“I owe my entire career to an elevator boy.”
With that, she begins. Ingrid Bergman backstage on a windy November evening, waiting for the curtain to rise. Sitting on the bony edge of an uncomfortable chair in a lime Jello-colored shift and soft mauve boots up to her still-pretty knees, with her soft brown hair pulled back in a girlish pony tail, streaked now with silver strands too real and unphony to lose in a bottle of rinse, smoking cigarettes and smashing them out in a tiny ashtray no bigger than a cameo in her tiny snuffbox dressing room that smells of rouge and powder and greasepaint and stale smoke. I don’t know what people expect movie stars to be like, but surely this Bergman would be a disappointment. No prize for the moon-faced and starry-eyed, she drinks her Scotches and laughs her curly giggle and doesn’t give a damn what people think. Behind her are the klieg lights and the countless Hollywood movies (“I don’t remember how many; I didn’t count”) and the Rossellini scandal and the Academy Awards and the bloody headlines and the pain. But people love to forgive, and now she’s back on Broadway, for the first time in 21 years, acting on the stage in a marathon role in Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions, a play the critics didn’t care much for and she’s mad as hell. “Yes, mad. Really mad.” But the anger comes later. After she’s gotten down to the nitty-gritty.
“I will tell you about how I decided to come back to Broadway, but first let me start at the beginning. I was studying in a dramatic school in Stockholm. It was my first year and in the summer vacation I went to the Swedish film industry and did a test and got a job. Just like that. I was 18, and I felt that if I went back to school I’d be an old woman before I got out, so I stayed in films. But all the while I knew I had to learn something. I didn’t want to be one of those girls who get discovered in drug stores and become movie stars. So I kept up my theatre training on the side while I made Swedish movies. Two years later, I made my first stage appearance in a little French comedy called The Hour Age. Then I got my first lead in a play, written by a Hungarian, called Jean. Hollywood was all over Europe then, looking for talent, and I had barely begun my stage career when I was asked to come to America. Every studio was signing girls to seven-year contracts and then they’d come back after a year and their chances at home were ruined, because if you’re no good in Hollywood who wants to see you at home? Many girls ruined their careers that way, jumping into films. Anyway, I played it cagey and waited for the right role and the right man who would only sign me to one film. I had done Intermezzo in Swedish, but I don’t think anyone in Hollywood noticed. However, there was an elevator boy of Swedish descent in David Selznick’s office building in New York who went to every little Swedish movie he could find. One day Selznick’s story editor, Kathryn Brown, rode up in his elevator and he told her, ‘You’re always looking for new faces, why don’t you go down to such-and-such a cinema on so-and-so avenue and look at this picture, Intermezzo?’ She saw it, sent a copy of the print to California, and Selznick wrote to me with one of those seven-year offers and I said no. So he sent Miss Brown to Sweden to see what was wrong with me. I guess they thought I was crazy. But when I learned they wanted to do a remake of Intermezzo in English I agreed to come to America and I loved it. I did that one film and by that time the war had broken out and I stayed.
“Then there was a period when everything stood still. I had made some fine films, but all the leading men and all the directors were at war and they were not making as many films. So one day I was sent a script of Liliom, which Burgess Meredith wanted to do on the stage. There was the part of Julie, which was the lead, and the part of her friend, a comedy role, not very big. I said, ‘It’s too funny and my English is not good enough to play comedy,’ and I sent back the play. They said, ‘Funny? We wanted you for Julie.’ I met Burgess Meredith at a Thanksgiving party for the first time in 20 years and he’s still laughing about that story.
“But you know, I could not get the theatre out of my blood. I think they thought I was crazy in Hollywood. I would make a film and on the side I would try to talk people into doing a play. Not many other stars were interested in the theatre, so they couldn’t understand it. But I have to be active. I have to work to be happy. So I talked David Selznick into letting me do Anna Christie, and I played it in three places—Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Maplewood, New Jersey. You couldn’t buy a ticket in any of those towns. Then, when I left Hollywood, I did Hedda Gabler in Paris, then Tea and Sympathy, which was a great success. Robert Anderson was a bit shocked at first, I think, because the sets were different and I was not like Deborah Kerr, but it was a happy time. And two years ago I did A Month in the Country with Michael Redgrave in London. But I hadn’t been on the New York stage since I played Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, 21 years ago at the Alvin Theatre. We ran for 11 months to standing room only every performance and every night a group of kids would gather at the stage door and bring me flowers and write me letters. I called them ‘The Alvin Gang.’ I left the country for 10 years and when I came back for one day to accept the New York Film Critics award for Anastasia I stepped off the plane and there they all were at the airport with a big sign: ‘The Alvin Gang—We Love You!’ It felt wonderful. They are all grown-up people now, with their own families, but for 20 years they have written to me and sent presents to my kids on their birthdays. When I opened this time in More Stately Mansions, there they were outside the theatre, the same kids who once stood every night in the snow. I have the same fans through the years. I have to hold on to a lot of wood”—she knocks her large Swedish knuckles on the bottom of her dainty chair, then spreads her arms and raps the wall—“I’m afraid to say it, but I’ve been fortunate. People do come to see me.”
Indeed they do. There are so many Bergman fans, in fact, that the lineup for tickets began the morning after the critics thumbed their noses at More Stately Mansions and the influx has been so great ever since that the “This Performance Sold Out” sign never leaves the entrance to the Broadhurst Theatre. But why this play? Why O’Neill? Why a vehicle she knew would never be a commercial success? She tilts her regal head toward the dressing-room mirror, framed in the glass by cold-cream jars and silver-rimmed photo cases containing portraits of her husband, Swedish theatrical producer Lars Schmidt, and warms the room with a smile, talking over the roar of a vacuum cleaner in the early evening stillness. “Because,” she begins, “I had to do it. If I just wanted to do any old play, I could do that in Europe, closer to home, where it’s easier on my husband and children. It had to be something I would regret all my life if I didn’t do. And More Stately Mansions is that play. Usually I have had to fight in films because they made me play either the villain or the good, good girl. This character is both. Also, in this play I play my own age for the very first time.” (She’s 52.)
“I am the only member of the company who ever met O’Neill personally. The Swedes have always loved his work, you know, that’s why he always gave us his plays to produce first. He was very influenced by our own Strindberg, just as Edward Albee is today, and we loved him for that. We understood him. So when I was playing Anna Christie in San Francisco, I was flattered and excited when his wife Carlotta came backstage and asked me to come home and meet her husband. He lived in a great house on a cliff over the ocean several miles from the city, it was called Tao House, and we drove there for Sunday lunch. He took me up into his study and there were all these plays lying around, plays here and there and everywhere. He told me about his plans to write this saga of an American family, beginning in the 1800’s and ending up in modern times, tracing their ups and downs, their greeds, nastiness, triumphs, everything. He wanted the same group of actors to sign up for all the plays so that he could have the same faces in the same roles. I was fascinated. ‘How many plays?’ I asked. ‘Nine,’ he said. ‘And how long would you want me to sign up for?’ ‘Six years,’ he said. Well, I was under contract to Selznick and I just didn’t have time, so I never did the plays.
“Years later, when the offer came to me in Europe to do this play, it seemed like O’Neill was calling me again. I felt I owed it to him. The Swedish version lasted four hours and forty-five minutes and in its full play form it reads between five and six hours. When José Quintero came to Europe, I told him I simply did not think we could get Americans to sit still that long. The Swedes will sit through anything as long as it’s O’Neill, but Americans come to the theatre with a couple of martinis under their belts and they just want to be entertained. So he agreed and we got it down to two hours and forty minutes, and every word is still O’Neill’s. It is a difficult play. You must study it as well as I have to realize how much depth it has, but audiences don’t listen to the words so they don’t learn anything. We worked very hard, trying to present to the public something important, and then what do I do but pick up Mr. Clive Barnes in The New York Times and read, in the first phrase of his review, that of all the playwrights in the world, Mr. O’Neill is the most banal. And I nearly dropped dead!”
And here the anger starts, turning her high Swedish cheekbones into raspberry tarts. “I cannot believe that a man who calls himself a critic could think so little about the greatest playwright America has ever produced, and a winner of the Nobel Prize. I’m mad because it’s so unfair. I’m mad because The New York Times is the only critical opinion that matters in New York and now Mr. Barnes has ruined this play all over Europe, because who will produce it now? I’m mad that just because a sick man says we have not done a finished play, it’s Out! Out Quintero! Out Bergman! Out O’Neill! I am a serious person. I like to be stimulated by theatre, then go home remembering what I’ve seen, not just have a few laughs. I mean, you may have more fun at There’s a Girl in My Soup. I haven’t seen it and I only use that as an example because I think the title is so funny. But I know I wouldn’t have returned to Broadway in a play like that. I would rather return in O’Neill. Isn’t it more interesting to see what a man like O’Neill had in his head, even if it is not one of his best plays? I have no respect for a theatre which ceases to be a forum for the ideas of great men. I would like to see all of O’Neill’s plays performed, whether he wished them performed or not. Now when some critic says we should not have done this play I say that is ridiculous. I would be very unhappy if this play had stayed in a drawer and I think it’s a horrible crime that they burned the others. I am only happy that there was a little angel looking over this one.”
And now that she’s back, are there any regrets? Any backward glances toward more commercial times? ‘Absolutely not. I do what I want to do. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people like critics were going to say. I have been facing critics of one sort or another all my life. I have a reputation for being a woman of great courage. You can’t be anything without courage. You can’t even be good without the courage to be good.”
She laughs again, waving her hands, and the flash of anger vanishes in a trail of pale-purple cigarette smoke. The standing-room-only crowd is filing into the theatre and she smiles at the sound. Proving, of course, that she still has what it takes at the box office. And proving, also, that Thomas Wolfe was wrong when he wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. Home, they say, is where the hatrack is and, long after the roses wilt and the cameras stop turning and the glitter is packed up and locked away in studio wardrobe, there will always be a hatrack in the theatre with Ingrid Bergman’s name on it.