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

W. C. Fields simple identification — "W. C. Fields." It made him look as if he'd just rolled into town off a cattle train, and he was convinced that people took it as his habitual state of dishevelment. "This kind of thing might get back to Philadelphia and ruin me socially," he once said. It was on Fulton's tour that comic juggling got its first real impetus in this country. Like his namesake with the steamboat, Fulton was to open new vistas with a traveling unit. Whereas Robert had gone upstream with the Clermont, Jim moved overland with Fields. During their association, which lasted eighteen months, Fields became popular out of all proportion to his theoretical salary and his billing. "The best act in the first part of the program last evening was that of W. C. Fields, a juggler with a nice, quiet manner, a relief after the noisy and laborious team of Greene and Werner," read an item of the period in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Critics everywhere showered praise on the boy, and he began to sense a gigantic maladjustment. Back in New York, after the tour, he took steps to correct this. When Fred Irwin, whose road shows occupied a comparatively exalted standing in the theater, offered him a job, Fields said, "I'll have to have thirty-five dollars a week." "Why, that's outrageous!" cried Irwin. "You haven't been getting anywhere near that." "I was getting twenty-five dollars with Fulton," said Fields, "and my work has improved exactly 40 per cent." "Yes, but there's a difference," Irwin told him, and added, with familiar theatrical logic, "You see, I pay my salaries. Everybody knows that. You ought to take less." "Thirty-five a week," said Fields, secure in the knowledge of his new popularity. Irwin capitulated, but he was marked for further woe. He and Fields had no contract — a system that managers of that era 58