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

any lines, before the most widely dissimilar audiences. One week he would perform for the upper-class residents of an English colony, and the following week he would entertain a tribe of naked Waziri. After his first circumnavigation of the globe, a Pittsburgh newspaper said, in listing his waystops, "For years he has been regarded as one of the cleverest jugglers in the business. He appeared in all the first-class vaudeville houses of this country and then made a tour of the world, during which he visited Honolulu, Samoa, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Madeira, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia and the northern countries. In most of these countries he appeared before the crowned heads and he has in his possession many valuable keepsakes given him by nobility before whom he entertained in his once familiar make-up of the tramp." Though he was reticent about many phases of his early life, Fields later boasted continually of his travels. He liked to sit on a movie lot, between scenes, and narrate hair-raising experiences apt to shock young females of the cast. By his account, he had cultivated romances with women of every known pigment. He enjoyed dwelling in particular on points of departure from Western standards. "This belle was a Melanesian," he'd say, with a confiding smile at an ingenue, "and she had kinky hair that stood up like a briar bush. She had a wooden soup dish in her nether lip, her teeth were filed, and through her nose she had a brass ring that had come off a misisonary's hitching post. Aside from that, she was tattooed all over with pictures of rattlesnakes. She was one of the prettiest girls in those parts." If Fields' stories are to be accepted without dilution, he had children by the majority of the women, married and single, in the Belgian Congo and in most of the other savage areas of the planet. He spoke freely of legging it through the brush with tribesmen **5