Seducing Ingrid Bergman (3 page)

One moment, she reflects, you’re a young girl – virginal, uncertain – trying for bit parts in the theatre in Stockholm. The next you’re a full-grown woman and a Hollywood actress accepting an Academy Award.

How does that happen?

She can scarcely believe it sometimes.

The strange thing is, this life enjoys its own kind of ordinariness after a time. The airplane travel, the swimming pools, the jewellery and expensive clothes all have their everyday texture just like everything else. And it’s crazy, she considers, but for a time you can fool yourself that this is what you really want. Stuck in this sunlit bubble, sucked in by the luxury, it’s easy to believe that you’re just a beat from fulfilling your dreams.

Why does she want to be a movie star anyway?

Because being herself is never quite enough, she supposes. And she loves that strange, mesmerized state she enters when she’s preparing for a role. The way she can hide away and transport herself to another time and place, immerse herself in a different life like a bath until it feels real. Then a point comes when she’s taken over. An energy possesses her. She feels a heat behind her ears. It’s as if she enters a secret existence, as if she’s admitted into the mystery of another human being, and only she has the key. It’s the kind of thrill you get when someone touches the back of your neck and you’re not expecting it. It’s incredibly intimate, and suddenly she’s able to see everything at a slant, the way her character does. It’s like living two lives at once, and she relishes that.

Her work gives her intense satisfaction; she loses any idea of time when she’s on set; then when she’s not working, she feels as if she’s wasting her days not doing anything. The way she figures it, she owes a debt to the world and needs to add something, to create something worthwhile; she feels she must earn her place.

But that’s not the end of it. There’s something else, she knows. In her more vulnerable moments, she feels as though an impostor has taken over her body, colonized her somehow, as if a parasite is slowly eating away at her flesh. She feels this other woman’s presence like a negative, a dark other, penetrating her skin and leaving its imprint. At times she feels it dissolving her insides like an acid, burning away what’s left of herself, so that even after a standing ovation, she can still yield to an impulse to run to the bathroom and cry.

It has taken time, but she’s reconciled herself slowly to the exposure. The photographs and films, she finds, grow to have a life of their own, a shadowy existence, remote from her. She manages it for the most part with the help of her husband, who is also her manager, and who works hard to puncture the Hollywood bubble, preventing success from going to her head.

Nevertheless, when she’s invited along with Larry Adler and Jack Benny to help entertain the troops following the end of the war, she grabs the chance to escape, to rediscover herself, to breathe the reinvigorated air of freedom on faraway shores.

She hasn’t been to Europe since before Pia was born. It will be good for her and good for her career, enlarging her audience, Petter agrees. But when he comes in now and sees her contemplating the open wardrobes, sees the number of cases laid out on the bed and the number of dresses she’s filling them with, he asks, ‘How long is it you’re going for?’

She needn’t worry. He’s only teasing. He gives her a kiss on the forehead, warm and tender, though with a vaguely patronizing note mixed in – not so she minds, though, because that’s how he always is and she has grown used to it. She doesn’t take offence; in fact she finds it endearing. She responds with genuine affection even if there’s little heat in the embrace.

‘Don’t eat too much ice-cream,’ he says.

‘What will you do? Cut off my allowance?’

‘Don’t drink or smoke too much. It’s bad for your complexion.’

‘You could still come.’

‘You know how busy the hospital is.’

‘And check up on me night and day.’

‘I’ll leave that to Joe.’

Ingrid offers him a tolerant look. She knows he means well. He’s a dear, really. What would she do without him? He organizes everything, attends to the arrangements, ensures every last detail is taken care of. She never has to worry and she loves him for that. She pouts, touches his nose with her finger and runs the same finger down the length of his tie.

Before leaving the room, Petter can’t resist offering one last piece of advice. ‘And remember, don’t sign anything without me seeing it first.’

She goes on folding her clothes and nodding, saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ in a sing-song voice, though when it comes to closing the cases, she does so firmly and snaps the buckles tight.

*   *   *

A chain of hands ensures that her luggage arrives at the airport safe and on time.

She waits in the lounge with a hollow feeling in her stomach and remembers how she kissed Petter goodbye and hugged a tearful Pia tight. She has never been away from her daughter for this long before, nor has she ever been this far apart. She’s discussed it with Pia, who is happy that her
mommy
– Ingrid still can’t get used to the idea that her daughter has an American accent – is doing her bit for the war effort, doing her best to raise the morale of the troops. But it’s one thing, she knows, to contemplate a parting in the abstract; it’s another to sit in the airport and be confronted with separation as an actual fact. In this instant, Ingrid experiences a primitive need to be with Pia, an ache that for a few minutes approaches a consumptive hunger. She will miss her terribly. She pictures herself sitting next to her in bed on a Sunday morning, reading the newspaper, and remembers her smell, the exact aqua colour of her eyes, the golden freckle on her left iris. And she recalls how, in a desperately affectionate gesture, the girl had tried to copy her mother’s wink. As Ingrid thinks of this, involuntarily she repeats the way Pia had wrinkled her nose, closing both eyes at the same time as though taking a photograph.

*   *   *

In the morning, my head pounds, and I’m conscious of nothing but this fist knocking insistently at a door inside my skull.

Slowly, like something seeping towards me under the door, the realization comes: she’s gone. No note, no address, nothing. Only a dent in the pillow and a crimp in the sheets, a faint flavour of perfume to remind me she existed and that she was here at all.

I smile to remember last night. It hardly seems real. Then a darker thought enters my head.

Everything I own in the world is in this room. I sit up quickly, check my wallet, run through all the leaves. To my relief, no money is missing. And my cameras? There’s my bag on the floor under the bed next to my boots. In it there are forty-seven rolls of film still undeveloped, cartons of flashbulbs, a bundle of ID papers, the latest copies of
Life
and
Picture Post
. Packed in a separate compartment are silk stockings, French perfume, a silver hip-flask and a left-handed corkscrew. The cameras are still there. She’s taken nothing as far as I can see. Not even my helmet. There it is still, with one long blonde strand of hair snagged in the strap. The details of my blood group lie snug in the lining with my two last letters: one to my mother – God bless her Jewish heart – and the other to a girl, only the name changes quite a lot.

Is it my fault if I defend myself badly against women?

I collapse back onto the bed. My head thumps from the effort. My mouth is parched, my tongue like sandpaper. I turn my face to the wall and try to sleep some more, but it’s noisy up here on the top floor. The pigeons scrabble on the skylight, their tiny feet scratching the glass. Personnel carriers and trucks, each with a fat white star on the side, drone down the street, shaking the light fixtures, making the windows tremble in their frames. The sound of wooden-soled shoes echoes on the cobbles, clack clack clack, the Nazis having requisitioned all the leather during the war. A boy hawks newspapers enthusiastically in the square. It’s all so noisy. The howitzers and bombardments I could sleep through, but not all this.

A telephone sits on the bedside table. A walnut dresser and cane chair are the only other furniture apart from the bed. I don’t know what time it is or how long I’ve slept, though I suspect it’s already mid-morning. I stare at the telephone, willing it to ring, and for someone to say something, to tell me what happens next. It lies there like a dark mouth, silent.

My toes protrude pinkly from beneath the white sheet. I wriggle them. Proof, at least, that I am alive.

I drag myself out of bed.

Half a dozen birds take flight as I open the shutters. Their wings make a
wap wap
sound like a flat tyre. I lean my head out the window and breathe, taking a slice of high cool air.

Sunstruck, the city stretches below: its pavements and roofs, its pigeons and brick chimney pots, its horse chestnuts and benches. Military jeeps and vehicles move like wind-up toys; bicycles glide as if on rails.

A few minutes later I’m standing, a white towel wrapped around my waist, shaving foam framing my face, a cigarette plugged in the side of my mouth, holding a razor while I turn on the tap.

The pipes chug and clank loudly. Rust-coloured water dribbles miserably into the sink. This can’t be true. It’s less the colour that bothers me, more the fact that it’s cold.

I telephone through to reception.

‘If you want hot water, Monsieur,’ says the man, ‘then you need to stay at the Ritz.’

‘Tell the manager I’m very disappointed. I bet the Nazis had hot water when they were here.’ I sigh, wipe a clot of foam from the mouth of the telephone and put down the receiver without quite slamming it.

It takes ages to fill the tub with lukewarm water, though at least it runs clear after the first few spurts of orange.

The level sways when I step in. The water is tepid at best. A rash of goosebumps extends along my arms and legs. I pinch my nose and slide back until my head is submerged and the water closes over me. I hold my breath for as long as I can. It’s the best cure for a hangover I know – the best, that is, aside from an oxygen mask or a parachute jump at 6,000 feet. So I lie there, cold and motionless, my stomach hollow, my head still thick, the acid aftertaste of the wine mixing with the fact that I haven’t eaten to produce a burning sensation in my gut.

I surface with a gasp. I hold my palms against my face and push back my hair. Through damp eyelashes, I can see that the water bends my limbs but straightens the hairs on my chest and shoulders. I’m so hairy. Everyone says so. If I were an animal, they’d hunt me for my fur.

My father was the same. Until he blew his brains out that is, having accrued the kind of gambling debts that can’t be paid except with your life. I remember how the hair was plastered all over his body, his back like a mountain bear’s. It was never enough to protect him. That Hungarian gloominess would descend without warning and cling to him like a mist. Poor papa. I like to think he’d be proud to see one of his sons now in Paris, with an American press pass, a room at the Lancaster and his pictures in the magazines.

I’ve always liked to read in the tub. Where else can you get peace and quiet? When I have a book and I’m on the move, I tend to pull the pages out as I read them so as to lighten the load. But I don’t have anything with me, not even a Simenon. In the hotel room, someone has left a close-typed edition of
War and Peace
in English translation next to a French bible on the shelf.

I hold the pages with the ends of my fingers so as not to get them damp. The first ten pages start with a party. A society soirée. They end with the bare white shoulders and ample bosom of a woman called Hélène. She adjusts the diamond necklace at her exposed throat as she listens to a story. The heat of the blush that rises from her chest fails to infiltrate my body. The water grows cold, too cold to read much more.

Dressed and ready to face the world, I check myself in the mirror. I put on a smile, my best one. I tell myself I have the strength to continue, the stamina to go on. I take the stairs rather than the elevator. And when I step out the door of the hotel, I feel my heart lighten. My legs feel weightless. The sunlight hits me with the force of a blow.

*   *   *

On a two-day stopover in London before flying on to Paris, Ingrid consents to an interview with
The Times
.

She’s already flown from Los Angeles to New York and taken the long ocean voyage from New York to Southampton.

Something of the endless expanses of air and ocean she’s been exposed to, something of the vast distances and tilting horizon seem to have entered her, making her light-headed.

On the ship each morning she would stand at the stern, mesmerized by the long creamy wake unravelling like the train of a wedding dress. Always a strong swimmer, she recalled a time after her father died when her Aunt Mutti took her on a picnic to the lake, and she set out with a gentle breaststroke for an island a good half-mile away. She had never felt so lonely or at peace as at that moment on the verge of womanhood with her parents both dead, striking out for that far shore. Had she turned round, she might have seen the figure of her aunt reduced to a dot in the swarm of summer; she might even have heeded the calls for her return, the pleading with her not to do anything foolhardy or dangerous. But her aunt’s voice quickly diminished to a murmur, a distant hum indistinguishable from the insects. Having reached the island safely, she then swam back before twilight, and was startled to find her aunt in an advanced state of panic, convinced her niece had drowned.

It was this same sensation of remoteness, light with inconsequence, that she experienced each morning at the stern of the boat; and she feels something of that dreaminess now, sitting in the lounge of the Savoy hotel, sipping tea with an over-dressed journalist as he licks the tip of his pencil and writes down everything she says.

She’s used to doing interviews. She’s endured hundreds of them. Those conducted in Hollywood are always carefully scripted, her responses dictated virtually word-for-word by the studio. Here, though, it’s different. She feels an urge to speak her mind, as if it doesn’t matter what she says, being so far away; she can be candid and careless, and her words will simply disappear like smoke into the air.