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"Have a drink?" said Fields.
"Oh, fine, Father. Let's have a nice drink together."
"What' 11 it be?" asked Fields.
"Make mine a coke," said the youth in an abandoned tone.
Fields opened his mouth and roared for the butler. "Throw him out," he said. "He's no son of mine."
At the conclusion of this narrative, Le Baron said, "Well, now, damn it, Bill, you ought to feel proud — a grown son, a fine boy from what I hear, coming to see you and all."
He watched Fields' face carefully in the moonlight, and thought he saw a softening of the expression, even a hint of moisture in the belligerent eyes. But the shifting palm fronds play strange tricks with the moonlight, he concluded a moment afterward, for Fields suddenly opened his mouth and gave vent to a raucous and disparaging Bronx cheer.
Later on, Fields said that he had investigated the visit and that the boy was not his son at all. "It was another fellow entirely," he said. "I misunderstood the whole business."
Fields' friends believe that if he ever did deny any of his family, it was because he felt that they made him seem old. During the war, when his son's wife had a child, the fact that Fields was a grandfather was advertised by Walter Winchell. Fields was gloomy. "I'm rooked," he told Fowler, using one of his favorite terms. "It dates me." He was always touchy about having his age mentioned; Mack Sennett used to ruffle his feelings by saying, "I saw you juggle when I was a kid, Bill. You were wonderful."
"That's a lie, you old fraud," Fields would yell. "You're old enough to be my father." Now and then Fields told reporters he was single, a statement to which his son took pardonable umbrage. The son once forced a retraction from a national magazine which had quoted Fields on his unmarried state.
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