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on Saturday and again early Sunday. Fields was driven down by his chauffeur, arriving with a retinue of secretaries, butlers, nurses, and others, amid great pomp. On Sunday night the production staff always displayed agitation over his script, to which he clung doggedly. "Any changes, Bill?" they would say, and the comedian would reply, "No, I'm going to do it just as it is." In an aside to Miss Michael he would add, "We won't show the damned thing to them — the hell with them." The production people would explain that the final version must be on file at "the New York office" before the show. At that stage, Fields had no idea what they meant by the New York office, and cared less. When it came time to do the program, he just said what he pleased, without worrying about J. Walter Thompson, Chase and Sanborn, the National Broadcasting Company, or even radio in general. By extreme good fortune Bergen was a man with an exceptionally nimble mind, and he made out skillfully without cues.
Fields' radio employers had to handle him with kid gloves. As he had grown older, his speaking tempo had slowed dcwn, and he sent them into prostrations of nervousness by dragging the show. When they remonstrated, he would say, as he had said to Mack Sennett, "Well, you'd better get yourself another boy." The production staff eventually depended upon Magda Michael's influence. She could often lead Fields to the trough, and even make him drink, by simple tricks of psychology. The basic principle of her method was flattery. If she wished to speed him up, she first spent ten minutes telling him how faultlessly, how stunningly he had done the passage. "It was probably the best reading anyone has ever heard on radio," she would say. "You have no idea how they admire you." Then she might add, in an elegiac tone, "Of course they'd like to make it slower, but I'm inclined to agree with you that a trifle more speed might get even more of the
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