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| 165 7 “Family Togetherness” in Fifties Hollywood On December 12, 1949, Hedda Hopper was notably scooped by Louella Parsons, who announced that Ingrid Bergman was pregnant and by a man, Italian director Roberto Rossellini, who was not her husband. “I spent the day of the announcement rubbing egg off my face,” Hopper recalled, “because six months before I’d interviewed Bergman at the scene of the crime.” She had traveled to Rome, where Bergman and Rossellini were living while making Stromboli (1950), to confront Bergman about newspaper reports of a pregnancy. Bergman denied them. “Hedda, look at me. Do I look like I was going to have a baby?” “I’ve never seen her give a finer performance,” Hopper remembered. At the time, Hopper reported, “Ingrid declares she will bring suit against the Italian papers which said she was going to have a baby. I don’t blame her; there’s not a word of truth in it.” After Parsons broke the true story, Hopper barely acknowledged it. The next day she dedicated an entire column to Rossellini’s filming of Stromboli, with only a veiled reference to his romance and impending parenthood in her last line, “He sure got Bergman.”1 Hopper’s anger at being lied to, losing a major story, and an actress’s sexual transgressions meant she took the side of Bergman’s wronged husband in the ensuing divorce proceedings, gratified that after the property settlement “I don’t believe Ingrid will have enough left to pick up a check for a cup of coffee.” Then, when baby Robertino was born two months later in February 1950, Hopper contentiously claimed “the morals clause in every player’s contract can now be deleted.” She referenced Gilda (1946) star Rita Hayworth’s nearly simultaneous adultery and pregnancy with Prince Aly Khan, and concluded bitterly, “With Rita’s travels before becoming a princess and later a premature mother, and now Ingrid, that clause should be clipped.”2 Hopper’s fury contributed to a heated controversy over Bergman’s actions, which created “a state of panic in Hollywood.” Initially, executives at RKO 166 | “Family Togetherness” in Fifties Hollywood chastised Bergman and claimed her scandalous behavior would destroy her career and their finances, and her publicist warned her of protests and boycotts from pressure groups, such as the Catholic Legion of Decency. But then the studio decided to capitalize on Bergman’s notoriety in the advertising for Stromboli, which prompted Senator Edwin C. Johnson, Democrat of Colorado, to condemn her from the halls of Congress as “a powerful influence for evil.” Johnson also proposed legislation to police the private lives of motion picture performers to protect the public good, naming both Hayworth and Bergman as “Hollywood’s two current apostles of degradation.”3 To many observers, Bergman’s adulterous affair and illegitimate pregnancy were particularly shocking given her most recent starring role in Joan of Arc (1948). “Having seen Ingrid on the screen in Joan of Arc,” Hopper noted, “they’d come to imagine that some of that sainthood had rubbed off on her. She just couldn’t commit such a common sin!” Yet Hopper, as well as Parsons , had contributed to making Bergman a star, enthusiastically reviewing her film performances and contributing to her “canonization” as an ideal wife, mother, and homemaker after her arrival in Hollywood from Sweden in 1939.4 Public knowledge of Bergman’s private transgression stripped the happy façade from her family life, betrayed the “moral security” she offered audiences as Joan of Arc, and provided Hopper’s readers with a reference point—“the morals of Bergman and Hayworth”—to assess bad behavior among stars.5 The resulting controversy also revealed fears about the strength and security of the American family generally, as Cold War tensions grew in 1949 following the “fall” of China and the fallout from the Soviet nuclear explosion.6 In print and over the airwaves, Hopper helped to establish connections between the American family and the nation during the Cold War. While experienced in the private sphere, the family is defined in the public sphere and images of the family have political significance.7 These connections between personal, familial lives and public matters had long been a feature of U.S. culture, politics, and society. But in the latter half of the 1940s and during the 1950s, anxieties about the state of the American family and what it meant for the nation as a whole heightened, as historian Elaine Tyler May...

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