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

W. C. Fields aboard English freighters that steamed outside the harbor only to turn back at the sight of an ugly black smudge on the horizon. Finally, in Sydney Harbor, he boarded an American tramp and slipped out under cover of a foggy night, to open water and comparative safety. The tramp was bound for San Francisco and made the trip in thirty-nine days, a period Fields spent mostly on deck, juggling, to the delight of the crew. From San Francisco he hurried on to New York, by train, and joined the Watch Your Step company in Syracuse, two days before the show's out-oftown opening there. Dillingham wanted him to do his billiard act, with a running patter of jokes. In the two days' time, Fields unearthed one of his old commentaries, a sort of omnibus tribute to snakes, and polished up his billiard shots. He took part in one full rehearsal. Meanwhile, Gene Buck, an old fan of Fields', who was now Ziegfeld's right-hand man, had decided to come up for the opening. Knocking about backstage before curtain time, he heard a rumor that Fields' act might be dropped, and he sent a note, "See me in New York if anything goes wrong," to his dressing room toward the end of the show. The day after the opening, Dillingham visited Fields and said, with what must be regarded as sublime heartlessness, "I'm sorry, Bill, but we've got to drop that scene of yours. We haven't room for the billiard table." Just what he meant by "room" Fields never found out, but Dillingham once told a friend that "the billiard act hadn't got over." He believed that it might have been because a noisy act preceded it; an axiom of show business is that a quiet funny act will always fail in a spot following a noisy act. In any case, Fields found himself in the unparalleled position of having made an expensive, six-week trip halfway around the world to play a one-night stand. The experience added another 146