W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

CHAPTER TWO I t was often difficult to trap Fields into telling the truth, but his father was, as he had said, an Englishman — James Dukinfield, a London cockney, whose family had emigrated to this country in the late 1870s. He settled in the Germantown district of Philadelphia and married a neighbor's daughter, Kate Felton. Their first child, William Claude, who later changed his name to W. G. Fields for professional reasons, was born on April 9, 1879. Both the Dukinfields and the Feltons were poor, and Dukinfield had to scramble to make a living. After weighing several professions, he invested in an elderly horse named White Swan and began to hawk vegetables and fruit. Years afterward, Fields was to give various accounts of his ancestry. He told an interviewer for a high school paper that both his father and his mother had suffered from leprosy, a blatant falsehood. During one period he maintained, seriously, that his grandfather had invented a process for making imitation tortoise-shell combs, and, in attempting to come to America, had been shipwrecked off Glen Cove, Long Island. For years he attributed his artistic talent to a powerful theatrical strain in the family — an uncle, he said, had been a popular Swiss bell ringer at Elks' smokers and chowder parties. "I've got the theater in my blood," Fields used to say. 8