As Time Goes By, What\'s This Piano Worth?

Everett Collection The piano made a brief but memorable appearance in “Casablanca,” which came out in 1942, with Dooley Wilson, left, as Sam, Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund Laszlo.

Marcus Yam for The New York Times The piano as it looks today is being auctioned off by Sotheby's.

Here's looking at you, piano.

No one would mistake you for Ingrid Bergman, though you and she shared a moment. And what a moment it was. It made you one of the most famous pianos in movie history. You must remember that: The flashback scene in Paris, the one that turned“Casablanca” from simply a war story into one of the most enduring cinematic love stories ever told.

Now you are to be auctioned off at Sotheby's by an auctioneer who has sold other famous movie props - the “Rosebud” sled from “Citizen Kane,” for example. Sotheby's expects you to sell from $800,000 to $1.2 million in the auction on Friday. That is between 34 to 48 times what Bergman was paid for sharing top billing with Humphrey Bogart.

And she really had to work. She was in scene after scene. You appeared in only one, in the Parisian cafe known with the words “La Belle Aurore” on the window. Warner Brothers used a different piano in the scenes in Rick's Café Américain. That was the one that Bogart slipped those “letters of transit” into, not you.

You were not on camera for long - only about 1 minute 10 seconds. And while you were seen, you were not heard. Dooley Wilson, who played Sam, moved his hands up and down your keyboard as he sang. But he was not hitting the notes. Somewhere off camera was a real pianist, performing on another piano.

So moviegoers never really knew what you could do. Bogart implied that you might not have been the greatest. Later in the movie, much later, when he told Miss Bergman that he had “heard a lot of stories in my time,” his next line was: “They went along with the sound of a tinny piano…” But what did he know? You were the silent piano.

Finally, 70 years after the movie came out, you had your “Garbo talks” moment - the moment when your voice was finally heard - at Sotheby's. As your vaguely honky-tonk sound drifted through Sotheby's exhibition space, a line from a certain song came to mind: The fundamental things apply as time goes by. And time does go by - pianos get old. They can lose the bounce they had when they were young.

You are not really in tune, but not badly out of tune, either, and that is with no help from a piano technician. Sotheby's said the piano had not been worked on since it was delivered for display several weeks ago.

Considering that “Casablanca” was shot in black and white, a spoiler alert is probably in order here. Readers who want to keep imagining the movie in black and white should skip to the next paragraph. In real life, the piano is green an d tan. Sotheby's said it still had several coats of paint, apparently left over from appearances in other movies, when it was bought by a Los Angeles collector in the 1980s. He scraped off the layers, revealing colors that “Casablanca” audiences could only guess at.

The piano is weathered, and a bit sluggish. It cannot handle the thrill of a trill, as Michael Feinstein - the well-known pianist and singer, who, with Ian Jackman, is the author of “The Gershwins and Me: A Personal History in 12 Songs” - discovered when he tried it at Sotheby's on Monday. “It's not gratifying to play,” he said, “but that's not actually what it's about.”

No. As he said after playing “Someone to Watch Over Me,” this piano was a prop. Bogart, who stood 5 feet 9 inches tall, must have liked this piano because it, too, is rather short. He would n ot have towered over a conventional upright the way he towered this one.

It is also slimmer than most pianos. It has only 58 keys, 30 fewer than a conventional modern instrument. “It's a cafe piano,” said the auctioneer at Sotheby's, David N. Redden. “It was designed to be wheeled from table to table. The pianist would move it to the next table. It's rather like the violinist coming round to each table.”

In “As Time Goes By,” Mr. Feinstein was well aware of just how limited the keyboard was. “At a couple of spots,” he said, “I was reaching for notes that weren't there.”

He was also aware of its little odor problem, not uncommon among old pianos with dust on the hammers, the strings and the soundboard. Mr. Feinstein said he could “actually smell the dust when the keys are depressed.”

The piano's life after “Casablanca” is “a little unclear,” Mr. Redden said. “It may have been used in other films, although we haven't id entified any.” There is a photograph from a 1943 War Bond drive. It apparently languished in a prop shop for years. (The other piano in “Casablanca,” the one from Rick's Café Américain, was sold to the same collector in the 1980s. Sotheby's said it is now on loan to the Warner Brothers Studio Museum in Burbank, Calif.)

Mr. Redden sold the “La Belle Aurore” piano in 1988 for $155,000, at the time the second highest price for a piece of Hollywood memorabilia. Prices for Hollywood memorabilia have soared since then. And just as Marilyn Monroe's dress from “The Seven Year Itch” was not bought to be worn when it went for $4.6 million last year, the “Casablanca” piano will probably not be bought to be played.

“This is memorabilia,” Mr. Feinstein said. “Nobody's buying this as a musical instrument. I mean, this is not something Lang Lang would want to have to play. But you can't put a price on what it is worth to an individual because there's o nly one of these. I've played many pianos through the years that people said George Gershwin played - ‘This belonged to George Gershwin' - and it's usually apocryphal. But this is the real thing, and so it's basically worth whatever someone's willing to pay for it. And it's going to be a lot.”

Marcus Yam for The New York Times The piano could fetch as much as $1.2 million at auction, according to Sotheby's.