Elysian Fields

"Got the theater in my blood," he once explained with profound gravity. "My great-uncle Fortescue used to be a Swiss bell ringer at Elks' smokers." Whatever his inherited leanings, W. C. Fields--born William Claude Dukenfield in 1879--growled, blustered and hustled his way to a high place among the funniest men who ever lived. Turned into an existential hero by the Beat Generation a decade after his death in 1946, and subsequently dubbed an archetypal black humorist by the hip generation of the Sixties, Fields has become the idol of a cult that grows by leaps every time an audience is treated to a viewing of his films.

Happily for his fans, he made a total of 42 pictures, 30 of which have survived. The best of them--The Bank Dick, My Little Chickadee, Million Dollar Legs and some of his other exercises in pure madness--are revived regularly at theaters across the country, and they have made Fields far more popular today than he was in his own lifetime.

The object of this adulation was not the kind of model citizen who normally deserves commemoration. He was a monument to waspish iconoclasm and spent the largest part of any day exercising the thin-skinned misanthropy for which he was well known. Apart from the zealous daily attention he gave to five of the seven deadly sins (envy, covetousness, pride, anger and belting the sauce, as his version of gluttony) and keeping up a nodding acquaintance with the two others (sloth and lust), Fields filled in the cracks with malefactions upon which he had put his personal stamp. He was, in rapid turn, cranky and faultfinding, devious, barely predictable, suspicious, larcenous, profane and given to cutting strangers out of his will.

Confronted with this catalog, rational souls uninfected by him may wonder what the hell there was to like about him and might ponder how such a man became a squint-eyed hero--not only to a galaxy of devoted fans but even to a flock of folks who knew him well.

The answer is that Fields was funny, both on screen and off. He garnered laughs by playing off his character. No man is of a piece, and Fields had lots more quirks and contradictions than the rest of us. By letting us see all his many facets, Fields proved resoundingly that most of him was fraud. His boasting was halfhearted, his tyranny was verbal and his chicanery, most of the time, defeated itself. Even his herculean parsimony was shot through with sudden splurges of generosity. The frequent bursts of outrage bubbled in a teacup, and his outsized truculence never quite reached its target.

Cultivating his roses--of which he was especially fond--he would encourage them to grow by trumpeting: "Bloom, you silly bastards, bloom!" Beset by juveniles seeking his autograph, he would vociferate: "Back to reform school, mendicants!" In both cases, he would take swashbuckling cuts at the offenders with his cane--missing them by a wide margin.

Beyond this always comic gap between intention and performance, Fields touched that chord in most of us that twangs whenever public policy gets belted in the eye. His roses might inadvertently survive to struggle through another day, but when Fields battled sacred cows, he flattened them. His enemy was order; received opinions were his bane. Whatever was established, self-assured and righteous got his goat. No matter what it was, if it possessed the slightest grain of status and respectability, Fields hated it. He carried this denunciatory attitude, as he did all his oddball mannerisms, right into his roles.

The idlers, tipplers and con men Fields portrayed were all reflections of himself--a man born into a cockeyed world that was rigged to give him the business. He confronted this world and its threat with deep-dyed mistrust. "Anybody will steal," he would bellow, "if he's thirsty enough." And this was the line he took in his films.

Actually, Fields drew only the haziest distinction between illusion and reality and often carried the stage into the street. When in the mood, he would slip into a stage beard--sometimes supplemented by an opera cape--and set out to find a wedding, garden party, wake or other social gathering, where he would present himself as Oglethorpe P. Bushmaster, or some such fabrication, just returned from the antarctic for the sole purpose of attending the function. He would then circulate affably, slosh up large draughts of whatever fuel was being served, spear daintily at the cold shrimps and regale the legitimate guests with stories of his search for a nearly extinct species of four-legged ostrich or some other implausible zoological rarity. On one such occasion, he crashed a party in Melbourne, Australia, and, as he later told it, had a long conversation with the governor's wife.

"What was it about?" one of his listeners asked.

"We were discussing the mating habits of the wallaby," Fields answered delicately.

Only on one point did the comedian make a distinction between his screen image and his real self, but that point was prominent. Fields was highly sensitive about his nose, a potatolike promontory that flourished ever richer as the years and floods of martinis added rills and gullies to its imposing topography. He knew the value of the beezer to his art and tended its expansive surface, when it had taken a touch of the sun, with a patent balm called Allen's Foot Ease. In his screenplays, Fields gave the other actors gag lines and funny business built around the object's size, color and general condition. But off camera, he got touchy if anyone so much as mentioned his beak.

His drinking buddies knew this and were unmerciful. In the manner of alcoholic wags, they dreamed up heartless schoolboy pleasantries about the man they knew as Uncle Willie. John Decker, the artist, once suggested that what he called the Bulb would make an imposing taillight on a hearse. On one hot day, Gene Fowler, the author and scriptwriter, having heard a loud shattering noise in Fields' neighborhood, spread it about that Uncle Willie's proboscis had exploded. John Barrymore wondered solicitously whether it might not grow so big as to interfere with Fields' drinking by keeping him from getting to the glass.

The target of these exercises in belesprit reacted like a man hurt where he lived. "You are poking fun at an unfortunate with an affliction," he would say, and retire with a cocktail shaker to sulk in the garden. Life, he felt, was tough enough without betrayal by one's friends. And life was one thing he knew in its most miserable forms.

Every foot of his films proclaims that Fields had started as a bum, that he'd had a tough scuffle on the way to the top and that he never got over the effects. Of course, his guile was somewhat less than Oriental in its subtlety. We know from his manner, like the villain in a melodrama, that he's up to no good. He is a kid standing near a store's candy counter, whistling loudly and staring nonchalantly in some irrelevant direction. His devices are both flimsy and transparent. People who knew Fields agree that he was exactly like this in real life.

"Uncle Claude can be very evasive," John Barrymore once told a reporter. "That's how he advertises that he's up to something. When Bill gets secretive, we count the spoons."

Like all of Fields' special cronies, Barrymore spoke of him as "Uncle Willie" or "Uncle Claude," though they were all pretty nearly the same age. An exception was the much younger Bing Crosby, who called Fields "Uncle Bill." The comedian's pontifical and majestic manner made him an avuncular figure, and so they honored him. Fields grandly accepted the tribute and patronized them all as "nephew."

Uncle Claude had only eight or ten of these bonded buddies, but there were dozens of people who, without trusting him for a moment, loved him dearly and considered it a delightful honor to know him. Cantankerous though he was, Uncle Willie had enormous charm. Even his crankiness, to those who knew that it was superficial and fleeting, was engaging. Life in his sunny glow could be damned difficult until you learned the rules. But it was also rewarding. His acquaintances understood that they had to pay their dues, and they did it by putting up with his foibles.

Prominent among these was his parsimony. Fields believed that money was hard to get and difficult to keep, that everyone, from Uncle Sam down to the laundryman, was out to grab more from Uncle Claude than they were legally-- or, at any rate, decently--entitled to. He thought that unless he watched each penny, he would wake up one day and find himself out on the pavements he had slept on as a kid.

He never took anybody's word for anything, but he was especially wary if the given word was even remotely connected with his wallet. Fields squirreled away his loot on a system that has been celebrated as "the most outlandish savings program in all banking history." He devised it around 1905, in the days when he was known not as a clown but as the greatest juggler in the world. In keeping up the title, he did a lot of one-night stands, from Walla Walla to Rangoon, and, with his usual caution, always nagged the management into paying him off in gold coins--which he kept stashed in secret pockets in his clothes. Inevitably, an enterprising highwayman waylaid him one dark night, rapped him sharply on the head and stripped him of his hoard. From that encounter on, the itinerant star opened accounts in every city, town or village in which he found himself in funds. In London, Butte or Barcelona, Singapore or Ocala, these deposits multiplied like fungus in a rain forest. Not infrequently, Fields would jump off a train and put all his loose cash into the nearest bank, while the engine took on water. Thus, he could be comfortably sure his savings were out of reach of thieves, borrowers and the Federal Government. To foil the last of these, Fields opened each account under a different name. Some of these pseudonyms have been retrieved from oblivion, and they reveal the dreamer at his imaginative best: Figley E. Whitesides, Sneed Hearn, Dr. Otis Guelpe, Felton J. Satchelstern and Professor Curtis T. Bascom are a representative sampling.

One of the traits featured by Fields in his screen roles was that of a deviousness so cunning it outsmarted itself. Fields probably suspected it was one of his own failings. It certainly operated flawlessly in the case of his far-flung accounts. He kept his bankbooks, but, as they reached the proportions of a small-town library, he started storing and, eventually, mislaying them. It isn't known how much he lost this way, but estimates have ranged up to $1,000,000.

Fields numbered the U. S. Government--whom he fondly dubbed Uncle Whiskers--as first among the swindlers grabbing at his poke, and he took pains to make the getting difficult. He had no faith in lawyers, all of whom, he was convinced, were secret agents of the Treasury Department ready to turn him over for back taxes. Fields saw to his own forms and his deductions were, to say the least, the unusual creation of his original and far-ranging mind. Bill Grady, long his agent, said he once discovered that Fields had claimed depreciation on several vaudeville houses in which he had appeared. Grady also noticed that his employer had put down large sums that were ostensibly donated to obscure churches in hard-to-reach locations, such as the Solomon Islands. Grady was shocked not so much by the lies as by their barefaced foolishness. Six months after sending in this harlequin return, Fields got a refund check for $1500. Grady picked up an ulcer; and Fields, a booster to his self-esteem.

The nucleus of Uncle Willie's obsession with money doubtless burgeoned in his infancy. If so, it had every chance to (continued on page 187)Elysian Fields(continued from page 118) flower exotically in his early youth. By the age of 12, he was living on the streets of Philadelphia, following a set-to with his father. Poppa Dukenfield had smacked his son with the working edge of a shovel, to teach the boy not to leave shovels where Pop could crack his shin-bone on them. Recovering from the blow, young Whitey, as Fields was then called, waylaid his father in the barn, bounced a packing case off the paternal head and walked away forever.

The year was 1891, and it was fortunate that the boy had already learned to read, because he never again stepped inside a school. Those were not times when welfare workers, cops and truant officers took careful stock of runaways. Young Fields survived without their help, suffering only token interference from the law. Mostly, he lived by stealing.

The boy who was to grow into the self-proclaimed greatest juggler in the world already boasted lightning fingers. He sometimes poached from cash registers, but his special targets were the vegetable stalls, the fruit stands and the free-lunch counters that were picturesque features of the period. His technique later became familiar in his movies--and cost his friends both anguish and money on the golf course. He would look abstractedly in one direction, while his flying mitts worked in another. He later claimed the only trouble he encountered was with cottage cheese, which he sometimes grabbed in error.

"Messed up my pockets," he recalled, and added. "Never cared much for cottage cheese." Then, as an afterthought: "Or cream cheese, either."

Fields never cared very much for anything closely associated, as cream cheese is, with Philadelphia. He liked to reminisce about it and he went back for one visit. But he held the view that his home town was suitable only as an alternative to some more immediate calamity.

For instance, in My Little Chickadee, a posse on the verge of hanging him asks if he has any last request. "Why, yes, indeed," Fields says from inside the noose, "I've always wanted to visit Philadelphia." In the 1930s, a popular magazine asked a number of celebrities to compose the epitaphs they'd like to see engraved on their tombstones. Fields' famous contribution read: "I think I'd rather be in Philly."

Given these sentiments, it's not astonishing that Fields worked like a bandit to get out of town. Juggling had caught his fancy and he practiced every day, sometimes for 14 hours at a stretch. He did this for four years, living as a vagabond for the first three and taking jobs from time to time during the fourth. He sold papers, but in a manner heralding the Fields to come. He'd bawl out such arresting bits of news as this: "Hermsillo Brunch named superintendent of P. S. Thirty-Four! Details on page twenty-six!" People were naturally curious, and he did very well. For a time, he racked balls in a pool parlor, became the house hustler and picked up the gaudy mannerisms that he later put to use in various comic routines.

Although nothing about these callings escaped his hothouse mind, he could not see a future in them. So he practiced tossing objects with the madness of a virtuoso. He himself recognized the parallel. "I don't believe," he said, "that Mozart, Liszt or Paderewski ever worked any harder than I did." When he neared 14, he decided the time for his debut had come.

As it happened, the boy juggler's entrance into show business hardly presented a radical change of experience: He had to lie to get the job and steal to collect his pay. Scheduled to appear in a church benefit, he found himself up against a deacon who refused to let him walk into the house of God with his cigar boxes--difficult gear the youth had learned to juggle, having no money for more conventional equipment. The deacon regarded them, however, as ancillary tools of Satan. Thinking fast-- one of his survival specialties--Fields explained that the boxes were especially made for him and had never contained cigars. On that specious understanding, he was allowed to do his turn. After the performance, he found the deacon elusive and, when finally cornered, vague about the promised two bits. Assessing the situation, Fields recalled a pious aphorism he had heard somewhere to the effect that the Lord helps those who help themselves and, following the advice to the letter, he walked out with 31 umbrellas that had carelessly been checked in the vestry. He sold his haul to a junk dealer, realizing $1.20, and no doubt drew a moral lesson from the experience.

Throughout his life, Fields treated all his employers as if they were deacons. He refused to trust them an inch and, by judicious sleight of hand linked with well-turned falsehoods, labored ceaselessly to get more out of them than they had meant to pay.

It took him a while, however, to learn all the ins and outs of sharp practice. His first regular job, in an Atlantic City tent show, required him to juggle eight or ten times a day and to drown on the side.

Drowning was a feature called for by the boss when he felt the business needed advertising. Young Fields would make his way some distance into the ocean, thrash about and call for help until a fellow employee rescued him. A crowd always gathered for this performance-- which was, after all, free--and the barker would turn the tip (the carnival phrase for talking the suckers into the tent).

Fields collected a salary for his twin contributions, but only after the boss chopped out a 35 percent commission or, as he called it, "agent's fee." The boy concluded from this that agents weren't much more trustworthy than deacons. As an adult, he invariably tried to trim their take below the standard theatrical ten percent.

In the next few years, Fields performed in every ragtag corner of showbiz. He put on his act, which was still plain juggling, in dime museums and cheap circuses, and once had second billing to some trained fleas.

Working his way up past these associates, the young juggler graduated into road shows--popular 19th Century mixed bags of melodrama, songs and sketches. As a rise in theatrical prominence--or in the social scale--it marked an improvement only by comparison with the fleas. The mountebanks featured in these patchwork offerings were a long way from stardom. One impressive ingénue Fields used to tell about was always late coming on stage. "She was very absent-minded," he would explain. "Kept misplacing her upper plate."

Fields himself once had to wear a curly wig and take her part as a lovesick maiden. Such substitutions were expected of everyone connected with a road show, regardless of his specialty, and Fields made a lot of them, sometimes roaring through three parts at once, playing the evil banker, the father and the hero, switching hats and voices, slipping in and out of beards and, in the process, getting lots of laughs and liking them. From this time, he started heading into comedy. He began by dropping the objects he was juggling, getting them mixed up, almost but not quite losing all control and saving everything, to great applause. Then he started introducing jokes--most of them stolen. When the audiences, which at that time weren't too fussy, took to collapsing in the aisles, Fields was hooked, and so were they. He acquired a reputation and, along with it, bigger fees.

The traditional summer layoff bothered him, though, for his acquisitive instincts worked full time; and in order to appease them during the dog months, he took engagements overseas.

In the course of the following decade, Fields managed to visit most of the countries of the world, relying on his pantomime and silent juggling where English wasn't understood and developing his verbal style where it was. He appeared in a tramp's outfit and Europeans, long familiar with every form of charlatanry, took him up with joy. Fields rapidly climbed to the status of a headliner, with salaries to match.

There were occasional minor setbacks. He landed in Madrid at the close of the Spanish-American War, and local resentment forced him to appear as an Englishman. Delighted, Fields chose to go on as Sir Cuthbert E. Frothingham, S. B., under which name he also, naturally, opened a bank account. In this instance, it was mandatory: Inflation had forced him to accept his pay in a bushel-sized canasta of small coins. Fields tugged and shoved it to his room, where he guarded it nervously until the morning, when he could make his deposit.

Pushing on, in due course, to South Africa, he arrived in Johannesburg just in time to catch the Boer War, with a curfew clamped down and the theaters closed. Waiting for things to cool off, Fields drank with a couple of American cowhands who were, respectively, trying to sell a string of ponies to the combatants and looking to get into the brawl "on either side, it don't matter." The first of these saddle tramps was Will Rogers, who later shared billing with Fields in the Follies; and the other was Tom Mix, whom Fields forever afterward defended as "no damn lace-pants hero but the real thing. That boy was tough."

Sandwiched conveniently between these large conflicts was a small one of his own that Fields managed to start. "On or about the eighth day of April 1900," as attorneys later agreed to word it, Fields married Harriet Hughes, a dancer who, it appears, had little sense of humor. Among the former Miss Hughes' almost immediate complaints about her spouse was one regarding Fields' habit of eating his meals with a bottle balanced on his head. It seems a harmless mannerism for a juggler, but somehow it irked her. The couple stayed together only long enough to have a son, named for his father. Since Mrs. Fields was a Catholic, they never divorced--a circumstance that, almost a half century later, brought grief to several people who had really cared for the comic and had nursed him through a decade of ill-health.

Climbing the ladder of fame, Fields also picked up social standing. In all likelihood, he was the first man since the more tattered cronies of the wild Prince Hal--Shakespearean version--to enter an English royal palace by the front gate wearing patched pants, a greasy vest, oversized shoes, no collar or tie and a battered secondhand hat. It was the tramp costume he sported in his act, and he wore it at the special request of the king of England, then Edward VII. The footman who accepted Fields' card had been forewarned and took it with British aplomb. Not so two mastiffs who were sniffing about: Reacting like every other dog who ever got the comic in his line of vision, they took after him with bared teeth. Fortunately, his Majesty was nearby and the dogs were caught and chained up by royal command before they had worked any noticeable damage to Fields or to his attire. For the rest of his visit, the comedian had a fine time, telling stories, juggling the king's cigars and mixing it up with the peerage of Merry England. He did notice that a couple of lords and a bishop shifted their pocket watches at his approach, but he took it as a tribute to his getup. The rest of the company laughed and carried on like any other crowd when Fields was in good form, and the king was profuse in his praise. Thereafter, Fields referred to him as Ed and made it known that, as far as he was concerned, the king was a real prince.

Encouraged by receptions of this kind, Fields elaborated the comedy side of his program. He worked out a billiard routine featuring a cue that looked as if it had lost its starch in the laundry or had been shaped to follow a map of the Ohio river. Sighting along his tortured pole, Fields would let his face suggest an expert pool player's estimate that the cue was not exactly straight. Then he would line up his shot for a minute or so and interrupt himself to shift the chalk to a new position, just one inch to its left.

The success of these and similar lunacies led Fields to try something like them with a golf act. It got him out of the tramp costume and into an outrageous parody of links fashions, including three-toned shoes and a tam-o'-shanter only a trifle smaller and less gaudy than a hooked rug. His equipment included, besides a full set of clubs, a garden hoe, a shotgun, a buggy whip, a polo mallet and a set of surveying instruments. The use to which he put these unofficially recognized aids to the game had audiences screaming with laughter. Just for a start, he gave the customers to understand that the whip was for use on the caddie, in case Fields missed his shot.

The word that there existed a first-class rowdy not on his payroll eventually reached Flo Ziegfeld, the honored impresario of the Follies, Broadway's most successful theatrical attraction. Ziegfeld had no sense of humor and hated comedians, whom he thought of as an intrusion on his specialty, which was presenting audiences with beautiful girls encumbered by as few clothes as possible. As a showman, however, he understood that audiences had a feeble-minded fondness for clowns and that, in any case, there had to be something on stage while the girls changed their headdresses.

In keeping with this reluctant policy, Ziegfeld hired all the leading zanies of the day, including Bert Williams, Ed Wynn, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers, who had given up sellingmustangs to foreigners for the more lucrative life of a trick-rope artist and monologist. Fields joined this crew of comics in 1915 and, after quickly establishing his eminence with both the critics and the public, played in every edition of the Follies through 1921.

Once acknowledged as a star, Fields began collecting pay checks amounting to several thousand dollars a week, and he risked taking on some of the trappings, as well as the air--which he had always assumed--of a man who has arrived. He moved into a mansion on Long Island, complete with a swimming pool he didn't use and a tennis court he did, and he commuted to and from these butlered premises in a seven-seat custom-built Cadillac, accompanied by his valet.

The valet didn't exactly fit in with all this splendor. He was a midget Fields had hired on purpose to get mad at. The comedian enjoyed losing his temper, and the midget, whose name was William Blanche, gave him a lot of opportunities, being both willing and slow-witted, a sure-fire combination for driving Fields into a fury. If the master sent him out to get a turkey leg, the midget would spend hours looking for a turkey egg. One evening, he came in from such an errand with snow piled on his hat and shoulders.

"Been snowing, has it?" asked his employer.

"I don't know," Blanche answered. "I didn't notice."

Fields fired him on the spot, as he did about twice weekly, his time on the grounds that Blanche was "dangerously unobservant." He relented, as usual, but he had made a discovery. "It's selfish of me to hog your incompetence," he told the midget. "I want to share you with the public." He put Blanche in his golf act as the caddie.

When the Follies went on the road, it was Fields' custom to travel with three trunks, one of them packed with what he called "strong waters." As Prohibition loomed closer, he gradually realized that two trunks of clothes and props were superfluous, and he turned one of those into a second cellar. This two-to-one ratio between his wet and dry goods struck him as satisfactory and he traveled with the rig for years.

Fields nurtured what was to become the recognized monarch of show-business thirsts. Only the late Fats Waller and the present titleholder, Joe E. Lewis, were in real contention for the crown. In his early days, Fields had dabbled in exotic sauces but, in time, had pretty well settled on what he then called a martini: a long pull from a gin bottle, followed by a short one from a flask of vermouth. As he rose in the world, he began mixing the ingredients before using, like everyone else, and he would breakfast on a double, keeping up this pace throughout the day. He attributed health-giving properties to the cocktail. "If Falstaff had stuck to martinis," he would mutter, "he'd be with us today."

The comic also had the opportunity, in his years with Ziegfeld, to play around with some of the most beautiful women of his time, and so he did--in a semi-monogamous fashion. Throughout his life, Fields showed a preference for the domestic alliance in which the little lady works happily in the kitchen and does not encourage her mate to fritter away his money on the night-club circuit. Surprisingly, he managed to convince not a few of the little tangerines, as he spoke of them, that this was, for them, a salutary arrangement. Bessie Poole, one of the more arresting of Ziegfeld's goddesses, lived with him for several years on this basis, and her son is widely acknowledged to be Fields'.

His success in domesticating his ladyfriends is a convincing tribute to the comedian's persuasive powers. He was especially fond of a girl who, when grieved or put out, tended to lock herself in the bathroom and sing selections from grand opera--an art form Fields particularly despised--until the master of the house capitulated. On one such occasion, Fields attempted to retaliate by burning newspapers and blowing the smoke under the door; but his inamorata held out and her tormentor had to give up. "Woman's got guts," he conceded.

Fields was often willing to give credit when it was due a woman. His attitude toward them was courtly, in the highest Victorian manner--at least until he got to know them well. He once introduced Grady to a date who happened to be puffing, with nonchalance, a large black cigar. The agent later made some pointed remarks about the young woman's smoking habits.

"The girl has class," Fields reproved him, with some asperity. "That heater cost a dollar."

But Fields was as wary of sex as he was about everything else. His sexual caution dated from the time he attended a film on venereal disease under the impression that he was going to be shown some naked women. Fields woke to his mistake along about reel three, and it jarred him. "The professor accompanied the picture with themes from Tchaikovsky," he recalled in later years. "From then on, I could never hear Swan Lake without wanting to take a Wassermann."

The comedian's association with the Follies came to an end in 1921, when he was lured by one of Ziegfeld's competitors, George White, into joining his Scandals. Uncle Claude, however, was already looking for new areas in which to practice his now well-polished arts; and after a year with White, he moved into musical comedy. The success of Poppy, in 1924, established Fields as an actor. And it jelled the character toward which he had been struggling. As Eustace McGargle, a petty con man and traveling grifter, he managed to create one of the classic roles of the American theater. He never again drifted very far from the part.

Poppy was more than a hit; it was perhaps the first musical comedy bought for the screen. The fact that there was yet no sound track did not deter Paramount from making the venture; and the studio assigned the direction to the father of the American movie himself: D. W. Griffith. For some obscure reason, Poppy was renamed Sally of the Sawdust and, under that title, it proved a satisfying boff, one that Fields easily walked away with.

On the strength of that triumph, Fields was invited to contribute further to the art of the motion picture, in the form of two-reel comedies. Fields approached this new venture as he had everything else in life: with an air of cautious contempt. He arrived for his first day's work wearing a clip-in mustache and a look that nicely blended disdain and defiance. The neophyte film player adopted the attitude that no one already involved in the movie business knew beans about it. Admittedly, there was some substance to his prejudice. The producer of his first shorts, for instance, was a writer who had been hired, he thought, to edit Cosmopolitan magazine, and who then discovered that, in fact, William Randolph Hearst had taken him on to run his newly acquired film studio. The situation was fairly typical of those prevalent in the industry during that experimental period. Fields discovered the truism immediately and didn't give it much rest. The presence of Uncle Willie on the set was a good bet to shake loose whatever small wits a director might have salvaged from a former life. If asked to do some juggling, Fields would squawk that he was an actor and that if any juggling were required, there would have to be a stiff upward revision in the salary clause of his contract. The moment that the management had conceded the point and had changed the prepared script accordingly, Uncle Willie would complain that he was not being allowed to do his specialty--juggling. Whenever the eye of authority wandered from him for an instant, Fields would alter the scenario to include a pool-hall scene or a tennis match, either of which would give him a chance to keep a dozen balls in the air at once.

In spite of Fields' intransigency, the studio rapidly pushed him into features. Possibly, the bosses hoped the move might sober their prima donna. If so, they were to be disappointed. With more room to work, Fields began to revise the stories to include his Ziegfeld acts in toto. The first film in which he made known this artistic quirk was a rather wistful tale--typically Hollywood though shot on Long Island--about a princess visiting a small American town. Gregory La Cava was the director and, on the third day of production, he arrived at the studio to find the crew shooting what looked like a series of small battlefield explosions. "What the hell's going on here?" he shouted, and Fields' head appeared in the vicinity of the explosions. "Getting a good start," he brayed. "We're shooting my golf act." And he went back to knocking up divots. La Cava drew a long breath, told the crew to take five and carefully explained to his star that there was neither room nor reason in the story for a golf act. Fields narrowed his eyes. "Why not?" he asked. When reminded that the picture was about a princess, he solved the difficulty with dispatch. "She can play the caddie," he decided.

Apparently nonplused by Fields' persistently bizarre approach to moviemaking, the studio decided not to renew his contract. Unemployed but undaunted, Fields retired to a favorite haunt--the golf course--while his agent tried to find him work. It came in the form of an offer from Earl Carroll, an ex-Ziegfeld hoofer who had moved on to compete with his former boss. Carroll was prepared to ante up the then-staggering sum of $6500 if Fields would star in his Vanities--but the unflappable Fields held out until Carroll had agreed to remove his own name from the marquee, substituting that of his star.

The two went on to a successful collaboration, but Fields was nursing a conviction that contradicted the opinion of the two men who had invented the cinema. The Lumière brothers didn't think their brain child had a future. Uncle Willie not only suspected it was around to stay but he believed he might go places with it. The feeling jelled around the close of the Twenties, when the medium took the important step of learning to speak. Listening to the gravelly sound tracks of the period, Fields decided that they ideally suited his own raucous style. Accordingly, he cashed in a portion of his East Coast accounts, packed a car with props and potables and said farewell forever to New York and the theater. He was carrying $350,000 in $1000 bills.

In spite of the normal expenses of crossing the country, Uncle Willie still felt reasonably flush as he approached the hills of Hollywood. He stopped at a gas station on the outskirts, changed into what he felt was suitable attire for a man about to take over the capital of movieland and had himself directed to the best hotel in town. Finding it to be appropriately elegant, he marched to the desk and asked for the bridal suite. He was wearing a cutaway, striped trousers and a high silk hat, and carried a gold-headed cane, but he didn't strike the clerk as a newlywed. For one thing, he lacked what is widely considered to be the essential ingredient. The clerk tactfully pointed out the lack and asked Fields when the bride might be expected.

"I'm planning to pick one up in town," Fields said, grandly. In spite of this display of good will, he didn't get the suite and, shortly after, rented a house on Toluca Lake, where he immediately became engaged in a feud with a swan.

Fields was never on easy social terms with the animal kingdom. Dogs plagued him; perhaps they recognized the former tramp inside the fancy shirts and resented the effrontery. During his circus period, Fields had been briefly engaged as waterboy to a troop of elephants. The beasts harassed him out of the job, tripping him, bumping him and blowing water in his face. When they finally perfected a trick they had been working on without the trainer's help and trapped the bucket handler between their flanks, Fields quit. He got back at them by forgetting to leave the lid on a box of mice he'd been collecting, he said, for juggling purposes.

One of the swans at Toluca Lake-- possibly resentful of the competition offered by the comedian's splendor-- attacked Fields the moment it laid eyes on him. Uncle Willie promptly bought a canoe and spent a good part of the next 18 months chasing after his aquatic neighbor, armed with a popular golf club of the period called a mashie niblick. After one particularly exhausting pursuit around the lake, Fields dozed off in the canoe. Seizing the advantage, his antagonist sneaked up from behind and gave the sleeping nimrod a hearty nip. Fields later grumbled: "The miscreant fowl broke all the rules of civilized warfare."

In spite of practice and persistence, Fields never did crown the swan; but it was fortunate for him that the bird occupied so much of his time, because he was having difficulties getting started in the industry. The word had preceded Fields that he was not exactly the kind of do-as-you're-told hireling favored by the sultans of the film center. Growing concerned about his future, the comic went to the extreme of offering to work for a golfing buddy, Mack Sennett, as a gagwriter--without pay. Sennett, it appeared, had been thinking along the same track, with a view to adding the Presence to a stable that already included such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin (who once played seventh fiddle to headliner Fields in the Parisian Folies-Bergère, and whom Fields once described as "a goddamn ballet dancer"), Fatty Arbuckle, Gloria Swanson and, of course, the Keystone Cops. Sennett gave Fields an appointment and, when the comic arrived, suggested that he might also do a little acting.

Fields, who had entered Sennett's office looking, for once in his life, humble and helpful, did a take, clutched his hat and murmured vaguely: "Act, eh? ... Well, in that case, we'd better talk salary."

The results of the talk put him to work at $5000 a week and guaranteed him, by contract, a number of perquisites and fringe benefits that did leave Sennett in charge of his own studio-- but just barely.

The association was artistically successful but otherwise stormy. Fields never took kindly to anyone else's ideas of what was funny; and the fact that Sennett had earned millions by making millions laugh cut no ice with the ex--juggler and Ziegfeld star. Fortunately, Sennett was patient, good-natured and potentially as guileful as Fields himself, though in a softer way. Sennett got around their differences with a simple ruse. He would mention a gag he had in mind and then listen carefully while Fields told him, in meticulous and graphic detail, how lousy the idea was and what he could do with it. Sennett would nod judicial agreement and drop the subject. In a week or ten days, he would casually approach his terrible-tempered comic and say, "Bill, I've been thinking we might be able to do that gag you mentioned, after all, the one about the barber and the bearded lady."

"Glad you've come to your senses," Fields would answer, with regal condescension. "Great gag. Used to do it in the Follies."

Although the point got settled in this manner each time it came up, the two laughmasters would squabble for hours about comic theory. Sennett played the philosopher, arguing that comedy had to be put together like a fine Swiss watch, and Fields would infuriate him by answering, "Hogwash!" or "What do you know about comedy, you jobbernowl?" Or he would simply emit a loud Bronx cheer.

Whichever one was right, they managed to turn out seven works together, including some of Fields' finest efforts. One of these--The Fatal Glass of Beer --certainly seems to back his view that comedy, unlike juggling, doesn't need hairline construction to come off. It consists almost entirely of Fields repeatedly opening a door, getting belted in the face with bucketfuls of paper snow and bellowing, " 'T aint a fit night out for man nor beast!" In the intervals between the onslaughts, Fields wanders around his cabin--presumably located somewhere in the North country --humming and mumbling wordlessly to himself. Qualified critics consider this bit of idiocy to be among the finest two-reel comedies ever put together-- with or without precision movement. To this day, viewers of it tend to collapse in helpless laughter.

Life for comics on the Sennett lot was, on the whole, more strenuous than this example suggests. Aside from shoving pies into one another's faces, they were expected to leap from high buildings, fall off moving trains, wrestle with bears and drive fire engines into concrete walls. In the course of one such exercise, a truck backed into Fields and broke his neck.

Shifted into a hospital, the comedian did not prove to be an ideal patient. His cronies smuggled in the necessary liquids, and before the week was out, the injured man had driven his wheelchair down a flight of stairs, fracturing his coccyx. Typically, he felt he had been had.

"I went in broken at one end and they treated me by breaking the other," he complained, loudly. When it came time to dismiss him, the staff watched him leave with exhausted but joyful satisfaction. Fields was equally relieved. "Beds are dangerous," he explained. "More people die in bed than anywhere else." And after mulling over the remark to drain it of all its profundities, he added: "Or are born there, for that matter."

Though he now earned a pay check of $260,000 a year, Uncle Claude wasn't getting careless. His grip on his wallet remained as hearty as ever. Solvency on even so substantial a scale did not induce in him any foolhardy distributions of largess. Fields was still working for Sennett when Paramount tempted him with a better offer--which, however, he kept to himself. Of course, Sennett heard about the lure and, with their firm contract in hand, let his star sweat awhile, for the pleasure of watching him dream up new and wilder complaints about the studio: It had become, it seemed, inadequate, ill-equipped, staffed with incompetent plebeians, and was located in (he wrong part of Hollywood.

After a few weeks of these bootless attempts to get himself fired, Fields was making life miserable for everyone around him, and the genial Sennett, having had his laughs, cheerfully let him off the hook. Fields, much relieved, shot over to his new place of work and joined the cast of If I Had a Million, a picture starring practically everyone in Hollywood, from Charles Laughton to George Raft. It was a smash, and Fields' portion--a sequence that he wrote himself and that involved about 30 automobile wrecks--was widely considered the high point of a somewhat untidy script.

Fields' next full-length effort was International House, a film in which he shared billing with Rudy Vallee, the pre--Bing Crosby champion of crooners, and with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, something of a champion herself, though in less public pastures. On the strength of this picture, the comedian got a long-term contract put together during lengthy bargaining sessions through which Fields mostly whistled, looked out the window and refused to budge. As was standard in his case, it gave him just about everything he asked for, though, in one major concession on the comic's part, Paramount's owners got to keep their titles.

Fields was set for the next eight years, during which time he made around a dozen films for Paramount, including Six of a Kind, It's a Gift, Million Dollar Legs, a remake of Poppy (under its own name), Mississippi (with Bing Crosby), The Man on the Flying Trapeze and The Big Broadcast of 1938.

During this period, Paramount also lent him to MGM, so that he could play Micawber in David Copperfield. Fields had a special respect for Dickens, whose works he had read several times through, and he was persuaded to speak the lines as composed by an artisan he conceived to be in his own class. For any creative light of lesser stature, however, he reserved his normal attitude of scornful hauteur. Producers rapidly discovered that the Fields portion of any work in progress--if it was to progress at all--was best left to the comedian's inspiration. Studio policy is normally against improvisation by the players. In Uncle Willie's case, though, a different line prevailed, one that presaged the neo-Stanislavsky method of later performers.

Uncle Claude's memory was phenomenal when he had reason to recollect, in its fine details, an injury done to him 40 years before. When it came to remembering words and business devised for him by hacks, however, his capacity for total recall deserted him. Confronted by the Fieldsian memory blank, a director would give way to despair.

"Ye gods! Bill," the afflicted man would wail, "we've got to get this scene in the can before noon!"

Fields would nod with evident sympathy. "Well, let's go ahead," he'd say. "I'll think of something."

And he generally did think of something. Not all of it, of course, could be classed with the masterpieces of world literature, but he almost always concocted improvisations considerably sharper than what the dialogists had dreamed up.

Some of the Fields trouvailles are not readily comprehensible out of context, but his manner carries them. During the remake of Poppy, for instance, he became enamored of (the phrase "Pardon my redundancy," and he managed to tack it, with absolute irrelevance and a tip of his hat, to the end of every third speech throughout the picture. Audiences had no notion why the line kept popping up, but they loved it.

Fields delighted in archaic words and recherché phrases, and he wove them richly into his personality, both in and out of character: modicum, remonstrate, domicile, jobbernowl, furbelow, reiterate, posy, shift expander, smidgen, half a mo', strong waters, a modest repast. He constructed his conversation around expressions such as these and he fitted them with comfortable assurance into his screen commentaries.

Unctuous vowels and the more sibilant, rolling and buttery consonants especially charmed him. No matter what fanciful tale he elaborated, it invariably took place in some such spot as Homosassa or Punxsutawney, or Woonsocket, or Cucamonga. He assigned his adventures to such localities in part, perhaps, to make the story difficult to check on. He once told Gene Fowler of some outlandish hazard that had befallen him, he said, in "Denver; Denver, Colorado."

"Really? What part of Denver, Bill?" Fowler asked politely. Fields immediately realized that Fowler had been born and raised in Denver.

"I just remembered," he said. "It wasn't Denver. It was in Onalaska; Onalaska, Washington."

According to Fowler, Fields had never been there, either.

But, if natural caution led him to pick unfrequented purlieus as the locations of his more dubious exploits, he went out of his way to choose those with the oleaginous sonority that gave him pleasure. He collected oddball names as others collect postage stamps; and many of his showpieces had belonged to people he had known in his past. A man named Muckle had been a dour acquaintance of Fields' childhood, and he put a Mr. Muckle into It's a Gift. Chester Snavely, an example he frequently called upon, had been an undertaker he once met. When his repository failed him, he called on invention. Among the more outlandishly dubbed characters in his films are Ouliotta Hemoglobin, Egbert Sousé and A. Pismo Clam. He sometimes signed his mail with the nom de plume Ampico J. Steinway or, more modestly, Father Favania Fields. And the films he composed in their entirety are credited to such gaudy surrogates as Otis Criblecoblis (a bartender who thereafter went about claiming he was Fields' collaborator), Mahatma Kane Jeeves (devised by Fields to foil the bartender) and Charles Bogle (for no reason save that he liked its hint of incompetence).

The rich profanity of his daily speech was among the few personal characteristics that Fields couldn't transfer unaltered to the screen. He dodged the censors, however, by carving expletives out of such otherwise innocuous expressions as "Godfrey Daniel!," "Suffering Sciatica!" and "Mother of Pearl!" One he saved for moments of great stress, such as when a friend had fallen out a window, was "Drat!"

Fields also delighted in creating pet names for his leading ladies, most of whom played termagant parts to which the endearments were monumentally unfitting. Prominent among these efforts were "My dove," "My glowworm" and "My little fuzzywishwash." He showered the first two terms on the likes of Alison Skipworth, Cora Witherspoon and Margaret Dumont. The last he coined for Mae West, with whom he wrote and made My Little Chickadee. The stiffness that arises between two strong personalities was probably not eased to any real extent by the offscreen version of the blandishment bestowed by Fields on his co-star. He called her "My little brood mare."

On the set, the people in charge of production took the brunt of Fields' churlish clamor. With the casts, he was a good deal more reasonable--feeling, no doubt, that he had the advantage over any player he came up against. But he brooked no trespassers on center stage; and with Mae West, he felt called upon to roll out his big guns. The Fields concept of chivalry prevented him from doing it himself, but he bribed the prop men to harass his leading lady by asking her repeatedly, "Show us your tits, Mae."

Miss West's reaction to these shenanigans was succinct. "Bill's cute," she said. "Too damn cute."

When Fields felt his pre-eminence challenged, he didn't fool around, but snatched the most direct means of squelching the competition. On stage, he once discovered Ed Wynn catching flies (i.e., distracting the audience's attention) during his billiard act and promptly coldcocked the Perfect Fool with the butt end of his cue--to the hilarity of the audience, which took it as part of the shtick.

The age or status of the competition didn't give Fields a moment's pause. He considered babies, those notorious scene stealers, particularly underhanded, and he took strong measures to keep them off balance. In the course of several pictures in which he was teamed with an infant described by Fields as "a baby; says his name's LeRoy," the older star laced the youngster's orange juice with a liberal slug of gin. As the staff, including a trained nurse, tried to get the goggle-eyed youngster going for the next scene, Fields sat in the background, alternately shouting "Walk him around! Walk him around!" and advising bystanders that "The kid's no trouper."

Baby LeRoy was, in fact, an earnest trouper who crawled about happily on his assigned job; but the child's benign placidity infuriated Fields, who did everything he could to shake his rival's composure. Thus, when the script of The Old Fashioned Way called for him to catch LeRoy unawares and give him a light boot on the bottom, Fields took the opportunity to place-kick the tot 17 feet across a room. LeRoy was reported to have been more puzzled than hurt, and the scene, besides setting a minor punting record, proved to be fine cinema.

Fields' jealousy of LeRoy was both unreciprocated and misplaced. Though the child had charm, no one really shared the screen when Fields was on it. The comedian must have come to realize this, because, when LeRoy's option came due, Fields deliberately wrote him into another film, to make certain that the studio would keep the child on its payroll.

His paradoxical handling of LeRoy reflects Fields' attitude toward all children. In general, he treated them with odium, not to say loathing. When asked by a reporter how he liked children, Fields answered with a line that has since become classic: "Parboiled." And, as Corey Ford relates it, Fields one day waxed nostalgic about his own childhood, reminiscing in particular about his job as the circus elephants' waterboy. "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. Well, fate proved kind to me; I was blessed 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 narrowing, Fields added: "And then I had a second thought: Fuck him."

Despite this candid admission, it was found after his death that Uncle Claude had left the largest part of his fortune to found an orphans' home, with the proviso that it teach no religion of any kind. (Although bequests with similar conditions have been honored in America--as in the case of Girard College in Philadelphia, which Fields may have had in mind--the children never got their orphanage, with or without chapel service. Fields' wife and lawyer son sprang from the past to contest the will. The result was that nothing that Fields requested in his testament was ever done. His wish to be cremated was struck down. His bequests to those who had tended him, loved him and put up with his unpredictable nature during the last decade of his life were all blocked. The faithful ones were even barred from the funeral, a ceremony Fields had particularly requested be omitted.)

As with children, Fields was of two minds about Hollywood, and he treated the place with restrained tolerance. Writer-producer Nunnally Johnson once asked him--in regard to his drinking --if he ever got the d.t.s. Fields responded earnestly: "I don't know. It's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the d.t.s begin." He liked the California climate, but he felt that the industry would be improved if its leading clodpolls were replaced with officially certified lunatics. A man he'd spotted, whose head was only a shade larger than a small softball, impressed him greatly. "With a noggin that size," he observed, awe-struck, "that fellow ought to own this town." He hired the man to appear in his movies.

Fields' treatment of Hollywood's retarded moguls reflected his scorn. He resolutely fought agreeing with any order coming to him from on high. His lese majesty, or total disregard for the exalted, had a grandeur of its own. At that period, the biggest man in the business was Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. Fields came under his aegis while working in David Copperfield. Halfway through the shooting, Uncle Willie decided, as he often did at similar moments in other pictures, that he was working for slave wages. Following his established plan for bringing power blocs to heel, he stopped going to work and left strict orders with his entourage that he was not to be disturbed.

For three days, studio emissaries knocked vainly at his door, until, finally, the big boss himself took things in hand and called at the comic's bastion. The Mayer mien overwhelmed Fields' secretary and she went upstairs, where the holdout was entertaining some cronies at cards.

"Mr. Fields," she said, with a tremor in her voice, "I know what you told me, but Mr. Mayer himself is downstairs and would like to speak with you."

Fields didn't bother to turn from the game. Instead, he waved a languid hand.

"Give him an evasive answer," he said over his shoulder. ''Tell him to go fuck himself."

Symbols of authority that turn lesser men into quaking masses held Fields in no such thrall. He took the view that anyone in uniform was his employee and damn well better get cracking. Gene Fowler recalled returning from John Barrymore's funeral in an open touring car belonging to Fields. The comedian had cannily stocked his conveyance with liquid comforters, which he shook up and dispensed with no regard whatever for state regulations against drinking in automobiles, open or otherwise. The law caught up with them in the form of two cops, who drew alongside, climbed out of their cruiser and demanded to know what the hell was happening.

"Ah, the constabulary," Fields replied, hoisting his glass. "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but we've got only enough for ourselves." Then he poked the chauffeur. "Drive on," he said. The chauffeur did and the cops, stunned by this jaw-dropping display of offhandedness, watched them go.

In sharp contrast to his deft handling of public officials, Fields had nothing but trouble with his personal staff. Bending to the inexorable laws of prosperity, Uncle Willie had put together a sizable household of servants, but they brought him no sense of security. Rather, the contrary. The help, he became convinced, was a giant cabal to defraud him, and he implemented countermeasures against any possible hanky-panky. He had an intercommunications system installed in the house, ostensibly to call for more ice but, in reality, designed to eavesdrop on the conspiracy.

When his listening device failed to produce any evidence more conclusive than a slight rise in the price of peas, Uncle Claude grew even more suspicious. The enemy, he concluded, was clamming up on purpose, to conceal its plans, and he struck back with vigor. He told the cook, privately, that the butler was spreading scandal about her mother. Then he told the butler that the cook had accused him of stealing. He revealed to the chauffeur that the cook and the butler had been conspiring to have him fired. It is possible that Fields had stumbled onto Machiavelli's advice that to rule effectively, one must divide the opposition. In any case, he considered that, as one of his biographers, Robert Lewis Taylor, has put it, "His house was in perfect running order ... when his servants had quit speaking to one another."

Fields seldom bothered to suborn the maids, since they never stayed long enough to join the plot against him. But the average butler hardly lasted much longer. One of these managed a slightly longer run than the rest, until Fields got the idea that the major-domo harbored a scheme to poison the master. From then on, Uncle Claude insisted that his man taste each dish as he served it, in the manner of slaves kept for that purpose by Roman emperors. The butler resented this and said so, and a series of squabbles ensued, at the close of which Fields was observed chasing the poisoner from his property at the point of a large and ancient horse pistol, which he kept around the house, as he said, "to foil intruders." The man apparently escaped unpunctured, but Fields later boasted that he had "winged him as he crossed the wall."

Another of Fields' temporary butlers turned out to be a weight lifter and acrobat whose face and build caused him to be known in the Fields household as the Gorilla. The Gorilla gave further substance to the nickname by putting up a trapeze in the master's garage, where he could practice on it in his off-hours. The Gorilla made a lousy butler--apart from not looking like the conventional occupant of such a position--but Uncle Willie, with an eye on the muscles, was not overeager to fire him. With practiced duplicity, however, the reluctant employer found a way out and, one day, when the Gorilla hit the top of a swing on his trapeze, the ropes broke and he fell to the concrete floor, severely put out. He couldn't prove anything, but, in the interest of his general health, he quit.

All of Fields' kaleidoscopic retinue were subject to domestic routines not widely practiced elsewhere. Uncle Willie developed the habit, for instance, of summoning the help, when needed, by blowing on a battered Halloween horn he carried for the purpose. When things were going well, his idea of a compliment to the staff was to tell them he was sure that their parents were all married. When dissatisfied, he took it all back, with elaborations.

That the Fields ménage stumbled along at all was due to the tact, charm and efficiency of two women, Magda Michael and Carlotta Monti, both of whom joined his disheveled life in the mid-Thirties and who, between them, managed to bring some kind of order into the normal Fieldsian chaos.

Miss Michael, attractive, elegant and impervious to disaster, served officially as Fields' secretary. In fact, she acted as the general overseer of all his affairs and was one of the few people he ever trusted.

Miss Monti had no title at all. She was an uncommonly pretty girl, with a dazzling smile that expressed her affectionate good nature. Fields had spotted her on a Paramount set, where she worked as a bit player. He had already had several ladyfriends in Hollywood, one of them an American girl he unaccountably kept dressed in Oriental clothes and referred to as the Chinese People. But in Carlotta Monti, he had discovered a woman who he knew instinctively would require all his guile to woo. Accordingly, he set afoot a devious campaign to win her. He was soon startled, though pleased, to discover that Carlotta was already taken with his raffish ways. He found her perfectly ready to enjoy them and, within reason, to cater to them. Shortly after moving in, she revealed a remarkable capacity for keeping things in order and she became the unpaid housekeeper of the Fields demesne.

The establishment of which Miss Monti took charge was located on De Mille Drive. Fields rented this house and its spacious grounds for $250 a month--to the anguish of the owner, who discovered, in rapid succession, that he could have got $1000 from others and that with Uncle Claude, renegotiation was not to be contemplated. Fields snickered for ten years over his bargain dwelling, but he had to do without repairs. Since it was not the comic's policy to put money into someone else's property, in time he lived surrounded by peeling wallpaper and a mist of powdered plaster. Pieces from the ceiling generally had to be cleared away before lining up a shot on his billiard table.

Although the house didn't belong to him, it very soon acquired other tones of the Fields patina. Double locks appeared on nearly every door and Uncle Willie carried the 30 or 40 keys on his person, jingling them constantly to remind himself that all was well.

Among his many paranoid notions, Fields cultivated the fear that the seven fat years would inevitably be followed by seven lean ones, and he intended to forestall famine with an ever-normal granary of his own devising. In most of the rooms, canned goods lay stacked in wholesale lots. As far as anyone knows, he never breached this cargo of beets, corn, sardines and soups--he only added to it. To the owner, though, this stockpile represented a shaky kind of security.

And no security could ever be more than shaky to Fields. For him, the ratty past always hovered at the door, ready to pounce. Wherever he was, he carried a roll of bills amounting to between $10,000 and $15,000. Gene Fowler once noticed the wad bulging out of the pocket of Uncle Willie's bathrobe and ventured to ask him what he used it for.

"Nothing," Fields answered. "It's getaway money."

The comic kept a careful catalog of the several hundred bottles of assorted liquors he stored in a room with three locks, and he would take inventory at least once, and sometimes twice, a day.

The house on De Mille Drive boasted several bars, one of them mounted on an express wagon for alfresco use, and iceboxes were strategically scattered throughout the premises. In the room he called the parlor, Fields kept a barber chair. He associated it with the one indulgence of his youth: hot towels and the manipulations of a Figaro. In later years, when afflicted with insomnia, he found he could slumber in it while reclining in his recollections of its luxury.

On the second floor, Fields maintained a gymnasium. Here he could be found, of a morning, riding a mechanical bicycle on which he had installed a horn that he would beep from time to time. "Breaks the monotony," he explained to those with an inquiring turn of mind. This sort of reasoning probably also prompted him to sing sea chanteys as he exercised on his rowing machine, interrupting himself from time to time to shout obscene pseudo-seafaring commands to an imaginary crew.

He further enlivened these room-bound trips with stops to take on supplies in the form of cocktails and highballs, to the resigned chagrin of his trainer, Bob Howard. The latter would watch hopelessly while the landlocked sea dog, sculling away like 60, chased the tom collins he had placed--like a stationary mechanical rabbit--just in front of the anchored boat. Having caught up with the drink, after ten minutes of frantic effort, Fields would knock it back and bellow, expansively: "These workouts are doing me a world of good, Bob. They should increase my liquor consumption two or three hundred percent."

Actually, though not exactly trim, Fields never really got out of shape. He played a hard, tricky and precise tennis game. Being disinclined to chase balls that were out of reach, he relied on the Big Game--making shots with an aggressive, fierce delivery--long before it had become the dominant style on the professional courts. His serves were not only explosive, they usually bit chalk, directed with a juggler's eye for exact distances.

Golf, however, was Fields' pet sport, offering, as it did, the chance to swindle several opponents at once. He shot, legitimately, in the 80s, a score he frequently lowered to championship level by the judicious use of furtive cheating. Finding himself in a bad lie, he would point at the sky and shout, "Wild geese!" while his club deftly hooked the ball into a more playable position. By careful attention to these details, Fields took down a good deal of loot in what amounted to a subsidiary career on the links. From La Cava alone, he won two Lincoln sedans; and Uncle Willie's doctor, whom he paid a retainer of $100 a day, usually found at the end of the month that he'd lost a good deal more than that to his patient.

Though attached to golf as an avocational contribution to his income, Uncle Claude's most beloved outdoor pastime was, by all odds, picnics. The mention of those bucolic excursions, at which children are indispensable, conjures up a picture of moo-cow serenity to which the irascible lush seems somehow foreign. Nonetheless, Fields loved them, as long as he was the instigator and rule maker. Of course, a Fields picnic wasn't an exact reproduction of the traditional family jaunt. It began, when the mood was on him, with the mixing of a bucket-sized Thermos of martinis. As he concocted it, he would shout orders to the women of the house: "Eggs! Hard-boiled eggs! And fried chicken! And bake some kind of cake. Two kinds!"

This gathering of the more usual picnic staples would, of course, take several hours of the morning, during which time Fields would make repeated assaults on the Thermos, replenishing as needed.

By the time the voyage got cracking, around noon, Uncle Claude himself would be well under way. His ever-present fear of running short of foodstuffs would assert itself at the first shopping center on the road. A half hour would be spent by the Pickwick of Picnics exploring the shelves for jars of pâté, tins of caviar, huge bags of pretzels and potato chips, potted shrimps, canned beans and whatever else struck him as indispensable to the success of the undertaking. Dire necessity, however, rarely struck the party, since the leader almost never strayed any measurable distance from civilization. He was, in fact, as likely as not to shepherd the revelers into some motel or other. "Looks like it's coming on to rain," he'd say, and then sock in for a refreshing nap.

Under these circumstances, it isn't astonishing that a Fields picnic often lasted into the following day; and on one especially attenuated occasion, the party, starting from L. A., ended up in San Francisco, where it spent a frolicsome and instructive five-day weekend before staggering back to home base. Fields was gratified. "Nice picnic," he decided. "We ought to have them more often." Uncle Willie's largess, on these outings, was typical of part-time misers, who, on occasion, blow off steam with princely abandon.

As might be expected with the contrary comic, he was especially attached to that bane of all picnickers--rain. The sound of a shower pelting a roof is calming to many people. To the congenitally fretful Fields, it had the soothing effect of a fifth of gin; and it distressed him that California summers, whatever else they might have had to offer, were deficient in this respect. Carlotta Monti took note of his dissatisfaction and devised a tranquilizer that she administered whenever Uncle Claude grew restive. Strollers past the Fields estate would then be riveted in their tracks by the unexpected--though possibly edifying--sight of the owner sitting under an umbrella that was being drenched from a distance by a pretty brunette in a sunsuit, wielding a hose.

In the late 1930s, Fields and Carlotta, with the umbrella and the hose, moved for a while to a sanatorium. Uncle Willie's addiction to pineapple juice, which he sometimes mixed in minute proportions with his gin--this concoction having replaced the martinis--had caught up with him. On hearing of the move and the reason for it, Fowler promptly called the invalid.

"How are you feeling, Claude?" he asked--deliberately using, as all Fields' friends did in moments of poignancy, the short form that the comic found insulting.

"Not so good, nephew," Fields replied. "Seems they found some urine in my alcohol."

The doctors eventually managed to sort out the antithetical ingredients, and for the next year, Uncle Willie tried to make do with light wines and beer. His doctors even had the gall to prescribe milk--which Fields promptly cited as the cause of his illness, calling it "a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies." The regimen didn't agree with him. "Stuff's bad for the nerves," he concluded after 365 days of unrelieved gloom, and he gradually worked his way back to his previous load of two-quarts-plus a day.

His return to films was equally triumphant. In 1938, he had gone on radio for Chase and Sanborn coffee, at $6500 a week, and in two years had shifted to Lucky Strike, at $7500 (confounding the latter sponsor by persistently referring to his imaginary son Chester while on the air--only weeks later did the company realize that the tad's full name might be a sly plug for a rival cigarette firm). He quit both engagements of his own volition. Although his voice--by turns petulant, pompous, didactic, wheedling and falsely hearty--accurately reflected his character, Fields felt that his listeners were being robbed of the overall effect; and he let it be known in a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter that he was ready to give the whole package to them.

Universal Pictures heard and heeded the siren call. Fields made four comedies for this permissive organization, at the rate of one a year. With the exception of the opus he co-authored with Mae West, these works were attributed to authors with names such as those on Fields' bank accounts. That they were the product of the master's marvelously warped mind is not in doubt: His signature is all over the place. In his case, though, the word "authorship" must be used in a special, Fieldsian sense. He charged the studio--and was paid--for scenarios at the rate of some $25,000 per picture. But, as in the case of Da Vinci, some of his best material was scribbled in the margins of a laundry list. His notes generally came out sketchier than those of the Renaissance master. They sparkled with such random suggestions as "Deaf widow runs snake farm. Don't forget the delicatessen." Fortunately for filmgoers, the studio accepted these jottings as legitimate scripts, putting the surcharge down to the incidentals of dealing with genius and, in the process, making their author the highest-paid writer, per word, in history.

The films that Fields wove out of such scraps were, in chronological order, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. With the Sennett two-reelers, and It's a Gift, made for Paramount, they are, without question, his most personal creations. In them, the turbulent artist asserts his claim to inclusion in any pantheon of American nonconformists and takes an honorable place beside Tom Paine, Thoreau, Amelia Bloomer, Robert Ingersoll, Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken. He achieved this status by ignoring every rule Hollywood imposed on itself and forced down the collective throats of those who paid the tab.

The principle that gripped film makers before the 1950s was, roughly, this: No institution that Americans officially held to be sacred might be transgressed, much less derided. Any screen personage who did so--and gangster and war pictures sometimes made this inevitable-- was slated to get his punishment, in spades. The one exception to the decree was Bugs Bunny.

Fields acted as if he, too, were licensed to get away with mayhem, and he blandly violated the Production Code at every turn, whacking away indiscriminately at romantic love, motherhood, marriage, children, the Noble Redskin, dogs and the entire catalog of boy-scout virtues. His principal arsenal was wrath, and he was an expert in all its weapons, from semisomnolent peevishness to choleric malignancy. So armed, he lit into all the textbook tenets advocated by pulpit moralists and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce.

Along with this bantering of society's traditional foundations, Fields celebrates everything that's frowzy and unkempt: truantism, simony, fraud, intemperance, advantage play and every form of disreputable behavior known to police blotters, including contributions to the delinquency of minors. And he gets away with it all.

Outstanding among his forays against morality is the plot of The Bank Dick, in which Fields and his wheyfaced son-in-law-to-be embezzle money from a bank, invest it in a beefsteak mine (logic was not the least of the comic's sworn enemies) and come out winners. Retribution is not on the agenda. The moral, apparently, is: It's oK to steal, if you're lucky. A second lesson is also discernible; namely, that business success, that all-American reward, is achieved not by application and foresight but through dalliance and incompetence. In similar philosophical essays, Fields dismantles the other gears of the American dream, and he does it with a deliberation that distinguishes him from his coevals.

Slapstick is the art of milking chaos for laughs, and all clowns are fundamentally anarchists. Nearly every comic bangs away at good behavior and accepted standards. Fields' rivals are destructive, but they break things up without plan and usually in consequence of desperate attempts to be correct and to get things done right. Langdon, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, are pathetically eager to conform, to be accepted. Respectability is Chaplin's everlasting goal. All of their mistakes are well intentioned or forced upon them, and they bumble their way into imbroglios and disasters. Even when, as did the Marx Brothers, they play amoral boors, the upheavals they cause have no permanent consequences. Groucho and his siblings are only snipping at the branches. Fields went after the roots. His attitude is unique, because he means it. Other antisocial comics are not dissatisfied. Despite his name, for instance, Groucho's usual view of things is one of mindless cheerfulness. Fields is cheerful only when he has put one over on society.

Fields, on the screen, intends to be a crook and means to be a monkey wrench; he assures us it's the only way to get things done. But he isn't proselytizing: As he sees it, this outrageous prescription for success already prevails, and he's only giving us examples. Going along with corruption is Fields' version of conformity; it is in insisting on it as a working principle that he becomes an image breaker.

"His was an art of exposure," Zero Mostel has noted. "He says, 'Don't be organized; steal to get ahead; drink all you can; beat your family.' " Save for interrupting setbacks, that is, indeed, the message. True, he is occasionally helpful, but it is because he's either killing time or working an angle. Either way, his impulse turns a simple nuisance into a local catastrophe. And when, as he sometimes does, he achieves respectability--always by pure chance--it is invariably on his own terms: Thenceforth, he can get sauced wearing a high silk hat--and on the cuff.

The last film in which Fields evidenced his full, masterfully outrageous form was a 1944 potpourri called Follow the Boys, in which he did a six-minute version of his billiards routine--and collected $25,000 for his efforts. Though he made two more movies--Song of the Open Road and Sensations of 1945--ill health marred his performances in both. It was not long before Fields was once more attacked by his rebellious kidneys. Severely ill, he went back to the rest home, where he languished, intractable as ever but much cheered by the presence of Carlotta Monti and a constant flow of old friends--all of them smuggling bottled contraband past a staff that had given up trying to be vigilant.

On Christmas morning, 1946, Fields died. It was drizzling--a condition Uncle Willie could only have approved. They say the last thing that he did was wink.