Because Casablanca was composed, however unwittingly, by committee, it is famous among movie buffs for its loose ends and unanswered questions. Why can't Rick go back to America? (According to Julius Epstein, the brothers tried to think of a reason but failed.) Where is the Czech patriot Victor Laszlo really going when his plane takes off for Lisbon? Why should the Germans honor letters of transit apparently signed by De Gaulle? Why doesn't Strasser just shoot Laszlo on sight?
Some of these questions, it seemed to me, had obvious answers. Since a hallmark of Rick Blaine is his cynical honesty, I chose to take at face value his answer to Renault—”It was a combination of all three”—when the police captain grills him about why he cannot return to New York and suggests embezzlement, a love affair, and murder. (The closest Major Strasser ever gets to the truth is“The reasons are unclear.”) Laszlo's real destination similarly admits of easy explanation, since the Czech resistance in December 1941 was headquartered in London. The problematic De Gaulle signatures, however, are better left unexplained—except to note that in both the play and the shooting script, the name attached to them is not De Gaulle's, but Weygand's. In general, however, all the action of As Time Goes By, both front and back story, derives from statements or clues in the screenplay that, when examined, are the only logical explanation for what happens in the movie,Casablanca.
Previous attempts to expand or rework the material of have made the mistake of either trying to reprise the action in the same locale or changing the essential nature of the characters, or both. As early as 1943 Warner Bros. was planning a sequel called Brazzaville, written by Frederick Stephani. Stephani's scenario, which never got beyond the planning stage, supposed that Rick and Renault had been working for the Underground all along, thus negating both Renault's political conversion and Rick's personal sacrifice—two of the plot elements that have made Casablanca so enduring.
In his own 1988 attempt at a sequel, Howard Koch moved the action forward a generation, inventing an illegitimate son for Rick and Ilsa, who returns to Morocco to try to learn what happened to his father. The 1955–56 television series Casablanca, which lasted seven months, trapped Rick Blaine in his CafÉ Americain forever“as a North African Mr. Fix-it,” as Aljean Harmetz noted in her 1992 book Round Up the Usual Suspects. Another TV version, in 1983, starred David Soul as Rick; it lasted only three weeks.
Fortunately the shooting script provides plenty of clues not only about the nature of the characters, but also about the direction their lives are heading at the time we meet them in Casablanca. By hewing to the self-contained world of the original—which itself followed contemporary history more closely than the casual viewer might at first suspect—it seemed to me that a plausible, convincing story could be told about the fate of Rick, Ilsa, Laszlo, et al., that was at once fresh and interesting while maintaining a scrupulous respect for the source.
That the source is a movie cannot be gainsayed or avoided. No one reading this book can fail to envision Humphrey Bogart as Rick, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa, Paul Henreid as Laszlo, or Dooley Wilson as Sam. Accordingly, I have embraced the material's cinematic source, right down to incorporating selected dialogue from the script into the novel, partly in homage, partly from dramatic necessity, and partly to let the reader know that the author is in on the fun, too. Rick's bitter wisecracks, Laszlo's lofty pronouncements, Sam's wise empiricism, and Ilsa's passion and confusion all find their source in Casablanca.
Therefore, I have endeavored to
• Match the novel's characters to their screen counterparts, sometimes by description and other times by the simple matter of omission. There would have been no point, for example, in describing Rick Blaine as blond or Victor Laszlo as small or Sam as white: Bogart, Henreid, and Wilson tell us otherwise. Because the memory of Casablanca is fresh in most readers’ minds, I have tried to give my characters dialogue that evokes the motion picture script, while at the same time keeping the physical description of the characters to a minimum.
One bit of film business I have incorporated is the incessant smoking and drinking of nearly all the characters. In the movie, a cigarette or a drink appears in nearly every scene, just as in As Time Goes By. We may look askance at behavior we regard as antisocial and self-destructive (Bogart died of the effects of alcohol and tobacco at age fifty-seven), but the social attitudes of half a century ago were very different and have been faithfully reflected here. Besides, the two-pack-a-day and three-martini-lunch generation not only overcame the Depression, it won World War II.
• Match the novel's action to historical circumstances. The film itself is replete with references to contemporary history—indeed, it relies on then current events for the basis of its plot. In this book, it made sense to wed the new story to the time and place of the movie—that is to say, post-Pearl Harbor for the front story and New York City before 1935 for the back story. Thus, if Victor Laszlo is Czech, then London—not New York—must be his real destination. Furthermore, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the only Nazi official murdered by the Allies during the war, must be what he is planning, since it was the only significant act of Czech resistance.
The most controversial application of this philosophy, however, is likely my contention that Rick Blaine was a Jewish gangster and former speakeasy owner from East Harlem named Yitzik Baline. But consider the evidence: The script tells us that Rick is thirty-seven years old in 1941, which places his young manhood in the years 1922–1935—roughly the Prohibition era. He is a political leftist (as evidenced by Ethiopia and his fighting against Franco). His best friend is a black man. He is handy with a gun. He runs a saloon. He disappears from New York shortly after the October 23, 1935, assassination of Dutch Schultz (the model for Solomon Horowitz)“the beer baron of the Bronx” and one of the last of the great fighting Jewish mobsters and nightclub owners. At one point early in the film, Ugarte remarks that Rick, who's just ejected a strutting German from the CafÉ Americain's casino, looks like he's“been doing this all [his] life.” Rick replies,“What makes you think I haven't?”
The evidence, however, goes further. Murray Burnett, the playwright, insisted to the end of his life that he saw himself as Rick Blaine and had written the character as a projection of his own desires and fantasies.“Rick—tough, morose, the man who didn't need anybody—was the man Burnett wanted to be,” writes Harmetz in Round Up the Usual Suspects. Most of the screenwriters—indeed, most of the creative people—associated with Casablanca were Jewish, including the Epsteins, Koch, Jack Warner, Hal Wallis, Michael Curtiz, and composer Max Steiner. It also was long the custom in Hollywood to disguise Jewish characters as WASPS. Finally, until he became a leading man in The Maltese Falcon, Bogart played a succession of ethnic gangster types at Warner Bros., often as a rival to Jimmy Cagney, whose Irish ethnicity was obvious to all.
• Match up names, dates, places, and so on associated with Casablanca with the action of the novel. A few examples:
1. The character of Lois Meredith as Rick's first, lost love.“Lois Meredith” was the original female protagonist in Everybody Comes to Rick's. She was a tramp and an adventuress, far less sympathetic than the virtuous Norwegian into whom she was transformed.
2. The use of the pseudonym“Tamara Toumanova” as Ilsa's nom de guerre in Prague. This was the real name of the Russian ballerina who inspired screenwriter Robinson to create the character of Ilsa Lund. Toumanova, who later married Robinson, even tested for the role.
3. The name“Baline” as Rick Blaine's real name. As noted in the novel, this was the real name of Israel (Isidore) Baline, better known as songwriter Irving Berlin, whose music permeates and defines the period. The resemblance is too remarkable to be entirely accidental, and on some level, I believe Murray Burnett had the Baline/ Blaine correspondence in the back of his mind when he wrote his play. Unfortunately, Burnett died in September 1997, so there is no way to know for sure.
4. The name“Laszlo Lowenstein” for one of Solomon Horowitz's gang members.
This was the real name of Peter Lorre (albeit spelled with an“¨”), who played Ugarte.
5. The name“Irma Horowitz” for Solomon's wife. Irma Solomon, in real life, was Jack Warner's first wife.
6. The interpolation of Herman Hupfield, the composer of“As Time Goes By,” into the narrative as the house composer in Rick's Tootsie-Wootsie Club.
7. The movie High Sierra, starring Bogart, which Rick and Sam notice as they trudge through Leicester Square. This film, released the same also was produced by Hal Wallis and written by someone named Burnett: in this case, the novelist W. R. Burnett, who earlier had written Little Caesar, which starred Edward G. Robinson, whose real name was Emanuel Goldenberg and … well, you get the idea.
8. The use of many of the film's most famous lines either directly or in a modified form, casting new light on their meaning or origin. These will be obvious to the avid fan. I felt it mandatory, however, to save“Here's looking at you, kid,” for the book's conclusion and to put the words in Ilsa's mouth, not Rick's.
Like Rick Blaine, some readers may wonder why the Allied governments did not go after Adolf Hitler instead of a lower echelon Nazi like Reinhard Heydrich: in fact, under The Hague Convention IV of 1907, it was international law that belligerents could not attempt the assassination of each other's heads of state or government (a principle the United States still observes today). With hindsight, it is easy to forget that in 1942 the ultimate horror of the Final Solution was still in the future, and Hitler was seen, for better or for worse, as merely the German Führer, not the monster we now know him to have been.
A few minor historical liberties, additions, and conflations occur in my treatment of the Heydrich assassination. In reality, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia was killed on the Kirchmayer Boulevard, not the Charles Bridge. Otherwise, though, my account of his horrific and agonizing death is largely accurate, as is its terrible, bloody aftermath.
A final word: Although the action of the book takes place in the 1930s and 1940s, the novel is written in the late 1990s. Thus it was important to enlarge the scope of action for several of the characters, most notably Ilsa and Sam, while maintaining plausibility. Dramatically, Ilsa needs to be more than simply the object of desire and competition between Rick and Laszlo, but she cannot grab a tommy gun and start shooting Nazis. Similarly, the spirit of Sam's dialogue, which in the original script verges on dialect, must be maintained, but I saw no reason not to give him a far richer inner life than is apparent in Casablanca—not to mention a considerable, indeed crucial, role in Rick's activities in the New York back story.
With the double ending, I sought not only to evoke the bittersweet mood of the film (Rick and Ilsa once more at cross-purposes), but to add a dash of cynicism (Major Miles congratulating them on a job well done), and, at last, to bring the lovers together in the only way possible.
Roll credits, and fade to black.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As Time Goes By is based on the play Everybody Comes to Ricks, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, and the 1942 Warner Bros. motion picture Casablanca, screenplay by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, produced by Hal B. Wallis, and directed by Michael Curtiz. Any thanks must perforce begin with them.
Thanks as well to the screenwriters whose contributions went uncredited, among them Casey Robinson, Aeneas McKenzie, and Wally Kline (who wrote the first draft), and Leonore Coffee; to Irene Lee Diamond, who bought the script; to Steven Karnot, the Warner's story analyst who saw and identified the cinematic possibilities inherent in the play; and to Jack Warner, president of Warner Bros., who knew how to green-light a good thing when he saw it—and proved it by running up on stage at the 1943 Academy Awards to snatch the Best Picture Oscar from Wallis.
Thanks as well to Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Arthur“Dooley” Wilson, Leonid Kinsky (Sacha), and S. Z. Sakall (Carl), whose performances gave their characters lives, personalities, and voices for me to listen to.
Thanks to Maureen Egen, president of Warner Books, who suggested the project to me.“What would you think about writing a novel of Casablanca?” she asked me one day over lunch, and the reader has just finished my reply.
Thanks to my wife, Kathleen, and our daughters, Alexandra and Clare, and to my colleagues and students at Boston University, and to my Hollywood rabbi, the producer Daniel Melnick, for his calm, professional support. Thanks also to the late Martha Duffy, my editor at Time magazine for more than a decade, whose formidable spirit was with me every step of the way.
Finally, many thanks to my editor, Susan Sandler, whose careful, analytical, and loving work on the manuscript honed and sharpened both plot and characterization; of all the editorial gin joints in the world, I’m glad I walked into hers.
—March 1998
Lakeville, Connecticut
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