GOING TO THE MOVIES : LUCK IN HIS CUP : CHRISTMAS IN JULY, <i> By Diane Jacobs (University of California Press: $30; 538 pp.)</i>

I have long kept a volume of Preston Sturges’ screenplays on my desk, and when writing a screenplay of my own and feeling tortured, depressed or simply driven insane by my betters in the film business, I have dipped into Sturges. His wit and grace can usually pull me out. Now that I’ve read “Christmas in July,” Diane Jacobs’ moving biography of Sturges’ life, Sturges is an even stronger talisman for me. He was tortured, depressed and occasionally quite mad himself, but always with inimitable Sturges style.

Sturges had remarkable beginnings. His mother, Mary Dempsy, was a close friend of Isadora Duncan and, as Jacobs describes it, dressed in the “flowing Greek robes, gold sandals, and ribboned coiffure that were Isadora’s trademark.” The two women raced around Europe together, the infant Sturges with them and absorbing their atmosphere, which must have been remarkable. When he was seriously ill in Paris of childhood pneumonia, Isadora’s mother fed him Champagne, which cured him (and perhaps shaped his taste). He went to the Paris Opera at night, and played with the Duncan dancers by day. He was brought up in the theater, watching, as Jacobs notes, the intricate French farce he perfected when he came to Hollywood later.

Mary Dempsy changed her name to Desti, and started a successful cosmetic line called Maison Desti. She also designed scarves, and it was a red batik Maison Desti scarf Isadora Duncan wrapped around her neck the day she died, the scarf catching in the spoked wheels of her car. Dark twists of fate such as this haunt Sturges’ films, in the midst of the brightest comedy.

When he was 16, he and his mother came to New York City, where she began a branch of Maison Desti. One May afternoon Mary attended a shipboard party in New York harbor. She decided to sail with the ship, and having neither baggage nor passport, waved goodby to Preston, who stood on the pier watching Mam sail away. A mother like this was bound to give her son a flair for the dramatic, and an independent turn of mind.

He was on his own in New York City as a teen-ager, managing Maison Desti and building up the business, even developing a lipstick called Kiss-Proof. The tall, handsome, charming boy from Europe had many Manhattan flappers interested in providing him lips on which to oversee Kiss-Proof’s development.

Inspired by the success of Kiss-Proof, he became a full-time inventor for a while. He invented a drink called Pepoclam, a concentrated clam-broth cocktail. It never saw the light of day, which seems a shame. There are directors I know who would surely benefit from the inspiration that might be found in a glass of Preston’s Pepoclam.

The Irish mother in the 1940 Sturges film “Christmas in July” says to her son, “You have luck in your cup,” and it was true for Sturges. When Maison Desti folded, he was hired as an assistant stage manager on a Broadway show, saw the light and began to write a play of his own. He’d been good at mixing his mother’s perfume but he was even better at mixing dialogue. “Strictly Dishonorable” was a hit.

After a few more plays, he came to Hollywood, wrote “The Power and the Glory” and somehow got a contract that said, “Should the producers wish changes, these would have to be sanctioned by the author.” Such a clause makes producers believe they are having a nightmare, like being held prisoner at a meeting of the Writers Guild. Samuel Goldwyn loathed him and called him Sturgeon, as in, “When can we get rid of this fellow Sturgeon?” But Orson Welles said that he wore out a print of “The Power and the Glory” studying its technique. And Sturges himself said, “I discovered that the directors were treated as Princes of the Blood, whereas writers worked in teams of six like piano movers. . . . It was easier to become a Prince of the Blood myself than to change a whole social order.”

Paramount made him a Prince of the Blood, and he had his directorial debut with “The Great McGinty.” It came in $1,000 under budget and three days ahead of schedule, and his credit read “Written and Directed by Preston Sturges.” This was the first such billing ever in Hollywood, and Sturges went on to win an Oscar for best original screenplay.

Between 1940 and 1944 he wrote and directed eight films. He also opened a restaurant called The Players on Sunset Boulevard, across the street from the Chateau Marmont. It was a dinner theater, and its layout was marked by his inventiveness. Jacobs writes, “After dinner, the tables scudded off on tracks, and the paneled floor sank in tiers so that everyone in the room had a perfect view of the production. After the final curtain call, elevators raised the tiers to a single height, and the theater turned into a ballroom.” Isadora would have loved it.

The Players ultimately helped to ruin him financially, but for now he was wealthy, successful, the third-highest-paid man in America, and as wonderfully wacky as his films. In an interview with Life Sturges observed that “the source of Veronica Lake’s sex appeal was the fact that her buttocks were pear-shaped rather than apple-shaped, like most women’s.” It is fortunate that he made this remark before the full wonders of plastic surgery had dawned, or young hopefuls would have been lining up for the posterior pear procedure.

Sturges had Cecil B. De Mille’s commissary chair at Paramount measured and then had his own made larger. As Jacobs points out, he had to be the largest presence wherever he was. Fights with Paramount studio heads for greater power led him to a deadly mistake: He started his own production company with another eccentric, Howard Hughes.

Their effort failed, and Sturges’ luck began to leak away. His films lost money, and so did his restaurant, where he nevertheless continued to feed for nothing out-of-work actors, immigrants and punch-drunk prize fighters. He lost everything, and became, in his own words, “a ruined man.” The luck in his cup had run out, and he saw it just that way--that his incredible good fortune had been a gift from fate, and that now “fate was trying to erase every trace that he was here on earth.”

He went to Paris, where he was still considered a great director. He made one small film, drank heavily and went deeper into debt. Even so, when a young reporter he knew in Paris became seriously ill, Sturgis sent the top internist in the city to see her, and paid the bill himself, an act that was typical of him. He died penniless in 1959 of heart failure, in a room in the Algonquin in New York.

Diane Jacobs’ excellent book contains a penetrating analysis of all his films, and of his life. As well as anyone can, she has looked into the shadows of the past and drawn them out. Her touching and thoughtful work creates a flickering resurrection of the strange, gifted, lovely man that was Preston Sturges.