City of Nets (82 page)

Back in Rome three days later, Miss Bergman's publicist, Joseph Henry Steele, called a press conference to announce that Miss Bergman had given up trying to negotiate with Lindstrom. “I have instructed my lawyer to start divorce proceedings immediately,” her statement said. “Also, with the conclusion of the picture, it is my intention to retire into private life.” From this, the Rome newspaper
Giornale della Sera
drew a daring conclusion and proclaimed that Miss Bergman was pregnant.

That prospect struck the guardians of morality as the final outrage. Divorces were common enough, and adultery could always be denied, but for a married woman to have a baby by a man who was married to someone else—that was too much. But for the time being, Miss Bergman admitted nothing, so the press kept pursuing her. In from Hollywood flew Hedda Hopper, demanding an exclusive interview and all the details of Miss Bergman's private life. Rossellini wanted her barred, but Steele took the usual stand that the press must be accommodated. So Mrs. Hopper was granted an hour-long interview, most of it avoiding the central point.

“One more question, then I'll go, Ingrid,” Mrs. Hopper finally said. “What's all this about you being pregnant?”

“Oh, my goodness, Hedda,” Miss Bergman said with a lighthearted laugh. “Do I look it?”

“That's all I wanted to know,” Mrs. Hopper said. She then cabled her syndicate a long story that said, among other things: “Ingrid declares she will bring suit against the Italian papers which said she was going to have a baby. I don't blame her; there is not a word of truth in it.”

Steele, the public relations man, had also left Italy believing that all reports about Miss Bergman's pregnancy were simply lying gossip. He had urged Rossellini to sue
Giornale della Sera
for libel, and Rossellini said he would. Reporters in Hollywood kept asking Steele about Miss Bergman's condition, and when he asked her what he should say, she finally wrote him, late in November, the truth. “This is for your eyes alone . . .” she said. “If again somebody prints that I am pregnant, don't sue them, as you so bravely wanted to do here in Rome, because you will be sure to lose your case. . . . Dearest Joe, maybe you suspected it toward the end. The question was always in your eyes, but I couldn't bring myself to tell you the truth.”

Steele was shocked. “It was like having your leg blown off,” he recalled, “and having no sensation of it at first, then the feeling that something hit you, but it's dark and you can't see, and your hands go up and down your body trying to find out what happened.” He wrote in alarm to Miss Bergman to warn her of the current state of panic in Hollywood. “No major releasing company will be permitted to release or show the picture [
Stromboli
]. Such organizations as the Legion of Decency, women's clubs, church groups, etc., will rise up in all their fury. The press will editorialize, there'll be speeches. . . . The picture will not make a nickel in this country, and you will thus be deprived of the money you need so badly and on which you count so much. Indeed, it is not exaggerating to envision that Roberto's future pictures, with or without you, will also be banned in this country.”

Steele urged her to try to keep the baby's birth secret, but Miss Bergman only wrote back cheerful accounts of Rossellini starting a new film about Saint Francis. As Steele worried more and more about Miss Bergman's impending ruin, he decided on a drastic and wholly misguided attempt to save her financial stake in
Stromboli
(she and Rossellini jointly owned 60 percent of the film). He arranged a secret meeting with Howard Hughes in Hughes's bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He swore Hughes to secrecy, admitted that Miss Bergman would “never forgive me” for talking but said that he was “doing it only for Ingrid,” and then told Hughes the secret.

“Ingrid is going to have a baby.”

“What did you say?” said Hughes.

“Ingrid is pregnant—she's going to have a baby.”

“How do you know?”

“She wrote me.”

Hughes's next question was about the expected date. Steele guessed at three months and then pressed on with his explanation for his visit. “If this story gets out in the open,
Stromboli
won't be worth a dime. I think you should rush it out as fast as you can—give it a saturation booking; maybe five hundred theaters—before anybody starts banning it. Give Ingrid a break, Howard.”

Hughes agreed, according to Steele, who thereupon went home to bed with what he called “mixed emotions.” He woke up the next morning to learn that the
Los Angeles Examiner
was shrieking the news:

 

INGRID BERGMAN BABY DUE

IN THREE MONTHS AT ROME

 

Hughes's idea of how to help his film and its star was to call in the press and provide some scandal. Not since he had arranged the banning of
The Outlaw
had he enjoyed such an opportunity. He telephoned Louella Parsons, and Mrs. Parsons rose to the occasion as only she could rise. “Few women in history, or men either, have made the sacrifice the Swedish star has made for love . . .” she wrote.“Mary Queen of Scots gave up her throne because of her love for the Earl of Bothwell. . . . King Edward VIII renounced his throne to marry the woman he loved, Wallis Simpson. . . . Now, the question is, Will Dr. Lindstrom grant her request for a divorce so that her child may be born in wedlock . . . ?”

Knowing that Miss Bergman would be dismayed by the disclosure, as indeed she was, Steele went and protested to Mrs. Parsons. “This is a terribly cruel thing you have done, Louella,” he said.

“I had to, honey, I had to,” she said. “I've felt awful about it ever since. Just awful. I couldn't sleep last night for thinking about it. I went to church today and prayed. It was big news—you know that—the biggest story I ever got.”

Nobody seemed to notice that the cruelest behavior had been that of Howard Hughes, who had given away Miss Bergman's secret solely in the hope that the publicity would make money for him. Having done so, he proceeded to re-edit
Stromboli
(the title was his idea) according to his own tastes. The result was a film that Rossellini denounced and disavowed, and the New York critics were merciless. The
Times
called it “incredibly feeble, inarticulate, uninspiring, and painfully banal.” The
Herald Tribune
said: “There is neither sense nor sensation to be found in it.
Stromboli
profits only from notoriety.”

Hughes was determined to continue exploiting the notoriety. He promoted
Stromboli
with a series of advertisements featuring a spouting volcano of such obviously erotic design that even Eric Johnston of the ordinarily complaisant Motion Picture Producers Association was moved to protest. Hughes called in Dore Schary, who had apparently impressed him by walking out when Hughes took over at RKO.

“Am I right or wrong about those ads for
Stromboli
?” Hughes asked.

“You're wrong, Howard,” Schary answered. “They're obscene.”

Hughes withdrew the ads, but the public fulminations went on, and the principal target was not Hughes and not even Rossellini but always Miss Bergman. There was an oddly political undercurrent to all this moralizing about the fall of Saint Joan, as though Miss Bergman had not only betrayed her fans but betrayed the society that had so idealized her. Reporters and photographers besieged the Rome hospital where she finally gave birth, in February of 1950, two weeks before the premiere of
Stromboli,
to a son, whom she named Robertino. There was no way to legitimize the baby except by the legally dubious expedient of a Mexican proxy divorce and a Mexican proxy marriage, which took place the following month.

Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado thereupon reared up in the Senate to denounce Miss Bergman as “a powerful influence for evil,” to accuse her of “an assault upon the institution of marriage,” to suggest that she might be suffering from “the dreaded mental disease schizophrenia,” and to introduce a bill for “the licensing of actresses, producers and films by a division of the Department of Commerce.” Senator Johnson placed particular emphasis on the fact that Miss Bergman, like many controversial figures in Hollywood, was a foreigner. (Lindstrom had become a U.S. citizen the previous fall.) “Under our law,” said the senator, “no alien guilty of turpitude can set foot on American soil again. Mrs. Petter Lindstrom has deliberately exiled herself from a country which was so good to her.”

The American Way, however, would not only survive her exile but benefit from it. “If out of the degradation associated with
Stromboli,
decency and common sense can be established in Hollywood,” Senator Johnson declared, “Ingrid Bergman will not have destroyed her career for naught. Out of her ashes may come a better Hollywood.”

 

In his seventy-ninth and last year of life, Heinrich Mann was tempted by the devil. He was penniless and sick, afflicted with the pain of angina, forbidden to climb stairs. His sister-in-law, Katia, who despised him, found him a new apartment near Thomas Mann's estate on San Remo Drive so that she could keep watch over him. Two years earlier, he had finally managed to finish his last novel,
Der Atem
(The Breath), but it had not yet been published in German, and nobody wanted to translate it into English. And then, in the spring of 1949, came the temptation.

The Communist regime in East Germany awarded Mann its German National Prize for Art and Literature and asked him to return to Berlin to serve as president of the German Academy of Arts. It offered him not only a salary and an office but a villa and a chauffeur, all the perquisites that Hollywood reserved for its studio executives. This was not a sudden move, for Mann's works had long been popular in the East. In fact, he was one of only four foreign authors then published in the Soviet Union, and his accumulated royalties would make him rich if only he could return from his destitution in Hollywood to collect the wealth awaiting him in East Berlin. “A millionaire in East-Marks,” he sighed to a friend. “Still it's very nice to die a millionaire.”

Though Mann considered himself a Socialist, he was quite aware of the evils of Walter Ulbricht, who now ruled as the Soviet Gauleiter of East Germany. He remembered how Ulbricht had criticized Britain and France for rejecting one of Hitler's peace offers in February of 1940, when the Hitler-Stalin pact was still in force. “I can't sit at a table,” Mann had once said of Ulbricht, “with a man who suddenly claims that the table we are sitting at is not a table but a duckpond, and who wants to force me to agree with him.” He was also perfectly aware that the Ulbricht regime's invitation to him—coming in the midst of the Berlin blockade—was part of the East Germans' effort to acquire international respectability and legitimacy. Still, Heinrich Mann had readers in the East, an audience, people who took him and his views seriously. In Hollywood, he was nothing. “In fifty years I have not been so completely disregarded as now,” he wrote to a friend in the summer of 1949. “If one had no need of dollars, one would laugh. At least let me smile.”

Mann was quite unable to decide how to deal with the temptation. He anxiously asked his younger brother Thomas for advice, and Thomas, that strait-laced conservative, offered a surprising answer. Thomas himself had been going through a similar crisis that same spring. He had been under increasing pressure to return to Germany, to confront the critics who attacked him for abandoning the Fatherland during its years of crisis. “Why must I come in person to Germany?” he wrote in anguish to a friend. “ ‘Where I am is Germany,' and where my books are, there I am too.”

But 1949 was the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe's birth, and Germans who wanted to extol Goethe as a symbol of the better things in German history kept inviting Mann to join in the celebrations. “I shall probably have to, and my peace is gone,” he said as he ruminated over an invitation to lecture in Munich. After accepting that, he felt no less obligation to lecture in Goethe's own city of Weimar, which lay in Communist East Germany.

He was in England, to lecture on Goethe at Oxford, when he received the news that his son Klaus, tormented by mental illness, oppressed by the shadow of his father's fame, defiant in his open homosexuality, had committed suicide in Cannes. Mann did not go to the funeral of his son; neither did his wife, Katia. The only member of the family who did go was Klaus's younger brother, Michael, on tour with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in Germany, who belatedly appeared at the open grave after the service was over and played a largo on his viola.

Mann continued on his stately procession to Sweden, to receive an honorary degree; to Switzerland, for a series of lectures; and then to Germany. Many West Germans were shocked and angered that Mann should venture through the Iron Curtain into the despised East. The East Germans were correspondingly appreciative. Schoolgirls lined the flag-bedecked streets to welcome Mann to Weimar. Mann was flattered, impressed. “I have looked into [their] faces and seen resolute good will and pure idealism,” he wrote. To his older brother back in California, fretting over the temptations of East Berlin, Mann urged acceptance. Accept the money, accept the homage and the flattery, abandon Los Angeles and go east.

Heinrich agreed. But in December of 1949, the Czech passport on which Mann had come to America was suddenly canceled in a general recall of all Czech passports. It took until the following spring for Mann to get his papers in order and book passage on the Polish ship
Batory.
A month before the ship sailed, Mann spent a long evening listening to Puccini on the radio, then went to bed and suffered a brain hemorrhage, from which he never awoke. “It was, at bottom, the most merciful solution . . .” Thomas Mann wrote to a friend. “The Temianka-Quartet played a slow and beautiful movement from Debussy. It was how he would have wished it. Then I followed the coffin over the warm grass of the cemetery.”