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

W. C. Fields pand his act, and he remembered his former employment in the pool hall. At the same time, he recalled an act he had seen in recent years, in which a Professor Devereaux performed with trick billiard devices. The professor, Fields now understood vaguely, had retired. After a good deal of figuring with a pencil and a notebook, he consulted a manufacturer of vaudeville equipment in New York. The upshot of this visit was Fields' celebrated pool table, which, with its owner, was to convulse audiences all over the world. It was built in sections, to be easily transportable, and had an ingenious system of invisible strings, to provide the master perfect control over the balls. For several weeks Fields spent nearly all his waking offstage minutes practicing with the table. He added equipment as he thought of it. At first he had intended to work with an ordinary cue, but a few weeks later he had a better idea — he would use one full of twists and bends, in a condition roughly comparable to that of an alpine shepherd's crook. As a ball racker, he had witnessed the ritual care with which the customers took their cues down from the rack, hefting them, rolling them on the table, and sighting down their length, to be sure they were true. It was his purpose, he said, in addition to being merely funny, to present the ultimate commentary on pool-hall mannerisms. There was a possibility, he admitted, that some members of his audiences, such as cloistered ladies and others who had not had all the advantages, would be unfamiliar with pool-hall behavior, but he hoped that, when they saw him, they would hasten to repair their education. "We must strive to instruct and uplift as well as entertain," he told a manager who timorously questioned the social worth of the pool table. After long sessions of pruning and polishing, Fields opened with his new act at the fashionable Orpheum in Boston. It was a risky tryout, because the average upper-class Bostonian, as is well 8a