Working and partly living
John Bayley
NOTORIOUS: THE LIFE OF INGRID BERGMAN by Donald Spoto HarperCollins, £19.99, pp.474 Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife was always a sturdy drawing-room comedy, and revived with Ingrid Bergman in the lead it ran at the Albery theatre for eight months. It made Bergman a very rich woman — by Hollywood standards she was only moderately well-off before — and it also killed her. Donald Spoto, her devoted biographer and fan, takes up the story:
At home in bed after a performance in late November she read a letter to a newspaper editor from a grateful reader who wrote that an article about breast self-examination had saved her life. As she read, Ingrid automati- cally began to move her hand slowly over the contours of her right breast. No lumps, noth- ing abnormal. Good. She read on, and her fingertips moved to the underside of her left breast. There was a small hard nodule she had never before noticed. No, she told her- self, this could not be anything serious.
Had her adoring biographer been in bed with her — it sounds almost as if he could have been assisting in the palpation — he might have known what she told herself; assuming, that is that she told him too. As it is we have to take the matter on trust, graphically presented as it is. No one else was in bed with her — that we do know. She had been married to Professor Petter Lindstrom, to Roberto Rossellini, and at the time to Lars Schmidt, a capable fellow who ran her business affairs and from whom she was divorced so quietly that her friends knew nothing of it for years. But at that moment she was on her own. 'Her career always came first,' remarked Schmidt philosophically. Bergman herself endorsed this view rather more absolutely:
My whole life has been acting. I have had my different husbands, my families. I am fond of them all, and I visit them all, but deep inside me is the feeling that I belong to show business.
She did indeed. What is remarkable about that statement is not the sentiment, which is banal enough, but the voice, even its slightly silky cadence: the voice of an actress enjoying herself getting the most out of her lines, almost as if involuntarily. As an actress she must have known that they would reveal her to a fascinated audience as a monster, although as a woman she probably thought she was saying something honest, warm-hearted, affectionately clear-headed. All great actors, great writers too, have of necessity something of a monster in them (Dickens had, and so perhaps did even Shake- speare); so does anyone for whom working is more important than living. Bergman seems to have made a special point of it though, and she suggested for her epitaph: `It appears that his lordship has walked into the trompe l'oeil again.' `She acted to the last day of her life' — a comment witty by intention but fundamen- tally very earnest and rather dull.
The dullness may remind us of her fellow-countrywoman Greta Garbo, who like Bergman probably never fell in love in her life. Bergman certainly did not. She left her vivacious dentist husband Dr Lindstrom not because she was in love with Rossellini but because she longed to act in his then very fashionable films. She left him to act in Paris for the same reasons, though he had also managed to grab most of the money she had earned. She set herself to fascinate Alfred Hitchcock and did well out of it, for Notorious and Spellbound were two of the best films she made. I appear to be unique in finding the famous Casablan- ca quite intolerable, but she will certainly be remembered for that too. She met her match in her fellow Swede and namesake Ingmar Bergman, who threatened to give up making Autumn Sonata because of the way she interfered. But unlike some, or even most, film stars she does not seem to have been a difficult person to get on with; her monsterishness was most evident in the unremitting force of her modesty. She knew she was not the tops by nature but was determined to get there anyway.
Although he bounds about a good deal, Spoto is a shrewd critic as well as a lively writer, shrewd enough to make clear that Bergman was at her best as an actress, though not necessarily as a star, in things that were not quite first-class. The Constant Wife was one such, and Spoto shows his perceptiveness in singling out the scene in which the heroine's tough old mother remarks, 'After all, what is fidelity?' and her daughter replies, `Mcilher, do you mind if I open the window?' Not a specially good touch by Wildean standards, though it neatly suggests that the older generation are accustomed to cosy promiscuousness, but Bergman's sense of movement and her mock-hesitant timing won applause from the audience at the revival. Bergman had been determined to go on, even with her breast cancer still untreated, and by the time she had taken the successful play to New York and finally had time for her operation, the chances were bleak. There was a northern grimness and stoicism about her — her mother was German and she had always been prepared to act in German and Nazi films just before the war — and it is impossible not to admire the courage and dignity of her end.
A lighter touch to end on — would this story have amused her or not? My old tutor David Cecil was once visited in his college rooms by the then not specially elderly Greta Garbo. When she left he said to the undergraduate who was having a tutorial, `Do you know who that was? Greta Garbo.' The undergraduate looked totally blank. At the present, or in a year or two's time, will his successors look equally blank at the name of Ingrid Bergman? Nothing is blanker than a faded star.
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