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

W. C. Fields case refused to come up, and she tried to solve the problem by yanking it. The pain was so numbing, and the cause so senseless, that Fields was more angry than injured. He sat up and gave the nurse a cursing so flagrant that he bragged about it forever afterward. "I knew then I was all right," he said later. "I was going to get well." Convalescent, he began to think again about his work. With Miss Michael and Miss Monti he went over script ideas and at odd times wrote down scraps of dialogue and skeleton plots. Some of the movie people were organizing a radio jubilee for Adolph Zukor, and they asked Fields to broadcast from his sickroom, a request that started the comedian on a successful venture in yet another medium. His voice came over the air with such resonance and comic effect that, when he went home in a few weeks, the Chase and Sanborn Coffee Company wanted him for a series of broadcasts with Edgar Bergen and his wooden dummy. For two years his asthmatic feuds with Charlie McCarthy were an important part of the Sunday night scene, like querulous youngsters and cold chicken. For the series with Bergen, Fields reportedly got $6500 a week. The New York advertising agency that handled the program, J. Walter Thompson, sent a radio writer, Dick Mack, out to help Fields. Like the other Fields' collaborators, Mack had his troubles. He would send a prepared script to Fields' home around the first of every week for "editing." But with Fields, editing took the form of throwing out all the lines assigned to him and substituting creations of his own. He and Mack had spirited wrangles. Fields never altered a word in another actor's lines ; his attitude was that if that actor wished to trust himself to anybody as freakish as a writer, it was on his own head. After the comedian had read the script, Mack would drive out to his home and they would square off, then go over it together. Rehearsals were held at the studio 308