W.C. Fields
The man we know as W. C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield, the son of James and Kate Dukenfield, in Darby, Pennsylvania, on January 29, 1880 -- though the date is disputed by his first biographer, Robert Lewis Taylor, who gives it as April 9, 1879. But this is typical of Fields's life. Over the years, he told so many stories, tall tales, and straight-out lies about himself that it is difficult to sort fact from fiction.
The result is that W. C. Fields has become a mythic figure, and the actor's persona has been confused with the man himself far more than it has been for any other great comedian of the era. No one ever believed that Groucho Marx was really a grouch or Charlie Chaplin a tramp, but everyone believes that W. C. Fields was really a drunk. In the excellent Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields, recently reprinted in paperback, Simon Louvish has done a heroic job of uncovering the real Fields. If you want to find out if Fields really drank too much, hated children, or squirreled away money under false names in banks all across the country, you must read this book. Louvish interviewed Fields's descendants and had access to a vast amount of documentary material, including the scrapbooks Fields painstakingly compiled throughout his career.
Louvish works hard 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 read: "All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia"). Nevertheless, Fields's childhood was no doubt tough enough, and he dropped out of school at an early age. The young Dukenfield was determined to make something of himself, and that something turned out to be "W. C. Fields, juggler extraordinaire."
Fields may not have had the greatest technique of his era, but he was nonetheless its most popular and successful juggler, and up until World War I, he played all over the globe. That Fields was a marvelous juggler with a variety of objects, particularly cigar boxes, we can tell from the routines he incorporated into his movies. Still, no matter how proficient, a juggler is bound to make mistakes. Fields realized that a little comedy could help him out of tight spots, and it was as a comic juggler that he scored his greatest success. He 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 in a 1904 magician's handbook Louvish uncovered in his exhaustive research: "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." 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 breaking it.
The outbreak of World War I made it impossible for Fields to continue his tours as a juggler, and he seized the opportunity to make the transition to the stage. He accepted an offer from the greatest theatrical impresario of the day, Flo Ziegfeld, and first appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1915. Fields gradually became one of the biggest names on Broadway, appearing with Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, and Bert Williams. Soon passing beyond the brief comic sketches he did as interludes in Ziegfeld's musical extravaganzas, Fields got to star in full-length plays in the 1920s, many of them worked up specifically as vehicles for him.
It was in the course of these productions that he developed and perfected the persona that he was to display on screen, and indeed some of his films, such as Poppy (1936), were remakes of his plays. Particularly valuable for studying Fields's art as a comedian is the 1930 short film The Golf Specialist. Louvish prints the script of this scene as Fields wrote it out for a 1918 stage sketch called "An Episode on the Links." Comparison of this version with The Golf Specialist, as well as the final sequence in Fields's 1934 You're Telling Me!, which used the routine yet again, shows that, however spontaneous and zany Fields's comedy may have seemed, it was carefully scripted and meticulously executed.
Perhaps the greatest of Fields's comic routines was first performed as "The Stolen Bonds" on Broadway in 1928 and then immortalized in 1933 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 popular kind of nineteenth-century melodrama. These stories of moral reformation, of a man who succumbs to vice and learns to overcome it, clearly rubbed Fields the wrong way -- especially when the vice was drink. 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 to his going off to "milk the elk." And, above all, Fields makes fun of movies themselves. 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."
The overlap between Fields's stage sketches and films shows that there was no sharp break in his career. Like any good gambler, Fields hedged his bets. While he was making his debut on Broadway, he was still appearing in vaudeville. Similarly, Fields did not make the move from Broadway to Hollywood in one abrupt step, but tested the waters several times before committing himself. 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 finally convinced Fields to give up the stage and devote himself to a movie career. In 1930 he left New York and moved to Los Angeles.
The motion picture industry never knew what to do with Fields. Many factors conspired to prevent him from using his comic skills to their fullest in motion pictures. His comedy was often off-color, with sexual innuendo or double-entendre in the dialogue and sight gags that bordered on the obscene (most notably in the 1932 The Dentist). Fields's battles with the Hollywood censors were epic, and the changes they demanded in his scripts often blunted the edge of his humor. Being Fields, though, he learned how to make comedy even out of censorship: "This scene was supposed to be in a saloon, but the censor cut it out," he says to the camera in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Fields's quirky comic imagination required more independence than the studio system of his day was willing to grant. He was often teamed with writers and directors who did not share his vision, or given cameo roles in films in which he did not belong and in which he stands out like a sore thumb -- or nose. A good example is the 1933 International House: Fields wanders into the film (or rather flies in on an autogyro), leaving us as confused as he seems to be about what he's doing in China. Even the pairing of Fields with Mae West in the 1940 My Little Chickadee did not work quite as well as expected, though it did produce some of his most famous and funniest moments. Fields and West display a bizarre kind of chemistry, but when the two are not together, the film drags.
The one truly inspired bit of casting Hollywood ever came up with for Fields was the role of Wilkins Micawber in the 1935 movie version of David Copperfield. So completely did Fields make the part his own that one might suspect that Dickens stole his lines for Micawber from Fields. It is even difficult to look at the famous 1850 Phiz drawings in David Copperfield without seeing Fields. The solution to these riddles is found in Louvish's biography. Though Fields had little formal schooling, Dickens was one of his favorite authors and Micawber one of his favorite characters. Fields modeled himself on Micawber almost from the beginning as he set out to create a comic persona, and especially as he shaped the distinctive comic rhythms of his ornate prose: Having patterned his image on a fictional character, he made that fictional character seem to have been patterned on him.
Some of Fields's problems in Hollywood resulted from his own limitations. He was around fifty when he finally committed himself to motion pictures, and adaptable as he was, he brought many theatrical habits with him to Hollywood. Unlike Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Fields never developed a truly cinematic imagination. His movies often feel as if they are merely filmed versions of stage plays. The fact that he sometimes appeared in films based on his Broadway successes did not help. For that matter, the plays Fields had appeared in were not exactly models of dramatic construction, and often consisted of comic bits strung together like his famous cigar boxes. Fields was fundamentally a sketch comedian. The plots of his 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, the back porch sketch.
But we should remember that Fields never had creative control over his movies the way Charlie Chaplin did. To see the distinctive nature of Fields's comic vision, the best film to look at is The Bank Dick (1940). Fields got to write it largely by himself (under one of his marvelous pseudonyms: Mahatma Kane Jeeves), and the director Edward Cline gave him more freedom than usual to shape the movie.
The result is Fields's masterpiece. With generally faster cutting than in his other films, The Bank Dick is well paced, less stagey, and more cinematic. The multiple plots are beautifully integrated, with all of them coming together in the chase sequence at the end. Fields drew upon 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." And in terms of its satiric targets, the film serves up a compendium of Fields's comic obsessions.
In The Bank Dick Fields plays the aptly named Egbert Souse (he keeps stressing the importance of 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 other hangers-on thrown in to make things even more complicated and unpleasant. The many dysfunctional families in Fields's films no doubt reflect his own unsuccessful domestic life. He broke up with his wife after having one child and spent the rest of his days maintaining an uneasy relationship with her, largely in the hope of staying in touch with his son.
Souse 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, and Souse must fight a constant battle just to smoke and drink. From a historical perspective, Fields's comedies represent a male reaction against what today would be called female empowerment in the first quarter of this century. Like many of Fields's heroes, Souse is threatened with emasculation.
Souse is haunted by the American Dream, the hope of striking it rich, of suddenly rising in the world, of becoming something other than the pathetic loser everyone thinks he is. For Fields, the get-rich-quick scheme is specifically a way for a man to reassert his authority in his family. The Fields hero has usually been emasculated because 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 (1935), with his eccentric but unfailing filing system. Sometimes the Fields hero is a con-man; a good example is You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), in which Fields plays Larson E. Whipsnade, a circus owner always one step ahead of the law. Short one act, Whipsnade steps into the ring himself as Buffalo Bella -- "the only bearded-lady sharpshooter in the world." Like all Fields's heroes, he will do anything to impress high society (especially when his daughter's fate is at stake) -- anything, that is, 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. His family despises him for not pursuing the normal 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 and secure in his masculinity.
In The Bank Dick, Fields weaves together several configurations of the American Dream. In the main plot, Souse 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. The way he has the coward Souse revel in his new-found reputation as a hero reminds us that Shakespeare's Falstaff was another source for Fields's comic persona -- and not just because Fields, with his capacity for drink, was Falstaffian himself. Just as the number of highwaymen who attack Falstaff in Henry IV multiplies as he recounts the incident, the knife a bankrobber supposedly pulls on Souse grows and grows in his retelling of the tale, until "the sword that Lee surrendered to Grant was a potato peeler by comparison."
Another element of the American Dream in The Bank Dick is purely financial. The boyfriend of Souse's daughter, Og Oggilby (played by Fields's favorite screen dunce, Grady Sutton) ends up buying five thousand shares of stock in Beefsteak Mines at Egbert's insistence: "You don't want to work all your life -- take a chance!" Though Oggilby at first appears to be in trouble -- right after he "borrows" funds from the bank to buy the worthless stock, the auditor shows up -- the mine proves to be a bonanza. 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.
Indeed, in Field's vision, America is one scam after another, and his greatest discovery was that show business itself is the biggest con game of them all. In The Bank Dick, he exposes the way movies pander to the masculine fantasy of becoming a hero and striking it rich in a Depression world in which obscurity and poverty had become the more likely fate for the majority of men. Fields makes explicit the connection between the American Dream and the motion picture industry.
In one of the subplots, a film company arrives in Souse's hometown and gets in trouble when its director goes off on a ten-day bender. Drawing upon his self-proclaimed expertise as a director and screenwriter, Souse 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" -- though, strangely enough, the only scene we see Souse rehearsing is a football story. Fields is merciless in ridiculing all the Hollywood stupidities he had lived with, including the miscasting (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 thirty-six-hour schedule and a stinko script . . . and it opens in this very town the day after tomorrow."
In the concluding chase scene, Fields weaves together all the threads: small-town heroism, Wall Street, and Hollywood. Souse once again becomes an inadvertent hero and gets a $ 5,000 reward for accidentally apprehending a bank robber 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. Souse thus ends up a rich man, and we see him presiding over a mansion, finally commanding the respect of his family. Fields has the women in the family claim responsibility for Souse's transformation. "What a changed man! You deserve a lot of credit, Agatha," his mother-in-law piously intones. "It hasn't been easy." But Fields leaves us laughing at the idea that money has actually altered anything about Egbert Souse. He concludes the film with an image of Souse following the siren call of his old friend 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 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 W. C. Fields. But since "W. C. Fields" was already one of Fields's creations, the character he portrays in the movie turns out to be not very different from the persona he had been playing for years. Although the movie is very uneven in quality, it continues Fields's satiric attack on Hollywood brilliantly. Most of the film consists of Fields trying to peddle an inept script to a producer at Esoteric Pictures. He makes fun of the crazy logic in Hollywood scripts, with the producer (played by longtime Fields nemesis, Franklin Pangborn) constantly interrupting Fields to point out the holes in the plot he is spinning, such as having a woman supposedly raised in seclusion on a remote mountain top in Russia launching into the latest American song-and-dance routine. Continuing his expose of the motion-picture industry, he pans in one scene from sound stage to sound stage and 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 song production number by co-star Gloria Jean may have been the inspiration for Mel Brooks's "Spring-time for Hitler" sketch in The Producers.
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break was not quite Fields's farewell to the screen, as he appeared in several cameo roles in later films before his death in 1946. But it provided his final word on Hollywood. Fields keeps interrupting the story with reminders of the phoniness and tawdriness of the cinema, but at the same time he still works the old magic and keeps us laughing at the absurd lameness of his own ideas for telling a story. It is the old cigar box trick, once again. As Fields reportedly described his situation on the West Coast: "We are sitting at the crossroads between art and nature, trying to figure out where delirium tremens leaves off and Hollywood begins."
With his successful careers in vaudeville, Broadway, and Hollywood, Fields could lay claim to being the representative figure of American show business in the first half of the twentieth century. He quite consciously and deliberately made himself into a star. He understood the constructed nature of celebrity and knew how to create a public image of himself. And he made the endless struggle to become someone else the theme of his films, as he debunked a variety of incarnations of the American Dream. His own ability to create illusions, which he found mirrored everywhere in Hollywood, made him obsessive about the hollowness and evanescence of celebrity, above all his own.
In the end, though, the joke was on Fields. For all his frustrations and unhappiness, his achievement as a comedian has turned out to be lasting, and ironically the very medium whose honesty he questioned -- the motion picture -- is what allowed him to create the images 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.
