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W. C. Fields
for Las Encinas Sanitarium, still a very sick man. He told Magda Michael he regretfully must let her go for a while, and she returned home, but Carlotta Monti stayed with him at the sanitarium for months. At first he was in a private room and with two nurses in attendance ; later he was moved to a cottage, where Miss Monti could be within call of his bedside. The long addiction to alcohol had overtaken him at last. He had many of the traditional symptoms of delirium tremens — hallucinations, grotesque visitations, nostalgic evocations. Once, as Miss Monti sat holding his hands, he screamed that watches were materializing between all of his fingers. Much later, when he had recovered, he alluded to this fancy in a letter to Miss Monti, taking the opportunity to combine it with a lecture on her singing, as usual. He asked if she remembered when he was in Las Encinas and suffering from paresthesia, then recalled that he had remonstrated with her for not gathering up the watches that he believed he was pulling out from "betwixt my fingers." The letter went on to thank Miss Monti for her kindness in telling him the unvarnished truth about his condition, and he said he wanted to "reciprocate" her kindness. She had fooled around for five or six years without obtaining even "a modicum of success," he said, with the result that she had suffered and her friends had suffered with her.
Fields often made his shortcomings the basis for stern moral admonitions to others. At the same time, he never forgot Miss Monti's devotion when he was stricken. Among other ways of showing his appreciation, he had a doctor flown to her when, a year or so afterward, she was on location working in a movie in the northern California mountains and was laid low by what was diagnosed as chipmunk fever, said to have been the second such case in California history. He was acutely grateful for the visits and other expressions of loyalty by his friends and acquaintances.
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