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

"I never read the papers," said Irwin. "It gives me indigestion." "Man says, 'Fields was a scream. Irwin has a real ' " "What's on your mind, Bill?" said the manager, who believed in cutting to the heart of a situation. "Seventy-five dollars," said Fields. "You're a goddamned bandit," Irwin told him. "This is the last raise you get, if I have to disband the unit." Fields clamorously affirmed that he had no further financial ambitions, and harmony reigned for weeks. In December of 1898 he wrote his mother a letter — her first news of him in eight years — and enclosed a ten-dollar bill. Thereafter, despite his monetary caution, he sent his mother at least ten dollars every week for the rest of her life. Many times on the road, he once said in a moment of rare confidence, he brooded about his former homelife, feeling the greatest compassion for his mother in her rigorous grind. Besides sending her the ten-dollar allotment, he was to brighten her life in many ways during the next few years. And, as is not uncommon in hard-boiled people with a soft streak, he did it on the sly, loudly denying that he would lift a ringer for his family. In Akron, Ohio, which was near Kent, Fields telephoned his old benefactor, the ticket agent, and invited him to attend a performance. The man came over, bursting with pleasure and vindication, and took a strong paternal interest in the entire evening's proceedings, calling Fields "son," lending counsel to the manager, and escorting the girls back and forth between wings and their dressing rooms. "His pride in my success couldn't have been greater if I'd been his son," Fields later told a friend, Jim Tully, the writer. "Different members of the troupe entertained him and made him feel glad that he had once been kind to a member of their fraternity." For years afterward, whenever Fields was playing near Akron, he looked up the agent, and so did other show 61