A Preston Sturges Celebration
Writer-director’s son fi nds father he never knew
BY DAVID NOH
When Tom Sturges, the son of the
great Hollywood comedic auteur
Preston Sturges, thanked me
for remembering his father with
kindness, I had to demur, reminding him of all
the joy his father created with his brilliant, hilarious,
and amazingly deep movies.
The younger Sturges, who never really knew
his father, has written, in collaboration with
Nick Smedley, “Preston Sturges: The Last Years
of Hollywood’s First Writer-Director.” It’s a thoroughly
researched, illuminating, and heartbreaking
portrait of the artist as a not so, really,
but already old man who once sat atop
the Tinseltown ladder, after an unprecedented
string of critical and commercial successes.
Beginning with his fi rst directed feature, “The
Great McGinty” (with his Oscar-winning script),
Sturges brought audiences “Christmas in July,”
Sullivan’s Travels,” “The Lady Eve,” “The Palm
Beach Story,” “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,”
and “Hail the Conquering Hero” — but then
came a crash as unprecedented as his meteoric
rise had been. A string of fi lms that were less
than box offi ce smashes, ownership of the fabulous
but cashing-draining Hollywood nightspot
The Players, an overweening ego, alcoholism,
and poisonous professional jealousy combined
to mangle a sterling career. Sturges found himself
broke and unemployed, with a family to
support and a passel of ex-wives, for nearly a
decade until his untimely death at age 60 in
New York.
In the 1940s, the fi lms of Sturges and his
brilliant contemporary Billy Wilder, especially,
allowed their studio, Paramount, to perfect a
picturesquely benevolent Hollywood fantasy of
small town American life, fi lled with cheery eccentrics
of every stripe. An astonishing range of
gifted character actors who came to be known
as the Sturges Acting Company — including
William Demarest, Porter Hall, Akim Tamiroff,
Raymond Walburn, Eric Blore, Robert Greig,
Almira Sessions, and Esther Howard — existed
in an idyllic, scrubbed-clean and shiny Neverland
dotted with white picket fences, billowing
lace curtains, and something yummy cooking
in the spotless kitchens.
Such is the setting for “The Miracle of Morgan’s
Creek.”
“It’s really my favorite of my Dad’s work, although
I will never say that to anyone watching
‘The Lady Eve,’” Tom said. “You just have
to wonder how he got away with something so
completely outrageous, this fi lm about a girl
who becomes pregnant without benefi t of marriage,
not knowing who the father is, even leaving
n n
Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in Preston Sturges’ 1942 “The Palm Beach Story.”
us with the thought that maybe there were
a lot of husbands. It really began as only the
sketch of an idea, maybe 40 to 50 pages of script
was all he had. Then someone broke their leg
on a fi lm and there was this hole in the production
schedule and would my Dad be ready
to start? ‘Miracle’ hadn’t even gotten approval
of the Hays Offi ce fi lm censors of the time. So
he’s shooting the fi lm all day, coming home at
night after looking at the dailies, then writes
another 10 pages of script and that is why that
movie has that gorgeous frenetic pace, the best
jazz you’re ever gonna see on fi lm. He just gets
Eddie Bracken into bigger and bigger trouble,
and Betty Hutton’s getting closer and closer to
her delivery date — and suddenly it’s Christmas
and there’s a cow in the living room!”
Preston Sturges died in 1959, when Tom was
three years old, “So I have no recollection of him
at all. My search to fi nd out who he was became
this book. There had always been a big fuss over
his amazing string of comedic successes in the
early 1940s, making all that money. But the
story of his later years — when he was out of
work and couldn’t get backing for another fi lm
— no one would talk about. This author, Nick
Smedley, contacted me out of the blue and said,
‘I want to write a book about your Dad.’
“I said, ‘With all due respect there have been
17 books about him and I feel the ground has
been covered, but for the fact that when Mom
died I found a four-inch high stack of letters
they had written to each other. No one had seen
them before, plus a bunch of his diaries. I said,
‘If you want to focus on the last 10 years, when
everything had gone to hell, let’s fi nd out what
happened,’ He loved that.
“I turned over everything to him, and began
the search for this man who was 58 when I was
born — looking at me, a baby, and befuddled in
Paris — and died at 60.”
“The Palm Beach Story” is my personal favorite
Sturges, a breathless blend of some of his
most witty, literate dialogue and lowest slapstick
invention, with a crazed and drunken millionaire
hunting party shooting up an entire
train car, looking for Claudette Colbert who has
latched onto them while escaping from her everbroke
and boringly upright husband, Joel Mc-
Crea.
“Apparently my Dad and Colbert didn’t like
each other. They would get into terrible arguments
on the set — in French — insulting each
other and proving he wasn’t the sweetest guy in
the world. There was a studio decree that at least
two to three pages of script had to be shot every
day, so he said to her, ‘Why don’t we get this shot
before your face falls?’ Part of the problem was
that he saw himself as the star, and his actors
were just along for the ride. On a crumpled sidebar,
if you are writing for Gay City News, there
were a few good luck charms my Dad used in all
his fi lms, and one, along with William Demarest,
was Franklin Pangborn, the most fastidious
gay guy ever. I have letters from him to my Dad,
which we donated to UCLA Library. They were
great pals. He loved having Franklin around
who was so bright and such a great actor but
so gay. He plays the apartment house manager
showing Colbert’s place to a prospective buyer,
the immortal Wienie King (Robert Dudley).
“He was part of the great Sturges Acting
Company. If you see two or three of my Dad’s
fi lms, you see the same motley crew who would
come over to The Players after shooting, a great
social thing. If you were an extra in the fi lm, he
saw to it that you automatically got paid for one
week. And if you had a speaking part, even if it
was merely one line, you got paid for the whole
duration of the shoot. They helped him make
his movies funny. He’d have a cigarette in the
lobby where his fi lms were shown and count the
➤ PRESTON STURGES, continued on p.37
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