[In the following excerpt, Ford offers his personal recollections of Fields.]

W. C. Fields is generally acknowledged to be the supreme comic artist of his time, in my own opinion the funniest man who ever lived, and he was even funnier offstage than on. His drawn-out rasping voice was the same, of course, but he had an infectious giggle, a falsetto he-he-he-he-he like the chirp of a cricket, which I never heard him use in his professional work. His everyday speech was extravagantly florid. "Methinks," he would intone, "there's a Nubian in the fuel supply." Due to his zealous reading of the eighteenth-century English romanticists, their stilted phraseology came naturally to his lips—"Betwixt" or "Forsooth" or "Hither and yon"—and he was the only person I've known to start a sentence with the word "Likely."

That occurred one night when Fields and I were having dinner at Chasen's. We were in one of the semicircular booths along the wall, and Bill by preference was facing the rear of the restaurant. Over his shoulder I could see Sabu, the Elephant Boy, making one of his elaborate entrances, clad in Indian robes and followed by two tall Sikh bearers (probably from Central Casting) with white turbans wound on their heads. The chokras stood with arms folded while Sabu seated himself in the booth next to ours, back to back with Fields. Bill had become conscious of the commotion behind him, and he swung his head slowly around, his gaze moving like the beam of a revolving harbor light until it fixed on Sabu with a baleful glare. Out of the corner of his mouth, in an aside which could have been heard clear to Santa Barbara, he growled to me, "Likely the little mahout will mistake my nose for a proboscis, and climb on my sho-o-oulder."

We had a weekly date to dine together at Chasen's, joined sometimes by Roland ("Stingy Lips") Young or Billy Grady, Fields's former business manager and vituperative companion, or Dave himself when he had a free moment. Over his eighth or ninth Martini, Bill was wont to lapse into sentimental recollections of his experiences in show business. "Got the theater in my blo-o-od," he would drawl. "My great uncle Fortescue used to be a Swiss bell-ringer at Elks' smokers. Ah, yaas, poor old Uncle Fortescue. Run over by a horse-car in Scollay Square, Boston, after attending a musi-cale at the Parker House." I never knew how much of what he said was factual, for Fields, a true artist, constantly embellished his stories with new imaginative touches. It didn't matter. Bill could have recited the alphabet and had me rolling on the floor.

He had toured the world, under the auspices of Tex Rickard, and loved to boast of his travels to Samoa and Australia. "Once I fell in love with a Melanesian belle," he would reminisce, "a charming little savage with kinky hair that bristled like a barberry hedge. A Bar-r-rb'ry hedge, yaas. Had a wooden soup dish in her nether lip, and through her nose was a brass ring from a missionary's hitching post. Prettiest gal on the island." Or: "One day in Melbourne whilst strolling down the street I observed a number of vehicles drawn up before a sumptuous mansion. So I went up to the door, and a butler stuck a silver plate under my nose. I contributed an old laundry slip and a dime, and went in. Most enjoyable soiree, most enjoyable. I had a long talk with the governor's wife."

"What did you talk about?" I asked.

"We discussed the mating habits of the wallaby."

Now and then he would dwell on his early boyhood in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia. He was born William Claude Dukenfield, the son of poor but dishonest parents. His mother would lie abed until midday—"besotted with gin," Bill emphasized to me carefully—and when she heard the noon whistle she would leap to her feet, pausing only to tie on an apron and dash some water over her face. Then she would stand on the front steps, mopping the bogus perspiration from her brow with a corner of the apron, and sighing, "Been working all morning over a hot stove" as the neighbors walked by. "Good day to ye, Mrs. Muldoon," she would beam, and add, after the stroller was out of hearing, "Terrible gossip, Mrs. Muldoon, Oh, and how are you today, Mrs. Frankel?" Another pause as she passed. "Nasty old bitch, Mrs. Frankel. Ah, there, Mrs. Cudahy, a lovely morning, is it not?" Bill's hypocritical greetings and sotto voce asides were clearly patterned on his mother.

His nasal drawl, on the other hand, was a heritage from his father, who owned an elderly nag named White Swan and made a scanty living hawking fresh vegetables from door to door, which he advertised in a hoarse adenoidal voice. Much against his will, young Bill was forced to accompany his father in the grocery wagon and help peddle the produce. He devoted his efforts to mimicking the elder Dukenfield, chanting in the same singsong whine a list of vegetables which he invented because he liked the names: "Pomegranates, rutabagas, calabashes." When housewives hurried out to purchase these exotics, his father would explain that his son was new to the job, and then clout him on the ear when they were out of sight.

Mr. Dukenfield was a firm believer in strict discipline, and whacked his son regularly whether he deserved it or not. He had lost the little finger of his left hand in the Crimean War—or so Bill claimed—and the absence of this digit made his back-hand blow a particularly bruising weapon. Once, at the age of nine, Bill sneaked past the ticket-taker at the local vaudeville house, and spent a fascinated afternoon watching a juggling act. Filled with enthusiasm, he stole some lemons and oranges from his father's cart, and practiced the new art. "By the time I learned to keep two of them in the air at once," he admitted, "I'd ruined several dollars' worth of fruit." His father took stern measures to cure him of this expensive habit, concealing himself in the stable until he caught his son in the act which would one day make him famous, and giving him a parental beating. One afternoon Bill left a small rake in the yard, and when Mr. Dukenfield stepped on it the handle banged his shin. Seeing that Bill was observing him from the doorway with evident amusement, he picked up the rake and bashed it over the boy's head. Bill resolved to square accounts—"I rejected certain measures which might have elicited the attention of the coroner," he said—and settled on the simple solution of hiding on a ledge above the stable door, poising a heavy wooden crate. His father entered, Bill flattened him, and left home at the age of eleven, never to return.

Psychologists have analyzed the humor of W. C. Fields, and concluded that his prejudices and fears were due to a basic hostility toward his father. Mr. Dukenfield was given to singing sentimental ballads around the house, they point out; Bill hated vocal music to his dying day. His cantankerous nature, his never-ending war with producers and directors, indicated a subconscious rebellion against the paternal image. Well, maybe it's all true, and yet I feel with E. B. White that "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." Personally I prefer to think of Fields as a comic genius who defies analysis, unequaled among America's funnymen, the one and only.

Gene Buck, who hired Fields for the Follies, wrote after his death: "He was amazing and unique, the strangest guy I ever knew in my lifetime. He was all by himself. Nobody could be like him, and a great many tried. He was so damn different, original and talented. He never was a happy guy. He couldn't be, but what color and daring in this game of life! He made up a lot of new rules about everything: conduct, people, morals, entertainment, friendship, gals, pals, fate and happiness, and he had the courage to ignore old rules. .. . He had taken a terrible kicking around in life, and he was tough, bitter, and cynical in an odd humorous way. His gifts and talents as an entertainer were born in him, I think. God made him funny. He knew more about comedy and real humor than any other person. . . . When Bill left the other day, something great in the world died, and something very badly needed."

He had the round ruddy face of a dignified and slightly felonious country squire. Its most prominent feature was the celebrated red-veined nose, which would grow redder like a warning light if he felt he was being victimized. When an insurance company doctor examined him and refused to renew his health policy, he protested to Gene Fowler, "The nefarious quack claimed he found urine in my whisky." His very appearance evoked shouts of laughter from an audience: the manorial air that was so obviously false, the too benign smile, the larcenous eye.

"His whole manner suggested fakery in its most flagrant form," Robert Lewis Taylor wrote in a recent biography. "One of the stills from My Little Chickadee shows him as Cuthbert J. Twillie, a crooked oil man, in a Western poker game with several desperadoes, all eying him appraisingly. Fields himself is rigged out in a cutaway, striped trousers, and a high gray felt hat with a broad black band; he is wearing formal white gloves, which are turned back delicately, and he has a wilted lily in his buttonhole. His hands, graceful and expressive, are carefully shielding his cards from any possible snooping by the man on his left, while his own furtive, suspicious gaze is plainly directed into the hand of the player on his right. His attitude is so frankly dishonest that the other players seem to sense the inevitability of their financial down-fall." Their fears were justified in the ensuing scene in which Fields managed to deal himself four aces and win a thousand-dollar pot without having undergone the inconvenience of putting up any money himself.

Fields's distrust of doctors and lawyers was neurotic. "They're all knaves and thieves," he insisted to Gene Fowler once. "I know a thief when I see one. When I was young I was the biggest thief at large. I'd steal golf balls, piggy banks of dear little kiddies, or the nozzle off the hose on the rectory lawn." He termed the members of the medical profession "dastardly fee-splitters. When doctors and undertakers meet, they always wink at each other." Bankers were even worse, he held. In order to outwit their cunning designs, he deposited small sums of money in banks scattered all over the country, even stepping off a transcontinental train to open an account in a small town while the engine was taking on water. Some of these accounts were under his own name, but most of them were credited to Figley J. Whitesides or Dr. Otis Guelpe or Larson E. Whipsnade, names which he had accumulated in the course of his travels. Gene Fowler told me once that Bill had over seven hundred bank accounts or safe-deposit boxes in such far-flung cities as London, Paris, Sydney, Cape Town, and Suva. "I think he lost at least fifty thousand dollars in the Berlin bombing," he speculated. Since Fields never took anyone into his confidence about his financial arrangements, and no bankbooks showed up after his death, it is probable that a sizable fortune is still stashed away in various banks under assumed names. Bill insisted that his unique deposit system not only insured him against conniving bankers, but also made it difficult for income tax agents to collect revenue for the government, which he likewise mistrusted. "Uncle Whiskers will strike down even a child and take away its marbles," he glowered.

Children were another of Fields's pet phobias. "Of course I like little tots," he would protest righteously, "if they're well cooked." When a group of noisy young autograph seekers surrounded him after John Barrymore's funeral, he bellowed, "Get away from me, you diminutive gamins. For two cents—or even one—I'd kick in your teeth. Back to reform school!" His radio feud with Edgar Bergen's wooden dummy, Charlie McCarthy, was genuine, and he would put real feeling into a snarled threat: "I'll slash you into Venetian blinds." Baby LeRoy, with whom he made several films, was his particular aversion. He was convinced that the infant was deliberately plotting to steal scenes from him, and would eye him with dark suspicion, muttering vague threats under his breath. Once he succeeded in spiking Baby LeRoy's orange juice with a surreptitious shot of gin, and sat back amiably while Norman Taurog, the director, tried in vain to rouse the youngster from his pleasant slumbers. "Walk him around, walk him around," Fields advised professionally from a corner. When Baby LeRoy had to be taken home and the shooting postponed till the next day, Fields was jubilant. "That kid's no trouper," he jeered.

One of the most agreeable moments in his film career occurred while shooting The Old Fashioned Way, in the course of which Baby LeRoy dropped Field's watch in the molasses, overturned some soup in his lap, and hit him between the eyes with a spoonful of ice cream. In the following scene, Fields was alone in a room with the obstreperous infant, who was creeping on all four across the carpet. Following the script, his face shining with benevolence, he drew back his foot and lofted his tormentor several feet forward. The cameras recorded some excellent footage, but Fields's conscience evidently troubled him, for the next day he arrived on the set with an armload of toys and gifts for young LeRoy. "One of the gifts was a bowie knife," he chuckled to me malevolently.

Sometimes Bill would lapse into a sentimental mood. "When I was a little tot," he recalled one evening at Chasen's, "I had to earn my way into the circus by lugging water for the elephants. All day long I would trudge back and forth, staggering under the weight of the burdensome receptacles till my arms were numb. Then and there I made a vow that, if I ever succeeded in life, I would donate a sum of money to help some other little tot like myself who had to lug water all day. Waal," and Bill made the gesture of peeling an imaginary glove off his hand and shrugged modestly, "fate proved kind to me, I was blest with more than my share of life's riches, and one day I thought of the money I'd vowed to give that poor little tot lugging water." His eyes narrowed. "And then I had a second thought: f——him."

Strangely his language, though generously larded with obscenities, never seemed off-color or offensive. Today's degenerate jokes and sick humor are, to me, infinitely more filthy than Bill's earthy Anglo-Saxon speech. His drawling voice and squirelike dignity robbed a four-letter word of any suggestion of smut. On stage, of course, he resorted to euphemisms like "Drat!" or "Godfrey Daniel!" to elude the censor; but the truth is that Fields was genuinely embarrassed by dirty stories, particularly when told in the presence of women. If someone started a bawdy anecdote in mixed company, he would make some excuse to leave the room, or wander around uneasily in a pretended search for a match.

Field's attitude toward women was courtly, even a trifle old-fashioned, and he would remove his hat punctiliously in an elevator or rise promptly to his feet if a lady entered the room. One hot afternoon Bill was sitting stark naked behind his desk when Billy Grady and a female companion burst through the door without warning. Ever the gentleman, Bill stood up politely and extended his hand, and then blinked in surprise as the lady gasped and departed in haste. He greeted members of the fair sex with such cavalier terms of endearment as "My little chickadee" or "My glow-worm" or, in a romantic scene with Mae West, "My little brood mare." At the time his residence on Toluca Lake was up for sale, Fields volunteered to show a timid pair of prospective purchasers around the house. "This is the dining room," he explained as they started their tour, "and this is the library, and this is the mah-ster bedroom." He led them across his room, past the rumpled bed where a blonde was lying asleep on her stomach. "How are you, my little turtle-dove?" he inquired, patting her fanny solicitously. "And this," he continued with perfect poise to the speechless couple, "is the sun-porch. . . . "

It was his dislike of birds—still another of Bill's innumerable prejudices—which led him to sell his Toluca Lake home, an imposing mansion with broad green lawns sloping down to an artificial lake, the featured attraction of the real estate development. The shallow lake was populated by numerous ducks and swans, which used to roam over Bill's property and hiss at him, an unforgivable affront to an actor. Whenever Bill spotted one of his web-footed adversaries cropping his grass, he would place a golf ball in position and drive it accurately at the intruder with a number-four iron, whereupon the outraged bird would flap its wings and chase Bill up the lawn and into the house. The battle grew more and more ruthless. Once Bill borrowed a canoe and pursued a large swan all over the lake, until he dozed off after his strenuous efforts, and the swan crept up behind the canoe and nipped him from the rear. "The miscreant fowl broke all the rules of civilized warfare," he complained later.

Norm McLeod, who lived two doors away, was directing him in a picture for Paramount, and was well aware of Bill's reputation for being taken drunk in the middle of the shooting. To make sure that nothing happened, McLeod moved from his own home and spent each watchful night on a cot in Bill's bedroom. One Sunday morning Norm slept late, and awoke with a start to find his roommate missing. As he leaped off the cot, his bare foot collided with an empty Bourbon bottle, and he suspected the worst. Somewhere in the distance he could hear Bill's voice, but he had a little trouble locating it. At last he stepped out onto the sun-porch, which commanded a sweeping view of Toluca Lake and the surrounding estates, their bedroom windows wide open in the early Sabbath stillness. Fields, clad in pajamas and carpet slippers, was wandering around the grass, liberally dotted with unsightly white droppings deposited by the ducks and swans. Grasping a heavy cane by the stick end, he was swinging it right and left at the feathered trespassers, bellowing in a voice which must have penetrated every neighboring boudoir, "If you can't shit green, get off my lawn."

Bill's capacity for alcohol was enormous—his household staff estimated that he consumed two quarts of Martinis a day—but I never saw him show the slightest effect. "I have a system," he confided to me once. "I know I've had enough when my knees bend backward." Although pictured by the public as a lush who indulged in wild drinking sprees, Fields had nothing but contempt for the thicktongued staggering drunk, and would order a friend from his house if he became tipsy. "Gives drinking a bad name," he growled. His own day started with a modest breakfast of two Martinis (if ravenous, he would take a third), and lunch consisted of another couple of Martinis which he washed down with some heavily reinforced imported beer. He brought a giant foam-rubber ice bucket of Martinis each day to the studio, the rear of his car was converted into an efficient bar, and he would secrete a dozen miniatures in the pockets of his golf bag before setting out for an afternoon on the links. "I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake," he liked to explain, "which I also keep handy." Generally this would tide him over until the cocktail hour before dinner. "Don't believe in eating on an empty stomach," he maintained.

Alcohol seemed to serve as a sedative for his jangled nerves, and put him in a relaxed mood for a performance. "His timing was better when he was drinking," Mack Sennett claimed. "He was sharp, sure, positive." Every so often, after a hospital siege, he would determine to give up drinking entirely. During one of these periods, we met at Chasen's before going to the opening of the Ice Follies, and Bill announced that he was on the wagon. On the wagon, I discovered, meant that he had given up Martinis, and drank only Bourbon and Scotch and beer and brandy. As a result of his abstinence, we did not finish dinner until ten-thirty, and the Ice Follies were almost over when we arrived. Even the usual crowd of autograph hunters outside the theater had dispersed, save for one pimply youngster who spotted Fields as he descended from his limousine and ran across the sidewalk, holding out a notebook and pleading, "C'n I have your autograph, Mr. Fields?" "Why, of course, of course, yaas, to be sure," Bill said pleasantly, and inscribed his name with a flourish. The boy stammered his thanks, and Bill patted him fondly on the head. "Quite all right, my nosepicking little bastard," he pronounced in benediction, and entered the theater.

Billy Grady, who had managed Field's business affairs during his early career, assured me one night at dinner that Bill always traveled with two wardrobe trunks, one for clothes and one for gin. "That's a lie," Fields thundered, "I had gin in both trunks." Fields and Grady loved to tell stories of their road trips together, interrupting each other repeatedly with blistering insults. "One night in Homosassa, Florida," Bill began. "It was Ocala, Florida, you feeble-minded moron," Grady broke in. "You call everything Homosassa because you like the name." "Keep your Irish-Catholic mouth shut," Bill roared back, and turned to me. "One night in Homosassa, Florida, we were driving in the rain when I spotted a man with a satchel standing under a street light, signaling for a lift. I requested Grady to halt our vehicle and let the stranger climb aboard—"

"I'm the one who wanted to stop for him, you kindergarten dropout," Grady interrupted. "You were afraid he'd drink some of your gin."

Fields gave him a withering glance. "Out of the goodness of my heart, I proffered the fellow a touch of stimulant to ward off a chill, and he gave me a look of righteous indignation. "Look not upon the wine when it is red,' he said, "It stingeth like the adder, and biteth like the serpent. Eschew the curse of the demon rum.'

"I motioned Grady to pull up at the side of the road. "Who are you, my good man?' I inquired.

"'I am a minister of the gospel,' he said, opening his satchel and taking out some religious tracts, "and it is my duty to convert you from the evils of drink.'

'Out, you pious son-of-a-bitch, out!' I said, and placing my foot against his chest I propelled him backward into a drainage ditch, pausing only to toss an empty gin bottle into the ditch beside him before we drove on." Bill shuddered at the recollection. "A most unnerving experience," he sighed, and signaled the waiter to replenish his glass.

Bill had first won fame as "The Tramp Juggler," developing the skill he had acquired with his father's oranges and lemons into a spectacular vaudeville act which he climaxed by juggling twenty-five cigar boxes balanced end on end with a rubber ball on top. He employed no patter, causing Variety to observe: "Why Mr. Fields does not speak is quite simple. His comedy speaks for him." As his reputation grew, Gene Buck signed him for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915, part of a glittering cast which included Ann Pennington and George White, Bert Williams, Ina Claire, and Ed Wynn as "Himself." It was in the Follies that Fields introduced Broadway to his immortal pool-table act, using an ancient billiard cue warped and twisted into a spiral. He would sight dubiously along the cue, halt his game to shift the chalk a few critical inches right or left because it offended his expert eye, and give the racked balls a single whack. An ingenious system of concealed strings would yank the balls into the pockets like a colony of gophers taking cover. After a heated session, in which he ripped the felt cloth into shreds, he would rear on tiptoes for a final killing shot and drive the cue downward through the splintered table, plunging his arm into the hole up to the shoulder.

Ed Wynn and Fields, as rival comedians, were constantly vying for laughs. During one performance, Wynn concealed himself beneath the pool table and tried to steal the scene by smirking and winking at the audience. Fields became uneasily aware that his laughs were coming at the wrong places, and his eye caught a suspicious movement under the table. He waited patiently until Wynn, on all fours, carelessly stuck his head out too far. With a juggler's perfect timing, Fields swung the butt end of his cue in a half-circle and lowered it onto his rival's skull. Wynn sagged to the floor while Fields continued his game serenely amid boisterous applause. Every time that Wynn struggled back to consciousness and emitted a low moan, the audience laughed louder at what they thought was his clever impersonation. Later Fields suggested that Wynn's bit might be incorporated into the act each night for the duration of the run, but Wynn declined to take advantage of his offer.

During his successive years in the Follies—Fields appeared in every edition from 1915 through 1921—he created other comic routines which have become famous: the golf act, in which a stray piece of paper blew across the course and wrapped itself inextricably around his club, defying all his efforts to shake it off; the rear of a three-story tenement, with Fields trying in vain to take a nap in a porch hammock amid the bedlam of neighborhood noises; the subway scene in the 1921 Follies, in which he was supported by Fannie Brice, Raymond Hitchcock, and Ray Dooley as a howling infant. Gradually Fields was building the familiar character of a frustrated man, harassed by inanimate objects over which he had no control—much the same beleaguered citizen portrayed, in a different technique, by Robert Benchley. His characterization reached perfection in 1923 with the musical comedy Poppy, in which the former Tramp Juggler graduated once and for all into an authentic and expert comedian. Fields played the role of Eustace McGargle, a magnificent fraud who gained his livelihood by fleecing the local yokels at a country fair. The grandiose eloquence and unctuous smile of the unscrupulous mountebank, urging the innocent farmers to participate with him in the shell-game and then commenting in an aside, "Never give a sucker an even break," established the pattern which Fields followed the rest of his life.

Poppy was an enormous success, and Bill, in a tender moment, brought his mother from Philadelphia to New York to watch his performance. "Why, Claude, I didn't know you had such a good memory," was Mrs. Dukenfield's cryptic comment. At a midnight supper after the show, Bill regaled her with hair-raising tales of his travels among savage tribes in the South Pacific. "One night some aborigines invited me to dinner," he began, "a tasty repast, starting off with whale—"

"Gracious," Mrs. Dukenfield interrupted, "I should think that would have been a meal in itself."

Fields's film debut occurred in 1925 at the Paramount Studios on Long Island. Paramount had decided to make a silent motion picture of Poppy—which was retitled, for obscure reasons, Sally of the Sawdust—and, after trying vainly to engage Fatty Arbuckle for the part of Eustace McGargle, reluctantly hired Fields to play his original stage role. Fields, giving the industry a foretaste of what it might expect in future years, usurped the star's dressing room, bullied D. W. Griffith, the director, and generally ran things with a high hand. Since Fields had created the McGargle character and could play it in his sleep, the picture was hailed as a comic masterpiece, and he followed it in 1926 with So's Your Old Man, and a year later with Running Wild, both directed by Gregory La Cava.

Although they struck sparks from the start—Fields always referred to him as "that dago bastard"—La Cava became a lifelong friend. Out of their intimate association, La Cava formed the theory that Fields's whole life was dedicated to repaying society for his cruel childhood. Robert Lewis Taylor quotes La Cava: "Nearly everything Bill tried to get into his movies was something that lashed out at the world. The peculiar thing is that although he thought he was being pretty mean there wasn't any real sting to it. It was only funny. Bill never really wanted to hurt anybody. He just felt an obligation."

Fields had the divine ability to turn his prejudices to comic advantage. Since acquiring a car, he had developed a persecution complex about road hogs, who he was convinced were out to get him, and would drive with one wary eye on the oncoming lane of traffic, ready for any hostile vehicle to attack him. His sequence in If I Had a Million gratified a lifelong thirst for vengeance. With the million dollars which he inherited, he purchased a number of secondhand cars and hired a flock of intrepid drivers, and he and Alison Skipworth set forth at the head of the column, his eye peeled for the first offender to cut across the center line. When he spotted a culprit, he would hold up a hand and signal one of his commandos to wheel out and ram it. Sometimes he and Miss Skipworth would take part in the fray, and Fields would give a bloodcurdling yell of exultation as headlights shattered and wheels came off and fenders crumpled.

His enmity toward children, dating from his own persecuted boyhood, found expression in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, written by Fields himself under the unlikely nom de plume of Otis Criblecoblis. In one gratifying bit with Gloria Jean, as his little niece, Bill lured the child into a saloon and plied her with an opaque fluid which he assured her was goat's milk. "What kind of goat's milk, Uncle Bill?" Gloria asked after a delectable sip.

"Nanny goat's milk, my dear," the doting uncle replied, absently flicking a cigarette lighter as he expelled his breath and sending a long sheet of flame across the bar.

Bill's pictures violated every known moral code, and endorsed such dubious enterprises as swindling, theft, and other degrading aspects of human nature. In The Bank Dick, which he wrote under his alternate pen name of Mahatma Kane Jeeves, he not only defied conventions, but reaped all the rewards of dishonesty. The plot, if it could be called that, concerned one Egbert Sousé (Fields insisted on the accent over the e) who was trying to acquire five hundred dollars to invest in a beefsteak mine. A couple of robbers, Filthy McNasty and Repulsive Rogan, held up the local bank; but as they fled with the loot McNasty stumbled over a park bench where Sousé was seated and knocked himself out. Sousé modestly explained to the bank president that he had subdued the miscreant at a great personal risk—"He pulled an assagai on me," he claimed—and was rewarded with the job of bank dick. His first official act was to capture a small boy carrying a water pistol.

The plot rambled on with dreamlike nonsequitur through a series of unrelated episodes, including one wildly extraneous sequence in which Fields discovered a movie company on location, and took over the sedan of the director, labeled A. Pismo Clam, to shoot a football sequence. In another episode, he escorted the bank examiner, J. Pinkerton Snoopington (beautifully played by Franklin Pangborn), into the Black Pussy Cat Café and Snack Bar, his favorite saloon, and asked the bartender pointedly, "Have you seen Michael Finn lately?" While the unsuspecting Snoopington was swallowing his Mickey, Fields ordered himself a Scotch with water on the side, downed it, washed his fingers delicately in the water glass, and asked for another Scotch with a fresh chaser. "Never like to bathe in the same water twice," he remarked. Eventually Fields struck a bonanza in the beefsteak mine; and the final scene showed Mr. Sousé, having triumphed over virtue, placing his hat absent-mindedly on his upended cane and setting off in the direction of the saloon, unregenerate to the end.

Bill was fascinated by unusual names, adding new ones to his collection as he came across them. "Every name I use is an actual one I've seen somewhere," he told Norman Taurog. "Posthewhistle & Smunn, Attorneys" was borrowed from a Philadelphia law firm; "Claude Nesselrode" was a local pugilist who took frequent dives at Jeffries' Barn; "Chester Snavely" was an undertaker he had known as a boy in Germantown; "Chester Bogle," the pseudonym he used when writing You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, was a bootlegger of his acquaintance. He insisted on authoring his own screen plays, which he would dash off on the back of an old grocery bill and then sell to the studio for twenty-five thousand dollars. Since his contract specified that he had story approval, he would notify the studio that he had rejected the script, and compose a second one for another twenty-five thousand dollars. (Norman McLeod told me that Fields once built up his total take on a single story to eighty-five thousand dollars.) After the script was finally approved and paid for, he would toss it aside and ad-lib on the set as he went along.

His cantankerous attitude toward producers and directors worsened as he became a leading Hollywood star. He refused to sign a lucrative contract with Paramount until he was given complete autonomy in the preparation, direction, and production of his films. When he moved to M-G-M, he was barely prevented from taking over the studio. Directors raved and ranted at his proclivity for altering scenes or inserting new comic routines—when he played the role of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, he wanted to work in a juggling act, and it took all the studio's efforts to dissuade him—but it must be said that Fields, a consummate craftsman and master of clownery, knew more about his own capabilities than any director. He was equally rebellious during his radio appearances on the "Lucky Strike" program, and kept referring to his son "Chester" for several weeks, until his sponsors belatedly realized that "Chester Fields" might indicate a rival product.

If he failed to have his say, he would stage a one-man strike and sulk until the studio came around to his way of thinking. During the shooting of a picture at M-G-M, he was rebuffed on some minor change (he wanted his name to have top billing above that of the studio) and retired to his residence, leaving orders with his butler to tell any and all callers that he was not at home. As the set lay idle day after day and production costs mounted, a series of executives drove out to see him, but were turned away from his door. At last L. B. Mayer, the head of the studio, decided to make a personal visit. The butler opened the door and recognized the distinguished caller, and left him standing in the hallway while he hurried back to Fields's bedroom for instructions. "It's L.B. himself," he whispered nervously to the master. "What shall I say to him?"

"Give him an eva-a-asive answer," Fields drawled. "Tell him to go f himself."

Of all the houses that Fields occupied while in Hollywood, his favorite was a run-down Spanish mansion on De Mille Drive, north of Hollywood. He had leased it during the depression for the bargain price of $250 a month, including the services of a Japanese gardener. When conditions improved, the landlord tried in vain to persuade his tenant to change the long-term lease, but Fields gloated over his advantage and refused to yield. The unhappy landlord suggested a compromise, and offered to renovate the old house if his tenant would agree to a financial readjustment. "Not one cent for tribute," Fields bellowed. "Let the joint fall apart."

The situation was a stalemate, and since neither tenant nor owner would invest in repairs, the mansion became more and more down-at-heel in appearance. The wallpaper hung in tatters, the warp of the carpet showed plainly before the three bars which Fields had installed, and chunks of plaster occasionally fell from the sagging ceiling onto the pool table he had set up in the drawing room. The living room was given over to a Ping-Pong table, and high pool-room chairs were arranged along the walls. The dining room featured a barber's chair, complete with towels and aprons, in which Bill used to doze when troubled by insomnia. (In his early days, he had found that getting a haircut in a warm padded barber's chair was one of life's greatest pleasures.) With his native distrust of servants, he had fitted every closet and storeroom door with a special lock to guard his liquor supply, and kept some thirty keys on a chain in his bathrobe pocket. His upstairs bedroom, which he called his "office," contained a combination bar and writing desk and bed, with slats like a crib to keep him from falling out. When his steps grew feeble, he would feel his way from his bed along the desk to the bar, and reinforce his strength with a handy nightcap.

He had an abiding fear of burglars, and his solution, of which he was inordinately proud, was the installation of an intercom system throughout the house, with the master microphone on the desk in his office. Loudspeakers were concealed everywhere, in the pantry, down in the cellar, inside chandeliers, under washbasins, behind pictures, and back of the knocker on the front door, a carved woodpecker which the guest activated by yanking a string. If he heard a suspicious noise during the night, he would grope to the desk and pick up the microphone and bellow into it, "Stand back, I've got you covered!" and then go back to bed, confident that the intruder would remain with arms raised until morning.

During the war, on my way out to the Pacific on Air Force duty, I stopped off in Los Angeles and took a cab out to De Mille Drive. The approach to Bill's house was a red-tiled lane, overhung with flowered trellises, and the velvet lawns, well tended by the Japanese gardener, rolled gently down the contour of the hill to form a bowl with a lily pond in the center. On it was floating a toy sailboat, a gift from one of Fields's friends. I stepped up to the door and reached for the string of the knocker, and the woodpecker yelled, "Let go of me, Ford!" in Bill's snarling voice. (He had a telescope in his office, I learned later, with which he could spot any approaching visitor.) He came downstairs, clad in his disreputable white bathrobe and holding a tall glass filled with a yellowish liquid. I had heard that Bill's health was failing, and I assumed that his drinking had been restricted to wine. We adjourned to the outdoor patio, one of Bill's preferred spots, and he bellowed to the butler, "Bring my guest a Scotch highball—and I'll have another Martini." He drank four shakerfuls of Martinis during my visit, and his good humor expanded. I had never seen him in a happier mood. Once the landlord stopped by, to inquire about the month's rent which was overdue, and Bill assured him loftily, "Have no qualms, my good man, your pound of flesh will be forthcoming shortly. Good day," and then, in a croaked aside like a honk of a raven, "All landlords should be grilled en brochette." At last it came time to leave, and Bill presented me with an affectionately inscribed photograph of himself, not in clown costume but in street attire with his face turned toward the camera so that his oversized nose did not show. I've never known what impulse prompted him to give me his picture. I made my way carefully up the uneven tile walk, for my knees were beginning to bend backward, and he waved his glass to me gaily as I reached the gate. It was the last time I ever saw him.

I returned to Hollywood shortly before Christmas of 1946, and Dave Chasen told me that Bill had lost the De Mille Drive house, when his lease expired, and had moved to a sanitarium in Los Encinas to sit in a rocking chair and await the Man in the Bright Nightgown. Dave and Billy Grady planned to drive out to see him on Christmas Day, a holiday which Fields always loathed. "I believed in Christmas until I was eight years old," he told Gene Fowler. "I had saved up some money carrying ice in Philadelphia, and I was going to buy my mother a copper-bottom clothes boiler for Christmas. I kept the money hidden in a brown crock in the coalbin. My father found the crock. He did exactly what I would have done in his place. He stole the money. And ever since then I've remembered nobody on Christmas, and I want nobody to remember me either."

Dave promised to take me along to Los Encinas on his next visit. "Bill isn't allowed any callers," he said, "but we'll manage to get in somehow." That was when I realized how seriously ill he was. On Christmas there was a tropical deluge, which flooded the streets with such a boiling torrent that a man stepped out of his car and was swept into a sewer and drowned. ("Rain dampens sidewalks in Los Angeles area," the Los Angeles Times admitted grudgingly the next day.) Somehow I kept thinking of Bill all day. It was just the kind of Christmas he would have chosen.

Dave phoned me late that afternoon. He and Billy Grady had arrived at the sanitarium about noon, he said, with a hamper of delicacies from the restaurant and several bottles of whiskey. They made their way through the downpour to Bill's bungalow, and Dave rang the bell and then knelt down, a simple gag designed to startle the party opening the door. A nurse answered the bell, weeping. "Mr. Fields died this morning," she said. Dave climbed to his feet in silence, and they drove back to Hollywood in the gray rain. That night some of Bill's intimates gathered at Chasen's, and phoned a full-page ad to the Hollywood Reporter:

The most prejudiced and honest and beloved figure of our so-called "colony" went away on a day that he pretended to abhor—"Christmas." We loved him, and—peculiarly enough—he loved us. To the most authentic humorist since Mark Twain, to the greatest heart that has beaten since the Middle Ages—W. C. Fields, our friend.

Several weeks after his death, a group of his closest friends met at Chasen's for a wake: Billy Grady, Eddie Sutherland, Ben Hecht, Grantland Rice, Greg La Cava, Gene Fowler, Jack Dempsey, Roland Young, Leo McCarey, Norm McLeod. Dave served us Bill's favorite dinner, accompanied by Bill's usual quota of drinks. None of us could keep up with it, and my recollection of the evening is still hazy. I remember that, by some unexpressed agreement, no one at the table mentioned Bill's name; that wasn't necessary. The only reference to him was when Dave read aloud a telegram he had just received from Frank Sullivan in New York.

I HOPE HE GIVES ST. PETER AN EVASIVE ANSWER, the wire said.