An Ingrid Bergman News Crisis
How much is a baby photo worth?
By Janet Flanner
March 31, 1950
It’s almost certainly a fact that when, with bewildered Italian help, the thirty-odd American newspaper correspondents and press photographers regularly operating here started what proved to be their unsuccessful twelve-day February siege of Ingrid Bergman, while she was lying abed in the Villa Margherita Clinic, she was, however unwillingly, the leading news story in the world. She and her infant, an invisible pair, pushed even President Truman and his hydrogen bomb onto the second page of hundreds of American newspapers that evidently were more interested in love. Now, eight weeks after the peak days, when an exclusive picture of her with the infant was enthusiastically calculated to be worth five million lire, or about eight thousand dollars, to anybody able to snap it, by hook or crook (nobody managed it), an unexclusive picture of the baby, solo, is rated by New York agency editors to be not worth the thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents it would cost to transmit it by radio. All babies, especially on second editorial thought, look alike, and a photograph of Robertino can be sent more cheaply and fast enough by air mail. So the Bergman news crisis, which started with its vital statistic at 7 p.m. on February 2nd in the Villa Margherita Clinic, on the Via di Villa Massimo—a crisis in which hundreds of thousands of cabled words were ticked out from here, in which Miss Bergman said nothing, and in which Rome seemed closer to Hollywood than to the Anno Santo—has finally died down, and the Roman American press is awaiting other statistics or events, such as the wedding and the baptism. Right now, or so American newspapermen have said to this correspondent—and Miss Bergman has said to this correspondent that she believes what they said to be true, because she has looked carefully out the windows of the Rossellini apartment on the Via Bruno Buozzi, where she is living, and can see no loitering cameramen—she could walk out of her apartment at any time without being met by a battery of photographers or reporters, such as were stationed at the hospital. Today they would have to be alerted.
Miss Bergman does not subscribe to any clipping service, but friends and enemies, known and unknown, have supplied her with what must be a fairly complete file of the evidence of her incredibly widespread newsworthiness. It runs into millions of words, most of them silly. With more patience than rancor, she says that nearly all of what has been printed is trivial, inaccurate, and distorted, except, of course, the three or four major facts. In the vast, rather empty salon of her apartment, her clippings, whose bulk grew steadily as she and Rossellini made more and more intimate revelations in the year following her arrival in Italy, form a sort of cheap, extra upholstery laid out over the divans and chairs. She seems to have preserved them as a painful phenomenon that, she realizes with Nordic realism, was inevitable. Over most of the past three months, she received, in addition, two hundred letters a day. Since the excitement over the baby’s birth died down, the number has dwindled to about fifty. Eight out of ten letters declare that she is “wonderful” or “courageous.” Most of these are from movie fans, and often verge on the illiterate. Eight out of ten also mention Christ and casting the first stone. Some are obscene, a few threaten death, and quite a large number of the recent ones complain about the nosiness of the press.
On April 13th of last year, Hearst’s society columnist, Cholly Knickerbocker, announced in the New York Journal-American what society columns call “rumors” of a Bergman-Rossellini romance. The rumors had been rampant, Knickerbocker said, ever since she flew to Rome in March—or somewhat earlier, Miss Bergman says, than they knew about the romance themselves. On December 12th, Hearst’s movie columnist, Louella Parsons, announced in a special I.N.S. story, which appeared in most Hearst papers, including the New York Journal-American that it was rumored Miss Bergman would have a child in March. On that day, cameramen began to encamp before Miss Bergman’s home, and she has since left her apartment only three times, the last time in February, to have the prophesied March child. On the night before Christmas Eve, she went to the Fono-Roma studio to do some belated dubbing in of sound on “Stromboli.” And on January 22nd, a fine, bright Rome day, seeing no cameramen, she ventured out to wait in the sunshine for Rossellini, who was going to drive her into the country for a pleasant, salubrious walk. As she reached the street, an ambushed photographer rushed toward her, snapped a couple of pictures, and pursued her as she ran toward the nearest corner, thinking to hide behind a newspaper kiosk there. She circled the kiosk one way and he circled it the other, so he was able to take another shot, while she burst into tears and he “smiled at her ironically,” a phrase contained in a charge the furious Rossellini preferred against him at a police station. The Italian Civil Code’s Article X, which deals with photographs taken and published without permission, forbids the publication of photographs of people “as a means of indicating some fact about their personal life.” Two of these pictures, which showed Miss Bergman’s condition, were copyrighted by the A.P., and one or both of them were printed in the Milan weekly L’Europeo, in Life, and in a number of A.P. newspapers in the United States, including the Los Angeles Mirror, which published one over the caption “Is she or isn’t she?” These pictures are notable, being considered the unique, sizzling news scoop of the whole complex Bergman-Rossellini journalistic campaign. On being advised of Rossellini’s angry police-station complaint and Miss Bergman’s tears, the A.P. management gallantly sent her flowers and a note of apology, which quaintly explained that the photographer was just an Italian. By then the police had dropped the charge against him.
Oddly, there were no photographers on the sidewalk at four o’clock in the afternoon of February 2nd, when Miss Bergman hastily crowded herself—a tall and by this time heavy woman, in a heavy coat—into a small car belonging to her physician, Dr. Pier Luigi Guidotti, and started for the clinic. The press pack, caught off guard, didn’t get on the scent till seven hours later. Most of its members had by then had a busy evening. They had been invited to a lavish gala première, at the Fiamma Cinema, of “Volcano,” the eruptive competitor to “Stromboli,” starring Anna Magnani, whom the American press had long tagged as Miss Bergman’s arch-rival in Rossellini’s personal and professional career. The evening’s entertainment had been diverting because it had been so strange. Contrary to expectations, Signora Magnani had not turned up. Warned that the baby had been born and reportedly commenting that this was Rossellini’s supreme sabotage of her film, she stayed at home. Soon after the film started, a bulb in the projector burned out, and while a boy was sent across Rome on a bicycle to forage for another, the author of the film, Renzo Avanzo, unexpectedly entertained the spectators by doing a tap dance before the blank screen. It was also strange, the press thought, that on the same night, in a private projection room across town, a preview of “Stromboli,” which has still not been released here, was being run off for several bishops and four hundred priests; the reason was that the Vatican is interested in the film’s salvational religious climax, which has been cut in the American version.
By nine o’clock that evening, the Italian news agency Ansa had informed its subscribing newspapers that the baby had been born, and when, where, and what it weighed. The American press didn’t catch on until later. When it did, the reporting of the Bergman-Rossellini news became a mass assault upon the principals in the case—mother, father, and child. By ten-thirty, some of the American and British news offices had been alerted by private individuals. The U.P. apparently got its news from a Belgian Dominican monk, Father Félix Morlian, who is rector of the Università Pro Deo, one of the churchmen interested in film propaganda, and an intimate friend of Rossellini; Reuters from a friend of Rossellini’s musician brother Renzo; the New York Times from another Rossellini family friend. The A.P., perhaps as punishment by Providence or by Rossellini’s friends for the offending January 22nd photographs of Miss Bergman, got no tip at all. The U.P. thought its story was the first in New York by a few minutes—at 4:48 p.m.Eastern Standard Time (10:48 p.m. in Rome). According to Hearst’s I.N.S., its Rome correspondent’s dispatch was received in Manhattan at 4:35 a.m. In his follow-up story, the I.N.S. man said it had been easy to find where Miss Bergman was going when she left the apartment, since she was traced “by prearranged telephone communication set up along the route” to the hospital—an idea as fanciful as it was unpleasant, for the buildings are three kilometres apart, and Rome’s maze of streets offers as many paths as the opening of a chess game.
It is to be noted that none of these early world-shaking press stories, of a few hundred words each, were based on official announcements by the Rossellini family, who spent a sleepless night, between the telephone-ringing and their denials, or by the two doctors—Dr. Guidotti and the accoucheur, Dr. Giuseppe Sannicandro—or by those in charge of the clinic, who had hastily locked its openwork iron garden gate on the crowd of newspapermen collecting outside and said they knew nothing. Through this garden gate, one of the unfortunate A.P.’s reporters had managed to ask a nun, one of the hospital staff who went down to try to quiet the racket, if she would swear on the Bible that Miss Bergman was not in the hospital. The nun, who had doubtless never been to a movie in her life and apparently had no idea who anybody was, including the mob of reporters, declared in good faith that there was no Signorina Bergman there. There was a Borghese, a Principessa Borghese, who had given birth that evening, but it was twins. So all night the A.P. continued gloomily filing bulletins to New York that the news of the birth remained unsourced, except by Ansa, and naming all the sources of denials—family, nun, clinic, friends, e tutti quanti. The rival New York editors began querying Rome was it true, wasn’t it true, and what on earth was going on there? This confusion added to the press’s job and also to its irritation. At 9 a.m., the A.P. chief here finally got an official source—one of the two doctors who assisted at the birth. Beaten by nearly eleven hours by the hares, the tortoise A.P. nevertheless won, in its exhausting, protocolar fashion. The A.P. chief was later complemented by some staid Middle West newspaper editors for the “restrained way”—the unrestrained way had already stirred disapproval in some breasts—in which he had handled the news. By papers that enjoy the unrestrained, such as the New York News, the New York Mirror, the Los Angeles Examiner, and the Los Angeles Herald & Express, the brief, unsourced stories were carried under blaring four-column and six-column heads. The Rome press, dazed by all the American hoopla about one more baby on earth, dutifully gave the story a biggish, if kindly and unsensational, play—except for the Demo-Christian organ, Il Popolo, and the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano, both of which practically ignored the event. This is an outline of how the siege began. There were, of course, dozens of minor incidents, such as the Hearst reporter’s referring, like a man in the know, to Miss Bergman’s tears and laughter after the baby was born. As a matter of fact, when she heard the child’s first cry, she asked, “What time is it?”
By midnight, Miss Bergman, as well as the other patients in the clinic, could hear the reporters and cameramen clamoring at the garden gate and trying to climb over the stone wall at both sides of it. The clinic called the Celere, Rome’s jeep riot police. As time passed and it grew chillier, the press nipped branches from the live oaks and the pines of the park that had once belonged to the princely Massimo family, built a fire, and settled down for the vigil. (In lesser force, this was to last twelve days.) The clinic director was outraged by the American hunger for news, but the next afternoon he began to realize that it could give his hospital, which is new and self-conscious, publicity. On the street, crowds had collected and a radio van had arrived. At 5 p.m., newspaper reporters—Rossellini had warned the clinic that press photographers could mean havoc—were invited in to see the clinic’s reception rooms, with a view to some public praise. Cameramen streamed in with them, their cameras hidden under their coats. A mild bedlam broke out. Photographers, pursued by truculent nuns and angry attendants, raced through the corridors and kitchens and into private rooms. A Life photographer, who had used an emergency back staircase, was collared on the second floor, and right where a man at the head of his profession should be—before the locked door of No. 34, Miss Bergman’s suite. The carabinieri were called in to guard her door and to eject all members of the press from the building, and the cameramen (for photographs were what was wanted; news could be made up) started really organizing the siege. They hired a room across the street from the clinic, set up a battery of cameras in the window, stationed men to cover the back exit of the clinic, and arranged among themselves for a round-the-clock schedule of watches, refreshments, and so on. The majority of the photographers were Italian free lances, hastily hired by American and Italian agencies. They thought the siege was absurd, and were more interested in the pay than in the news. One of the Italians has said that the siege cost the agency that hired him a quarter-million lire. It produced no pictures of Miss Bergman and the child.
Being a very healthy woman and recovering splendidly in a room in which, during her fortnight there, the iron Venetian blinds were kept pulled down (except for the last two days, when the electric light began to hurt her eyes) to prevent photographers from taking telephoto shots from trees or walls, Miss Bergman was soon strong enough to know, and feel trapped by, what was going on. The nuns who were her nurses reported, shocked by the wickedness of the world, that they had been offered a million lire to open the door a crack so that a photographer could snap a picture. An Italian cameraman with a conveniently pregnant wife took a room upstairs in the clinic, but as her time was found to be weeks off, both of them were thrown out. A free-lance photographer for L’Europeo, which disclaimed all responsibility if he fell and broke his neck, shinnied up a rain pipe to the balcony of No. 34. The rival weekly Oggi, which also wanted a picture, at least got a picture of the Europeo man, halfway up. In addition, Oggiphotographed photographers walking teeteringly in single file, cameras in hand, on top of the walls surrounding the clinic, but it missed getting a shot of one who fell off and broke his arm.
Since no legitimate photographs of Miss Bergman or the baby were forthcoming, improvised photographs began to turn up. A midwife in the hospital, who, like the director, enjoyed the publicity, willingly lent herself to the photographers’ needs. The New York Mirror published a picture, which it ran as an exclusive but which had already been flashed all over Italy, of the midwife weighing a baby “born yesterday.” The self-cancelling caption read, “Is this Ingrid’s Little Roberto? Exclusive picture shows midwife who attended Ingrid Bergman at birth of her son Thursday weighing a child at Villa Margherita Clinic in Rome. Although midwife said not, photographer was led to believe baby was Ingrid’s.” A still from “Stromboli,” showing Miss Bergman sad-faced and in coarse pajamas, was dug up and used variously, one caption reading, “In the Villa Margherita, Ingrid is not smiling now!” Another picture, taken off the “Stromboli” set, and showing Miss Bergman in the striped bathrobe used in the picture and looking dreary, with curling pins in her hair and Rossellini standing by, was captioned, “She is well protected in Villa Margherita.” An old shot from her film “Notorious,” showing her sick in bed from poison given her by German spies, was titled “Ingrid at Rest.” A news photograph taken of Miss Bergman last year at the Ciampino Airport—her eyes wide with alarm, for she was being almost crushed by the crowd—was dragged out and captioned to indicate that she had looked frightened while “en route to the clinic.” Rossellini was the subject of fewer improvisations, because he was irate, and he had already taken a swipe at a Life photographer in the clinic (and apologized). However, one picture of him was sent out, captioned as the latest shot of him in the hospital. The picture was taken before, he says, he became “fat, balding”—as certain sections of the United States press have described him for the past year. Another photograph of Miss Bergman, taken in 1949 outside a Trastevere restaurant, showed her in the sort of loose coat she apparently wears year in, year out; the caption implied that this was a maternity garment, and the picture was represented as one “taken a few days ago, for which our cameramen patiently waited a long time”—possibly because it was felt that the weary photographers by now needed at least a little praise. The siege group across the street from the clinic did get a real photograph of Rossellini’s ten-year-old son by his former wife, and it was run with a supposed statement by the boy: “I hate the new baby. It has blond hair.” Actually, the lad came out of the building excoriating the photographers, in an excellent imitation of his father.
On the evening of February 6th, the voice of Dr. Sannicandro, the accoucheur, was projected on the Italian government radio, answering a series of questions on the birth, stating that the anesthetic that had been given shortly before to Rita Hayworth in similar circumstances had been used, but adding “credo” to everything else he said—stale news about the child’s weight, the hour of birth, and so on, which, after all, had been announced by the clinic director the morning after the birth. The interview had been recorded at the clinic. Dr. Sannicandro was indignantly criticized by Rome medical men for being publicity-mad.
Some of the cameramen-besiegers stayed on duty through the twelfth day, but the American Acme agency pulled its man out early, having reached the intelligent conclusion that nobody was going to get even a peek unless Rossellini wanted him to. Besides, Acme had shrewdly got Rossellini’s permission to go to the hills near Lake Bracciano—where, when he had time for it, he was working on his film on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi—to take some snapshots of him there. The A.P., discouraged, also shortly withdrew its photographer from the weary battle group. Oggi, the most powerful weekly in Italy, which thought it was going to get a world-beating picture of mother, father, and child for its cover the week after the blessed event, delayed its appearance on the stands from Saturday to Sunday and came out with a picture of a trio, all right—a warmed-over photograph taken in the Farfa displaced-persons camp, where the opening “Stromboli” incidents were filmed, showing director Rossellini with star Bergman, who held a two-year-old D.P. in her arms. La Settimana Incom, an Italian news-and-picture weekly, came out, in desperation, with a frank photomontage of a Villa Margherita hospital group, posed by models, on which the faces of Miss Bergman, Rossellini, the accoucheur, and the obliging and ubiquitous midwife had been pasted. About this time, one of the American agencies started the rumor that Rossellini was going to auction the baby’s photograph to the highest bidder. A visiting American photographer for one of the big American weeklies wrote to Miss Bergman quoting another rumor—that the reason no one was allowed to photograph the baby was that it was a monster who would be hidden away and substituted for. He begged Miss Bergman, in her own interest, to permit him to photograph her son and scotch this rumor without delay. At the end of the twelfth day, since force and ruse had failed, the photographers worked out a plan by which one man, drawn by lot, would take one picture of the baptism, whenever it should occur, this to be shared by all. Rossellini approved the idea, but the Hearst picture agency refused to come in, and the scheme, and the siege, collapsed. Miss Bergman, Rossellini, and the baby had won.
The writing part of the press was no more successful than the cameramen were, but at least the writers were soon allowed back in the clinic lounge, where they could the better think things up. It is incredible that, beginning a day and a half after a woman had been through childbirth, reporters of two of the largest American news agencies should have sent her whining, wheedling, or inciting letters, and in some cases—of all things, for up-to-date reporters—handwritten and running page after page. The agency men used different psychological approaches. On February 5th, one tried to butter up Miss Bergman by sending flowers that purported to come from Maxwell Anderson, in whose “Joan of Lorraine” she appeared. The man claimed he had recently seen Anderson in New York, and, of course, there were flowers from himself, too. He also said that since his wife had had two daughters in two years, he realized that briefness in bedside visits was necessary, so would she give him a two-minute bedside interview? On February 7th, another man from the same agency tried the helping-hand angle. He opened by mentioning the rising swell of opinion in the United States, which he thought was being misled about her; then, with all due respect, Miss Bergman, it was his sincere conviction that now was the time for her to state her true position; you are much loved, Miss Bergman, but in the eyes of millions this sentiment is becoming clouded; it is my suggestion that you could remove the clouds by issuing statements—three paragraphs of them, which he asked her to sign. On February 8th, a reporter sent Rossellini his New York editors’ five pages of cables, in cablese jargon, deploring the unfavorable American attitude toward Bergman, which could be counteracted if permission given us to take human-interest photos of the new family soonestly, as you know how American public reacts to baby pix. Two days before that, one of the original botherers had been at Miss Bergman again, stating that she might like to see what was being done to distort her in the eyes of the world and enclosing a cabled agency report on the Mirror’s baby-on-the-scale photograph, which he called a fake. He soon came back once more, with a new suggestion: that she jot down what he called a quick yes or no to fifteen questions. He wanted to know if she was planning to go to America, Paris, or Sweden; if she was planning to be married; if she was planning to make another picture; if she hoped to be reunited with her daughter Pia. Question No. 15 was “The nurse says your new baby smiles all the time. Is this an accurate report?” However, one of his colleagues had already taken the panhandling prize with a two-page handwritten letter in which he whined as probably few men with good newspaper jobs have ever whined. He said that he was sure Miss Bergman had had struggles when young and knew the bitterness and hardship that come from defeat; he was in the same position in Rome, dependent on obtaining a few comments from her. He begged her to consider the position she had put him in. He said he understood her desire to be alone with her loved ones at this time (not quite forty-eight hours after childbirth), but couldn’t she spare him a moment to tell him how she felt? He ended by respecting her courage to live and love with her heart.
Altogether, Miss Bergman has during the past year received between thirty thousand and forty thousand letters on her so-called private life. They make a strange library, to judge by a few hundred random examples. Ninety-nine per cent came from America, usually air mail, and often registered. Most of them were addressed just to Rome. There were hundreds of those gay American congratulation cards for a baby’s birth, and hundreds of sacred medals. Many modest sums of money were enclosed to buy the baby a present. One letter, piously dated “February 6th, the Feast of Saint Titus,” was from a young seminarian studying for the priesthood, who said he was praying for her intention and thanked God for a new young soul on earth. One Negro woman expressed her appreciation of Miss Bergman’s stand on segregation in Washington theatres. There was a kind note, in German, from Austria, which had been opened by the censor. There were thousands of enthusiastic letters from New York Italian-Americans. One of many angry anti-Italian letters contained a photograph of Rossellini on which a mustache had been sketched and the words “Wop wolf” had been written. There were two letters from Canadian farmers and a fantastic one from a female miner out West, which began, “Well, Ingrid, I bet you’re surprised to hear I sold my old mine and am in a new shack now.” There were begging letters. One woman in the Middle West sent a huge envelope containing the deed to her house, her husband’s old-age-pension card, her Social Security card, and other personal documents, and a request that Miss Bergman pay the mortgage on the house. A retired colonel wrote a courtly letter of good cheer, closing it, “I beg to remain, dear lady, respectfully yours . . .” An elegant old American expatriate in Nice wrote that he was thinking of Cosima and Richard Wagner and wished he could order a little orchestra to serenade Miss Bergman with the “Siegfried Idyll.” Several letters mentioned Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” and deplored puritanism. There was one note of congratulation from the boss of a modest Madison Avenue dress shop, and on the back of it the names of his eleven employees, each name being preceded by the word “Sincerely” or “Love.” Several letters threatened Miss Bergman. The most vicious threat of death was typed with a red ribbon, in impeccable French, and was sent from Alsace by “Un Homme Nordique,” who ended with “Craignez la justice divine. Je me sens l’instrument de cette justice pour vous châtier.”
A great number of the letters contained criticisms of the press—references to “filthy scandal sheets in our land,” “the disgust and outrage I feel for the press,” “contempt for a press which thinks we have to know all.” There was a letter from a former Time writer, deploring what he called the disgraceful American press, “against which those who wrote for it were usually unable to rebel.” One angry grandmother said, “I told Louella Parsons a thing or two about her nasty tongue.” Along with hundreds of letters of insult, there were cables of friendship and kindness from public figures, among them Cary Grant, Phil Baker, Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and wife, Billy Rose and wife, and Helen Hayes and Charles MacArthur, and one from a Canadian Member of Parliament and wife, both unknown to Miss Bergman, that ended with “Cheers.”
The Swedish letters were unanimously harsh, as the Swedish press was. More than one Swedish newspaper dubbed Miss Bergman “a blot on the Swedish flag.” Swedish journals had never been especially flattering to her as an actress until the birth of her son, when suddenly they claimed that she was a great artist who had been destroyed by an Italian. In discussing her now, they invariably bring in the fact that the Italians bombed a Swedish Red Cross truck during the Ethiopian War. One paper has started a campaign to get the Swedish government to abandon its attitude of neutrality on the question of the return to Italy of her African colonies and to side instead with Haile Selassie. This paper concludes that if the Swedish delegate in the United Nations General Assembly votes against Italy on the colonial question, as he should, it will be all Roberto Rossellini’s fault.
The private element in the making of “Stromboli” has been of much less interest to the serious Roman newspapers than the treatment of the film in the American version. Editorials have appeared denouncing R.K.O.’s cutting and switching around of the film as punishment and sabotage. The Church has been particularly exercised about the fact that the final speeches of the actress, in which she calls upon God for help, have mostly been put into the mouth of an unseen announcer, as if they were a news report. Rossellini’s repudiation of the Hollywood version of “Stromboli” (the original version may be either good or bad, he says, “since, like all directors, I have made both kinds in my time”) was one of the big stories about him in the Roman newspapers during the American journalists’ Bergman-Rossellini Roman holiday.
For two months, the American journalists in Rome were hot to find out what Miss Bergman’s plans were. It is noticeable, in conversation with her, that she keeps repeating (in her strongly accented Nordic English) the earnest statement “I am healthy. I am still young enough. I can work.” To Rossellini, harried, frequently enraged by the tensions and intrusions of the past year, and known among Romans as a volatile temperament in any circumstances, an American newspaperman recently said, looking puzzled, “What are you kicking about? You got five million dollars’ worth of free publicity.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 8, 1950, issue, with the headline “Letter from Rome.”
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