W. C. FIELDS, OR more properly William Claude Dukenfield, was the quintessential American comedian. He came from the background created by the freak master Phineas T. Barnum, from 1830, with his Dime Museum, featuring a mermaid; General Tom Thumb and his midget wife, Lavinia Warren; and Washington’s nurse, Joice Heth, a black woman reputedly 160 years old. Born in 1880, he started as a juggler in such shows, graduated into burlesque and then vaudeville (1898–1915), worked with the Ziegfeld Follies on the stage (1915–1930), made a dozen silent movies (1915–1928), and then thirty-two talkies (1930–1944), before dying in 1946.
Reconstructing Fields’s life and career is a messy business, for he was prone to monstrous exaggerations about himself, buttressed by downright lies. Most books about him are unreliable, including his “official biography” by Blythe Foote Fink. However, the best of the Hollywood star–historians, Simon Louvish, has done a good job, in his The Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields (1997). Most of the lies have been identified, the exaggerations toned down, and the truth dredged out. His movies survive, apart from four missing silent shorts. So do some radio tapes on the Charlie McCarthy puppet show, 1933–1943, and there are the texts of sketches written by himself: sixteen in the Library of Congress and eighteen in the Fowler/Walker Collection. Some thirty-two other sketches are missing. Among the highlights of Fields’s career was his appearance (beating out Charles Laughton for the part) as Mr. Micawber in David Selznick’s 1935 MGM movie of David Copperfield, with Freddie Bartholomew, Basil Rathbone, Lionel Barrymore, Elsa Lanchester, and Roland Young as Heep. Fields was proud of having made this classic Dickens adaptation, perhaps the best ever. His only complaint was that “It didn’t include a poo-room scene.” The director, George Cukor, said Fields was “perfect” and his scenes were completed in a mere ten days. The other highlight was his 1940 movie My Little Chickadee with Mae West, in which each wrote their own parts. However, Louvish argues, and many agree with him, that Fields’s best show was his 1935 movie Man on the Flying Trapeze.
Readers can judge for themselves, for most of the oeuvre is easy to get ahold of nowadays. But in my view, his masterpiece was W. C. Fields, the man and the actor, on or off stage and screen, a part he created and added to throughout his life: angry and irascible (not the same thing), witty and bawdy, lustful and mean, suspicious and obsessive, indeed paranoid, full of hates and feuds, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and with every healthy and unhealthy prejudice known to man. As his own scriptwriter, there was no essential difference between the man and his parts, all of which were similar and did not change over the years.
His father was an immigrant from Yorkshire, who retained his accent to his dying day. I can detect Yorkshire tones in Fields’s own speech, and certainly in his character. His mother was of German origin, and “that figures, too,” as Mae West said. The place of birth was Philadelphia, then a highly religious, wide-open city, with seven hundred churches and three hundred brothels. Fields’s fair-barker tone was equally well adapted for preaching from a pulpit and for drumming up trade in a red-light area. His fondness for his birthplace was part of his act. In My Little Chickadee, about to be lynched as the Masked Bandit, he was asked, “Any last words?” “Yes, I’d like to see Paris before I die. Philadelphia will do!” He is said to be buried under a tombstone carved “I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” But the truth is his ashes are in a casket marked simply “W. C. Fields, 1880–1946.”
Fields called himself “Philadelphia’s most distinguished vagrant since Franklin.” He claimed he quarreled with his father, left school, and went into showbiz at eleven. In fact he worked in a cigar store and as a “cash boy” in a department store before becoming a juggler, aged sixteen. He began as “the tramp juggler” and dressed as a tramp for five years. He said, “I don’t believe Mozart, Liszt, Paderewski, or Kreisler worked any harder than I did.” He also said, “A comedian is best when he is hungry.” His role was “The Comic Juggler,” which included getting laughs at his incompetence. He also did “The Lazy Juggler.” His act involved large numbers of cigar boxes, billiard balls, and cues (balancing two balls on the end of a cue), and tricks involving throwing a lighted cigar into the air and catching it in his mouth. There was also “an umbrella caper.” His act gradually expanded to take in a pool table and a series of tricks performed thereon. It was organic. Indeed most of his physical jokes, on stage or screen, were variations or expansions of his original pool table performance, but involving cars, bathrooms, barber’s chairs, yachts, and golf courses. His pool and golf tricks went through countless transformations.
At what point drink entered his act and life is not clear. In his early stage career he performed “Olio Acts,” tricks in front of the oilcloth stage curtain lowered for scene changing. The chorus was known as the Monte Carlo Girls, and he married one of them, Harriet “Hattie” Hughes, later a worthy opponent in a spectacular marital war. According to Blythe Foote Fink, he did not drink before marriage but, soon after, took to sipping weak brandy and ginger ale. Then “graduated to Scotch whiskey, to Irish Whisky to Bourbon to martinis.” Liquor inspired his only poem, “A Drink with Something in It”:
There is something about a martini
A tingle remarkably pleasant
A yellow, a mellow-martini
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about an Old Fashioned
That kindles a cardiac glow
It’s soothing and soft and impassioned
As a lyric by Swinburne or Poe.
In 1938 Fields said he had calculated that he had drunk $185,000 worth of whiskey in forty-two years. After Joe Louis knocked out Schmeling, the super-fit German champion, Fields said, “It simply bears out what I have always contended. A kidney needs a good alcoholic lining to stand up under wear and tear. Schmeling was the victim of clean living. If Louis or any other professional slasher dealt me such a blow their hands would crumple from the impact. As a result of long and serious drinking, I’ve developed ripples of muscles over my kidneys. I will live to be one hundred and twelve years old and perhaps a fortnight longer than that, and I deserve it because I’ve gone out of my way to live the wrong way. Some of my best friends are bartenders, but most of them die young. They can dish it out but they can’t take it.”
Fields’s self-presentation as an accomplished drinking man, a genius of alcoholic consumption, was an addition to his onstage, real-life character, which went with formal suits, cravats, gray top hat, and silver-topped cane. He liked to wear spats.
Drinking did not impair his work. He was never drunk on stage or on the set. On the contrary he was celebrated as a hard and highly efficient worker, a “good study” who always knew his lines, and a money saver for the studios. At various times in the thirties, he earned more cash in a year than any other male star.
He looked like a drinker, though. Rosy cheeks, red ears and neck, Ascot gray topper at an angle, screwed-up eyes, double chins, and, above all, the Nose. His skin was fair and prone to eczema and blotches. At some time he may have had an operation to remove the cartilage in his nose, leaving it soft and pulpy. He may also have suffered from a nose condition known as rosacea. Or he may have shared a complaint with J. Pierpont Morgan called rhinophyma. His nose became his most prominent feature and a source of jokes, his most valuable stock-in-trade. He said it was worth “fifty thousand bucks” to him.
The nose, the furrowed frown, the pursed, tight mouth, the unrelenting eyes, and biting tongue went into the permanent Fields character. He radiated irascibility and invincible dislikes. As an eight-year-old paper delivery boy he had been attacked by savage house dogs, and he hated the canine species thereafter. The text of a soliloquy was found in 1971 entitled “Why Alcohol has taken the place of the dog as Man’s Best Friend.” Extracts include “Alcohol can take care of itself, which is more than a dog can do. . . . Whiskey doesn’t need to be periodically wormed, it does not need to be fed or trained. You never have to train a bottle of grog. A dog will run up and lick your hand. No bottle will do that. If the whiskey starts licking your hand, I advise you to leave off for a while. Say ten minutes.” Even so, Fields used dogs. He made a silent short, Fido the Beautiful Dog. There is also a sketch, “Buster the Dog,” in It’s a Gift. He is believed to have possessed dogs in the 1920s, and owned them in the late 1930s too. But these were guard dogs, essential to a suspicious man who kept large quantities of valuable liquor on his premises. He never had a dog in his scripts by preference. What he liked as material for joke sketches were golf, tennis, railroad stations and saloons, cars, yachts, doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries (especially injections), hats, and anything to do with water. He liked ropes too—Mae West shoots the rope off his neck in the Little Chickadee hanging scene. One reason he liked Will Rogers (other friends were Eddie Cantor and Bert Williams, “the Lucky Coon”) was that he was one-quarter Cherokee, “a wizard with a rope,” and “World Champion Lasso Manipulator.” But Fields disliked Rogers’s lack of hate: Rogers: “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Fields: “I never met a dog or a baby I didn’t hate.” He manufactured hate jokes: “What are you, Chinese peoples?” “Who’s the head myeroon round here?” “Don’t vote for Franklin Disraeli Roosevelt.” “Is he a full-blooded Indian?” “Not the way I play it.” “I understand you buried your wife recently.” “Had to—she died.” “So you never drink water?” “No. Fish f—k in it.” “Women are like elephants. I like to look at them but I don’t want to own one.” “Sleep is the most beautiful experience in life—except drink.” He coined jokes but used old ones. “As for the war, I’m ready to take up arms at a moment’s notice. The legs can follow later.” “Why is a cat’s tail like a long journey?” “Because it has fur to go.” (Alternatively: “So fur to the end.”)
Fields had a particular hatred for the Internal Revenue Service, which he was convinced was anxious to ruin him and send him to jail. He said he had over seven hundred different bank accounts, to fox them. He liked to have large amounts of cash in easy reach: a lump of high-value bills was kept in one pocket of his dressing gown. The other held thirty-six keys to strong rooms and other safe places where he kept liquor. He was not anti all officials. He was on good terms with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, with whom he shared many hatreds, especially of Eleanor Roosevelt. They met over an obscene cartoon of her which, held upside down, showed her vagina. Hoover wrote to him, “It means so much to me to know that the Bureau can call on loyal friends like you in time of need.”
The great event in Fields’s life which changed and prolonged his showbiz career was the discovery that he was a master of speech as well as manipulative comedy. In his juggling career he was totally silent; he made a virtue of it. His pool room and golfing acts, which launched first his stage, then his silent movie careers, were pointedly silent. But when the talkies came he found he could project a rasping, imperious voice into the comedy which added a new dimension to it, and got more laughs. It also enabled him to articulate his hates, an increasingly important part of the W. C. Fields persona. Then, early in the thirties, he discovered radio. This followed a physical collapse, which forced him to dry out at Soboba Hot Springs. He had DTs and double vision in the hospital and found he could not read: his first intimations of mortality. Radio came as a godsend: “I lunged at it boldly and seized it by the throat with one hand, while tweaking its nose with the other.”
He starred on the radio show Edgar Bergen made with his puppet, Charlie McCarthy, sponsored by Chase & Sanborn Coffee. Why this worked on radio is odd, but Fields found the puppet, neither a child nor a dog, uniquely hatable, and it made the show. Fields wrote the dialogue or ad-libbed. “I have a warm place for you, Charlie.” “In your heart?” “No. In my fireplace.” Charlie was “you animated hitching-post.” Charlie called Fields “bugle-beak. Why don’t you fill your nose with helium and rent it out as a barrage balloon?” He did his sketch “The Golf Game” with Charlie. Typical lines were “Will somebody get me a sedative with an olive in it?” “What’s the score? How do I stand?” “Charlie, I often wonder.” And: “Quiet, my termites’ flop-house. I’ll cut you down to a pair of shoe-trees.”
Fields’s battles with Charlie were fairly clean. But as a rule he had trouble with the censors. He never took the view that dirty jokes and innuendoes were beneath the dignity of a comic. An early impression in showbiz had been hearing Eva Tanguay sing “I Want Someone to Go Wild with Me” and “It’s All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It,” and discovering she got paid $3,000 a week. So Fields always used sex when he could get away with it. His battles with Joseph Breen, chief agent of the Hays Office, were an important part of showbiz history. The great point about Breen was that he had no sense of humor whatsoever, so Fields enjoyed the warfare. Much of Breen’s censorship survives, notably in My Little Chickadee. “The goat must be cut.” “We cannot have ‘Willie of the Valley.’ “ “Omit ‘tramp’ when applied to women.” “Please cut the business of the woman belching.” “Revealing white blouse must go.” “She must not expose her breasts.” “Entire speech regarding traveling salesman must go.” “No suggestive movements in scene with Indian.” “No exposure in the bathtub.” Breen hated one of Mae West’s favorite jokes: “She was Snow White, but she drifted.” Fields also lost “go back to the reservation and milk your elk” and “pear-shaped ideas.” Breen insisted: “Nix the reference to Black Pussy Café. It would be acceptable to say Black Pussy Cat Café.” Breen objected to “physiology,” “buzzards,” “tighter than Dick’s hat-band,” and “Falling Water O’Toole” as an Indian’s name. Also censored were “showing bananas and pineapples,” “did you ever gondola?” and “playing at Utsna.” Breen would not have Fields “looking at girls’ legs and breasts and reacting thereto” or taking out false teeth. But Fields, while accepting Breen’s cuts, did not in fact carry them out invariably. The goat stayed in, for instance.
Fields earned a lot of money and delighted to be thought mean about it. What did he spend it on? One item was cars. At one time he had seven, including big ones with traveling bars in the back seats. He regarded a refrigerator in a car as “one sign that civilization is worth having.” He said, “Only fairies ride in trains.” At the funeral in 1942 of John Barrymore, who died with only sixty cents in his pocket, Fields drove up in his Cadillac with a bar fridge in the back. He brushed off the boys admiring the vehicle at the graveyard gates: “Back to the Reform School you little nose-pickers!” Once, when drinking in his car bar, a traffic cop pulled up: “You are double-parked.” Fields: “No. We are sitting at the crossroads between Art and Nature, trying to figure out where Delirium Tremens leaves off and Hollywood begins.” “That’s OK, Mr. Fields.”
Fields would never buy a house. He always rented. He had a saying: “All landlords should be sent to the electric chair.” He refused to do repairs to his rented houses, preferring discomfort to doing his landlord a favor. His last (rented) house was 2015 De Mille Drive, near Griffith Park, Hollywood. It was gated, and had five bedrooms and eleven baths, and a maid’s apartment (used by Carlotta, his mistress). It also had a “formal dining room,” library, recording studio, glass elevator, a “full floor bar,” tennis court, and observation deck. The rent was initially $250 a month, and when the landlord tried to raise it, Fields refused, even when the house began to fall apart. It had an exercise room, containing a stationary bike, a rowing machine, and “a bar well-stocked with potables.” Carlotta later recorded, “At the sight of the bottles as an incentive, Woody would pedal furiously.” His study was “cavernous” and contained “The W. C. Fields Filing System Desk.” There he would “sit and type long, tipsy letters to friends.” He had a big fridge on wheels with an endless electric cord so he could have ice for his drink in any room of the house. There was a barber’s chair to relieve his back pain. The staff varied as Fields had rows with them. He had locks on all chests and strong room doors, “to stop the servants stealing my booze.” But there was a permanent butler, a strong man known as “the Chimp.”
In the last years of his life, 1940–1946, Fields enjoyed his quarrels more than ever, especially with servants: “In this house it’s capital versus labor all the time.” Animals aroused his fury. He chased away swans from his garden: “Either shit green, or get off the lawn.” He believed his near neighbor, Deanna Durbin, the singing star of the famous musical movie One Hundred Men and a Girl, had trained the swans from her lake to invade his property. Another neighbor/enemy was Cecil B. De Mille. It was wartime and Fields had drunken fantasies about a Nazi invasion of California. His feud with De Mille came to a head one night with Fields growling “Why are you sneaking across my lawn with a warden’s helmet on and carrying a shotgun? I believe you are a lost German paratrooper. You speak English well for a Nazi.” “I was born here!” “I know. Another Benedict Arnold.” “I pay your salary.” “I know. Leave a check in the mailbox and beat a hasty retreat.”
Fields claimed that in all the years he drank whiskey he never got drunk. Toward the end he switched to rum and pineapple juice. This was fattening. He hired a night watchman to drink with him until the small hours. He got DTs again: “I’d see the men with whiskers sitting on bulls. They’d charge me.” Fields alternated between living at home and drying out in a bungalow at the Las Encinas clinic. His last recorded joke was an answer to the query “Do you like children?”: “I do if they’re properly cooked.” His last appearance in a movie was 1945 and his final words as a performer were “Come, my little popinjay.” But a $25 war bond was presented “to any nose which matches in size, color, and decorative effect the bulbous projection of Mr. Fields.” In 1946 disease of the liver set in, and he moved permanently into his Encinas bungalow where he died over Christmas.
Humorists are either chaos-creators or order-enforcers. Fields had steered an unsteady course between the two. Instinctively he liked order. He was a U.S. marshal and a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff. But at his funeral on 2 January 1947 chaos finally took over. There were a lot of Hollywood people there and the famous boxer Jack Dempsey. Edgar Bergan gave the address. But also in attendance were Carlotta Monti and an angry ex-wife, Hattie Fields, as she called herself. There were in fact three memorial services: Catholic, attended by Hattie; spiritualist, conducted by the medium Mae Taylor; and a third when the casket was bricked up to await cremation. A tramp turned up who said he was an old pro who had known Fields for thirty-five years. Fields left $771,428, not counting sums stashed away in countless bank accounts. Among the claimants was a blind woman who said Fields had married her under a false name in 1893 when he was only thirteen, and an illegitimate son, William Rexford Field Wallace, who claimed his mother was a Ziegfeld chorus girl named Bessie Poole. He eventually got $15,000. Hattie Fields got most of the residue, but only after a seven-year legal battle, ending in 1954, by which time she was seventy-five.
Fields’s story is not edifying. But it is not discouraging either, like that of so many comics. Since he took pleasure in fury, he got a lot out of life, and he gave a lot back too, in laughs. He always tried to be hard-boiled and cynical, brutal even.But there may have been another side. J. B. Priestley, the Yorkshire novelist, who had seen Fields as a silent juggler in the English halls before the First World War, and who recognized another Yorkshireman beneath his American skin, wrote of his tricks, “he moved warily in spite of a hastily assured air of nonchalant confidence, through a world in which even inanimate objects were hostile, rebellious, menacing, never to be trusted. He had to be able to juggle with things, to be infinitely more dextrous than you or I need be, to find it possible to handle them at all. They were not his things, these commonplace objects of ours. He did not belong to this world, but had arrived from some other and easier planet.” But he was a hard man, all the same, perhaps precisely because he was unsure. His favorite line was “Never give a sucker an even break,” and he meant it up to a point: the breaking point.