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

W. C. Fields chiefly to separate him from income-tax money, and he spent several weeks of each year trying to think up ways to forestall this separation. Both Miss Michael and Miss Monti recall that income-tax month was a severe trial for everybody in the house. Fields' manner was irritable and conspiratorial in the extreme. Miss Michael often helped him with his return, as Grady had done, but her counsel was largely ignored. She remembers suggesting, at one point, that no good could accrue from his deducting depreciation on a borrowed lawn mower, and another time she demurred at his construing twelve cans of weed killer as a professional expense. One year he deducted his bill for liquor, which he said was a necessary tool of his trade. Westbrook Pegler came to visit Fields one day, and the two conversed at length on the general subject of vice-presidents. Pegler suggested, and Fields agreed, that a movie built around a typical Vice-President of the United States might be funny. They decided to concentrate their research, in the main, on Henry Wallace's speeches. Fields accordingly wrote Wallace a letter asking for copies of some of his speeches, explaining that he had a hobby of filing the public utterances of government officials. In reply, Wallace promptly sent him copies of all the speeches he had made while in office, and added a personal note of the warmest kind. He had always revered Fields' comedy, he said, and hoped that he would have, in the future, as many delightful hours of enjoyment from it as he had had in the past. Thereafter, Fields' attitude toward Wallace and all vice-presidents was guarded. He seemed to lose interest in the project with Pegler, and whenever he heard anybody damn Wallace, he would say, "Well, now, I wouldn't go that far. Mr. Wallace is a highly intelligent man, a sound man in many ways." Fields' favorite dictation was done in collaboration with his pal Sam Hardy. They would set up shop in the comedian's study, 276