Presto, Preston

I was in the library looking at some books on Preston Sturges and it occurred to me he's a biographer's nightmare.

He lived quite a life, first as a son of a free-spirited mother who flitted about Europe with Isadora Duncan; then as a socialite himself, as well as an inventor; then as a Broadway playwright; then as a touted screenwriter; then as a major director; then as a Hollywood has-been licking his wounds in Europe. And all along he did many other things, such as manage his restaurant.

But to most people, he's Preston Sturges, classic writer-director of the 40s. About 99% of his fame rests on a handful of movies he made then, most of which, in fact, he created during an intensely busy five-year period at Paramount.

So how much space should a biographer give to this half-decade? If you concentrate on it, you cheat the man out of most of his life. But if you only devote, say, 20% of your pages to these years, you run the risk of readers ignoring 80% of your book.

In Diane Jacob's 525-page book, Sturges doesn't start directing his first film, The Great McGinty, until page 200, and he leaves Paramount by 320. In Donald Spoto's 301 pages, Sturges starts directing McGinty at page 151, and is gone from Paramount at 195. James Curtis's bio is 339 pages, and McGinty shows up on 126 and Paramount is in the rear-view mirror by 194. I guess a biographer is obligated to tell the whole story, but how many readers ignored all those other pages?

Sturges died suddenly in 1959, and never finished his memoir, The Events Leading Up To My Death. Maybe, as a great storyteller, he couldn't crack the structural problem.