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He asked us how we had liked the act and he seemed awfully pleased when we said it was funny."
In the first months of the marriage the couple lived in various furnished apartments. Then they took a suite at the old Bartholdi Hotel, on Twenty-third Street across from the Flatiron Building, in a district then distinguished by the pre-eminince of its architecture but today humbled by the loftier eyesores uptown. Though there is generous support for the belief that Fields was later a difficult husband, he was at first docile, and stuck close to home. His evenings were devoted mainly to study, a member of the family recalls. He had a prolonged session of rereading his favorite authors — Dickens, Swift, Mark Twain.
So domestic had Fields become, after his season of wooing, that he invited his family to accompany him and Mrs. Fields on a professional trip to Europe. His brother Walter accepted, and the three sailed together on a sunny morning in May. Fields was, as stated, domestic, but his firmly rooted caution about money had not altogether disappeared. It developed that he and the bride were to travel first-class and Walter was to join the mediocrities in second. During the voyage Mrs. Fields expressed concern over her brother-in-law's welfare; she persuaded her husband to investigate. Her worry was commendable but baseless. "Walter Fields was as good-looking a young man as any matinee idol, what they called in those days 'a regular Gibson type,' " says a female friend who knew him then. "He was tall and well-made and very blond, like most of the Dukinfields. Women used to pause and stare whenever he passed." Fields and his wife picked their way into second class for the investigation and found Walter hobnobbing with a countess, the ship's only celebrity of the first magnitude. He nodded democratically but made no gesture about an introduction. Later on, it came out that the countess had spotted him from A deck with a pair of binoculars she carried for the purpose and had sought him out promptly.
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