Hollywood by Kanin Garson

Author:Kanin, Garson [Kanin, Garson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Published: 2013-08-04T07:00:00+00:00

13

For a while there, Ingrid Bergman was just about everyone’s fantasy friend. She turned up in Hollywood in 1938, a beauty of twenty-three, and made a film for David O. Selznick called Intermezzo, opposite Leslie Howard. It was a touching, ephemeral story in which she had scored a great success in the original Swedish version.

The unique loveliness of the leading lady captivated us all. Ingrid Bergman was a new personality, however, and difficult to cast.

Selznick admitted he did not know exactly what to do with her. This may have been the reason he did nothing with her for almost three years, and then loaned her out to Metro to make Rage in Heaven. A dud. Next, to Columbia for Adam Had Four Sons. This, too, failed, but Spencer Tracy asked for her in his remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which she made a considerable impression.

The following year, 1942, she appeared opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and was, overnight, the biggest star in pictures. There followed For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gaslight, The Bells of St. Mary, Spellbound, Saratoga Trunk, Notorious, and so on. It was not until 1950, after an astonishing and productive decade, that scandal struck and almost ruined not only her career, but also her life.

One of her misfortunes was that her success came when David O. Selznick was preparing Gone with the Wind, working an eighteen-hour-a-day schedule on that monumental project, and finding it difficult to fix his attention on anything else.

He thought something would come up. Things did, but, for one reason or another, were not considered suitable, or the deal could not be made, or a decision was postponed until it was too late. Meanwhile, Ingrid Bergman sat.

The Selznicks invited her constantly to their home. She met many people. But no work. There were no parts. At the age of twenty-four, this can be tragic.

She told me once that she had spent whole days walking up and down the beach at Malibu, crying. All she wanted to do was to act. Instead, here she was in a great beach house, getting up every morning with nothing to do, except on those rare occasions when a script would be sent from the studio for her to read or when she had a luncheon invitation. She recalls that the indignity she hated most was the gifts the Selznicks would always send her on her birthdays or holidays: flowers, gold compacts, a Capehart record player.

“But all I wanted was a part,” she says.

When she complained, it was pointed out to her that she was, after all, Swedish, that she was a star, and that she could not just play any old thing.

Somewhere in this time, she came to know Burgess Meredith, who was going to do a stage revival of Liliom. He invited her to play opposite him. She implored Selznick to let her do it. To get her out of his hair, Selznick agreed. She went East, played it, and returned. Again, nothing happened.

After Adam Had Four Sons, she went back East and did Anna Christie.

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