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his rings, and took a gigantic swing, with spectacularly bad results. At the end of his arc, the ropes broke, or became unfastened, and the man took a wrenching header into a pile of old furniture. As he lost consciousness, he said later, he heard a kind of hoarse, maniacal laughter from a darkened corner of the building. The fall almost put him out of commission; when he recovered he threatened to sue Fields, but the comedian paid him off, with a small bonus, and he left peacefully.
Magda Michael, Fields' secretary for twelve years, who is now executrix of his estate, first went to his house at Toluca Lake in 1934 to help him with a dictaphone he had bought. The comedian had decided to capture, for posterity, the mental gems that visited him as he loafed around the premises. To transcribe his first notes, the dictaphone company suggested Miss Michael, not only because she was exceptionally competent at secretarial work but because she had a philosophic disposition, not likely to be ruffled by the eccentricities of genius. When she arrived, she found her employer's affairs in a remarkable state of dishevelment. He had a desk almost identically like one that had turned up in a film he had recently made. The scene probably represented a dream of Fields; in it he was seated at a huge roll-top desk which was stuffed to bursting with papers of every size and shape, a picture of hopeless confusion. Fields, working at the desk with his hat on, was approached by a cringing client who asked for "that deed we were talking about a couple of years ago." Without looking up, Fields reached into the mess, withdrew a yellowed paper, and handed it over.
Miss Michael recalls no such miracle on the occasion of her first visit. The fact is, Fields, after shuffling through the desk for ten minutes, was unable to find his dictaphone rolls, and it took him the better part of the morning to locate them in an icebox, where he had absently placed them beside a jar of martinis. He seemed
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