Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments When I began writing the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award tribute to Frank Capra with producer George Stevens, Jr., in 1981, there were troubling questions lingering in my mind, aspects of Capra's story that didn't quite add up. Particularly baffling was the question of how this great director could have so utterly self-destructed after the late 1940s, in the most precipitous decline of any American filmmaker since D. W. Griffith. The explanation in The Name Above the Title was unconvincing: Capra's self-flagellation over selling his independent production company to Paramount Pictures hardly sufficed to account for his subsequent creative bankruptcy, his premature abandonment of his craft, and his long, embittered exile from Hollywood. I expected that in the course of researching the tribute I would find some answers to that question. Still, I was unprepared for the impact of the revelations that awaited me. Working with Capra on his Life Achievement Award acceptance speech, meeting his colleagues, and beginning to dig into his collection of personal and working papers at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, I realized how little I had really known Frank Capra from his public persona. To understand Capra fully, I had to reexamine everything I knew about his life—his entire life, not just his period of disintegration, which I came to see as the result of forces set into motion much earlier. I began work on this book in 1984, and it took more than seven years to assemble all of the pieces of the picture he had tried so long to keep hidden. I once asked Capra why he thought there have been so few good biographies of movie directors, and he replied, "Because they didn't have wives who saved everything—I didn't know she was doing it." I express my gratitude here for the work of the late Lucille Capra (a former secretary) in organizing and maintaining his papers along with her husband's longtime personal secretary, Chester E. Sticht, and for Mrs.Capra's scrapbooks, which document the press coverage of her husband 's career from the early 1930s through its end in the 1960s. Capra's papers, donated to Wesleyan in 1980 as The Frank Capra Archive, also include hismanuscripts , dating back to 1915; his voluminous correspondence; his diaries; film production files; and the final shooting scripts, with the director's annotations, for most of his sound features and some of the silents, as well as some of his scripts for silent comedy shorts, scripts for the Why WeFight films, and scripts and treat- 690 Acknowledgments ments by Capra and other writers for many unmade projects. Though the papers did not contain all of the answers to the riddles of Capra's life, they made it possible for me to begin asking the right questions. I studied the papers extensively on a second visit to Wesleyan for ten weeks in the fall of 1984. I am grateful to David Rivel, who graciously assisted me during my second visit. Although I made it clear to Frank Capra from the outset that this would be an unauthorized biography, he still was willing to grant me many hours of interviews, and I am grateful to him for that. We spoke frequently at his homes in La Quinta and June Lake, California, until he suffered a series of strokes in August 1985. Although he was not always candid, he often came forth with genuine selfrevelation , usually when I presented him with hard facts dug up from documents or from my other interviews. Capra also enabled me to obtain his U.S. Army personnel records and his transcripts and other records from the Los Angeles Unified School District and from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, even though some of those documents contradict elements of the Capra myth. I thank Frank Capra, Jr., for granting me a one-hour interview in 1987. Frank Capra's daughter, Lucille, and his son Tom did not respond to requests for interviews , although Tom and I had a pleasant lunch with his father at June Lake in 1984. I had extraordinarily good fortune in tracking down and interviewing other people who had known Capra throughout his lifetime, including many from his distant past and many who had never been interviewed before about Capra. Of the 175 people I interviewed, Chester Sticht was my most inexhaustible source of factual information and close-range, insightful observations of Capra, his employer of thirty...