Autumn Sonata

By Eve Auchincloss

INGRID BERGMAN: MY STORY by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess Delacorte; 504 pages; $14.95

Thirty years ago, a U.S. Senator rose in the chamber to denounce the "illicit affair" between a "popular but pregnant Hollywood movie queen" and a "love pirate." The pirate was the brilliant Italian director Roberto Rossellini (Open City, Paisan). The gravid queen was, of course, Ingrid Bergman, who had arrived in Hollywood from Sweden in 1939, a hefty 5 ft. 8 in. of raw material crying out for diet, plucked eyebrows and capped teeth.

The young Bergman was scarcely a great actress, as David Selznick assured her, but her radiance was irresistible. "Lunching with Ingrid," said one admiring film critic, "is like sitting down to an hour or so of conversation with an intelligent orchid."

Ingrid's Swedish husband, Fetter Lindstrom, a brain surgeon, persuaded her to smooth her frown, lay office cream and the fourth martini. He also advised her to emulate Garbo by keeping her garrulous mouth shut. On a movie set she stood up to directors; in real life she was easily led. Someone even had to tell her to abandon her marriage. Combat Photographer Robert Capa, whom she met in Paris after the war, tried. They loved each other, but he was not the marrying sort.

Seeing Rossellini's Open City did it. Overwhelmed by the director's neorealism, she wrote to offer herself as an actress: the only Italian she knew, she told him, was "ti amo." Their affair was inevitable, though its bliss was wet with her guilty tears. When she gave birth to Rossellini's child, Bergman became part of a warm and rackety Italian family, though nothing made up for the loss of young Pia, the daughter she had abandoned in Hollywood. She bore Rossellini a son and twin daughters. But the films she made with him were wretched stuff; both in art and life, the two were hopelessly mismatched. When he fell for another woman, Bergman was released from a marriage she could not desert.

Afterward she divided her life between her children in Rome (Rossellini got custody), a new husband in France and her revived career. If they sometimes had little else to redeem them, the plays and movies she starred in were illuminated by her stately, ageless presence. "Too bad she isn't the queen of some country," an adoring Goldie Hawn reflected.

In 1977 Director Ingmar Bergman forced the 62-year-old Ingrid to unmask herself in Autumn Sonata, a film about a professional pianist who has sacrificed her affections to her career. The actress did not spare the moody Ingmar her frank opinions about his script and direction, but he came to admire this tactless spontaneity that is the key to her nature. Speaking Swedish, her own language, at last, instead of one not perfectly mastered, she gave a scalding performance.

Bergman and a capable writer, Alan Burgess, take turns telling her story. She is perfectly straightforward and writes about her ordeals--the latest a second mastectomy--without drama, self-pity or blame.

--By Eve Auchincloss

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