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

W. C. Fields Walter's position en the tour was not wholly that of guest. He also functioned as his brother's secretary. The work was not heavy, though Fields found many little tasks, annoying in the aggregate, to delegate from time to time. Once, in Fields' dressing room, when Mrs. Fields found a gayly scented letter on his table and demanded an explanation, he backed Walter into a corner, pressed a twenty-dollar bill into his hand, and cried in angry tones, "How many times have I told you to stop using my name?" The explanation, Fields said, was actually quite simple, though he somehow didn't feel up to relating it at the time — a young lady sitting in a box had merely sent him a warmly affectionate fan letter. It was inevitable that marriage for Fields should fail. His years of fighting life on his own terms had diminished his adaptability. Even if he had married a girl with the patience of a saint, he would have been chafed by the double harness. There was, between him and Mrs. Fields, a difference in religious conviction. The bride was a responsive Catholic, given to sturdy, dawn expeditions of worship. Fields' religion was less formal, less capable of definition. In general, he felt that the average minister should be unfrocked immediately and prevented, by force if necessary, from communicating any ideas to persons under thirty-five. He considered, further, that Methodists especially, having, as he had been told, a theological bias against nicotine, needed the most vigilant kind of watching. In the light of maturer statements from Fields, one gathers that he had a sort of religion of his own but that it was disassociated from the church. Never in his lifetime did he establish a rapport between himself and any of the Lord's agents on earth; his divinity was practiced wholly within the temple of his mind. The little things that disrupt marriage became much in evi 114