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

W. C. Fields booklet called The Gourmet's Guide, which he bought in a stationery store, and had arranged a digestive line-up which set him back several hundred dollars. Even Fillmore looked a little impressed when he surveyed the larder. The comedian had also done a bangup job on his person : he had arrayed himself in evening clothes of faultless good taste and was brushed, pruned, barbered, drycleaned and pressed to a magnificent degree. Notwithstanding his progress, he was rigid with tension when Le Baron arrived, some hour or so ahead of the first guests. "How's everything look, how's everything look?" Fields kept babbling, and Le Baron advised him to sit down and relax. "I don't know what to say to these people," Fields said. "Why don't you just try being natural?" Le Baron replied. His advice went all unheeded, for Fields greeted his guests, when they began to turn up, with a sedate, upper-class restraint that was only slightly less painful than Fillmore's. He was very stiff and proper, and he had settled on a sort of broad-a singsong as being the precise accent of the aristocracy. Fillmore served drinks — small, unostentatious ones — and the group filed funereally in to dinner. Le Baron kept trying to jolly Fields up, but during the hors d'oeuvres, the fish and the partridge, Fields' demeanor bore a strong resemblance to that of an elderly, bilious floorwalker. His guests probed gently for humor, but he gave them genteel observations on the weather and a discourse on a novel he'd been reading by a man named Meredith. "I think it was about simultaneous with the filet," says Le Baron, "that Bill looked around and saw, to his surprise, that his guests were people just like himself. I think it came as a terrible shock." The comedian let his muscles sag a trifle, advanced one elbow to the table, and told a scrubbed-up lie about a widow he'd known in New Guinea. The response was so brisk that he began to beam, igo