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

writing projects. One was a movie satire called Grand Motel, with which she was helping him, though they were not getting very far — Fields kept trying to switch the locale to a delicatessen. The other was an article for a magazine which had asked for his views as to how to end the war. Fields, in all seriousness, was expounding in careful prose his long-cherished plan to put the ringleaders of each country in the Rose Bowl and let them fight it out with sockfuls of dung. It was Miss Michael's theory (which proved to be correct) that the piece was not likely to get published. Only infrequently did Fields' real comic genius shine through his writing. For the most part his material had a tendency to sink progressively deeper into the ridiculous, shedding all meaning, and most of its humor, in the process. He wrote one book, Fields for President, which ran serially in This Week, and one chapter of which, My Views on Marriage, was reprinted in several collections, such as Tales for Males, edited by Ed and Pegeen Fitzgerald, the radio breakfast clubbers. After a long, wheezy passage about how he had once tried to impress a woman named Abigail Twirlbaffing (by playing "The Whistler and His Dog" backward on a cornet) he outlined a daily regimen for model wives, one which he genuinely approved. It went as follows : 7 to 8 a.m. — Arise quietly, shake down furnace, stoke it, prepare breakfast — eggs exactly four minutes, two lumps in the Java. 8 to 9 — Awake husband gently, singing sotto voce. My prefer ences would be "Narcissus" or "Silent Night." 9 to io — Drive husband to station, do marketing for dinner, and be sure not to order anything husband might decide to have for lunch. io to 12 — Mow lawn, wash clothes, iron husband's shirts, press his suits, paint screens, weed garden, swat flies. 279