Read Online Leontyne by Richard Goodwin - Free Book Online Page B

contained any garlic, which made Ray ill, became increasingly tiresome.
    We were moored under the magnificent citadel in Namur, which no doubt had had a glorious past, but in the recent World Wars had had only a very short history of combat. It stands perched high on a hill at the junction of the Meuse and the Sambre, and must have looked very daunting to any invaders approaching from the river, but it was attacked from the rear in the First and Second World Wars. The defenders thought they had everything catered for, but were surprised by a parachute attack directly into the middle of the fortified area. Between the
Leo
and the citadel was one of the casinos that earn this part of the country the title ‘Belgium’s Côte d’Azur’. Ray and I went to see whether we could get into this vast modern gambling hall, but we were not properly dressed and the men on the door obviously did not like the cut of our jib, so we decided to let them keep their money and moved on to Dinant further up the Meuse.
    Probably the most knowledgeable man about the nuts and bolts of film making that I know had heard we were in the area and came on board for lunch. Lee Katz has spent most of his life in Hollywood, sometimes writing scripts for Warner Brothers ‘B’ pictures and sometimes acting as assistant director or producer on major movies. Some were good, some bad and some indifferent but Lee was a true professional who had known all the greats of Hollywood in the golden studioyears. He is always amusing company and was in Europe on business of one kind or another. He told me of his days as assistant director on
Casablanca
and of how neither Humphrey Bogart nor Ingrid Bergman had been the first choice for their parts, nor had they wanted to play them, but they, like Claude Rains, were under contract to Jack Warner and had been obliged to make the film.
Casablanca
was entirely shot in the studio, though it has been praised many times for having the authentic feel of the Paris streets just before the war. He told me with some pride that it had been his idea, when the script arrived at the last minute for the final scene in which Bergman and her film husband leave from the airport, to make the studio set look authentic by hiring a group of dwarves to load the plane, and so give the correct perspective. Nobody at the studios ever thought the film would be successful and so even the choice of music was limited to what was cheap and already belonged to Warners. ‘As Time Goes By,’ Casablanca, Bogart, Bergman and Rains somehow made a magic that will last forever. The film is a brilliant example of how nobody, but nobody, knows what the public will like and respond to before the work has been completed. Lee caught the train to Paris and I was sorry to see his dapper figure disappear with his memories.
    As we pushed on up the Meuse we came to the Ardennes. Steep wooded hills swept down to the river’s edge, making the landscape look as though someone tidier than I had folded it away in a drawer, like socks. I remembered how my mother who had been a fine watercolourist had explained the principles of the vanishing point to me whilst she was sketching the blue hills of the Nilgiri range in South India. With a few deft brush strokes, she had made the ranges of hills fall behind each other, somehow managing to create a distance on a flat surface. Perspective to me is a truly mysterious subject, but the Meuse in the sunset that evening seemed to wander enticingly up the sky, like the backdrop of a clever ballet set at Co vent Garden. At an isolated lock,the lock-keeper told me how worried he was for the magnificent apple tree outside his little house. The tree was covered with blossom but he felt that the weather was sure to be unkind and there would be snow in July which would deny him the obvious bounty that was coming his way. He sold us some free-range eggs and some home-made cider and we felt enormously relieved to