PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2012
Copyright © Chris Greenhalgh, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover images: couple © Ian Berry / Magnum Photos; background © Murat Taner / Getty Images
All rights reserved
The extract on page vii is taken from Great Stars: Ingrid Bergman by David Thomson (Penguin Books, 2009). Copyright © David Thomson, 2009.
ISBN: 978-0-24-196318-0
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN BOOKS
Chris Greenhalgh is the prize-winning author of three volumes of poetry and a novel. He wrote the screenplay for Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which occupied the prestigious closing slot at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. He lives with his wife and two sons in Sevenoaks.
www.chris-greenhalgh.com
For Ruth, Saul and Ethan
Not without reason (for he had a fierce gypsy charm as well as the scent of danger), she fell madly in love with Capa. And he was the real thing.
David Thomson, Ingrid Bergman
A moment of trust. The green light flashes. There’s no time to think, and I don’t need to jump – the blast from the propellers just sucks me out of the hatch. Straightaway I’m falling with a splayed flailing of arms and legs, the roar of the transport lost in the swirling clouds above me.
I have a shovel in my backpack, a camera strapped to each of my legs and a flask in my breast pocket. Buffeted by crosswinds, my jacket puffs up. My cheeks feel as if they’ve been slapped and my hands smart from the cold. The air feels squeezed out of my lungs.
I’m hurled upside down, tumbled like a bird in a storm. My bowels turn watery. The contents of my stomach slide into my mouth – a nauseous mixture of coffee and whisky and scrambled eggs. My eyes prickle with tears. I manage to right myself. I count one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, and pull the cord. The parachute shuffles out of its pack and unfurls in an instant, blossoming into a silken basilica over my head. The plummeting sensation ends, and I’m conscious of a sudden weightlessness, swaying, my hands fastened to the straps.
A bent-winged gull hangs motionless, not caring that this is Germany or that we have crossed the Rhine. And for an instant it seems as if I’m not falling at all. Instead, I feel buoyed up, held steady by forces unseen. Purged of fear and boosted by a new energy, I seem – yes – I seem to be flying, flung upwards like a dove.
The ground spreads out like a map below: rectangles of newly ploughed land neatly organized in furrows, a few farmhouses and outbuildings, the fuzzy stuff of trees. I unstrap my Contax and take a few shots. No time for tricks, I just keep clicking. All around me, the men of the 17th Airborne Division twirl like sycamore seeds, their heads rubbing up against the webbing of their helmets and their last letters home. I feel a few drops of what I presume must be rain. But it’s not rain. Vapour condenses on the canopy and drips down onto my bare hands and face. The sensation is cold, my fingers numb. I’m careful not to let any moisture smear the lens.
Within seconds, everything changes. Bullets zing like hornets past my head. One punches a hole in my chute. I hear the snap of it against the fabric. I press my helmet down towards my chest, try to make myself small. I keep the Contax close to my face, still clicking. A chill spreads damply across my back.
It seems to take an age to reach the ground, though in reality it must be less than a minute. I think about a lot of things in quick succession – about the women I have loved and lost, about my mother having escaped the Fascists in Budapest, and about the fact that I am desperate to pee.
The paratroopers glide in slow diagonals. Most seem fine, but one is not so lucky. I can see from the trajectory that he’s headed straight for the powerlines. He must see it, too, as he drifts with dreamlike slowness, unable to change tack, prey to the direction of the wind. I want to shout out but there’s no way he can hear me, and nothing he can do. His body looks tiny. His legs wriggle in an attempt to veer off course, his arms yank at the straps, and at the last his mouth opens in a soundless cry as if this might lift him the extra few inches he needs to clear the wires. There’s a terrible inevitability about his path. He slides right into the dark lines, his parachute crumpling over the wires. He writhes frantically for several seconds, but strung like a puppet he proves an easy kill for the machine gunners. And he’s not the only one. Several others swing, stricken, fifty feet up in the leafless trees, their bodies dangling from their canopies, shrivelled pieces of fruit.
Is there a lonelier way to die?
Before I know it, the landscape enlarges, and there’s a high whistling noise. The wind stirs the tops of the trees. The ground seems to leap towards me. I realize that the small dark spot that has been bobbing about beneath me is my shadow and I rush towards it. I remember to keep my legs together. The harness bites into the top of my thighs. I hold on tight to the Contax and slam down into the earth. I feel the thud inside my lungs. Ngh.
I lie face down for several seconds, checking myself for injuries, registering a remote ache in my ankle, a jarring pain in my knee. I must have fallen awkwardly, but nothing is broken.
The earth is hard despite the thaw. A few scraps of ice still lie in patches, exposing the colour of my fatigues. I get up, my legs wobbly, and roll up the chute like a skin sloughed off. Immediately I look for cover. To my left lies open country. The nearest building, with snipers inside, is five hundred yards ahead. A stand of birches is about half that distance to my right. I suck air into my lungs and run – a zigzagging path, my shovel waggling in my knapsack, the camera banging against my chest.
I choose the thickest trunk I can find, check the focus on my Contax, crouch down and listen. The sound of rifle fire, flattened by the landscape, ricochets off the trees, so that at first I’m looking in the wrong direction. Dozens of crows explode upwards. Rounds of shelling shake the earth beneath my feet.
The light is ghostly between dark branches as I frame the shot, the sky thick with transport planes and parachutes still gliding like giant spores to the ground. My fingers are freezing, but my legs and back are slick with sweat. I’m thirsty, my throat parched, and now I feel really desperate to pee – partly from the cold, but also a sense of fear. My knee still hurts. A taste of metal enters my mouth, making me swallow.
Dead cattle and horses lie frozen in odd postures across the fields. The stench touches my nostrils, adds to the feeling of nausea. The sun is unlocatable behind the clouds. I finish one film, seal it in a canister, clip another one in, wind it on, snap the back of the camera shut, and start clicking again.
The resistance is fierce but limited, confined to half a dozen farm buildings and an outhouse. The artillery does its job. The buildings burn. The first prisoners are smoked out, hands on heads, the barns mostly destroyed. The inner walls are exposed so that it’s hard to believe there were people in there just a few minutes ago, and odd to see how small a space the rooms once occupied. The farmers are the last to flee – an old man with expressionless eyes, his headscarved wife rescuing what possessions she can, and their grandchildren, a boy and a girl, too paralysed with fear to cry.
By 11 a.m. I have several rolls of film, including shots of parachutes slung over wires like stockings over a bedpost, medics tending to the wounded, and a transport plane bulking large and coming in low over the trees. I write March 1945 on the canister. A good morning’s work. Time for a cigarette and a hit of whisky from the flask.
And only now does it seem safe to pee. I dream of trees in leaf, fields ripe with wheat, an eight-page spread in Life, my pictures showing the world what happened here near Wesel. As the beatific vision continues, I imagine myself in the arms of a good woman, who strokes my hair and covers my face with lipsticked kisses, making everything all right.
The reverie doesn’t last long. The tree I relieve myself against has only just started to darken when I see the sign: ACHTUNG! MINEN!
I spend the next four hours until the disposal team arrives standing motionless, smoking cigarettes, checking the focus on my cameras, doing my best to look unconcerned.
She almost ceases breathing, pulls her stomach muscles in, resists the impulse to fiddle with an earring. But she can’t stop her mind racing or ignore the itch inside her, the little kick of ambition that drives her on.
Does she think she’ll win? She can’t think that far ahead. Does she deserve to? That’s a different question.
She tries to slow down the pounding of her heart, works to control her breathing. Everything around her grows quiet. She hears the nominations read out by last year’s winner, Jennifer Jones – her own, followed by Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Greer Garson, Barbara Stanwyck – each name announced with the same crisp excitement that holds out the promise of brilliant things. Like snow, she thinks.
There’s a silence. An envelope is opened, its rustle amplified by the microphone that stands like a sunflower in the middle of the stage.
She holds her husband’s hand to the left and feels the tightening grip of her producer, David Selznick, to the right. The room pitches. She finds it difficult in this instant to make connections between things.
When the four Scandinavian-sounding syllables of her name are announced, they seem remote, oddly foreign, unrecognizable. Applause fills the auditorium at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, quickening around her.
‘That’s you,’ Selznick says. ‘You’ve won. You’ve won!’
‘Go get it,’ Petter says.
Ingrid stands and the seat tips behind her. Everything is confusion: the sudden tumult of the music, the fan of lights, the fierce clapping and chasing spotlights.
She presses her neck forward, her senses alert, her eyes alive to the male attention that swims around her. It is harder than she imagines to walk in a straight line. Caught in a current of affection, she feels tugged along, her insides filling with warmth. The sensation enlarges. Her hands grow clammy and, as if she’s had a glass of wine already, she feels the redness creep into her cheeks.
Photographers jostle and flashbulbs explode, capturing the evening in bright slices. Hatless, simply dressed, with a long beaded necklace that hangs down to her waist, in flat shoes and wearing minimal make-up, her effort at restrained elegance feels inadequate set next to the dinky hats and spotted veils of her fellow nominees. For a moment, she feels horribly exposed.
Unknown in Hollywood just six years ago and speaking with an accent that was mistaken for German as the war began, Ingrid still feels an outsider. But she got lucky with Casablanca, made her mark in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and here she is lauded for her performance in Gaslight, with Saratoga Trunk and Spellbound about to open in theatres across America, and shooting The Bells of St Mary’s for a Christmas release.
Later she will regret that the evening went so quickly, that the moment like a dream was over so fast. Later she will feel cheated by the experience, and long to relive it. But in this instant, she almost runs onto the stage.
She remembers thinking it important to keep her head still. After that, everything is a blur. She remembers taking a breath to steady herself. If she remembers hovering over the microphone, it is only because of the lights splintering into a million filaments. If she recalls being conscious of the audience, their faces grey beyond the glare, it is only because of the collective hush.
‘I’d like to thank the Academy for honouring me with this award.’
The microphone picks up a slight tremor in her voice, but the note is huskily feminine, not girlish, and noticeably lower than that of Jennifer Jones.
Her fingers play with the statuette, her palms mottled, her hands surprised by how heavy it is. She feels the tug of it like a gravitational force, clings to it, enjoying the sense of possession.
How she wishes her parents were alive to witness this. Or her Aunt Mutti. Someone. She thinks of Pia, her six-year-old, at home in bed, asleep. Will she understand what this means? Of course not. She’s probably dreaming about riding her bike, the wobbly first attempts just yesterday, leaving her mother running to keep up, hands outstretched to prevent her falling. She feels a need to reach out and grasp her now.
As a young girl herself, Ingrid cultivated the shy habit of glancing upwards through her long and perfectly spaced lashes and shooting a stare from under her fringe. It is the same look she offers now as the lights spear into her eyes.
Naturally she feels nervous, her heart racing, the words trying to line up and stand to attention inside her mouth. But she feels wonderful, too, and this slides into a sensation of calm that extends slowly to her legs, her head, the words that she says and that she hears herself utter as they are hurled by the sound system beyond her over many hundreds of raked seats.
Her face is lit, her eyes grow watery. She thinks she might cry, but she doesn’t, not properly. This is what she’s worked for, prepared for all her life, and she’s not going to spoil it. The quivering that she experiences within her subsides.
‘I’ll do my best in the future to be worthy of it,’ she says.
Applause, deep and appreciative this time, reverberates around the theatre in a series of overlapping waves as she moves with grace and without visible hurry from the stage, escorted by Jennifer Jones.
From the wings she watches Bing Crosby josh with Gary Cooper, the pair of them clowning together on stage, enjoying that male camaraderie and wisecracking energy she loves to be a part of on the set.
Afterwards, at the party hosted by David Selznick, when Ingrid returns to her husband’s side, she notices how quiet and reserved he is. Perhaps he’s having trouble absorbing the enormity of what has happened. He tries to look pleased but, she observes, something tugs at the corners of his mouth. It’s obvious that he finds the adulation distasteful. He must resent the way everyone wants to talk to her, the fawning attention of the press, the way he is left alone at the table, working a toothpick at a stubborn bit of meat between his teeth.
She realizes he hasn’t enjoyed a moment alone with her since she received the award. When eventually he manages to get near her, it is to urge her to leave early. He smiles stiffly and touches her hand just once as if in consolation for some great sorrow. Later she won’t remember agreeing or making excuses, but she does recall being driven home just minutes after midnight, Petter stone-faced and silent next to her, their legs not touching in the back of the car.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’
‘It’s nothing less than I expected.’
A sourness revolves in her stomach. ‘You really thought I’d win?’
‘They’d have me to contend with if you didn’t.’
‘You don’t seem happy.’
She watches the tree-lined boulevards float by, with their manicured lawns and hacienda-style houses. North Fairfax Avenue dissolves into Sunset, which melts into West Sunset. She notices how the reflections swarm, shaky as a back projection pouring across the windows of the car.
‘You understand what this means?’
The vibrations of the engine mingle with the smell of petrol to make her feel queasy. The fragrance Petter wears next to her becomes a part of that. ‘What does it mean?’
He smiles, kisses her on the cheek. ‘Nothing.’
The car pulls into Benedict Canyon. She realizes she’s hungry. She’s always hungry. It hits her now like a light switched on inside her head. They left before the dessert was served, before the dancing began. And though she knows she shouldn’t, sitting here with the gold statuette in her fingers and her name on everyone’s lips, with the city lit and flickering like a train outside, she feels more than a little flat.
I’ve learnt to sleep anywhere.
Tonight, though, it’ll be a hotel room in Paris, with a bathtub, a bottle of Scotch and a buzzer for room service right by the bed.
In the streets on this May day, the sound of cheering mingles with the peal of church bells, the honk of klaxons and the smell of freedom released like a gas. Thousands of people wave home-made tricolours and brandish American flags with too many stripes or too few stars. The air-raid sirens sound a final all-clear.
Irwin directs two men with moving picture cameras from the Signal Corps. The cameras putter like small outboard motors and hum above the celebrating crowd. But the jeep jerks around so much and brakes so abruptly, it’s a struggle to keep the lenses steady.
I sit braced in the corner as the jeep slews around, my Rolleiflex and Contax primed. In case one of the cameras jams, I alternate shots. And I’m snapping away like crazy.
All the young men want suddenly to shake our hands. Several have climbed trees and shinned up lampposts, clinging on with one arm and raising a free hand in salute. Women print our cheeks with kisses, fill our arms with flowers. Children are hoisted on their fathers’ shoulders, lifted from the crowd to see. A nun wearing sunglasses waves her handkerchief. Two gendarmes, caps tilted back, join in the revelry rather than attempting to keep the peace. Local mademoiselles, in floating skirts and light print dresses, belt out the Marseillaise.
The women look pretty, the way only French women can – that original girlishness, that poise and elegance, as if femininity were invented here, along with perfume, good cooking and saucy lingerie.
One girl, with sun-browned legs and hair piled up high above her forehead, rides a bicycle and tries to keep pace with the jeep. Her skirt, shaped like a lampshade, lifts as she pedals to reveal a rhythmical glimpse of voluptuous pink thigh. She knows this and smiles, holding her skirt with one hand to stop it billowing completely. She seems to enjoy the feeling of us looking and the sensation of wind on her skin.
I manage to get off several rolls of film, just taking what’s there. People are crying, they’re so happy. The whole population of Paris seems to press into the streets, spilling out so that they fill every space available, perching on ledges, massing on balconies, one boy poised atop a statue like a Cupid on a cake. A group of old men cluster round a board, reading of the German surrender, needing to witness it in print to be convinced that the war in Europe is finally over.
And it really is. I think about what that means for me. At last I’ll be able to brush my teeth instead of using my finger. I’ll be able to shave using a mirror rather than just by touch. It means I can pay some kid to polish my boots again. It means fresh bread and cheese instead of C-rations. Oranges, maybe. Soap and shampoo. A fresh change of underclothes. Whisky in a glass instead of a tooth mug. The freedom to come and go whenever I please and talk to whoever I want – and no one shooting at me when I raise my camera.
I don’t go in for crazy angles or anything. Nothing fancy. I just concentrate on getting close enough to see the expression on people’s faces, fix them in the viewfinder, then click. All it takes is a certain sensitivity to the moment and a steady pair of hands, a quick eye and a willingness to push yourself forward. With a camera you can’t help but have a point of view.
Wine cellars bricked up during the war are re-opened. It’s like opening the tombs of the pharaohs. The rich odour of casks and the stored perfumes of Burgundy leak from windows, inundate the streets, thread a delicate ribbon of scent down the avenues. Everywhere, the brasseries and bistros overflow with grateful soldiers. The menus may be shorter and the prices higher, and some of the wine may be sour or corked, but after the first mouthful no one notices; each new glass tastes like a nectar specially brewed.
We drink to celebrate. We drink to forget. We drink because getting drunk helps to keep the nightmares at bay.
Irwin reminds me about the dance halls on the rue de Lappe, the casino at Enghien-les-Bains. If you have enough money, he says, there are girls who are also models around the Champs Elysées. If you’re not so flush, there’s always La Maison des Nations, with its Oriental room and prints of Mount Fuji and the girls unfailingly luscious and young. Or if you’re down to your last sou, then there’s still the Bastille. There amid the shadows and the sickly sweet scents, he says, you’ll find women with kohl eyes and black chokers, and though they may be a little older, they’ll still open their legs and give you a wild time.
It’s a wonder the city doesn’t crumble, he says, with all the fucking that’s going on.
We end up in the Dôme around midnight. The tables are full. All the windows are open. A thick band of smoke moves levelly across the ceiling and wafts like the conversation into the air outside. The noise is tremendous. Men and women are pressed together so tight that you can almost smell the fermentation. The next thing I know, Irwin is disappearing off, one hand clutched by a long-lashed mademoiselle who stares up at him – adoringly or drunkenly, it’s hard to say – the other raised to wave a helpless goodbye. The poor sap. He doesn’t stand a chance.
At the same time, I become conscious of a shimmer of colour and scent off to my left. A woman’s face flashes amid a group of friends, a face wide like a cat’s. She keeps glancing in my direction, then pretending she hasn’t. And when she tilts her eyes, the whole room seems to tip sideways. I make my way to where she stands, intent on restoring some kind of balance.
‘American?’ she says.
I shake my head. ‘Hungarian. Budapest.’
She points at my uniform. ‘You fight with Americans?’
I fish out my press pass, hand it to her.
She unfolds it, sees my passport-sized photograph with its official stamp, and reads. ‘Capa?’
‘You see that?’ I say. ‘Signed by Eisenhower himself.’
She nods slowly, impressed.
Amid the riot and clamour that surround us, she has the coolness of a flower shop. Her face is bright and open, her eyes meltwater-fresh. She twiddles her fingers, indicating that she wants a cigarette. She would have seen the GIs throwing packets of Camel from their jeeps. I pull a cigarette out of my pack and watch as she takes it with one hand, folding her other arm across her chest.
I pat my pockets for a matchbox.
She holds the cigarette cocked and ready. The blue flame illuminates her face. She pushes her hair back, tucks it behind her ear. Her eyes are green, her irises flecked with hazel. There’s a blue tint on her eyelids, a dusting like pollen. The sweetness of her perfume cuts through the sourness of the bar.
‘I like you,’ she says.
‘You don’t know me.’
‘We can work on that,’ she says, this time in French.
With touching clumsiness, someone starts playing a violin, managing a few romantic spasms. If I close my eyes, I could be back in the Café Moderne in Budapest on a Saturday night.
She seems tense and expectant. I notice how she holds her cigarette some distance from her body as if she’s ready to give it away. I notice, too, the pale band of skin on the third finger of her left hand where a ring has been removed. And there’s something fragile about her that makes me want to protect her, to clear a space around her, and make sure that she’s all right.
After a few shy words and a little kissing, and the kind of speed you associate with a dream, we’re alone together in the warm shadows and silence of my hotel bedroom, the lights of cars re-tilting the angles of the walls.
She pulls the single pin in her bun. A plait unravels, slips down like a sigh. In lifting her dress, she gives off a sweet smell, an odour composed of shampoo, tobacco, lipstick, powder. She seems to pour herself upwards. Bits of her hair cling to the fabric as she tugs the slip over her head. And giddy as if we were breathing helium, we immerse ourselves, descend into each other. The night becomes all raw sensation, blind will, and I experience an incredible warmth across the whole of my body.
Afterwards, naked, lazy, sitting up in bed, we share a cigarette.
‘I won’t stay,’ she says.
‘You can if you like.’
I stroke her hair, which seems to spark in the darkness and change colour as my fingers move through it. I switch on the lamp. And it’s only now that I see the thick pencil line she’s drawn down the back of her legs to pretend she’s wearing stockings.
‘I’ll be gone in the morning,’ she says.
‘I’ll still be here in the afternoon.’
She smiles, looks around, takes in the room, its bare furnishings and mess of magazines and clothes. She sees the cameras on the floor in the bag next to my boots, but it’s my helmet she seems most interested in. She’s surprised by how heavy it is, and holds it with both hands for a moment as if measuring its weight. She tries it on. It’s too big for her, and her hair squeezes out the sides in little blonde licks. She tilts it, regards herself in the mirror, watches it wobble on her head, and when one long strand snags in the straps as she removes it, I feel something take a deep scoop out of my chest.
Floor-to-ceiling white wardrobes contain rails of dresses, black at one end and white at the other, with all the other colours – navy, camel, lemon, teal-green, magenta – pressed next to each other in between. Ingrid looks at them, hands on hips, and frowns. Evening dresses, cocktail dresses, ball gowns, a small mink coat. They hang like shadows of herself, clinging to an imagined silhouette. She runs her fingertips across them, enjoying the answer of the fabrics. A current shoots through her, a crackle of static, as she feels the textiles scrape against her nail.
Now that she’s famous and acclaimed, she can’t just pull something on; she has to think about everything she wears because she will be noticed, and the way she dresses will be commented upon in the magazines. This is a fact, a consequence of her success, and there’s no point bitching about it.
She does her best to retain a private existence, to keep her feet firmly on the ground. She works hard, remains dedicated, professional. She’s known for the commitment she shows to her roles, the conviction she gives to them. But it’s as if, at times, the barrier between her public and personal life dissolves, the two blending imperceptibly together like adjacent paints. And she understands how easy it is to be seduced by stardom, to grow blind to its predations. She’s seen it happen often enough. Her husband warns her daily of its dangers, reminds her she must stay on her guard.
One moment, she reflects, you’re a young girl – virginal, uncertain – trying for bit parts in the theatre in Stockholm. The next you’re a full-grown woman and a Hollywood actress accepting an Academy Award.
How does that happen?
She can scarcely believe it sometimes.
The strange thing is, this life enjoys its own kind of ordinariness after a time. The airplane travel, the swimming pools, the jewellery and expensive clothes all have their everyday texture just like everything else. And it’s crazy, she considers, but for a time you can fool yourself that this is what you really want. Stuck in this sunlit bubble, sucked in by the luxury, it’s easy to believe that you’re just a beat from fulfilling your dreams.
Why does she want to be a movie star anyway?
Because being herself is never quite enough, she supposes. And she loves that strange, mesmerized state she enters when she’s preparing for a role. The way she can hide away and transport herself to another time and place, immerse herself in a different life like a bath until it feels real. Then a point comes when she’s taken over. An energy possesses her. She feels a heat behind her ears. It’s as if she enters a secret existence, as if she’s admitted into the mystery of another human being, and only she has the key. It’s the kind of thrill you get when someone touches the back of your neck and you’re not expecting it. It’s incredibly intimate, and suddenly she’s able to see everything at a slant, the way her character does. It’s like living two lives at once, and she relishes that.
Her work gives her intense satisfaction; she loses any idea of time when she’s on set; then when she’s not working, she feels as if she’s wasting her days not doing anything. The way she figures it, she owes a debt to the world and needs to add something, to create something worthwhile; she feels she must earn her place.
But that’s not the end of it. There’s something else, she knows. In her more vulnerable moments, she feels as though an impostor has taken over her body, colonized her somehow, as if a parasite is slowly eating away at her flesh. She feels this other woman’s presence like a negative, a dark other, penetrating her skin and leaving its imprint. At times she feels it dissolving her insides like an acid, burning away what’s left of herself, so that even after a standing ovation, she can still yield to an impulse to run to the bathroom and cry.
It has taken time, but she’s reconciled herself slowly to the exposure. The photographs and films, she finds, grow to have a life of their own, a shadowy existence, remote from her. She manages it for the most part with the help of her husband, who is also her manager, and who works hard to puncture the Hollywood bubble, preventing success from going to her head.
Nevertheless, when she’s invited along with Larry Adler and Jack Benny to help entertain the troops following the end of the war, she grabs the chance to escape, to rediscover herself, to breathe the reinvigorated air of freedom on faraway shores.
She hasn’t been to Europe since before Pia was born. It will be good for her and good for her career, enlarging her audience, Petter agrees. But when he comes in now and sees her contemplating the open wardrobes, sees the number of cases laid out on the bed and the number of dresses she’s filling them with, he asks, ‘How long is it you’re going for?’
She needn’t worry. He’s only teasing. He gives her a kiss on the forehead, warm and tender, though with a vaguely patronizing note mixed in – not so she minds, though, because that’s how he always is and she has grown used to it. She doesn’t take offence; in fact she finds it endearing. She responds with genuine affection even if there’s little heat in the embrace.
‘Don’t eat too much ice-cream,’ he says.
‘What will you do? Cut off my allowance?’
‘Don’t drink or smoke too much. It’s bad for your complexion.’
‘You could still come.’
‘You know how busy the hospital is.’
‘And check up on me night and day.’
‘I’ll leave that to Joe.’
Ingrid offers him a tolerant look. She knows he means well. He’s a dear, really. What would she do without him? He organizes everything, attends to the arrangements, ensures every last detail is taken care of. She never has to worry and she loves him for that. She pouts, touches his nose with her finger and runs the same finger down the length of his tie.
Before leaving the room, Petter can’t resist offering one last piece of advice. ‘And remember, don’t sign anything without me seeing it first.’
She goes on folding her clothes and nodding, saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ in a sing-song voice, though when it comes to closing the cases, she does so firmly and snaps the buckles tight.
A chain of hands ensures that her luggage arrives at the airport safe and on time.
She waits in the lounge with a hollow feeling in her stomach and remembers how she kissed Petter goodbye and hugged a tearful Pia tight. She has never been away from her daughter for this long before, nor has she ever been this far apart. She’s discussed it with Pia, who is happy that her mommy – Ingrid still can’t get used to the idea that her daughter has an American accent – is doing her bit for the war effort, doing her best to raise the morale of the troops. But it’s one thing, she knows, to contemplate a parting in the abstract; it’s another to sit in the airport and be confronted with separation as an actual fact. In this instant, Ingrid experiences a primitive need to be with Pia, an ache that for a few minutes approaches a consumptive hunger. She will miss her terribly. She pictures herself sitting next to her in bed on a Sunday morning, reading the newspaper, and remembers her smell, the exact aqua colour of her eyes, the golden freckle on her left iris. And she recalls how, in a desperately affectionate gesture, the girl had tried to copy her mother’s wink. As Ingrid thinks of this, involuntarily she repeats the way Pia had wrinkled her nose, closing both eyes at the same time as though taking a photograph.
In the morning, my head pounds, and I’m conscious of nothing but this fist knocking insistently at a door inside my skull.
Slowly, like something seeping towards me under the door, the realization comes: she’s gone. No note, no address, nothing. Only a dent in the pillow and a crimp in the sheets, a faint flavour of perfume to remind me she existed and that she was here at all.
I smile to remember last night. It hardly seems real. Then a darker thought enters my head.
Everything I own in the world is in this room. I sit up quickly, check my wallet, run through all the leaves. To my relief, no money is missing. And my cameras? There’s my bag on the floor under the bed next to my boots. In it there are forty-seven rolls of film still undeveloped, cartons of flashbulbs, a bundle of ID papers, the latest copies of Life and Picture Post. Packed in a separate compartment are silk stockings, French perfume, a silver hip-flask and a left-handed corkscrew. The cameras are still there. She’s taken nothing as far as I can see. Not even my helmet. There it is still, with one long blonde strand of hair snagged in the strap. The details of my blood group lie snug in the lining with my two last letters: one to my mother – God bless her Jewish heart – and the other to a girl, only the name changes quite a lot.
Is it my fault if I defend myself badly against women?
I collapse back onto the bed. My head thumps from the effort. My mouth is parched, my tongue like sandpaper. I turn my face to the wall and try to sleep some more, but it’s noisy up here on the top floor. The pigeons scrabble on the skylight, their tiny feet scratching the glass. Personnel carriers and trucks, each with a fat white star on the side, drone down the street, shaking the light fixtures, making the windows tremble in their frames. The sound of wooden-soled shoes echoes on the cobbles, clack clack clack, the Nazis having requisitioned all the leather during the war. A boy hawks newspapers enthusiastically in the square. It’s all so noisy. The howitzers and bombardments I could sleep through, but not all this.
A telephone sits on the bedside table. A walnut dresser and cane chair are the only other furniture apart from the bed. I don’t know what time it is or how long I’ve slept, though I suspect it’s already mid-morning. I stare at the telephone, willing it to ring, and for someone to say something, to tell me what happens next. It lies there like a dark mouth, silent.
My toes protrude pinkly from beneath the white sheet. I wriggle them. Proof, at least, that I am alive.
I drag myself out of bed.
Half a dozen birds take flight as I open the shutters. Their wings make a wap wap sound like a flat tyre. I lean my head out the window and breathe, taking a slice of high cool air.
Sunstruck, the city stretches below: its pavements and roofs, its pigeons and brick chimney pots, its horse chestnuts and benches. Military jeeps and vehicles move like wind-up toys; bicycles glide as if on rails.
A few minutes later I’m standing, a white towel wrapped around my waist, shaving foam framing my face, a cigarette plugged in the side of my mouth, holding a razor while I turn on the tap.
The pipes chug and clank loudly. Rust-coloured water dribbles miserably into the sink. This can’t be true. It’s less the colour that bothers me, more the fact that it’s cold.
I telephone through to reception.
‘If you want hot water, Monsieur,’ says the man, ‘then you need to stay at the Ritz.’
‘Tell the manager I’m very disappointed. I bet the Nazis had hot water when they were here.’ I sigh, wipe a clot of foam from the mouth of the telephone and put down the receiver without quite slamming it.
It takes ages to fill the tub with lukewarm water, though at least it runs clear after the first few spurts of orange.
The level sways when I step in. The water is tepid at best. A rash of goosebumps extends along my arms and legs. I pinch my nose and slide back until my head is submerged and the water closes over me. I hold my breath for as long as I can. It’s the best cure for a hangover I know – the best, that is, aside from an oxygen mask or a parachute jump at 6,000 feet. So I lie there, cold and motionless, my stomach hollow, my head still thick, the acid aftertaste of the wine mixing with the fact that I haven’t eaten to produce a burning sensation in my gut.
I surface with a gasp. I hold my palms against my face and push back my hair. Through damp eyelashes, I can see that the water bends my limbs but straightens the hairs on my chest and shoulders. I’m so hairy. Everyone says so. If I were an animal, they’d hunt me for my fur.
My father was the same. Until he blew his brains out that is, having accrued the kind of gambling debts that can’t be paid except with your life. I remember how the hair was plastered all over his body, his back like a mountain bear’s. It was never enough to protect him. That Hungarian gloominess would descend without warning and cling to him like a mist. Poor papa. I like to think he’d be proud to see one of his sons now in Paris, with an American press pass, a room at the Lancaster and his pictures in the magazines.
I’ve always liked to read in the tub. Where else can you get peace and quiet? When I have a book and I’m on the move, I tend to pull the pages out as I read them so as to lighten the load. But I don’t have anything with me, not even a Simenon. In the hotel room, someone has left a close-typed edition of War and Peace in English translation next to a French bible on the shelf.
I hold the pages with the ends of my fingers so as not to get them damp. The first ten pages start with a party. A society soirée. They end with the bare white shoulders and ample bosom of a woman called Hélène. She adjusts the diamond necklace at her exposed throat as she listens to a story. The heat of the blush that rises from her chest fails to infiltrate my body. The water grows cold, too cold to read much more.
Dressed and ready to face the world, I check myself in the mirror. I put on a smile, my best one. I tell myself I have the strength to continue, the stamina to go on. I take the stairs rather than the elevator. And when I step out the door of the hotel, I feel my heart lighten. My legs feel weightless. The sunlight hits me with the force of a blow.
On a two-day stopover in London before flying on to Paris, Ingrid consents to an interview with The Times.
She’s already flown from Los Angeles to New York and taken the long ocean voyage from New York to Southampton.
Something of the endless expanses of air and ocean she’s been exposed to, something of the vast distances and tilting horizon seem to have entered her, making her light-headed.
On the ship each morning she would stand at the stern, mesmerized by the long creamy wake unravelling like the train of a wedding dress. Always a strong swimmer, she recalled a time after her father died when her Aunt Mutti took her on a picnic to the lake, and she set out with a gentle breaststroke for an island a good half-mile away. She had never felt so lonely or at peace as at that moment on the verge of womanhood with her parents both dead, striking out for that far shore. Had she turned round, she might have seen the figure of her aunt reduced to a dot in the swarm of summer; she might even have heeded the calls for her return, the pleading with her not to do anything foolhardy or dangerous. But her aunt’s voice quickly diminished to a murmur, a distant hum indistinguishable from the insects. Having reached the island safely, she then swam back before twilight, and was startled to find her aunt in an advanced state of panic, convinced her niece had drowned.
It was this same sensation of remoteness, light with inconsequence, that she experienced each morning at the stern of the boat; and she feels something of that dreaminess now, sitting in the lounge of the Savoy hotel, sipping tea with an over-dressed journalist as he licks the tip of his pencil and writes down everything she says.
She’s used to doing interviews. She’s endured hundreds of them. Those conducted in Hollywood are always carefully scripted, her responses dictated virtually word-for-word by the studio. Here, though, it’s different. She feels an urge to speak her mind, as if it doesn’t matter what she says, being so far away; she can be candid and careless, and her words will simply disappear like smoke into the air.
She says she loves food but doesn’t use make-up. She says she doesn’t mind whether she appears on the stage or in films, as long as she is working. She admits that she’s shy, but declares that inside her there is a lion.
Asked why she chose to be an actress, she says she didn’t choose acting, acting chose her, but without it now she would stop breathing.
Of future film projects, she says she has to trust the voice inside her that tells her what to do.
Does she believe in God?
She says that God hasn’t exactly covered Himself in glory with the recent war.
The interviewer studies her before writing this down. Already she knows he won’t include it.
Asked what she thinks of Humphrey Bogart, her co-star in Casablanca, she says that it is possible to kiss a man and not know him, and this is what it was like with Bogart because he kept himself to himself, but in the film he looked at her with such longing that it makes her blush whenever she watches it now, and her husband was worried something might be going on.
She doesn’t say this last bit. But she thinks it, and the way the journalist shuffles uneasily in his chair makes it seem as if he has heard it, too.
She is quick to write him a note to thank him for his time, to compliment him on his professionalism, and to wish him well for the future.
The next day, her picture is featured prominently on the front page.
I sit with Irwin at one of the aluminium tables in an Art Deco café on the boulevard Saint-Germain: big smoky mirrors, burnished cutlery, glinting chandeliers.
The pâtisseries may be empty and the cakes just cardboard models; the menus may show less than half what was offered before the war and at more than twice the price, but the food still tastes wonderful. And that’s not all that stays the same.