‘A vile free-love cultist’: the affair that ruined Ingrid Bergman

In 1956, a US talk show served as a referendum for a female movie star said to have disgraced herself. “I know that she’s a controversial figure,” explained host Ed Sullivan, “so it’s entirely up to you if she should appear. I think a lot of you think she’s had years of time for penance. Others may not think so.”

The woman in question, the actress Ingrid Bergman, had been suggested as a guest on Sullivan’s show by 20th Century Fox, but Sullivan had left it up to his viewers to decide whether the appearance should go ahead.

Bergman, seven years earlier, had had an extramarital affair with her director Roberto Rossellini, and her reputation in America remained in tatters. After Sullivan received more than 6,000 letters campaigning to keep Bergman off the show, the appearance didn’t happen.

Half a century later, a US talk show has served as another referendum for a woman believed to have stepped out on her marriage. In early July, Jada Pinkett Smith confirmed, following weeks of contradictory statements, that she and husband Will Smith had briefly separated in 2016, and Pinkett Smith indeed had an “entanglement” with a rapper named August Alsina during that period. In recent days, Alsina has released a single, literally called Entanglement, suggesting the matter hasn’t yet been put to bed.

Unlike the Sullivan incident in 1956, this was a referendum held within a very different context – the reveal occurred on Pinkett Smith’s own Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk, an odd fusion of intimate dinner-table conversation and celebrity interviews, on which her family (Will, mother Adrienne and children Jaden and Willow) regularly appear. 

Pinkett Smith, unlike Bergman in 1956, has also never been shackled to a saintly, almost virginal reputation. But both scandals make for interesting contrasts.

Bergman’s American career was destroyed for close to a decade as a result of her affair with Rossellini, with the resulting scandal so dramatic that US politicians called for the star, who was born and raised in Sweden, to be thrown out of the country for being “a powerful influence of evil”. Pinkett Smith, in comparison, has so far only been made the subject of funny memes as a result of her confession. It’s progress of a sort.

Hollywood has never liked to dwell on its past misdeeds, whitewashing the cruelty, blacklisting and faux puritanism built into its fibres. It means that someone like Bergman’s journey is only ever talked about by Hollywood itself as the embodiment of a fairy tale; a star written about as an icon of beauty, grace and magnetism in classic film.

And there are a staggering number of classics in her filmography: Casablanca, Gaslight, Spellbound and Notorious, to name but a few. What Hollywood doesn’t like to talk about, however, are the years she spent in exile, with tabloids, studio executives and good, old-fashioned American moralism all conspiring to ruin her.

When Bergman arrived in Los Angeles in 1939, after years of acclaim in Swedish film, she was aesthetically and professionally different to many of the female stars of the era. The legendary film producer David O Selznick, who previously brought Alfred Hitchcock to America, initially felt out of his depth upon hearing Bergman’s demands – she had no interest in changing her appearance or losing her accent, and was indifferent to chasing mere stardom either.

Selznick, meanwhile, wished to change her teeth, eyebrows and wardrobe, before realising he could use Bergman’s wilful defiance as a marketing tool.

“I’ve got an idea that’s so simple and yet no one in Hollywood has ever tried it before,” he would tell her, according to her 1980 memoir, My Story. “Nothing about you is going to be touched. Nothing altered... You are going to be the first ‘natural’ actress.”

Bergman’s novelty at the time would soon influence the roles she was pushed into taking. Her early career was dominated by characters who were virtuous and timid by design – sweet musicians; good wives who were contrasted with villainous femme fatales; nuns and Joan of Arc. In an era in which women in pop culture tended to embody either pent-up respectability or carnivorous sex appeal, Bergman was identified as the former. Her young daughter Pia and, in public at least, a wholesome marriage to a Swedish neurosurgeon only drove the image home.

That was until she participated in an affair with Italian filmmaker Rossellini, a notorious lecherer who seemed to always sleep with his co-workers on set. Bergman pursued Rossellini professionally, writing him a letter in the late 1940s and begging to work with him. “I am ready to come and make a film with you,” she insisted.

Together, they would work on the oddball 1950 volcano epic Stromboli (think John Cassavetes meets Dante’s Peak), with Bergman so passionate about the script that she helped get it financed through her relationship with business tycoon Howard Hughes, who ran RKO Pictures. It was a considerable victory, considering that Hughes had doubts the film would work.

Hughes was proven correct, with the film becoming a notorious flop, but it was doubly felled by the news of Bergman and Rossellini’s affair. While Rossellini was married too, it was Bergman who weathered the storm. Hughes threw a further grenade after a disastrous phone call with Bergman herself. Hughes had only agreed to finance Stromboli if he had Bergman’s word that she would make a second film with him in the immediate aftermath.

Over the phone, Bergman said she was suddenly unavailable – she was pregnant with Rossellini’s baby. Enraged at the apparent betrayal, Hughes leaked the pregnancy news to famed gossip monger Louella Parsons, who splashed the story across the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner and extinguished Bergman’s image in the process.

Bergman was ruined. Endorsements were rescinded, film roles dried up, and studios came to believe her mere presence in anything was a liability. February of 1950 sparked a whirlwind of scandal for the star, with her husband Petter Lindstrom refusing her a divorce until after she gave birth to her child with Rossellini, and US politicians calling for a ban on screenings of Stromboli due to its female star “glamourising free-love”.

A custody battle had also ensued between Bergman and Lindstrom over Pia. Lindstrom became a US citizen towards the end of Rossellini’s pregnancy, giving him added advantage in the custody case. Bergman, due to her residence in Italy and ostracisation from Hollywood, would ultimately not see Pia for seven years.

Even stranger, Colorado senator Edwin C Johnson took to the US Senate floor to call for Bergman’s removal from the country, as well as a new law that would make the moral decency of movie stars an imperative for film production.

“Now that the stupid film about a pregnant woman and a volcano has exploited America with the usual finesse, to the mutual delight of RKO and the debased Rossellini, are we merely to yawn wearily, greatly relieved that this hideous thing is finished and then forget it?” Johnson asked.

Further outrageous statements followed, with Johnson speculating that Bergman had schizophrenia, and calling her a “vile free-love cultist” who wielded a “powerful influence for evil”. “Out of her ashes may come a better Hollywood,” Johnson concluded. Bergman hadn’t set foot in the US for more than a year by that point, but Johnson’s rant only gave her more impetus to stay far away.

In tandem with the breakdown of her marriage to Rossellini, which would produce three children including the celebrated actress Isabella, Bergman did eventually return to America. In a twist that embodied Hollywood’s craven opportunism, Bergman’s blacklisting was, by 1956, viewed as something potentially lucrative.

That year’s Anastasia, a retelling of the Russian aristocratic impostor tale, served as Bergman’s triumphant comeback vehicle. While Sullivan would rescind his invitation for Bergman to appear on his show, his audience not ready to forgive her personal indiscretion, the film was a critical smash and made money at the box office.

In early 1957, Bergman won the Best Actress Oscar for Anastasia, but skipped the ceremony. She only learnt she had won after overhearing a radio news report while taking a bath at home in Italy. Cary Grant, her co-star in Notorious, collected the gong on her behalf, saying at the podium: “Dear Ingrid, if you can hear me or see this, I want you to know we all send you our love and admiration.”

Her comeback cemented in earnest, she would begin to alternate between American and European films – a mode that would last until her death in 1982.

A decade prior, America had been so re-charmed by Bergman, via films including Cactus Flower and Murder on the Orient Express, that Johnson’s comments on the Senate floor finally earned a public apology.

In an open letter, Illinois senator Charles Percy addressed Johnson’s “bitter attack” and suggested “millions of Americans would wish to join me in expressing their regrets for the personal and professional persecution that caused Ingrid Bergman to leave this country at the height of her career”.

In response, Bergman wrote back: “Dear Senator Percy, my war with America was over long ago. The wounds, however, remained. Now, because of your gallant gesture with your generous and understanding address to the Senate, they are healed forever.”

Bergman had a happy ending, but it didn’t mark the end of such moral finger-wagging over a female celebrity’s personal affairs. Similar treatment befell Meg Ryan three decades later. When she, while married to Dennis Quaid, embarked on an affair with her co-star Russell Crowe on the set of the forgotten 2000 thriller Proof of Life, it was deemed a betrayal to her “girl next door” star image.

Potentially because she was never as celebrated as a dramatic actress, her niche being a romantic comedy genre otherwise dominated by women in their 20s or 30s, Ryan’s career didn’t recover in the same way Bergman’s did. It’s arguable that it never has.

That Elizabeth Taylor and Angelina Jolie weren’t ruined by their own participation in extramarital affairs, with Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton and Brad Pitt, respectively, was more to do with their personal brands than any form of Hollywood progressiveness. With both women already cemented in the public eye as sexualised femme fatale types, they didn’t particularly have images to betray.

If any other bonafide Hollywood A-listers have had splashy affairs in a fashion similar to Bergman and Rossellini (and, truthfully, they probably all have), they’ve smartly been kept below the radar, likely too afraid of retribution to dare go public.

Pinkett Smith’s relative ease in skirting over career destruction, at least compared to her predecessors in this unusual line-up of stars, is down to the honesty that she has made an integral part of her celebrity brand. Even if she and her husband hadn’t separated at the time of her relationship with Alsina, she articulated in the “confession” episode of Red Table Talk much of why affairs happen in the first place.

For Pinkett Smith herself, there was lust, but primarily a need to reevaluate her choices. She and Smith were unhappy, frustration had been mounting for a while, and a third party suddenly entered her life. By reducing the inevitable fluctuations of long-term marriage to their most mundane fundamentals, the show savvily muted much of the sensationalism kicked up before the pair had addressed any of it.

Plus, in an era wherein stars are cancelled or professionally ruined as a result of racist tweets, rampant stupidity or acts of sexual misconduct, merely stepping out on your partner (whether with their permission or not) seems almost quaint by comparison.

A lot was still left frustratingly ambiguous in Pinkett Smith’s “confession”, such as the actual specifics that led to the couple’s separation in the first place. But it was a masterclass in presenting the “idea” of openness, quietly rewriting the celebrity marriage rule book at the same time.

Albeit with help from the fact that they had total control over the execution of the message they wanted to put out there, from the venue to the final edit to the decision to publish the episode on a Friday night (conveniently after the following week’s tabloids had already gone to press).

Bergman, pregnant and miserable and spoken of like a Eurotrash succubus polluting American values, could only have dreamed of such autonomy.