It was a televised night to remember. Not a ship sinking, but a
society listing heavily to port. Thursday, December 4. You could
catch the traditional lighting of the nation’s Christmas Tree out
on the ellipse in Washington, some good music from a Texas band, a
service orchestra, brief remarks from the President, and
“blam!” — the tree lights up and there is a little
frisson of “yes, we are a nation of one will and mutual
affection.”
Couple hours later, though, and we are reminded of the social
malaise in which we are mired. Three daughters of the late actress
Ingrid Bergman are being interviewed by Larry King. Two, Isabella
and Ingrid, were fathered by Roberto Rossellini, with whom Bergman
had an infamous affair in 1949. And the third was Pia Lindstrom,
Ingrid’s daughter by the cuckolded husband (Pia’s description),
Peter. The three seemed to get along famously. And they were there
not just to talk about their late mother’s indiscretions, but also
the inauguration on DVD of their mother’s most famous film,
Casablanca.
The Rossellini reverberations in 1949-50 cannot even be imagined
by generations of this day. The nation that cherished
Casablanca, that could watch the movie and recite nearly
every line as it came up, had loved the luminous Swede with the
perfect face because with but one notable exception — the bad girl
in Jeckyll and Hyde — she had always played the
heroine-victim. Now, suddenly, in real life, she had victimized her
husband and her public and done it while off making some explosive
movie called Stromboli with some Italian director named
Rossellini. She would bear a son, and then marry him. America was
shocked, yes, even awed.
She was denounced on the U. S. Senate floor, Senator Edwin
Johnson of Colorado declaring her a “powerful influence for evil.”
For five years, Bergman made films with Rossellini in Italy. The
‘50’s were changing America. There was no rock ‘n roll version of
“As Time Goes By.” In 1956 Ingrid Bergman came back to the United
States to make Anastasia, won another Oscar, and divorced
Rossellini the next year.
The three daughters recalled the day their mother died. She was
67, succumbed on her birthday in London in 1982. None of them was
there. But they had kept in touch.
The interview seemed to make clear that all was forgiven because
the offense was so innocuous, like a Victorian forgetting that the
kerchief must match the cravat, a minor slip of grace. And we
should watch for the DVD.
Couple hours later our education is complete. After a few bawdy
jokes, Jay Leno welcomes the willowy star of Shakespeare in
Love.” Gwyneth Paltrow is pregnant, unmarried, but the
companion of a frontman for a British rock group, Coldplay. Honest.
(Had Leno better research, he could have had them in the aisles.)
Miss Paltrow insists that she is a very private person. But she
willingly discusses the fact of her pregnancy, reveals that for
luck she sometimes pinches her amplifying stomach. And the fact
that she is to bear a bastard child seems the only occasion for her
Leno visit. The subject of marriage was never brought up. In our
time, it would have been the only forbidden, uncomfortable question
the host could have asked.
So, there we have it, in the space of hours as only television
can compress time. Indiscretion, then and now. Once disgrace; now,
in your face. But then, as the song goes, “The world will always
welcome lovers, as time goes by.”
