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

W. C. Fields Fields, "I invite those girls' mothers to come down to the lot almost every day!" "Floosies," Fields would mutter, hoping to bring on some sort of cardiac disturbance. "I made four [the number was actually seven] comedies for the Irishman," he once wrote for a newspaper, "and had forty more or less friendly fights. Neither of us could agree on the nature of comedy. One of the comedies paid for itself three days after release." Sennett was interested in Fields' early life, and Fields was amused by Sennett's. The fact that the producer, whose father was a Northhampton (Massachusetts) contractor, had got into films by studying to be an opera singer seemed of telltale significance to Fields, who spoke with sarcastic relish of the humor he'd seen on the operatic stage. The producer would urge that the sin of his near-musical career had been expiated by the novelty of his switch to the screen. One day in a restaurant near Carnegie Hall, young Sennett had chanced to ask a successful baritone how much he was making, and when the man, with some gloom, replied, "Seventy-five a week, clear," the boy's faith in the melodic plot was shaken. He obtained work as a three-dollar-a-day extra at the Biograph Studio on Fourteenth Street, soon gravitating to the funny movies — a wrenching ordeal, since practically everything they were doing struck him as funny. In a month he changed over to assistant director and received a salary boost to $80 a week, which went immediately to his head. He began to heave petty cash around like the Aga Khan. He bought a checkered vest and took to playing the ponies. For a beginner, his luck was remarkably steady — he never won a dime — and before long he found himself in hock for a hundred dollars to a group of sinewy gamblers. For weeks his life consisted of trying to duck them on the streets. 218