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

W. C. Fields — an anonymous crypt in an ornate niche at Forest Lawn, a pretentious burial park that he frequently derided. Miss Michael and Miss Monti often go out with the flowers he loved, hoping on each trip that somebody might have gotten around to putting a simple identifying inscription on what promises to be his final resting place. Miss Michael, reflecting on all the turbulence that harassed her employer, sometimes thinks of a question she once asked him. "If you had your life to do over, what would you like to change, Mr. Fields?" He thought a minute before answering. "You know," he said, "I'd like to see how I would have made out without liquor." It seems doubtful, as Bergen told the funeral crowd, that he could have brought any more happiness to all the people he delighted for so many years. It is almost certain, though, that his personal life would have been more normal, less painful, what he had probably dreamed for it in the cruel time after his flight from home. But if George Sand was in the right, in her letter to Gustave Flaubert, then "Uhomme c'est rien, Uceuvre c'est tout" — the man is nothing, the work is everything — and Fields had brilliantly discharged his debt to society. The night of his death, several of his friends gathered at Chasen's restaurant for a wake. There, beneath John Decker's famous painting of the comedian as "Victoria Regina" — squatting lumpily with a doily and a silver salt cellar perched atop his head — they talked about his life and why they had liked him. Toward morning they put it briefly into words, and phoned it to the Hollywood Reporter, where it appeared as a page ad on December 27, 1946. 340