W.C. Fields from the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the Screen: Becoming a Character Comedian

276 Pages·2016·3.639 MB·English

by  Arthur Frank Wertheim (auth.)

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY
W.C. Fields from the
Ziegfeld Follies and
Broadway Stage
to the Screen
Becoming a Character Comedian
Arthur Frank Wertheim
Palgrave Studies in Theatre and
Performance History
Series Editor
Don B. Wilmeth
Brown University
Emeritus Professor
Providence, USA
Aims of the Series
Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History is a series devoted to
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theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study but utilized as
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is no geographical focus for this series and works of excellence of a diverse
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Arthur Frank Wertheim
W.C. Fields from the
Ziegfeld Follies and
Broadway Stage to
the Screen
Becoming a Character Comedian
Arthur Frank Wertheim
Historian, Rancho Palos Verdes
California, USA
Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History
ISBN 978-1-349-94985-4 ISBN 978-1-349-94986-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94986-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960536
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
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Cover image © In the “Sleeping Porch” scene Fields futilely tries to place a heavy block of
ice in his icebox. The Comic Supplement/1925 Follies. Courtesy, W. C. Fields Productions
Inc., www.wcfields.com.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
In honor of my beloved brother Jack—a devoted friend, a caring helpmate,
and an exemplar of strength and courage to the end—R.I.P
I
ntroductIon
My life with W.C. Fields started on a spring day in May 2007. An article
in The Los Angeles Times announced that the Academy of Motion Pictures
Arts and Sciences was staging an exhibition on its fourth floor gallery titled:
“The Amazing Peregrinations and Pettifoggery of One William Claude
Dukenfield, late of Philadelphia, PA., familiarly known to Crowned Heads
and Hoi Polloi alike as W. C. Fields.”
Entering the door to the show, I was bowled over by the sight. The
walls were covered with colorful posters; original playbills; handwritten
and typed personal letters; contracts; cartoons; photographs; stage scripts;
movie scenarios; souvenirs from his performances abroad; and much much
more. At one end of the room gales of laughter stemmed from visitors
watching his films. The show embodied a treasure trove of memorabilia
recently donated by the Fields family so that the public might encounter
the astonishing career of an eminent comedian, who brought so much
hilarity to people around the world.
As if he was a skeleton in a closet, the Fields Papers were once pad-
locked in the basement of his widow’s home. Fields’s five grandchildren
were not even allowed to see what was hidden behind a bolted door. They
believed that the “Bogeyman” lived in the basement. After Fields’s widow
died, the contents were placed in storage. The curse of silence about the
comedian was finally broken by his grandson, Ronald J. Fields, who gained
access and released his findings in his groundbreaking book W. C. Fields By
Himself (1973). His complete papers remained unavailable for researchers
until the family gifted them to the Academy.
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
After the show, I was granted permission to research the material with
the goal of perhaps writing his life story. After perusing the multi-page
inventory and the material for a few months, I became convinced that the
seventy-one boxes in the Fields Papers are possibly the most voluminous
and valuable collection of an American performer’s career. The collection
is a gold mine. It begins with his date book listing his first stage appear-
ances in 1898 and ends with papers about his lengthy confrontational
probate trial lasting until the mid-1950s.
A journey through Fields’ career from 1898 to 1946 is an incredible
ride that yields significant information about his appearances in practi-
cally every performance art during the first half of the twentieth century:
club shows; burlesque; medicine, museum, and minstrel shows; American
vaudeville; British music halls; leading European variety theaters; three
Broadway revues, including performances in six annual Ziegfeld Follies; a
star in the long-running Broadway show Poppy; twelve silent movies; thirty-
two sound shorts and features; guest spots on radio comedy programs;
and a recording of the artist six months before his death. Responsible
for this amazing body of work primarily is that comedy came naturally to
Fields—it was in his DNA.
As I worked my way through the research, a number of revelations
stood out. Fields’s long stage career from 1898 to 1930 had a major influ-
ence on his comedy. While a performer in burlesque in 1899 he made a
monumental decision—to use juggling as a means to furnish comedy in
his act. In the Ziegfeld Follies he next became a character comedian playing
roles that became the quintessence of his art.
While in Ziegfeld’s spectacular revue he created two comic char-
acterizations: the good-natured charlatan and besieged husband; two
impersonations that reappear in his films. When he went to Hollywood
permanently in 1930 to make films he took with him not only his stage
scenarios but the techniques he had learned in the theater. He repeated his
vaudeville acts juggling balls, manipulating cigar boxes, and pool tricks for
the screen Pool Sharks (1915). His 1918 Follies’ sketch as a frustrated bun-
gling golfer is reused in The Golf Specialist (1930). Three of his four shorts
for Mack Sennett stem from his stage sketches. Fields’s hilarious “Back
Porch” scene from the 1925 Ziegfeld Follies is repeated in the silent picture
It’s the Old Army Game (1926) and sound film It’s a Gift (1934). Three
of his last movies can even be traced back to his stage career. Fields pos-
sessed the talent to make these sketches appear pristine and side- splitting
on the screen.
INTRODUCTION ix
Since Fields’s vaudeville juggling act was mostly silent, he turned to
pantomime to amuse his audience. He never trained as a pantomimic art-
ist; it happened instinctively. Fields started intentionally missing a trick,
grimaces, feigns embarrassment, and then completes the stunt, which pro-
vokes theatergoers to laugh heartedly. Building on his talent, he showed
various emotions by using different body movements, diverse facial
expressions and gestures, and unique mimicry. Fields honed his flair for
pantomime on the Broadway stage and used this skill in his silent motion
pictures, which require feelings and dialogue to be expressed by an actor’s
movements. Although his inimitable voice usurps the screen in his talkies,
Fields still uses pantomime to demonstrate his emotions.
Fields’s massive correspondence sheds light on new information about
his life off stage. The letters help to unravel many legends about him and
to discover the truth behind many fabrications, beginning with the come-
dian’s own hyperbolic tales about his personal life. Adding to the conun-
drum are the numerous trumped-up stories written by studio publicists
and fan magazine writers who were anxious to create an exciting rags-
to- riches tale about a runaway poverty-stricken lad who climbed to fame.
Thanks to the Fields Papers numerous questions about Fields’s life can be
answered.
His letters reveal that his comic persona and private life were strongly
intertwined. The correspondence provides insights into his tragic relation-
ships with his wife and son; affairs with other women; clashes with his
father; battles with censors; confrontations with stage producers and film
moguls; his complex dual personality; prejudices; and frustrations, among
others. Because Fields’s wife refused to divorce him the correspondence
between the two ranges from the practical (continual complaints that the
money he sends was meager) to the vitriolic (wild accusations about each
other). His wife controls their son and feeds him unflattering stories about
his father. Fields and his son consequently remain estranged for years.
The letters uncover a life full of despair. His tyrannical father became
a demon who haunted him all his life. Fields’s occasional lengthy affairs
with other women fell apart, leaving him lonely until he found another
companion, who eventually left. He paid the price for treading on a con-
tinual precarious path as an entertainer. His roller coaster showbiz career
alternated from the depths of joblessness accompanied by depression to
the pinnacle of fame bursting with exhilaration.
Fields recognized that pain was the springboard for his comedy. These
excruciating relationships impacted his persona on stage and screen;
x INTRODUCTION
propelled him, for instance, to impersonate the beleaguered husband
tormented by a despotic wife and sassy son. His role as a confidence
man operating shell games, pitching quack medicine, pool hustler, and
card shark stems from the crookedness he experienced as a youngster, as
a showman, and from his fellow beings. Fields’s personal life and pub-
lic persona coalesced to create a famous stinging American iconoclast,
who through satire and parody lashed out at sacrosanct institutions and
society’s dishonesty.
The Fields Papers unleashed the need for a three-part sequential series
that re-evaluates the evolution of his comedic art and its relationship to his
personal life. The first book, W.C. Fields from Burlesque and Vaudeville to
Broadway: Becoming a Comedian, discusses his early life and stage career
until 1915. This second volume, W.C. Fields from the Ziegfeld Follies and
Broadway Stage to the Screen: Becoming a Character Comedian, dramatizes
a momentous turning point in Fields’s career. During his appearances in
six Follies and two other Broadway shows from 1915 to 1925 he moved
from being typecast as a vaudeville comic juggler to a character comedian
performing a variety of roles. While in the famous revue he underwent a
burst of creativity writing sketches that depict dysfunctional families (as his
own) and played a milquetoast husband berated by a bossy wife.
Between Follies’ engagements Fields became a star in the Broadway
play Poppy (1923–24), impersonating Eustace McGargle, a kindhearted
con man. McGargle is the first of many memorable mountebanks that he
portrayed on the screen. In his final Follies in 1925, Bill magnified his role
as a beleaguered husband in hilarious scenes that were repeated in two
films. By the end of his appearances before the footlights in 1925, Fields
has created his two most durable characters—an endearing con artist and
harassed husband—an achievement that would soon bring him fame as a
top film comedian.
The final part in the series highlights his stage, screen, and radio suc-
cesses after the Follies, his satirical iconoclasm, and his Phoenix-like rise to
become an American cultural icon. The three books, in total, enliven the
extraordinary saga of a virtuoso comedian, often called a comic genius,
legendary iconoclast, and “Great Man,” who brought so much laughter
to millions while enduring so much anguish.