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

W. C. Fields the homes of movie notables, and damn them all. Instead of following Sunset through Pacific Palisades, they turned left at Chautauqua and followed the steep hill down into Santa Monica, where they picked up the beach road and headed north toward Santa Barbara. It was ten o'clock now and the sun was high overhead ; the first bathers were making their nests on the beach. A light but steady breeze had brought out scores of sailboats, some of them with red, yellow, or blue sails, and altogether it looked like a perfect day for an outing. Passing Malibu, Fields spotted Gregory La Cava in front of his beach house, watering his insatiable lawn, and pulled up long enough to call him "a Dago bum" and offer him a martini, which La Cava refused with an exclamation of deep disgust. Fields waved amiably, cursed him some more, and they drove on. They had a late lunch in a grove just outside Santa Barbara, beside the ocean. For their table he picked a lot of wild flowers, or semi-wild, since the municipality had planted them several years before with some hope of permanency, and he walked around as they ate, exclaiming on the beauties of nature. He had opened a bottle of champagne, and after the others had sipped a glass or two, he finished it. Before they left, he went down to the sand, where he pointed out the loathsome surf, as if he were exhibiting some natural phenomenon for the first time, and described in detail his sapping employment as a drowner at Atlantic City. Driving back into Santa Barbara, they decided that the afternoon was too far advanced to continue in comfort, so they stayed overnight, Fields engaging a suite for everybody at the Biltmore. They dined in the hotel that evening and went to a movie, a Western, one of the few kinds in which he could find no trace of competitiveness. On this night he even made the expansive observation that the comedian, an elderly whiskerando whose sole 284