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great man was going through his old manual of arms with a cigarette, and saying, at the end, "Nothing to it, really. I'll teach you when you grow up. I never smoked a thing before I was nine."
Alcohol whetted Fields' sense of humor. Nearly everything struck him as funny, in addition to being absurd and reprehensible, but his appreciation was keener when his nerves were quiet. "His timing was better when he was drinking," Mack Sennett thinks. "Often when he hadn't had a drink he seemed indecisive, other times he was sharp, sure, positive. He was terrified of speaking lines too fast, which he sometimes did if he was sober. He had a saying, 'If you're talking and get nervous, don't go fast — slow down.' " Toward the end of his year on soft drinks, Fields decided that the game was scarcely worth the candle, and he began to freshen up with an occasional nip. Several doctors who were in his employ at fantastic sums — one of them was on a retainer of $100 a day — tried to keep booze out of his reach. The comedian made a sport out of circumventing them. "We'll play golf," said one of the doctors. "That'll tone you up and keep your mind off the strong waters." Fields nodded glumly, got out his commodious golf bag, and made a great show of docileness. But during the morning, before each date, he would secrete a dozen or so miniature bottles of whisky at various places in the bag.
When they reached the first tee, the doctor would say, "Now, this is the life! All sober? Smell your breath."
He would check the patient's sobriety, which was, at that point, unimpeachable, and get things under way. At the start Fields was in a cloudy, uncommunicative mood. This was corrected as soon as the doctor whaled into the rough or got behind a tree. The patient himself seemed to stray into many unflattering spots. During the early holes, for example, he seldom missed a sand trap and he spent an uncommon amount of time in the woods.
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