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WC FIELDS (VOLUME 3, EPISODE ONE) PART ONE

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W. C. Fields, Hollywood Legend

WC Fields, Passport Photo, 1915

W. C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield on January 29, 1880 in Darby, Pennsylvania.  His parents, James and Kate, were English immigrants of modest means, his mother a homemaker and his father appropriately enough at the time of his son’s birth, an innkeeper and bartender.

Fields, in his Broadway years

Fields scraped together some money, relocated and made the rounds of the numerous NY agents and bookers that funneled entertainers to the hundreds of venues around the city, but without any references or solid experience, this venture was doomed from the outset.  Fields quickly ran out of cash and had no choice but to return home, the only tangible result of his brief move a lifelong loathing of Philadelphia, which, after his exposure to the bustling sophistication of Manhattan, struck him as backward and dull.

Fields in “The Old Fashioned Way,” with Baby LeRoy

WC Fields would whip through several solid performances during the remainder of 1933 and 1934: “Six of a Kind,“ “You’re Telling Me,“ and “The Old Fashioned Way.” Stuck in the middle of these efforts were Fields’ least favorite role as “Humpty-Dumpty” in “Alice in Wonderland, and the dreadful “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” which finally proved to the Paramount brass that casting Fields as a secondary character was a mistake.

Recent photo of Fields’ DeMille Drive home, Los Feliz section of Los Angeles

 

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WC FIELDS (VOLUME 3, EPISODE ONE) PART TWO

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W. C. Fields, Hollywood Legend

Fields with Mae West in My Little Chickadee

To much excitement, it was announced that Fields would next team up with Mae West.  One of America’s biggest stars in the mid-thirties, West, now aged 43, had also recently been cut loose by Paramount after her popularity waned.  Months would pass before a script and director would be selected, the result of Fields’ cantankerous and territorial approach to his participation.  Surprisingly, the two actors were able to co-exist and what was eventually entitled “My Little Chickadee,” came to pass.  The film was a commercial success but West was apparently embittered by the experience in which Fields was paid substantially more, got a dubious screenwriting credit and she received poor reviews that caused Universal to pass on another more expensive option for a second film.  She would disparage Fields for the rest of her life.

WC Fields as Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield

Charles Laughton, against his better judgment, had been persuaded to take the key role of Wilkins Micawber and after three days of shooting, the skilled actor was convinced that he was completely unsuitable to continue. Reluctantly, Selznick and director George Cukor set about getting the man they had initially contemplated casting: WC Fields.  Because he was under contract with Paramount, the actor would not come cheap and Fields, always mindful of money and sensing he had MGM over a barrel, held out for $50,000 for two weeks work.

Fields On Radio, March, 1938

With Paramount reluctant to cast him in anything tangible, Fields decided to head in a different direction and embrace the medium of radio.  By 1937, he was appearing on the prestigious Chase and Sanborn hour mostly trading barbs with Edgar Bergen’s ventriloquist dummy, Charlie McCarthy.  The radio show quickly became the most popular in the US but the pressure on Fields to perform on a weekly basis was unpleasant and as soon as he got another film from Paramount, he quit.

Fields’ grave at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California

WC Fields died on Christmas Day, 1946.  Despite the legal protestations of his wife and son, he was eventually cremated and interred in a vault in Forest Lawn Cemetery.  The plaque adorning his ashes merely lists his stage name and the years of his birth and death.  Contrary to urban myth, there is no epitaph concerning the city of Philadelphia.

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