She was America’s perfect woman, a sex symbol kept high on a pedestal till she
toppled off, scandalising the world by leaving her husband and child for a
married man. But what led Ingrid Bergman astray was more than just lust. Her
greatest weakness was that she was a hopeless romantic.
“I did not always get life right. I lacked the wisdom,” she told Charlotte
Chandler, author of a new, intimate biography based on conversations with
Ingrid and others. The director George Cukor told Chandler that Ingrid had
“a great sense of fantasy. Sometimes this works in her favour – in the films
and on the stage. In real life, it may have been her undoing”.
The rosy myth she took to heart was that somewhere there existed a perfect
“other half” with whom she would live ecstatically ever after. When she was
dying of cancer, the actress carefully put her own memorabilia in order for
posterity. Papers, scrapbooks. And three dresses, each of which she had
dry-cleaned, hand-pressed and wrapped in plastic – one to represent each of
her three marriages. “Each of them was mine, if only for a while.” She was
shrewd enough to understand that her three husbands would become as much a
part of her legend as her movies.
The deep yearning for romance that led her from one marriage to another was
virtually imprinted on her from childhood. It’s doubtful whether any husband
could have lived up to her father – “the perfect man in my life” – who
encouraged her to perform in front of a camera and made her believe in
herself. Nor could any relationship ever have matched her parents’ fairy
tale, the legend of which was all the more powerful because she had never
really known her mother. Through her father’s proud, sad, devoted memories,
Ingrid grew up believing that love was the most important thing in the world
– and forbidden love the truest.
Her parents had met in 1900 in a Stockholm park. Frieda Adler, known as
Friedel, was a 16-year-old German girl on holiday. Justus Bergman was a
28-year-old struggling painter. Friedel’s parents thought this penniless
artist with no property or financial prospects was entirely unsuitable, and
forbade the relationship. For seven long years Friedel secretly wore his
ring on a chain around her neck, waiting while he developed a successful
business as the owner of a photography shop. Now that he had prospects, her
parents gave in.
Friedel and Justus were spectacularly happy for a very short time. Their first
child died at birth. Four years later, another child died after living for
just a few weeks. In 1915, to their joy, Ingrid was born: a healthy baby who
thrived. There are two pieces of film footage taken by Justus that
poignantly sum up what happened next. In the first, Ingrid, aged two, is
seen walking along with her mother. In the second, aged three, she is
putting flowers on her mother’s grave. Friedel had died, suddenly and in
agony, of liver disease. “Sometimes I would see children with their mothers
who didn’t seem to love their mothers the way I would have loved mine if I
could have known her,” Ingrid told Chandler. “Much later, I realised that I
had been living with an ache, but it began so early and was so constant, I
was not aware of it.”
(On the last day of her life, the morning of her 67th birthday, Ingrid saw her
mother again. Her daughter Isabella recounted: “Even before she opened her
eyes, she felt this awesome presence in the room, and she knew immediately
who it was. She knew she was dying, because she saw her own mother sitting
at the make-up table. Her mother was facing the mirror, and she didn’t turn.
She was young and lovely, in her early thirties. The mother Mama never
really knew was there, and Mama understood why. Her mother had been a joyful
young woman there to rejoice at Mama’s first birthday, and she was there to
be at Mama’s last birthday, to make it easier for her. Mama said, ‘My
mother has come for me, to take me with her.’ That night, Mama died.”)
Motherless already, Ingrid grew up adored by her father, and was, she said, a
happy child – until he too fell ill, with stomach cancer, when she was 12,
not yet of an age to be critical of a parent. He died with the two people he
loved most at his bedside: Ingrid and her governess, Greta. Greta had been
employed three years earlier, and she and Justus had become lovers despite
his being 30-odd years older than her. Friedel’s family strongly
disapproved, so Greta had ended the affair, but Ingrid hadn’t had any
problem with it: Greta was fun (Greta, who worked as an extra, later got
Ingrid a walk-on role in a film, her first taste of film-making). Ingrid had
learnt another lesson from her father: that love was to be seized when it
presented itself; that other people’s feelings mattered less than your own.
Ingrid went to live with her aunt Ellen. Six months after her father died, the
aunt collapsed and died in her arms. All this real-life drama gave her an
extra impetus to lose herself in make-believe, and Ingrid auditioned for
Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre school. Her capacity for melodrama, as well
as drama, can be inferred from her reaction when she thought she hadn’t got
in: “The only answer seemed to be suicide… This was the end of all my hopes
and dreams.” She thought she might throw herself into the canal, but then
noticed the water was dirty. “[It was] filthy. I was utterly revolted, so I
went home.” And, it turned out, she had passed the audition: life was worth
living, after all.
And life was about to get more interesting in the form of a young dentist,
Petter Lindstrom, whom she met through a blind date – her first. Petter was
nine years older than her, “a man of the world”, and he took her to lunch at
Stockholm’s grandest hotel. “It was his invitation, and he paid the bill.
And he had a car.”
She fell for this willing father substitute right away. “I couldn’t bear to be
away from Petter. I was too desperately in love. The idea of being away from
him for even a day was too terrible. I was never in love like that before,
and I was never in love in quite that desperate way again.”
Petter was a respectable, hard-working young man. He was also a fitness freak,
big on self-discipline. When the couple went for long walks in the woods, he
carried a very heavy rucksack that he never opened. One day he showed her
what was inside: five large bricks. He explained: “I am building muscles.”
Seventy years ago this summer, in the small Swedish town of Stode, 235 miles
north of Stockholm, Ingrid married Petter Lindstrom in the town’s church.
(Bizarrely, the town’s folklore society is searching for an Ingrid Bergman
lookalike to mark the anniversary. The happy couple will have their wedding
paid for, and the guests will dine on the original wedding china. The groom
does not, apparently, have to be a dead ringer for Lindstrom. He always
played second fiddle.)
When their wedding date was set, Ingrid went to look through the property that
her aunt Ellen had left her. Among it she found her mother’s letters to her
father written before they married, when she was a teenager. They were so
beautiful, they made her cry. “I came to know my mother as a girl, long
before I was born, passionately in love with my father.” She hoped she would
ind the same with Petter. “I spent my whole life in search of that romance,”
she said. “Perhaps my high expectations even worked against my finding it
or, more important, against my holding onto it. I know I felt certain that
the warmth of this bond would be mine, that a great love would find me, as
it had my parents. Words would be nothing. Feeling is everything.”
Petter didn’t turn out to be the great love that Ingrid had anticipated,
however – not least because he was sexually inhibited. She was a
virgin – not, she said, because she had given it any importance but because
nobody had been interested in her before. “I think my innocence and naivety
were a great part of my attraction for Petter,” she said.
She offered to go to bed with him when they were engaged, but he wouldn’t
consider it. “He said we should take long walks in the cold instead. I felt
it was because he respected me so much.” That might not have been the
reason, it transpired: once they were married, she did not, as she hoped,
“find an intimacy beyond my imagination”.
Ingrid was shy; but so was Petter. “It surprised me to find when he made love
that he was so decorous. I think he was very concerned about abandoning
himself and losing his dignity, seeming a fool in front of me. Perhaps he
thought about how we would feel facing each other in the morning.” She
thought things would improve: “I assumed that passion grows. I was wrong.”
But Petter seemed happy enough with their sex life, so she thought: “Maybe
that whole side of life had been exaggerated”.
By now Ingrid was a successful actress, with a reputation not just for the
quality of her acting but for speaking her mind and knowing what she wanted.
In her personal life, however, she was insecure and unsure of herself.
Petter made all the decisions, even helping her to decide what to wear. They
had a daughter now, Pia, born in 1938. Ingrid had already made 11 films in
Sweden, and now Hollywood was beckoning. The producer David O Selznick
invited her to star in Intermezzo, in the first of the roles that would make
her an icon. Petter and Pia would stay in Sweden, where Petter was training
to become a surgeon. Though they went to the US eventually (Pia first, with
a nanny), the physical separation only aided what later became a total,
painful split. The cracks were starting to show already. When Petter visited
Ingrid in New York, which she loved, he hated the city. “He saw only that
the buildings were dirty. He complained his socks got dirty when he walked
on the rug in the hotel. He complained about everything. I was terribly
disappointed.” Their daughter, Pia, summed up the marriage thus: “My parents
were in love, and then they weren’t.”
Selznick’s son Daniel described Ingrid’s first husband as “very handsome.
Beautiful blue eyes. Very Nordic… I wouldn’t describe him as nervous, but
high-strung. Very handsome, very poetic, and very tender with Ingrid. And
obviously controlling”. As Ingrid’s career skyrocketed, Petter had to adjust
to becoming “Mr Ingrid Bergman” as well as seeing her in clinches with
co-stars on screen. And the more she was feted, the more she gained in
confidence. “The more famous she became, the freer she became, the more it
was out of his control, and there was nothing he could do about it. Frankly,
I felt sorry for him,” said Daniel Selznick.
In 1942, Casablanca was released, and was an immediate international hit with
its theme of self-sacrifice in wartime. Petter couldn’t stand the publicity.
Now his wife was a household name, and earning far more than he was.
Everybody wanted her, and he was losing her. She was growing up, was no
longer his little girl. And the less she needed him, the more he tried to
keep hold of the reins.
He particularly liked to monitor what she ate. “Petter was very strict with me
about my eating, and I was starving.” He made her eat lots of cottage
cheese, and forbade sweets. “I always left our table hungry. Petter, being a
person of great discipline, thought it was a very good thing.” When she put
on weight anyway – she had a secret biscuit jar in her room – Petter would
ask her why, when she had been dieting, and she would avoid his questions.
He also took care of her finances, and would say things like: “You don’t need
a new dress. You look beautiful in anything you wear!” As time wore on and
the marriage wore out, his nagging about her appearance increased. He would
say: “Don’t wrinkle your forehead that way when you speak. It makes for
premature wrinkles.” “Hold in your stomach.” “Have you gained some weight? A
pound or two?” But when she tentatively suggested a divorce, he thought she
was joking. “How can you say such a thing when we are perfectly happy?”
She wasn’t, though: she still yearned for the kind of high-octane romance that
her parents had known. In 1945 she appeared in her first film directed by
Hitchcock: Spellbound. She recalled: “I was worried about the utterly
unromantic character who was suddenly so carried away by love that she is
ready to throw away everything she has studied and worked to achieve. I
didn’t believe an intelligent woman would act that way without thinking
everything out – until I did it myself.”
She and Petter had been separated further because of the war – he had joined
the Swedish army as a producer of films on military dentistry. Now they
could be together, the marriage fell apart. His pernicketiness can’t have
helped. When they went to the Hitchcocks’ house, Petter would dance the
jitterbug with their daughter, Patricia. “He told me it was the best
exercise,” said Ingrid. “He was so meticulous. He always brought three extra
shirts to their house for when he perspired so from the vigorous activity.”
When she was in stage plays and she would come home buzzing from the
adrenaline, he would give her a pill he’d prescribed to calm her down. She
didn’t want to calm down. He believed she should do slimming exercises for
half an hour every day, at the same time every day. Had she done them, he’d
nag. No, she hadn’t: she had been eating ice-cream sundaes. She didn’t tell
him that, though. “Petter couldn’t really imagine anyone being so lacking in
discipline as to ever desire treats between meals.” After a while, Ingrid
began to feel that “he saw me as a property to be protected”.
If Ingrid and Petter had stayed in Stockholm, if Ingrid had not become a star,
perhaps their marriage would have survived. But it was doomed – not least
because her work offered the perfect unreality missing from her personal
life. The attractive leading men in her films were one thing – it was rather
nice, for example, to have to “fall in love with” Gary Cooper. But then she
met a real-life adventure hero: the war photographer Robert Capa. She was in
Paris in June 1945, entertaining the troops. Capa and the writer Irwin Shaw
took her out for dinner. She was drawn to Capa’s inner strength. “He was
brave, too brave, intelligent, funny, a romantic.”
He was unattainable; he told Ingrid he was married to his work and must have
his freedom. Perhaps that added to the attraction, with echoes of her
mother’s pining for her “unsuitable” future husband, and her father’s
relationship with the nanny. Nine years later, in 1954, Capa stepped on a
landmine in Vietnam, killed at 40. But his impact in her life was huge.
“Capa awakened a sexual side in me I didn’t know was there. He helped me to
be me. He was not inhibited. Capa was lost completely when he made love, as
he must have been when he took his war pictures. I learnt what it was to
forget everything.”
Ingrid had already found an escape through her work. “Acting, I could be
someone else.
That someone else had no need to blush. That character was thrilled to have an
entire audience watching.” Now she found herself liberated in a different
way, through sex with an equal – one who had his own demons. “It seemed he
felt guilty all the time, except when he was making love. I never knew what
he felt guilty about. I think it was about being alive. He had seen so many
people die.”
Petter cottoned on to their affair after it was over, but by then the marriage
had petered out anyway. It wouldn’t be long before she was showing a
talented Italian director, Roberto Rossellini, the sights of Hollywood. Says
Chandler: “Petter had perfect confidence. Ingrid had no reason to look
elsewhere, since she already had a perfect and a faithful husband. Also,
Petter could not help but notice, without paying any special attention, that
Rossellini was shorter than Ingrid, balding and had too large a waist.”
Poor Petter, with his wholesome outdoorsy life, his dedication to his career,
his underestimation of his wife, his confidence in himself. He once told her
he thought she should keep her mouth shut if she couldn’t say anything
intelligent. And he denied her whims. When Ingrid took Roberto Rossellini to
a toy shop, because he was looking for a cowboy outfit for his son, he saw a
cuddly cow for $75 that Petter had refused, and said: “I want to buy that
for Pia. She will love it.” Ingrid saw this as a special sign. She was
looking for a way out of her marriage. In no time at all, they were lovers.
Just before they started working together, Rossellini had written her a letter
in which, apropos of not very much, he told her: “In the deepness of my soul
there is a secret envy for those who can love so passionately, so wildly, as
to forget any tenderness, any pity for their beloved ones. They are guided
only by a deep desire of possession of the body and soul of the woman they
love.” This was more like it.
Within a year, to the shock and horror of Hollywood’s “moral guardians”, she
would run off to Italy with Rossellini, have his child, and later marry him
and have another two children with him. Still later, she would realise he
was as difficult as he was brilliant, grow tired of his raging and gambling,
not be able to cope with the pain of him getting a mistress pregnant, and
divorce him too. Finally she would find the happiness she sought with a
fellow Swede, Lars Schmidt. (Rossellini was furious when Robin, his son with
Ingrid, told him – after seeing Lars naked – “Papa, he’s much bigger than
you are.”) But the demands of her work would take their toll, he would seek
company elsewhere and her third marriage too would come to an end when he,
too, had a child with another woman.
She could not have anticipated that togetherness with Rossellini would mean
separation from her much-loved daughter, Pia, who was then 12; she thought
she and Petter would share custody. The romantic ideal didn’t allow for any
fallout. But Petter was incredibly bitter. “Petter was unrelentingly
unforgiving,” she said. “He felt mortified in front of his medical
colleagues and, indeed, before the whole world, including his conservative
family in Sweden.”
She would not see her daughter for another six years. In Ingrid’s 1980
autobiography, Pia recounted: “A whole new life opened for her which was
dramatic and glorious and a passionate love affair so romantic and glorious.
Well, that was grand for Mother. But on the other hand, what was left behind
was not. I was part of what was left.”
Petter went on to become a neurosurgeon, remarried and had four more children
– though he never forgave his first wife’s betrayal. Ingrid’s career was
temporarily ruined, although Hollywood later welcomed her back with open
arms. In total she was nominated for seven Oscars, and won three. She told
Chandler: “I know what I do not want to be remembered for. I do not want to
be remembered as a participant in one of the biggest scandals of the 20th
century, the personification of the fallen woman.”
Well, she is – but it’s all part of the romance. She followed her heart,
regardless of the cost. Her father might have congratulated her.
Ingrid: A Personal Biography, by Charlotte Chandler (£18.99), is published
Simon & Schuster on April 2. It is available at the BooksFirst price of
£16.99, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
