(2 of 6)
Nobody could argue the point. Her last three pictures had won her an international reputation. The Stockholm Daily News had named her as one of Sweden's ten outstanding women. It was only a year since she had led a fan-magazine poll as the most popular screen actress, any weight or country, in Sweden.* Although she was being sought by every major studio in Hollywood, it seemed to her a little worse than foolish to let anyone, at any price, try to improve on her life.
By that time, however, one of the cagiest men in one of the cooniest communities in the U.S. had seen Miss Bergman's Intermezzo. He usually got what he was after; and he was determined to get her. While calm Miss Bergman sat in Stockholm flicking off her wrist offers which nearly every actress in Europe would have rolled over and begged for, she reckoned without David O. Selznick. In that failure of reckoning began a sort of duel, and a sort of wooing, as rare in Hollywood as victorious talent.
Beauty & the Beast. It was simple enough, from Miss Bergman's point of view. Look at Charles Boyer since he went to the States, tiptoeing his great abilities across roles too thin to support a minimum human intelligence. Look at all the individual talents, as inimitable and irreplaceable as thumbprints, which had been turned into just so many highly decorative zombies. "Hollywood," she told the press, "has a queer way of taking an individual and fitting her into the American mold. I have worked hard to develop my style and I don't want anything to do with bathing suits and plucked eyebrows."
This was the sort of talk the Hollywood pashas had heard for years from' fourth-raters and sour-grape sideliners. If a proved professional talked like that it was just a come-on. The proper reaction was either to snort your opinion and move off or to up your offer. They upped their offers—and clonked in mild faints again as Miss Bergman again said, no thank you. But this sort of talk suddenly dazzled David Selznick with a new, if incredible, idea. The idea was that Miss Bergman meant precisely what she said. She was genuinely less interested in becoming one of the apotheosized queen bees in the dream hive of millions, less interested even in great wealth, than she was in getting good parts and doing them as well as she knew how without interference. That, accordingly, was the only basis on which to approach her. And on that basis, for twelve months, David Selznick sedulously stalked his prey.