“Here’s Looking at You, Casablanca”

Casablanca lives on, at the intersection of Lincoln Blvd. and Rose Avenue, not far from me in Venice, California. It’s true there’s nothing even faintly Moroccan about this nearly forty-year-old restaurant: its menu features California-Mexican cuisine, complete with margaritas, guacamole, and flour tortillas made on the spot. But Casablanca Restaurant does boast Casbah-style décor, and  houses a prime collection of memorabilia from the 1942 movie. The restaurant’s founders were so enamored of the denizens of Rick’s Café Américain that their parking lot has assigned parking spaces for Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and the rest of the movie’s featured players, should they deign to show up. 

Noah Isenberg, though SoCal born, doesn’t seem to know about Venice’s Casablanca Restaurant. But his new We’ll Always Have Casablanca is a paean to the many ways in which the seventy-five-year-old film – “Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie” – is still with us today. This is the place to find comic allusions to Casablanca on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Life; he also tracks down various literary attempts, some of them bizarre, to update the love story of Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, chronicling what happens after he urges her to get on that plane with her husband because “the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Isenberg even introduces Rick’s Café Casablanca, a picturesque nightspot opened in 2004 by a former U.S. diplomat in Morocco to serve those who hanker for good seafood amid nostalgic reminders of a movie that was filmed in its entirety on the Warner Bros. backlot.

Though Casablanca is best remembered as a love story, it owes its impact partly to the fact that it was released just as Hitler and his Nazis were overrunning Europe. Isenberg is at his best in focusing on a cast filled with actual refugees, actors who’d fled to Hollywood from such places as Austria, Germany, and France to escape Nazi persecution. (Some of them ended up playing Nazi on screen to make ends meet.) The actors’ own personal sense of loss helps explain why the scene containing the singing of the Marseillaise in support of the Free French packs such a wallop. He also makes the excellent point that Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, the detached cynic who finally chooses political involvement, nicely represents the attitude of many Americans before (and even after) Pearl Harbor. The American public in the 1940s, notes Isenberg, tended to prefer isolationism, but films like Casablanca helped sell the appeal of  a principled commitment to solving the world’s larger problems. Jack and Harry Warner, themselves from a Jewish immigrant background, boldly used their films in this period to address the specter of Nazism in Europe. One irony: though Casablanca highlights the desperation of the refugees, the specific threat to Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe is never mentioned. 

 Isenberg also traces the popularity of Casablanca into the Sixties, when scores of young campus activists identified with Humphrey Bogart’s iconic blend of idealism and cynical cool. That’s why Bogart-as-Rick posters were so visible in college dorm rooms in my day, and why theatres like the Brattle near Harvard University played Casablanca as part of an end-of-term ritual for many years. Now, as the Syrian refugee crisis makes headlines, the public’s appreciation for Casablanca seems to have waned not at all.  It turns out that Senator Elizabeth Warren, of all people, watches the film each New Year’s Eve, seeing in it much relevance to our nation of immigrants. “Each time I watch it,” she writes, “Casablanca gives me hope.”

Wild About Nature: Gary Ferguson’s "The Carry Home"

It’s a common Hollywood trope: people are transformed when they go back to nature. Think of the number of movies in which, while traipsing through the wilderness, protagonists discover their innermost selves, or confront their fundamental fears, or make peace with their haunted past. From the last decade alone, I can name several such films, all of them based on true stories of present-day Americans who—after a trip deep into nature—will never again be the same. There is, for instance, 127 Hours, in which James Franco, portraying the impetuous Aron Ralston, discovers the inner strength it will take to free himself after being pinned down by a boulder. In 2007’s Into the Wild, a young man played by Emile Hirsch journeys all the way to Alaska before realizing that his need for human contact is even greater than his obsession with the out-of-doors. And in 2014’s Wild, a recent divorcee named Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) hits the road, hiking from the Mojave Desert to the border of Washington State, in search of self-redemption and relief from the memories of her mother’s fatal illness.

Strayed’s journey up the Pacific Crest Trail spotlights how ill-equipped she is at the start of her trek. Gary Ferguson’s wilderness journey is quite, quite different, but equally compelling. Though at its core is an intense grief, the story he tells in The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness builds to an unexpectedly upbeat ending. Ferguson, an award-winning essayist and science writer, was married for 25 years to a fellow Indianan named Jane. As Ferguson puts it in his beautifully lyrical prose, “We’d been restless children, destined to become restless adults. Proud members of the last generation to soothe the anger of youth not with Ritalin, but with road trips.” 

The couple, bonding over a mutual love of nature, spent their lives both working and playing in the great outdoors. While Gary pursued his writing career from their Montana home base, Jane introduced young people to the beauties of Yellowstone National Park, and also served on search-and-rescue teams. For fun they hiked, skied, and canoed. It was a springtime canoe trip on Canada’s Kopka River, “when the leaves of the north country were washed in that impossible shade of lemonade green,” that the end came for Jane. After a tragic spill, Gary crawled away with a badly broken leg, but the waters claimed Jane’s life.

Gary explains what happened next, after Jane’s body was recovered and the local authorities dismissed their first assumption that the drowning involved foul play: “My redemption would come in the form of a last request Jane had made years before, asking me if she died, to scatter her ashes in her five favorite wilderness areas. And so I did. Five trips to five unshackled landscapes. At first, the journeys broke my heart. Later they helped me piece it together again.” His book cuts between a step-by-step accounting of that last fatal day on the river and a travelogue of the journeys he took, first alone and then with others, to return what was left of Jane to the wilderness that had claimed her life. We feel his emotions evolving, helped along by the passage of time and by some Native American wisdom that allowed him to slowly absorb the fact of her death into his own ongoing existence. Early in The Carry Home , Ferguson speaks of a “life lived as though nature were both wings and nest.” At the book’s end, having survived a tragic loss, he can again look to nature for inspiration and for solace. 

Here’s a link to Thomas Curwen’s deeply-felt Los Angeles Times story about the end of Gary Ferguson’s grief journey. Curwen was a participant in that last hike.

"The Graduate" and SoCal’s Endless Summer

 If you’ve watched The Graduate over and over – as I have, preparing for the publication of my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson in November – you know that most of the film seems to take place during an endless summer. All of the movie’s daytime SoCal scenes are filled with such summer obligatories as backyard barbecues and dips in the pool. One of the film’s great touches is that when Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson shrugs off all her clothing to entice Benjamin, the tan lines of her bathing suit are clearly visible. (Director Mike Nichols, a pasty-faced New Yorker himself, issued sun lamps to his cast so that they’d all have the requisite bronzed glow.)

I bring this up now because I just heard an interview with writer D.J. Waldie, who recently published in the Los Angeles Times an op-ed titled “How Angelenos Invented the L.A. Summer—In the Beginning Was the Barbecue.” Waldie, an expert on Southern California history and culture, begins by explaining how the Mexican custom of cooking outdoors rather than inside stuffy adobe-walled kitchens was ultimately promoted by magazines like Sunset as a lifestyle choice well suited to L.A.’s warm, comfortable climate.

Then there’s the whole matter of tanning. Into the 1920s ocean bathers across the U.S. were fully covered up, with both men and women hiding their bare skin as much as possible. In SoCal, there were laws on the books to enforce public modesty. Says Waldie, “The Long Beach City Council determined the legal distance between swimsuit and knee in 1916. Santa Monica police still were arresting topless (male) sun bathers as late as 1929. Laguna Beach didn’t repeal its modesty law until 1940.” In the end, though, comfort won out over yards of soggy fabric. A new SoCal concept of beauty and propriety moved in; in typical SoCal fashion, exposure to the sun was promoted as benefitting one’s health.

 Hollywood, of course, participated in this sell-job. In the 1930s and thereafter, pin-up photos of movie queens and their golden-brown male counterparts were everywhere. (Classic film buff Raquel Stecher of @QuelleLove has recently been celebrating summer by tweeting a whole raft of poolside shots of  Hollywood lovelies, who make the outdoor life seem awfully enticing.)  Then in 1959 Sandra Dee in Gidget transported teenagers across America to the beach for surfing and (mostly) innocent merriment. (I remember being startled by some then-surprising dialogue about the difference between a good girl – who goes home and goes to bed – and a nice girl, who does things in reverse order.)

By the early 1960s, summer SoCal style was a hit across the nation. American International Pictures reinforced the concept with its fun-in-the-sun teen movies, starting with Beach Party in 1963. Beach Party was quickly followed by such deathless classics as Muscle Beach Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. In these films, the bland young love of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello was played off against surfside hijinks, as everyone baked in the sun.

This was the era of surf music and Coppertone ads (dating from 1959) that exhorted the public, “Don’t be a paleface.” The rambunctious parodies of the little-girl-on-the beach ad campaign are still with us. But we’ve since learned about the dangers of skin cancer, and even Doonesbury’s Zonker Harris has given up on his career as a competitive tanner. Today UV protection is the watchword,  and the sunbaked Benjamin Braddock is probably running to his dermatologist at this very moment, worried about a small patch of skin that may mean big trouble.

David Letterman’s Biographer Uncovers a Sad Clown

Yes, I stay up late, but it rarely occurs to me to watch television. So I’m trusting in Jason Zinoman -- who covers comedy for the New York Times and has written the masterful Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror – to guide me through the intricacies of David Letterman’s unique career as a comic and talk show host. His new bestselling biography is called Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night.

I discovered through Zinoman that one of Letterman’s original comic idols was mine was well: the late, great Steve Allen, who brought to his TV hosting duties (on the Tonight Show and elsewhere)  an antic spirit and a willingness to do pretty much anything (wacky visits to the Hollywood Ranch Market! custard pie fights with the studio audience!) for a laugh. Letterman, of course, did much of the same, dropping watermelons from high places and donning a Velcro suit to hang from the walls of his studio. Zinoman notes the similarities of these pranks, but also zeroes in on one key difference: “Steve Allen played the role of a game, if occasionally reluctant, guinea pig delighted to be part of his experiments. He followed jokes with a big, booming cackle. By contrast, Letterman didn’t appear to be having a good time, like a man forced into this situation.” What he contributed to the insanity onstage was his own ironic detachment. What we saw on his face, says Zinoman, was perilously close to misery.

Zinoman’s point is that David Letterman, though highly ambitious and determined to make his way in the comedy world, seemed almost congenitally unable to enjoy the laughs he generated. Zinoman carefully delineates the various stages of Letterman’s career, as he moved from an NBC morning show to NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman to CBS’s Late Night, as well as the crushing moment when he was denied the chance to follow Johnny Carson as permanent host of the Tonight Show. Letterman’s style evolved over time, but the man himself seemed to become less and less comfortable in his skin, and far less willing to collaborate with those whose job was to make him look good.

The story of Merrill Markoe is a particularly vivid one. When Letterman was a nobody, she was his girlfriend, also an aspiring comic as well as someone with a special flair for writing. As Letterman rose through the TV ranks, she masterminded his comic persona, contributing to his shows such off-the-wall features as “Stupid Pet Tricks” and “Viewer Mail,” as well as the remote featurettes that sent him out into the community, honing his native sarcasm through chance encounters with everyday folk. But Markoe couldn’t count on Letterman’s affection and gratitude forever. Eventually she moved on, only to be summoned back when he needed a quick sequence that would feature him in conversation with an office intern named Stephanie Birkitt. Eventually Markoe figured out what was going on—Letterman was having an affair with Birkitt behind the back of his then-wife. On her blog Markoe made a heartbreaking joke: “This is a very emotional moment for me because Dave promised me many times that I was the only woman he would ever cheat on.”

But David Letterman is far from a total egotist. One of the most powerful moments of his career came in the wake of 9/11. Reeling from the disaster that had hit his beloved New York City, he spoke to his audience candidly and with great emotion. David Letterman moving beyond irony was truly something to see.

Memories of Jeanne Moreau (and Sam Shepard)

It’s not true, as some Hollywood onlookers claim, that Jeanne Moreau was once cast as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Yes, her name came up as producer Larry Turman and director Mike Nichol contemplated having Benjamin Braddock lured into bed by a genuine Française. This would have been nicely in keeping with the French cinematic tradition of sophisticated older women initiating naïve young men into sexu­ality.  But Turman and Nichols decided between themselves that the story of The Graduate needed to be an all-American one, and so Moreau was never offered the role.

It’s no surprise, though, that they considered Moreau for the role that eventually went to Anne Bancroft. Born in 1928, she would have been just the right age in 1967 to play a still-sexy woman with a daughter in college. And Turman and Nichols, both fans of the innovative new European cinematic movement known as the Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave), surely had seen Moreau in some of her most iconic roles. In 1958, she was directed by Louis Malle in Les Amants (The Lovers), playing a bored wife and mother who upends her comfortable marriage in the arms of a much younger archaeologist she’s just met. By the film’s end she has turned her back on her previous life, abandoning husband and daughter for an uncertain existence with her new flame.

 In the U.S. The Lovers was particularly known for its role in a landmark obscenity case A screening of the film in Cleveland Heights, Ohio led to a criminal conviction of the theatre manager for public display of obscene material. He appealed to a deeply-split U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice Potter Stewart (not known as a flaming liberal) wrote a soon-to-be-famous commentary on Jacobellis v. Ohio.  Stewart refused to label The Lovers pornographic, saying that, while he could not narrowly define pornography, “I know it when I see it.” (Happily, while few of the justices could agree on their own definition of what makes something obscene, Jacobellis won his case.)

The other film for which Moreau will never be forgotten is François Truffaut’s provocative Jules and Jim, which startled moviegoers in 1962 via its depiction of a lethal love triangle, with Moreau’s Catherine at its apex. (The two young men involved were Henri Serre and Austria’s Oskar Werner, who would later make a big impression in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools.)  The film’s inventive stylistics, coupled with its insights into the extremes of human behavior, assured it of serious attention from every film-lover out there.

As Moreau grew older, she won the respect and the friendship of such leading writers as Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Marguerite Duras. She acted for Orson Welles, once vocalized with Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Hall, and was briefly married to William Friedkin of The Exorcist fame. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, she had affairs with everyone from Pierre Cardin to Miles Davis. As recently as 2012 she was still making movies. When she died yesterday at the ripe old age of 89, no one could say that she hadn’t lived a full life.

Rest in peace, as well, to Sam Shepard, a talented actor (a Best Supporting Actor nominee for The Right Stuff) who was also one of our best contemporary playwrights. His tough, spare dramas of hard-scrabble family life were performed by major actors and won major awards (like the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child). Shepard’s personal life included a two-decade relationship with Jessica Lange that produced two children. How sad that he succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease at the not-so-advanced age of 73.