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

confidence in the presence of an obvious stripling, he then offered Fields sixty-five dollars a week. But he had sadly misjudged his man. When he asked what Fields was getting with Irwin, Fields replied, "A hundred and seventy-five a week," a gross lie. Staggered, the scout expressed an opinion that the figure represented twenty-five or thirty dollars more than Irwin himself was making. "A very equitable arrangement," Fields said. After a great deal of haggling, during which the Keith's man grew increasingly nettled and began to wish he were dealing with an older and mellower head, a salary of $125 a week was agreed on. But when the scout turned to go, Fields indicated that the conference was not quite over. "About the billing," he said. "Why, we take care of the billing," exclaimed the scout. "Only in a general way," said Fields. "The fact is, I've decided to be billed as 'W. C. Fields, the Distinguished Comedian.' " "We bill you as a juggler," said the unfortunate from Keith's. "Damn it all, you couldn't be a day over nineteen. What do you mean, 'Distinguished'?" "Good day," said Fields, lighting a cigar. "W. C. Fields, the Distinguished Comedian," cried the scout, and ran out of the room like a rabbit. Fields was pleased with the new announcements. He clipped several from newspapers and sent them to his boyhood friends, who had not heard from him in years. "Vanity can be excused when you are young," he once said of these communications. The truth is that Fields was eternally grateful for his friends' succor in the black time of his flight. As the years wore on, he began to realize that he might literally have starved had the boys not kept him supplied in the first difficult months. One of the Samaritans, when an old man, wrote Fields asking for a note to 69