June 3, 2007
Siren
By HOWARD HAMPTON
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INGRID
Ingrid Bergman: A Personal Biography.
By Charlotte Chandler.
Illustrated. 334 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.
Ingrid Bergman held the screen with the imposing beauty of an earthbound though no less pristine Garbo, but her assurance was flecked with melancholy, ambivalence, even neurasthenic sensitivity. Projecting wholesomeness along with a hint of the perverse, she could strategically unbutton that tightly corseted persona in a manner designed to make the sympathetically aroused viewer wonder: What’s a nice Victorian girl like this doing in a sadistic place like Hitchcock’s “Notorious”? (Having a blast playing undercover doxy to Cary Grant’s casehardened F.B.I. pimp, that’s what — abandoning body and soul to slow death as if that were the ultimate stoic test of true romance.)
“Ingrid,” Charlotte Chandler’s chummy, unevenly anecdotal new “personal biography” of the actress, comes blessed by odd-couple endorsements from Michelangelo Antonioni and the late Sidney Sheldon. But don’t get your hopes up for a dose of juicy estrangement or the glamorized ennui of a good scandalous ride on fame’s R-rated roller coaster. “Ingrid” isn’t that kind of book, for Chandler is the soul of circumspection when it comes to her subject’s lesser flings or anything that smacks of salacious gossip.
Despite this kid-gloves approach — Chandler writes about the actress as if she were a favorite aunt who had swept the author into her winking confidence — there’s no getting around the fact that Bergman’s meteoric wartime climb from Swedish ingénue to America’s sweetheart ended in hysterical backlash when she left husband, daughter and America behind to run off with (and get pregnant by) the director Roberto Rossellini in 1949. Such was the indignation occasioned by this extramarital affair and out-of-wedlock pregnancy that Bergman was denounced on the United States Senate floor like some scarlet-letter threat to rival the Red Menace. But Chandler is hardly interested in the cultural implications of Bergman’s rise and fall from grace: she treats this episode almost exclusively in domestic terms, focusing on the actress’s difficulties in beginning a new family and working partnership with the mercurial Rossellini while dodging the prying flashbulbs of the newly massed paparazzi. In “Ingrid,” the erstwhile home-deserter is revealed as a diligent mother and housewife trying to make ends meet on a shoestring, the plucky prizewinner of Defiance, Italy.
This comes as a quasi-neorealist interlude after the treatment of Bergman’s Hollywood years, glossed over with such infantilized Andy Hardy blandness that her major source of satisfaction there seems to have been an infatuation with American ice cream. (“I even dreamed about ice cream. Those were good dreams, those ice cream dreams.”) Chandler has zero feeling for the movies themselves, which function as perfunctory backdrops to gee-whiz testimonials or are reduced to TV Guide-like plot synopses that are abruptly shoehorned into the text as if inserted by an automatic software program. You’ll have to look elsewhere if you want insight into what went wrong with “For Whom the Bell Tolls” or very right with “Casablanca.”
But if “Ingrid” is useless as an artistic overview, the book gradually uncorks some enjoyably incidental oral history. Chandler managed to interview Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, their daughter Isabella and many others who were close to them, gathering a wealth of raw material in the process. The more of these stories she works into “Ingrid,” the more rewarding it grows. When Bergman lets down her guard and talks about her relationship with the risk-loving war photographer Robert Capa, a genuine sense of a conflicted romantic nature emerges; she seems eager to taste reality and yet seeks shelter from its harsher aspects. Capa wanted her to witness a concentration camp firsthand, but she couldn’t bring herself to go: “I thought if I saw it, it would be in my mind all the time and that I would never be able to work again.”
Her decision to write Rossellini a fan letter and offer her acting services is the impulsive flip side of such reticence — a willingness to plunge into the uncharted, up to a point. The movies they made together are sporadically compelling oil-and-holy-water experiments, while the marriage between the impractical, debt-ridden artist and the sensible movie star sounds as if it could have been made into a fascinating film itself (albeit one directed by Fellini instead — Bergman probably would have been better suited to his carnivalesque vision of the world, or Visconti’s operatic one). “Life is really made up of small things,” she tells Chandler, and what “Ingrid” finally leaves us with are such stray moments, incongruous snapshots of aging gracefully: Bergman opening an unexpectedly touching letter from Howard Hughes 25 years after it was written, Liv Ullmann admiring Ingrid’s nerve in standing up to Ingmar Bergman (no relation), Isabella Rossellini describing how her mother cared for her through nearly two years of excruciating treatments for scoliosis.
These are tiny clues to the Bergman whose screen smile hovered between giddy release and instinctive modesty, the sex symbol and chastity symbol rolled into one. They indicate a more complicated personality, perhaps a fiercer mother-daughter bond: was Isabella ever more a proud chip off the maternal block than when she dived wholeheartedly into the luxuriant darkness of “Blue Velvet,” acting out what was implicit all along in “Notorious”?
Howard Hampton is the author of “Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses.”