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formed the skeleton of his liquid diet, he drank other things from time to time. At different stages he rested on Irish whisky, scotch, bourbon, rye, gin and grapefruit juice, red wine, sherry, rum and Coca Cola, and beer. Invariably he had a good reason for shifting his tippling habits. Rye whisky kept him awake; scotch began to taste like medicine; bourbon led to drunkenness; red wine made him hot ; sherry was rough on his stomach ; rum went to his nose. His affections sometimes wavered, but his true married love was martinis. Members of his household staff estimate that his average daily consumption of gin ran to about two quarts. He bought nothing but the best of all kinds of liquor, and kept hundreds of bottles stored in an upstairs room, to which only he had the key. During the recent war, when liquor was scarce, he conceived delusions of liquor thefts, and he changed the lock guarding the sacred chamber once or twice a month. Quite often he went in with a top-secret inventory, compiled by himself, and carefully counted his stocks. The indication was always that things were in order, but Fields never felt certain. He would go downstairs and study his servants' faces, searching for clues to abstractions.
Fields had several jocose utterances on the subject of his drinking. "I exercise extreme self-control," he liked to say in Hollywood. "I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast." In his early middle age he had said substantially the same thing, but substituting beer for gin in the sentence. His standards and his appetites had altered in the few years. On the general subject of his light eating, and of his steady drinking, he sometimes said, "I don't believe in dining on an empty stomach." The comedian had a trick, late in the evening, of balancing a full martini glass on his head, as he had done with the beer bottle at his mother-in-law's. If the glass trembled, he said, "There, I've had a sufficiency." His skill and his self-command were such that
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