City of Nets (42 page)

One last question: How could Boris Karloff, the original Frankenstein monster, play the role of the mad scientist bringing the frozen monster back to life? The fact is that Karloff had tired of playing the monster (he did so three times), and so, in
The House of Frankenstein,
he passed on his most famous role to a stunt man named Glenn Strange. Unlike Karloff, Strange was never on the right corner at the right time. He had once been chosen to play Tarzan, but then he was pushed aside by Johnny Weissmuller. Now that he was assigned to imitate Karloff, Jack Pierce again did the makeup, and Pierce could probably have made even Gary Cooper look like the Frankenstein monster. Strange would reenact the role in
House of Dracula
(1945) and in the ultimate degradation,
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
(1948). But Strange's last major decision was to reject the role of the legendary gillman in
The Creature from the Black Lagoon,
and he worked out his last years as Sam the bartender in the television series
Gunsmoke.

 

The Hays Office objected to the heroine's description of the evening on which she got pregnant, “ . . . and then kinda . . . out to a roadhouse somewhere and then you know . . . like that. . . .” It also asked that “all the material set forth on pages 33, 34, 35, 36, and 37, having to do with the pregnancy of the girl, be drastically cut down and the matter entirely rewritten.” For good measure, it asked that a clergyman named Upperman be renamed, “because the name has a comedy flavor which is not good when used in connection with a clergyman.”

In such circumstances, it was hard to see how Preston Sturges could ever get Hays Office approval for his comedy about a girl named Trudy Kockenlocker, who found herself pregnant with sextuplets by a soldier whose name she could remember only as something like Private Ratskywatsky. Not only was it immoral but it was unpatriotic, and this in 1944, when American troops were fighting their way across northern France. The studio bosses at Paramount had let Sturges make the movie, but they anticipated nothing but trouble. They delayed for more than a year in releasing it at all. But Sturges had a way of getting what he wanted, and of making even the most grievous situations funny. Not cruelly funny—anybody could do that—but charmingly funny.

The premiere of
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
was, of course, a triumph. James Agee, writing in
Time,
said Sturges's new film was “a little like talking to a nun on a roller coaster.” Writing in
The Nation
(Agee was a regular reviewer for both magazines), he said that “the Hays Office has either been hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep.” The
New York Times
was equally pleased: “A more audacious picture—a more delightfully irreverent one—than this new lot of nonsense at the Paramount has never come slithering madly down the path.” And lines began forming outside the theater.
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek,
immoral and unpatriotic as it was, became the biggest commercial hit of 1944, taking in what was then an impressive sum of nine million dollars.

That was the way things generally happened in Preston Sturges movies. The impossible triumphed; the powerful were made ridiculous; penniless idealists became millionaires. This kind of upheaval may have seemed merely the product of a fertile imagination—and Sturges's imagination was certainly that—but much of Sturges's life was a Sturges comedy. His real name was Edmund Preston Biden, that being the name of his father, who worked for a Chicago collection agency and played the banjo and drank too much. His mother, Mary Dempsey Biden, who loathed the banjo, was a woman of considerable charm and considerable imagination. “Anything she said three times she believed fervently,” Sturges recalled. “Often twice was enough.”

When her son was two, she fled Chicago and took the boy to Europe, where she became a great friend of Isadora Duncan. (It was she who eventually painted the red Chinese shawl that Miss Duncan managed to get caught in the wheel of her Bugatti, and so choked to death.) She also convinced herself that her real name was not Dempsey but Desmond, and then D'Este, and thus she became, in her own mind, an Italian princess. Her mother persuaded the princess to return to Chicago, with her son Preston, the prince, and there she married a quiet stockbroker named Solomon Sturges. Two years later, though, she was off to Europe again, to the Bayreuth of Wagner, where she shared a villa with Isadora Duncan.

Her next husband was a Turk named Vely Bey, whose father had been a physician to the sultan. One day when Mary suffered a rash on her face, her new father-in-law concocted a purple lotion that soon cured it. Mary saw vast possibilities. She thought of a splendid name for her discovery,
Le Secret du Harem,
and she opened the Maison d'Este on the Rue de la Paix. The real D'Este family threatened a lawsuit to stop this absurd usurpation of a famous name, so Mary changed the name of her store to Maison Desti. She put her son Preston, by now fifteen, in charge of operating a new outlet on the
plage
at Deauville.

None of this is of surpassing significance, except that, like the childhood images that keep reappearing in the films of Federico Fellini—the fat woman on the beach or the unattainable angel—such situations of cheerful implausibility came to animate all of Sturges's comedies, and these were among the best and funniest comedies of the early 1940's. After the most haphazard of educations, Sturges joined the Army Air Corps and acquired a passion for flying, but the war ended before he ever got to France. His mother, tired of running the Maison Desti in New York, handed it all over to her son, and he found that he enjoyed inventing new lipsticks and makeups.

He met a girl of twenty, named Estelle Godfrey, who, primarily to escape a mother addicted to drugs, had married a man of sixty-four. Within a few months, she abandoned her husband and married Sturges, bringing with her a trust-fund income of eleven thousand dollars a year. The Sturgeses bought a house in the country, and Preston spent his time inventing things—a new kind of automobile with the engine in the rear, a new photoengraving process, a flying machine that was a hybrid of airplane and helicopter. After four years of this, Estelle suddenly announced to Sturges that she no longer loved him.

Sturges was devastated, contemplated suicide, then tried writing songs—“Oh, Minnie” and “Asia Minor Blues” and “Maybe You'll Be My Baby.” Nobody wanted to publish them, so he wrote a play,
The Guinea Pig,
and when nobody wanted to produce it, he produced it himself. It was a moderate success, enough to interest Broadway producers in his next venture. He wrote
Strictly Dishonorable
in nine days, and it soon became, implausibly but inevitably, the smash hit of 1929. His first week's royalty check was fifteen hundred dollars.

On a train to Palm Beach, he met Eleanor Post Hutton, the stepdaughter of Edward F. Hutton, the Wall Street millionaire, and the granddaughter of C. W. Post, the Battle Creek cereal millionaire. She was twenty, and charming; they charmed each other. Arriving in Palm Beach, Sturges went to stay at her family palace. He announced to her father that he wanted to marry her.

“You can't afford to marry a girl like Eleanor,” said E. F. Hutton.

“Why not?” said Sturges. “I've got a hit play and an income of fifteen hundred a week.”

“For her that's pin money,” said E. F. Hutton.

The same kind of dialogue was taking place between Eleanor and her mother. “He even owns a yacht,” said Eleanor.

“How large?” asked Marjorie Post Hutton.

“Fifty-two feet,” said Eleanor.

“My dear, you mean a
yawl,
” said Marjorie Post Hutton.

The headline on the front page of the
New York Times
a month later said:
ELEANOR HUTTON ELOPES WITH PLAYWRIGHT; WEDS PRESTON STURGES OVER PARENTS' PROTEST.

It didn't last, of course. Nothing in Sturges's life lasted; that was the essence of Sturges's comedies. Everything was breakable. And there could be no preposterous triumphs until there had been preposterous failures (and vice versa). Sturges was somehow persuaded by a French musician named Maurice Jacquet to rewrite the libretto for a Jacquet operetta named
Silver Swan,
which had already flopped. Sturges not only wasted his time writing a new libretto, he also wasted $64,000 of Eleanor's inheritance to produce it himself. Eleanor loved Sturges, but she was used to being taken care of, not to doing the cooking. She decided she would go to Paris.

Sturges was completely uninterested in movies, but Hollywood offered what it always offered, money. Walter Wanger promised him one thousand dollars a week to adapt
The Big Pond
for Maurice Chevalier. Sturges did it in two weeks, and only then learned that he was supposed to take ten weeks. Carl Laemmle, who had produced the successful film version of
Strictly Dishonorable,
invited Sturges to come and work at Universal at the same one thousand dollars a week. He was supposed to rewrite H. G. Wells's
Invisible Man,
which eight other writers had failed on, as a possible vehicle for Universal's newest star, Boris Karloff. “I like it out here very much,” Sturges wrote to a friend in New York, “but it's very God Damned far away from everything. . . . [It] really is like Bridgeport with palm trees, only Bridgeport is greener.”

Like the eight previous writers, Sturges wrote an
Invisible Man
script that Universal didn't like, and so he was unceremoniously fired. Sturges didn't much care, for he was already engrossed in a new idea, a film based on the story of Eleanor's grandfather, C. W. Post, founder of the Postum Cereal Company, rancher, inventor, art collector, who mysteriously killed himself at the age of fifty-five. A decade before
Citizen Kane,
Sturges began writing
The Power and the Glory.
Like
Kane,
it would begin with the death of the millionaire. Like
Kane,
it would be told in a series of flashbacks narrated by various people who had known him. And like Orson Welles, Sturges wanted to do the story his own way.

When he was about one third of the way through his screenplay, he met at a party a man who worked as a story editor for Jesse Lasky, one of the founding fathers of Paramount but now an independent producer at Fox. A meeting was arranged. Lasky was interested. He wanted to see a brief “treatment.” Sturges refused. He was busy writing a finished script, which he agreed to show Lasky when it was done. Lasky planned to assign the inevitable rewriting to several other writers. Then he got Sturges's script. “I was astonished,” he said later. “It was the most perfect script I'd ever seen.” They had one brief story conference to discuss changes. “We tried to find something in the script to change, but could not find a word or situation,” Lasky said. “Imagine a producer accepting a script from an author and not being able to make
ONE CHANGE.
”

There was only one thing more unheard of than a writer creating all by himself a script that didn't need any changes, and that was a writer demanding a percentage of the gross, and getting it, and an advance of $17,500 against 3.5 percent of the first $500,000 and then escalating up to 7 percent of everything over $1 million. Hollywood was shocked. B. P. Schulberg even wrote a protest in
The Hollywood Reporter,
warning everyone that this was a dangerous precedent.

The Power and the Glory
(1933), starring Spencer Tracy as the railroad tycoon, got splendid reviews and did very well commercially in New York, but not in the rest of the country. People said it was depressing. And a few years later, the negative was accidentally destroyed in a studio fire. Again, nothing lasted. But Sturges was now an established Hollywood writer, making $1,500 a week in the worst of the Depression. He worked on Fanny Hurst's
Imitation of Life
(Claudette Colbert) and a Samuel Goldwyn version of Tolstoy's
Resurrection
titled
We Live Again
(Fredric March) and even an M-G-M musical called
Broadway Melody of 1939
(Eleanor Powell). For that, his pay was $2,750 a week, but what he was now determined to do, well before the emergence of a Billy Wilder or a John Huston or a Joe Mankiewicz, was to direct his own screenplays. Paramount kept refusing, so Sturges finally offered the studio one of his scripts for a dollar if he could direct it himself. It was called “The Vagrant,” the story of a bum who, through a series of absurdities, became governor of the state. And if his one-dollar offer was not good enough, Sturges made it clear that he would quit.

Paramount's William LeBaron grudgingly agreed to let Sturges hang himself. But he offered a budget of only $325,000, with Brian Donlevy as the star. Donlevy couldn't act very well, but he was diligent. He started his working day by inserting his false teeth; then he squeezed himself into a very tight girdle, then put on platform shoes, and a jacket with padded shoulders, and then a hairpiece. Thus outfitted, he played tough-guy parts. Sturges was still so inexperienced that he didn't know which end of a viewfinder a director was supposed to look into, but he nonetheless brought in his first film on schedule and under budget. Artfully retitled
The Great McGinty,
it earned handsome reviews and handsome profits. Sturges's script, which nobody would buy when he originally wrote it as a sequel to
The Power and the Glory
back in 1933, won him an Academy Award for 1940. For his acceptance speech, Sturges “tried to think of something funny” and finally announced to the audience: “Mr. Sturges was so overcome by the mere possibility of winning an Oscar that he was unable to come here tonight, and asked me to accept it in his stead.” Since very few people in the audience knew what Sturges looked like, his joke was received with total incomprehension, and, as he said, “I walked dismally back to my table.”