The New Yorker:

From March 31, 1950

The all-out contest to get a photo of the actress’s child with Roberto Rossellini.

By Janet Flanner

It’s almost certainly a fact that when, with bewildered Italian help, the thirty-odd American newspaper correspondents and press photographers regularly operating here started what proved to be their unsuccessful twelve-day February siege of Ingrid Bergman, while she was lying abed in the Villa Margherita Clinic, she was, however unwillingly, the leading news story in the world. She and her infant, an invisible pair, pushed even President Truman and his hydrogen bomb onto the second page of hundreds of American newspapers that evidently were more interested in love. Now, eight weeks after the peak days, when an exclusive picture of her with the infant was enthusiastically calculated to be worth five million lire, or about eight thousand dollars, to anybody able to snap it, by hook or crook (nobody managed it), an unexclusive picture of the baby, solo, is rated by New York agency editors to be not worth the thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents it would cost to transmit it by radio. All babies, especially on second editorial thought, look alike, and a photograph of Robertino can be sent more cheaply and fast enough by air mail. So the Bergman news crisis, which started with its vital statistic at 7 p.m. on February 2nd in the Villa Margherita Clinic, on the Via di Villa Massimo—a crisis in which hundreds of thousands of cabled words were ticked out from here, in which Miss Bergman said nothing, and in which Rome seemed closer to Hollywood than to the Anno Santo—has finally died down, and the Roman American press is awaiting other statistics or events, such as the wedding and the baptism. Right now, or so American newspapermen have said to this correspondent—and Miss Bergman has said to this correspondent that she believes what they said to be true, because she has looked carefully out the windows of the Rossellini apartment on the Via Bruno Buozzi, where she is living, and can see no loitering cameramen—she could walk out of her apartment at any time without being met by a battery of photographers or reporters, such as were stationed at the hospital. Today they would have to be alerted.

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