Film director Preston Sturges lived a life that could happen only in the movies. And he used his experiences to create some of Hollywood's greatest: The Great McGinty (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), and Unfaithfully Yours (1948). Sturges grew up in pre-World War I Europe, where his mother had taken him to live the bohemian life (her closest friend was Isadora Duncan). Mother and son returned to the U.S. at the outbreak of World War I, when Preston was 16. He later served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, although the war ended before he saw action. In 1927 he was 28 years old and working in his mother's cosmetics business when his first marriage broke up. He consoled himself by learning to play the piano and write songs. By the end of that year, he had written a musical comedy. A few months later, he wrote his first play, The Guinea Pig, to vent his anger at a young actress he was dating who had used him to rehearse a play she was writing-without his knowledge. His second play, Strictly Dishonorable, was inspired by a failed seduction that occurred at a friend's summer house in Monte Carlo. The comedy was the hit of the 1929-30 Broadway season. That winter, on the train to Palm Beach, he met Eleanor Hutton, the 20- year-old daughter of heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and financier E.F. Hutton. Her parents objected, but the kids didn't listen: Eleanor and Preston eloped in April 1930. Their happiness was short-lived, however. His mother died on their first wedding anniversary; they separated on their second. Looking for yet another new start at age 33, Sturges went to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. By the time he died in 1959, he had written 31 movies and directed 14 of them. Sturges began to write his autobiography in 1959 but did not finish it. His fourth and last wife, Sandy, with whom he had two sons, took the manuscript as well as Preston's journals, diaries, and letters, and edited them into a book. Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges will be published in September by Simon & Schuster.
Hollywood I started at the bottom: a bum by the name of Sturgeon who had once written a hit play called Strictly Something-or-Other. Carl Laemmle of Universal offered me a contract, with unilateral options exercisable by the studio, to join his team as a writer. My wife (Eleanor Hutton) had decamped, my fortune was depleted, and even though I was living on coffee and moonlight, my costs of living continued to cost. I did not have to wrestle with any principles to leap on Laemmle's offer. On Sept. 9, 1932, I arrived in Hollywood with my secretary, Bianca Gilchrist. I was to write, offer suggestions, and make myself generally useful, and for this I was to get a nominal or beginning writer's salary of a thousand dollars a week. Junior writers got less, of course, but I had written Strictly Something-or-Other, and that made me a kind of senior beginner. I was charmed; it vindicated my contention that writing was my profession, and the money proved it. There were a great many writers on the lot, and the reason for this was that at the time, writers worked in teams, like piano movers. It was generally believed by the powers down in front that a man who could write comedy could ! not write tragedy, that a man who could write forceful, virile stuff could not handle the tender passages, and that if the picture was not to taste all of the same cook, a multiplicity of writers was essential. Four writers were considered the rock-bottom minimum required. Six writers, with the sixth member a woman to puff up the lighter parts, was considered ideal. Many, many more writers have been used on a picture, of course; several writers have even been assigned the same story unbeknownst to each other. Bianca and I were assigned beautiful offices in a little bungalow on the Universal lot affectionately known as the Bull Pen. It took me exactly two days on the job as a hired writer, or until I met my first director, to find out that I was in the wrong racket. I had expected my producer to be peculiar, of course, because the facts about Hollywood producers had been well publicized throughout the land. On meeting him, I was not disappointed. About directors, though, I knew very little, and it took me a few minutes to get the point. It was not so much what the director said; it was the way he said it, especially the way he looked at me (a writer): coolly, confidently, courteously, but with a curious condescension. He was a perfectly polite and affable little man and did his best to put me at my ease, but one of my knees kept twitching and I had the uneasy feeling that instead of standing on my feet looking down at him, I should have been on one knee looking up at him. The man was obviously a prince of the blood. The more directors I met, the more I realized that this was not an isolated case. They were all princes of the blood. Nobody ever had them directing pictures in teams with one of them handling the horseback scenes and another handling the bedroom interludes. The bungalows they lived in on the lot had fireplaces and private bathrooms and big soft couches. Nobody ever assigned them to pictures they didn't like; they were timidly offered pictures. Sometimes they graciously condescended to direct them, but if they said, no, a story was a piece of cheese, it was a piece of cheese. This ennoblement, of course, had been conferred upon directors during the silent days, when the directors truly were the storytellers and the princes of the business. By the time I got to Hollywood, this aristocracy was merely a leftover from an earlier day. The reasons for it were no longer apparent, like the reasons for so many other aristocracies. Years later when I became a writer-director, actually the storyteller again, people said I was doing something new, but I was not; I was doing something old. As I had never written anything but comedies, my producer assigned me the job of writing the ninth script of a horror picture: an adaptation of H.G. Wells' book The Invisible Man. Hardly any of Wells' story was suited to a motion picture, so it actually meant coming up with an original story. Eight well-known writers had already been paid for adaptations which the studio said could not be used, and I thought that if mine were used, my future at Universal would be assured. I hurried into the Bull Pen and came out 10 weeks later with 180 pages of stuff so chilling that it would cause the hair of a statue to stand on end and cold sweat to stream down its sculpted back. The director said it was a piece of cheese. The studio did not pick up its option on my services and I was fired without further ceremony. I had just been assigned a rewrite of a continuity for Slim Summerville and Zasu Pitts when my contract was up, but I stayed on at the studio to finish the job and made them a present of a couple of weeks' work. For this they pronounced themselves grateful, and my hope was that this bread cast upon the waters would return as ham sandwiches. Although off salary, I was not idle. Thoroughly displeased with the abysmal status of a Hollywood team writer, I considered the benefits of free-lancing, writing scripts on my own time and selling them to a studio later. I could then write anywhere I liked, spend the spring in Paris, for instance, the summer on my boat, the fall in New York, and the winter in Palm Beach, coming to California for a couple of days a year to sign contracts for the sale of the scripts.
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- Filmography SELECTED FILMS BY PRESTON STURGES
