W. C. Fields

by J. B. PRIESTLEY

SO NOW there is another cold gap, for W. C. Fields is dead. I wrote the rough treatment of a film for him once — and kept my family all winter in Arizona on the proceeds (those were the days) — but the film was never made, chiefly, I think, because even then Fields could no longer sustain a leading role. It was a story about an itinerant piano tuner wandering round the ranches in the Southwest, and had some good Fieldsian situations in it. In one of them Fields, in despair and after some desperate bragging, decides to get tough and hold up a car, but the car he chooses is full of old Western sharpshooters on their way to a rodeo and delighted to find a little target practice. If you remember Fields, you can imagine him in that situation.

I saw him long before he found his way to Hollywood, before 1914, when he was touring the halls in England with his juggling and trick billiard table act. He was very funny even then, and I seem to remember him balancing a number of cigar boxes and staring with horror at a peculiar box, in the middle of the pile, that wobbled strangely, as if some evil influence were at work. All his confidence, which you guessed from the first to be a desperate bluff, vanished at the sight, of this one diabolical box, which began to threaten him with the nightmare of hostile and rebellious things.

And this, I fancy, was the secret of his huge and enchanting drollery — though, oddly enough, it seems to have been missed — that he moved, warily in spite of a hastily assumed air of nonchalant confidence, through a world in which even the inanimate objects were hostile, rebellious, menacing, never to be trusted. He had to be able to juggle with things, to be infinitely more dexterous than you and I need be, to find it possible to handle them at all. They were not, you see, his things, these commonplace objects of ours. He did not belong to this world, but had arrived from some other and easier planet.

All the truly great clowns — and Fields was undoubtedly one of them — have the same transient look. They are not men of this world being funny. They are serious personages — perhaps musicians like Grock, ambassadors with attendants like the Fratellini, or hopeful inventor-promoters like Fields — who have, through some blunder on the part of a celestial Thomas Cook, landed from the other side of Arcturus on the wrong planet. They make the best of a bad business, but what is easy for us — merely picking up a bag of golf clubs or moving a chair — is horribly difficult for them. Things that give us no trouble offer them obstacles and traps, for nothing here is on their side.

Nobody could suggest the malice of objects better than Fields. At his best moments, an ordinary room, empty of other human beings, could turn itself into a mined mountain pass. He could start a bitter feud with two chairs and a sideboard. When he arrived in places like golf courses or billiard rooms he would be plunged into an Arabian Night of sorcery. Once in a delirious short film he appeared as a dentist, surrounded by gadgets and visited by curious patients, and then there was nothing for it but to go berserk; and as you stared at him you could feel your temperature rising. He wandered through Hollywood films like a hoarse Ally Sloper in Wonderland.

Even when he did not care any more, and was only anxious to sail away on a sea of double Martinis and straight Bourbon, and ambled through any kind of supporting part, usually as a broken-down showman, he was still a character in another dimension, still faintly illuminated by the wonder and nonchalant glory of the great clown. In about the last scene in which I remember seeing him, he was denounced by the outraged host at a party as “an incorrigible prevaricator” or something of that sort. “Is that good or bad?” the Fields character demanded, poised between friendship and fury.

Like so many Americans whom we think of with gratitude and affection, he showed what he thought of the American way of life by drinking and thumbnosing himself clean out of it. Always a ripe character off the stage, he became fruitier and more fantastic in his later years, turning his whole existence into one huge comic character part. He began as a waif and ended as one. The vast pretensions of Hollywood withered away at his glazed look and contemptuous mutter. (Among his entourage he had a man with a tiny head. And with a head like that, Fields announced, “he’ll own Hollywood.”)

Fields was frequently cast as the boaster whose bluff was called, the inventor who achieved nothing useful, the intriguer who missed success; but one always had an odd feeling, perhaps because one knew that this was not really his world at all, that his failure was better than other people’s triumphs. And though he was no Micawber in voice, appearance, manners, somehow he contrived to suggest the indomitable romanticism of Micawber, the spirit that transformed the lower depths of corn and coal agencies into the shining stuff of an epic. He was Micawber’s American grandson who had got into show business and had been kicked around.

He was a professional droll who defied all conventions and soaked himself in hard liquor. No doubt he had had his day. But his departure, perhaps for his real home, where the furniture is quiet and kind and all things behave properly, is a sad loss to America, which could better spare whole rows of hard-faced rich men, glad-handing politicians, obedient editors, and raucous commentators than it could this one rebellious clown. For it is here, among these bitter or uproarious drolls, slapping the custard pie on the faces of solemn prominent citizens, refusing to sign on the dotted line, that American life stays healthy, ripe, still crammed with promise, and not among the brassy patriots and the inquirers into Un-American Activities. Long ago Fields made us laugh by staring in despair at the wobbling cigar boxes. Now the others stare at the wobbling boxes too. But I doubt if they will make anybody laugh.