Isabella relives Ingrid shocker
PUSSSYKATT
GROWING up as Ingrid Bergman's daughter, a girl had to be pretty unshockable.
But Isabella Rossellini admits she was absolutely stunned when she learned her
mother had a passionate romance with famed combat photographer Robert Capa.
Isabella, who often crops up on the Manhattan party scene and in the films of
mentor David Lynch, almost never talks about Bergman, the woman driven out of
Hollywood (and America) for having an adulterous affair with Isabella's father,
Roberto Rossellini.
But she speaks out in an essay penned for the catalog of "Magna Brava: Magnum's
Women Photographers," which just opened at the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery in Edinburgh. Capa was the renowned photo agency's biggest star, so
maybe Isabella figured this was a good occasion to go public about her thoughts
of him.
She says that shortly before her mother's 1982 death from cancer, a nervous and
teary Bergman handed her the manuscript of herautobiography, "My Story," so she
could read the facts before a new wave of gossip started.
"Most of it I already knew, with the exception of one event," Isabella recalls.
"Mother had been in love with Robert Capa. They had had a passionate affair."
From the manuscript, she learned her mom had been prepared to leave her then
husband, Peter Lindstrom, to marry Capa. "But Bob did not want to marry. He
knew he was going to die in one of those terrible wars he photographed [and
indeed he did, in Indochina in 1954, killed by a mine]," Isabella writes.
"I was stunned," she says of the affair. "Bob Capa had been one of my heroes.
His friend Chim Seymour was often at our house, photographing all of us. Chim's
photos are, for me, the memory of my family at one of its happiest moments,
when Mom and my father, Roberto Rossellini, were still in love."
Isabella thinks her mother was attracted to both men through their work. "Dad's
films were like Bob's stills in motion," she says.
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