City of Nets (43 page)

At Paramount, though, Sturges now could do no wrong. What would he like to work on next? One of the pleasures of success is that past failures can be triumphantly revived. Back in 1931, Sturges had written a little comedy that he called “A Cup of Coffee,” about an eager young man who keeps submitting advertising slogans for contests, and who comes to believe, mistakenly, that he has won. (“All his films,” André Bazin wrote of Sturges long afterward, “are an exploitation of a misunderstanding.”) Paramount happily approved this as Sturges's next project, but by now the making of films was only part of Sturges's hectic life. He was married again, of course, to a sympathetic woman named Louise, but he also clung to the idea of himself as an inventor. He subsidized with more than sixty thousand dollars of his film earnings a small operation in the nearby town of Wilmington, which he had named the Sturges Engineering Company, or, on less solemn occasions, “my machine shop.” Its official purpose was to produce a new and improved kind of diesel engine.

More important, Sturges didn't like Hollywood's restaurants. For Paramount writers, the office saloon was Musso and Frank's, just across Hollywood Boulevard. It claimed that its founding in 1919 made it the oldest restaurant in town, but Sturges didn't think much of the food. The Brown Derby on North Vine was famous for looking like a brown derby, and Chasen's, on Beverly Boulevard, was the place to be seen making deals, but Sturges didn't think much of the food there either. He missed New York, and perhaps he even missed Deauville, where, as the fifteen-year-old manager of the Maison Desti, he got free meals at Giro's restaurant in the same building. He now found himself a steeply sloped piece of land at 8225 Sunset Boulevard, across the street from the caravansary called the Garden of Allah, at the intersection of Havenhurst Drive and Marmont Lane. There was a house there that had been turned into a wedding chapel, and Sturges envisioned this as a three-tier restaurant: a street-level drive-in, an informal restaurant above that, and at the top, in the house itself, a very formal dining room, which, in Hollywood terms, meant coat and tie required at all times. In honor of his memories of New York, Sturges called it The Players. He supervised everything, the carpentering and the cooking, and he indulged himself by throwing out anyone he didn't like. The Players cost him $250,000 in its first year and ultimately cost him everything he had.

But these were the years in which everything that Sturges touched flourished. “A Cup of Coffee” turned into the charming
Christmas in July
(showing for the first time that Dick Powell was more than a song-and-dance man). Sturges then directed his third hit of the year,
The Lady Eve,
in which Henry Fonda pursued Barbara Stanwyck in one of the great drunk scenes of all time. In 1941 came
Sullivan's Travels,
in which Sturges demonstrated that he could make even Veronica Lake funny. He also justified his own career in the remarkable scene in which the earnestly liberal movie director, who had been trapped by a series of Sturges twists in a southern penitentiary, watched as his fellow prisoners viewing an animated cartoon were uplifted by the healing force of laughter. And in 1942,
The Palm Beach Story,
in which Sturges explored the interesting question of how far an attractive woman (Claudette Colbert) could travel without any money whatever, and what would happen when her equally penniless husband (Joel McCrea) tried to pursue her. And then
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

One of the many unusual things about Sturges was that he not only was ahead of his time but could recognize his time when it finally caught up with him. Thus
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek,
which seems remarkably attuned to the spirit of 1944, when people were beginning to get a little tired of heroic propaganda, and beginning to realize that a number of propagandized girls did get pregnant by soldiers like Private Ratskywatsky, was actually an idea that dated back to 1937. Sturges's plan then was to write a modern nativity story, about a small-town Virgin Mary who hardly knew how she had become pregnant. Nothing came of it then—Sturges had a whole filing cabinet full of ideas, stories, and even finished screenplays that nothing had come of then—but when Betty Hutton suddenly exploded on Broadway in
Panama Hattie,
which happened to be written by Buddy DeSylva, now the production chief at Paramount, and when Betty Hutton pleaded with Sturges to write a comedy for her, the time for
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
had obviously arrived.

Even Morgan's Creek itself stood ready and waiting, a small-town set built for some now-forgotten movie. Paramount's accountants urged its demolition, but Sturges persuaded DeSylva that he could make good use of this town. Such
objets trouvés
appealed to some subterranean aspect of Sturges's imagination. He liked to star actors who were not stars—in this case, Eddie Bracken—and to surround them with a kind of repertory company of wonderful character actors whom nobody had ever heard of (Raymond Walburn, for example, the marvelously unctuous corporation president in
Christmas in July,
or Jimmy Conlin, who kept banging out ragtime piano throughout the revels of the Ale & Quail Club in
The Palm Beach Story,
and, of course, William Demarest, who appeared in a half-dozen Sturges movies as the perpetually outraged and uncomprehending representative of authority and respectability).

A movie about an unmarried girl pregnant with sextuplets by Private Ratskywatsky was, of course, impossible. Not only had the Hays Office been established to prevent such things, but there was now a Bureau of Motion Pictures, a subdivision of the Office of War Information, which was assigned to make every Hollywood producer keep in mind one basic question: “Will this picture help win the war?” Officially, Washington disavowed any thought of censorship. “The motion picture must remain free in so far as national security will permit,” said President Roosevelt. “I want no censorship of the motion picture.” Roosevelt made that resounding promise, however, in the course of appointing a former newspaperman named Lowell Mellett as the chief of the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures at the end of 1941.

Like any good bureaucrat, Mellett echoed the decree that the government did not want to censor anything. All he wanted to do was to “review” movie scripts to see that they did not conflict with the national interest. To carry out this mission, he soon acquired a staff of 140 employees and a budget of $1.3 million. And to make the government's view clear, he produced a document entitled
The Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture.
It offered a remarkable series of prescriptions: “At every opportunity, naturally and inconspicuously, show people making small sacrifices for victory—making them voluntarily, cheerfully and because of the people's own sense of responsibility. . . . For example, show people bringing their own sugar when invited out to dinner, carrying their own parcels when shopping, travelling on trains or planes with light luggage, uncomplainingly giving up seats for servicemen or others travelling on war priorities.” More generally, the BMP urged moviemakers to remember their responsibilities toward “(1) the Issues of the War: what we are fighting for, the American way of life; (2) the Nature of the Enemy: his ideology, his objectives, his methods; (3) the United Nations and United Peoples: our allies in arms . . .” And so on.

In theory, Hollywood agreed with these idealistic principles, but once the BMP began reading scripts, its suggestions became more than suggestions. It objected to a farm boy enlisting in the army, for example, on the ground that Hollywood should make it clear that agricultural production was important to the war effort. It objected to a movie that showed a sit-down strike, on the ground that all labor-management relations should be portrayed as harmonious. It objected to a movie called
The Revenge of the Zombies
for implying that blacks were inferior; it also objected to all banquets at English manorial estates, which might imply that some of the English ate more than their minimum rations. It objected to all gangster movies.

Hollywood was not legally obliged to carry out the BMP's requests, and when the agency asked to see a rough cut of
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek,
Sturges simply ignored its request. The BMP's Hollywood representative sent off an indignant telegram to headquarters in Washington: “
THIS IS THE ONLY STUDIO WHICH HAS EVER REFUSED SPECIFICALLY REQUEST OF THIS NATURE. IT IS ONLY STUDIO NOT FULLY COOPERATING AND IS NOT COOPERATING ONE IOTA.
” This might have become the first step in a campaign of government pressure against any signs of excessive independence in Hollywood, but the BMP was actually doing its job slightly too well for its own good. In Congress, there were still those who regarded the war as Roosevelt's war, and any war propaganda as Roosevelt propaganda, and next year would be an election year. In May of 1943, the House, ignoring its own appropriations committee, cut the BMP budget from $1.3 million to a mere housekeeping fund of $50,000. Its chief, Lowell Mellett, dutifully resigned and was appointed to the limbo of a special mission to the Middle East.

Ignoring the Washington censors did not save Sturges from the nuisances of political censorship, however. Paramount had its own staff censor, Luigi Luraschi, and he, too, wanted to make sure that Sturges did not sabotage the war effort. At one point, for example, Eddie Bracken's jalopy was supposed to screech to a halt outside Betty Hutton's house, and Luraschi described this as “contrary to the rubber conservation program.” He wondered if Sturges could replace the squeal of tires with “possibly a funny toot on the horn.” Nor was that all. The Catholic Legion of Decency, which not only rated movies but enforced its ratings with threats of boycotts and picketing, demanded still more alterations as the price of changing its preliminary verdict of C (condemned) to B (morally objectionable). DeSylva acquiesced, and Sturges had to do some reshooting to placate his critics.

While DeSylva dithered over
Miracle
(Paramount's real problem now was that it had a backlog of finished movies awaiting release), Sturges went ahead and filmed a kind of sequel that was even more cynical, even more unpatriotic—indeed, the only real satire of the war effort made during the war—and almost equally funny. Sturges was so pleased with Bracken's performance in
Miracle
that he wrote for him a script entitled “The Little Marine.” It was the tale of a pitiful young man, rated 4-F because of hay fever, who pretended to join the Marine Corps, in which his father had been a hero, but who actually worked in a defense plant. Then he met in a bar a band of homecoming marines (headed by Demarest, of course, as the tough sergeant who had served under the young man's heroic father in World War I), and the marines all decided to escort him home and vouch for his heroism in combat. In the patriotically deluded home town, the marine conspirators and their constantly protesting victim encountered all the elements of the contemporary homecoming movies: the cheering crowd, the high school band, the mother in her apron, the beautiful girl—all of them unfortunately devoted to the celebration of a fraud.
Hail the Conquering Hero,
it was called, and DeSylva really disliked it. He insisted on re-editing it himself, but the preview screening of his version was a disaster, so he grudgingly allowed Sturges to spend several weeks re-editing DeSylva's re-editing, bringing the film back to more or less its original form. Released finally in August of 1944, it was Sturges's second big hit of the year. “This riotously funny motion picture,” said the
New York Times,
“this superlative small town comedy, is also one of the wisest ever to burst from a big-time studio.”

So in four years, Sturges had written and directed seven straight hits. Now his contract was up for renewal, and all he wanted was the right to make more, without any interference from Buddy DeSylva or anyone else. That was the one thing that neither Paramount nor any of the other major studios would grant. “I was very happy here without any contract at all,” Sturges declared in his last meeting with DeSylva. “I realize quite well that I cannot make the final cutting decision on a picture because that would make it my property instead of yours. . . . I ask that at the conclusion of each picture, for a period of two weeks I have the right to abrogate my contract—not for the purpose of holding a club over your head, because I love Paramount and do not want to leave, but merely to cause your production head, whoever he may be, to treat me with the courtesy due a grown man of known integrity.”

No. That was the answer from DeSylva and Paramount's general manager, Henry Ginsberg. Let Sturges be happy with his handsome salary of $3,250 per week, plus a $30,000 bonus for each film completed, far more than President Roosevelt earned for leading a nation at war. These negotiations took place before either
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
or
Hail the Conquering Hero
was released. According to the rules of Sturges's comedies, that double triumph should have brought all the studio executives to heel. It didn't. What Sturges failed to realize was that the studio authorities considered it less important to make successful movies—much less good movies—than to maintain their grip on power. To relax that grip would have implied, ultimately, that they themselves were unnecessary.

So Sturges and Paramount parted company. Other studios, of course, wanted to hire him. M-G-M offered six thousand dollars a week, but only under the suffocating control of Louis B. Mayer, and what Sturges wanted most was freedom. After considering all the offers, he made a decision that can only be regarded as suicidal. Trusting the friendship of a man who had often been a guest at The Players, who shared his own enthusiasm for both movies and aviation, and who promised a total independence that he would never actually permit, Sturges decided to form a film production partnership with Howard Hughes.
Time
magazine, in one of the few good examples of its passion for portmanteau words, described it as a
“cinemanschluss.”