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

and fireman got out deliberately. They introduced themselves, chatted a few minutes, and shoved the car back onto the road. As the engine labored off down the tracks, the cracker permitted himself an observation. "I figured they wasn't any use gittin' worked up," he said. "We might as well wait till we got some he'p." Nearly everywhere he went in the South, Fields ran into alligators. He had a fixation on the subject. Often, he said, he came dangerously close to being eaten. To hear him tell it, the entire South was overrun by alligators, most of which had a strong personal grudge against him. Grady believes that Fields actually did encounter one alligator in the South, at a time when he was driving through with Grady and a lady passenger. The day was warm and the lady wanted a drink. Fields pulled up beside a rotting farmhouse and made inquiries. "You'll have to go down to the spring," said the farmer, rousing himself from a nap on the front porch and pointing to the path through the woods. Fields took a thermos bottle and stepped down to the spring, "about a two-day trip by pack train," he said later. "I figured they'd have to get me out with bloodhounds." He eventually found the spring, a rivulet of fresh water that trickled into a rusty, sunken kettle and then into a slough. But as he leaned over to dip in the thermos, an alligator coughed and slid off a log on the bank near by. "We heard a dreadful cry and Bill came running out of the woods, white as a sheet," Grady says. "The thermos was missing and he was yelling, 'Start up the motor! Start up the motor!' It took a long time to get him quieted down." It was not uncommon for Fields to be bullied by animals other than dogs. His trouble with a swan, later on in Hollywood, was notorious. He had rented a large establishment on Toluca Lake, i6y