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W. C. Fields
boys in places like El Alamein and Guadalcanal, he capitulated. Sitting beside his radio, he had followed the war from day to day with choleric and profane interest. He asked the studio (Universal) to engage Eddie Sutherland, who had directed several of his movies, to direct the shooting of his pool act.
On the set, Fields decided that, to recapture his old vim, he needed an audience, and the scene was rigged so that, in the story, he was performing for a roomful of troops. By special dispensation of a post commander, the troops used were actually men from a nearby army camp. Fields found this situation congenial and stimulating. As the cameras ground, he walked onto the set, wearing a frayed business suit and an antique straw hat from his own wardrobe and absently humming an unmelodic air. He started when he saw the audience, as if something had been put over on him, and took down the warped cue with his familiar look of persecuted dismay. Then he went about trying to poke the end of the cue through a loop formed by his left forefinger and thumb. With his face hideously contorted, he chased the needless loop around the room, finally cornered it, and settled down to sawing for his aim. As in former years, he interrupted this several times to move the chalk, whose position offended his sensitive eye. Then, having fixed on the precise angle, he lunged forward, tripped, and opened a two-foot rip in the fabric. Muttering indistinct threats against various fictitious persons, he began to thrust at the balls savagely, shooting them all in with a single, unlikely blow on two or three occasions. At last, clearing the table of all but three balls, he announced to the audience, with delicate enunciation, "A difficult massee shot." As he hauled himself up on tiptoes and raised his cue to the vertical, his expression clearly revealed that the troops were in the presence of a great moment. Then, after a dramatic pause, he drove violently downward, knocked a sizable portion out of the center of the table, and
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