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terly about his stinginess. As a general thing, when a girl in Fields' presence expressed a desire for refreshment, he took it to mean beer, or water, and he had no compunctions about dining, a deux, in a dog wagon. His ceaseless bout with privation had given him a vast respect for money. To a man in the Fulton company who inquired as to his ultimate ambition on earth, Fields replied, "To make a thousand dollars a week." As he said it, his eyes were fixed on that bright, personal horizon and he seemed to know that he would be there, on some secret schedule of his own, a few years hence.
Early photographs of the young juggler reveal him as moderately handsome, with a full head of light-colored hair parted near the middle, a firm, self-contained, indomitable line of a mouth, and humorous, quizzical eyes. Only in Fields' eyes could one read the vast, pervasive sense of the absurdity in humans that was to shape all his work; in the rest of his face was written the hard score of his fight for survival. Fields grew to be quite vain about having his picture taken. He was often peremptory with photographers about which exposures he wanted developed. In general, he liked views that glamorized him and rejected ones that had a searching or definitive quality. A print that he gave to close friends during his Hollywood years shows him holding a cane somewhat in the manner of the late Jimmy Walker, flawlessly barbered, and exhibiting the filmy stare of a young actor approaching the worn balcony of the Capulets. "Is that the cane you used in your juggling acts, Bill?" a recipient of the print once asked him, and Fields replied with considerable heat, "Juggling, hell ! That stick's been in the family for generations." Fields' touchiness about pictures grew out of the fact that he was repeatedly caricatured in his tramp costume. As a rule the artist wrote some such caption as "The Tramp Juggler" or "Skillful Comic," but too often, in Fields' opinion, the picture carried the
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