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W. C. Fields
"Why Mr. Fields does not speak is quite simple — his comedy speaks for him."
In the next few years Fields' act became one of the most popular vaudeville was ever to know. It was the period of his swiftest development. With the warm praise of each fresh audience his touch grew surer. He knew where he was going, and he was in more of a hurry than ever. On the road tours, with a little money for the first time, he permitted himself some well-earned relaxation, squiring the ladies and throwing the saloons a little custom now and then. Upon his start in vaudeville he returned to his man-killing practice. In the evenings, in his room, he took up the laborious polishing that had made his work distinguished. Often he stood beside his bed and tossed objects into the air until he fell over, in a sort of coma, and slept the night through without extinguishing the light. "Usually," he said, "I could tell when to quit. When I got so tired I began to drop everything, the person below beat on the radiator and I knocked off."
Once, in a hotel in Pittsburgh, Fields, still in his street clothes, was on the point of mastering a difficult feat and continued after the warning thumps. The trick involved a sizable crockery jar which he had found in his room, and there were indications, he said, that as it kept falling it jarred considerable of the plaster loose down below. The hour was around 3 a.m., and there can be no doubt that sleep, on the lower level, was, for anyone with normal hearing, awkward. Presently, the subordinate tenant, a giant of a man, sprinted upstairs in his nightshirt, whacked on Fields' door, and accosted him bitterly. Fields had thrown the door open with his usual injured fury, determined to bluff it out, but his first glance told him that this was no ordinary mortal. Expecting to be floored, if not actually murdered, he stepped back promptly, but the man's expression changed as he said, with a certain deference, "Ain't you the feller that was juggling to the
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