Eau-oh... (Part 2)

A kiss is just a kiss. Except when papers are involved…

You must remember this: CAPTAIN LOUIS RENAULT, the Vichy Prefect of Police who extorts sex from migrant women in exchange for visas, walks into a bar. Not just any bar. The most legendary bar in all of cinema.

INSERT SIGN: "Rick's Cafe Americain".

All about him there is the HUM of voices, CHATTER and LAUGHTER. The occupants of the room are varied. There are Europeans in their dinner jackets, their women beautifully begowned and bejewelled. There are Moroccans in silk robes. Turks wearing fezzes. Levantines. Naval officers. Members of the Foreign Legion, distinguished by their kepis.

Actually, as far as I can tell, there are no Moroccans. Though we’re in Morocco. Maybe in the street crowd scenes. Or maybe FERRARI, across town at the Blue Parrot (but then why is he named Ferrari, and played by Sydney Greenstreet with a weird Brit accent?). No Jews, either. Or if there are, they are not identified as such. Which is truly weird, as this is a story about WWII refugees “fleeing from all sections of Europe by foot, wagon, auto, and boat, and all converging upon one point on the tip of Africa — Casablanca.” Many of the people involved in the making of Casablanca were refugees. Most of these, and many many more besides, were Jews — the couple that wrote the play it is based on (Everybody Goes to Rick’s), the three scriptwriters, the director, the assistant director, the producer, the composer, the musical director, the art director, the studio heads, many of the actors, including almost every actor in a Nazi uniform. By the time Rick’s opened for business (25 May 1942 was the first day of principal photography), news of the extermination camps had been circulating in the West for about a year. Three days in, the German authorities in France passed an ordinance making it compulsory for Jews in the occupied zone to wear a yellow star on their clothing. The Casablanca script was, famously, cobbled together daily, with new lines and plot points pencilled in at the last minute, right up till the last day of shooting, the hill of beans and you better hurry or you'll miss that plane — and the last line, written by the producer —

— which wasn’t stitched on until a week after the last day of shooting. As one of the screenwriters, Jason Epstein, put it, the “story had more yellow corn in it than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined.” But no yellow stars, and no Jews.

Maybe that’s a story for another time1. Rack focus to CAPTAIN LOUIS RENAULT, “a handsome, middle-aged Frenchman, debonair and gay, but withal a shrewd and alert official.” We first heard mention of him — as did a middle-aged ENGLISH COUPLE sitting at a table just off the square, observing the commotion across the way in front of the Palais de Justice — from a vulturous, pickpocketing —

EUROPEAN: Two German couriers were found murdered in the desert... (with an ironic smile) The unoccupied desert. This is the customary roundup of refugees, liberals, and uh, of course, a beautiful young girl for Monsieur Renault, the Prefect of Police.

The captain orders two champagne cocktails (sugar, Angostura bitters, champagne, cognac, orange slice, maraschino cherry) from SACHA, the crazy Russian bartender who is in love with YVONNE, the French woman who is in love with Sacha’s boss, RICK, the ex-pat American who, after being jilted by ILSA, the Norwegian woman he had a fling with in Paris — she ended it the day the Nazis rolled in — is in love with no one. Or anything. He once ran guns to Ethiopia, for use against the Fascists. He fought in Spain on the Loyalist side. Now, his only cause is himself — like so many of us, he sticks his neck out for nobody. And that neck, and the cynical half-corpse to which it is attached, is stuck, like the condemned sinners in the third and final ring of the seventh circle of Hell, in the “occupied” desert, an arid, unbearing dust bowl of scorching sands, insatiable thirsts and torched ideals.

No, not in Canto XIV, in Burbank, California, on a Warner Brothers lot made to look like Casablanca, the largest city in French Morocco, whose French-enthroned Sultan, Mohammed bin Yusef, claimed direct descent from the prophet Muhammad. As does, today, the Sultan’s grandson, Mohammed VI, the current King of Morocco2; though, under the new constitution that he had drafted by members of his inner circle in 2011, he is no longer “sacred or holy”; but “the person of the King is inviolable, and respect is due Him.” Not showing Him that respect, i.e., criticising or directly opposing Him (crime de lèse-majesté), will land you in one of Morocco’s infamous prisons, or, worse, in Temara, one of the country’s extrajudicial detainment facilities, a confirmed CIA black site and a hellhole beyond Dante’s wildest imagination.

But maybe that too is a story for another time. This, after all, is about water, part 2 of a 3-part piece that introduced us last week to a couple of crazy ladies wild swimming in Paris…

Renault holds a report.

RENAULT: I am making out the report now. We haven't quite decided whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.

RICK: I don’t buy or sell human beings.

FERRARI: That's too bad. That's Casablanca's leading commodity.

Who’s got nothing?/We got nothing/How much nothing?/Too much nothing — Dooley Wilson & cast in Casablanca

The King of Morocco is the richest man in the country, the richest monarch in Africa, and the fifth richest monarch in the world. One in five of his subjects live on less than four bucks a day. Just under 9% are acutely poor and 36.6% are poor. Poor here means multidimensionally poor, which means poor in basic services and capabilities, such as health, education and literacy, living space, nutrition, electricity, sanitation, cooking fuel, and, especially pertinent in Morocco (and here), access to safe drinking water (53.9% of rural households are acutely water poor, and a staggering 79.3% are water poor.

These figures, however, actually represent progress; they show a marked improvement from just a little over a decade ago, when the king, in response to what is referred to as the February 20 Movement — six months of peaceful demonstrations across Morocco brought on by Wikileaked evidence of royal family corruption and Arab Spring anti-government protests in the region — promulgated a program to alleviate poverty, improve education, provide clean drinking water, and turn the country into a constitutional, democratic, parliamentary and social monarchy. He has delivered on quite a bit of it. Close to two million Moroccans have been raised above the national poverty line (though this statistic is pre-COVID-19, and that line is based on earnings of a buck a day). He even delivered an Equity and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated some 20,000 cases of human rights violations perpetrated during the reign of his father, Hassan II, in a period of the country’s history called les années de plomb (The Years of Lead, 1958-1988). The 18-month commission handed out USD 85 million in reparations to victims of state-inflicted torture, forced disappearance, murder and arbitrary arrest. That the Commission could not reveal or prosecute the perpetrators of those crimes, nor mention the king’s father by name, nor report about human rights violations since 1999, the year the king was enthroned, nor criticise violations of freedom of speech in the country, which remains rampant, nor has it in any way swayed the king’s Directorate for the Surveillance of the Territory (Direction de la surveillance du territoire, (DST)) from continuing to use coercive and rights-infringing tactics, including using Pegasus spyware to incarcerate investigative journalists on trumped-up charges, including several just this year…

But that’s a — I thought this was about water?

JUMP CUT to this month’s marking of two 80th anniversaries. First, the “Operation Torch” invasion of Casablanca (8-14 November 1942) by US troops — and British troops dressed as US troops, so as not to offend the Nazi-backed, rosbif-loathing Vichy French troops in place, in the hopes that, once beaten, they could be persuaded to switch allegiances and join the Allied cause. Which they did, eventually. However, the transition was bumpy: Vichy’s racial laws remained in place for almost a year (and would have stayed in place forever if the man in charge, Henri Giraud, had had his way); as did all the billboards and posters of Le Maréchal Pétain.

Then, on Thanksgiving, two weeks after Operation Torch, and due to its popularity in America — it was the United States’ first major military operation in the European–North African theatre, and footage of Maj. General George S. Patton storming the beaches of Casablanca was on every cinema newsreel in America — Warner Brothers released Casablanca in NYC months earlier than planned. On New Year’s Eve it was screened at the White House in DC for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Its general release came three weeks later, on 23 January 1943, a day before the signing, by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, of the Casablanca Declaration,3 which outlined how the Allies would not allow the Germans and Japanese to sue for peace, but only accept unconditional surrender. The Sultan attended the conference, as did his son, the 14-year-old Hassan II, and the rival representatives of the Free French forces, Generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud. All four, however, denied any role in what the Allies determined was purely a military campaign, were mainly stuck off in a corner, far from the grown-ups’ table, and only invited to participate in photo-ops.

It was on this occasion that Roosevelt promised the Sultan that Morocco’s “situation, especially in colonial matters, would change radically after the war.” He took Churchill to task for Britain’s colonial protectorates and spoke about the future role the United Nations should play in “bringing education, raising the standards of living, improving the health conditions of all the backward, depressed colonial areas of the world. And when they’ve had a chance to reach maturity, they must have the opportunity extended them of independence.” 

DISSOLVE TO:

EXT. BATHURST, BRITISH GAMBIA - STREET - DAY

President Roosevelt, the day before, in a car driving through the dismal streets of the capital of British Gambia — “that hell-hole of yours called Bathurst,” he later told Churchill.

CUT TO:

INT. BATHURST HOTEL SUITE - NIGHT

From his bed, he speaks about the experience to his son ELLIOTT.

FRANKLIN: I must tell Churchill what I found out about his British Gambia today. This morning, at about eight-thirty, we drove through Bathurst to the airfield. The natives were just getting to work. In rags…glum-looking.…They told us the natives would look happier around noontime when the sun should have burned off the dew and the chill. I was told the prevailing wages for these men was one and nine. One shilling ninepence. Less than fifty cents.

ELLIOTT: An hour?

FRANKLIN: A day! Fifty cents a day! Besides which, they’re given a half-cup of rice. Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate. I asked. Life expectancy — you’d never guess what it is. Twenty-six years. Those people are treated worse than the livestock. Their cattle live longer…. Churchill may have thought I wasn’t serious, last time. He’ll find out, this time.

Today, the mortality rate in the Republic of Gambia (independent since 1965) is 59.9 years for females and 57.7 for males; 41.7 percent of the population are multidimensionally poor; 28.0 percent are classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty. More than 45.3% of the country's population has E. coli in their source drinking water.

On second thought, maybe Rick belongs in a different ring and circle. The third of the seventh mentioned above is reserved for blasphemers, sodomites and usurers. Some argue that Rick’s “beautiful friendship” with Captain Renault may put him in the second camp, but nowhere in the Comedy does Dante express anything against same-sex relations: in fact, he shows great compassion and respect for sodomites in Cantos XV and XVI; and his Purgatory is filled with gay lovers and other members of the LGBT community, all on their way to an eternity of bliss in Paradise. No, it is excessiveness and obsession, not whether one is cis, nonbinary, or queer, that he has issue with: love — of sex, wealth or food and drink — when these become lust, avarice, and gluttony. Those get you the one-way ticket. (Incidentally, there is not a single Jew condemned to Dante’s Inferno, and there are more Jews enjoying eternal bliss in his Paradiso than there are Christians). It might, then, make more sense to forget about deserts occupied or otherwise and place Rick and those around him at the Gates of Hell of the third canto, about to enter the vestibule but not yet ferried across the river to the first circle of the Underworld. Aka Limbo. Aka Rick’s Café American.

Where the wretched around him, the narrator's voice tells us as it fades away... “wait — and wait — and wait.” Like this man sitting at the table next to him:

RICK: What of it? I'm going to die in Casablanca. It's a good spot for it.

Is it? Life expectancy in Morocco is 76.90 years, less than a year less than the US average, and 40 years longer than it was in 1942 (and higher than it is in Louisiana (76.1), Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, (76.0), Kentucky (75.6), Alabama (75.5), Mississippi (74.9) and West Virginia (74.8) and, in my home and native land, Nunavut (71.1)).4

But we said — water? Right. Rick in Limbo then, not drinking, “he never drinks with customers” we are told by CARL, the waiter (played by S. Z. Sakall, whose three sisters, niece, brother-in-law and sister-in-law all died in the camps) — sitting among the usual suspects of the third canto, the neutral angels who neither remained faithful to God nor rebelled, and the souls of the uncommitted, who chose neither Good nor Evil and lived “sanza 'nfamia e sanza lodo” — without shame and without honour.

Forsaken people, maggots drinking their tears and their blood at their feet, their heads encircled by swarms of stinging flies and wasps, gazing upward from their cocktail glasses —

EXT. AIRPLANE FLYING OVERHEAD — its motor cut for a landing.

The plane SWOOPS down past a neon sign atop a building at the edge of the airport. The sign reads “Rick's Cafe Americain.” And as the plane lands a swastika on its tail is clearly visible.

Cafè Américaine. Another limen, a threshold between two circles, and the final boundary dividing Civilisation and Barbarism. And Rick is —

ILSA: Is what?

RENAULT: Well, Rick is the kind of man that... well, if I were a woman, and I were not around, I should be in love with Rick.

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OFFICER: Excuse me, Captain. Another visa problem has come up.

RENAULT: Show her in.

Earlier, lovesick Sacha tries to win over Yvonne (or just reduce her résistance) by plying her with tumblers of Hennessy X.O — “the boss’s private stock. Because Yvonne, I loff you.”

YVONNE (morosely): Oh, shut up.

SACHA (fondly): All right, all right. For you, Yvonne, I shot opp, because, Yvonne, I loff you… Uh oh.

Rick saunters over and leans on the bar next to Yvonne.

RICK: She's had enough.

YVONNE: Don't listen to him, Sacha. Fill it up!

SACHA: Yvonne, I loff you, but he pays me.

Rick manhandles her towards a taxi.

RICK: Go with her, Sacha, and make sure she gets home.

SACHA: Yes, boss.

RICK: And come right back.

SACHA (his face falling): Yes, boss.

The next day — presumably, Yvonne slept it off — she met a Nazi officer somewhere, probably at the Blue Parrot, Casablanca’s other watering hole; and after a few cocktails, they stumbled arm and arm into Rick’s and made a beeline straight to Sacha’s bar, where the Nazi officer shouted out to Sacha:

NAZI OFFICER: French 75s!

YVONNE: Put up a whole row of them, Sacha… starting here and ending here!

A French 75 is a Tom Collins made with Champagne instead of carbonated water. It was so named because its kick was said to be like that of the French 75mm field gun, the artillery cannon that won the Battle of the Marne in 1914 and the Battle of Verdun in 1916. The 75 was also used with great success against “insurgents” in France’s North African colonies during the interwar, including two very long and bloody wars of independence in Morocco; and with considerably less success in the earliest stages of WWII, before the fall of France, during which 4,500 were deployed against, and then captured by, the Nazis.

* * * Who are you really, and what were you before? — Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca

Meanwhile, Rick’s is filled with vultures, vultures, everywhere, everywhere — Captain Renault among them. The blackmailing, gambling, child abusing serial rapist has already downed a couple of Hennessy VSOPs. The champagne cocktails he ordered were for him and Victor Laszlo, the Czech nationalist and Resistance hero. Victor already ordered two glasses of Cointreau, one for himself and one for Ilsa, his wife. Coincidentally, the time bomb planted on Hitler’s plane on a flight from Smolensk to Berlin the following year (“Operation Spark”, 19 February 1943) was disguised as a box containing two bottles of Cointreau. The plot failed because the parcel was carried in the unheated cargo hold, and the plastic explosive’s percussion cap froze.

Earlier, just after the captain accepted a Hennessy VO from Rick and speculated why Rick never returned to America —

RENAULT: Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator's wife? I like to think you killed a man. It's the Romantic in me.

— he recommended a bottle of 1926 Veuve Clicqout ‘26 — “a very good French wine” — to MAJOR HEINRICH STRASSER and his Luftwaffe cohorts.

Strasser no doubt was already a connoisseur. Veuve Clicqout supplied the Reich with 790,930 bottles during the war. According to Christophe Lucand, author of Vin et la Guerre – Comment les nazis ont fait main basse sur le ­vignoble français, (Armand Colin, 2017):

In the months preceding the attack on France, wine had been officially designated by the authorities in Berlin as a highly strategic product, considered essential to supply the German civilian population, essential to maintain the morale of its troops in combat and indispensable to supply the Reich's social circuits.

When the 22 June 1940 Armistice divided France in two, the Nazis made sure that Champagne, Burgundy, Cognac and Bordeaux were in the occupied zone. Of these, Champagne was their favourite vignoble, and, it seems, the most accommodating towards its occupiers. There are countless stories of how the Germans ransacked cellars, stealing bottles from winemakers who bricked-in their best inside secret cellars. The truth is less edifying. After Liberation, the official audit of the “Comité de Confiscation des Profits Illicites” listed the "stupefying" wartime profits of Veuve Clicqout, Moët & Chandon, G.H. Mumm, Heidsieck Monopol, Louis Roederer, Mercier, Lanson, Veuve Laurent-Perrier, Pommery and Greno. Even Pol Roger, Winston Churchill’s favourite bubbly — he is said to have consumed 42,000 bottles, at a rate of 2 a day, between 1908 and his death in 1965 — appeared on a list of Champagne houses “best rated for services rendered” during the Occupation. In total, during the war the 180 or so champagne houses pulled in "about one billion francs" above the profits to be expected in a "normal" business period. “The champagne merchants also sold the Germans an enormous quantity of wine on the black market," which resulted in "vast and incalculable profits. At the same time, they ‘offered' considerable quantities of champagne to the Germans at 'Wehrmacht' rates to maintain open collaboration:"

At the end of the conflict, tens of millions of bottles and millions of hectolitres of wine were delivered without hindrance to the enemy, according to arrangements that largely contributed to the German war effort and ensured the fortune of many merchants, wine growers and local intermediaries, to the direct detriment of French interests.

Collaboration of course occurred in other sectors, especially in gastronomy, fashion, luxury, and other “secondary” activities. From Wikipedia:

Hitler's plans for France were to eliminate it as a European power and to reduce its importance to the status of a second-class nation: ‘In the future, France will play the role of an enlarged Switzerland' in Europe and will become a country of tourism, possibly providing some production in the field of fashion.’ The idea that Germany's power on all levels, military, political and economic, prevailed led, among other things, to France playing only a minor role in its own industry.

Coco Chanel slept with a Nazi officer and was a Nazi spy. The actress Arletty said “My heart belongs to France, but my ass is international.” The family of Louis Vuitton manufactured 2,500 busts of Maréchal Pétain. The SNCF transported 76,000 French and foreign Jews to extermination camps in 74 trains. Eugène Schueller, the founder of L'Oréal, wrote violent anti-Semitic screeds and financially supported paramilitary collaborationist groups. The carmaker Louis Renault (no relation to our handsome Captain) died in prison in 1944, accused of collaborating with and profiting from the Nazis, for which his factories were nationalised three months later. The Lafarge cement factory (mentioned last week for its cement-truck slurry dumps into the Seine and its multimillion-euro payouts to ISIS in Syria) built the Atlantic Wall, the Nazi’s coastal fortification system, which ran from the Spanish border with France to the tip of Denmark, and then the length of Norway, as a defence against Allied invasion.

Meanwhile, French cinema revenues doubled and theatre revenues tripled. Two hundred and twenty feature films were made in France during the war. According to Julian Jackson (Dark Years: 1940-1944, Oxford University Press, 2001), “art, cinema, theatre, and publishing experienced a sort of golden age.”

And so on.

If you were there, back then, which circle would you have found yourself in? Which direction would you have swum? Which direction are you swimming today?

“Who are you really?” Rick asked. How would you answer?

* * * “A lot of water under the bridge.” – Dooley Wilson as Sam in Casablanca

Water under the bridge. Lots of water. Lots of bridges.

The Veuve Clicqout champagne brand was purchased in 1986 by Louis Vuitton (LV). A year later, LV merged with Moët & Chandon, which had merged with Hennessy Cognac in 1971. The resulting group, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, owns over 70 other luxury brands and has a retail network of over 5,500 stores. (Disclosure: I have worked as a copywriter for a dozen LVMH brands.) Despite the war in Ukraine (the group closed its 124 Russian stores) and the consequent supply-chain and energy crises (it announced on September 15 that it would turn off lights at 10 pm in its stores, and lower temperature settings in its industrial and administrative sites, starting with France and then worldwide, to save energy), and despite a deep stock price dip in April and a fear that COVID-19-related lockdowns in China would disrupt sales, LVMH generated 64.2 billion euros in 2021, up 44% compared to 2020 and 20% compared to 2019.

The CEO of LVMH is Bernard Arnault. According to Forbes, Arnault’s personal fortune is USD 151.7 billion, which is roughly USD 20 billion higher than Morocco’s gross national income (GNI) for 2021, and about the same as Kuwait’s. Arnault’s career began in 1971, working for his father’s  construction company, which he converted into a real estate company, before transferring his focus onto textiles and retail, acquiring a holding company that owned Christian Dior and Le Bon Marché department, stripping away the rest of its assets and laying off 9,000 employees, and selling his real-estate business to the Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE), a water company created in 1853 by Napoleon III.

For roughly 100 years, CGE ran public water systems in Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Venice, Constantinople (from 1882) and Porto. In the 1960s it began to diversify and by the 90s it was focussed on construction, telecommunications, pay television, hotels, and amusement parks. In 1997, it changed its name to Vivendi and got deeper into media, merging with Canal+ television and acquiring Seagram’s media assets, including Universal Studios. (Disclosure: I worked for Vivendi at this time, writing for the online magazines of World Media Live, one of France’s first Internet publishing houses). Corporations of this size, especially in France, are shapeshifters: the full list of acquisitions and mergers and renamings is as unfathomable as the Marianas Trench; but basically, in 1999, Vivendi spun off CGE’s water division into Vivendi Water, which became Veolia Water (VW) in 2005. VW is the world's largest supplier of water services (drinking water and collecting and treating waste water/sewage water). It is among the world’s largest privatisers of public services, and, by revenue, the world's largest privatiser of water. Its revenues in 2021 were somewhere around 38 billion euro (comparable to the GNI of Uganda, Bolivia, Latvia or Paraguay), thanks to the extra 10 billion euros coming through its merger last year with Suez, the other big French water-service company.

Suez, founded in 1858, merged with France’s other major water concern, Lyonnaise des Eaux (1997), which, originally was the Compagnie des eaux de Paris (1770), which oversaw the building of the city’s canals and water pumps, and which spun off into media, cable, and communications in the 1980s…

At sea? Au large? Never mind. It’s all Veolia now. And Veolia is everywhere. About two-thirds of its turnover comes from Europe; the other third is divided between Asia-Pacific; Africa (including Casablanca, where it runs the waterworks through a subsidiary and is bidding on an 800-million-euro desalination plant), the Middle East and India; and the Americas — where, most famously, it oversaw drinking water treatment in Flint, Michigan.

RENAULT: Water? What water? We’re in a dessert.

RICK: I was misinformed.

Let’s dangle a toe or two a bit longer. LVMH consumed 4.41 billion litres of water in 2021, 1% more than in 2020. Fashion and Leather Goods accounted for 43% of the group’s total water consumption, followed by wines and spirits (30%), selective retail (16%), perfumes and cosmetics (5%) and watches and jewellery (2%).

This is a drop in the bucket. In France, twice that many litres of bottled water were consumed last year…

END OF PART II.

Next week, Eau-Oh Part III: “We’ll always have Vichy.”

Here’s the elevator pitch: Virgil tells Dante that the rivers of Hell are composed of tears — the distillate of human suffering. I would suggest they’re composed of bottled water.

Thanks for reading. Please share. And while you’re at it, buy me a drink. All this writing is making me thirsty.

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