Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  The final show was July 1. The driver hired to take her home was running late, so she sat in the empty auditorium and watched as the props were removed and the set was taken down. Since her doctors had insisted she cancel the American tour of Waters of the Moon, she suspected she might have taken her final curtain call.

  “There is something so dramatic, nostalgic, and almost heartbreaking about the end of a run of a play,” she said later. “You have to move out of your dressing room and that in itself is awful. You take down your telegrams, the cards, the good-luck pieces, the little animals that people send you. You have a party at the end of the last show on Saturday evening. You have it in the theater bar or you go from dressing room to dressing room and everybody’s kissing everybody else, and everybody’s in tears. It’s such a desperation when you leave; it’s divorce from the people you’ve learned to love, and you say, ‘Shall we ever meet again?’“

  Griff James kept calling to her, “It’s very late. Why don’t you go home? I’ll get you a taxi.” But she couldn’t bear to leave. So she watched the stagehands knock down the scenery and cart it away. The manager of the theater came to chat with her for a few minutes. “I don’t suppose this will ever happen again in the history of the Haymarket, every seat sold for every performance,” he told her. “We could have run for years and years.”

  She watched the workers until the very end. “On Sunday, the new scenery is put up,” she said later. “On Monday, the new show opens, and it’s as if you’d never existed. But I felt that my life had been rounded out with Autumn Sonata and Waters of the Moon. Yes, I might make more movies and more plays, but if I didn’t, I was satisfied with this finale.”

  When the run was over, Ingrid went to see her doctor. “Now! Into the hospital,” he said. “Let’s not waste a minute.”

  “No,” Ingrid replied, ever defiant. “I’ve been working for six days a week giving eight exhausting performances for six months. I’m going to France for a two-week holiday. Then I’ll come back.”

  So she lay in the sun and swam and laughed with James and Burgess. “Being that sort of orderly person,” she said, “I wanted to give Alan all the cuttings, scrapbooks, diaries, and letters so that he could go on with the book.”

  When her vacation was over, Ingrid checked into the hospital under her married name and surgeons performed the mastectomy. Then came the radiation treatment. The public still knew nothing about her battle with cancer, although the cancellation of her American tour raised some eyebrows since it was uncharacteristic of Ingrid to miss even one show, let alone an entire tour.

  But people connected with the shows began to talk, and finally, she had to admit she was seriously ill. “We all don’t want to die,” she later told People magazine, “but I don’t fear it.”

  In October 1978, feeling a little stronger, she went to New York to see her children and record the English soundtrack for Autumn Sonata. At the time, Pia was working as an anchorwoman for WNBC-TV, Isabella was modeling and acting in the city, and Ingrid was teaching at New York University; Robertino, meanwhile, was still in Europe, living in Monte Carlo and selling real estate.

  When Autumn Sonata was released that fall, the critics raved – even the usually disapproving Swedish press. Stanley Kaufman in The New Republic wrote, “The astonishment is Ingrid Bergman’s performance. We’ve all adored her for decades, but not many of us have thought her a superb actress . . . She’s exalted in the hands of a master.” All agreed that scenes between Ingrid and Ullmann would be remembered as classics in movie history.

  At the beginning of 1979, Ingrid returned to London for more radiation treatments. She told Schmidt that she’d never felt so tired. In March, the American Film Institute asked Ingrid to host a ceremony in Beverly Hills to celebrate the illustrious career of Alfred Hitchcock, who was nearly eighty and ailing. Fifteen hundred guests attended the event, which featured clips from Hitchcock’s films and dozens of celebrities applauding his cinematic genius.

  When it was her turn to speak, Ingrid reminded him of the scene in Notorious, when the camera zoomed in on her hand, which gripped the key that would open the wine cellar. Cary Grant had stolen the key from the movie set, she said, and kept it for about ten years before giving it to her as a good-luck charm. “I have kept it for twenty years, dear Hitch,” she said, “and now - here in my hand - is this very same key. It has given me good luck and . . . now I’m going to give it to you, with the prayer that it will open some very good doors for you. God bless you, dear Hitch - I’m coming down now to give you the key.”

  Ingrid walked to the center table, where Hitchcock, suffering from painful arthritis, struggled to his feet to embrace her. As she handed over the Notorious key, he hugged her tightly and kissed her cheeks. Both had tears in their eyes. Grant, sitting next to Hitchcock, rose and joined in their embrace.

  It was Ingrid’s turn to be feted in November 1979 when she found herself in Los Angeles again, this time to attend a Variety Club gala in her honor to raise funds for a children’s hospital. The venue was Stage 9 at the Burbank studio of Warner Brothers, where the interior shots for Casablanca had been filmed thirty-seven years before. Ingrid, looking wearier than she had in March, graciously accepted accolades from Cary Grant, Joseph Cotten, Helen Hayes, Goldie Hawn, and Paul Henreid, among others.

  Warner Brothers pulled out all the stops for the event, even putting up the original set of Rick’s Café Américain and hiring a big orchestra. Henreid, who played Victor Laszlo, the husband of Ingrid’s Ilsa Lund, opened the doors of the famous set and said, “Ingrid, come in. Welcome back to Rick’s and let’s have a glass of champagne.” The champagne was served by the same actor who had poured it in the film. Henreid raised his glass and said, “To Bogie.” She drank to that, adding, “And to [director] Mike Curtiz and all the others” who had died.

  The great swing pianist Teddy Wilson was at the piano to play “As Time Goes By,” since the original pianist, the late Dooley Wilson (no relation) had passed on. When Ingrid started to hum the tune, she heard a voice behind her take up the song. It was none other than Frank Sinatra. Later, she learned that Sinatra, though she hardly knew him, had asked to be part of the show, having always wanted to sing that song to her. In fact, Ol’ Blue Eyes had flown across the country just to be there for that brief moment, then had to hustle back to Atlantic City to open his own show the following night. “I was very touched by his generous gesture,” Ingrid said.

  For the tribute, Ingrid had compiled clips of childhood films her father had taken, and she narrated as the video played, telling the audience how much her father loved this particular camera, which he cranked by hand. The audience saw her as a one-year-old, sitting on her mother’s lap and watched her mother push her in a little wheelbarrow - her first prop, she joked.

  As the images flashed by, Ingrid talked about how happy she was to have clips of her mother moving and smiling, and then there was one of herself, at age three, putting flowers on her mother’s grave. Other clips showed her singing at the piano, playing in the garden, and climbing off a boat upon her return from Germany one summer. A decade later, she told them, she got off a much larger boat in New York harbor, determined to be an actress in America.

  While in Los Angeles, Ingrid visited Hitch one last time. With his health deteriorating, he cried and held her hands and told her he was going to die. She confided that she would probably be dying soon, too. They sat together in silence for a while; sharing the same fear seemed to calm him.

  During this time, as she reflected on her life, Ingrid was comforted by the fact that even when she was gone, her family would continue to thrive and multiply. Her daughter Ingrid had a baby son, Tomasso; Isabella had married film director Martin Scorsese (they would divorce three years later); and Pia was happily married to Joe Daly and had two young sons, Justin and Nicholas.

  Ingrid also wanted to mend old wounds with Pia’s father. Hoping for a reconciliation, she wrote to Lindstrom asking if she could meet his sec
ond wife. Though Ingrid wasn’t feeling well, she visited their home in San Diego at Thanksgiving. Lindstrom later wrote that he felt nothing for her except sympathy for her cancer. She was emotional at their meeting, he wrote, but he was suspicious of her motives.

  When Ingrid returned to London for Christmas, Schmidt picked her up at Heathrow Airport and brought her home to Chelsea where he’d gathered her children and arranged a holiday reunion. As they sipped champagne together on New Year’s Eve, Ann Todd remembered Ingrid saying she knew time was short, but that every day she survived was a victory.

  In spite of her deteriorating condition, Ingrid refused to feel sorry for herself. All she could do - all she knew how to do - was to get on with life, however much of it she had left. In London, Schmidt came to dine with her, as did Larry Adler, her lover decades earlier. Adler said later he could see how much Ingrid still depended upon Schmidt.

  In March 1980, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm invited Ingrid to perform in whatever play she wanted. She hated to say no but declined on the advice of her physician, Dr. Edward MacLellan. She was not healthy enough for stage work. By now, Ingrid had a daily companion, Margaret Johnstone, a nurse and masseuse who had begun cooking for her as well.

  In the fifteen years prior to 1980, many of Ingrid’s friends and colleagues had passed away, among them Edvin Adolphson, David Selznick, Spencer Tracy, George Sanders, Charles Boyer, Bing Crosby, and Gustav Molander. But the worst blow came on April 29 when she learned that Alfred Hitchcock had died.

  Ingrid wanted very much to go to Hitch’s funeral, but she simply did not feel well enough to face the crowds and the press. So she found another way to salute her friend. On October 15, when she was to be honored at the Museum of Modern Art, she asked that the sponsors arrange a screening of Notorious.

  There were other loose ends to tie up as well. Knowing her time was limited, Ingrid wanted to finish her memoirs but knew it was a gargantuan task - especially in her frail state. The manuscript Burgess had turned in earlier was extremely disjointed, some of it written by him and some by Ingrid. Fortunately, her editor at Delacorte Press, Jeanne F. Bernkopf, helped her combine the two. When Ingrid Bergman: My Story was finally published in November 1980, it alternated first-person segments with narrative in the third person. The result was a bestseller that received mixed reviews. Kirkus praised Ingrid’s “no-nonsense, often witty voice” but called the book “a disjointed, involving/annoying mishmash.”

  In the book, Ingrid let the world see her as she was - an imperfect woman who had been married three times but who bore no ill will toward any of her ex-husbands. Like everyone, she had made mistakes, but she never assigned blame to anyone but herself. Grudges were a waste of time, she said. Despite conflicts, she believed, all relationships were redeemable.

  While that proved true with regard to Rossellini and Schmidt, her road with Lindstrom was far rockier – even hostile at times. Friends and acquaintances who knew them both thought her memoir’s account of their marriage seemed accurate, but Lindstrom never forgave her. After reading Ingrid’s version of events, he was highly critical of her in his letters to friends as well as in the interviews he gave to writers, journalists, and Ingrid’s biographers. In one damning quote Lindstrom provided to his ex-wife’s biographer Laurence Leamer, Ingrid supposedly once said, “I’m only interested in two kinds of people: those who can entertain me and those who can advance my career.”

  After her book came out, Ingrid somehow managed to find enough strength to promote it, doing television interviews and hosting booksignings in England, America, Sweden, France, and Italy. In the United States, the press often wanted to know about her role in Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart gazed at her and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  “I get the creeps when I hear Casablanca,” she told People magazine. “No one talks about Gaslight, Anastasia, Notorious or The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.”

  When People asked if she would leave Lindstrom for Rossellini again if she could do it all over, she said, “Yes, but I would try not to hurt my oldest daughter, Pia, so much. I would have had her with me more.” At one point, the interview became uncomfortable. “As an actress, you’ve always had to be very concerned with your physical appearance,” reporter Andrea Chambers asked. “Was your illness especially traumatic for this reason?” Ingrid snapped, “Oh, I’m fed up with all this,” and she left the room, her eyes filled with tears. A few minutes later, she returned to finish the interview.

  Though she wondered if she would ever work again, Ingrid, in fact, had one more movie to make – an epic, four-hour drama for the small screen. American producer Gene Corman, who had produced four movies in Israel, wanted to make one about Golda Meir. The former Israeli Prime Minister had lived a remarkable life: She was strong, driven, and completely dedicated to her country. As with Ingrid, her work took priority over her husband and family. In 1978, Meir had died at the age of eighty after a battle with cancer.

  Paramount Pictures had agreed to work with Corman if he could find a good actress for the job. He immediately thought of Ingrid and reached out to her agent Laurence Evans to see if she was available. Evans was honest, telling him that any producer would be taking a financial risk since Ingrid’s illness meant she could not be insured for the production. Corman and Paramount decided that didn’t matter – they wanted her anyway. When Evans asked her, Ingrid laughed. How could a tall Swede play such a tiny Jewish woman? She looked too different, sounded too different, and knew almost nothing about the woman’s political mission. No, it would not work. Knowing Ingrid well, Evans took that as a “maybe.”

  When she finished the promotional tour for her book, Ingrid snuck away for a vacation in Israel with her cousin Britt Engstrom. She told Evans not to read anything into it: She wanted to see where Jesus tread, that was all. He didn’t believe her, but he wasn’t going to argue with her.

  While Ingrid was in Israel, Corman was there as well, working on another movie, and asked if he could meet with her. During their meeting, Ingrid was polite but persistent about her not being right, physically, for the role. Corman told her he was more interested in displaying Meir’s intrinsic qualities and her contributions to the world, and no one could play Golda Meir better than she. If Ingrid didn’t mind, he had some books he’d like to send her. He hoped they would meet again soon.

  When Canadian Alan Gibson, who was slated to direct the television film, met with Ingrid in London, he was surprised to learn she had been practicing Meir’s voice and accent and recording her attempts on cassette tapes. She felt better about the difference in height after hearing Israelis say they thought Meir was taller because of her larger than life persona.

  The more she learned about Meir, the more Ingrid admired her. And they did have many similarities. Both endured terrible guilt when their devotion to their work separated them from their children. Both had moved from their homeland and had lived in foreign places and spoke several languages. Last, they both had cancer, with Meir suffering from lymphoma.

  Ingrid had another reason to take the role: to alleviate her guilt for her apathy towards the “Jewish problem” while working in Germany in the late 1930s. This film would give her a chance to make amends. The chance to honor such an important Jewish leader was just the motivation she needed to play this difficult role in her increasingly feeble condition.

  Before she agreed, though, she told Corman and Gibson that she wanted a screen test to be sure she could look like Meir. She hadn’t been in front of a camera in four years, and much had changed since then. She was nervous - so much so that she was shaking - until she spotted the camera. As she walked up to do the test, she told Corman it felt like she had found an old friend.

  She did three takes flawlessly. On September 4, 1981, Ingrid signed the contract and left for Israel with Johnstone.

  A Woman Called Golda was unlike anything Ingrid had ever done. She would barely be recognizable: Her face, her hair, and her voice would be completely dif
ferent. It was her last little surprise for movie lovers.

  Filming was scheduled to take nine weeks in and around Jerusalem - Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Lydda, Natanya, and Jericho. As the weeks passed, the cancer spread throughout Ingrid’s body, making her weaker and thinner. Her right arm swelled due to an accumulation of lymphatic fluid. She referred to it as her puppy dog - it came with her everywhere and would not be shooed away. Writing a brief note now took up to fifteen minutes, but she still kept up her correspondence with friends old and new. The pain, however, never went away.

  And yet, typically, Ingrid asked for no special treatment on the set. She showed up at six in the morning for two hours of makeup and endured twelve to fifteen hours on the set. At night, she studied her lines with Johnstone, practiced her voice, and read and watched documentaries about Meir. She also interviewed officials and people who knew Meir, including former foreign minister Abba Eban, American ambassador Simcha Dinitz, and Meir’s secretary and friend, Lou Kaddar.

  Wally Schneiderman, Ingrid’s makeup artist, was impressed with Ingrid’s transformation. Once she was wearing the padded clothing, wig, and makeup, she looked like an old Jewish woman. Some days the temperature rose to more than 100 degrees, but Ingrid never complained, although she did pass out once. A half-hour later, she was back at work, walking along a precipice.

  By now, the swelling in her arm had become so noticeable that costumes had to be designed to hide it. And there were problems with scenes that showed her hand in close-up, such as when she was signing a letter. Someone suggested she use a hand double, but she wouldn’t have it. Instead, she attached her hand to a metal pole at night, which kept her arm suspended while she slept - albeit uncomfortably - and allowed the fluid to drain out.

  Ingrid lost herself in the role of the strong-willed, outspoken, charming leader, but there was one scene that was particularly emotional for everyone on the set: the day Meir’s doctor told her she had cancer. Ingrid delivered her lines poignantly: “Well, I’m sixty-six. How long can I expect to live, anyway? The question is - those few years - will they really be good?”