City of Nets Page 22

  It was Buckner, though, who conceived the flashback structure that began with an almost godlike President Roosevelt, nameless and filmed only from behind, presenting the aging Cohan with a medal and thus enabling him to tell his inspiring story, and thus making that story an allegory of innocent America catapulted once more into the sordid conflicts of Europe. But it was Cagney, of course, who carried the whole movie. Twice, he sprained an ankle as he struggled to master that oddly stiff-legged way in which Cohan danced, but his strutting performance of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” is still marvelous. “A proud and feverish characterization,” as one critic put it. And even the scene in which Cagney sits at the piano and dabbles at the theme that will eventually become “Over There”—even that is strangely moving, strange because it is so obvious and so mawkish, but perhaps we were all mawkish in 1942. Cagney naturally won an Academy Award, and when he accepted the statue, he had the wit to say, “Don’t forget to say that it was a good part, too.”

  There had been many liberties taken, however, and Warners worried about Cohan’s approval. The studio shipped a projector and a screen in that April of 1942 to the firehouse in Monroe, New York, and there both Cohan and his second wife, Agnes, sat in their wheelchairs and watched. The cancer-ridden Cohan had to be escorted from the room several times to relieve himself, but when it was all over, Agnes Cohan was so captivated by Cagney’s impersonation that she said to Cohan, “Oh, George, you were fine. And I always knew I was ‘Mary’ to you.”

  Warners had planned to stage the gala premiere on July 4 (Cohan really was, as Cagney sang, “a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the fourth of July”), but Cohan was so sick that the studio advanced the premiere to May 29, and the opening-night audience bought six million dollars in war bonds. “As our soldiers and sailors depart to fight on the seven seas and five continents . . .” Howard Barnes wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “what could be more timely than to have recalled for us the career of America’s lustiest flag-waver?”

  It was typical of Warners to assign Yankee Doodle Dandy to a tall and rather handsome Hungarian director who had never mastered more than the rudiments of English. Michael Curtiz had been born Mihaly Kertész, and his background was very Hungarian. The son of either a wealthy architect or a poor carpenter, depending on which press release could be believed, he either was or was not a strongman (or perhaps an acrobat) with a touring circus, then served in the Austrian artillery (or cavalry) in World War I, then organized Hungary’s first film studio. Harry Warner heard praises of a Curtiz film made in Germany, Moon of Israel, so he signed him up and brought him to America in 1927. One of the legends is that Curtiz was gratified to see flags and fireworks welcoming him to New York. “All this for me?” he asked. “Sorry, Mike,” said Warner, “it’s the fourth of July.”

  If Curtiz knew little about America, he was a phenomenally hard worker, and he had a certain talent for whipping up scenes of action, crowds, battles. He helped make a star out of Errol Flynn in Captain Blood (1935), and then went on to make The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Robin Hood (1938), and six other Flynn epics. It was in The Charge of the Light Brigade that Curtiz delivered his famous command for a herd of riderless horses by shouting, “Bring on the empty horses!” David Niven, who made that the title of his Hollywood memoirs, wrote that he and Flynn both doubled up guffawing at Curtiz’s order. Their laughter did not please the director. “You lousy bums,” Curtiz shouted, “you and your stinking language . . . You think I know fuck nothing . . . well, let me tell you—I know fuck all!”

  And there was more. Hal Wallis insisted that Curtiz once described Bette Davis as “the flea in the ointment and a no good sexless son of a bitch.” Less belligerent was his request to an actress to “sit a little bit more feminine.” Or “Watch me, I’ll give you the cue a feet before.” And to a pair of lovers: “Come a little closer together apart.” And to an assistant returning from an unsuccessful errand: “Next time I send some fool for something I go myself.”

  Not until 1940 did Curtiz belatedly go back to New York to visit some of the scenes that had appeared in his movies—Broadway, Times Square, Madison Square Garden. He had dinner at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant and then wandered around to look at pictures on the walls and eavesdrop on conversations at the bar. “It is not the way I pictured it,” he told a reporter from the Herald-Tribune. “I thought it would be more intimate and filled with literati.”

  None of this innocence really mattered very much, for Curtiz kept laboring away at whatever outpouring of patriotism Warners assigned him. Yankee Doodle Dandy came to seem almost pacifist compared to Curtiz’s bugle-blowing version of Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army. But Curtiz could also do comedies or thrillers or whatever anyone wanted—he eventually made seventy-four pictures for Warners, ranging from Angels with Dirty Faces to Life with Father—and when the exhibitors polled by Film Daily named Curtiz the top director of the 1942–43 season, one of the main reasons was that he had somehow concocted, out of an unlikely script and an unwilling cast, the most romantic wartime romance ever filmed.

  Out of somewhere in the jungle of the story-buying process had come an unproduced play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by two unknown dramatists named Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. “Just before war broke out in Europe,” according to Hal Wallis, “they had visited a nightclub in the south of France, called La Belle Aurore, a gathering place for raffish expatriates, where a black pianist played the blues.” The two of them had turned this scene into a melodrama about “Rick Blaine, a tough American running a nightclub in Casablanca; Sam, his black piano player; Captain Louis Renault, the French prefect of police; and Ilsa Lund, Rick’s former girlfriend, involved with a Czech underground leader named Victor Laszlo. . . .”

  Several studios had rejected this tale (indeed, when someone tried the experiment of resubmitting an outline of the story to all the major studios a few years ago, they all rejected it all over again), but Jack Warner decided to buy it, for a princely twenty thousand dollars* because he thought it might make another Algiers, with Hedy Lamarr again, and George Raft as Rick. Raft showed the same judgment he had shown on The Maltese Falcon: he refused the part.* Warners had a lot of contract players to keep busy, however, and so the studio executives began considering new possibilities. Dennis Morgan might play Rick, and Ann Sheridan could be Ilsa. And Ronald Reagan, who had just co-starred with Miss Sheridan in Kings Row and had not yet gone off to war, could play the part of the Czech underground leader, Victor Laszlo.

  Wallis called in the Epstein twins to write a script, and then turned back to the question of casting. The man he wanted for Rick, he finally decided, was Humphrey Bogart, but Bogart was irritated at playing another role that had been rejected by Raft. Besides, Warners had promised to loan Bogart to Columbia for a picture called Sahara, in exchange for Harry Cohn’si promise to provide Cary Grant to Warners for Arsenic and Old Lace, and now Cohn kept switching the starting dates for Sahara.

  Wallis also encountered problems in signing up the heroine, Ingrid Bergman. She had made a deep impression on him as the pianist in Intermezzo, her first American movie—who could have seen her in Intermezzo and not been deeply impressed?—but she was under personal contract to the most possessive of owners, David Selznick, and what she really wanted was a chance to play Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Her relationship with Selznick had begun almost by accident. A Swedish elevator boy who worked at 230 Park Avenue in New York, the offices of Selznick’s New York representative, Kay Brown, told Miss Brown one day that his parents had been overwhelmed by a new Swedish movie called Intermezzo, and by its twenty-one-year-old heroine. Kay Brown dutifully went to a screening and dutifully reported to her boss that this young actress was “the beginning and end of all things wonderful.” Selznick was accustomed to her effusions (she was the one who had vainly urged him to buy Gone With the Wind). He told her to buy the story, not the actress; she bought both.

  Selznick was perh
aps the only man in America who could have greeted the radiant young Ingrid Bergman on her arrival in Hollywood by saying, “God! Take your shoes off.” She told him that it wouldn’t do any good, since she was five feet eight inches tall, with or without shoes. Selznick sighed and started the customary assertions of authority. “You realize your name’s impossible,” he said. Nobody could pronounce Ingrid, and Bergman sounded too German.* “There’s obviously trouble with Germany coming up, and we don’t want anyone to think we’ve hired a German actress.” Selznick thought that “Berriman” might make a better name. Or, although her married name of Lindstrom wouldn’t do, perhaps “Lindbergh” might capitalize on the popularity of the aviator. (Selznick seemed not to realize, or not to care, that Lindbergh was now prominent in the isolationist America First movement.) “Maybe you could take that name?” Selznick asked.

  Miss Bergman resisted all this. She said that her name was Ingrid Bergman, and that anyone who couldn’t pronounce it would have to learn. Selznick ruminated on that for a while—he had invited her to stay in his home, but this midnight supper was his first appearance there since her arrival—and then he made a new pronouncement: “Well, we’ll discuss that in the morning. Now what about your makeup, because your eyebrows are too thick, and your teeth are no good, and there are lots of other things. I’ll take you to the makeup department in the morning and we’ll see what they can do. . . .”

  Miss Bergman’s response was exemplary. She quit. “I’d rather not do the movie,” she told Selznick as he kept munching. “We’ll say no more about it. No trouble of any kind. We’ll just forget it. I’ll take the next train and go back home.” Selznick was impressed, or amused, or something. He decided to turn Miss Bergman’s intransigence into a promotion of his own. “You are going to be the first ‘natural’ actress,” he told her. “Nothing about you is going to be touched. Nothing altered.” Actually, Selznick was overwhelmingly busy with Gone With the Wind, and so the remake of Intermezzo remained relatively free from his interference, and it did very well. “What star,” asked a young English movie critic named Graham Greene, “has made her entrance with a highlight gleaming on her nose-tip? The gleam is typical of a performance which doesn’t give the effect of acting at all but of living—without make-up. . . .”

  Miss Bergman went cheerfully back to Sweden after Intermezzo, then returned to Hollywood with the start of the war, and found that Selznick had nothing for her to do. The producer had gone into a complicated kind of funk, convinced that nothing could match his triumph in Gone With the Wind (plus Rebecca in 1940). He could not bring himself to make another movie. He gambled and drank. Hemming and hawing over various projects, he lived on the stars whom he had made his personal properties, renting them out to various studios at considerable profit. He owned not only Ingrid Bergman but Vivien Leigh and Joan Fontaine and even Alfred Hitchcock. “I couldn’t understand what there was to be proud of in getting a sum many times these people’s salaries and not sharing with them,” Mrs. Selznick later observed. “It was not nice money, not our kind. . . .” Selznick knew better. Like his brother Myron—not to mention his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer—he knew that all successful Hollywood people lived on other people. When one of his protégés complained that Myron took only 10 percent while David took everything, David just shrugged.

  He rented Ingrid Bergman to Columbia to make Adam Had Four Sons, a flop, and to M-G-M to make Rage in Heaven, a modest success, written by Christopher Isherwood, and then to M-G-M again for its clumsy version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Not an incandescent career, so far, and yet the appeal of the young Ingrid Bergman was irresistible. “She was,” said Hal Wallis, looking back on the preparations for Casablanca, “the only actress with the luminous quality, the warmth and tenderness for the role.” Jack Warner worried about what he would have to do to get her away from Selznick. He summoned the Epsteins, who had not yet written the script, and told them to go and persuade Selznick that they had written a superlative story for her. “We said we didn’t know what to say,” Julius Epstein recalled later, “but Warner told us to make up something, anything, just bring back Bergman. Phil and I were ushered into Selznick’s office, and Selznick was eating a bowl of soup. I got things started by saying it was a romantic melodrama with a sinister atmosphere. Dark lighting and a lot of smoke . . . crooks, refugees pouring in, a mysterious man who runs a nightclub. I said, ‘Oh, hell, it’s a lot of junk like “Algiers.” ’ Selznick slapped the desk top and said, ‘That’s all I need to know, you’ve got Bergman.’ ”

  The stars were by no means the only problems. Wallis wanted a woman—specifically Lena Horne, or Hazel Scott, or perhaps Ella Fitzgerald—as the singer in Rick’s place. Nothing came of that. The Warners executives finally chose Dooley Wilson, who couldn’t sing or play the piano, so they determined to give him lessons, then decided that they preferred him as he was. They also found that he was owned by Paramount and on loan to M-G-M, and they had to buy him for $3,500 a week, which was $375 more than they were paying Ingrid Bergman.

  Everybody suddenly became absurdly expensive. For the trivial part of a waiter in Rick’s Café, Warners had to increase S. Z. Sakall’s pay to $1,750 a week. Peter Lorre, who was owned by Warners but on loan to Universal, had to be retrieved at a cost of $2,750 per week. Sydney Greenstreet, who, since The Maltese Falcon, had become almost mandatory in any scene of international intrigue, demanded and got $3,750 per week for a minor part as the owner of the Blue Parrot Café. Claude Rains, a free lance, got $4,000 to play the Vichy police chief. And for Conrad Veidt, as the evil Major Strasser, M-G-M had to be paid $5,000 a week, almost twice the cost of Ingrid Bergman.

  And there was still no script. The Epsteins had suddenly been called to Washington to work on a war project, which eventually became Frank Capra’s series, Why We Fight, and so Warners called in Howard Koch to finish Casablanca. Koch was an amiable and conscientious writer with some impressive credits. As a novice playwright, he had gone to work for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and written the sensational radio script for the Martian invasion in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. In Hollywood, he had written The Sea Hawk for Errol Flynn, The Letter for Bette Davis, and Sergeant York for Gary Cooper—and now this. “I had inherited from the Epsteins excellent material, some in sequence, some not,” Koch recalled, “which I assumed contained what was useful from the original play [which seems to mean that Koch never read it]. However, there was still much work to be done.”

  Even though Casablanca had never been considered a major production, all those actors’ contracts created considerable pressure. As soon as Koch finished a few pages, the studio had them mimeographed and sent to various departments—the designers, the costumers, and, of course, the actors. When Koch was about halfway through, and Curtiz had already started shooting, Koch was surprised to receive from the mimeograph machine several pages of script that he had never seen before. Unknown to him, the Epsteins had returned from Washington and been reassigned to the project. Producer Wallis also called in his old friend Casey Robinson to strengthen Paul Henreid’s role as Laszlo, and Henreid later recalled that Albert Maltz worked on the film but got no screen credit. Koch, an ardent liberal, gave a political twist to the portrait of Vichyite authority, but it was Curtiz who somehow assembled all the pages coming from all directions and continued shooting. When Koch protested that some of the new episodes were illogical, Curtiz retorted: “Don’t worry what’s logical. I make it go so fast no one notices.”

  The expensive cast was even more unhappy. Ingrid Bergman fretted over the fact that nobody seemed to know how the movie was going to end. Would she stay with Bogart or fly away with Henreid? If nobody could tell her that, which of the two was she supposed to be really in love with? “Just play it, well . . . in-between,” Curtiz told her. “It was ridiculous,” Miss Bergman said later. “Just awful. . . . Every day we were shooting off the cuff. Every day they were handing out the dialogue and we were trying to make some sense of it. No one kne
w where the picture was going.”

  Bogart seemed to be angry all the time. He not only disliked the script but he was getting frequent telephone calls from his wife, Mayo, who accused him of courting Ingrid Bergman and threatened to kill him. It was this ill-suppressed rage that provided the sting to his performance, provided the sarcastic contempt in some of the lines he made famous, like “I came to Casablanca for the waters.” Claude Rains, as the Vichyite police official, played the victim perfectly: “The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.” And Bogart: “I was misinformed.”

  It may be, in fact, that the unhappiness of the whole cast was what made Casablanca such a triumph. Ingrid Bergman’s uncertainty about which of the two heroes she was supposed to love was not a problem, as she thought, but the essential point in the character she was playing. And her anxiety about the possibility of playing Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls—which had just been assigned to, of all, people, Vera Zorina—helped give her portrayal of Ilsa a marvelously distraught quality. As for Paul Henreid, who complained bitterly that no Resistance leader would wander around Vichyite Casablanca in a white suit, he succeeded precisely because of the slightly pretentious unworldliness implicit in that white suit. Even Max Steiner, assigned to compose the score, was unhappy. He hated “As Time Goes By.”