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

dence during the few years that he and his wife lived together. The greatest sympathy may be felt for a woman whose choicest bric-a-brac was frequently describing a course between her husband's fingers and the ceiling. On days when Fields' timing was bad, she suffered acute and understandable shocks. With a figurine of the Virgin crashing here and a painted shell from Atlantic City dissolving there, she found it hard to read, or attend to her sewing. On a second trip to Europe, Mr. and Mrs. Fields took Mr. Dukinfield along. The father had a nostalgic urge, as he put it, ;'to take another look at old Ben afore I die." His wife stayed home to mind the family, aided by a generous subsidy from her eldest son. Dukinfield's wish was gratified; shortly after they arrived in London, Fields put him on an omnibus that ran right by the big clock. On this tour Mrs. Fields notified her husband that she was expecting a child, and sometime before its arrival was due, she and Dukinfield returned home. She had remembered, perhaps, that an American boy born outside the country's limits is disqualified from becoming President. Her child was, as she had anticipated, a male ; he is at present an attorney, practicing in Los Angeles and living in Beverly Hills ; an upright, mildly corpulent man in his early forties, astonishingly similar, physically, to his father, with the familiar resonance of voice, and rigorously devoted to his mother, of whom he sees a good deal. "The two have always felt," says an acquaintance, "that they have been a very great comfort to each other during the long, hard years when Mr. Fields was receiving his vulgar publicity." The boy was named W. G. Fields, Jr., a fact that he has never presumed on; he goes, as anonymously as possible, by the name of "Claude," which both he and his mother like. Mr. and Mrs. Fields separated a few years after Claude was born. The critical reasons for their disharmony will remain, appropriately enough, 1 '5