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

CHAPTER TWELVE O ne day, Fields was visited at his hotel in Berlin by an American friend who, when he got in the room, began to skip around in a very trying manner. He looked under the chairs, behind the bed, and in the closet. Fields demanded an explanation, alert, as always, for trouble. "Shhh!" whispered the friend. "There's a man in this room." Automatically, Fields muttered, "The house dick!" and started to frame a denial of everything. "My dear fellow," said the visitor, breaking off the joke. "It's you — you're twenty-one. This is your birthday!" Fields sometimes gave out his birth date to the press (though generally lying about it, for no apparent reason except perhaps to keep his hand in) , but he had small taste for birthdays himself. He seldom remembered when the fateful day rolled around. More often than not, he was in some place, at the time, where he knew nobody well and where a celebration would have had limited appeal. On his tours and in this country, though he often saw friends (who were largely theatrical connections) , he had wretched sieges of loneliness, when he aimlessly wandered the streets, sat reading in his room, or sequestered his thoughts in some quiet, uninquisi 1 06