Ingrid Bergman, after a decade of being one of the most famous movie stars in the globe, began 1950 embroiled with the scandal of the century. The star of “Casablanca”And “The Bells of St. Mary’s”She left her husband, child and had an affair with Roberto Rossellini, an Italian author. They gave birth to a boy out of wedlock.
The public backlash she faced – including her new films being boycotted across the U.S., getting banned from “The Ed Sullivan Show” and being condemned on the floor of the U.S. Congress – have been well documented. It is not known what Bergman was subject to in private. The torrent of hatemail she received from her former fans over the months, while she remained hidden from the public, are all well documented. The extent of the scandal is now being revealed 70 years later, thanks to 47 telegrams that were sent in the first months of 1950. These telegrams were only obtained by.
Throughout 1950, the Stockholm-born star would receive telegrams and letters from people who felt betrayed that the innocent and pure actress they had in their mind – the only one who could portray Joan of Arc or a nun — was actually just a woman. They called her a womanizer, un-godly and un-American, and even worse. They declared that she would not be welcome back in the U.S.A or her homeland.
Bergman did not speak out about the scandal for many years and showed little regret for her actions. Calling the experience “absolute hell.”The communications Bergman received from her show just how much she had to deal behind the scenes with anger and abuse.
“You are just a common adulteress, worse than a streetwalker. How can a mother bring such shame on her young daughter,”Telegram signed by “a former ‘fan’”She wrote this in February 1950, just days after giving birth to Renato Roberto Rossellini. “I hope that you will never darken our fair shores again as we have enough immorality without adding to it by your presence.”
“You are a dirty prostitute, you deserted your 12-year-old daughter and your husband, you have disgraced yourself and both of them. You bold rotten hoar [sic], you are a disgrace to womanhood,”Another writer. “Your daughter will suffer terribly for your putrid life. Are you crazy? How long will it be until you desert this new baby? As for old bald headed depraved Rossellini, to hell with him. You are a living disgrace to the whole world. Hope you will not be allowed to return to the good old U.S.A. Don’t want your kind over here.”
“The best thing for you to do would be to take an overdose of sleeping pills. That would please Robby and everyone,”Another wrote March 1950.
Bergman and Rossellini originally shared the telegrams with writer and humorist Art Buchwald, who in February 1951 wrote an article for Look Magazine that mentioned thousands of such fan mail in the wake of her baby’s birth and said that she was still receiving as many as 30 letters a week.
“Miss Bergman has saved all the letters she received while she was pregnant and after the baby was born. She has tried to answer all the friendly ones and she retains enough of her sense of humor not to destroy the others,”Buchwald wrote. “These included threats on her life, prayers for her salvation, poems of praise, anti-Catholic and anti-Italian obscenities, penciled notes of sympathy and printed and unsigned scrawls of disgust.”
But Look magazine didn’t publish the nastiest of the bunch, and to see the telegrams in their full context more than 70 years removed suggests she may have put up with worse than anyone realized.
“When I first read the telegrams, the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh, nothing’s changed.’ I’ve been guilty in the past of believing that it must’ve been easier for stars in Old Hollywood days than today,”Alicia Malone, a film historian, and film critic, shared her thoughts on the. “We’re starting to have an understanding of the kind of power dynamics that happen with women in society and the way that we can put them up on a pedestal and expect them to be perfect and drag them down gleefully if they fall from grace.”
“Ti Amo”
Ingrid Bergman was brought to America from Sweden in 1939 to remake the film in English. “Intermezzo,” and from there she would become one of the decade’s biggest box office draws. However, she was gone by the end. ‘40s, she grew tired of Hollywood movies and studio filmmaking and wrote to Rossellini to star in what would become “Stromboli” in 1950. The film is about a displaced Lithuanian in post-war Italy who agrees to marry an Italian ex-POW and live with him on an exotic, volcanic island. But the film in some ways mirrors the reality of her scandal when she’s shunned and treated with hostility by the island’s more conservative residents who see her as a foreigner and a loose woman.
“Dear Mr Rossellini, I saw your films ‘[Rome,] Open City’ and ‘Paisà’ and enjoyed them very much,”she Write. “If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and in Italian knows only ‘ti amo,’ I am ready to come and make a film with you.”
This note would launch a five-year romantic and professional relationship between Bergman & Rossellini. It was an unusual pairing between a movie star trained and a neorealist author who had previously worked with amateur actors. The scandal surrounding their affair would prevent her from being in Hollywood and preventing her from having any kind of success at the box-office. The theater owners could be called upon by religious groups throughout the country. ban “Stromboli”You can access their screens hereBergman gave birth days before the movie was due to open. It was a disaster, and RKO spent an estimated $200,000.
Bergman, despite all of this, remained mostly out of the public’s eye. New York TimesWriting on February 3, that she “remained almost constantly in her apartment for the last two months to avoid publicity” ahead of her baby’s birth. As a result, the public began reading into the details of Bergman’s initial note to Rossellini – particularly that “ti amo,”Italian words she knew she could only because she said them at end of the sentence “The Bells of St. Mary’s” — placing the blame of the affair squarely on her shoulders and saying that they would never let their children watch the work of an actress who “done the things you did.”
“You gave Rossellini the cue to wrong you,”One telegram was read. “You played a bitter part Ingrid when you actually lived the ‘Stromboli’ role and bore a bambino.”
“I would not give up my Swedish ancestry or American citizenship for any old Italian,”You can also read another article. “You can’t be very intelligent to give up all you had for that.”
Some telegrams speculated that Bergman’s newborn was not Rossellini’s but still that of her husband, Dr. Petter Lindstrom. One speculated that she might have been Rossellini’s baby. “defiled the home”Lindstrom right under his nose. And others gave undue credit to Lindstrom and his character without regard for Bergman’s side of the story.
Malone stated that the reaction was understandable given the time. “People seem to put a lot of blame on her as though she had actively gone to Italy to cheat on her husband and have a child out of wedlock. And the nature of time when this happened, post-war and early 1950s, there was very much a push for women to become housewives and mothers and they should be satisfied with that,”She explained. “She didn’t understand why the public was so interested in her private life. She saw herself as just being an actress, people should enjoy her performances or not enjoy her performances and save their criticisms for her work rather than what she was doing in her own life. So she stayed away from Hollywood because she didn’t want to go back to face that kind of criticism. She wasn’t sorry at all.”
Betrayal
Though Bergman had portrayed a prostitute in 1941’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” or a villain in 1945’s “Saratoga Trunk,”She was best known for her pure, saintly parts in films such as “Casablanca,” “The Bells of St. Mary’s”And “Joan of Arc.”When the Rossellini scandal broke the public was alarmed. “betrayed,”This is also evident in the telegrams. “So many people, who knew me only on the screen, thought I was perfect and infallible and then were angry and disappointed that I wasn’t,”Later, she was said. “A nun does not fall in love with an Italian.”
“You continuously let people write articles in magazine about how your husband and child came first. How you adored them, how ideal your marriage was, it was one that would last,”One note is read. “All your publicity was written to lead fans to think of you as saintly, virtuous woman, wife and mother. Then your pictures, you had the affrontery [sic] to play sweet-faced nuns, Joan of Arc and other roles that made all the fans say ‘She is to be looked up to, kept on a pedestal.’”
Malone explained that part of Bergman’s appeal as a star came from the fact that she didn’t change herself for Hollywood’s standards. She didn’t have the glamour or sex appeal of a Rita Hayworth and refused to change her hair, face or appearance just for the public.
“All that added up to an image of her being quite natural and real and a mother with a child, a devoted woman, and that’s something that happens with women, especially at that time, she needed to be a wife and a devoted mother,”Malone stated. “She always felt that acting was the most fulfilling thing in her life, and she wasn’t satisfied with just being a mother and a wife. I think that definitely rubs a lot of people the wrong way. And she was so public about it. She didn’t hide her affair, she didn’t hide her child, and she wasn’t apologetic. I think that played into the rage around her. I think people want women, when they do something wrong, to be very sorry for it.”
Love and Hate
Many telegrams express an anti-immigrant bias toward the Swedish Bergman or the Italian Rossellini. “we don’t want you here,”She would not be allowed to enter the U.S.A., or she was worthy of it. “banishment from your home, foster country and career.”One is Rossellini, with an Italian pejorative “Dago”While another was referred to as the director “Mossolini the spaghetti eater.”
Others slammed Bergman’s Roman Catholic faith as she sought a divorce through the church, with one signed by a “true Protestant”She claimed that she would be exiled from Sweden if the church was abandoned. “Do you know the Catholics strung up the Protestants in the trees like so many apples and burned the Protestants by the thousands at the stake,”They wrote.
Some of the hate mail was just plain nonsensical or crude, such as telling Bergman to “get rid of Rausoline, the lousie lover”And another who wanted her to be informed “you stink a mile a minute.”
Bergman did not receive every negative message. She also received supportive, caring, and thoughtful messages. A reverend from a seminary sent Bergman telegrams. She was a woman who called herself an “anonymous”. “invalid suffering from heart trouble”A letter from a man who wrote to her one day before he had his brain surgery. “the outcome of which is doubtful.”Another sent a request from Chile for a signed photo. One enclosed a “medal”Thanking her for her support. A college student sent a note of support at the expense and inconvenience of her missing classmates. “my first class.”
Fans were shocked to hear how many people there were “believed themselves authorized to meddle with your private life”Bergman is innocent and no one can condemn him as such. “sinner.”Another woman said that all the arms groups against Bergman were probably hypocritical “fat dowagers”They have had their husbands cheat on them for many years.
“You are a warm, intelligent, up-righteous, normally passionate woman, incapable of lies, deceit or duplicity,”Another writer. “If the women of today were half the woman you are, this world would be overflowing with lovely, normal, upstanding women.”
Senator Edwin C. Johnson from Colorado was Bergman’s target. Johnson accused Bergman of an attack on marriage, and she claimed that she was a scapegoat. “powerful influence for evil.”However, she had some support in Congress, including three representatives who let her know. “in the midst of all the turmoil”She still had admirers. James Agee, “The African Queen”Screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize Winner, he said that he was also among the many friends who have “thorough sympathy”The actress.
“It’s a cruel, embittering ordeal you’ve had to go through publicly, and you may well not realize how very many people, total strangers to you, there must be who wish you well and wish you could know they do,”Agee wrote Bergman February 3. “I know plenty of journalists, in sympathy with both of you, who cannot say so as part of their work.”
Bergman would return to Hollywood in 1959 but her career was not the same as in her 1940s glory days. Bergman would be asked about her affair on talk shows years later. She even encountered backlash when she attempted to return to Sweden to play other roles. In Rome, she was reunited with Pia Lindstrom in 1957. After she had twin girls with Rossellini (including actress Isabella Rossellini), Bergman and her later divorced.
She agreed to star as a guest in “Anastasia” (1956), a performance that director Anatole Litvak felt could only be played by Bergman — and she won her second Best Actress Oscar for the role. She didn’t attend the ceremony. Academy Awards at the eveningHowever, she accepted her apology and Cary Grant, her close friend, offered to forgive her. “Dear Ingrid, if you can hear me now or if you see this televised film, I want you to know that…everyone of us here tonight send you our love, our admiration, our congratulations and every affectionate thought,”He said.
