City of Nets (74 page)

“I cannot remember everything,” cried the narrator of Schoenberg's “A Survivor from Warsaw.” “I must have been unconscious most of the time. I remember only the grandiose moment when they all started to sing . . . the old prayer they had neglected for so many years, the forgotten creed.” “A Survivor from Warsaw” was incredibly condensed, compressed, a black hole in cultural space. It began with an orchestral shriek, and then the narrator started his terrible story. He and some other Jews had been hiding in the sewers under the battered ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Shortly before dawn, the Germans discovered them and ordered them out. They stumbled forth, some of them old and sick. A German sergeant kept shouting at them:
Achtung!
The Germans beat them as they emerged, all the time ordering them to move faster. The narrator, beaten, fell unconscious. Others fell on top of him. “The next thing I knew was a soldier saying. ‘They are all dead.' ” Lying there under the corpses, the survivor heard other Jews being marched away and then starting to sing, in their half-forgotten Hebrew, the
Shema Yisrael.

It is a complete drama and a very powerful one—replete with such Schoenbergian violences as a high trombone trill, bursts of snare drumming, bugle calls, and a xylophone tremolo—and yet it lasts only six minutes. Schoenberg wrote both the words and the music at high speed in the summer of 1947, then tried to find someone who would perform it. Not until the following spring was “A Survivor from Warsaw” given its premiere at the University of New Mexico by the Albuquerque Orchestra under Kurt Frederick. At the end of this first performance, the audience sat in shocked silence. Frederick played it all over again, and then the audience burst into loud applause. That spring of 1948, when Schoenberg's account of the Warsaw ghetto was first performed, was also the spring in which
Gentleman's Agreement
won the Academy Award as Hollywood's best picture of the previous year.

 

A far more interesting picture, which won the New York Film Critics Award as the best foreign movie of 1948, not only concerned itself with Nazism but actually started being filmed in Rome while the German army was still in the process of evacuating the city. That was late in 1944, and Roberto Rossellini had to make
Open City
without any studio sets, with mostly amateur actors, with bits and pieces of black market film. Until then, his work for Mussolini's state-run movie industry had involved mainly propaganda pictures like
The White Ship
(1941) and
The Return of the Pilot
(1942), but he rose to the challenge of filming the German occupation as a quasi-documentary, rough, grainy, crude, alive.

The lords of Hollywood remained indifferent, for
Open City
lacked what they liked to call “production values.” One of the film's most important viewers, however, was deeply impressed. “There was darkness and shadows, and sometimes you couldn't hear, and sometimes you couldn't even see it,” said Ingrid Bergman, “but that's the way it is in life . . . you can't always see and hear, but you know that something almost beyond understanding is going on.” When Miss Bergman asked friends to tell her more about Rossellini, nobody seemed to know anything. “In 1948, foreign films didn't rate in Hollywood,” she recalled.

A few months later, she was wandering along Broadway, alone, when she saw a billboard advertising
Paisan
(1946), Rossellini's sequel to
Open City.
She went in and saw what she considered “another great movie,” and yet the theater was nearly empty. She herself was sick of Hollywood's “production values”—the elaborate sets, the hairdos always perfect, the orchestral music surging up in the background. She decided that she wanted to make a movie with Rossellini. Being the kind of woman she was, she simply wrote him a letter: “Dear Mr. Rossellini, I saw your films
Open City
and
Paisan,
and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not yet very understandable in French, and who, in Italian knows only ‘ti amo' I am ready to come and make a film with you.”

Almost any other director in the world would immediately have telephoned to invite her onto the next plane. The beautiful star of
Casablanca
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
had won an Academy Award in
Gaslight
(1944), and she had given such a glorious performance in Hitchcock's
Notorious
(1946) that her co-star Cary Grant had been moved to declare at the Academy Award ceremonies: “I think the Academy ought to set aside a special award for Bergman every year whether she makes a picture or not.” Rossellini, however, had never heard of her.

Her letter happened to arrive at Minerva Films in Rome on the day that the studio burned down. Somebody poking around in the debris found the letter and opened it. Rossellini was then engaged in suing Minerva about something or other, but a sympathetic secretary telephoned him to say that there was “a very funny letter for you.” Rossellini said he was not talking to Minerva and hung up. It took several more calls before Rossellini agreed to listen to the message from Hollywood, and several more before he learned what his correspondent's name represented (Money!), and then he cabled her a characteristic answer: “
I JUST RECEIVED WITH GREAT EMOTION YOUR LETTER WHICH HAPPENS TO ARRIVE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY BIRTHDAY AS THE MOST PRECIOUS GIFT
. . . .” And so on.

Despite her flirtatious remark about “ti amo,” Miss Bergman seems not to have had any romantic designs on Rossellini, but she was restless, both professionally and personally. Her supposedly happy marriage to Peter Lindstrom, the Swedish doctor, had been in trouble for some time. Lindstrom managed her career, haggled over her contracts, and generally ordered her around. This was quite customary in that period, but although Miss Bergman rather enjoyed imagining herself in the role of Nora in
A Doll's House,
there were limits. One of Lindstrom's rules was that newspaper photographers were not allowed to come to the house to take pictures. When Miss Bergman found it more convenient on one occasion to be photographed at home rather than at the studio, Lindstrom became furious on seeing the pictures in print.

“All right, I made a mistake again,” Miss Bergman said. “But everybody makes mistakes, you make mistakes, I make mistakes. . . .”

“I . . . I make mistakes?” her husband echoed.

“Well, yes, don't you make mistakes?”

“No,” said Lindstrom. (In recounting this scene, Miss Bergman added that Lindstrom subsequently denied this denial.) “Why should I? I think carefully before I do something. I weigh it. I ponder it, and then I decide.”

This announcement persuaded Miss Bergman that it was time for a change. “I asked if Peter would mind if we had a divorce,” she recalled. He would indeed mind. “Why should we get a divorce?” he asked. “We haven't had a fight. We've never had a quarrel.” So they didn't get a divorce, not then. “I think I was just waiting,” she said later, “for someone to come along and help me out of that marriage.”

The man who came along was Bob Capa
*
, the Hungarian photographer who was then at the height of his celebrity as the all-seeing chronicler of war. (The reason you remember those head-on photographs of GI's wading ashore into the gunfire on Omaha Beach is that Capa had waded in ahead of them and then turned back to record their landing.) Miss Bergman, arriving in Paris just after the war to tour military bases with Jack Benny, had never heard of the two young men who pushed a joint letter under her door at the Ritz to invite her out to dinner. One was Capa, and the other was a GI named Irwin Shaw. She went out with them and was charmed. Capa could be irresistibly charming. She met him again in Berlin, then again back in Paris. “And I suppose,” she said later, “that's where I began to fall in love with him.” It was very intense, even during their separations, but Capa could not give up his career as one of the roving stars of
Life
magazine, any more than she could give up hers. “He told me, ‘I cannot marry you. I cannot tie myself down. If they say “Korea tomorrow,” and we're married and we have a child, I won't be able to go to Korea. And that's impossible.' ” (It was not too many years later that he went to Vietnam and stepped on the land mine that killed him.)

Miss Bergman went back to work. She had wanted all her life to play Joan of Arc—that impossible combination of heroism, mysticism, and martyrdom—but the role had repeatedly eluded her. When she first sailed for America, Selznick had cabled her to tell the press in New York that she was arriving to play Saint Joan, but a Selznick publicity man went to meet the ship at the pier and warned her, “Don't talk too much about Joan of Arc.” Nothing ever came of that project. Then, seven years later, she got a telephone call from Maxwell Anderson, the playwright, who said he was “just wondering [if] maybe one day you might like to come to Broadway to do a play?”

“Yes, of course, I'd like to do that,” she said. “Tell me, what is your play all about?”

“Joan of Arc,” he said.

She agreed without even reading it. And after she had read it, she went walking with Anderson on the Santa Monica beach and signed the contract, right there on the beach, while Selznick and Lindstrom were still haggling with Anderson's agents about the terms. Then, the week after she left for rehearsals in New York, Selznick announced to the press that he was going to make a film of Joan of Arc, starring Jennifer Jones. Nothing ever came of that project either.

Anderson's
Joan of Lorraine
was not really about Saint Joan but rather about a theatrical company rehearsing a play about Saint Joan. Miss Bergman kept prodding Anderson to write in more about his heroine, and he kept obliging her. What opened on Broadway was something of a hybrid, and a rather pretentious one, but Miss Bergman's performance won high praise.
The New Yorker,
for example, said that it “may be incomparable in the theatre of our day.”

Victor Fleming, who had directed Miss Bergman in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
back in 1941, now urged her to join him in filming the play. They formed an independent production company, with Walter Wanger as producer. Though Miss Bergman once again received warm praise for her performance, however, the Anderson script remained a burden. When she subsequently saw this 1948 picture on a television rerun of the 1970's, she realized how artificial it had been. “It had that smooth, glossy quality of Hollywood,” she said. “All the battle scenes were done in the studio: the towers of Chinon and the French villages were painted backdrops. I didn't think I looked like a peasant girl at all. I just looked like a movie star playing the part of Joan. Clean face, nice hairdo. . . . I suppose when I look back, this is where my instinctive rebellion and resentment began.”

Rossellini followed his first cable to Miss Bergman with a long letter explaining his methods: “I must say that my way of working is extremely personal. I do not prepare a scenario, which I think terribly limits the scope of work. Of course I start out with very precise ideas and a mixture of dialogues and intentions which, as things go on, I select and improve.” He also proposed an idea for a film, which he wanted to call “Terra di Dio.” Driving in the country near Rome, he had noticed a barbed-wire enclosure for displaced persons, and he had stopped to look at it. A guard had ordered him away. He had noticed a woman standing apart from the others, a blond woman dressed all in black, and she had told him that she was a Latvian. Then the guard had chased him away. “The remembrance of this woman haunted me . . .” Rossellini wrote. “Shall we go together and look for her? Shall we together visualize her life?”

Miss Bergman eagerly accepted Rossellini's offer, but she was committed to make a Hitchcock film,
Under Capricorn,
in London that summer. Perhaps she could take a break and come to Italy to discuss it? They agreed to meet in Amalfi, where Rossellini had gone with his mistress, Anna Magnani, the tempestuous star of
Open City.
Even before he had ever met Miss Bergman, Rossellini took the precaution of telling the head porter at his hotel in Amalfi that any letters or telegrams from London should be given to him privately and discreetly. And even though Miss Magnani had never met Miss Bergman either, she had her suspicions. When the head porter received the telegram from London announcing Miss Bergman's arrival in Amalfi, he apparently thought that no message could be too private for Rossellini's well-known traveling companion to hear, so he went to the dining room, where Rossellini was having lunch, where Miss Magnani was applying seasoning to the spaghetti, and he said in a stage whisper, “You say if you receive a telegram from England, I must give it to you privately. Here it is. . . .”

“Ah, grazie,”
Rossellini said as casually as he could, slipping the telegram into his pocket unread, as though it were a matter of no importance. Miss Magnani went on stirring seasoning into the spaghetti.

“Now,” she finally said, holding forth the bowl. “Is this all right—eh, Roberto?”

“Ah, sì, sì, grazie,”
said Rossellini, all innocence.

“Good,” said Miss Magnani. “Here, you can have it.” Then she threw the whole bowlful of spaghetti into his face.

 

Just as the Holocaust eventually changed every Jew's perception of himself—proving forever that there was no such thing as assimilation, and that to be a Jew meant being perpetually vulnerable and in danger—that self-perception also changed fundamentally on the day the Union Jack finally fluttered down the flagpole over Government House on the Hill of Evil Counsel in Jerusalem. With that act, General Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham, the British governor general of Palestine, abandoned the city. He flew on an RAF plane to the port of Haifa, where bagpipers skirled him aboard the light cruiser
Eurylus.
Exactly at midnight, on May 15, 1948, the
Eurylus
steamed past the three-mile limit and fired a flare to celebrate the end of Britain's mandate over Palestine. Just a few hours earlier, David Ben-Gurion and a dozen of his lieutenants and four hundred of his followers had gathered in the heavily guarded auditorium of the Tel Aviv Museum. There, under the blue-and-white-striped Zionist flag, proudly bearing the Star of David that the Jews of the Holocaust had worn in their degradation, they stood and sang the Zionist anthem “Hatikvah”: “The ancient longing will be fulfilled, to return to the land . . . of our fathers.” Then Ben-Gurion pounded his fist on the table and began to read a document that proclaimed “the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel.”