City of Nets (81 page)

If Pat Neal seemed somewhat more credible than the script, that was because her main function was to be in love with Cooper, and she was. In his younger days, Cooper had been well known for pursuing any actress within reach, but since his marriage in 1933 to a wealthy New York girl named Veronica Balfe, he had made a reasonably conscientious effort to remain faithful. Pat Neal ended all that. She was twenty-two and beautiful and talented and in love with him. She wanted to marry him. He was forty-seven, past the peak of his career, and susceptible. The affair that began on the set of
The Fountainhead
continued through another film they made together,
Bright Leaf,
continued after her departure from Warners in 1950, continued through his comeback in
High Noon.
When Cooper's health began to disintegrate in a series of operations for hernias and ulcers, Miss Neal was at his bedside; his wife sent flowers.

Cooper repeatedly told Miss Neal that he couldn't leave his wife; there were separations and reunions. As Veronica Cooper became aware of the situation, she, too, veered between rejection and acceptance. At one point, she announced: “I am a Catholic and under no circumstances would I consider absolute divorce.” At another, she was quoted as saying, “Any time Gary wants a divorce he can have one.” Cooper still couldn't decide, and after five years, Miss Neal finally decided to marry the English writer Roald Dahl.

The Fountainhead
proved to be another message picture that did not do very well. Even in the Cold War atmosphere of mid-1949, the reviews were tepid, and the box office brought no profits. History has not been kind either. Nora Sayre wrote in
Running Time
that Cooper played his love scenes “with all the sexuality of an ironing board,” and that his relationship with the heroine was “a sadomasochistic passion in which rape is more satisfying than ‘surrender.' ” All in all, she concluded, since “only those who had read [the novel] could have followed the tormented logic of [the] script,” the screen version “can be revered as one of the funniest films of any period.”

 

Roberto Rossellini probably didn't have to go to America to sign up Ingrid Bergman for his new film, but in January of 1949 the New York Film Critics chose
Paisan
as the best foreign movie of the previous year and invited Rossellini to come to New York to receive their award. Before he left Rome, according to a correspondent for a Los Angeles newspaper, Rossellini said, “I'm going to put the horns on Mr. Bergman.” In New York, he sent Miss Bergman a wire: “
I JUST ARRIVE FRIENDLY.
” She cabled back: “
WAITING FOR YOU IN THE WILD WEST.
”

Rossellini needed no further invitation to take the train for California and register at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Miss Bergman promptly invited him to save money by coming to stay at her house on Benedict Canyon Drive. She also started raising money for his film. Sam Goldwyn had long wanted her to star in one of his pictures, but he had never managed to find the right story. Now she telephoned him and said, “Sam, I have a story I like. Would you like to do this one? It's by an Italian named Roberto Rossellini.”

“Sure,” said Goldwyn. Only then did he venture to look at the murky outline that Rossellini had sent to Miss Bergman. “Sounds very artistic,” he said. Miss Bergman brought the two of them together, and she served as interpreter for Rossellini's version of French and Goldwyn's version of English. Then the press was called in to witness Goldwyn and Rossellini signing contracts. Goldwyn invited various Hollywood grandees to have dinner at his house and see Rossellini's unreleased new film,
Germany, Year Zero,
a bleak quasi-documentary that Rossellini imagined to be the completion of a trilogy begun by
Open City
and
Paisan.
“The picture finished and the lights went on,” Miss Bergman recalled. “
And no one said a word.
Not a word. No applause. Complete silence. Twenty people. Not a sound. This freezing cold silence from all these people. Instinctively I stood up and walked to Roberto, threw an arm around him and kissed him on the cheek, to show everybody—something—I didn't know what I wanted to show—but I had to protect him.”

Goldwyn understood the signs—not Miss Bergman's kiss for Rossellini but the silence of his dinner guests. He telephoned Miss Bergman and canceled his financial support. “I'm sorry, I can't do the movie,” he said. “I can't understand the man. I don't know what he's doing, what he's talking about.”

Well, who else was there? Well, there was always Howard Hughes. Like almost everyone else, Hughes had yearned for Miss Bergman. He had even enlisted Cary Grant to arrange a double date for the two of them with Miss Bergman and Irene Selznick. Then, dancing at El Morocco, Hughes had said, “I'm so lonely, I'm so terribly lonely.” Miss Bergman told him not to be silly. She found him rather tiresome.

When Hughes acquired RKO, he telephoned Miss Bergman and said, “I've just bought a film studio for you.”

“What have you done?” said Miss Bergman, who had been drying her hair when she picked up the phone.

“I've just bought a film studio for you,” Hughes repeated. “I've bought RKO. It's yours. It's my present to you. Are you happy now?”

Miss Bergman treated it as a joke, and turned Hughes aside, but now her husband suggested that Hughes would finance Rossellini's film if Miss Bergman just asked him.

“No, I don't want to,” she said. “You know I'm afraid of that man.”

“I'm sure you can handle him,” Dr. Lindstrom said. So she called Hughes at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and he appeared on her doorstep fifteen minutes later in his white tennis clothes and white shoes.

“Sure, okay, I'll do the picture,” Hughes said. “How much money do you need?”

“Listen, don't you want to hear the story?” Miss Bergman asked.

“No, I don't want to hear the story,” Hughes said. “I'm not interested. I don't care what sort of story it is. Are you beautiful in it? Are you going to have wonderful clothes?”

“No, I'm playing a DP in some horrible camp,” Miss Bergman said, laughing. “I'm going to wear the worst and cheapest things you ever saw.”

“Too bad,” Hughes said. “The next picture you're going to do you'll look great.”

With the financing arranged, Rossellini headed back toward Rome at the end of February while the Lindstroms went skiing in Aspen. There had already been items in the gossip columns about Rossellini and Miss Bergman going on drives together, but all three players in the game seem to have agreed tacitly to pretend that nothing was happening. “I knew that he [Rossellini] liked me,” Miss Bergman recalled later, but she added, “If people had looked suspicious when I mentioned Italy, I would certainly have said quite indignantly, ‘I'm going to make a movie—that's all I'm going for.' ”

This guileless masquerade hardly lasted beyond Miss Bergman's arrival in Rome, where she was greeted by a cheering crowd of well-wishers. From the throng emerged Rossellini, who presented her with a large bouquet, kissed her on both cheeks, and whispered,
“Je t'aime.”
Then he escorted her into his red sports car and drove her off to the Excelsior Hotel, where more crowds welcomed them, and friends waited with champagne. “I was simply overwhelmed,” Miss Bergman said.

That was just the beginning. Rossellini took his star on a leisurely tour down the coast, to Monte Cassino, Capri, Amalfi. “He knew all about the history and the monuments and the ruins . . . all about the legends,” she said. As they climbed hand in hand up a stairway toward one of those round towers guarding the coastal route, a pursuing photographer took their picture, and it appeared on a full page in
Life.
Newspaper editorialists began to cluck with disapproval. Miss Bergman ignored them. From Amalfi, she wrote to Dr. Lindstrom that she was leaving him for Rossellini. “It was not my intention to fall in love and go to Italy forever . . .” she wrote. “But how can I help it or change it?”

Rossellini was determined to shoot his film on Stromboli, the northernmost of the Lipari islands, about fifty miles north of Messina and the Sicilian coast. It had a live volcano that periodically spouted lava from its two-thousand-foot cone, but it had very little else—no running water, no electricity, no telephones, no newspapers. The five hundred or so inhabitants, mostly old people, lived on money sent by relatives on the mainland. A steamer made the fourteen-hour trip from Naples once a week to bring food and mail. Rossellini's preparations for his movie were almost equally primitive. He had no script, and except for Miss Bergman, no cast. He had picked up two fishermen on a beach and planned to use one or the other as the leading man. Then, with some of the local villagers, he would improvise.

“Roberto would give them an idea of what to talk about and they'd chatter away,” Miss Bergman recalled, “and I'd stand there like an idiot, because . . . I didn't know what they were saying. . . . So I stood there saying, ‘Have you finished yet?' or ‘What do I answer to that?' Absolute chaos. So to solve it, Roberto attached a string to one of their big toes inside their shoes. Then he stood there, holding this bunch of strings, and first he'd pull that string and one man spoke, then he'd pull another string and another man spoke. I didn't have a string on my toe, so I didn't know when I was supposed to speak. . . . I thought I was going crazy.”

Rossellini apparently thought that the isolation of Stromboli would keep the press away, but the press treated this romance as one of the major events of the year. Nobody seemed to remember that Miss Bergman had played a fallen woman in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and another one in
Arch of Triumph,
an adulteress in
Casablanca
and another one in
Notorious,
only that she had been the smiling nun in
The Bells of St. Mary's,
and that her most recently released film was
Joan of Arc.
Reporters hired boats and began prowling around Stromboli (one even disguised himself as a monk), questioning the natives about the circumstances of Miss Bergman's life, where her bedroom was, how many toothbrushes were visible in her bathroom. “We have been continually hunted,” Miss Bergman wrote to a friend. “The photographers have been everywhere.”

As these stories flowed back to the United States, the authorities in Hollywood began worrying that there would be such a public outcry that Miss Bergman's past and present films would all have to be suppressed. Joseph I. Breen, who had been director of the Production Code Administration but now was nervously occupying an executive position at RKO, wrote Miss Bergman to urge her to deny all the stories that she was planning to leave her husband. “Such stories . . .” he warned, “may very well
destroy your career as a motion picture artist.
They may result in the American public becoming so thoroughly enraged that your pictures will be ignored, and your box-office value ruined. . . . [They] constitute a major scandal and may well result in complete disaster personally.”

Walter Wanger, who had financed
Saint Joan,
and who liked to consider himself an intellectual producer of bold social concerns, sent a cable that seemed to reflect naked terror: “
THE MALICIOUS STORIES ABOUT YOUR BEHAVIOR NEED IMMEDIATE CONTRADICTION FROM YOU. IF YOU ARE NOT CONCERNED ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY YOU SHOULD REALIZE THAT BECAUSE I BELIEVED IN YOU AND YOUR HONESTY, I HAVE MADE A HUGE INVESTMENT ENDANGERING MY FUTURE AND THAT OF MY FAMILY WHICH YOU ARE JEOPARDIZING. . . . DO NOT FOOL YOURSELF BY THINKING THAT WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS OF SUCH COURAGEOUS PROPORTIONS OR SO ARTISTIC TO EXCUSE WHAT ORDINARY PEOPLE BELIEVE.
”

The uproar could hardly help forcing a confrontation between Miss Bergman and her husband. Lindstrom, though stunned by her letter from Amalfi, did not want a divorce; he wanted her to return home. She refused; she had to finish
Stromboli.
They finally agreed to meet at a hotel in Messina. Rossellini, who feared that Lindstrom might persuade his wife to return to him, only grudgingly agreed to the meeting.

“I went into Petter's room,” Miss Bergman recalled, “and he quickly locked the door. Then Roberto went crazy.” Rossellini went to the police and claimed that Miss Bergman was being held behind locked doors against her will. “But Signor Rossellini, she is his wife,” one of the police officers said. Rossellini furiously assigned three of his underlings to guard all the entrances to the hotel. Then he leaped into his car and began racing it around the building, as though to catch Lindstrom wherever he might emerge with his kidnap victim. “Roberto was circling around and around every thirty seconds—vroom—vroom—vroom—with me saying, ‘Here he comes again . . . here he comes again!' ” Miss Bergman recalled. “He never stopped all night long, hour after hour, and I just sat at the window and stared out and listened to Petter talking until the dawn came up. It was a nightmare.”

After issuing an ambiguous statement to the effect that she and her husband had met and “clarified our situation,” Miss Bergman returned with Rossellini to Stromboli, and to the shambles of their picture. Shooting was far behind schedule, and Rossellini continued improvising. At one point, he kept his entire cast and crew bobbing idly in a flotilla of fishing boats while they waited for an annual tuna run. When the fish finally appeared, Rossellini shot a scene that lasted less than a minute in the final film. RKO sent various emissaries to regain control of the project, a real writer to write real dialogue, a production manager, a publicity adviser, but Rossellini went his own way. The scheduled six weeks of shooting stretched to sixteen. One of the RKO envoys finally threatened to shut down production unless the filming finished the following day. Rossellini sent the studio a long cable, signed by Miss Bergman, pleading illnesses and the weather, charging defamation and violation of contract. RKO backed off, and Rossellini finally brought filming to an end.