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W. C. Fields
show business. Although the comedian was a member of the Follies for seven years, he and the maestro saw eye to eye on practically nothing. The fact is, there was a recognizable air of hostility between them. Ziegfeld had no feeling for funny men; he regarded them as tiresome but necessary time-fillers, placed on stage so that the girls could change. For his part, Fields, though he granted that pretty girls had their uses, looked upon them dramatically as a harmless backdrop for comedians. "My experiences with this company were many and varied," he once wrote in a series of articles for some newspapers. "Ziegfeld was a weird combination of the great showman and the little child. He really did not like comedians and tolerated them only because of the public. His forte was beautiful girls and costumes with elaborate settings."
The producer and the former juggler had their first falling out over a golf act Fields had put together during his travels. Like the billiard act, it was a parody on the ritual surrounding a basically absurd exercise. In its original version Fields had appeared with an outsize golf bag he'd ordered from an English leatherworker. It was about twice as large as the average golf bag and was equipped with all the professional appliances favored by dedicated, high-score players. It had a prop-up stand, a rolling platform, several secret compartments and sliding panels, wrist guards, club sheathes, complicated rubber tees, ball brushes, and various other indispensable equipment. Inside, he had an extraordinary collection of clubs, including the usual golfing woods and irons, a polo mallet, a buggy whip, an ordinary garden hoe, a mole trap, some surveying instruments, and a sizable shovel, presumably for getting out of bunkers. Fields' clothing for the act was a pointed insult to everybody who had ever appeared on a golf course. It was offensive in almost every detail. Reading from the top down, he had on a heather cap that stuck up like a mushes