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known, spends comparatively little time in pool halls. Nevertheless, Fields' trick table was received with thunderous, low-bred applause. From the moment he walked on, in his rags, and selected his ridiculous cue, he was reassured about the value of esoteric parody. He rolled, or attempted to roll, the cue on the table, but it only bumped and clattered. Then, perplexed, he held it to his eye, his expression indicating an incipient awareness that the stick was not altogether straight. His manipulation of the balls seemed uncanny. At one prodigious whack from the unlovely cue, they would scramble over the table and dive into the pockets like rats. Or, again, as the old New York Star said of a subsequent performance, the way he made them "carom around the table and land in his capacious hip pocket is an amazing revelation in the art of billiards."
Despite his back-alley garb, Fields' gestures were majestic as he pursued the significant game. No stylized flourish escaped his attention. He stooped low as he studied the lie of the balls, he broke off his aim to shift, ever so slightly, the irrelevant position of the chalk, and he dropped all holds to flick a disturbing ash off the end of his splayed cigar. Over a period of forty-five years, he was to alter the act constantly, in little ways. Basically, it remained the same — a burlesque, or parody, or satire, or caricature, or travesty, dealing with a thoroughly unimportant institution. The last performance of the act was in the wartime movie revue, Follow the Boys, which was released in 1944. When first approached about redoing his old sketch for the film, Fields was reluctant, even crotchety. He didn't like movie revues, he said. They turned out to be meaningless hodgepodges, with strings of imposing names, and were run off with such kaleidoscopic speed that audiences reeled away glassy-eyed and exhausted. When he was told that the act would be a fine morale builder for American
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