Twelve Desperate Miles (19 page)

A veteran contract player at Warner, Humphrey Bogart, was signed to play Rick Blaine, the café owner. Bogart had twenty years of acting experience, eleven of those making movies in Hollywood; but he had only recently become a star at the studio, with the release of
The Maltese Falcon
. Casting him as Rick Blaine was one of the simplest aspects of Wallis’s job. Bogart exuded the sort of electric combination of barely stifled passion and lip-curled cynicism that described Rick Blaine. Rumors that Ronald Reagan was considered for the part were just that.
Wallis never seriously considered anyone but Bogart.

Ingrid Bergman, in contrast to her costar, was one of the freshest faces in Hollywood. Just twenty-six years old when she was hired to play Ilsa, Bergman had been signed to a contract by David Selznick, the producer of
Gone with the Wind
, after he saw her in the Swedish film
Intermezzo
. She was a “radiant” beauty, to use the word most frequently employed to describe her performances and presence. Bergman, however, was also more than a little uncertain about her role in
Casablanca
, both before and during filming. Wallis made inquiries of Selznick about hiring Bergman for the role of Ilsa in April (Wallis had to pay $25,000 to Selznick to “borrow” Bergman for his movie), but to the actress there seemed to be nothing terribly special about the script. It seemed like a standard sort of melodrama, and she desperately wanted to play the role of Maria in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, which was soon to be cast. She didn’t want to be occupied shooting a mediocre movie if it would mean losing her chance at being a part of the filming of the highly anticipated adaptation of the Hemingway novel.

The set of
Casablanca
actually shared the trait the Warner Brothers marketing department attributed to the city of Casablanca. It was, in fact, “a meeting place of … refugees.” Ilsa’s Czech husband was played by the Hungarian actor Paul Henreid. Peter Lorre was an Austrian born
in Hungary. Claude Rains was the British actor who played Captain Renault. And Conrad Veidt, who played Major Strasser, the Gestapo agent shot at the Casablanca airport by Rick Blaine, had left Germany with his Jewish wife in 1933. Half a dozen other actors in the company with lesser roles had likewise fled German oppression in Europe.

Made with alacrity within the framework of the Hollywood studio system of the day,
Casablanca
nonetheless had more than its share of difficulties during production. In part due to the changes in scriptwriters, the movie had gone through an unusual number of drafts and rewrites over the course of the spring and summer of 1942, with additions and changes made all the way through the shoot. There were still gaps and unanswered questions in the plot that were being filled as shooting began in May and wound down in July. Even as the crew prepared to film the crucial airport scene, Bergman had not been given the pages that would tell her just where, and with whom, her character was going to wind up. Would she stay with Rick in Casablanca or head off with her husband, Laszlo, to continue the fight for freedom in other parts of Europe? Bergman, who was a perfectionist, predisposed to nervousness, and preoccupied by her interest in the casting of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, kept asking Curtiz and the writers just who it was that she was supposed to be in love with, her husband or Rick Blaine.

In the original play, Blaine gets the girl. Ilsa stays behind with him in Casablanca. But Wallis and the writers recognized immediately that that sort of ending wouldn’t cut it with the film audience. Only through this act of selflessness, insisting that Ilsa leave, would filmgoers see Rick’s commitment not just to Ilsa but to greater causes. “I’m no good at being noble,” he tells her, “but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

In August 1942, as the editing on his film was beginning, Hal Wallis had no better idea than the next Hollywood producer exactly where or when the United States was going to enter the war in Europe. But as head of production at Warner, he did happen to have this movie nearly in the can, and North Africa was already proving to be an important locale in
the war’s evolution. Wallis also had a feel for the patriotic sensibilities of the nation. He knew that his audience would want an ending to the movie that would offer some hope and certainty in what felt like desperate times. Unfortunately, the rough cut that he’d just viewed had more ambiguity than he wanted to see.

Wallis was a man who involved himself in every aspect of moviemaking, from choosing stars to suggesting the briefest of cuts to film editors as his movies neared completion. He was known for writing reams of memos to staff, detailing his wishes. It was a practice encouraged at the company, which printed an advisory on all its stationery:
VERBAL MESSAGES CAUSE MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND DELAYS. (PLEASE PUT THEM IN WRITING.)
Though the rule came from the head of the studio, Jack Warner, not Wallis, Wallis himself was habitually disposed to oblige.

As Wallis reviewed the last scenes of the film, he felt that it needed “
a good punchline,” one that was in keeping with both the narrative of the movie and the mood of the nation. Wallis was not the sort of film producer who was interested in shades of gray, which is what he felt he was seeing in the close. He wanted
Casablanca
to end with
a clear-cut moral.

In the final scene, Blaine has just insisted Ilsa leave on a departing airplane with her husband. He follows that heartrending moment by shooting a Gestapo agent who has come to the Casablanca airport to prevent the plane from taking off. After this jolt of melodrama, Rick is seen walking off into a foggy early morning with Louis Renault, the French police officer who ought to be arresting Rick for the murder of the German agent. The question was what to do with these two world-weary figures, who have spent the movie parrying each other in a kind of cynical fencing match. What should they say to each other now? What does this archetypal American character say to this archetypal French character, given the complex circumstances of their two nations’ geopolitical postures, and given the artistic and moneymaking demands of Hollywood movie production?

The final scene had been filmed a few weeks earlier on stage 1 at Warner Brothers Studios in Hollywood, for reasons of frugality and the
restrictions of war. The location was supposed to be an airport in Morocco, but not much attention was paid to making the details specific. In fact, no genuine planes were available for use by Warner or any other studio at the time. All had been drafted into official business by the Department of War.

Instead, the company prop department created a wooden cutout of a twin-engine plane that turned out to be considerably less than a full-size replica, even in single dimension. To hide the artifice, the set was liberally fogged and the mock plane was placed as far back on the stage as was possible without completely obscuring it.

In contrast to the actors and sedan occupying the foreground of the shot, the cutout, perhaps not surprisingly, lacked depth and proportion, despite the steaming dry ice and distance from the camera.
To give the scene a little more verisimilitude, an assistant director decided to hire a handful of little people—midgets—to portray mechanics. Dressed in light-colored coveralls, they were directed to look busy around the plane, checking under the faux fuselage and plywood wings of the cutout, as if preparing it for flight. Meanwhile, the actors were to project high drama before the camera.

But what should Rick say and do next? The script called for the two of them to walk off into the Casablancan fog, with Renault telling the gendarmes who have accompanied him to the airport “to round up the usual suspects.” He will let Rick go off to the Free French garrison in Brazzaville, in the Congo. But the day of shooting, someone suggested that Renault should go off to Brazzaville as well. He’d just been made something of a heroic figure himself by failing to arrest Rick, and what would happen to him in Casablanca if he didn’t leave? In the ever-changing circumstances under which the film was shot, that revision was instantly accepted.

To Wallis, the two of them going off together felt right. This was how this story should end, both from a narrative point of view and from the audience’s point of view: the American and the Frenchman should end as allies, shouldn’t they?

But on August 7, 1942, Wallis sat down to type a note to the editor, Owen Marks. He wanted to add one more line, however, he still wasn’t exactly certain what that should be. He decided to have Bogart record a voice-over for two possibilities, and Marks would need to cut in the one chosen. The first choice Wallis crafted, “Louis, I might have known you’d mix your patriotism with a little larceny,” was in keeping with Rick’s wise-guy character, but there was something too cynical about it, Wallis thought, something that thrust a viewer backward in the movie, toward a sense of who these characters were at the start of the film, not the way they had evolved. So Wallis ultimately decided to use the other line he jotted down for Rick to record: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” which, of course, was the coda that would ultimately be placed in the movie.

Had it been phrased in the form of a wish rather than a belief, this last line would have resonated thousands of miles away, in the halls of the Munitions buildings in Washington, at Allied headquarters in London, and at the offices of the American legation in Tangier, as well as among many elements in Casablanca itself.

But as much as they might have hoped that Operation Torch would somehow constitute the beginning of a beautiful friendship, the people planning the invasion of North Africa were involved in war, not the creation of a movie. Only time would tell if Rick and Louis would walk off together into the Casablanca night as allies.

U
ncoiled from what he called “his casket”—the trailer hauled by Holcomb and Browne through the hills of Spanish Morocco—to be deposited here, at the doorstep of the American consulate in Tangier, René Malevergne found himself standing before yet another sumptuous villa occupied by U.S. spies. He was soon shown to a soft bed, where it was easy to assume he was in safe hands. Malevergne fell into a welcome sleep, awakening refreshed and ready to continue his journey.

The next afternoon, someone from the American consulate—a tall man with a sympathetic air, according to Malevergne—brought a fistful of British passports and a change of clothing for what was envisioned as a straightforward, albeit disguised, voyage to Gibraltar under a forged passport. The clothes were ill fitting, and the pile of passports had no faces or builds that resembled his. It was the first indication that Malevergne’s trip out of the Spanish zone might be a little more complex than envisioned.

On September 29, the second day after his arrival in Tangier, he met for the first time with Colonel William Eddy, the chief architect of his exfiltration from Casablanca. As he had when he had met Patton back in Washington in July, Eddy wore his dress uniform for the occasion. Malevergne had dinner with Eddy and noted the colonel’s limp from those old war wounds, as well as the fact that Eddy spoke a “
rude French.” Eddy explained how he’d picked up the language in the war, apologizing for the fact that “I speak [French] like a soldier.”

Malevergne immediately liked Eddy’s
“comforting sensibility.” The fact that Eddy brought up the issue of a salary also pleased him, not for mercenary reasons but because it showed a sensitivity to Malevergne’s circumstances. The $280 a month for his work for the Americans was more than fair, Malevergne thought. And Eddy won more points when
he volunteered to provide Germaine and the boys six thousand francs a month while Malevergne was away.

Though Eddy could not offer specifics on what Malevergne was going to be doing in the service of the Americans, he told the pilot for the first time that he would be working with the U.S. Navy, that from Gibraltar he would head on to London and from London probably to the United States. Eddy told Malevergne that he would send a letter, by way of diplomatic pouch, to Gibraltar, and that Malevergne was to take the letter to London, where it would serve as a form of accreditation to the Allied command. He also promised to send a telegram to what Malevergne called
“the intelligence section of the American Navy”—more likely OSS offices in Washington—telling the agency of the pilot’s arrival in Tangier. Finally, Malevergne was asked to compose a series of postcards to his wife, implying that he had left her for another woman. These were later mailed by Holcomb from various cities in Morocco as a means to disguise Malevergne’s whereabouts to the French authorities, who presumably would be on the lookout for him. Malevergne makes no mention of whether or not Germaine was prepared to receive these notes, whether or not any actually arrived in Mehdia, or what her response was if they did.

Eddy and the staff in Tangier soon decided that the subterfuge involving the false passport should be scrapped. It was determined that sending Malevergne to Gibraltar by standard means, guarded only by transparently phony documentation, was impractical and dangerous. Option number two, however, turned out to be no cakewalk either.

On September 30, Malevergne, swimming in the oversized garments he’d been given at the American consulate, was taken to yet another grand villa—it seemed all of these spies had lovely homes—decorated with African hunting trophies and ancient weapons and owned by an Englishman named Grim. Malevergne had little time to appreciate his surroundings. That evening around 8:00 p.m., Monsieur Grim drove him down the hills of Spanish Morocco to the Mediterranean coast. There the Frenchman was deposited at the darkened offices of a steamship
company and into the hands of an anonymous guide, who immediately told Malevergne that the valise in his hand, in which he was carrying his shaving kit, would have to be disposed of.

In a light rain, the man led Malevergne silently along a road running parallel to the beach. The Shark quickly understood why he had to get rid of his toiletries: they soon came upon a surveillance zone, where the valise would have surely given him away. Malevergne and his guide were let through and continued in silence to a distant spot on the road beyond the checkpoint, where the blackness of the night seemed almost total and all that could be heard was the lapping of the sea along the beach.