Lunch with Pia

Sunset over the Hudson on a very hot summer day. 7:30 PM. Photo: JH.

Friday, July 17, 2009. It was very hot in New York yesterday. Summer in July. Humid. The weatherman has been forecasting thundershowers and a break. We’ll see.

This past Tuesday, as reported here, I had lunch at Michael’s with Pia Lindstrom, the longtime television journalist and entertainment reviewer who has a new radio show on Sirius called “Pia Lindstrom Presents” every Sunday night at 7:30 and rotating on the Sirius schedule through the week.


	DPC and Pia Lindstrom at Michael's.

Our meeting was arranged by her public relations people on her new show. I was especially interested in talking to her because we are of the same generation and, as the daughter of Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish-born movie star, Pia had a famous childhood with an infamous (at the time) subtext.

Ingrid Bergman was a young Swedish actress when she was seen in a Swedish film by an American literary agent named Kay Brown who worked closely with film producer David O. Selznick – the man who produced “Gone With the Wind.” It was Kay Brown, in fact, who first urged Selznick to read and buy the book.

Brown had been in Sweden on business when she saw Bergman on film, and she urged Selznick to bring her out to Hollywood for a screen test.

Selznick took Kay Brown’s advice and Ingrid Bergman began a major film career, starring ultimately in “Intermezzo,” “Casablanca,” “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” “Gaslight,” Notorious,” “Anastasia,” “The Visit,” among many others. She won three Academy Awards (was nominated for seven), two Emmys, and the first Tony Award (for Best Actress) in 1947. She ranks with the American Film Institute as the four greatest female film stars of all time after Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Audrey Hepburn and ahead of another Swede, Greta Garbo (fifth).

Pia and her husband Jack Carley.

Pia with Byron Janis and Maria Cooper Janis.

Though she had a slight foreign accent, Ingrid Bergman was unusually American in her physical presence which brought her a highly idealized image to movie going audiences. This image was shattered, when in the late 1940s, she left her Hollywood career, her neurosurgeon husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, the country and her ten year old daughter Pia, for an Italian film director named Roberto Rossellini.

What today seems ordinary in circumstances (think Brad and Angelina), was a great scandal in post-War America. The country (fanned by the press) was so up in arms about the affair that there was even discussion in Congress of deporting her from the United States and banning her re-entry. In the press, the most damning issue was the abandonment of her 10-year-old child Pia, who remained with her father in Beverly Hills.

Ingrid Bergman, her three Rossellini children and Pia.

In the short term, it was a bad career move for Bergman – whose first film with Rossellini was “Stromboli terra di Dio” (released in America as “Stromboli”) in 1950. American audiences turned away from her. And while she continued working, divorced Pia’s father, married Rossellini and had three more children, her career waned seriously for several years until she was offered the starring role in “Anastasia” in the 1950s. This provided a triumphant return to American audiences and she won her second Academy Award (in 1956) for it.

One thing about interviewing a person like Pia Lindstrom who has been in the public eye for most of her life, is you know you can ask them anything because someone else already has. They know how to handle the questions.

Mother and Daughter Reunion.

Children of famous stars and very prominent public figures have a unique experience in our culture. For the child, the parent’s fame (and fortune) and its advantages are very often greatly outweighed by its disadvantages. The name recognition rolls out red carpets and provides impressive entrée that can be useful, especially if the child is bright and clever. On the other hand, the parent him or herself may have enough personal issues having to do with ego, career and money as to make the child’s life quite obviously not the priority.


	Dr. Peter Lindstrom and his then wife Ingrid Bergman.

	The iconic pair, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in "Casablana."

I remember the Bergman-Rossellini scandal from when I was a kid because of Pia Lindstrom. The break-up of a marriage meant nothing to this child but the thought of losing your mother, being “left” by your mother, made a deep impression. I grew up with a mother who had been orphaned at a young age and I was well aware of the distress and emotional loss this can create.

So I asked Pia Lindstrom what it was like? Did she go with her mother? No, she stayed with her father who at that point in his young life was the most famous cuckold in the world, and very bitter about it. Did she see her mother, did her mother have visitation rights? No, she never saw her mother again until she was 18.

In the meantime, she grew up in Beverly Hills which in those days was a very small village with neighborhoods of famous stars and their families. Pia’s best friend growing up was Maria Cooper, (now a lifelong friend) the daughter of Gary Cooper who, Pia learned many years afterwards, had once had an affair with her mother.

Beverly Hills in those days had a bridle path that ran down the center of Sunset Boulevard and people rode their horses all the way out to the Palisades. It was also a working town with actors under contract to studios and sometimes six day work weeks.

The glamour that the world saw on the screen and in black and white news photos was staged much like charity galas are today, but with the specific objective of publicity. Family lives were often typically all-American, as were family troubles.

I asked Pia what was most difficult for her as a child after her mother had left. It wasn’t, firstly, her mother’s “abandonment” (my word, not hers) but rather her name.

Pia at that time in America was a very unusual name and she was the only person she knew who had it. So whenever she entered a room of new people, everyone knew who she was and what happened to her mother and father’s marriage. The child feels the embarrassment.

With Charles Boyer in "Gaslight."

When she was 18 it was arranged for her to go Europe to see her mother again. By that age, eight years later, now a young woman, it was something she was curious about.

Her father saw her to the airport. I asked her how he felt about her making this trip. She said that her step-mother later told her that when they were at the airport and she kissed her father good-bye and walked to the plane, he was disappointed that she never turned around, before boarding the plane, for that one last wave good-bye. His child had left too.

Reunion with her mother seems to have run smoothly and quickly. This mother, she quickly learned, was fun to be with. Bergman’s apparent lack of maternity with her small child was replaced easily by a woman who loved the company of her daughter the young woman.

With Gary Cooper in "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

A screen shot from Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious," co-starring Cary Grant.

Pia’s reunion with her mother was also a return to her mother’s world and life. It was through that connection in Rome when she was in her early 20s that she met a public relations man named Henry Rogers (later Rogers & Cowan in Hollywood) who offered her a job promoting Fiat cars in America. Pia’s job was to drive around the country (for two and half months) talking to press and giving radio interviews about her experience. That experience led to her first broadcasting job in San Francisco, and what has, like her mother, become a lifelong career.

I asked her how she came to terms with her mother’s choice to leave her behind when she went off with a new man. Pia was philosophical about it. At this age now, she can easily consider her mother as a young woman. Her mother, she said, had been orphaned at two. She was taken in by aunts who also died before she was a teenager. She was quite used to being on her own. She once questioned why people put so much emphasis on the psychology of childhood “when it is the shortest time in a life.”

Pia Lindstrom has two sons of her own and they lived with their mother until they were old enough to make their own way. She had the good fortune to have a good father who despite his own heartbreak was a solid man who looked after his child well. She grew up in a familiar environment (show business) and made friendships that have lasted a lifetime.

Gordon Parks' portrait of Bergman on Stromboli.

Her new show, “Pia Lindstrom Presents” on Sirius is about books. I asked her why books? I soon learned that she, like me, loves books, all kinds of books and that she loves learning.

After lunch we walked a few blocks before departing company. We talked about books and why she chose the ones she chose to read and to cover. I soon learned that she has the curiosity of a scientific mind as well as that of a dramatist, and that has served her well in life. A combination, if you will, of her parents.

After we said good-bye I was still thinking about Pia Lindstrom’s life, still from the perspective of my own childhood. It was apparent that she’d worked her way out of her difficulties in childhood with her curious mind. It was such that when she first saw her mother again, she found the older woman curious and fun and interesting, and someone she wanted to be around. Mother.

Enter your email address below to subscribe to NYSD's newsletter. It's free!

This Sunday night at 11 PM, JH and I are being interviewed by Peter Klein on "Tolerance Freedom and Philanthropy" on WOR 710 AM, or streaming at WOR710.com.

Comments? Contact DPC here.