A Basket of Ricotta

One afternoon last week, while the world's headlines featured nothing more exciting than the hydrogen bomb, Cinemactress Ingrid Bergman picked up the phone in her luxurious Rome apartment. She spoke calmly to tall, handsome Dr. Pier Luigi Guidotti, 32, the family physician of Italian Cinemaestro Roberto Rossellini. As she hung up, the doctor rushed over to drive her to Rome's most modern private clinic, the streamlined Villa Margherita. At 7 p.m., Ingrid gave birth to a plump, blue-eyed, 7-lb. 14-oz. boy.

Father Unknown. Only six weeks had passed since the loud report of Ingrid's expectancy (TIME, Dec. 26), and only a week since she had filed for a quick Mexican divorce from Hollywood Physician Dr. Peter Lindstrom, her husband of twelve years. It was just a year since the Swedish-born star, 34, had met the balding, 43-year-old Italian director in Hollywood and first talked of going to Italy to make Stromboli with him. It was just nine months since Dr. Lindstrom had spent two grim days in Sicily with Ingrid and Rossellini, trying to talk her out of her world-publicized romance and her demands for a divorce.

For two days last week Rossellini bustled in & out of the clinic with every appearance of a proud parent. Then, back on location outside Rome for his new film on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, friendly local peasants presented the director with their traditional gift to the father of a newborn son: a basket of ricotta, a cheese made from ewe's milk and eaten on coarse black bread in the open air. Munching happily, Rossellini told a newsman: "I am the father."

The infant, he said, will be called Roberto Ingmar (the Swedish masculine equivalent of Ingrid), and the birth registration will read: "Father unknown." This, Rossellini explained, is to cope with any possible attempt by Dr. Lindstrom to claim custody. As soon as he and Ingrid can be married, Rossellini added, he will formally give the child his name.

The Tot. Actress Bergman was in a chintz-decorated three-room clinic suite, the U.S. public learned from its front pages.* "She is so taken with the tot," glowed one dispatch. Said Dr. Guidotti: "Miss Bergman is one of the happiest mothers I have ever known . . . The baby is one of the healthiest and prettiest I ever delivered." Flowers soon filled one room of the suite, and congratulatory messages flooded in, many from the U.S. (among the notable well-wishers: Marion, Davies and Ernest Hemingway).

If Ingrid Bergman had found any of the privacy that her situation clearly called for, it was not the fault of newsmen, photographers and talkative clinic personnel. Reporters got hold of Ingrid's nursing schedule. Obstetrician Dr. Giuseppe Sannicandro gave Rome's radio audience a play-by-play account of the delivery ("We used the same sort of sedative that was administered to Rita Hay worth"). Three jeeploads of the celere, the Rome riot squad, were summoned to pull clambering reporters off the clinic wall and to guard not only the building but also Ingrid's room from photographers.

Picture Banned. Hollywood kept its comment down to whispers. Privately, most of the high movie brass professed to take a dim view of Actress Bergman's professional future. Only Colleen Townsend, the starlet who is reportedly quitting films to become a divinity student, spoke up. She recalled the Bible story of the woman taken in adultery: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." The first stone was promptly cast by 83-year-old Memphis Censor Lloyd T. Binford, who announced that he was banning Stromboli without seeing it, along with all other Bergman pictures. "She is a disgrace . . . to American women," he fumed. "I'm glad she's a foreigner."

A spokesman for RKO, which will rush Stromboli into a "saturation" release next week, loftily announced that "Miss Bergman's private life is of no concern to the studio." But Daily Variety noted that the studio had been concerned enough to move up the picture's release date when it heard "that Bergman had checked into a hospital." By a happy coincidence, the picture will now open the day after a Juarez court, if all runs on schedule, grants the divorce.

* Notable exception: the New York Times, which wrapped up the story in a four-paragraph item, buried it on the amusements page.

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