Preston Sturges: The Last Years of Hollywood's First Writer-Director

By Nick Smedley, Tom Sturges and Peter Bogdanovich

Few directors of the 1930s and 40s were as distinctive and popular as Preston Sturges, whose whipsmart comedies have entertained audiences for decades. This book offers a new critical appreciation of Sturges' whole oeuvre, incorporating a detailed study of the last ten years of his life from new primary sources. Preston Sturges details the many unfinished projects of Sturges' last decade, including films, plays, TV series and his autobiography. Drawing on diaries, sketchbooks, correspondence, unpublished screenplays and more, Nick Smedley and Tom Sturges present the writer-director's final years in more detail than we've ever seen, showing a master still at work – even if very little of that work ultimately made it to the screen or stage. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789380255

Nick Smedley

Nick Smedley has a Ph.D. from London University on the history of Hollywood in the Golden Age, and has taught the master's course in film studies there.  

Book preview

Preface by Nick Smedley

The genesis of this book was a speculative email I sent to Tom Sturges one afternoon, to ask whether he had any archival material that was not available to the public via the enormous and fantastically rich collection deposited in UCLA. He gave me an audition by reading some of my earlier work, and then said he was prepared to let me see the private correspondence, diaries, unpublished screenplays and various other memorabilia of his famous father. He suggested I write a book about the last ten years in the life of Preston Sturges: ten years of struggle amidst constant creativity, ten years largely hidden from public knowledge and academic scrutiny. While I was not at first sure whether such a study would yield enough to interest readers both academic and general, the project certainly seemed fascinating. By the time I had come to grips with the abundant material in Tom’s possession, my anxiety was the opposite – how on earth could I bring order and structure to such a vast treasure trove of data?

This book, then, is first and foremost an account of the last ten years of Preston Sturges’ life, drawn exclusively from the Tom and P. G. Sturges Collection. I hope it offers insights into the myriad ideas, inventions, stories, screenplays, memoirs, plays and other outpourings of one of the most fertile minds in any field of artistic endeavour in the twentieth century. I hope, too, that readers will enjoy learning more about this man’s political and philosophical thoughts, including his views on women and relations between the sexes. Finally, I want everyone who picks up this book to feel that they have come to know the often-extreme personality and the chequered private life of a complex, erudite, fascinating, witty and, at times, frustrating human being. This is not just voyeuristic. Getting so much closer to the man behind the artistic achievements allows us to gain fresh insights into the themes and ideas he explored in his famous and brilliant films of the 1940s. It is also compelling as an end in itself.

To make sense of his decline and his struggles to come back to prominence during the 1950s, I have felt it essential to provide the reader with a brief account of his early life, and an analysis and history of his decade at the top in Hollywood. The section that follows, which I call the Preludes, is based on my own research into contemporaneous reception material, secondary sources and my previous research and writings on the political, social and cultural history of Hollywood in the New Deal Era, from 1930 to 1950. The analyses of the films that I provide in this introductory section offer, I hope, new interpretations of many of Sturges’ themes and preoccupations, and their relationship to the culture and context of the time. This section of the book is not, however, intended as a full-scale biography, or a detailed assessment of the academic literature on Preston Sturges in the 1940s. I have highlighted some of the more interesting and pertinent secondary material in the endnotes to each chapter, and directed academic readers to other works in the bibliography at the end of the book.

Also interspersed throughout the main part of the book – the account of the last years of Preston Sturges – are five ‘Interludes’ by Tom Sturges. Tom was an infant when he last saw his father in Paris, and was not yet four years old when Preston Sturges died in 1959. But he grew up with Sturges’ last wife, Sandy Sturges, Tom’s mother, and these Interludes offer Tom’s memories of the stories Sandy told about her life with her famous husband. They are provided here in what Tom calls ‘thought photographs’, to give a personally inflected flavour of the man as a man, rather than as a great artist. These examples of oral history are imbued with the ghostly presence of a man who died tragically young. I hope that they provide readers with a unique perspective on the life of Preston Sturges to complement my own analytical history.

Part I

The Preludes: The Brilliant Career of Preston Sturges, 1940–1949 — A Critical Survey of His Hollywood Films

i. Beginnings

Preston Sturges burst onto the Hollywood firmament in 1940 like a spectacular fireworks display. And like a fireworks display, he filled the air with light and colour, with explosions of sound, with joy and excitement, with beauty and pyrotechnical wizardry. And just as quickly as he was there, he was suddenly gone. The sky was black again. The air was silent. Darkness reigned. Something incandescent had burst into light, flared with a blinding brilliance, and then burned out. By 1949, less than a decade after his rise to fame, Preston Sturges appeared to be a spent force in Hollywood. All the doors that had once yielded to his lightest touch were suddenly shut in his face. Telephone calls went unreturned. For Sturges, it was time to reconsider his future path. Slowly, he untangled himself from California, wound his way across the United States to New York and finally settled in the city of his childhood, Paris, where he would base himself and his manifold activities for the rest of his life. Although he was never to climb again to the heights he had scaled in the 1940s, life was far from over for the once-legendary writer-director who had bestrode Hollywood with such ease. Never one to shirk a challenge, Sturges viewed the decline in his fortunes as nothing more than a temporary setback. Not for Sturges the easy path of retiring to France and dwelling on past glories. He would fight back and he would rise again.

The next decade was to see Preston Sturges actively pursuing his comeback. Using every contact in his network, exploring new avenues for his seemingly unlimited creative drive, his pen was hardly laid down throughout the last ten years of his life. Screenplays, stage plays, television projects, songs, a monumental draft of his memoirs, constant letters to producers, writers, friends, fellow artists and his absent wife, diaries stuffed with new ideas for films, books, plays, television series and an extraordinary, prescient series of inventions for modern living: all of these poured forth from his unceasingly fertile imagination. Alongside all this writing, Sturges travelled to New York, to Rome, to Miami, to Cincinnati, to London, in search of work; he dined out and drank heavily in various bars in Paris as he relentlessly worked his contacts, seeking that all-important deal for his comeback film, his theatrical breakthrough, his relaunch as a television personality, his arrival as an author. Sturges never lost his drive, nor did his creative juices show any signs of drying up. For him, writing was living and, so long as he could breathe, dictate ideas or handle a pen or a typewriter, he would create. Every single day brought a thought for a story, an idea for a title, a visionary invention or the development of his latest script, screenplay or musical. Preston Sturges may have been knocked down in the bout, but he was by no means out for the count.

But how would he fare? Throughout these years, Sturges battled his demons: excessive drinking, debilitating smoking, serious asthma attacks and a routine of late nights and limited exercise that was to drive him to an early grave. For the last two years of his life, his wife and two small children lived apart from him in Los Angeles, and he was not to see them again before his death. Underpinning it all was the unending, sometimes desperate, search for money – and this from a man who, in 1948, was the third-highest paid employee in the whole of the United States, earning $12,500 a week with an annual income before tax from his salary alone of $407,000. Yet he refused to give up: he could not allow himself to fail, he would not admit defeat. Occasionally he might be tortured by intimations of death, or oppressed by sudden bouts of deep despair. But most of the time his spirits were buoyant, and he nurtured a boundless, at times almost ridiculous, optimism for the certainty of success that lay just around the corner. He had been there before; he knew the vicissitudes of fortune. Preston Sturges had always had a knack for making money – lots of money. But he had an equal facility for spending it. He had been rich more than once by 1950, but he had always spent more than he earned, always lived extravagantly and well beyond his means. He had made and lost more than one fortune by the time his Hollywood career came to a sudden end; he was entirely confident that he would make one more yet.

His mind was brimming with new ideas throughout these final years, many of them excellent ideas. Yet there was one crucial difference between his position in the 1950s and that which maintained in the decade before: now, Sturges was out in the world of independent filmmaking. Hollywood was changing rapidly in the 1950s, reducing its personnel, trimming its budgets and releasing fewer films than it had done at the height of the studio system in Sturges’ hey-day. It was getting ever harder and ever more competitive for writers and directors trying to find a steady stream of commissions. Sturges had virtually no experience of this world. He had been brought up in the Golden Age of Hollywood, a talented employee in constant demand. At this time, Hollywood was like an enormous family firm for those lucky enough to be on the inside. Sturges had producers like Frank Freeman and Paul Jones supporting his endeavours, who recognized his genius and made sure he had the money and autonomy to give full expression to his artistic imagination. The facilities were world-class and at his fingertips. There were cameramen, technicians, costumiers; there were secretaries, drivers, script-girls, typists, make-up artists, hairdressers; they were all on the company payroll and they were all at Sturges’ command. There was a roster of some of the most glamorous and most gifted actors and actresses ever assembled in one town. There was the commissary for sociable dining; there were fellow directors, producers and writers passing through every day. There was, in sum, a whole infrastructure of support that enabled men like Sturges to concentrate on what they did best – fashioning entertainment of an unparalleled brilliance – without having to worry about the prosaic matters of film production. When he ceased to be a contract employee in 1949 and moved to become a freelance writer, he entered a far more precarious world of independent producers and unreliable financiers. In this world, Sturges would need all his negotiating skills and powers of persuasion to seduce hard-nosed money men into backing his projects. How well equipped would he turn out to be in this dog-eat-dog environment?

The fight was on. Preston Sturges, comic genius, one of the most successful and brilliant Hollywood film directors of all time, witty, erudite, raconteur, restaurateur, serial philanderer, sophisticated American with European manners and education; and Preston Sturges, arrogant, wilful, irascible, incapable of accepting criticism – a woeful businessman, jealous husband, serious drinker and heavy smoker. The two sides of this extraordinary, talented man would be evident in the years to come and both would play their part in determining the highs and lows in his battle for survival. He might have looked like a fallen giant in that summer of 1949, when his last ever fixed-term Hollywood contract came to an end, but he wasn’t going quietly. This was the man who would not give up. He was ready for them. Preston Sturges would rise again.

Overture

When Preston Sturges came to direct his first film in 1940 for Paramount, The Great McGinty (1940), he was 42 years old and had been working as a screenwriter in Hollywood for almost ten years.¹ It was not standard practice at that time in the American film industry for writers to direct their own scripts. The roles were strictly demarcated, with writers hired, often in teams, to produce different versions of a story and a screenplay, for the film’s director and producer to review before choosing a suitable treatment. Sturges had often railed against the practice of having up to ten people work on a screenplay, and he felt frustrated about the lack of control he had over his own scripts. He was also highly conscious of the relatively inferior, albeit well-paid, status of the writer when compared to the director on a film. But his repeated efforts to secure a place in the director’s chair in the 1930s were repelled. He had tried to interest studio heads in his screenplay, The Biography of a Bum, since it was first written in 1933, on condition that he, Sturges, be allowed to direct it, but to no avail. Finally, at the end of 1939, William LeBaron, production head at Paramount (where Sturges had been working as a writer since 1937), agreed to let Sturges direct his own script, retitled The Great McGinty, for a director’s fee, purchasing the screenplay for the nominal sum of $10. The frustrations Sturges experienced in the 1930s were to form part of the background to his later masterpiece about the Hollywood studio system, Sullivan’s Travels (1942).

Once set upon the career of a writer-director, Sturges’ rise was meteoric and his output prolific, making seven films in a mere four years, four of which are indisputably masterpieces. Yet this burst of energy ended as suddenly as it had begun. Whereas some artists, like the composer Verdi or the novelist Dickens, mature over time and develop their philosophy and style over decades, Sturges burnt brightly for a magnificent short period, then burned out. He seemed to cram into four short years an entire oeuvre. The second half of his Hollywood career, from 1944 when he left Paramount to 1949 when his last American film was released, was by no means quiescent or lacking in artistic achievement. Both The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) and Unfaithfully Yours (1948) have much to commend them, even though neither was a commercial success. But the phenomenal genius of the early 1940s was gone. It was as if Sturges knew he did not have much time, and worked at twice the pace of most film directors to produce a corpus of work in four years that would take many of them more than a decade.

The Road to Fame

Preston Sturges was born Edmund Preston Biden in Chicago on 29 August 1898 to working-class, Irish-American Roman Catholics, Edmund Biden and Mary Dempsey, who had married the previous year. The marriage did not last long and, when the boy was still an infant, his mother left her husband and took her son with her to Paris. In circumstances that are still obscure, Mary Dempsey took up with the famous dancer Isadora Duncan in Paris, and the two women remained life-long friends. How Mary sustained herself during these first years in Paris is not known. Nor is it clear how she came to meet wealthy Chicago stockbroker and businessman Solomon Sturges, but in October 1901 the two were married. Little Preston was adopted by his new stepfather and took the name Preston Sturges in January 1902. In later life, he would claim that this event marked his real birthday, as distinct from his August birthday as a Biden. It is not known how the new marriage functioned, but Mary spent much of her time with Preston in Europe, living in Paris and Dresden, with occasional visits back to Illinois and New York. By 1907, when Preston was 8 years old, he and his mother (now styling herself Mary Desti) were living permanently in Europe.

The young Sturges began attending boarding schools in Paris, then in Normandy, and then back in Paris. His mother rented an apartment in Paris and owned a house in a small village about 35 miles outside the city, where Preston would spend weekends and holidays. His childhood was a highly damaging combination of extreme indulgence and total neglect. Mary lived a bohemian lifestyle with Isadora and her entourage, often travelling and dumping her son in hotels or with friends. When she was with Preston, he was treated as an adult in some respects, taken to the theatre and opera and allowed to drink wine, while being dressed in a Roman tunic for some of his childhood years. Abandoned by his true father, and separated from his adoptive father for years at a time, shunted backwards and forwards between other people’s houses as an only-child enduring long absences from his mother, it is perhaps no surprise that the adult Sturges was the man he was: exceptionally confident and assured, with a self-belief so high that he never contemplated failure, even in the darkest hours; highly independent-minded and an original thinker, not constrained by the urge to conform, not limited in his thinking by convention and social norms; educated, erudite, a sophisticated American with European manners and an amused detachment from many of the underlying values of American culture; a sense of his own talent that bordered on egomania; emotionally complex and needy, attention-seeking and prone to jealous rages; married four times, neglectful of his children, forgetful of birthdays and anniversaries, sometimes even capable of physical violence towards the women in his life; constantly seeking approbation and unable to accept criticism or advice; hard-working and committed; and finally, a quality that he found invaluable in the harder climate of his life in the 1950s – a tireless optimist who would not allow himself to admit defeat or to wallow in depression.

One other habit he formed at this impressionable stage of his life was that money was always there, and always would be. It appeared as if by magic. There was no need to work for it; there was no need to save up money for a rainy day. One could spend it, give it away to friends (or strangers); it was of no consequence. Money did not matter and was not important, not because one could live without it – far from it – but because it would always be there when you needed it. His mother appeared to live without any noticeable source of income for much of the time. His step-father, with whom he had a close relationship until Solomon died in 1940, provided for him at many crisis points in his financial affairs, and subsidized his mother throughout her life. In later life, Sturges would be utterly cavalier with his money, making and spending a fortune during the hey-day of his Hollywood career, careless with accounts and a terrible businessman. He was always generous with his money when he had it and, equally, he expected his friends to be generous to him when he fell on hard times. His own generosity could be exploited – his half-brother Edmund Biden was content to live rent-free in the Sturges house, accompanied by his wife, children and dog, for years and years, allowing the property and its grounds to fall into wrack and ruin while Sturges was absent in France. At the end of his life, when work and money were hard to come by, Sturges could become desperate, simply unable to comprehend how money did not appear from a clear blue sky when it was needed.

Mary’s marriage to Solomon did not endure and they divorced amicably in 1911, after which she married a Turkish businessman, Vely Bey. He and his family inspired Mary to open a perfume and cosmetics store in Paris, named ‘Maison Desti’, in 1912, which was initially very successful, with branches opening in Deauville on the Normandy coast, New York and (after the outbreak of World War I ruined the business in Paris) London. At 15 years old, the young Sturges, suffering from bronchitis and a mild dose of tuberculosis, was sent to boarding school in Lausanne for ‘the air’. At the end of the academic year 1913-14, Preston went to join his mother in Deauville for the summer. When France declared war on Germany, a worried Mary dispatched her son to America, where Solomon arranged accommodation for him in New York. When his mother arrived shortly thereafter, Preston finished his education at 16 years old and joined his mother’s cosmetics business, she staying at the Ritz while he lived in a seedy hotel off Washington Square. Mary soon decamped to London, where her cosmetics enterprise could continue, leaving the 17-year-old boy to run the New York end of the business. In 1917, Preston enlisted in the Signal Corps and trained as a pilot, qualifying in 1918, but not in time to see any active service. Once demobbed, he returned to New York and to the business, relocating the ailing beauty products store to Brooklyn. His mother remained in Europe, now married to her fourth husband, an Englishman named Howard Perch.

A couple of years later, Sturges met the girl who would be the first of his four wives. He fell in love with a young woman named Estelle Godfrey who was married to a man 62 years of age. The young couple began to see each other regularly, and Estelle left her marital home to live first with an aunt in New Jersey, and then in an apartment in Chicago provided for her by Solomon Sturges. Preston spent much of this time with Estelle, neglecting his job in New York, until her husband came looking for the couple with some private detectives. Finally, after some negotiations, Estelle was granted a divorce, and she and Sturges were married at the end of 1923. Estelle being a woman of independent means, the couple were able to retire to her large country estate in upstate New York, with an apartment on 39th Street in Manhattan. It seemed as though Sturges would amount to nothing, content to idle away his time in Westchester County, dreaming up inventions, swimming and fishing in the lake on the estate, and living the life of a wealthy dilettante. This bucolic idyll was shattered, however, in 1927 when, after four years of marriage, Estelle suddenly announced she was leaving him. It was to give Sturges an abiding distrust of women and their ruthlessness in relationships, later describing her ‘as businesslike and impersonal as a slaughterhouse employee’.² Forced back into the real world, he was again rescued by the good offices of Solomon Sturges, who agreed to refinance the defunct cosmetics store to the tune of $1,000 a month. His mother, who had come back to run the New York business during the interlude of Sturges’ marriage, promptly left him to it and returned to Europe. It was at this somewhat inauspicious juncture that Sturges’ life took a decisive turn, one that would take him in a direction from which he would never waver. Preston Sturges became a writer.

It was while he was laid up in hospital in 1928, recovering from an operation to remove his appendix, that Sturges, bored and bedridden, read a book on the craft of playwriting. With the self-confidence born of a privileged life, he determined to try his hand at writing a play. The result was The Guinea Pig, a play that he managed to get staged in New York at the start of 1929. It ran for two months and attracted moderately favourable reviews, critics spotting a first-time playwright who they thought might have some potential. It was also the first sign of an affliction that would become prominent again in the later stages of his life: a tendency to over-write. His prolixity would spoil not only some of the plays and screenplays of his last decade, but would also render his autobiography a turgid bore: as he was to confess in those same memoirs, ‘my trouble never lay in inventing dialogue, but in throwing three-quarters of it away’.³ A more serioues lifetime affliction became apparent when he came to mount his follow-up play, Strictly Dishonorable, which opened on Broadway on 19 September 1929. During the preparation of the run, Sturges had repeated and fierce arguments about the script with the producer, Brock Pemberton. Sturges recalled in his memoirs: ‘every change was fought over like a fresh kill in a famine. So violent were our disagreements that they resulted in days during which he and I exchanged not a word’.⁴ This inability to accept another person’s opinion, or to be able to collaborate with a colleague and build enduring relationships, would in time sabotage his relations at Paramount Studios, the organization that was to launch his directorial career. It would also present a serious obstacle to finding partners for his enterprises once he set forth into the uncertain world of freelance writing and independent production after 1949. Despite these incipient problems, back in 1929 the play was an enormous success. Not for the last time in his career, Preston Sturges was catapulted to fame and stardom overnight. He had the biggest hit of the season and, it seemed, his future as a playwright was guaranteed.

Hollywood immediately showed an interest in this new star writer, and Sturges began to do bits and pieces of writing for the major studios, discovering quickly how lucrative this source of employment could be. Meanwhile, in a style that he would replicate when he began directing, Sturges proceeded at great speed to produce a follow-up to his first successful play. By 29 January 1930, his new vehicle, Recapture, had hit the boards on Broadway. It was a flop, however, and closed within the week. Sturges hardly seemed to notice, running away with an heiress, Eleanor Post Hutton, buying a yacht and preparing to mount his first musical show, The Well of Romance. His new, and fabulously wealthy, wife financed the production when it ran into difficulties, only to see her investment vanish when the play was a second flop for Sturges, closing a mere eight days after its opening night on 30 November 1930. The next year, his mother, to whom he remained deeply attached, died in April and Eleanor left him a couple of months after that. It had not been a happy marriage, and Sturges did not appear to grieve much, instead concentrating on his next play, Child of Manhattan. Opening on 2 March 1932, it was the last chance saloon for the tyro playwright, who badly needed a hit after two dreadful flops. Unfortunately, this was the third. Mauled by critics, it too closed down after a short run of two months. It was time to move to Hollywood. Faced on the one hand with an uphill climb to regain his credibility in the theatre, and on the other with the offer of $1,000 a week to work on scripts for Universal Studios, Sturges wasted no more time. On 9 September 1932, he signed up for a new career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

In the eight years that followed, Sturges became a highly paid writer, and one increasingly frustrated by the limitations imposed on that branch of the Hollywood professions. He had not been out in California long before he attempted to overturn the established orthodoxies, writing an original screenplay without a commission, and then selling it to a studio. This practice may not strike us today, in the age of independent film production, as unusual but, in 1932, Hollywood was a fully integrated business in which everyone was an employee of a company. Freelance writers were not encouraged, not least because it removed from the studio bosses an element of control over the finished product. The studio heads much preferred to employ a roster of screenwriters who would work only on the projects that they were given, and whose work could be ignored, adjusted or utilized as necessary, in circumstances where the screenplay was the property of the studio, not the author(s). Sturges saw an opportunity to work in the film industry in the same way that he had worked on Broadway: he would write a script, sell it to a studio, and then help to oversee the story’s transfer to the screen. His property for this innovation was The Power and the Glory (Howard, 1933), which he sold to Jesse Lasky at Fox in 1932. But it was not an innovation that the studios had any wish to encourage. Sturges himself, characteristically, made matters far worse by taking to the airwaves and talking to the press, denouncing the oppressive practices of the studio heads and proclaiming the arrival of a new method of writing for the cinema. His experiment was not copied at the time, and he made a number of enemies among the producers and directors with whom he was now compelled to work. It was a pattern of behaviour – arrogance, belittling others, overplaying his hand, alienating those very people whose influence and assistance he might one day require – that Sturges would repeat, not only when at the height of his powers in the 1940s but also, more alarmingly, in the subsequent decade when he needed to win support from theatre and film producers. It was not a propitious omen.

As the 1930s passed, Sturges became ever more wealthy, earning $2,500 a week by 1935. He bought a second boat, Destiny, and opened an engineering company in Wilmington and a restaurant off Sunset Boulevard, Snyder’s (later to become the venue for Wolfgang Puck’s legendary Los Angeles restaurant in the 1990s). He wrote screenplays for such films as The Good Fairy (Wyler, 1935) and Diamond Jim (A. Edward Sutherland, 1935) while at Universal, and then moved to Paramount in 1937, writing Easy Living (Leisen, 1937) and If I Were King (Lloyd, 1938) among others. In April 1937, he finally gave up his New York apartment and bought a house in Hollywood at Franklin Avenue and Ivar, a short drive from the Paramount lot. The following year, 1938, he closed Snyder’s and opened a restaurant that he would personally run, The Players on Sunset Boulevard (now the Pink Taco). In November that year, his longstanding, and often fiery, affair with his secretary, Bianca Gilchrist, came to an end, and Sturges married, for a third time. His bride was a 29-year-old girl called Louise Tevis. Five years later, at the height of his powers, Sturges would record a thought for a film story in his Ideas Book:

In order to prevent himself from remarrying a Bitch who fascinates him. [sic] A man marries an almost total stranger.

Beneath this typed note, Sturges jotted down ‘Bianca Louise’.⁵

Louise would bear him the first of his three children, Solomon (known as ‘Mon’), two-and-a-half years after their marriage, on 25 June 1941. Sturges was 40 years old when he married Louise in 1938. In 1939, his beloved stepfather, Solomon, moved to Los Angeles with his wife to spend the last year of his life nearer to Preston. He was to die in 1940. In the year of Solomon’s death, Preston Sturges finally got his way, and a new and glorious chapter in his life opened.

Once the new technology of sound pictures had established itself by 1929, Hollywood had begun to employ writers to provide the dialogue now needed for filmmaking. These writers were specialists with a clearly defined function – to write dialogue. The role of director was entirely separate. But, ten years later in 1939, the art of writing a screenplay had achieved heights that no one foresaw in the early days of sound. The best writers were now as creative as the best directors and, in some films, arguably made a more important contribution. Preston Sturges became the first screenwriter since the coming of sound in 1927 who would get to direct his own scripts. It was a startling innovation and Sturges paved the way in short order for such other luminaries as Billy Wilder, John Huston and Orson Welles. Sturges had campaigned for years to earn the title he so craved, and in which he was to invest all his astonishing brilliance. He was, at last, a writer-director.

Notes

Abbreviations

In the Notes for this book, the following abbreviations are used:

–UCLA PS: University of California, Los Angeles, Preston Sturges Collection

–TS Collection: Screenplays and an ‘Ideas Book’ in the Tom and P. G. Sturges Collection

–Diary: Preston Sturges’ three years of diaries (1954, 1958 and 1959), in the Tom and P. G. Sturges Collection

–SL: Sturges’ letters, usually between him and his wife, Sandy Sturges, in the Tom and P. G. Sturges Collection

–PS: Preston Sturges

–Sandy refers to Sandy Sturges, the fourth and final wife of Preston Sturges

1The chronology of main events that follows in this potted biography of Sturges and his early career as a writer in Hollywood is derived largely from Sturges’ own memoirs, as adapted and edited by his widow, Sandy Sturges, in Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (Simon & Schuster, 1990). Most biographers of Sturges follow these memoirs and, even though they are the subjective memories of Preston Sturges in the last months in which he was alive, they do appear reliable in terms of the broad outlines of his life. The most comprehensive biography is by Diane Jacobs, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges (University of California Press, 1992). Jacobs, too, bases her early chapters on the published autobiography, supplemented by memoirs from his mother and Isadora Duncan, plus correspondence where it exists for his first decade in Hollywood. Also useful for Sturges’ early life and post-Hollywood career is Donald Spoto’s Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges (Little, Brown and Co., 1990).

2See his musings in Sturges, Preston (1990), Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, S. Sturges (ed.), New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 222.

3Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, p. 237.

4Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, p. 252.

5Ideas Book, 22 February 1943; in TS Collection.

ii. The Emergence of a Genius

The Great McGinty

When Sturges came to direct his first film, he chose a property from his ‘bottom drawer’, a practice that he was much to decry when he spotted others doing it, but which he himself happily did for his first three films, again later in the decade for Unfaithfully Yours and, to a lesser extent, with both The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and The Great Moment (1944).¹ When he was looking somewhat desperately for work in the later 1950s, he had no qualms at all about exhuming whatever properties he could find, sometimes quite literally from a bottom drawer in his old house in Hollywood. On watching The Great McGinty today, a first-time viewer, while undoubtedly enjoying the amusing screenplay, might wonder quite why it was greeted on its release as the arrival of a new style of comic writing. But it certainly was – critics commented on the freshness of Sturges’ style, on the novelty of his treatment with its irreverent and sardonic approach. This reception owed a lot to the fact that, while the script was indeed quite old, it also anticipated a significant shift in the type of films Hollywood would make in the 1940s. Thus on its release in 1940, the seven-year-old script was something like the two-faced Roman god Janus, who looks backward to the year just ended, and simultaneously forward to the new year just begun. Similarly, The Great McGinty drew much of its moral compass by looking back to the confident and optimistic decade of the 1930s when it had been written, while at the same time shaking hands with the new decade of the 1940s, an era in which Hollywood had begun to produce darker, more pessimistic films. Sturges’ first film made such an impact with critics (and audiences) precisely because it tentatively moved away from the style of romantic comedy prevalent in the more carefree decade of the 1930s, and took steps towards the much more edgy, morally ambivalent filmmaking that was to characterize the 1940s.

The Great McGinty is a comedy about corruption in American civic life, and a perverted morality tale, in which doing social good is punished, while acting selfishly and crookedly for personal gain is rewarded. McGinty, played as a thug by Brian Donlevy, is a worthless tramp whose street-wise cunning attracts the attention of the powerful Boss, played as an intelligent political fixer by Akim Tamiroff. McGinty learns that he can be paid to cast votes for the Boss’ candidate in a mayoral election, using the voting cards of dead people with which he is supplied by the Boss’ gang. He does so to such an extent – voting no fewer than 32 times – that the Boss is impressed enough to hire him as a strong-arm debt-collector. After a while, the Boss decides to use McGinty as his front man, installing him as Mayor to help push through various crooked schemes and deals to enrich the Boss at the expense of the people. To make him a respectable-looking candidate, McGinty is married off to a willing member of the Boss’ entourage, and it is she who inspires him, eventually, to give up his corrupt career and become a genuine civic reformer. When McGinty ascends to become state governor, to the Boss’ horror he embraces the social ideals of Roosevelt’s New Deal reform programme. It is this late conversion to honesty and genuine political commitment that brings down McGinty. Whereas in a Capra film, the qualities of virtue and civic responsibility are celebrated, for Sturges these values spell doom for his anti-hero. The Boss turns against him and ends his political career. With his crooked past now exposed, McGinty – and the Boss – have to flee to South America (incidentally eluding justice in a manner quite incompatible with the normal rules for Hollywood films in the era of the Hays Code).

Sturges’ examination of the corruption at the heart of American political institutions was direct and unflinching. While comparisons might be drawn (and were at the time) with Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Sturges’ take on the issues is more hard-edged than Capra’s and more satirical, even cynical. Where Capra pits the essentially innocent and good man from the small town against the manipulative and self-interested politicians of the big city, Sturges takes a less conventional approach to the question of good and evil, right and wrong. Otis Ferguson saw the film as ‘out of the ordinary partly because of its delightful and wicked jabs at the various forms of the squeeze, the shakedown and ballot-stuffing’,² and Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times of the way in which Sturges ‘really captures the rowdy spirit of corrupt politics […] making titanic sport of the brazen peculations of grafting opportunists’.³ The central character in the film, through whom the viewer follows the story, is not a Capra-esque ‘little man’ fighting the powerful forces of corruption. In fact, far from it – he is himself a criminal brawler who has graduated to corrupt politician, adept at manipulating the system for his personal gain. Critics noted the mixture of dark and light in the film. Thus Pare Lorentz, finding the film a harder-edged story of political corruption, wrote: ‘Sturges, with no attempt at writing a social consciousness drama, probably in a bawdy, picaresque fashion has told a truer story of politics than we’ve ever had on the screen’.⁴ Bosley Crowther thought that the film would not have been amusing some years earlier, in ‘the era of wonderful nonsense…But now, with graver matters to concern us and with a more comfortable sense of civic security’, one could laugh at McGinty’s ‘shameless tricks and vulgarities’.⁵ Meanwhile, Gilbert Seldes commented that McGinty’s reform from a cynical crook into a social crusader was entirely believable, ‘ because he has married’, adding that ‘there are some good ideas about sex and marriage implied in the simple and attractive conversations between Donlevy and Muriel Angelus [Mrs McGinty]’.⁶

Sturges’ darker take on the theme of American politics and corruption fitted well with the emerging zeitgeist in the United States in the 1940s. At the height of the New Deal in the mid-1930s, American filmmakers were celebrating the values of communities, the essential honesty inherent in small-town life, the rejection of unfettered capitalism and its attendant greed and self-interest.⁷ Bosley Crowther had hit the nail on the head when he wrote that the film would not have been amusing in the 1930s. A story that appeared to find humour in the corruption and self-enrichment of crooked politicians would not have found favour in the high idealism of the 1930s. Nor would audiences and producers have looked with indulgence on characters escaping their just desserts at the end of the film. It is, in this light, no surprise that Sturges had been unable to interest studios in his script for the seven years preceding LeBaron’s offer for him to direct the film in 1940. But as the 1940s began, the high watermark of Roosevelt’s New Deal passed, and Hollywood started to lose its confidence in the durability of a more socially minded governing class in America. The introduction in the 1930s of a moderate form of welfare capitalism, based on models in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in western Europe, had filled many of the liberals in Hollywood with confidence that a new era was dawning in the United States. Film directors, producers and writers, along with novelists, playwrights, social commentators and politicians, had sensed a permanent change in American institutions, a move away from individualism and brutal capitalism towards a greater sense of social justice, economic equality and more developed welfare systems. This self-confidence did not endure, however, into the 1940s. While World War II naturally led to a strengthening of national unity and a strong sense of a shared mission to save the world from injustice and dictatorship, this merely postponed the question of the future of American liberalism as conceived and executed by Roosevelt. After the war, the Republicans regained control of both Houses of Congress and the stage was set for a right-wing reaction to the Roosevelt era. The emphasis switched from social inequalities at home to the threat of communism, both abroad and in America, with its ethos of egalitarian socialism, aligned with a rejection of democracy and individualism. Ultimately, this shift in focus led to the rise of McCarthyism and the pursuit of those who espoused and conducted ‘unAmerican activities’ – many of whom worked in Hollywood. Hollywood responded to this realignment of the political spectrum by expressing its anxiety and fear about the prospects for social renewal in America. The films it produced in this period were darker, bleaker and more pessimistic, a cinema aptly labelled film noir.

In this more edgy atmosphere, the Sturges analysis of the dark holes at