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Culture Shock. Until she finds a man who can put her in his pocket and also let her out, Liv's involvements are few—and quiet. There is a French writer in her recent past; in the U.S. she has seen Warren Beatty a few times, but he does not appear to be the someone whom Liv "cares about very much" right now. "Going to bed is something serious," she says. "I don't want to have shared it with too many." Liv devotes much of her attention to Linn, who, with a nanny, travels to her locations, and she spends as much time as she can at her house in Norway. Built in Norwegian style with a veranda warmed by a fireplace, the house is a haven where she can cook her favorite Chinese dishes, read and muse on the profound culture shock that Hollywood represents for her.
"It's so easy to get spoiled," she worries. "I love the cars and the roses and the champagne, and my mother is just floating with joy. But I feel uneasy. You get too used to it. You count your values and one day you begin to ask: 'Why didn't they send me roses today?' "
Even before Hollywood, she was worried that her life was too good. "My work, everything has gone so well," she says. "I feel guilty about this sometimes. I feel the pendulum will swing back and I will be penalized for my good luck. There is a destiny. I think the life I am leading has to have a conclusion, and I think that conclusion will be bad." She sometimes predicts that she will finish her life paralyzed or crippled, old and alone and above all unloved, with nothing but her books to keep her company. Perhaps it is in hopes of warding off a crippling thunderbolt that she still resists being a star, plays down her fame, dresses unremarkably. "You look just like Liv Ullmann," Oslo store clerks often tell her. "Do you think so?" she always replies. "That's what everybody says."
To Be a Woman. If Liv is headed for a bad end, one would have a hard time proving it by Hollywood. Not that the film colony is blind to the pitfalls that surround her. She is still unfamiliar to mass audiences in the U.S. For every Garbo or Ingrid Bergman before her, there have been dozens of European actresses who have not traveled well. While she was protected by Ingmar Bergman, she had no real chance to make career mistakes. Since being on her own she has made at least two: she signed up for The Night Visitor, a forgettable thriller, and, worse, she threw herself wholeheartedly into a dreadful costume epic called Pope Joan. Her Hollywood agent, Paul Kohner, admits, "It's hard to say yet whether she has any script judgment."
Meanwhile Liv is trying to make sense of it all in her usual way: by describing it in diary-like essays. She scribbles constantly—between takes, in the evenings, on vacations—and hopes to put together a book, part of which is already in the hands of an Oslo publisher. "I want to write about what it feels like to be a woman in this century, where everything has changed," she says, "about what I feel inside myself, having a child and not being married; about my childhood, what is left and what has disappeared. I would call the book The Change."