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

the other. It was plain that her purchase was involved with some intimate requirement of her sex, and the proprietor looked tactfully professional. She looked up at last and said, "Do you have a female attendant?" "Why, yes," he replied. "I'll call her right away." He hurried up a flight of stairs in the back, summoned his wife, who was busy with her housework, and hurried back. "She'll be down in half a mo," he assured the flustered caller, and resumed his dusting — humming, examining his merchandise, often with galvanic starts of surprise, and throwing the woman little darting looks, winks, and smiles. His wife went through an elaborate program of removing her domestic garb, replaced it with a starched uniform, and came downstairs. The customer tiptoed up and whispered in her ear, then, upon receiving some advice in an undertone, withdrew to the rear and used the ladies' room. From beginning to end, the sketch was a study in frustration, of the general sort that Fields felt qualified, by long experience, to demonstrate with expert feeling. "When we finished it," says Sennett, "I had the notion that he had settled several old scores known only to himself." With Sennett, Fields also resolved mysterious grievances against barbers and dentists and others of the legions that plagued him. Perhaps the best known of the two-reelers they made was The Fatal Glass of Beer. The comedian was in top form; he had his way about many details of the plot, which was uniquely meager. In general, it consisted of Fields sitting on a campstool in a far Northern shack, dressed in a coonskin coat, a fur cap and mittens, and singing a tuneless song about his unlikely downfall, while accompanying himself on a zither. Periodically he would arise, walk to the door, fling it open, and cry, "It ain't a fit night out for 221