An Elite Worth Joining

Preston Sturges​ died in August 1959, when Donald Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets. But he did rather like the atmosphere of the place. Eleanor Hutton, his second wife, was the daughter of the food magnate Marjorie Merriweather Post, who built this ‘seventy-bedroom cottage on the sea’, as he called it, in the late 1920s. The weeks Sturges spent as Eleanor’s house guest at Mar-a-Lago supplied him with abundant material when he came to write and direct The Palm Beach Story (1942), which exemplifies his approach to film in the challenge it poses to Hollywood decorum through riotous alternations of slapstick and salty dialogue. ‘Millionaires are funny’ was the lesson he drew from the experience. The millionaires in The Palm Beach Story are funny both in the sense that their customary exemption from everyday rough-and-tumble renders them particularly susceptible to humiliation by pratfall and in the sense that their vast wealth has by this account equipped them – contrary to popular prejudice – with an unquenchable desire to help out those less fortunate than themselves. Sturges certainly possessed a soft spot for the super-rich. It’s idiosyncrasies of this kind which ensure that his films, while unapologetically straight off the studio production line, are never bland.

Sturges came late to writing, later to writing for film, and later yet to directing what he had written. Judging by his autobiography – a text ‘adapted and edited’ by his fourth wife, Sandy, from the mass of memoirs he left at his death – he had no wish to be famous for being famous. It takes him until page 292 (out of 340) to get to his debut as writer-director. Some debut it proved, too. The Great McGinty (1940) didn’t just make his name. It scooped the inaugural Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The six further comedies he went on to write and direct for Paramount, from Christmas in July (1940) to Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), enjoyed consistent critical and commercial success. At least two of them, The Lady Eve (1941) and Sullivan’s Travels (1941), have since achieved classic status in accounts of Hollywood comedy.

But there is something else that demands acknowledgment, something woven into the pell-mell seriality of a life in which career opportunities, like wives and children, came and went: artist, store manager, airman, stockbroker, private secretary (fired on his first day), gigolo (declined), inventor, industrial magnate, playwright, script doctor, film director. Sturges was a born overreacher. You don’t get very far into any of his films before the sound of breaking glass announces the consequence of yet another false step or expansive gesture. But these are, for all their amplified vehemence, the blithest of shatterings. Sturges liked the idea of being able to act with impunity. ‘I am, always was, and always will be violently optimistic. I knew at twenty that I was going to be a millionaire. I know it today. In between times, I have been.’ The violent optimism arose from the life. It sets the tone of the autobiography, and of the films.

Sturges was born in August 1898 in Chicago. His biological mother and father soon separated. The place of the nuclear family in his upbringing was to be taken by an eerily symmetrical ad hoc quasi-parental quartet: two mothers (one biological, the other surrogate), two fathers (both surrogate). In January 1901, Mary Biden, née Dempsey, set off for Paris to study for the stage, with the infant Preston in tow. A woman of inexhaustible enterprise, she was always going to land on her feet. To help things along, she now called herself Mary d’Este, on the grounds that Dempsey had always been a crude anglicisation obscuring noble (if distant) Italian ancestry. When she gave the cosmetics business she subsequently established the name Maison d’Este, the noble Italians objected, and she had to revert to Desti. She had barely set foot in Paris before becoming best friends with Isadora Duncan, then cutting a swathe through the more bohemian reaches of the avant-garde with her lyrical interpretations of dance. A good deal of Sturges’s life until the age of fifteen was lived as a junior member of Duncan’s entourage. His biographer Diane Jacobs regards these two ‘complex women’ as the ‘crucial influences’ on Sturges both as a person and as a filmmaker. The optimism they instilled in him was made possible by their excess of talent, beauty and charm. ‘I have never waited to do as I wished,’ Isadora was to declare. The attitude evidently rubbed off on Mary, who also knew that she was, as Jacobs puts it, ‘among the world’s elite’, and thus ‘entitled to do as she pleased’.

In September 1901, Mary took the three-year-old Preston back to America, where she proceeded to marry Solomon Sturges, a well-to-do stockbroker from a prominent Chicago family. This was his first encounter with a kind of entitlement drawn not from late Romantic aesthetic ideology, but from an inheritance of power and prestige accumulated over generations. The two kinds, it appeared, could co-exist. Solomon promptly agreed that his wife and adopted son should henceforth spend six months of the year in Chicago, and six in Europe. The arrangement came to an end in 1907, after a violent quarrel during which Preston first learned that Solomon was not his biological father. Solomon, however, remained a much loved surrogate, even – or especially – after his separation from Mary. For one thing, his kind of entitlement generated helpful displays of largesse. ‘Father always put up the money for everything.’ In 1909, the quasi-parental quartet was completed by the arrival of Duncan’s new lover, Paris Singer, heir to the sewing machine millions, who made an immediate, lasting impression. When Singer was in town, Sturges later recalled, ‘I became a temporary millionaire and went every place.’ It was Singer who introduced him to Palm Beach. There can be no doubt about the enduring influence exerted on Sturges by his two surrogate fathers. ‘He was conservative in politics,’ Stuart Klawans observes, ‘after the fashion of moneyed people who resent paying taxes, and proudly cynical.’

Although scarcely definitive as an account of the life, the autobiography does establish and maintain a revealing tone. Facetiousness – a form of wit which is less a statement about the world than an indirect expression of character by means of sheer nagging insistence – came naturally to Sturges. He sometimes caught himself at it. ‘Money? My God, I earned so much money, so much that it seemed unimportant to me and I came to pooh-pooh it … the last thing in the world one should pooh-pooh.’ Money was not the only thing to receive a pooh-poohing. In 1918, Sturges trained as a pilot. He was just getting the hang of the appropriate Top Gun manoeuvres ‘when a terrible disaster overtook us all: on 11 November 1918, the war ended.’ It’s understandable that he should have been eager to ‘take some shots at some Germans’; and that he subsequently came to regret his bravado. But the autobiography’s recantation still has the ring of a classic non-apology apology. ‘Much time has passed since that war, and my feelings about the end of it are now quite correct.’ Facetiousness flows from the violent optimism bred by entitlement.

In January 1927, Sturges’s first wife, Estelle de Wolfe Mudge, an heiress, like Eleanor Hutton though on a less lavish scale, walked out on him. He fled to Chicago, and the care of his adoptive father. This seems to have been a low point. Eventually, however, violent optimism kicked in again, and over the next few years he made a new career for himself, first on Broadway, where the success of Strictly Dishonourable (1929) was followed by a string of failures, and then in Hollywood. In 1933, he sold The Power and the Glory, an original screenplay based on the life of Hutton’s grandfather, C.W. Post, to Jesse Lasky, who had just joined Fox as a producer. Lasky expected a brief treatment; what he got instead was the ‘most perfect script’ he had ever seen. ‘I felt that proceeding sans director and sans teammates,’ Sturges said later, ‘gave me an opportunity to show how I thought it should be done.’ He was soon rubbing shoulders with some of his new teammates on the Fox lot. He couldn’t get over the superb condescension unfailingly displayed by the studio’s star directors. ‘They were all princes of the blood.’ The metaphor is telling. Here, at last, was an elite worth joining.

Klawans makes it clear that his approach to Sturges’s major films will ‘veer’ from ‘biographical-psychological’ interpretation. Instead he means to follow Stanley Cavell in demonstrating that these films, like many others produced in the studio era, ‘can be understood to unfold like reasoned arguments about subjects of real concern. That is to say, they can be read’ – literally so, in fact, since we’ve long been able to draw on two hefty volumes of screenplays superbly edited by Brian Henderson. What I have described as idiosyncrasies, Klawans would probably regard as complications intended to reinvigorate well-worn comic formulae. He doesn’t by any means underestimate the strength of the contempt for ‘simple-minded convention’ that Sturges acquired at a young age through his exposure to ‘boulevardier sophistication and bohemian élan’. But his aim is to identify in the films a counteracting ‘democratic impulse’: a belief that the ‘gaiety of invention’ afforded by language can serve as a vital resource for those who have to ‘get by in a world that on average is absurd and at worst feels like a trap’.

There​ is a moral, social and perhaps even political point to the gaiety. The complication Klawans has mined to greatest effect is the sense of foreboding that lies just below the surface even of films as jocular as The Lady Eve, a whip-smart variation on the Genesis myth which merits a chapter in Cavell’s widely influential study of screwball, Pursuits of Happiness (1981). Multimillionaire Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike (Henry Fonda) is beguiled twice over by a temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) whom he encounters for the first time as Jean, a con artist working a cruise ship, and then as Lady Eve Sidwich, guest of honour at a party thrown in the Pike family mansion in Connecticut. Sturges, familiar as few other Hollywood directors were with such establishments, loaned the production his own silverware. Klawans is particularly good at identifying the mean streak in Hopsy which complicates another of Sturges’s characteristic happy-ever-after (or is it?) endings. Where such pursuits of bleakness are concerned, however, the place to start is Sullivan’s Travels, still his best-known film, and one which explicitly addresses the plight of those for whom the world feels like a trap.

The screenplay for Sullivan’s Travels was the first Sturges had written in the full knowledge that he would also direct, and the film wastes no time in announcing itself as a de luxe production. The camera pulls back from the Paramount logo to reveal that it is in fact the seal on a large package. A woman’s hands enter the frame. She removes the wrapping from the package. Inside is a large, gilt-edged book. Sullivan’s Travels, we read, ‘by Preston Sturges’. The woman’s hand turns the pages of a credits sequence which concludes with a high-flown dedication to ‘the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little’. This pronouncement, too, must surely be ‘by Preston Sturges’. Who else?

Enter our hero, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), acclaimed director of hit comedies and musicals, who’s about to tell the studio bosses that he’s done with the motley mountebank malarkey. He wants instead to make a film of a grittily realist social protest novel titled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, by Sinclair Beckstein (Sinclair Lewis meets John Steinbeck). When the bosses point out that he has no relevant personal experience on which to base such an adaptation, he declares that he will go on the tramp until he does.

It’s an intriguing premise. Hollywood’s standard three-act structure requires that Sullivan’s odyssey should unfold in stages. In Act 1, the bosses, knowing a publicity coup when they see one, equip him with a tramp’s outfit and a back-up ‘land yacht’ crammed with studio personnel. Escaping the clutches of the land yacht, he enjoys an adventure or two before ending up back in Hollywood, where a woman he meets in a diner buys him a cup of coffee. In Act 2, the woman, known simply as The Girl (Veronica Lake), insists on accompanying him – ‘I know fifty times as much about trouble as you ever will’ – on his next, somewhat steeper, descent into the lower depths. In Act 3, Sullivan, concluding that he will never witness enough poverty to be able to make a decent film about it, returns alone to shantytown to distribute compensatory five-dollar bills, and is duly mugged. Assorted further mishaps earn him a spell on a brutal prison farm during which an audience’s response to a Disney cartoon teaches him the value of shared laughter. Engineering his own release from the prison farm in a further gratifying blaze of publicity, he announces to his bosses and The Girl that he no longer has any intention of making the ‘tragedy’ they now expect him to make. Turns out that ‘there’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have?’ His final word, over a montage of laughing faces, is a limp ‘Boy!’

Klawans readily acknowledges the feebleness of this ending. There surely has to be more to the film than that. But what, exactly, if not social realism? Disobligingly, Sturges doubled down on Sullivan’s underwhelming ‘Boy!’ in the autobiography. ‘After I saw a couple of pictures put out by some of my fellow comedy-directors which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favour of the message, I wrote Sullivan’s Travels to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish; to leave the preaching to the preachers.’ If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

The real problem, for a film that champions art over life (or at least Walt Disney over Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck), is that its comic scenes are, as Klawans also acknowledges, so much worse than its ventures into documentary realism. So bad are the three knockabout sequences which chronicle the first stage of Sullivan’s travels, in fact, that he can only describe them as parodies of the comic genres which would have been the stock-in-trade of a successful journeyman director like Sullivan. Unhappy at being trailed by the land yacht, Sullivan hops a ride with a farm boy in a makeshift hot rod. A headlong pursuit ensues, as Sturges cuts frenziedly back and forth between the hot rod and three separate interiors within the wildly bucketing vehicle chasing him. Six separate shots show the Black chef on board (Charles Moore) flung violently from one end of the galley to the other – eggs fly off the tray he totes – and on one occasion through its roof. A seventh finds him on the floor, as though in some other, oddly restful space and time, cradling a bowl of pancake batter which has apparently mixed itself in the interim without any indication of spillage. There he sits, having just removed his head from the bowl, an apparition in whiteface. And there he stands, a few minutes later, after the yacht has come to a halt, as the crew assembles to wave Sullivan off on his henceforth solo adventure. It’s clear from the last and significantly closer shot in which the chef features in this scene that the batter has been reapplied, since it now drips from his nose and chin. Sturges has junked the logic of the pursuit sequence in order to shoehorn in a conceit. Is this parody? Or did his facetiousness get the better of him?

In Acts 2 and 3, Sturges goes out of his way to broaden Sullivan’s horizons. Before Sullivan can ‘embrace his identity as a privileged director of comedies’, Klawans remarks, he will have to experience as well as witness extreme deprivation, and learn that he can’t end it. On the prison farm he gets a beating, and is confined to a coffin-like sweatbox for a day. But he’s allowed to accompany the rest of the convicts when they’re taken to a nearby church to join its African American congregation for a showing of a Disney cartoon featuring Pluto the dog. The minister (Jess Lee Brooks) exhorts his congregants to welcome the ‘guests’ who will shortly join them, guests ‘less fortunate than ourselves’. He then leads them in a rendition of ‘Go Down, Moses’ as the convicts shuffle in. During the film show, Sullivan is gradually, reluctantly, caught up in the waves of laughter which surround him on all sides. The function of this rite of passage, which takes place in a liminal space set apart from life as it is customarily lived (by Hollywood’s mostly white audience), is to reassert a common human bond by dissolving social, cultural and racial identity.

The result, as Klawans rightly remarks, is ‘a scene of Black church life so dignified and respectful’ as to be ‘almost unassimilable’ within classical American cinema: respectful enough, in fact, to merit an immediate thank-you letter on the film’s release from Walter F. White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. We need to pause here. The letter isn’t quite the anti-racism kitemark it has sometimes been taken to be. White, who developed a lively interest in Hollywood’s representation of African American culture, was at that point in the middle of a charm offensive (a method he much preferred to protest or boycotts). He was soon to champion The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a Western which also features an eloquent Black pastor, on account of its condemnation of lynching. Sturges may have got lucky. When White left the country to take up a post as a foreign correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that Baxter paid greater attention than White had to the racial caricature latent in cinema’s visual and verbal detail. It would be interesting to know what she made of the whiteface gag.

Still, the scene in the church is strangely compelling – right up until the moment when Sullivan starts to laugh at Pluto along with everyone else, and we realise that the entire elaborate event has been staged so that this charmless halfwit can give himself permission to re-embrace his identity as ‘a privileged director of comedies’. Klawans offers a more generous interpretation. Sullivan, he says, ‘sits in the church not as a victim but as a witness’, at long last ‘one among the multitudes’. Maybe. But the underlying question remains. Why has Sturges had to outsource the hard work of Sullivan’s moral transformation to an initiative taken by an African American preacher?

The reason, I think, is that in Act 2 his comic invention fails him. Sturges the writer has supplied Sullivan with a female companion whom Sturges the director allows to go to waste. The screenplay proposes Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) as one of the films that could possibly be shown in the church. Chaplin apparently refused permission. But he left his imprint on the film. The heroine of The Gold Rush, like the heroine of Sullivan’s Travels, is known only as The Girl. Sturges was determined, despite strong opposition from the studio, to cast Veronica Lake in the role. He liked the fact that Lake stood five foot two inches in her socks. The key exhibit is the lengthy interview she gave to Life magazine in May 1943. Sturges, she said, had ‘analysed’ her size, explaining to her that, like Chaplin (5’4") and Mary Pickford (5’1"), she belonged to a ‘motion-picture race of Little People’ whose members for some reason assume a sort of luminous vivacity in front of the camera. In Act 2, clothed in loose-fitting jacket and baggy trousers (she was in any case pregnant at the time), Lake becomes Charlie the Tramp’s blonde female reincarnation. It could be that Sturges wanted at once to allude to and to channel a filmmaker who – even (or especially) in his depictions of poverty – knew how to make people laugh and move them at the same time. If so, he failed. The Girl, for all her claim to know more about trouble than Sullivan does, is never a figure to be reckoned with. In Act 3, she disappears from the film altogether, to re-emerge at its end as simpering arm candy. Sullivan’s Travels voices intelligent disquiet about Hollywood hustle, without being able to envisage anything better.

Sturges,​ at any rate, reverted to a strict adherence to genre. The Palm Beach Story, a screwball comedy, was apparently conceived as an illustration of his theory of ‘the aristocracy of beauty’. A woman leaves the dull and ineffectual husband she is still strongly attracted to because, as Klawans puts it a little drily, she ‘feels that her abilities are greater than the economic value assigned to her by marriage’. ‘You have no idea,’ Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) declares to her husband, Tom (Joel McCrea), ‘what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything.’ The film’s original title, swiftly rejected by the censors, had been ‘Is Marriage Necessary?’ The things Gerry wishes to do without doing anything are to be done in the millionaires’ playground of Palm Beach. Like those precursor aristocrats of beauty, Mary Desti and Isadora Duncan, Gerry will need to find some amenable sponsors if she is to sustain her bid for freedom. Fortunately, the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), a lugubrious sausage magnate, is on hand to clear the improvident couple of debt; and the journey from New York to Palm Beach yields a multi-purpose Florida meal ticket in the shape of the unimaginably rich John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallée).

Arriving penniless at Penn Station, Gerry blags her way onto the train by enticing the elderly millionaires of the Ale and Quail Club to adopt her as their ‘mascot’. The Ale and Quailers have hired a whole carriage, with a view to a gigantic piss-up. Sturges is certainly pleased to see them, because they waste no time at all in supplying the film with its quota of broken glass. A pair of boobies take aim with their shotguns at a handful of crackers tossed for them by the Black barman (Charles Moore, once again), and succeed only in blowing out several windows. This is perhaps the blithest of all Sturges’s blithe shatterings. Hell, they own the joint for the duration of the journey and they can do whatever they bloody well like with the furniture. The barman dives for cover as they turn their fire on the rows of bottles behind him.

Klawans doesn’t quite know what to make of such concentrations of violent optimism. The tone of his argument falters noticeably as he gets to grips with what happens next. ‘Then again, maybe some viewers, perhaps including Sturges himself, felt the rumpus at this point was still funny but had taken an ugly turn. All I know is that Gerry is soon fleeing in fear from the club’s members, who eventually reconstitute themselves as a drunken posse and pursue her with shotguns and baying dogs.’ He’s exaggerating, I think. For one thing, it would be hard to imagine less priapic pursuers than this sorry bunch (Sturges cut from the script most of the only scene in which any of them even goes so far as to flirt mildly with her). When they do track Gerry down to a Pullman car, it’s their dogs who cause the trouble by barking up the wrong tree: the bunk occupied by John D. Hackensacker III. Rather than frightening her, the Ale and Quailers make her realise how much she misses Tom. Klawans, however, has found something a good deal uglier still in their boorishness. The posse, he suggests, could be understood as a ‘parody of a lynch mob’. Immaculate doe-eyed Claudette Colbert as a species of strange fruit? It might be kinder to Sturges to suppose that he never meant to go there. I’d be inclined to say that he found too much to enjoy in displays of entitlement, however boorish, to call a halt to the mayhem.

The Palm Beach Story was released in December 1942. The previous August, American forces had launched their first major offensive action of the war at Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands. The action dragged on until February 1943, with the Marine Corps taking heavy casualties throughout. In May, Sturges began work on the screenplay for what would become Hail the Conquering Hero, which features a detachment of marines on home leave from Guadalcanal. In a waterfront saloon in San Diego, the marines encounter Woodrow Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), who buys them a drink. Assessed as unfit for military service on account of his chronic hayfever, Woodrow cannot bring himself to return to the small town of Oakridge where his mother still lives. The marines resolve to escort him home; they will equip him with the rack of medals necessary to ensure a hero’s welcome, and fake some rousing eyewitness testimony to feats of derring-do.

The frenzy of the welcome creates a perfect storm of complicity: everyone, marines included, wants to believe in Woodrow’s heroism. Except for Woodrow. The drama lies in his mounting embarrassment, regret, rage and terror at the role he has been chosen to play. For this is a film explicitly about entitlement – or the lack of it. It succeeds because Guadalcanal has forced Sturges to think more incisively about the perception of war than he ever did about the perception of poverty. Bugsy, a marine whose behaviour shows clear signs of PTSD, ‘is startling in a film of 1944’, Brian Henderson remarks, ‘and remarkable in a comedy at any time’. Bugsy is played by a boxer called Freddie Steele. Klawans points out that there is a significant gap between Steele’s affectless delivery and the performances of the other actors, who find ways fully to inhabit the words they speak.

In this respect, Hail the Conquering Hero bears comparison with William Wyler’s magnificent The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Wyler, a close friend of Sturges, cast a wounded veteran, Harold Russell, in the role of a returning amputee. But this demand for authenticity doesn’t make for an updated version – O Brother Marine, Where Art Thou? – of the book Sullivan had once set out to film. Instead, it produces a new and more complex narrative rhythm. Sturges had never much favoured the kind of establishing long shot which creates context. Here, he moves the camera yet further forward into scenes thronged with characters whose complex interrelationship becomes, as Henderson puts it, the film’s mise-en-scène. The pace is breakneck, even by his standards. But it nonetheless allows for the stasis abruptly induced by the sort of stand-off in which neither side yields an inch, and for digression. We might think that the deftly understated scene in which the town’s blowhard mayor drafts a speech celebrating his imminent re-election has little or nothing to do with Woodrow’s travails; except that he, too, is laying claim to a title he hasn’t earned. In Hail the Conquering Hero, the film Sturges thought had ‘less wrong with it’ than any of his others, no one gets to embrace privilege. It took him a long time to write for film, and longer to direct what he had written; and yet longer still to get over himself. But he did.