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was disgusted ; he had paid forty cents for a seat down near the front, and he felt that he had been skinned. He started to leave, but the next caption froze him in his spot. "You, too, can wind up in a place like this!" it said, and he leaned back, thinking maybe they were coming to the brothel. But it was a hospital room, containing a man, a formerly well-to-do cobbler, so the screen said, who, in a moment of weakness, possibly after surveying a lobby display for a venereal-disease film, had visited a bawdy house and was now in an outrageous condition and past any hope of salvage. Fields stayed on. He hadn't any place else to go, so he traveled the whole celluloid trail, from one clinical horror to another. He was, finally, impressed, not only by the eroded state of the people involved, but by the alarming statistics. Since the discovery of sex, some years ago, venereal disease has offered the statistician a highly enjoyable meadow for exercise. Within an hour or so Fields was pretty certain that his case had been covered by one of the broadsides, which went, in a very general way, "Eighty-two per cent of all white, Protestant males between the heights of five feet two and six feet eight are exposed to syphilis on an average of eleven times a year in public drinking places," and "Three out of every twenty-seven Chinese coolies past ninety who arrived in San Francisco from 1862 to 1864 showed possible symptoms of inherited gonorrhea." When Fields came out of the theater, he hurried past the lobby display without looking back. "I was afraid of turning to saltpeter," he said later. Years afterward, he told his secretary in Hollywood, Magda Michael, about seeing this picture. Though he described it lightly, he admitted that it permanently altered his outlook. So vivid was the experience that he even recalled the incidental music that played during the scenes. "It was from Tschaikovsky's Swan Lake," he said. "I could never hear that damned thing again without wanting to take a Wassermann."
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