by Grace Carter
Grappling with the horrors of the Nazi regime was especially difficult for Ingrid because she was half-German herself and had spent happy childhood days in Germany where many of her friends and relatives still lived. “They said Germany had done this to itself,” she said later, “but there were innocent people, children not born when Hitler came to power, people who never voted for him nor supported him, people who didn’t know what would happen. I knew there were good people in Germany. There were people there who had been kind to me. It was impossible to understand what had happened.”
Ingrid and the other entertainers returned to Paris in time for V-J Day on September 2, 1945, when Japan surrendered. Celebrations broke out in the streets. Ingrid had seen newsreels of V-E Day on May 8, marking the Allied victory in Europe, and was amused by the images of women kissing soldiers. “I’m going to do that,” she told Capa as they sat in a jeep in the Champs-Elysees. “I’m going to throw myself at somebody and kiss him.”
“Which one?” Capa said. Ingrid scanned the scene. “Him - over there.” She dashed out of the car, threw herself at the lucky soldier, and kissed him on the mouth. “He didn’t think twice about it,” she recalled. “He kissed me back.”
In Paris, perhaps the most romantic city in the world, Ingrid found herself spending more and more time with the handsome, dashing war photographer she always called by his last name: Capa. “And I suppose,” she wrote in her memoir, “that’s where I began to fall in love with him.”
At the same time, Ingrid may have also been having an affair with Adler, a harmonica virtuoso who many years later would perform with Sting, Elton John, and Kate Bush. In her autobiography, Ingrid is candid about her romance with Capa but mentions Adler only briefly, saying nothing about having an affair with him. Adler, in his own memoirs and interviews with Ingrid’s biographers, insisted they did have a romantic relationship that began when Ingrid joined the USO tour and continued, on and off, for several years. He was married with children at the time.
Adler said that during the USO tour, he and Ingrid and Capa went out together often. One night in Montparnasse, he said, they all went to a nightclub and Ingrid asked Adler to leave. She came to his room the next morning to apologize, but the incident supports the prevailing view of her biographers that it was Capa, not Adler, who was Ingrid’s main romantic interest at this time.
In 1932, at age eighteen, Capa, born Endre Friedmann to a Jewish family in Hungary, moved to Germany where he became fascinated by photojournalism. When Hitler rose to power, he escaped to Paris and changed his name to conceal his Jewish heritage. (He thought Robert Capa sounded suitably American, like the film director Frank Capra.) He became an intrepid war photographer, plunging into the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War where he took one of his most famous photographs – a Spanish Republican soldier falling at the moment of death.
When France was overrun by the Nazis, Capa fled to the United States, where he shot a squadron of young United States airmen on their first Flying Fortress mission over Europe. When the planes returned from combat, Capa began clicking away at a wounded pilot, who glared angrily at Capa and said, “Are these the pictures you were waiting for, photographer?” Capa was so humiliated he resolved never again to shoot from safety. Thereafter, he would shoot only in the war zones themselves – the more dangerous, the better.
When Ingrid met Capa, she was fascinated. “Vigorous and challenging, he was an international man, worldly and wise,” wrote Ingrid’s coauthor, Alan Burgess. He lived like a gambler, aware that he had only one short life and was willing to risk it in pursuit of the greatest pleasure and most noble causes.
In Capa’s view, Ingrid was failing to take full advantage of life’s possibilities. “You’re mad,” he told her. “You have become an industry, an institution. You must return to the status of human being. Your husband is driving you; the film companies are driving you; you let everybody drive you. It’s just work, work, work. You don’t take the things you should out of life because you’ve got no time for living. You’re like a cart running on three wheels; you don’t realize you’ve lost the fourth wheel, but at any moment now you are going to topple sideways.”
Ingrid disagreed with this assessment. “No,” she replied. “I am fulfilling myself. I’m going to make more films in Hollywood. I’m going back to the theater to do more plays . . . I need the discipline of the theater.” Still, she wondered, “Is he right? Could he possibly be right?”
Capa was not exactly in a position to question someone else’s life decisions; he faced some daunting choices of his own that could inevitably require compromise. Now that the war was ending, would he continue to travel around the world, looking for the adrenaline rush of armed conflicts? Or would he find a less risky way to make a living that might include Ingrid?
At times, Ingrid fantasized about marrying Capa. But when she brought it up, he would quickly change the subject, leaving her wounded. In her heart, she knew he was married to his risky work. Before she left to return home, she urged Capa to let her find him a job as a photographer in the film industry. Ingrid knew it was a long shot. But, smitten with Ingrid, he promised to consider it.
In California, Ingrid settled back into her domestic routine, helping Pia get ready for the new school year and waiting for word from Hitchcock about their next movie. No one knew about Capa or Adler; gossip columnists never suspected that the star was having summer flings with not just one, but two men. Her relationship with Lindstrom, meanwhile, was almost non-existent. It consisted mostly of drinking coffee with him in the morning to talk about Pia and making plans for the house. They didn’t bother to feign love.
Ingrid felt lonely and trapped. Her private life was nothing like the public image the press had fabricated: the perfect homemaker and wife, abstaining from alcohol and cigarettes and staying home night after night with her physician husband. In reality, her marriage was crumbling, her life in shambles.
One afternoon, she went to visit Hitchcock, who, seeing the sadness in her eyes, offered her a drink and a shoulder to cry on. Over several cocktails, she confessed her love for Capa, and her sorrow that she could not spend her life with him. As the two commiserated, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin, he recited a line her character Constance had spoken in the final scenes of Spellbound: “It is very sad to love and lose somebody. But in a while you will forget and you will take up the threads of your life where you left off not long ago. And you will work hard. There is lots of happiness in working hard - maybe the most.” Ingrid cried. Work would always be her salvation.
They were a strange pair, Ingrid and Hitchcock. Never lovers, they were close friends, colleagues, and drinking buddies. Hitchcock had a rule: No drinking before 6:00 p.m. But at the stroke of six, he rushed for the martinis. “He just adored keeping your glass filled,” Ingrid recalled. “He awarded me the honorary title of ‘The Human Sink.’”
One night Hitchcock was cooking dinner for the two of them, and they got so carried away with laughing and drinking that Ingrid finally said, “Hitch, I’m getting sleepy.”
“Well, go and lie down on the sofa and recover while I finish the meal,” he said. So she did and woke up in the middle of the night. “I looked across the room to the other sofa, and there was Hitch curled up and sleeping like a baby,” she recalled later. “At that moment, he opened one eye.”
“What happened to our marvelous meal?” Ingrid said.
“Dammit,” he said, “You passed out on me. And then, dammit, I must have passed out on me.”
Hitchcock and Ingrid were such a winning team in Spellbound that soon after its release, David Selznick began to put together another package deal for RKO Studios for a second Hitchcock thriller, Notorious, starring Ingrid and Cary Grant. Like Ingrid, Hitchcock was under contract to Selznick, who also owned the rights to the script, written by Ben Hecht and Hitchcock. In exchange for the script, Hitchcock, and Ingrid, RKO paid Selznick $800,000 and 50 percent of the profits. That turned out to be a great
deal for all involved as the film ended up grossing $8 million.
As with his other deals, when Selznick rented Ingrid out, his take was many times higher than hers. “What an interesting agent you have,” Ingrid’s friends would tell her. “The roles are reversed. He takes ninety percent and you get ten percent.”
“I laughed about it,” Ingrid said later. “I didn’t really mind. I’d signed a contract. I earned a lot more money than I ever had in Sweden. David didn’t know I was going to be successful any more than I did. If he could make money renting me out, good luck to him. We made some great pictures and I loved working.”
Later, her feelings about Selznick’s clever deals would change, but for now, she had a film to make. After a year of writing, Hitchcock and Hecht finally had a workable script for Notorious that centered on the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy who is recruited by the U.S. government to infiltrate a Brazilian Nazi spy ring.
Ingrid played the dissolute and disillusioned anti-heroine, Alicia Huberman, who falls in love with the government agent sent to recruit her, Cary Grant as T.R. Devlin. To achieve his ends, Devlin sends her into the arms of Alexander Sebastian, a German agent, and a former acquaintance of Alicia’s father, so that she can spy on Sebastian. As Devlin and Alicia fall in love, their affair is thwarted by the government’s insistence that Alicia do whatever is necessary to win Sebastian’s affections, including marrying him. The brilliant script is filled with suspense and intrigue, and Ingrid was delighted to play the complex and tortured party-girl-turned spy.
To enhance her performance, Hitchcock worked with Ingrid closely throughout the filming, even taking suggestions from her on how to make her character more believable, a courtesy he rarely extended to actors. Grant’s performance as Devlin was also compelling. Though he was best known for playing romantic comedies, he had worked well with Hitchcock on the romantic psychological thriller Suspicion and had demonstrated he was up to the task.
The chemistry between Grant and Ingrid was electric, although only on-screen. During their weeks on the set, he and Ingrid established a friendship that would last for the rest of their lives. Shortly afterward, Grant was quoted as saying, “I think the Academy ought to set aside a special award for Bergman every year whether she makes a picture or not!”
During the filming, Hitchcock came up with one of the most spectacular shots of his career: The cameras zoomed from above a chandelier in a crowded ballroom all the way down to a key clutched tightly in Ingrid’s hand as she danced with Grant. The key was to a wine cellar that contained smuggled uranium ore, a plot device that played upon public fears generated by the first atomic test in New Mexico in July 1945, only months before filming began.
Hitchcock delighted in provoking the authorities with his films – and this one was no exception as he was followed by the FBI while conducting research about atomic weapons. He saw another opportunity while filming a kiss between Ingrid and Grant that lasted for two-and-a-half minutes. At the time, Hollywood’s Production Code limited kisses to only three seconds, so Hitchcock mischievously evaded the rule by interrupting each kiss after three seconds.
“We just kissed each other and talked, leaned away and kissed each other again,” Ingrid recalled later. “We did other things: we nibbled on each other’s ears and kissed a cheek, so that it looked endless, and became sensational in Hollywood.”
When Notorious was released in August 1946, the reviews were glowing. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther praised the writing and the direction, saying “Mr. Hecht has written and Mr. Hitchcock has directed in a brilliant style a romantic melodrama which is just about as thrilling as they come . . .” The typically terse British film critic Leslie Halliwell raved, “Superb romantic suspenser containing some of Hitchcock’s best work.” The acclaimed author and film critic James Agee wrote, “Ingrid Bergman’s performance here is the best that I have seen.”
As 1945 came to an end, three of Ingrid’s movies were playing in theaters at the same time - Spellbound, Saratoga Trunk, and The Bells of St. Mary’s; together, they would gross $21 million, making her the most bankable actor in America. In any given week, Ingrid received 25,000 fan letters and was presented with award after award, although she would not win an Oscar for her portrayal of Alicia Huberman in Notorious (nor, surprisingly, would she be nominated).
As she was making Notorious, Ingrid resumed both of her summertime relationships, albeit briefly. Again, Larry Adler played second fiddle to Robert Capa, who arrived in California just before Christmas. To keep Capa close at hand, Ingrid arranged for him to shoot publicity photos for Notorious. But it was not easy for him to find time for her; a celebrity in his own right, Capa was feted by a variety of directors and producers familiar with his work, and he spent many evenings attending one Hollywood function after another.
Still, they managed to steal some time together. When Ingrid finished filming two days earlier than the rest of Hitchcock’s cast and crew, the couple slipped off to Malibu Beach, where they spent two days soaking up the sun at a beach house loaned to them by Capa’s friend Shaw. Time was short, but Ingrid was not yet ready to let him go.
As the United States adjusted to peacetime in the years after World War II, Ingrid’s life became a battleground. She severed stormy relationships with two of the most important men in her life, played a famous warrior on stage, and was even suspected of having communist sympathies.
On the latter charge, Ingrid was in good company. On January 16, 1946, the right-wing Christian minister Gerald L. K. Smith sent her a telegram asking if she had participated in a recent rally with Frank Sinatra and other celebrities, organized by the American Youth for Democracy, a group formed after the dissolution of the Young Communist League. In fact, Ingrid had been at the rally but knew that she was free to associate with whomever she pleased. She tore up Smith’s provocative telegram and did not respond to it.
Two weeks later, Smith spoke before the newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee, insisting that the committee examine the lives and political leanings of Hollywood personalities including Ingrid, Walter Winchell, Eddie Cantor, Sinatra, Orson Welles, and others. The committee did not respond to his request, but the episode planted a seed of doubt in some people’s minds about the allegiance of Ingrid and other foreign-born celebrities who had not become American citizens.
Ingrid was involved in another kind of witch hunt that year. She returned to the theater in a role she had always dreamed of playing – Joan of Arc, the martyr famously burned at the stake for her beliefs. “Joan of Arc always obsessed me,” Ingrid wrote in her memoir. “I don’t quite know where this deep compulsion came from, perhaps from way back in my childhood dreams, but when David Selznick sent me that cable at the beginning of the war, I was divinely happy.”
As the years went by and Selznick continued to put the project on hold, Ingrid never gave up. At cocktail parties, she would approach directors and producers and say, “Now what about Joan of Arc?” But nobody was ever interested.
Then, out of the blue, she got a telephone call from Maxwell Anderson in New York. Ingrid didn’t know much about the playwright who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his political drama Both Your Houses. “I’ve written a play,” he said, “and I was just wondering . . . I know you are doing a lot of movies, but I’m just wondering maybe one day you might like to come to Broadway to do a play?”
“Yes, of course, I’d like to do that,” Ingrid said. “Tell me, what is your play all about?”
“Joan of Arc,” he replied.
Ingrid almost dropped the phone. “Joan of Arc!” she cried. “Good heavens, send it out immediately. Of course, I must read it first because everyone will think I’m mad if I accept it without reading it, but I can almost swear to you I’ll do it. Please send it quickly. I’m very excited by the idea.”
Anderson brought the play to her in person, and Ingrid rapidly devoured his story – a play-within-a-play about a theater troupe putting on a play about Joan of Ar
c. Anderson’s story had too much political commentary for Ingrid’s taste – and not enough about Joan’s amazing story – but she would worry about that later. “The main thing was that at last I had Joan,” she said.
“David, I have a perfect play for me!” she told Selznick, and was pleasantly surprised when he agreed. But the contract negotiations went on endlessly and finally Anderson had had enough. “I can see that you’re not going to do the play,” he told her. “I realize now that I should never have gotten involved with people in the movies because they have far too many problems and demands upon their time. I know it’s not your fault, but from now on I am going to stick to people in the theater. So I’m going back to New York tomorrow.”
Before he left, Anderson wanted to see the Pacific Ocean one last time and asked Ingrid if she would drive him to a beach. So they drove to Santa Monica and took a walk in the sand. Finally, Ingrid said, “Max, do you have the Joan of Arc contract with you?”
“Here in my pocket,” he said. “Give it to me,” she said, “and I’ll sign it.”
Right there on the beach, sitting in the sand, she signed his contract. Anderson was ebullient. Rehearsals would begin in the fall for the play, called Joan of Lorraine. Later, when the negotiations were over, Lindstrom told her to sign on the dotted line. “I already did,” she said.
“I’ve never worked just for money,” Ingrid explained later. “I’ve always worked for the pleasure of doing what I thought was the right thing at the right moment. If I can then get a good deal, that’s fine. But the part, not the money, is what comes first.”
By then, Ingrid’s relationship with Selznick was seriously fraying – and now money was at the heart of it. Her contract was expiring and Lindstrom – who had displaced Ingrid’s agent Charles Feldman – had written to Selznick’s attorney, John O’Melveny, complaining that his wife was not being paid enough or being given sufficient work. Unless new financial arrangements could be agreed on, Lindstrom said, Ingrid would not be renewing her contract.
