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

CHAPTER TWENTY B illy grady quit Fields, after representing him for fourteen years, because of a dispute involving Earl Carroll's Vanities. The comedian's early pictures on Long Island — Sally of the Sawdust, So's Your Old Man, Running Wild, and The Old Army Game, were artistically successful but made little money. He was starred in The Old Army Game, a Fieldsian kind of story about a sharpshooting fraud who lived principally by the shell game, and became well liked by movie-goers. To Fields, stardom meant big money, whether the box office flourished or not. He argued that he deserved at least as much as Rudolph Valentino and Wallace Reid were making, and probably more. Paramount, with some justification, contended that he should be paid in accordance with the popularity of his pictures. It was a hopeless deadlock ; while Fields was unable to wangle the fantastic sums he demanded, Paramount's combined lung power was insufficient to convert Fields. "As none of our hopes materialized during that period, I returned to the stage," he wrote Jim Tully later. Another time after that, helping a Paramount publicity man prepare a sketch of his life, he gave additional details, not altogether accurate, on his first film venture. "All my life," he said, "I had earned my living by entertaining people. I figured I 203