The Talented Mr. Dukenfield: W.C. Fields and the American Dream
As the twenty-first century approached, 1999 was a banner year for postmodernism in American cinema. Three excellent films were released, which all flirt with paradoxes of identity, specifically with the notion of identity as something constructed rather than natural: Being John Malkovich, Boys Don’t Cry, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. As different as these three films are, they have one thing in common: each deals with the desire to be something one is not. The Talented Mr. Ripley tells the story of an impoverished young man who is sucked into the world of what Robin Leech used to call the lifestyles of the rich and famous. He is so dazzled by the luxurious existence of an expatriate American in Italy that he eventually murders him and uses his talent for mimicry and forgery to take his victim’s place in Rome. Based on a true story, Boys Don’t Cry portrays the brief and sad life of Teena Brandon, a girl who rejects her sexual identity and re-creates herself as Brandon Teena, a teenage boy who succeeds in having a love affair with a woman. Although the film focuses on the Brandon Teena character, it gives a poignant portrait of the depressing lives of a representative group of lower-class Americans, all of whom wish that they could be something other than what they are. The most brilliant and innovative of the films, Being John Malkovich, takes this principle to the level of absurdity. Through a marvelously comic premise—the discovery of a portal into the mind of John Malkovich (played with consummate subtlety and understatement by John Malkovich himself)—the film shows that ordinary Americans would pay good money for the chance to get into the head of a famous actor, if only for fifteen minutes while he orders towels from a catalogue over the phone.
All three films deal with gender issues and specifically pose paradoxes of identity to call into question traditional sexual roles. This is most obviously true of Boys Don’t Cry, which in postmodern fashion asks us to entertain the possibility that sexual identity is not a biological given, but rather a matter of conscious choice. Since Being John Malkovich allows women as well as men to enter the actor’s mind, it, too, produces moments of sexual ambiguity and in particular explores a variety of lesbian possibilities, including the idea of two women as parents. The Talented Mr. Ripley has strong homoerotic undercurrents, and the emptiness of the protagonist’s life is reflected in the fact that he desperately craves love from both men and women. But the issue of class is as important as that of gender in these films. This is clearest in The Talented Mr. Ripley, which focuses on the efforts of a lower-class character to take his place in the world of the upper class. But many of the problems of the characters in Boys Don’t Cry are also generated by their lower-class status. A good deal of the frustration of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon stems from his/her poverty and the limited options he/she has in life. And Being John Malkovich turns on the fact that celebrities constitute the only aristocracy Americans have and thus form the horizon of their social aspirations. In all three films, the desire to be someone else is at least partly a desire to rise in social class.
As the most postmodern of the three films, Being John Malkovich explicitly connects the desire to be someone else with the logic of the motion picture as an art form. The film basically claims that we all go to a movie in order to be John Malkovich. To see a movie is to want to be someone else, to identify completely with an actor up there on the big screen, to live vicariously the lives of celebrities. The ultimate protagonist of Being John Malkovich is the movie camera itself, which is the real portal into the actor’s brain, the magic device that allows the audience to share the experiences of many of the characters in the film and to see the world as Malkovich sees it. The American dream is to be someone else and thereby rise in social status, and cinema is the medium that most powerfully allows Americans to indulge in this fantasy. The dream of being someone else is quintessentially American because it is quintessentially democratic. In an aristocratic society, one is born into a certain role in society and must accept it. But in a democracy, social roles are not fixed by birth, and at least in theory anyone may aspire to any position in society.[i] America is, after all, the land where every youngster can dream of being president someday. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Boys Don’t Cry, and Being John Malkovich deal with what it is to live in this kind of democratic world, in which all boundaries—economic, social, sexual—begin to look fluid and no longer set limits to human desire. As sympathetic as the three films are to this urge to escape fixed identities, each sees something dark and troubling in this desire to be someone else—they suggest that it may be a formula for perpetual frustration and even disaster. For one thing, this desire inevitably leads to some form of fraud or imposture or acting, thereby linking it to Hollywood and its escapist fantasies.
At the time, these three films seemed to be cutting-edge works of art, but they were anticipated by movies made way back in the 1930s—by the great comedian W. C. Fields. If it seems at first implausible to compare Fields’s work with these complex and unnerving contemporary films, recall that Fields’s comedy always had an edge, and several of his films had a distinctly dark side. In fact Fields was constructing his identity—and making comedy out of it—long before postmodernism and poststructuralist French philosophy were ever heard of. The construction of identity is the principle that unites Fields the man and Fields the artist. In both his life and his art he thrived on creating illusions, sometimes in vertiginously complex ways that in retrospect seem to point ahead to postmodern art. Fields himself once reportedly described his situation: “We are sitting at the crossroads between art and nature, trying to figure out where delirium tremens leaves off and Hollywood begins.”[ii]
FROM VAUDEVILLE TO BROADWAY TO HOLLYWOOD
Born William Claude Dukenfield, he reinvented himself as W. C. Fields and conquered first the world of vaudeville, then the world of Broadway, and eventually the world of the mass media as well, including movies and radio. The comic persona he crafted over the years is basically the all-American con man, part carnival barker, part patent medicine salesman, part circus showman, part cardsharp, and part stockbroker. The main characters of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Boys Don’t Cry, and Being John Malkovich are all in one way or another contemporary versions of the con artist. Fields reminds us that this archetype has deep roots in American culture. In the nineteenth century, it produced such literary embodiments as Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and several of Mark Twain’s most memorable figures, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In Fields’s vision, America is ultimately one gigantic con game, and he was determined to come out on the winning side, both in his life and in his art. His greatest discovery was that show business itself may be the biggest con game of them all. At their best, his films turn inward on Hollywood and expose the fraudulence of the magic world of cinema. Before the Frankfurt School and its Marxist theories of American popular culture, Fields understood that Hollywood is a dream factory.[iii] And long before Being John Malkovich, Fields grasped the connection in America between movies and the desire to be somebody else.
W. C. Fields both lived the American dream and tried to expose it as an illusion. In his own life, he acted out a classic rags-to-riches story, rising from obscurity to become one of the biggest stars of Hollywood. In addition to his contradictory personal mottoes—“You can’t cheat an honest man” and “Never give a sucker an even break”—he might well have adopted Tom Ripley’s credo: “I always felt it would be better to be a false somebody than a real nobody.” And yet precisely because Fields was so good at creating illusions, he was haunted by the thought of the illusoriness of his own celebrity, living in fear that it might at any moment evaporate, and fighting, sometimes desperately, to maintain it. That may explain why so much of his comedy is devoted to satirizing get-rich-quick schemes, social climbing ambitions, and in general people’s efforts to construct their identities and become something other than what they are. Fields knew both how to construct illusions and how to deconstruct them.
The son of James Dukenfield and Kate Felton-Dukenfield, Fields was born in Darby, Pennsylvania on January 29, 1880. Even this fact is disputed; his first biographer, Robert Lewis Taylor, gives his birth date as April 9, 1879.[iv] Since the Dukenfields were married on May 18, 1879, we sense what may be at stake here. This is typical of the situation with regard to Fields’s biography. Over the years, he told so many stories, tall tales, and outright lies about himself that it is difficult for would-be biographers to sort out fact from fiction in his case. Fields reveled in the curious institution of the Hollywood publicity department, allowing and even encouraging studio publicists to invent the most outrageous stories about him. As a result, W. C. Fields has become a mythic figure. As happened with Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, the public has confused the persona Fields created with the real man in a way that is not the case with the other great comedians of his era (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers). No one has ever believed that Charlie Chaplin was really a tramp and most people understand that Groucho was not just a grouch, but almost everybody believes that W. C. Fields was really a drunk. He did in fact drink heavily, especially toward the end of his life, but a man whose comedy relied on precise timing and adroitly executed physical business could not have been habitually drunk in the ordinary sense of the term, particularly given the fact that for much of his career he was performing live before audiences with no chance for retakes. Another widely believed legend about Fields is that he squandered his money or squirreled it away in banks all over the country under false (and improbable) names, thus making it irretrievable after his death. Louvish shows that throughout his life, Fields was careful about financial matters, and left an estate valued at $771,428, a very substantial sum in 1946, the year of Fields’s death. As one myth dies, however, another gains new life: Fields’s remaining stock of liquor was valued at $1,553.[v]
Louvish takes great pains to debunk the myth of Fields’s bleak childhood, and he even shows that W. C. may not have hated his hometown of Philadelphia quite as much as legend has it (alas, his gravestone does not say: “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia”).[vi] Nevertheless, Fields’s childhood was tough enough, and he did drop out of school at an early age, perhaps by the fourth grade. The young William Claude Dukenfield was determined to make something of himself, and that something turned out to be: “W. C. Fields, juggler extraordinaire.” Today we know Fields mainly for his movies, and thus we tend to forget that he came to Hollywood relatively late in life (not until his fifties). For him, film was basically the third stage in an already highly successful entertainment career. It is a tribute to Fields’s ability to invent and reinvent himself that he was twice able to make the difficult transition from one phase of show business to another, first from a juggler in vaudeville to a musical comedy star on Broadway, and then from the stage to the screen—a career move that has proved over the years to be a stumbling block for many famous stars of the theater.
Fields may not have been the greatest juggler of his era, but he was the most popular and successful. Up until World War I, he played all over the world and was a huge star, especially in England and Germany. That Fields was a marvelous juggler with a variety of objects, particularly cigar boxes, we can see for ourselves because he incorporated juggling routines into a number of his movies. Still, no matter how proficient a juggler may be, he is bound to make mistakes in live performances, and Fields quickly learned to incorporate his errors into his act, making them seem intentional and making light of them. He realized that a little comedy could help him out of tight spots, and it was as a comic juggler that Fields scored his greatest successes, usually dressed as a tramp in a way that eerily foreshadows Charlie Chaplin’s screen persona (both were working from precursors in the English music hall tradition). Fields had a favorite trick with five cigar boxes tied together by hidden strings. He first performed it to his audience’s amazement and then revealed the secret to them. As Fields wrote about “the great cigar-box trick” in a 1904 magician’s handbook: “the experiment possesses an advantage over many others, inasmuch as the performer nearly always brings the house down with appreciation for his almost miraculous dexterity, and afterwards secures a laugh so hearty as to nearly shake the foundations of the theatre when the audience see how they have been sold.”[vii] Illusion—disillusion: here in his early days as a juggler, we already see in miniature the characteristic rhythm of Fields’s comedy. He loved to cast a spell over an audience, but he took equal delight in exposing his own magic as a fraud.
The outbreak of World War I made it impossible for Fields to continue his world tours as a juggler, and he seized the opportunity to make the transition from the variety circuit to the Broadway stage. He accepted an offer from the greatest theatrical impresario of the day, Flo Ziegfeld, and first appeared in the famous Ziegfeld Follies in 1915. Fields gradually became one of the biggest names on Broadway, appearing with such legendary performers as Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, and Fanny Brice. With Ziegfeld he was featured in the sort of brief comic sketches that served as interludes between the main attractions of the show—the song and dance numbers for beautiful women that were Ziegfeld’s specialty. Fields eventually got to star in full-length Broadway plays in the 1920s, several of them worked up specifically as vehicles for him and his particular talents. It was in the course of these performances that he developed and perfected the comic persona that he was later to display in his films, and indeed some of his films, such as Poppy (1936) were remakes of plays he had done on Broadway.
Perhaps the most famous of all Fields’s comic routines was first performed as “The Stolen Bonds” on Broadway in 1928 and then immortalized in 1932 as The Fatal Glass of Beer, a short film Fields made for Mack Sennett, the king of Hollywood comedy in the silent era. The Fatal Glass of Beer is a condensed parody of a kind of melodrama that was popular in the nineteenth century (epitomized by a play called The Drunkard, which Fields incorporated into his 1934 full-length film The Old-Fashioned Way). Such stories of moral reformation—of a man who succumbs to the temptation of vice and learns to overcome it—clearly rubbed Fields the wrong way, especially when the vice in question was insobriety.[viii] The ridiculously stylized and stilted acting in the short film makes fun of the moralism these melodramas purveyed. By 1930, with Prohibition still in force, Fields was itching to ridicule the demonizing of rum, beer, and other alcoholic beverages. But as comedy, The Fatal Glass of Beer transcends its immediate satiric target. The action shows Fields at his absurdist best, from his impossibly bad zither playing and singing to his going off “to milk the elk.” Above all, Fields makes fun of movies themselves throughout the short. As Louvish writes: “the staginess of the film, which made it, at the time, a box-office disaster, seems to show a wonderful contempt for the motion-picture conventions, which fits our ‘post-modern’ conceits.”[ix]
The way Fields’s stage sketches overlap with moments in his films shows that there was no sharp break between his career in theater and his career in motion pictures. Like any good gambler, Fields hedged his bets. While he was making his debut on Broadway, he was still appearing in vaudeville shows. Similarly, Fields did not make the move from Broadway to Hollywood in one abrupt step but tested the California waters several times before committing himself. In fact, he was quite prescient and saw very early that the motion picture was the wave of the future in entertainment. He appeared in a silent film as early as 1915, and by the 1920s he was starring in full-length versions of his Broadway hits. Just as World War I effectively brought Fields’s vaudeville career to an end, the Depression and its devastating impact on Broadway business finally convinced Fields to give up the stage and devote himself fully to a movie career. In 1930 he left New York and moved to the Los Angeles area for good, following the path westward that is forever linked with the American dream, even in Fields’s own film, It’s A Gift.
FIELDS IN THE MOVIES
The motion picture industry never knew quite what to do with Fields. Given the quirkiness of his comic imagination, he needed more freedom to develop his ideas in film than the studio system of his day was willing to grant him. He was often teamed with writers and directors who did not share his vision, with the result that his films suffer from inconsistency. Some of Fields’s problems in Hollywood no doubt resulted from his own limitations. He was, after all, roughly fifty years old when he finally decided to commit himself whole-heartedly to motion pictures, and as adaptable as he was, he had spent almost his whole life on stage in one form or another, and brought many theatrical habits with him to Hollywood. Louvish quotes Fields: “The hardest thing for a former stage player to get used to in movie work is to do your stuff minus applause or encouragement before a handful of cameramen and technical directors. You wonder if you’re getting across, and there’s no way of finding out.”[x] Unlike comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Fields never developed a truly cinematic imagination and contributed very little to the art of the motion picture. His movies often feel as if they are merely filmed versions of stage plays. The fact that he often appeared in films based on his Broadway successes did not help him learn what is distinctive about cinema as a medium. For that matter, the plays that Fields had appeared in were not exactly models of dramatic construction to begin with and often consisted of a series of comic sketches loosely strong together like his famous cigar boxes.
One could argue that Fields was fundamentally a sketch comedian. As brilliant as his comic mind was, he tended to think in terms of individual routines, perfectly molded within blocks of time, but for that very reason they were self-contained and difficult to integrate into a larger drama as a whole. Thus the plots of Fields’s movies often seem designed merely to provide an excuse for him to go into one of his favorite routines—the golf sketch, the pool sketch, the Pullman car sketch, or the back porch sketch.[xi] Before pronouncing too negative a judgment on Fields’s film career, we should, however, recall that he never had creative control over his movies in the way that Charlie Chaplin did over his. To see the distinctive nature of Fields’s comic vision, it might be best to look at The Bank Dick (1940). In that case, Fields got to write the film largely by himself (under one of his marvelous pseudonyms—Mahatma Kane Jeeves), and the director Edward Cline gave him more freedom than he usually had to shape one of his movies. The result is Fields’s motion picture masterpiece. With generally faster cutting than in his other films, The Bank Dick is well-paced, less stagey, and more cinematic.[xii] The multiple plots and subplots are well integrated, with all of them coming together in the pure cinema of the chase sequence at the end. Fields drew on many of his favorite routines for the movie, but, as Louvish writes: “For the first time one does not get a sense of comic episodes strung together for the sake of convenience, but a coherent whole, knit together and flowing from point to point with inexorable logic.”[xiii] And in its satiric targets, the film serves up a compendium of Fields’s comic preoccupations.
In The Bank Dick Fields plays the aptly named Egbert Sousé (he carefully stresses the accent mark to everyone he meets). The film begins with one of the dysfunctional family scenes that are Fields’s trademark—the breakfast table from hell. Fields always portrayed family life as a nightmarish labyrinth of tensions—between husbands and wives and parents and children, with in-laws, suitors, and assorted hangers-on thrown in to make life even more complicated and unpleasant for the characters. The many dysfunctional families in Fields’s films no doubt reflect his own unsuccessful and troubled domestic life. He broke up with his wife after having one child and spent the rest of his days maintaining an uneasy relationship with the estranged Hattie Fields, largely in the hope of staying in touch with his son, Claude Jr.
Sousé is the typical family man in Fields—henpecked by his wife and mother-in-law, mooched off by his children, and harassed by all sorts of outside forces, including snooping neighbors. Fields is particularly negative about the way women try to domesticate men. Sousé must fight a constant battle just to have the opportunity to smoke and drink. All the forces arrayed against him are summed up when his daughter priggishly complains at breakfast: “My Sunday school teacher Mr. Stackhouse told me that he saw my father coming out of a saloon the other day and that dad was smoking a pipe!”[xiv] Like many of Fields’s heroes, Sousé seeks refuge from the stifling world of women in a masculine retreat—in this case the Black Pussy Café, presided over by the friendly bartender Joe (played by Shemp Howard, of Three Stooges fame). From a historical perspective, Fields’s comedies represent a male backlash against what today would be called female empowerment in the first quarter of the twentieth century. No doubt Fields saw women as the chief political force behind Prohibition and he never forgave them for that. Like many of Fields’s heroes, Sousé is threatened with emasculation. Belittled by the women in his life, dismissed as uncouth and unproductive, he is not the master of his own household. In particular, his mother-in-law accuses him of being a worthless dreamer, whose idea for supporting his family is to enter puzzle contests or to suggest advertising slogans and hope for the best.
THE AMERICAN SCHEME
Here is where the American dream enters Fields’s comic universe. For Fields, the get-rich quick scheme is a way for a man to recapture his dignity and reassert his authority in his family. The Fields hero has usually been emasculated in the first place because of some form of economic irresponsibility. Unable to bring home the bacon, he no longer gets to sit at the head of the table. Sometimes the Fields hero is a misunderstood genius, like the inventor Sam Bisbee in You’re Telling Me (1934), with his revolutionary puncture-proof tire, or the memory expert Ambrose Wolfinger in Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), with his eccentric but unfailingly accurate filing system. Fields’s It’s A Gift (1934) opens to the upbeat strains of “California, Here I Come,” signaling that it will explore a classic incarnation of the American dream. The film’s hero, Harold Bissonette, will follow Horace Greeley’s injunction to Americans—“Go West, young man”—in his effort to make something of himself. Bissonette had initially failed, according to his shrewish wife, in his “scheme to revive the celluloid collar.” She says that it “was going to make us a fortune,” but she pointedly asks: “Where is it?” But Bissonette does not give up—he cannot stand his life as a harried grocery store proprietor, at the mercy of his demanding customers, including a man who insists on purchasing no less than ten pounds of cumquats and a blind man who turns out to be the original bull in a china shop. Living in New Jersey, Bissonette finds the West Coast beckoning and he dreams of making his fortune by purchasing his own orange grove.[xv] In the face of warnings against his venture, Bissonette sticks to his guns the way an American entrepreneur should: “I got my heart set on a thing; I’m going through with it.” After a long trek to California with his grumbling family in tow, Bissonette finds that his dream grove is in reality a nightmare of totally unproductive land. But at the last minute, Bissonette’s story has a happy ending. A neighboring race track desperately needs his land to build its grandstand and buys him out for many times what he originally paid—and throws in a functioning orange grove to boot. Bissonette’s move from the East Coast to California to realize the American dream turns out to be almost as rewarding financially as Fields’s own move to Hollywood.
Sometimes the Fields hero is an outright con man; a good example is the 1939 movie You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, in which Fields plays Larson E. Whipsnade, a circus owner who is always just one step ahead of the law. Short one act, Whipsnade steps into the center ring himself as Buffalo Bella—“the only bearded-lady sharpshooter in the world”—and later he substitutes for the absent Edgar Bergen in what must be the worst ventriloquist performance in the history of show business. But even when Fields plays a legitimate businessman like Sam Bisbee, there is an element of larceny in his soul. Bisbee meets a real aristocrat, Princess Lescaboura, on a train, and she devotes herself to rehabilitating his fallen reputation with the social elite in his hometown. But Bisbee thinks that she must be an impostor when he hears the Fieldsian moniker Lescaboura: “That’s a funny name; how did you think that up? I hope we can put it over on my wife.” Even when the whole town turns out to welcome the famous princess, Bisbee thinks that she is playing a part: ”This princess stuff is working like a million dollars—keep it up.” We might as well be back in the world of the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn, and the idea that in America all aristocracy is phony.[xvi] Bisbee cannot believe that a real princess would come to his aid, but he is happy to accept help from a fraud. Like all Fields heroes, he will do anything to restore his place in the community—except hold down a regular job. Instead of bringing home a weekly paycheck, the Fields hero usually plays for higher stakes and looks to make one big killing.[xvii] His family despises him for not pursuing the ordinary middle-class route to financial solvency, but his great hope is that if just one of his schemes pays off, he will be back on top again and secure in his masculinity. Winning a lottery has often been viewed as the epitome of the American dream, and Fields grasped the deep connection between the entrepreneur and the gambler in America.
In The Bank Dick Fields weaves together several configurations of the American dream. In the main plot, Sousé becomes a local hero by accidentally thwarting a bank robbery. In gratitude the bank president gives him a “hearty handclasp” and a job as a guard. In Sousé’s improbable success story, Fields sought to expose the arbitrariness of fame and the hollowness of heroism. The way he has the coward Sousé revel in his newfound reputation as a hero reminds us that Shakespeare’s Falstaff—perhaps the greatest drunkard in all literature—was one of the ultimate sources of Fields’s comic persona. Just as the number of highwaymen who attack Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One famously multiplies as he recounts the incident, the knife a bank robber supposedly pulls on Sousé grows and grows in his retelling of the tale, until “the sword that Lee surrendered to Grant was a potato peeler by comparison.”
Another version of the American dream in The Bank Dick is financial. The boyfriend of Sousé’s daughter, Og Oggilby (played by Fields’s favorite screen dunce, Grady Sutton) ends up buying 5,000 shares of stock in Beefsteak Mines at Egbert’s insistence: “You don’t want to work all your life—take a chance!” (the motto of gamblers and lottery participants everywhere). The stock is being peddled by J. Frothingham Waterbury, a slick and fast-talking con man—the part Fields usually played himself in his movies. Waterbury first tantalizes Sousé with his own version of the American dream: “Sixteen cylinder cars—big home in the city—balconies upstairs and down--home in the country—big trees, private golf course--streams running through the rear of the estate.” It is hilarious to hear first Sousé and then Oggilby try to repeat this materialist mantra and get it all jumbled up in the process. Fields shows how elusive the American dream can be, even when one is just trying to formulate it. Although Oggilby at first appears to be in deep trouble—right after he “borrows” funds from the bank to buy the worthless stock, an auditor shows up—the Beefsteak proves to be a bonanza and Og can look forward to rolling in money (which he generously agrees to share with Sousé, whom he dubs “a financial wizard”). Og has done nothing to deserve his financial windfall; Fields thereby makes fun of the arbitrariness and even absurdity of another archetypal American road to success—the stock market. A victim of the 1929 crash, Fields liked to satirize the world of Wall Street—with its high-pressure sales tactics, mad speculation, and wild ups and downs, it struck Fields as just another con game.
The Bank Dick embodies Fields’s insight into the fantasy element of motion pictures. He exposes the way movies pander to the masculine dream of becoming a hero and/or striking it rich—in a Depression world in which obscurity and poverty had becomes the likely fate of the vast majority of people. With his genius for parody, Fields piles up the Hollywood clichés in The Bank Dick and reveals how male frustration generates the stock plot twists of cinematic melodrama, especially the abrupt reversals of fortune. Fields makes explicit the connection between the American dream and the motion picture industry itself. In one of the subplots, a film company arrives in Sousé’s hometown and gets in trouble when its director goes off on a ten-day bender. Ironically, the usually inebriated Sousé gets to save Hollywood from the effects of the director’s insobriety. Meeting the film’s producer in a bar, Sousé starts reminiscing: “In the old Sennett days, I used to direct Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the rest of them. I can’t get the celluloid out of my blood.” Drawing upon his self-proclaimed expertise as a director and screenwriter, Sousé takes over the film and is soon remaking it into a typical Fields vehicle: “I’ve changed everything—instead of an English drawing room drama, I’ve made it a circus picture” (although the only scene we see Sousé rehearsing is a football story).
Delighted with his own work, Egbert is soon proclaiming in tried-and-true Hollywood rhetoric: “We’re making motion picture history here.” Fields is merciless in ridiculing all the Hollywood stupidities he had lived with for years, including the miscasting he often suffered from himself. The film pairs a very tall leading man with a very short leading lady. But above all Fields shows how perfectly congruent the shabby dream world of a cheap Hollywood production is with the shabby dream world of small-town America. Indeed the producer links the two forever when he complains: “We’ve got a 36-hour schedule and a stinko script. . . and it opens in this very town the day after tomorrow.”
In the best concluding chase scene in all his movies,[xviii] Fields mixes together small-town heroism, Wall Street, and Hollywood in a grand cocktail of the American dream. Sousé once again becomes an inadvertent hero and gets a $5,000 reward for accidentally apprehending one of the original bank robbers a second time. In the process he saves Og’s stolen Beefsteak stock, and the movie producer shows up to offer him $10,000 for a script idea he let drop on the set of the film he was directing. Sousé thus ends up a rich man, and in the last scene he presides over a mansion, living in the lap of luxury and finally commanding the respect of his family. Of courses, the women in the family claim the credit for Sousé’s transformation. His mother-in-law observes to his wife: “What a changed man! You deserve a lot of credit, Agatha.” She piously intones: “It hasn’t been easy.” But Fields leaves us laughing at the idea that money has actually changed Egbert Sousé. He concludes the film with an image of Sousé following the siren call of Joe the Bartender. You can take the Fields hero out of the saloon, but you can’t take the saloon out of the Fields hero. In Fields’s cynical dissection of the American Dream, family life and middle-class domesticity turn out to be incompatible with a man’s yearning for the freedom of the open road.
In Fields’s next—and in effect his final—film, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), he chose to drop his mask and for once play himself, a character named W. C. Fields. In postmodern fashion, the film opens with Fields in front of a billboard for The Bank Dick, forced to listen to some street urchins badmouthing his recent film. Since “W. C. Fields” was already one of Fields’s creations, the character he plays in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break turns out to be not very different from the persona he had been portraying for years. Although the movie is uneven in quality, it brilliantly continues Fields’s satiric attack on Hollywood. Most of the film consists of Fields trying to peddle an inept script to a producer at Esoteric Pictures. Fields makes fun of the crazy logic or rather lack of logic in Hollywood movies. The producer constantly interrupts Fields to point out holes in the plot he is spinning, such as having a woman supposedly raised in seclusion on a remote mountain top in Russia go into a song-and-dance routine that evidences familiarity with the latest American trends in “jumpin’ jive.” With its artistic self-consciousness—it is after all a film about making a film—Never Give a Sucker an Even Break ends up being Field’s most postmodern production. In one scene, he pans from sound stage to sound stage, exposing the artificiality of the world of Hollywood as he reveals the cameras, boom microphones, and other studio paraphernalia that go to make the movie. The moment when some goose-stepping Nazi soldiers march right through a musical production number by co-star Gloria Jean could have been the inspiration for Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler” sketch in The Producers.
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break was not quite Fields’s farewell to the screen—he appeared in several cameo roles in later films before his death in 1946—but it provided his final word on the Hollywood he both loved and hated. Fields keeps interrupting the story with reminders of the phoniness and tawdriness of the cinema, but at the same time he is still able to work the old magic and keep us laughing at the absurd lameness of his own ways of telling the story. It is the old cigar box trick writ large.
FIELDS FOR PRESIDENT
In his long career, Fields had one more trick up his sleeve. His interest in the American dream and especially the con man’s version of it inevitably led him to politics, the realm in which the American talent for deception and fraud has reached its greatest heights—and depths. As the quintessential con man, Fields sensed that he might belong in politics. Accordingly, in 1940, Fields lived the dream that all Americans by birth are entitled to pursue—he ran for President of the United States.[xix] Records of such minor details as his officially registering as a candidate or getting his name on ballots across the country are sadly unavailable, but like so many politicians in our day Fields definitely got a book deal out of his campaign. Fields for President was originally published in 1940 by Dodd, Mead and Company. With show business in his blood, Fields intuited something about democratic politics in America—that it has many links to the world of entertainment and the mass media. Looking back on Field’s presidential run in 1940 from the vantage point of what we know today, we cannot help noticing that he anticipated many of the dubious trends in American politics in the decades since his death. In an age when politics seemed at its most serious—right after the Depression and during World War II—Fields saw the comic, ignoble, and indeed the seamy side of American democracy and grasped the way that political reputation and celebrity might come to fuse in a democratic arena. Above all, Fields sensed the link between the politician and the con man, in a passage that anticipates Coppola’s Godfather films in the way it runs together business, government, and crime: “If he knows nothing else, a President should at least understand the secret of success in the business world. For, after all, what is the Presidency but a glorified business—or, at least a fine racket?”[xx]
Although Fields surely did not develop a coherent political philosophy, his reflections on government and its function (or dysfunction) have a certain consistency and in general lean in a libertarian direction. Fields planned his campaign around a variant of a familiar slogan—“A chickadee in every pot”[xxi]—and was unusually candid in addressing the American people: “When, on next November 5th, I am elected chief executive of this fair land, amidst thunderous cheering and shouting and throwing of babies out the window, I shall, my fellow citizens, offer no such empty panaceas as a New Deal, or an Old Deal, or even a Re-Deal. No, my friends, the reliable old False Shuffle was good enough for my father and it’s good enough for me.”[xxii] Fields cut through the usual campaign rhetoric and got right to the heart of what is on the minds of voters: “The major responsibility of a President is to squeeze the last possible cent out of the taxpayer.”[xxiii]
Fields’s obsession with the federal income tax threatened to turn him into a one-issue candidate. He kept harping on the dreaded moment when payments to the IRS come due: “That is the day when all the citizens of our fair land may practice their inalienable rights of sending a fat slice of their yearly increments to Washington; in return, our Congressmen will forward packages of radish seed or intimate camera shots of themselves weeding their farms or kissing their grandchildren.”[xxiv] Fields’s antipathy to the tax authorities dated all the way back to the days when he toured the world as a juggler. In 1913, he complained about being stopped by a policeman in Prague:
I was informed that I would have to pay a tax of five cents for coming home at that hour. (It appears they tax everyone who remains out after nine o’clock.) I asked the policeman what would happen if I didn’t come home at all. He said I wouldn’t have to pay in that case. And, ashamed as I am to tell it, I must admit that I strolled away and didn’t come back to my rooms for two weeks—and then I left without paying half the taxes I owed the city.[xxv]
Over the years, Fields was to become more adept at evading taxes, and with good reason. He was especially incensed when President Roosevelt proposed capping Hollywood actors’ annual incomes at $25,000.[xxvi] Fields became famous for his ongoing battles with the IRS over his aggressive deduction strategy on his tax returns. He is rumored to have claimed as a business expense $25,000 spent on milk for entertaining the press.[xxvii] One year he supposedly tried to deduct his liquor bill as a legitimate business expense.[xxviii] After all, he did have a public image as a drunk to maintain.
Beyond Fields’s rants about taxes, he spoke out in the name of freedom in several areas of American life. In a Hollywood that generally favored Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, and sometimes celebrated them on screen, Fields refused to jump on the Democratic Party bandwagon and proved to be the great contrarian. He had the audacity to make fun of one of the central planks of the New Deal—FDR’s new labor policy, specifically the new power granted to labor unions by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act. In Fields’s You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, Larson Whipsnade’s struggles as a small town circus manager are made even more complicated by a labor thug who barges into his office with the ominous words: “You don’t want no trouble with the unions, do you”—a line that had more resonance for the Hollywood of Fields’s day than most filmmakers would have dared to admit in public. When the union goon says, “Now you take the Wagner Act,” Fields’s character replies, “You take them. We had them last summer—the worst acrobats I ever saw.” In a Hollywood whose New Deal sympathies were soon to culminate in John Ford’s film of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, a joke at the expense of the Wagner Act was a rare exception.[xxix]
For Fields, the central symbol of what was wrong with federal government policy was of course the Noble Experiment, Prohibition. A lifetime devotee of potent potables, Fields had no sympathy for the U. S. government’s attempt to impose a temperance policy on its citizens. Throughout Prohibition, he reveled in making fun of the stupidity of the anti-alcohol policy. We have already discussed his hilarious 1933 short, The Fatal Glass of Beer, which skewers temperance melodramas. As with Fields’s animus against the IRS, his hatred of Prohibition had a personal basis, but a more general attitude toward liberty emerges in his comedy as a whole. The great target of satire in Fields’s works is the busybody, the person who in the time-honored American puritan tradition tries to tell you how to live your life. It may be your boss, your wife, your mother-in-law, a snoopy neighbor, a temperance preacher, a policeman, or an agent of the federal government. But in each case, someone tells you what is good for you and it never turns out to be what you yourself want to do—whether it is drinking, smoking, or simply going to the wrestling matches in the afternoon. Fields evidently was struck by how much time and effort some people devote to interfering in other people’s lives for no reason beyond the pleasure of exercising power over them.
Fields’s vision of how overregulated our lives have become is caught perfectly in his short film The Golf Specialist (1930). According to a wanted poster, the film’s protagonist, Effingham Bellwether, stands accused of a multitude of transgressions:
BIGAMY.
PASSING AS THE PRINCE OF WALES.
EATING SPAGHETTI IN PUBLIC.
USING HARD WORDS IN A SPEAKEASY.
TRUMPING PARTNER’S ACE.
SPITTING IN THE GULF STREAM.
JUMPING BOARD BILL IN 17 LUNATIC ASSYLUMS.
FAILING TO PAY INSTALLMENTS ON A STRAITJACKET.
POSSESSING A SKUNK.
REVEALING THE FACTS OF LIFE TO AN INDIAN.[xxx]
With his genius for the absurd, Fields exaggerated the bizarre lengths to which society will go to regulate human conduct, but if he were alive today, he might find that life has outrun art. With contemporary concerns over the environment, animal rights, and cultural sensitivity, it would not be surprising to find that all of Bellwether’s activities are by now illegal in one jurisdiction or another.
Fields himself sometimes ran afoul of the authorities in ways that made him an early martyr to political correctness. In 1928, he was hauled into a New York court on charges of cruelty to a canary. The local Humane Society had accused him of mistreating the bird in one of his dentist sketches on Broadway and being responsible for its death. Fields was acquitted on the grounds that the canary had actually been killed when the Humane Society officers tried to have it photographed as evidence and the smoke from the flashbulbs asphyxiated it. This story may be apocryphal—Louvish suggests that the affair may have originated as a publicity stunt—but in any case it offers an apt parable of how do-gooding can backfire.[xxxi]
Mistreating canaries was undoubtedly not the cornerstone of Fields’s achievement as a comedian, but in one respect his conflict with an overintrusive society went straight to the heart of his art. He found himself constantly at odds with the Hollywood censors. Fields’s humor was often off-color, with sexual innuendo or double entendre in the dialogue, as well as sight gags that bordered on the obscene (notably in the 1932 short film The Dentist). What strikes us now is the incredible pettiness of the censors Fields had to deal with. In 1939 he got into trouble over a line in the script for his film with Mae West, My Little Chickadee: “I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to India and become a missionary. I know there’s good money in it, too.” As Louvish documents, these lines were challenged by Joseph Breen, censor-in-chief with the motion picture censorship board. The now infamous Hays Production Code ruled out anything “suggestive of an unfavorable, or derogatory, or comedy, reflection on the gentlemen of the cloth.” Hoping to salvage his script in foreign markets, Fields wrote directly to Breen in a desperate attempt to keep the line: “Will this also have to be deleted from the European version or does that not come under your jurisdiction? I’ve got to get a laugh out of this picture somewhere even if it’s down in India.”[xxxii] Fields’s humor was evidently lost on Breen, who became even pickier when dealing with Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Breen was determined not to let Fields get away with anything this time and his memo to the studio is quite explicit and peremptory: “Any and all dialogue and showing of bananas and pineapples is unacceptable by reason of the fact that all this business and dialogue is a play upon an obscene story.”[xxxiii]
In a heroic gesture on behalf of denture-wearers everywhere, Breen put his censorious foot down: “The business of the man taking out his false teeth strikes me as a piece of business which will give offense to mixed audiences”[xxxiv]—a sentence so preposterous it sounds like something Fields might have written himself. Faced with the ultimate busybody in Breen, he could only respond by making censorship itself the butt of his comedy in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, with the famous line: “This scene was supposed to be in a saloon, but the censor cut it out.”
THE LIBERTARIAN COMEDIAN
Fields’s vision might best be described as absurdist anarchism or anarchic absurdism. He ridiculed all figures of authority mercilessly, revealing them as petty, pompous, and silly, while exposing their efforts to govern our lives as meddlesome, misguided, and inept. He celebrated the spirit of individualism and enterprise, even when the entrepreneurship took eccentric or even morally questionable forms, like the gadget inventor, the carney barker, or the patent medicine salesman. As a champion of free speech and an opponent of the federal income tax, Big Labor, puritanical experiments such as Prohibition, and intrusive regulation in general, Fields was an early champion of what is today known as libertarianism.
With his successful careers in vaudeville, Broadway, Hollywood, and radio Fields could lay claim to being the representative figure of American show business in the first half of the twentieth century. As we have seen, Fields quite consciously and deliberately made himself into a star. He understood what would be today called the constructed nature of celebrity and knew how to exploit all the media institutions of the modern age to fashion the public image he desired. And he made the frustrating and endless struggle to become someone else the theme of his films, as he debunked a variety of incarnations of the American dream. Beginning with his juggling act, his own ability to create illusions, which he found mirrored everywhere in Hollywood, made him obsessive about the hollowness and evanescence of celebrity, especially his own. In the end, though, the joke was on Fields. For all his frustrations and unhappiness in life, his achievement as a comedian has turned out to be lasting, and ironically the very medium whose reality he questioned—the motion picture—is what allowed him to create images of himself that have fixed him in the public eye forever. However cynical he may have been, Fields himself offers proof in his life story that there really is something to the American dream after all. Where else but in America could the humbly born William Claude Dukenfield have had the chance to become W. C. Fields--a major star, wealthy and famous beyond the wildest dreams of his childhood?
[i] For an analysis of how this logic plays out in the nineteenth-century novel, see René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). Girard’s theory of “mimetic desire” is perfectly illustrated by Being John Malkovich. We look up to our celebrity idols so much that we want to be them in the most ordinary details of their lives, or, rather, the ordinary details of their lives become extraordinary to us because they are celebrities. On the connections between postmodernism and democracy, see my essay “Waiting for Godot and the End of History: Postmodernism as a Democratic Aesthetic,” in Democracy and the Arts, ed. Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and Richard Zinman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 172-92, 201-6.
[ii] Quoted in Simon Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 468. Portions of this chapter were originally published in a review of Louvish’s book in The Weekly Standard, February 21, 2000, 29-33. I have relied heavily on Louvish’s excellent biography for the facts of Fields’s life, as well as on Louvish’s central thesis that Fields “was forever inventing and re-inventing himself” (10); his life is “an actor’s tale, the story of a creative artist whose greatest creation was himself, a fully achieved, imaginary person, who completely subsumed his creator” (12).
[iii] See, in particular, the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1986).
[iv] Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 28.
[v] Ibid., 9, 15, 474.
[vi] Ibid., 34.
[vii] Ibid., 51.
[viii] As we saw in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain also satirized con men who use stories of moral reformation to extract money from a gullible public.
[ix] Louvish, FlyingTrapeze, 343.
[x] Ibid., 282.
[xi] On this point, see Simon Louvish, It’s a Gift (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 20. Louvish points out that, in the true spirit of the American entrepreneur, Fields “actually patented his own original sketches, such as his golf skit, listed as ‘Copyright Number 109’ on 4 November 1918” (25).
[xii] We can see how carefully Fields worked on the final cut of The Bank Dick by examining his notes to the studio concerning the preview of the film, printed in the volume of his writings assembled by his grandson, Ronald Fields, W. C. Fields by Himself (New York: Warner Books, 1974). After detailing which scenes need to be cut and which restored, Fields ends with a not-so-veiled threat to the studio: “However, if some kind of adjustment cannot be arrived at I shall reluctantly insist upon the clause where it is agree we each pick a judge and mutually agree upon a third person to decide” (467).
[xiii] Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 451.
[xiv] I have transcribed all quotations from Fields’s films from the DVD versions.
[xv] Louvish aptly describes Bissonette: “Inside the small-town failure, J. P. Morgan struggles to spring out, to realize the American dream” (Louvish, It’s A Gift, 47).
[xvi] Fields enjoyed making fun of any sort of aristocratic pretension, which he, like Twain, associates with claiming European roots. We have already seen that Egbert Sousé insists on a French pronunciation of his name. In It’s A Gift, the social climbing Mrs. Bissonette similarly points out to everybody that her name should be pronounced “BissoNAY.”
[xvii] With their hope springing eternal, Fields’s heroes resemble the character of Mr. Micawber in Dickens’s David Copperfield and his principle of “something will turn up.” An avid reader of Dickens, Fields to some extent modeled his comic persona on Mr. Micawber (Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 122-23). He was thus perfectly positioned to play the role in the 1935 George Cukor film of David Copperfield, and he delivered one of his greatest performances on screen. Louvish points out: “His only regret in the part was Dickens’ foolish omission of a poolroom scene” (389). Once again we are faced with a vertiginous postmodern spiral—a real man, W. C. Fields, is playing the cinematic reproduction of a character out of a book, a character on whom he had based his stage persona in the first place.
[xviii] In his notes on the preview, Fields immodestly said: “The chase I thought the best I have ever seen” (Ronald Fields, Fields By Himself, 467)
[xix] Ever ahead of his time, Fields thus anticipated the faux presidential runs of comedian Pat Paulsen in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1988, 1992, and 1996.
[xx] W. C. Fields, Fields for President, with commentary by Michael M. Taylor (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1973), 23.
[xxi] Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 431.
[xxii] Fields, President, 10-12.
[xxiii] Ibid., 20.
[xxiv] Ibid., 47.
[xxv] Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 103-104.
[xxvi] Ibid., 350-51.
[xxvii] Fields, President, 45.
[xxviii] Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 351.
[xxix] See ibid., 411-13, for more on Fields’s making fun of the New Deal and labor unions. In a more serious context, the threat of a union shutting down a production comes up again in Coppola’s The Godfather I, as part of Don Corleone’s plot to get Johnny Fontane a part in a movie.
[xxx] Ibid., 312-13.
[xxxi] Ibid., 308-309. For what purports to be a transcript of Fields’s trial for avicide, see Ronald Fields, Fields By Himself, 94-117.
[xxxii] Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 439. For Fields’s full letter to Breen, see Ronald Fields, Fields By Himself, 447.
[xxxiii] Louvish, Flying Trapeze, 461.
[xxxiv] Ibid.
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