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

brought up at the wreckage, then went through tneir own door, as planned. Some time later, Fields was supposed to ride a bicycle gently into the rear end of a backing truck and fall down. Both he and the truck were going too fast; they collided sharply and Fields fell with great force to the ground. Bystanders noticed that his head was tilted at a grotesque angle. After the impact, the truck continued to roll and Johnny Sinclair, then a stunt man and now a comedy writer, leaped underneath and snatched the comedian out just before the back wheels reached him. Holding his head in his hands, Fields was hurried into a car and rushed to a hospital. The doctors made a quick diagnosis — he had a broken neck. "How long have I got?" he asked an examining surgeon. "If you co-operate, many years, I expect," replied the surgeon, "It's only a single vertebra." The surgeon and the whole hospital soon had occasion to regret his casual advice, for Fields, viewing the injury as trivial, refused to co-operate in any way whatever. He removed the brace from his neck. Whenever a nurse tried to refit it, he would wave her away, crying, "Never mind — it's only a flesh wound." He moved his head about with perfect freedom, though it clicked audibly, and he had a bar set up in his room. The hospital staff were distraught; their attempts to reason with the patient resulted only in disconnected narratives about other, more horrible injuries he had suffered and fixed with something he identified as "Doctor Buckhalter's Kidney Reviver." Within a week or so, Fields took to walking the corridors, something not generally done with a broken neck. When the hospital people spotted him, they got him into a wheel chair, almost by main strength. But it was energy wasted. Toward the close of the very next day, after several visitors had arrived bringing martinis, he wheeled his chair into 225