire for independence, especially in light of her husband’s insistence that he control every aspect of her career. Hitchcock and other friends also noticed that Lindstrom had little respect for his wife and her chosen profession; one guest noted that when she came home from work, Lindstrom would insultingly ask if Ingrid had anything better she could do with her time.
At the end of 1942, with the conflicts in their marriage escalating, Ingrid and Lindstrom were ready to finally make their long-awaited move as a family to the west coast. Lindstrom, who would obtain his medical degree from the University of Rochester in a matter of months, would complete his residency in neurology at Los Angeles County Hospital. Maybe things would get better once they were all living together.
As they were packing up their belongings, Ingrid continued to lobby Selznick to allow her to make Saratoga Trunk for Warner Brothers. Selznick disliked the screenplay but liked the book and held out hope that the script could be improved. But, once again, Selznick did not want Ingrid to play a part that conflicted with her wholesome image: Her character Clio Dulaine thirsts for revenge on her father’s family for mistreating her mother.
Over several days, she implored Selznick to let her do the film. In Ingrid’s corner was Wood, who said she was so good, she could do anything. “Everybody must be crazy,” Selznick told her. “You are Swedish, they don’t care. You don’t look French, they don’t care. You can’t act it, they don’t care.”
Finally, Selznick relented and gave his blessing. Cooper soon agreed to make the film, too, so he could work with Ingrid again. Before she could move to California and start filming, however, Ingrid had to make a stop in Minnesota, where she had been asked by the U.S. War Department to participate in a documentary entitled Swedes in America, one of a series of short films highlighting the achievements of various immigrant groups as a way to foster a spirit of unity during the war.
In early February, Ingrid, Pia, and Mabel arrived in frigid Minneapolis, where they were met by Joseph H. Steele, Selznick’s new publicity director. After depositing Pia and Mabel at the Nicollet Hotel, Steele drove Ingrid two hours north to Chisago County, where she spent a few days with the Swanson family, Swedish farmers who raised sheep. As Look magazine took pictures, Ingrid shoveled snow, pitched hay, and cuddled piglets, taking a genuine interest in the family and listening carefully to the concerns they faced as immigrants.
Steele had lots of experience with movie stars but none like Ingrid. She did not complain about the cold, worked long hours, and never acted like she was better than anybody else. “She performed all the publicity chores he asked of her with charm and tact,” wrote Alan Burgess, the coauthor of Ingrid’s memoir, “and real tears ran down her cheeks when she met gracious geriatric Swedish ladies in an old folks home.”
Steele could not help but be attracted to the enchanting actress and wasted no time before making a pass. Once rebuffed, the wise - and married - publicist opted to settle for Ingrid’s friendship, a relationship that would last for years. “Sometimes I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” Steele wrote in a publicity article for a movie magazine. “If what I have told you is not beauty, then my forty years and more have been meaningless and I have learned nothing.”
On February 8, Steele, Ingrid, Pia, and Mabel took a train to Los Angeles, where Ingrid was due on the set of Saratoga Trunk. Selznick again netted a big payday from loaning his star to Warner Bros, with his haul dwarfing hers: Ingrid would be paid her contractual salary of $2,250 weekly while he collected $15,625 per week.
As soon as Ingrid read the final script, however, her heart sank. She knew the movie would not live up to anyone’s expectations, including her own. Even the experienced screenwriter Casey Robinson couldn’t do much with the story that revolved around a vengeful Clio (Ingrid), the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Creole aristocrat and his placée - a not-quite-legal common-law wife - who returns from Paris to New Orleans. They seek revenge against her father’s family who had scandalized her mother and forced mother and daughter to flee to France. Even if the script had been adequate, the film would still have been a bloated and overproduced affair, featuring dozens of nineteenth-century costumes, ninety-six sets, 11,000 props, and 200 stuntmen. In the end, Selznick may have been the only one to make money on Saratoga Trunk. Warner Brothers certainly did not; it was the most expensive movie the studio had ever produced.
After begging for the opportunity to be in it, Ingrid cried in Ruth’s arms after reading the script. Yet another movie was disappointing her. Even with the success of Casablanca, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the only one of her six American films she was truly proud of. Regardless, she worked on the movie six days a week for four months - from February to May - and gained eleven pounds in the process, which forced the wardrobe department to let out her gowns.
To add to her misery, Ingrid also had to wear wigs and heavy makeup, which she despised. She wore satin petticoats, tightly laced bodice, flowing bustles, and bright lipstick – a far cry from the crudely-dressed mountain girl Maria. She did, however, get a thrill when her agent, Charles Feldman, passed by her in the canteen without a second look; she had fooled him.
And, once again, she experienced the joy of playing against type. “I played this nasty woman, very egotistical, spoiled, shouting and screaming, and affected in every way,” she said later. “People said before we started filming, ‘absolutely wrong for you.’ I couldn’t care less because it was exactly what I wanted to do. I was a New Orleans bitch and that was completely new.”
In her downtime, she kept herself occupied by playing with her new eight-millimeter camera, filming the activity on the set, including Sam Wood’s direction. (She told friends she could have done better.
) She did her work without grumbling or complaining and was mindful of the struggles of her coworkers, especially Betty Brooks, whose job was to stand in for Ingrid while the gaffers adjusted the complicated lighting. Being her usual thoughtful self, Ingrid suggested that Betty be given a bonus for her hours of tedious work.
Her filming schedule was so punishing that Selznick finally wrote to Steele asking that he stop meeting with Ingrid on Sundays, her one day off, so that she could spend time with her daughter. Even such a dedicated actress had a breaking point, he told the publicist, adding that he’d never seen anyone work the kind of hours she was putting in on Saratoga Trunk.
Despite Ingrid’s dedication and the movie’s overblown budget, the final product failed to impress Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers. The studio decided to send the movie overseas to entertain the troops and didn’t release it to the general public in the U.S. until November 1945. Ingrid said nothing as there was nothing more to say. Saratoga Trunk had been a huge disappointment, from start to finish.
But things would soon get better. That summer, knowing Lindstrom was in San Francisco to begin his internship and wanting to keep Ingrid busy, Selznick proposed she star in Valley of Decision, the story of a young Irish maid who falls in love with her employer’s son. After reading the screenplay, Ingrid was put off by the overwhelming virtue of her character and declined. Besides, there was another project she was far more interested in.
That film was an MGM production called Gaslight, a Victorian noir thriller based on the play Angel Street, written by Patrick Hamilton, that had intrigued her since she saw it on Broadway. The role was just what Ingrid had been looking for - a character rich in depth and complexity. Selznick almost refused; he was unhappy that MGM planned to give top billing to Ingrid’s costar, Charles Boyer. But Ingrid insisted. She didn’t care where her name appeared on the marquee, she told him. She just wanted the part. Selznick finally relented, and, as he had on previous occasions, made a huge profit, charging MGM $253,750 while paying Ingrid only $74,156.
