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

"Posthle whistle and Smunn" were names that Fields used whenever he felt the need for a fictitious law firm. Smunn was a lawyer in Philadelphia, and the majority of the English village of Barrow-in-Furness was named Posthlewhistle, according to Fields. He picked the name "Prettiwillie" off a lumberyard once while riding a train through Michigan; he used it in two of his early movies — The Old-Fashioned Way and The Old Army Game. "Every name I use is an actual name I've seen somewhere," he told Norman Taurog, who directed him in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. "If I think they're funny, I remember them. So when an opportunity presents itself, I use them in the pictures." He used the name "Peppitone" in a short in which he played a dentist. The authentic holder of the name, a dentist in Washington who had installed some fillings for Fields, wrote him a rather sharp letter, saying that the celluloid Peppitone, in his opinion, was an outrageous character, of dubious professional ethics, and that dentistry was a serious business and should be treated more reverently. Although Fields was unmoved, there may have been some basis for the writer's complaint. In the film, Fields, wearing a dingy white jacket and a faraway expression of perplexed ennui, had worked fruitlessly over a client who was so heavily bearded he couldn't find his mouth. Added to that, he had an office full of pale, bandaged people who kept mistaking the noise of a nearby riveting machine for the sound of his drill. Peppitone was probably justified in being sore, but the comedian dismissed him with a snarl. "The bastard overcharged me," Fields said. Certainly, Fields had a richer chance to collect odd names than most people, since his travels, in the years prior to World War I, were interrupted only by sustained performances. He left a tortuous trail. On May 28, 1907, for example, he was described 139