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them up before he left for the Coast. Fields rolled out of New York in a new Lincoln, carrying, in his jacket pockets, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in thousand-dollar bills. "What will you do if you get robbed, Mr. Fields?" a reporter asked him, and he replied, "What do the banks do?" His implication, the man assumed, was that the banks would steal more, but this went unexplained in his story.
After three decades of big-city theater, Fields was finished with the stage and with New York. He never went back. With the steely resolution that had enabled him to leave home at eleven and not return, he left the medium in which he had found security and headed for an opportunity of dubious worth. The years of his gaudiest triumphs, of his national notoriety, lay ahead, but he was starting, in advanced middle age, from professional scratch. It was a situation that pleased him; he was only happy when the barriers were exceptionally high. He had no ties, no home, no family that claimed his attention. A change of personal scene, for Fields, involved no more emotional risk than shifting the furniture of a stage. Nevertheless, as he crossed into New Jersey he felt already a faint breath of nostalgia. "When I got over the river," he told a friend later, "I twisted around for a last look at the skyline. I had an idea somehow that I wouldn't see it again. But I felt young, and I knew I was good, and it was a wonderfully sunny day. So I drove on toward a very uncertain future, about the same as I had in the past."
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