Bergman Biographer Gets Star Treatment

Three thousand miles from Santa Monica, 4,000 miles from Morocco and 44 years from “Casablanca,” all three elements came together here Thursday in an evening that featured couscous, political talk and a pair of blond belly dancers.

The occasion was a party honoring adopted Californian Laurence Leamer and “As Time Goes By,” his “fiercely honest” biography that, as publisher Harper & Row likes to tout, “unmasks the myth of Ingrid Bergman.”

From the moment they pounded on the door, Casablanca-style, for entry to a Middle-Eastern restaurant called Marrakesh, the 200 or so friends of Leamer and admirers of Bergman were transported out of the pinstriped world of Washington into a fantasy land where fans whirled overhead and musical themes alternated between “Casablanca” and the casbah.

‘The Usual Suspects’

Some guests like La Donna Harris, founder of Americans for Indian Opportunity, wore elaborate caftans or flowing Middle-Eastern robes. Others wore the kind of evening attire that would have suited them equally for a soiree at Rick’s Cafe. Looking around the room, on the whole it was a definite case of “round up the usual suspects.”

Transplanted nearly three years ago from Washington to a Santa Monica town house, Leamer said he felt certain it was the crowd Bergman would have regaled in. In fact, he said, “Ingrid is looking down now and enjoying being the center of things.”

For, as Leamer writes, Bergman demanded, and generally received, total attention--if not outright adulation. The actress quite coolly summarized her basic philosophy when she said, “I’m only interested in two kinds of people, those who can entertain me and those who can advance my career.”

Still, her mystique and her icy beauty generated intense passion from those who knew her, even if only on the screen.

“Really, I used to be completely in love with her,” said Abdallah Bouhabib, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States. “I was 14 years old and I loved her.

“She was beautiful,” he went on. “I don’t know, there was just something about her.”

Former senator and one-time Democratic presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy said he had admired Bergman, certainly, but that wasn’t the sole basis of his interest in the actress and her films.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m from Minnesota, and we have a lot of Swedes there . . .”

Real Reason Given

Dipping a hunk of thick bread into a plate of Middle-Eastern vegetables, McCarthy said the real reason for his presence at the Casablanca party was that “I knew Larry when he was writing serious political tracts.” That would be a decade ago, when Leamer was struggling to make a living as a free-lance writer in the journalist’s jungle of Washington.

“Larry did the best book of its kind on Washington, ‘Playing for Keeps in Washington,’ ” said old campaigner Maurice Rosenblatt, the founder of, among other organizations, the National Committee for an Effective Congress. As for “Make Believe,” Leamer’s portrait of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, “the title itself is a masterpiece,” Rosenblatt said.

But on the subject of the Bergman book, Rosenblatt was less generous. “It’s much more than I wanted or needed to know about her, put it that way,” Rosenblatt said. Dismissing Southern California as “a series of high-rise apartments that have been cut down, spread out and had carports attached to them,” Rosenblatt expressed hope that Leamer would one day return to his senses and trade the glitz and sunshine of Lotus Land for the political parade of Washington.

He’s ‘on Parole’

Not that Rosenblatt would go so far as to say Leamer had sold out, writing star biographies. Rather, he said, “I would say he is a political writer on parole.”

McCarthy, for his part, merely shrugged when asked whether Washington writing was any more or less real than tales of Hollywood.

“People write what they want to, I guess,” McCarthy said. The former senator had completed the final words of a book of his own, his 15th, that very afternoon. Still untitled, the book is “semi-autobiographical,” McCarthy said, “but it’s more about other people than about me.” Now, McCarthy said, he is eager to get back to his desk and write some more poetry, his real literary love.

Talking to a room that included many practicing journalists, Leamer joked that “Harper & Row refers to me as a ‘former journalist.’

“That may be a term of endearment,” he said. “Or it may be an attack on my research methods.”

But even though Leamer and wife Vesna were clear in describing themselves as former Washingtonians, the capital wasn’t so sure it was going to let them get off that easily.

“They live here,” financier Michael Tomic said. “We just rent them to L.A.”