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W. C. Fields
would sit up late at night, with volumes of miscellaneous information. After memorizing a long string of facts, he would be all primed when the trainer arrived the next morning. He steered the conversation to his pets indirectly. "Hear old Bing won himself a couple of races yesterday," he'd say, with a pleased chuckle.
"That so?" Howard would murmur, and go on, "No doubt you recall that passage in The Merchant of "
"A curious thing," Fields would boom, admitting no competition, "about that notion that horses were first discovered in Arabia."
As a rule, Howard fell into the trap, and Fields' morning was made. He had two names for his trainer; one, "The Learned Professor," was a tribute to Howard's erudition, the other, "Horizontal Howard," was a kind of envious sneer at his sleeping ability. The fact that the trainer was able to take naps at odd times nettled Fields; he himself, if he was lucky, often could get to sleep only after Howard had exercised and massaged him into a state of limp exhaustion.
With all their petty bickering, and despite Fields' many infractions of the course, he benefited greatly from his formal attempts to stay in training. His consumption of alcohol, instead of increasing, lessened for quite a while. Howard lectured him constantly about drinking hard liquor, and even cut a hole in Fields' shower curtain to police him during the sequestered period of his baths. Prior to the peephole, at the end of a morning's moderation, the comedian would often come out of his shower singing and in rare bloom. Suspicious, Howard investigated the soggy chamber and found a miniature bar hung on wires beneath the soap dish.
It was Howard who persuaded Fields to switch to red wine and soda for several months. The trainer's solicitous inquiries about how it was working all provoked the same answer: "Rotten."
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