Preston Sturges, screwball comedy auteur. |
Playwright/screen writer/Director
Preston Sturges was
known as the king of the screwball
comedy but with an eccentric/bohemian
upbringing and his own star crossed
romantic life including four wives, the
urbane master could have been a
character in one of his own films.
He
was born on August 29, 1898 as Edmund
Preston Biden in Chicago to a second generation Irish lass, Mary Estelle Dempsey, and the proverbial traveling salesman, Edmund C.
Biden. His father, the first of
Mary’s several husbands and strings of lovers was soon out of the
picture and his mother was off to Paris to
pursue her dream of being a singer.
She obtained an annulment from
Biden, questionable under U.S. law, in France. Mary wed and
disposed of a second husband.
Young Preston with his beautiful bohemian mother in 1901. |
Bouncing back and forth between continents, Mary wed wealthy and proper stockbroker Solomon Sturges in 1902 who adopted the toddler and gave him his name and financial security. The senior Sturges disapproved of his wife’s bohemianism—what did he expect? She spent much of her time with her son in
France. There she became associated with
modern dance diva and avant
garde icon Isadora Duncan. As a
child Preston often lived out of a trunk
on Duncan’s tours. Mary wed and
disposed of a second husband and had an affair with English author and occultist
Aleister Crowley, with whom she collaborated
on his master work Magick.
As
a child Preston often lived out of a trunk on Duncan’s tours. Preston became fluent in French and considered
France more of a home than the U.S. which he saw only sporadically and became a life-long
Francophile.
With
war raging in Europe Preston returned to the U.S. in 1916 probably at the insistence of his mother to keep him
from enlisting in the French
Army. His adopted father got him a job
as a runner at the New York Stock Exchange in hopes it
would lead to a successful, stable career. But the young man took to it like a duck to the Sahara
and couldn’t imagine a more dreadful and
dull prospect.
Sturges as an Army aviation cadet at Camp Dick in Texas in 1918. |
The
American entry into the War saved him from that fate. No one could stop him from enlisting in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from which he entered the Army Air Service and graduated as a pilot and lieutenant
from Camp Dick in Texas in 1918, too late to see active service in France. But a smart uniform lent just the right amount of irresistible dash to the handsome
young man when he returned to New York and it nightlife.
Rather
than settling into a brokerage seat,
Sturges miraculously was tapped as a manager of his mother’s fashionable
beauty product boutique the Desti
Emporium—named for a corruption of
one of her Irish grandfather’s names,
the Anglo/Norman d’Este—an
indulgence from yet another husband. Purveyors
of upscale accouterments the store had a glittering clientele. Old friend Isadora Duncan was strangled by a Desti scarf in her famous final
accident. Evidently the position was
not too demanding and left plenty of time for him to prowl as a young man about town in the Gatsby
era Big Apple.
In
1922 Sturges began living with an
older married woman, Estelle De Wolfe
in an apartment he personally
designed behind the Brooklyn plant
that manufactured items for the
store. The couple were married a year
later after Estelle’s divorce. Their
happiness was interrupted when his
mother returned from Paris after disastrous marriage number 5 and demanded to
take control of the business which Sturges believed had been given to him. Forced out, he and his
mother fell into a bitter estrangement.
Through a nasty legal battle, he did retain ownership of a lip stick brand he had developed, which
gave him a modest income.
His
relationship with Estelle, which bordered on obsessive, ended abruptly in
1925 when she suddenly announced that she didn’t love him anymore. Heartbroken, he considered suicide while staying with his adopted father in
Chicago. Mary returned from Paris to
reconcile with him and comfort him. She
even returned control of Desti to
him and his father promised $1000 a month to underwrite reestablishing the business. He also gave Mary a similar monthly stipend
to return to Paris where she again became Duncan’s companion.
At
loose ends, Sturges turned his attention to the stage. Back at Camp Davis he
had published an essay called Three Hundred Words of Humor
which revealed a flair for comedic writing. He began to tinker with using that skill in scripts.
He also tinkered with songwriting,
including the libretto for a failed operetta.
Recuperating from a nearly fatal
bout of appendicitis, he wrote a
hospital comedy from his sick
bed. He jettisoned that effort but responded to the taunts of an actress he was seeing who told him she was writing a
play about a bore and he was the model, he dashed off a new comedy, The Guinea Pig, which he
managed to get staged as a summer stock production
by the Warf Player in fashionable Provincetown, Rhode Island.
The
play got excellent notices and
Sturges tried to interest Broadway
producers who were unwilling to give an unknown a try. He charmed
the wealthy hostess of a party at which he read excerpts from the play into backing a shoestring production with $2,500.
The modest production opened just after Christmas of 1928 and attracted the attention of major critics who
had no other new productions to see. It
got excellent notices and ran for 56 performances,
very respectable for a small independent production. Sturges was now on the Broadway radar.
Meanwhile,
he picked up work as a stage manager and
ensemble cast member in touring productions. A script that Sturges dashed off in just
six day was picked up by producer/director
Brock Pemberton with whom he had worked as a stage manager. Strictly
Dishonorable was set in a
venue the author had intimate
familiarity with—a speakeasy operated by low level Italian gangsters. Pemberton and
members of the cast all tinkered with
the script, which Sturges first resented
but ultimately embraced as a model
of the theater as a collaborative art
form.
The play, co-directed
by Antoinette Perry was an astonishing success and ran for 557
performances at the Avon Theater from
September 18, 1929 to January 1931 surviving
the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression which killed
many shows. Sturges made a life
changing $300,000 from the production, a fortune
at the time.
A suave Paul Lucas starred in the film version of Sturges's Broadway hit Strictly Dishonorable. |
Shortly after the Broadway run ended Universal Pictures paid Sturges a near record $125,000 for the film rights. Although Sturges was not directly involved
further in the production and was not credited as the screenwriter, most of his
dialogue was left intact, as was the boatload of sexual innuendo because it
was a pre-production code film. The movie starred Paul Lucas as a suave
Italian opera singer who in reality was
an Italian-American risen from the slums, Sydney Fox as a virginal but
romance hungry Southern belle, George Meeker as her sappy and officious fiancé, and Lewis
Stone as a world wise judge and reluctant referee in the love triangle. The film, released on December 31, 1931,
was also a hit and helped make
Sturges in demand in Tinsel town.
Before turning his attention to Hollywood, however, Sturges returned to
Broadway with Recapture, a
comedy/drama based on his tumultuous relationship with his first wife. In it a jilted
husband sets out to re-win the wife
who left him. He succeeds in the second act and in the third she falls down an elevator shaft to her death. Critics and audiences
both hated his thinly veiled romantic
revenge fantasy. Two other Broadway
plays, including a musical also
flopped.
Second wife Eleanor Post Hutton was an heiress who would file for an annulment and go on to many more marriages. |
Escaping his flops and spending his new wealth on with
his yacht in Palm Beach, Florida in 1930 Sturges met and wooed socialite Eleanor Post
Hutton, an heiress to the Post Cereal
and other fortunes. The pair eloped but their stormy relationship ended in
an annulment less than two years
later after she fled to Europe to pursue singing lessons—a bizarre replay of
the story of his natural father and mother.
To make it more poignant, his mother returned in poor health having
never recovered from the death of Isadora Duncan and died in April of 1931,
just weeks before his wife’s departure.
By the end late 1930 Sturges was already doing short term contract work at Paramount and establishing himself as a
screenwriter. He worked on several films, both credited
and uncredited at several studios and by mid-decade was making a good income of
about $2,500 a week. But he was unhappy
with the gang of writers, dialogue
and script consultants, directors and producers who contributed to most films. His first screen credit was for English dialogue for Maurice Chevalier’s The Big Pond/La grande mere (simultaneously produced in
both languages) with Claudette Colbert.
After participation in several other projects finally broke through in 1933 with an original screen play partially based on
his ex-wife’s grandfather C.W. Post. Sturges sold The Power and the Glory to Fox as a star vehicle for
Spencer Tracy. Producer
Jesse Lasky paid and astronomical
$17,500 for the script plus 7% of the profits above $1 million, an unprecedentedly rich deal for a screen
writer. And Lasky didn’t even turn it
over to a gang of writers for an overhaul, as was customary. “It was the most
perfect script I’d ever seen” he said, “Imagine a producer accepting a script
from an author
and not being able to make one change.”
The Power and the Glory was Sturges's first solo screen play and starred Colleen Moore and Spencer Tracy. |
The
innovative script used flash backs and
flash forwards to trace the rise of a tycoon from scruffy railroad
track walker to king of the
boardroom. It heavily influenced Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane years later.
The film also starred silent
movie queen Coleen Moore as the tycoon’s neglected wife and Ralf Morgan as the surrogate father figure who guided him in his early years and
witnessed the estrangement with his
family because of his obsession with
success and narrates the story after
witnessing the funeral. Highly regarded in first release, the film
almost disappeared and was once considered lost but has been restored and
revived on TCM and other classic movie
outlets.
Despite
this success, which Sturges said drew as much resentment as admiration from
other screen writers. And he was right
back to working on short term contracts without creative control of his
work. Meanwhile, he spent his money
lavishly on comfortable living, chasing actresses, and side projects like a company
to produce gadgets he invented and tinkered with and his own night spot, the Players Club.
Preston Sturges with third wife Louise Sargent Tevis and son Solomon Sturges IV. |
In
1938 Sturges eloped again, this time
to Reno with former actress Louise Sargent Tevis who he had met at
the Players Club. At least for a time,
it seemed that he had at last found elusive
familial happiness which grew with the birth
of his son, Solomon Sturges IV in 1941.
Among
the films Sturges worked on, sometime uncredited, over the next several years
were both classics and programmers, Among the most notable
were The
Invisible Man, The Twentieth Century, Claudette
Colbert’s original version of Fanny
Hurst’s Imitation of Life, bio-pic Diamond
Jim, Hotel Haywire which was another original screen play but
produced as a Paramount B movie
starring Leo Carrillo of all people,
the Ronald Coleman swashbuckler If I Were King, and his first full on screwball comedy Remember
the Night with Barbara Stanwyck and
Fred McMurray in 1940.
The
success of the last film finally got Paramount to give Sturges what he had
always wanted—total control of a picture.
Of course to get it, Sturges had to make
the studio an offer they couldn’t refuse—the script for only $1 in exchange
for the director’s chair and
complete final control. For legal reasons
that was upped to $10, but still a hell
of a bargain. Thus began Sturges’s golden run as undisputed master of the screwball comedy.
Akim Tamiroff, Muriel Angelis, and Brian Donlevy in The Great McGinty which earned Sturges an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. |
In
The
Great McGinty Brian Donlevy played a hobo whose unexpected talent
for vote fraud causes his spectacular rise in the corrupt
political machine run by the ruthless
Boss played by Akim Tamiroff. He moves from alderman, to phony reform
mayor, to the governorship. Along the way he acquires a wife of
convenience with two children
and adorable wiener dogs. The couple surprise themselves by actually falling in love and the
good woman, played by English film
star Muriel Angelis, convinces him
to go straight and do the right thing by the Voters.
McGinty has to skip the
county—and leave behind the family he finally
deserves to escape prison. The virtuous wife was said to be a tribute to
his own new bride. The picture owes undoubted debt to Frank Capra but crackles with Sturges’s sharper dialog. The
writer won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for 1941.
His
next Paramount outing was not quite the same box office bombshell as the The
Great McGinty, but was a charming preview has his more famous films of the
next few years. Christmas in July, based
on his unproduced 1931 play A Cup
of Coffee. In the film, much
changed from the original play but with the same central idea, a dreamer played by Dick Powell who habitual
enters—and loses—radio contests fantasizes about winning a $25,000
prize for a new Maxwell House Coffee
jingle—an early example of prominent product placement in a film. It’s
all he can talk about and his irritated co-workers conspire to play a cruel joke on him. They forge a telegram saying
that he won the big prize. Elated, his
good fortune seems to grow when his impressed
boss gives him a promotion and a
raise.
He spends lavishly on gifts for all of his friends and
co-workers, and has the courage to ask his longtime
girlfriend, Ellen Drew of the legendary
Barrymore clan, to marry him. Of course when the truth comes out there are consequences and lessons for everyone. The
film is also notable for firming up Sturges’s stock company of supporting
players who enlivened his best films with memorable characters. They
included William Demarest, wall eyed
Raymond Walburn, prissy Franklin Pangborn, and Harry Rosenthal an actor/pianist/composer who went back to Sturges’s
Broadway days.
Stars Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, and director Preston Sturges on the set of The Lady Eve. |
Next
up was a true masterpiece that began
with germ of Sturges’s failed Palm Beach marriage and
his comedic but complicated thoughts about veiled
identities, love, and marriage. And yet it is not autobiographical the way his Broadway failure Recapture was. In The Lady Eve Barbara Stanwyck plays
a con woman who falls for her mark, Henry
Fonda as a naĂŻve beer fortune heir,
on a cruise from Latin America. The attraction is mutual but just when she is about to renounce her villainous ways
and leave behind her swindling clan including
father Charles Coburn, Eric Blore, and
the ever present Demarest the sap discovers the truth and rejects her with a cruel and moralistic
speech. To get revenge Stanwyck
invents a new identify with a new hair color and swankier clothes, Lady Eve Sidwich who ingratiates herself with his wealthy family—father Eugene Pallette and mother Janet Beecher and wins his heart—and marriage ring. Complications are many, especially after the phony
Eve realizes that the real Jean actually
loves the mope she’s trapped.
Tomorrow: Part II--Peak and decline.
Tomorrow: Part II--Peak and decline.
Wow. Was this guy naturally such an ants in his pants kinda person, or was he prescribed some sorta mood enhancer like amhetamines? He never sat still.
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