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At the same time he is a shrewd entertainer who admits he will stop at nothing to keep his audiences awake. In three of his pictures he has shown a Shakespearean fascination with the life of the strolling player, the poor mountebank who, "like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven as make the angels weep." Clearly, he sees himself as such an ape. Says Bergman: "I perform conjuring tricks with a conjuring apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any performer in history would have given anything to use it. I am really a conjurer, and in my work I am guilty of deceit."
The Two Faces. The contemplative and the jackanapes are two faces of a deeply separated nature. In Bergman's case, moreover, the split is a thing of more than psychological interest. Since he insists that he himself is the principal subject matter of his movies, the split in his character is a key not only to his life but to his work.
Many Swedes, wrote Playwright Hjalmar Söderberg, are torn between "the desire of the flesh and the eternal loneliness of the soul," between short, delirious summers and interminable bitter winters of deep-country solitude. But Bergman's sense of inner division is so strong that once (or so he claims) he walked into a room, saw a standing figure, realized with terror that the figure was himself, his Doppelgaenger. Even the two sides of his face seem startlingly unrelated. The right side looks strangely dead, the left side vividly alive. And he can see much better with his left eye, hear more keenly with his left ear.
On the one hand he has a magical, green-eyed charm, on the other a maniacal temper; in his furies he rips phones off the walls, and once in a TV station he hurled a chair through a glass control booth. Bergman can be stuffily bourgeois, particularly in business, and wildly bohemian, especially with women. His steamy affairs have long been the talk of Scandinavia, and he has been married four times.— Few women ever really recover from the Bergman experience, and his ex-wives have not remarried. ("Too tired," explains one.) But they remain his friends, as do his former mistresses, many of them movie actresses.
The Icebergman. Yet the burning lover, both Bergman and his women agree, has a heart of ice. "The Icebergman," some have called him, and he himself has often confessed that he cannot really feel. About women he once mused: "All of them impress me. I would like to kill a couple of them, or maybe let them kill me." An author who knows him well be lieves that "there is no tenderness or consideration in the man. Sometimes you feel as if inside him there is no one at home."