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W. C. Fields
enjoyed by nearly everybody, it had to be different to be memorable. Fields introduced a fresh note into his tricks : he made them funny. He developed a genius for the conscious error, the retrieved blunder. As the San Francisco Examiner was to note, a few years afterward, "It is impossible to tell whether Fields makes real or fake mistakes in his juggling. He will drop a hat apparently by accident in the middle of some difficult feat and then catch it by another apparently accidental movement. It is all so smooth and effortless." Though he was to carry juggling to heights previously unknown, he never lost his fondness for fumbling. Many years later, when giving large dinner parties, Fields liked to stand at the head of his table and serve. After filling a plate, preferably a comparative stranger's, he would start to hand it down the line, and then drop it, provoking a loud, concerted gasp. With consummate nonchalance he would catch it just off the floor, without interrupting whatever outrageous anecdote he was relating at the moment.
A good many of Fields' juggling stunts, during his Norristown connection, involved flipping up a slender object, such as a yardstick, and catching it, balanced by one end, on a finger, a foot, or his forehead. As a result of the painful, man-killing practice he often described subsequently, Fields at fourteen was probably as good at this form of juggling as anybody in the world. The cigar boxes, which he had first taken to using only because they were available and free, were far from conventional juggling material, but they were to become symbolic of his art. At this time he had only begun to exploit them ; later he was to perfect a routine with cigar boxes that nobody else was ever able to duplicate.
Most of Fields' materials were makeshift. "I evolved a trick to use small cups on the ends of rods," he told one of the Paramount publicity men in 1926. "I caught small balls in the cups and continued juggling in the meantime. If I'd had any money
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