March 14, 1950, 70 years ago: Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman is denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate, for her "immorality."
Bergman had starred in Casablanca; the film version of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls; Alfred Hitchcock's films Gaslight (winning an Academy Award for Best Actress), Spellbound and Notorious; and had played a nun in The Bells of St. Mary's, and a saint in Joan of Arc. She was not only beloved around the world, but was viewed as worthy of those nun and saint roles. She was Catholic, but she was married, to neurosurgeon Petter Lindström, with a daughter, Pia.
In 1949, she wrote a letter to Italian director Roberto Rossellini, saying she admired his films and wanted to work with him. He invited her to star in his film Stromboli. They began filming, and they began an affair. As a result, she became pregnant.
On February 2, 1950, Renato Roberto Ranaldo Giusto Giuseppe Rossellini, nicknamed "Robin," was born. On February 9, Bergman obtained a "quickie" Mexican divorce from Lindström. On February 12, Stromboli was released in America. It did well in Europe, where their affair wasn't considered as big a deal. In spite of Italy being, historically, a very conservative country, the film was awarded the Rome Prize for Cinema as the best film of the year.
But in America, it was a box-office bomb. RKO Pictures, the American distributor, lost $200,000 on it. Most reviews suggested that the film was weak, but fell short of being nasty: American critics seemed willing to dislike it on merit.
On March 14, Senator Edwin C. Johnson, Democrat of Colorado, a baseball executive who built the original version of what became Mile High Stadium in Denver, denounced Bergman on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He said that she had once been his favorite actress. But now:
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? I hope not. A way must be found to protect the people in the future against that sort of gyp.
At this point, the Hays Code was still in effect, and cuts to Rossellini's film had been made to make it fit for American release. But Senator Johnson wanted to go further: He proposed a bill wherein movies would be approved for licenses based on the moral compasses of those behind the picture, insisting that Bergman "had perpetrated an assault upon the institution of marriage," and going so far as to call her "a powerful influence for evil."
There was a double standard at work: Male actors were able to work their way through the bedrooms of Southern California without being shamed into stopping. Her co-star in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gary Cooper, slept with pretty much all of his female co-stars. So did her co-star in The Bells of St. Mary's, Bing Crosby -- who, in that film and its prequel, Going My Way, had played a priest, and was known as a Catholic moralist. The affairs of male actors may have been poorly-kept secrets in Hollywood, but the legitimate news outlets kept them quiet.
(Both Cooper and Crosby had co-starred with Grace Kelly, who fooled around with them, and with pretty much every male co-star she had. It's been suggested that the reason she was allowed to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco was to cover up a coming revelation about her character.)
Bergman allowed nationally-syndicated columnist Art Buchwald to read her mail during the scandal. In an interview years later, he said, "Oh, that mail was bad: Ten, twelve, fourteen huge mail bags. 'Dirty whore.' 'Bitch.' 'Son of a bitch.' And they were all 'Christians' who wrote it." (Buchwald was Jewish.) Bergman later said, "People saw me in Joan of Arc, and declared me a saint. I'm not. I'm just a woman, another human being."
On May 24, she married Roberto Rossellini. On June 18, 1952, she gave birth to twin daughters, Isotta and Isabella. She could not return to America, but made the film Anastasia in 1956. It had been 6 years, and Ed Sullivan was willing to believe that America would welcome her back. He flew to Europe and filmed an interview with her, intending to air it on The Ed Sullivan Show. But when he got back to New York, CBS, which normally gave him a lot of leeway due to his show being the most popular one on the network, put its foot down, and said no, she could not appear, not even on film. Ed had wasted a lot of money, time and effort in a good cause.
But on March 27, 1957, she was announced as the winner of her 2nd Academy Award for the film, and the audience in the NBC Century Theatre in New York gave the announcement a rousing round of applause. Former co-star Cary Grant, one of the few celebrities to stick up for her all that time, accepted the award on her behalf, and brought it to her in London. She, Grant, Sullivan, and everyone else who had stood up for her were vindicated.
Later that year, she and Rossellini were divorced, following his affair with another actress; and she was reunited with her daughter Pia, in Rome. Petter Lindström, however, remained bitter towards Bergman. In 1958, Ingrid married Swedish theatrical producer Lars Schmidt. That marriage ended in divorce in 1975, the year she won a 3rd Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Murder On the Orient Express.
She died in 1982, of cancer, on her 67th birthday. Rossellini had died in 1977. Lindström lived until 2000; Schmidt, until 2009. Pia Lindström became a journalist, Robin Rossellini a director like his father, Isabella Rossellini a model and an actress like her mother, and Isotta Rossellini became a literature professor. All 4 of Ingrid Bergman's children are still alive.
And Edwin C. Johnson? After serving 3 terms in the Senate, he did not run for a 4th in 1954, seeking to return to an office he had previously held, that of Governor of Colorado. He won, but did not run again in 1956, and never ran for office again. He died in 1970. In 1972, Senator Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois, officially entered an apology for Johnson's denunciation of Bergman into the Congressional Record.
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