Preston Sturges

...On the evidence of this book, Preston Sturges as a boy was himself a little like these dogs—and like his mother: naughty, bright, enterprising, and completely untamable...

...Sturges's meditation on the subject goes back to his school days in France: Many of the boys at school with me were dukes and barons and marquis and all the rest of the titles so popular in France and all the other democracies since the fall of the Bastille...

...Just as grown men will invariably find some way around an unjust or stupid rule, Prohibition, for example, or the present confiscatory taxes, so will boys, or any other group of humans, find ways to accommodate themselves to arbitrary decrees...

...Now the life seems to be returning the favor, since a revival of interest in the man has led MCA/Universal to promote its release of much of the Sturges oeuvre on home video cassettes...

...Naturally enough, a man who had enjoyed great success but who spent most of the last decade of his life trying to make ends meet had a word or two to say about the evils of what, after thirty years, the liberals are once again learning to pretend is "fairness" in taxation...

...From the time of his earliest memory until he went to PRESTON STURGES BY PRESTON STURGES Edited by Sandy Sturges/Simon and Schuster/352 pp...

...These films deserve a place in your library alongside this book...

...For a time he lived in Europe, where his work was more highly regarded than in his own country, and he even wrote and directed a film for which every scene was shot twice, once in French and once in English...

...It is a disappointment that there is not a more exhaustive account of the great days of movie-making from one who was so much a part of them, but if you come to this book expecting a gossipy, inside account of the lives of the stars you misunderstand it and its author...

...Of course, boys being boys, they finally went a little too far...

...It was all very democratic, though, and so that no one, large or small, might appear richer than anyone else nor the faintest whiff of plutocracy infest our grove of learning, each one of us, by school regulation, received the same amount of pocket money, to wit, fifty centimes a week, a sum at that time equal to just under ten cents...

...We know a celebrity when we see one —a performer (in the broadest sense of the word) who makes us want to watch or listen to him—but that is a different matter...

...As, for example, when his mother decided to raise exotic fowl for the table in France: About this time somebody gave me a Lavrock hunting dog puppy...

...It is a wonderful book and deserves to be an American classic, the twentieth-century equivalent of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin...

...His life turns out to have been even more extraordinary than his films,though we should scarcely have known about it but for the work of his maturity...

...I didn't know much about training her, but somebody told me that if the chicken the dog had killed were tied around the dog's neck until the chicken rotted off, the dog would forever avoid any chicken, dead or alive, like the burned child who forever fears the flame...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991...

...I think we even tried a dead goose collar one time, but it didn't work any better than had the chicken collars...

...For years when he was a lowly scriptwriter, trying with more or less success to escape from the mad studio system in which "writers worked in teams, like piano movers," he struggled for the chance to show what he could do as compleat filmmaker, a creature then all but unknown in America: I badgered Mr...

...In 1948, just past the peak of his success, he was supposed to be the third highest paid man in America...

...She was a splendidly eccentric lady and friend of Isadora Duncan who dragged him all over Europe in his earliest years in pursuit of one mad project, or marriage, after another...

...Of course, he finally did get his chance to direct and won an academy award for The Great McGinty and nominations for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero...

...Something of the life of the story goes out of it, however, when his mother dies in 1931 with an untypically epigrammatic flourish: "There is no tragedy in dying," she said, "only in never having lived...

...Above all, we don't like troublemakers, and genius is nothing if not troublemaking...

...But pocket money was increased...

...As the father was not disposed to be persuaded that his son had taken a walk with a rowing machine, the whole thing came out and their little arrangement was called off...

...His versatility also made him unusual in a town so addicted to typecasting as Hollywood in the 1930s...

...Where Ben defined the personality that eventually made America Top Nation, Preston sets out for us the image of America in its ascendancy...

...22.95 Amos Blood Amos Blood is the pseudonym of a Washington writer...

...Nevertheless, she managed to get herself in the family way, and the next thing you know we had nine chicken murderers running around the place, all wearing dead chickens around their necks...

...Sturges was always (and almost always to his credit) an outsider in Hollywood, looked on with suspicion and dislike by those who played by the rules...

...When one boy's father asked to see the rowing machine for which he had been billed, the miserable child was forced to stammer out, "I lost it while taking a walk...

...Having produced some of the brightest, wittiest, most intelligent comedies of the 1930s and '40s, he died alone, penniless and all-but-forgotten in 1959, just after having completed an autobiography with which he had hoped to recoup his fortunes...

...There naturally followed the events leading up to the fund of excellent stories in this volume...

...It was worth a century and a half of hard work and self-denial to produce so irresponsible but endlessly entertaining a character as Preston Sturges...

...One day, scooting around on her oversized puppy paws, she caught a chicken and amidst a fearful din dispatched it rapidly...

...His mother died and he went to Hollywood at about the same time, when he was 33 years old, but the last twenty-seven years of his life occupy only the final fifth of this book...

...but Uncle Sam got most of the money that wasn't swallowed up by his loss-making businesses and he fell a victim to that old Hollywood bugbear, "changing tastes...

...Since she was always wearing a chicken in an advanced stage of decomposition around her neck, she didn't smell very inviting either...

...Hollywood, especially, has always been full of examples of under-appreciated greatness (and over-appreciated mediocrity), and the writer-director Preston Sturges, who did more than anyone else to introduce the studio system to the auteur, is one of the most outstanding...

...What has even Hollywood got to offer to compete with the first half of such a life as his...

...Always his response echoed the constant advice I received from well-meaning friends: "Shoemaker, stick to your last...

...It was not a big success in either language...

...Somehow, all his experience of both success and failure as a filmmaker and public man, that which gives the autobiographer a claim upon our attention, seems to come back to these early years spent tagging along with his mother to exotic places and meeting fascinating people...

...It took years before I found the answer to that one: "Show me the man who has stuck to his last, and I'll show you a shoemaker...

...He was a natural storyteller who was blessed with a life full of stories, most of the best of which he owed to his mother...

...This allowance really was not enough, even for boys marooned out in the country far from the fleshpots of Paris...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 43 Hollywood as a scriptwriter in the early 1930s he lived at breakneck speed and was lucky indeed not to have broken his neck, literally or figuratively, on several occasions...

...That book, which had the typically clever title, The Events Leading Up to My Death, was a flop, but it has now been recut and reissued by his fourth wife and widow, Sandy Sturges, as Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges...

...William LeBaron, the production chief, to allow me to direct, suggesting those pictures on the roster for future production that no one could direct as well as I, if I could once be allowed to prove it...

...Their way was to work an elaborate scam with the local shops by which the boys would pretend to buy various items of school uniform or sports equipment which would be billed to their parents...

...Maybe the pup's olfactory sense wasn't very highly developed, or maybe she didn't make the connection between the killing and the rotting carcass trussed around her neck, or maybe she just didn't give a damn, because she kept right on chewing up all the chickens she could get her teeth into for the rest of her life...

...where Ben is earnest and didactic, Preston is funny and humane...

...Then, instead of taking their ostensible purchases, they would leave them for the shopkeeper to re-sell, often to another phantom buyer, and simply pocket the money...

...True greatness is usually quieter, less obtrusive, or else it appears to us as the sort of strangeness from which we would prefer to avert our eyes...