Seducing Ingrid Bergman
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The beautiful Casablanca star, the world's greatest war photographer, and the secret love affair that would change their lives forever . . . in Chris Greenhalgh's Seducing Ingrid Bergman
June 1945. When Ingrid Bergman walks into the lobby of the Ritz hotel in Paris, war photographer Robert Capa is enchanted. From the moment he slips a mischievous invitation to dinner under her door, the two find themselves helplessly attracted. Played out against the cafés and nightclubs of post-war Paris and the parties and studios of Hollywood, they pursue an intense and increasingly reckless affair.
But the light-hearted Capa, who likes nothing more than to spend his mornings reading in the tub and his afternoons at the racetrack, is not all that he seems. And Ingrid offers the promise of salvation to a man haunted by the horrors of war, his father's suicide, and the death of a former lover for which he blames himself. Addicted to risk, Capa must wrestle his devils, including gambling and drink, and resist an impulse to go off and photograph yet another war.
Meanwhile, Ingrid, trapped in a passionless marriage and with a seven-year-old daughter to bring up, must court scandal and risk compromising her Hollywood career and saintly reputation if their love is to survive. With their happiness and identities at stake, both Capa and Ingrid are presented with terrible choices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Slipstreaming behind The Paris Wife and any number of other fact-based love stories that use the City of Light as a backdrop, this middling novel from Greenhalgh (Coco Igor) centers on the real-life love affair between combat photographer Robert Capa and Hollywood movie star Ingrid Bergman at the end of WWII. He's with his good friend, writer Irwin Shaw, and she's about to start a USO tour of Europe. After meeting at the Ritz Hotel, the two fall helplessly in love. The romance is not without tension, since Bergman is married and Capa is not used to commitment. The affair continues after Bergman returns to Hollywood to film Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, but can it survive Capa's growing dissipation and Bergman's mounting guilt? The author dutifully fills in Capa's past to explain his Gypsy-like existence and Ingrid's unhappy domestic life with a controlling husband to show her need for real love. In the end, Greenhalgh doesn't find anything convincingly truthful in this true story.