W.C. Fields:
A Biography
by James Curtis.
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. 593 pp., illus.
Hardcover: $35.00.r
Drunk.
Mean. Hated his family. Hated kids. Hated Mae West. Stashed
money in secret bank accounts all over the world. Said
he kept a Bible in his library to “look for loopholes.”
That was the W. C. Fields we knew, through accounts passed down
through the years, and constantly embroidered, by his cronies,
and publicists and journalists who were all too happy to print
the legend. It is to the credit of biographer James Curtis, author
of esteemed volumes on directors James Whale and Preston Sturges,
that in this new volume he slices through the flab of fiction
and finds a stronger, more compelling, and infinitely more poignant
vein of fact.
Fields,
who we all think we know—and may not today love,
or at least respect, as much as we should—was a prodigious
talent. He had a gift for all manner of physical humor and wordplay,
but, as the personal correspondence quoted at length in this
book attests, these were not abilities he took lightly. He worked
constantly at the craft of comedy, endlessly trying to perfect
his early juggling routines on vaudeville stages at home and
abroad, then developing new personas to suit the stage, screen,
and radio. Though he was by the end of his career the highest-paid
Hollywood star, it never came easily. Fields created the template
that every performer ever to try to play an ordinary citizen,
harassed by the absurdities and inconveniences of daily life,
follows. With his ineffable Philadelphia-ish drawl, countenance,
and carriage, he remains the gold standard by which all others,
from Jackie Gleason to Larry David, are yard-sticked. But the
image of Fields as the bulbous-nosed, top-hatted mountebank,
an incarnation he enjoyed but found creatively lacking, persisted,
and found its way onto a postage stamp. Today we most often recall
the ‘wrong’ Fields, not that Curtis, who takes the
full measure of the man, draws such distinctions in his text.
The commoner, however, in Fields as a person and as a performer,
strikes the deepest chords in this book.
“Unlike most comedians,” Curtis writes, “he
never asked to be loved: he was short-tempered, a coward, an
outright faker at times.” Examining the roots of Fields’s
characterizations, he observes (minus the maudlin pop psychology
of so many biographies), “Yet the humanity he always strived
for in his film treatments failed him when dredging up details
of his own early life…and although he was married to the
same woman for the entirety of his adult life, he was always
at odds with both her and the world, embattled and solitary.” Life
for William Claude Dukenfield, born 1880, was perpetual boom-and-bust
where relationships were concerned. He always portrayed his father,
British immigrant Jim Dukenfield, as abusive. While there was
ample truth in this characterization—enough to make a disgruntled
Fields leave his home in Philadelphia to seek his nomadic path
onwards and upwards through the ranks of vaudeville—he
later took pride in his dad’s late-blooming literacy and
the values his parents instilled in him. His once-beloved wife,
Hattie Hughes, a fellow entertainer who tired of trips to Europe,
Australia, and South Africa (all vividly described by Curtis)
as Fields established himself on he worldwide circuit, plummeted
in his affections, however. Being a strict Catholic, she never
divorced him, but they exchanged harrowing correspondence over
money matters and her upbringing of their son Claude, much of
it reprinted here. “Your low cunning and scheming will
some day cause you no end of grief,” he wrote her after
one row, and he later lampooned her and his “mama’s
boy” son as characters in The Man on the Flying Trapeze
(1935).
Relations
with those closest to him, including his mistress Bessie Poole
and his other, unacknowledged son,
were frequently
strained. In his finest film, 1934’s It’s a Gift,
Fields seems to be assembling a happier family from his own discontents
as a son, husband, and father. Yet he was often capable of great
kindness, particularly toward children and his young costars,
who recall him warmly in this book, and fretted over the masses
of Christmas gifts he dispatched. Professionally, his ire was
directed at those who thwarted his ambitions. Ed Wynn, for one,
was savagely assaulted by Fields for stealing one of his theatrical
routines, a common-enough occurrence at that time, and one that
Fields himself was not above participating in. (Many of his best
stage bits, whose lineage Curtis tirelessly tracks, were recycled
in his films.)
Being
W. C. Fields, the person, could be difficult. Becoming W. C.
Fields, the comic genius, was harder still,
and not all
setbacks could be addressed with body blows. Impresario Florenz
Ziegfeld paid good money for the comedians who peppered his extravagant
revues but preferred his endless strings of chorines, leaving
singular talents like Fields in the lurch. D.W. Griffith loved
Fields’s low comedy and had an early screen success with
him in Sally of the Sawdust (1925), an adaptation of the comic’s
stage hit Poppy, but their other films were clinkers and it took
much trial and error for Fields to find a footing on the big
screen.
When
he finally hit his stride, in the mid-1930s, he was middle-aged,
frequently ill, and took to heavier drinking
to quell the pains
in his infamous “sacroliliac” (one of his favored
two-dollar words that tripped off his tongue) and other failing
organs. He quarreled with studio personnel and censors over his
more ribald antics and saw a number of his films collapse into
peculiar, broken-backed affairs, with insipid romantic interludes,
car chases, and gorillas added. Radio salvaged his career, but
the stress of coming up with ten minutes of foolproof material
per show took its toll. He often let himself be the patsy for
drunk routines with Edgar Bergen and his despised dummy Charlie
McCarthy, a betrayal of his true talents given that he never
played alcoholism for laughs on the screen. The image stuck.
It’s painful for Fields fans to hear him described as “the
great comic drunk,” as there was so much more to his talents,
all of which Curtis excavates in his balm of a book.
And
make no mistake: While there is much that is painful, and grubbily
human, in this biography, there are
plenty of brighter
insights. Fields’s descriptions of Johannesburg, and the
other, surprising places he tramped in his career, are the stuff
of good travel writing (“The place is full of grim-faced
Boers with double-barreled guns and thickly-bearded faces…they
pass the lonely hours waiting for trouble by vying with each
other to look the dirtiest.”). Curtis takes us deep inside
the burlesque halls and vaudeville houses where Fields spent
hours perfecting his juggling and physical routines, and brings
us into the process of how the comedian and other collaborators
(including Double Indemnity author James M. Cain, who worked
on his stage plays) created, page by page, his indelible alter
egos.
Curtis
corrects a few of the usual errors. Yes, Fields had money all
over the U.S., but in small deposits that
he made criss-crossing
the country on his theatrical tours. No, there was no running
battle between Fields and West on My Little Chickadee (1940)—West
resented Fields’s screenplay credit but the two vaudevillians,
while wary, respected each other and came up with one of Fields’s
more concentrated films. And when Curtis cannot find documentation
for some of his subject’s more famous ad libs, like the “looking
for loopholes” line, he says so. For the reader, there
are additional bonuses: the ninety-five black-and-white illustrations
are placed near the matching text, rather than relegated to distant ‘photo
sections,’ and unlike so many film books today it has been
properly copy-edited, which would have pleased its meticulously
mellifluous subject.
W.C.
Fields: A Biography falters only in that it ends with its subject’s death. Mention is made of his revival in the
late 1960s, when fresh prints of his films were put into circulation
and the Beatles put him and other Hollywood iconoclasts like
West and Marlon Brando on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band. Having reclaimed this disturber of the peace
from legend, Curtis omits his cantankerous legacy. Take John
Cleese, who reveres Fields in a short film aired regularly on
Turner Classic Movies; his Basil Fawlty, a shambling spectacle
of abrasiveness of wit’s end, sprang, Hulk-like, from Fields.
Fields’s ironic understatement is the stock-in-trade of
the latest generation of sitcoms, though their edge is rarely
as knife-sharp. His reaction towards life’s disasters,
often of one’s own making, was keenly felt on Seinfeld
and has seen its darkest flowering on Larry David’s subsequent
Curb Your Enthusiasm, which has an acid tang that would have
fascinated Fields. The comedian would have felt right at home
with Bernie Mac, who on TV struggles to accommodate his sister’s
kids within his child-free domestic routine, doing right by them
only at the last second of the eleventh hour. Mac’s network
promises to make his character more “accessible” and
less aggravating this season, the kind of tug of war that Fields
often faced in forging his unique path.
Fields
has never been greener. And if Curtis missed the vogue he’s still due ample thanks for bringing this larger-than-life
trendsetter closer to us than ever before. —Robert Cashill
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