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wearing his clip-in mustache and his most overbearing manner. His first act was to pre-empt the star's dressing room. When Miss Dempster had been revived with ammonia, a conference was held about the script. The problem of lines was, of course, non-existent, since the movie was silent, but Fields was told that many scenes that had been much favored by the legitimate audiences would be deleted. In their stead, Miss Dempster would substitute things such as a Slavonic folk dance, a scene in which her mother died, at a snail's pace, and several passages featuring wooing, ranging from sweet to hot. Fields retired to his dressing room, seated himself in a comfortable rocker, and indicated that the movie was at a standstill, which was correct. The bosses shouted in vain. Eventually, rather than scrap the project, they more or less allowed him a free hand, forging the first link of a chain of similar compromises with which Hollywood would become all too familiar during the following years.
"In the windup," William Le Baron recalls, "they tried desperately even to keep Miss Dempster's part on an equal footing with Bill's. But it was no use — he walked off with the picture, and made everybody half mad in the process. He was just suited ; that kind of thing was right in his line. When he left the set at the end he looked watchful but triumphant. He'd got the upper hand and he couldn't have been happier."
The film version of Poppy, whose title was changed to Sally of the Sawdust, as being more commonplace and unwieldy, showed to satisfied audiences everywhere. The studio heads congratulated themselves on having had the foresight to encourage initiative in their comedian. A year later, Le Baron, who had taken no official hand in Sally of the Sawdust, signed Fields for several additional pictures. Le Baron had come to Paramount only recently, having previously written plays, edited Collier's Weekly, and then managed, briefly, William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan motion
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