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Still, the breakup "was a terrible nightmare," admits Liv. "It was so public. I felt everybody was looking at me. I don't know where you can hide your sorrows any more." Scandal magazines and newspapers hounded her, and reporters and photographers followed her every movement. One day, to get away from them, friends took her out the back door of a Copenhagen hotel, leaving her for a minute in an alley while they fetched a cab. "I was standing there in the garbage," she remembers, "and I felt it was really symbolic. Something died in me. I resolved it would never be the same again." Even at the worst, however, she was looking at herself in that invisible mirror. "I was crying floods of tears and I would think: "This makes me grow as an artist.' "
In her affair with Bergman, Liv resembled another famous Norwegian woman, Nora Helmer in Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879). Like Nora, Liv was loved and protected but also patronized. "I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald," said Ibsen's heroine to her husband. "But you would have it so." Like Nora, Liv rebelled. As Nora's husband commented shortly before she closed that famous door on her domestic life, "she is terribly self-willed, this sweet little person."
In his television series about marriage Bergman has used Liv to symbolize a woman's emerging consciousness. "Bergman is now starting to create a sort of new woman character," says Liv, "a woman who is really free and who can live without the help and support of a man."
Would Liv like to live without the help and support of a man? Yes and no. "You don't have to probe," she says testily when questions become too personal. "What do you think I feel when I am alone in my room, when there is nobody there? I am very lonely. I want to be in somebody's pocket, to be taken care of." She stops and shakes her head, letting her long blonde hair swirl around her like leaves in a sudden gust. "But then I want to be free too.
"What I need from a man is that he must love me. When I tell him that I want to quit acting and stay home and cook dinners, he must immediately say no." Why? "Because he should know that it is as a working woman that I am happy and can make him happy. He must believe that our relationship is forever and work for it, just as I want to believe it and work for it. And if it is not forever, then he must not be that sort of hateful person who will be inflamed at a breakup."