Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (79 page)

Bergman began to show her clout during the Washington, D.C., tryout. She protested the racial segregation at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. And Anderson fired the original director, Margo Jones, because he felt she wasn’t up to the challenge of making nuances heard and felt in a large, echoing auditorium. The producers wouldn’t have made that move without their star’s advice and consent (though Bergman in her 1980 book,
My Story,
says the firing shocked her). Bergman’s co-star, Sam Wanamaker, who played Mary Grey’s director, Masters, became Bergman’s actual director, with uncredited assistance from Alan Anderson, who was already working as
his
father’s stage manager. “I have a feeling everyone agreed, including Bergman,” Anderson says. “Margo Jones really had no experience. Never should have been there.”

When Masters falls into an old crush he had on Mary, he tells her, “You’ll forgive an old admirer for sort of relapsing a bit and—admiring you?” By the time preproduction on Fleming’s
Joan of Arc
began, with Anderson working on a new script, the backstage plot of
Joan of Lorraine
would come to life in two ways. Bergman and Fleming were having an affair—and some felt that Bergman had come to believe (in the words of Anderson’s daughter, Hesper) “that she was the reincarnation of Joan.”

On opening night, November 18, 1946, at the Alvin Theater in New York, she triumphed. “Six years ago,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in
The New York Times,
“Miss Bergman paused briefly in New York to play in a revival of ‘Liliom’ en route to Hollywood. Her beauty was extraordinary then, and her gifts as an actress seemed to be considerable. Since then her gifts have multiplied and prospered, and Miss Bergman has brought into the theatre a rare purity of spirit.” At the end of 199 sold-out performances
Variety
reported, “She is regarded as the most successful repatriate from the coast, in marked contrast to Spencer Tracy in
The Rugged Path.
”

Terese Hayden, who joined the cast in January 1947 as the Dauphin’s mistress, thought there was no question what made the play so popular. Bergman “was a magnificent physical presence,” and audiences “were thrilled to just walk into the theater and [be] where she was. They don’t make them like that anymore. This was Ingrid at the top of her powers.” Those powers, Hayden cautions, were mesmeric, not thespian. “I don’t think Ingrid was a first-class actress,” she says. “I thought she was a marvelous girl. I don’t think she was particularly fine in the play.” Kevin McCarthy, who played the Bastard of Orléans, also admired her personally. “She was such an unusual person,” he says. “She had a perfect kind of freshness.” Critics sounded similar notes: Louis Kronenberger (in the leftist daily
PM
) and Atkinson called her “radiant.” George Jean Nathan begged to differ: in the
New York Journal American
he called the production “a Readers’ Theatre performance of Percy MacKaye’s Joan of Arc, directed by a second cousin of Pirandello and interrupted from time to time by some old patent medicine doctor with faith and hope messages from Mr. Anderson and with a popular screen actress as ballyhoo.”

“
Everybody you ever heard of in Hollywood came to see the play,” Hayden recalls. “The most beautiful, in my memory, was Gary Cooper.” Bergman complained to Hayden that Greta Garbo never showed up. “I was in Stockholm last year, sent flowers, and made it very clear I would love to see her,” Bergman said, “but she didn’t even respond.” Well, why wouldn’t Bergman feel a little petulant about it? Every night a large group of fans who dubbed themselves “the Alvin [Theater] Gang” waited to greet her by the stage door. “Steinbeck and Hemingway saw the show,” she reported to her English coach and lifelong friend Ruth Roberts, and “Hemingway said I was the greatest actress in the world.”

Roberts was a good pal to have, for her loyalty
and
her industry savvy as the sister of George Seaton, who scored a critical and popular hit with his script for
The Song of Bernadette
(1943) and had just directed
Miracle on 34th Street
(1947). Roberts may have fostered Bergman’s tendency to push Joan toward schoolgirl notions of uncomplicated sainthood. Bergman chose to perform half-hour radio condensations of
The Bells of St. Mary’s
with Crosby on August 26, 1946—before rehearsals began for
Joan of Lorraine—
and on October 5, 1947, just after the start of Fleming’s
Joan of Arc.
It was as if she thought playing the feisty yet wholesome Sister Mary Benedict, the feminine counterpart to Crosby’s resourceful, unflappable Father O’Malley, was the best way of getting into character.

Dr. Petter Lindström was Bergman’s strong, handsome husband—no pushover in matters of money or the heart. Hollywood types who found him a hard bargainer on his wife’s behalf always referred to him as a dentist, but as Pia Lindström, his and Ingrid’s daughter, testifies, “Petter never was a dentist. He got his Ph.D. and taught dentistry as part of his plan to pay for medical school.” In the United States, he studied medicine at the University of Rochester in the early 1940s and then became a neurosurgeon in Los Angeles, holding teaching and clinical appointments at UCLA and USC and becoming chief of neurosurgery at Los Angeles County Harbor Hospital by 1949. During later stints at veterans hospitals in Pittsburgh and Salt Lake City, and the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah, he developed the use of ultrasound to perform bloodless brain surgery.

“He was very good-looking as a younger man. He was a professional-class ballroom dancer, a wonderful dancer,” says Pia.

We
won contests together, and we had such fun. He also was a great skier—he took me skiing as a child. The myth is of “the interfering dentist.” The fact is, he was educated, [Ingrid] was not, though she was a gifted actress. And she was also [eight years] younger, and he was of the old-fashioned European stock who would try to protect her. But he was a Swede with an accent and not in that world or that business, so calling him “the interfering dentist” was a way of diminishing him.

When Bergman’s contract came up with Selznick early in 1946, the producer thought Lindström’s demands were so exorbitant that both parties let the contract lapse; soon Bergman was bound for Broadway, anyway. Yet the critical and popular success of
The Song of Bernadette,
starring Selznick’s new protégée and future wife, Jennifer Jones, as well as the flurry of interest around
Joan of Lorraine,
made the Joan of Arc story a sought-after property. Selznick copyrighted the title
Joan of Arc,
assigned Ben Hecht to the script, and floated it as a possible production for Jones, who insisted (Selznick said) that he offer it to Bergman first. In England, the producer Gabriel Pascal tried to launch a screen version of Shaw’s
Saint Joan
with Deborah Kerr.

Just when Selznick and Bergman dissolved their relationship, Fleming’s post–World War I acquaintance Wanger began to reorganize Walter Wanger Productions into a group of smaller companies, including the Diana Corporation (the director Fritz Lang, the writer Dudley Nichols, and the star Joan Bennett). With Wanger, Bergman formed the En Corporation (from the Swedish for “one”). Wanger hoped to snag Bergman for the lead in an adaptation of the British writer Rosamond Lehmann’s international best seller
The Ballad and the Source.
Lehmann’s novel spanned the Victorian and Edwardian eras, in Britain and in France; it told of a free-spirited woman’s determination to be true to her lovers as well as her children. Wanger touted the heroine’s “constant search for happiness and truth in a world shackled by the chains of a bigoted culture” and wooed Noël Coward for the screenplay. Wanger would later write that Bergman told him, “Walter, I could never play the part of a woman deserting her child and leaving her husband for someone else, because I could never do a thing like that.”

In 1949, of course, Bergman
would
do that, for Roberto Rossellini. Pia says the humiliation her father endured from that public scandal and her mother’s other infidelities left lasting scars:

I
was a young woman, seventeen or eighteen, when my father told me how he felt about it. Years after, it affected him. It was so disturbing and painful to him that he couldn’t drive home after performing neurosurgery without stopping the car and getting sick by the side of the road. He felt shamed that it happened, and he wasn’t of the generation that thinks everything is easy, you go to therapy or counseling, you work it through, you get over it. That kind of grief was damaging to his self-esteem. And for it to happen again and again: he was not from that world in which everyone was having affairs, so he felt humiliated, publicly humiliated, even when he went to the hospital. Life took its toll on him.

In January 1947, Anderson and Lindström had quarreled, and Bergman and Anderson had stopped talking to each other. The energetic Lindström negotiated for Bergman with Liberty Films, but turned Liberty down. “The good doctor is a hard man to do business with,” Liberty’s partner and producer Samuel Briskin told Bergman’s publicist, Joe Steele. “If he had his way there would be nothing left for us.” Bergman was getting tense with Lindström, too. “Business, business, it’s always business. How I feel doesn’t matter,” she vented to Steele. But Wanger secretly sympathized with her husband. He later told an interviewer that Ingrid “was always going off half-cocked, making crazy financial commitments, and he was the one who had to extricate her. She had bum judgments, phony enthusiasms.” After her triumph in
Joan of Lorraine,
Wanger said, she wrote him “that she was the happiest woman in the world and that, from now on, the theater was for her. But three months later, she was bored. She couldn’t wait to rush back to Hollywood.”

During the run of
Joan of Lorraine,
Hollywood’s top filmmakers came to pay their respects at the Alvin Theater. The Liberty director George Stevens flew in to see the play and talk movie projects, but said his script was “not good enough for you and I won’t even tell you what it is.” (Instead of that comedy, Joseph Fields’s
One Big Happy Family,
Stevens filmed the hit Norwegian-immigrant play
I Remember Mama
with Irene Dunne.) When Bergman let it be known that she’d do a Joan film without using Anderson’s play, another Liberty director, William Wyler, began courting her and Lindström. Anderson thought his partnership with Bergman was through. He met with Jerry Wald of Warner Bros. to discuss a movie of
Key Largo
( John Huston eventually
made
it, with Bogart and Bacall), and Wald pitched
Joan of Lorraine
as a possible star-making vehicle for Viveca Lindfors (who never became a star) or a comeback vehicle for Garbo.

Wanger didn’t give up easily on
his
dream movie,
The Ballad and the Source.
He asked Fleming to see Bergman in January, not to consider
Joan of Lorraine
as a movie, but to pitch that novel again. Fleming was feeling unusually unmoored. Many of his friends—Hawks, Mahin, Gable—were in marital limbo or upheaval, and though his own daughters had anchored his life on Knapp Island and Moraga Drive, he’d begun to get bored or frustrated with Lu. “He used to pick on her terribly at the dinner table, and she’d go crying up to her bedroom,” says Victoria. “Mother told me that if Daddy had had two bourbons, she knew to watch it. I remember crawling under the bed one time because I was scared,” says Sally. He started monitoring Lu’s comings and goings, touching the hood of her car when he got home to see if it was warm.

Professionally, Fleming had been unattached for the first time since 1932. Although the deals with Vidor and Liberty didn’t pan out, his new adviser, Lew Wasserman, continued to nudge him away from the studios. (Wasserman soon pioneered the epochal arrangement that netted half the profits of
Winchester ’73
for James Stewart.) Wanger, a literate independent with studio-sized dreams and a cosmopolitan background, who knew Fleming from his days as President Wilson’s cameraman, was a good fit for the director. Wanger enlisted him to bring a copy of Lehmann’s book to New York in hopes of hooking Bergman for the lead. Theaters usually go dark on Monday, but
Joan of Lorraine
took its day off on Sunday, instead, out of deference to a devout audience. At the Monday, January 27, performance, the actress who thought herself just part of another movie Fleming made five years earlier became the center of his career and his emotional life.

Accounts conflict on just what happened next. In a publicity piece written for his byline, Fleming said he invited Bergman to lunch the next day and proclaimed, “Ingrid, you were magnificent! You ought to play Joan for the rest of your life.”

But according to the publicist Steele,

The white-maned lion stormed backstage and clamored to see her now, instantly. “Victor, Victor!” Ingrid cried out as they kissed and embraced with fervor.

Words
gushed from him in a violent torrent. “God damn it, Angel, why do you want to make a picture? You should play Joan for two years, ten years, all your life!” He grabbed her shoulders, held her off and gazed into her eyes. Tears streamed down the bronzed, part-Cherokee countenance.

“I came here to talk to you about
The Ballad and the Source—
to hell with it, it’s a lot of junk! I don’t want to direct you or make pictures with you. God damn it, you belong here, out there on that stage!”

“Oh, Victor! Victor!” she said, and they cried together.

Only in Bergman’s version of events does Fleming sweep in, toss Lehmann’s novel in the corner of the dressing room, grab, embrace, and praise her, and
then
say, “You must play Joan on the screen.” For Bergman, “So there it was. The words I’d been waiting for as long as I could remember, certainly for the last six years since David Selznick said we were going to do it. I was so happy. At last it was serious.”