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W. C. Fields
By request of his wife, Fields transported his new grandson from the hospital to his son's home in Beverly Hills, the son being away in the Navy. It was a singular trip. The chauffeur drove them — Fields, the estranged Mrs. Fields, his daughter-in-law, her mother from Massachusetts, and the babe in his swaddling clothes — in the big Lincoln. Fields devoted the trip, to his wife's horror, to a detailed explanation of how one could drink martinis without that fact being suspected from one's breath. He had two flasks, one containing martinis and the other containing a popular mouthwash. "You take a snort, like this," he said in the friendliest way to his son's mother-in-law, "and then you gargle with mouthwash. After that you spit out," and cranking down a window he gave a misty blow. His manner indicated that he hoped the visitor was chalking up the trick for future use.
Fields' sickness gave him a permanent worry about food and other shortages. He heard of the bitter malnutrition in Europe, and he took measures to ride out the scarcity. During the war he began to buy canned goods in large quantities. Once bought, they presented a serious problem of storage, which Fields solved, he thought, very ingeniously. What it boiled down to was that, at the time, he had among his servants only one, a maid, whom he trusted. It was in her room, therefore, that his stockpiles of commodity goods were heaped. At the outset of his hoarding, she and the others thought that his diligence would soon wane. But as the months went by, her situation became critical. To get to her closet, she had to shovel cans aside like a miner moving coal, and the nightly trip to bed was accomplished over shifting dunes of salmon, tuna, peaches, corned beef and carrots. The likelihood that Fields would ever eat any of this material, even if he was starving, was slight, but its possession bucked him up. He was crestfallen when the maid came forward with a badly injured shin and said, "Mr. Fields, I don't think I can make it any longer.
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