“Back in my rummy days, I would tremble and shake for hours upon arising. It was the only exercise I got.”
W.C. Fields was known for his piquant one-liners, his signature top hat, and his loveable-grump persona. Self-conscious about his bulbous nose, he had cartilage removed in an attempt to fix the problem, but that only worsened it. A major star of vaudeville, Broadway, and radio, Fields made a number of silent films but did not become a star until sound arrived—he needed dialogue to translate his act to the screen. Fields’s most enduring films are The Dentist (1932), The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939), and The Bank Dick (1940). He died in Pasadena on Christmas Day as his girlfriend sprayed the roof with a hose to approximate his favorite sound, falling rain.
SPRING 1941 AND AMERICA WAS ON THE VERGE of war. Take a look at the May 12 issue of Life magazine. The cover shows a U.S. Army parachutist, braced for whatever is to come. The world was at war, and America was inching toward declaration. But within the magazine’s pages was the real bombshell: the legendary W. C. Fields had started to exercise. At age sixty, the portly actor had apparently abandoned his lifelong disdain for health and good sense—he had even hired a personal trainer.
Then, as now, working out was common in an industry built upon youth and beauty. Never mind that Fields had neither, the real surprise here was that he could walk, let alone jog. Fields drank heavily anytime he was awake. In fact, the Life article’s first paragraphs were devoted to reminding readers of his status as a first-class “tippler.” He would only confess to being drunk one time—it lasted “from the Spanish-American war to the New Deal.” The Life photographer witnessed Fields drinking straight rum from a “tall glass with a wooden lid, to ‘keep out the flies.’” He finished five such drinks in the two hours the photos were taken. While working out.
He had also spent the morning drinking double martinis.
Not in the halls of Seagram’s will you find a more staunch advocate of the martini than William Claude Fields, Bill to his friends. Fields started drinking relatively late in life. As a young vaudeville performer, he didn’t touch alcohol because he wanted full reflexes for his astounding juggling and stage acts. Eventually, out of boredom, he started drinking whiskey as a means to socialize while on tour. The oft-reported date is 1904, when Fields was twenty-five, but in the W. C. universe no fact was safe from convenient rearrangement. Whatever the case, by the dawn of Prohibition in 1920, he had discovered martinis.
Fields started drinking relatively late in life. As a young vaudeville performer, he didn’t touch alcohol because he wanted full reflexes for his astounding juggling and stage acts.
At the time, many people adopted the martini merely because gin was the easiest liquor to bootleg. Fields was not one of those people. He wrote essays about the drink’s perfection. It was the object of passion in his only known poem. He decried any nonalcoholic substitute, even water—because he reasoned “fish fuck in it.”
By 1941 Fields estimated that he was drinking two quarts of gin a day. How he would survive daily workouts nobody knew, but apparently, this was no joke. An upstairs room and the garage had been converted into gyms. He had a stationary bike with a full bar just in front of it, which his girlfriend, Carlotta Monti, said “provided incentive.” And so it was that his trainer, Robert Howard, would show up daily at 4 p.m. Fields would run around his lake while being timed. He lifted weights, rode the exercise bike, and jogged on the roads of Bel Air with either a beer wagon or a starlet running in front of him. Again, “incentive.”
The third photo shows Fields, shirtless, taking a drink of rum from that aforementioned tall glass. Fields wrote his own caption: “It is imperative that the right elbow be kept in perfect condition at all times.” Apparently no Fields endeavor would be complete without a few jokes, the Life article included. He was indeed a master of the one-liner, especially when it came to booze.