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

wolfhound. I stopped and let my jaw sag. When she reached the center of the stage, I said, 'My, what a beautiful camel!3 Everybody roared and Ziggie threw in the sponge. He was a little sore, but he said, 'O. K., Bill, we'll do it your way. It's the first time I've ever turned one of my lovely girls into a comedian's prop.' " Fields and Ziegfeld used to squabble about money. Besides his long-standing habit of asking for a raise every month or two, Fields had a trick of running up "incidental expenses." Walter Catlett, who was a Follies comedian in those days and later went to Hollywood, remembers a scene he and Fields did that caused Ziegfeld a lot of suffering. "It was a tennis act," Catlett says. "We took turns being straight man. It was a very funny act. Bill later assembled a croquet act that was very much like it. We minced around emphasizing the dainty aspects of the game as it was played at polite upper-class parties of that time. Occasionally we'd have elegant little arguments but allow people to understand that we'd really like to break each other's necks. "Bill insisted on juggling now and then, though it didn't seem to fit into the act. Nobody could argue with him. He'd just pull up when the notion suited him and juggle until he got tired, then we'd go on with the act. He finally conceived the idea of batting all the balls out into the audience when we finished. It was a popular windup, but at the end of the first week Ziegfeld docked Bill's salary eighty-six dollars for tennis balls. "Bill stormed in and raised the devil, but Ziegfeld was firm. He said, 'Your contract states that you must furnish your own props.' Bill never had much use for him from then on out. They fussed a good deal at the best. To tell you the truth, Bill didn't like Ziegfeld." Thereafter, when Fields and Ziegfeld met backstage, Fields nodded coldly and studied him with a rather calculating expres *55