Modern Screen (Feb-Dec 1959)

Ingenue The magazine with an exciting new approach to the whole teenage world! ingenue offers teenage girls . . . • A personalized approach to all her problems. • Information on fashions, homemaking, sports, grooming and career-planning. • General news on entertainment, the arts and world events. ingenue goes to the heart of the teenage girl 76 ON SALE WHEREVER MAGAZINES ARE SOLD. 35f it came to Ingrid's playing Anastasia, he felt different. He hated the idea. But Ingrid "tired of being broke," ignored his feelings, went ahead with the picture. . . . "In Rome," she'd said, "I learned so much of warmth and love," but now she was in Paris, and the play Tea and Sympathy followed Anastasia, and there was no place for Rossellini in Ingrid's working life. He acknowledged this, harking back to — for him — happier moments. "The children were small, they cried for mama, and Ingrid came. Now the children grow older, they are not so dependent on her, and Ingrid becomes restless. So my wife and I are going our separate ways professionally. And things are as they are." Rossellini thought Anastasia was "terrible," and Tea and Sympathy was another thorn in his side. "She did not want to hurt me. She was kind, but she did want to play in Tea and Sympathy. I told her to do as she liked, I am a professional. I understand. I may not like it, but I do understand." Before he left on his fateful trip to India, Rossellini summed up his helplessness. "I don't have a sense of money. It's a grave error, no? They say I ruined my wife. What are you going to do when the whole world thinks of you as a monster?" The end was inevitable. In India, he met a woman who gave him back his sense of himself as a powerful, successful, fascinating man. He'd been perishing in the chill of his wife's shadow; now he stepped back into the sun. It's hard to ascribe praise or blame. Ingrid and Roberto have been good artists, and bad children. They've been careless people who lived for the moment, and others have paid the price for their wilfulness. One wonders if Robertino or little Ingrid or Isobella had a sense of something wrong during that last year of their parents' marriage. A success — and a failure In January of 1957, Ingrid flew to the United States to accept the Film Critics' Award for Anastasia. Again, there was Rossellini opposition. Again, Ingrid had her way. The day she left, Robertino came to her, his precious stone good luck charm in his hand. "Take it with you to America," he said. . . . That was the winter Ingrid won the Oscar, and lost her husband. The rumors from Bombay were many, and Ingrid raged. "The shabby way in which people treat my husband makes me sad. He's not a villain. He's nice. He's a considerate human with practically no vices. People are always trying to get us divorced, the idiots!" In July there was a gathering of all of Ingrid's children. For the first time in six years, Jenny Ann came to visit, and Ingrid, meeting the plane, said, "It's the happiest day of my life." When they walked out, that summer, people were kind. "Oh, we're so glad you came," they'd say to Jenny. "Your mother has waited so long for this visit — " Still Roberto stayed in India. On Ingrid's wedding anniversary, she'd had a stilted cable. "May you enjoy a long married life." You? she thought. Not we? On Robertino's birthday, Ingrid hired clowns from the circus, but the big thing had been the phone call from Bombay, and Robertino, wild with excitement, explaining across two continents that he'd made a drawing for his papa's return. "I sign it Roberto Number Two!" "How can you cause your wife more hearbreak?" Rossellini was asked. "I know my wife," said Roberto. "She is a strong woman, stronger than I in many ways. Remember, she did what she wanted to. I did not kidnap her, and we have had a good life together." In Italy, volatile Rossellini relatives made statements. "Ingrid is loved by us all. She is a great woman," they said. And some of them cried. But Ingrid's children didn't cry as, once again, they were uprooted. Their mother was going to make a movie in England. They were left in Rome with their father's sister, Marcella Mariani. Once Robertino got on the phone with his mother, begged to come to her. "I will learn English," he promised. "I will learn English so fast — " At Christmas, Ingrid got five days' vacation, and the Rossellinis decided they'd spend the holiday together, for the sake of the children. It was a strange Christmas. Roberto arriving at the house with an electric train, and Parisian dolls, and the house full of shouts, "Papa's back! Papa's back!" The children knew all the time Only later did Ingrid and Roberto discover that the children had known the truth, and had been pretending all day. In January of 1958, Ingrid went to Formosa to make The Inn of the Sixth Happiness; Roberto went back to Sonali Das Gupta; and, in Rome, a judge, noting how little the Rossellini children saw of their parents, considered putting them in the care of a state-appointed tutor. Within the year, however, after a quickie divorce, Ingrid married Lars Schmidt, a Swedish theatrical producer ("How lucky I was to find him. Poor man, I ruined his privacy") and her children had a home again. It was a place called La Grange Aux Moines, near the village of Choisel, outside of Paris. The fight was on The Schmidts were married o: eember 21st, in London, and they had Christmas morning with Ingrid's children. And then at noon Roberto's chauffeur came for them. "They had been told they could spend the holidays with him," Ingrid said. "They would have been terribly disappointed if I hadn't let them go." In January, there was another bombshell. Rossellini sued for custody of the children, basing his appeal on moral, religious and practical grounds. He said Ingrid had been "living together with Mr. Lars Schmidt," that she was Protestant (while the children had been baptized in the Roman Catholic church) and that it was a sacrifice for "the children to have to ride every day to and from the nearest Italian school, which is in Paris." Rossellini's objection to Schmidt was a trifle bizarre, considering his own colorful relationship with Madame Das Gupta while he was in India. The French courts stood by Ingrid, so Rossellini took his case to Italy. "I am an Italian citizen, and so are the children." Between hearings, he offered a compromise. He'd take Robertino, and let Ingrid keep the girls. Or he would take all three for six months, and she could have them for the other six. Ingrid said no, backed up, temporarily at least, by a Roman court. "I will not give him the children so he can give them to his sister!" And still the fight goes on, unsettled as this is written. . . . There was a time not long ago when Ingrid suffered a recurrent nightmare. She would dream of photographers "advancing on me, cameras pointed like machine guns, trampling on my children — " She wants to believe those nightmares are over. She wants to live at peace with her new husband, her growing children, the baby who's to come. A baby who will not be given the pain her other children had to endure. This is her chance. This is the one that counts. end