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

woman who drank. Invariably, when a woman, whether a cotillion leader or a fishwife, entered a room he was in, he performed the pretty rite of standing up. Once, his old friend and former agent, Billy Grady, called at Fields' home, bringing a lady he wished to present. The day was warm, and Fields, at the moment, was upstairs behind his table-high desk, entirely nude. Grady and his lady came up without knocking or ringing the bell. When they burst into the study, Grady began, "Bill, I want you to meet " then stopped, furious. Fields was rising slowly, wearing only an expression of regal punctilio. He executed a courtly half bow and said, "Pray come in. I'm delighted to see you." Relating this anecdote, another of Fields' friends said, "Bill was full of scruples about women, all right, but he never allowed anything to take precedence over humor." His regard for humor infrequently led Fields to introduce a double-entendre into his work, but it could scarcely have been objectionable to the fussiest censor. He liked to contrive situations wherein he and a sexless crone exchanged pleasantries of an amorous and slightly appalling kind. When he and a dowager entered a game room in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, she asked, with an arch look, "By the way, how is your ping-pong?" and Fields replied, in a mildly bragging tone, "Pretty good, how's yours?" The notion that anything might come of this was, of course, rejected by an audience as preposterous beyond the dreams of vulgarity. Fields' tete-a-tetes with Mae West in My Little Chickadee reached such absurd heights of hyperbole that they were effectively removed from the romantic. The truth is that Fields always viewed romance in a pretty comical light. In Chickadee he enjoyed a scene in which he climbed a ladder to Miss West's boudoir, disguised as her masked lover. "I played it straight," he told an inquisitive friend who hadn't seen the picture. It was a sensitive and venturesome meeting, in the classical 79