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

crown, the frightened Croesus. His money bothered him. He took to examining bills to make certain they were not counterfeit; further, he became suspicious of the Treasury. What if the Government fell? Would his greenbacks stand up under the new regime? Would they be viewed as tender in another land? Weighing everything, he found currency dubious and decided on conversion. After exchanging what bills he had, at the nearest bank, he asked Irwin to pay him in gold henceforward. In 1896, on a dark night in San Francisco, with $210 in gold secreted in various recesses of his attire, Fields walked toward his hotel, much easier in his mind. As he rounded a vacant corner, he was struck with some heavy, blunt instrument — as the police later described it — and he slumped to the pavement. When he awoke, half an hour later, he found himself stripped of ore. There were drawbacks, he observed, even with the mother lode. In the words of a Nebraska orator of that year, he had been crucified on a cross of gold. Next payday he opened a small bank account, the first step in what was to develop into the most outlandish savings program in the history of banking. Fields' days of want were over. The waif was behind him, caught up and transformed in the harsh converter of ambition. He was to have wistful moments about his boyhood, but it had slipped by without ever actually having existed. Almost from the beginning, he had known nothing but hardship and abuse. While his contemporaries frolicked through the leisurely time of their youth, he had fought for his life. That he came through at all was singular; that he came through with humor was evidence of courage and genius. But in the human a process of hardening can seldom be undone, and Fields was to keep his scars. The day never arrived when he was free from the ghost of poverty. And as is common with others, he wasted his worry on the least of his 63