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

W. C. Fields Grady, "he got a check from the government for $1100. They said he'd overcharged himself. I thought he'd blow up and crow about it, but he almost went out of his mind. He kept yelling, 'Think! Think of all the things I could have taken off in years past!5" In this period of his Follies celebrity Fields took a fondness for big motor cars. "With anything of that sort he was far from stingy," Grady says. "He bought the most expensive cars, clothes, food, and so on he could find. It was mainly in his dealings with people that he began to act like a miser. But he wasn't consistent even with that. There were times when he'd sit in a restaurant all night rather than pick up the check. Other times, he wouldn't let anybody buy as much as a cigar. Bill was full of paradoxes." Fields' first car was a seven-passenger, custom-built Cadillac. He had the salesman from whom he bought it investigated by a detective agency. The man's record seemed to be all right, barring a few domestic spats, and Fields paid him in cash, but he insisted on getting a receipt signed in the presence of several witnesses, including a bootblack he brought in from the street. When the garage owner asked if he could drive, he said, with the kind of injured pomp that was making him famous, "I've been driving professionally since I was ten," or several years before automobiles were available. He added that his father had owned one of the first cars in Philadelphia, a purposeless lie. The garage people were relieved that he could drive. They shook hands with him and thanked him for the sale; then he got in the car and went about two hundred yards down the street, where he hit a parked laundry truck. He bawled out the driver, returned to the garage, and had a crushed fender repaired, while he delivered a mendacious account of how the laundryman had backed out of a driveway, at forty miles an hour, and hit him on the opposite side of the street. Although Fields had forked over 1 60