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

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE O f all Fields' houses, the one he liked best was a big Spanish place on a high hill in the center of Hollywood. The area is known as Laughlin Park, a quiet, faintly aristocratic collection of green knolls that struggle up above the glamour and neon. A handful of fine old houses, remindful of the leisurely but perhaps unphotogenic dons, has resisted the onward, indigenous march of redwood and glass ; ringed by hedges, shaded by palms, they stand almost unseen on their inessential hills, tourist-free and forgotten in a city restlessly expanding. Fields leased his house for five years in 1940, obtaining it by some mischievous device for $250 a month, which included a worn Japanese gardener, who presumably was installed on the property with the shrubbery and plumbing. Soon after the transaction the war talk thickened, prices went up, and the owner repented his hasty grant. He came around and asked Fields to hike the rent, out of common humanity. The response this provoked — ■ peals of wild, triumphant laughter — set off one of the great real estate feuds of the century. Fields felt that he had put a lot of anxiety into the house ; he intended to cling tight to his gains. His old friend William Le Baron had previously rented the place, and during a period when the producer was desperately ill, Fields had 266