Self-Made Curmudgeon

W. C. FIELDS: His FOLLIES AND FORTUNES (340 pp.)--Robert Lewis Taylor--Doubleday ($3.50).

At the age of nine, William Claude Dukinfield conceived a passion for juggling. In the Philadelphia stable where the family vegetable cart was stored, he practiced earnestly with oranges and lemons. But the elder Dukinfield took a dark view of his son's ambition, and once he went as far as to tan him for bruising a lemon. Incensed beyond containment, William climbed aloft in the stable one day and dropped a large box on his father's head. Then he left home, never to return.

Thus began the career of W. C. Fields. He slept, successively, in a hole in the ground, a forge, a bran trough in a livery stable, a barrel and a saloon toilet. To eat, he scavenged saloons and stole. Backsliding into respectability, he lived for a while with his grandmother, who made him get a job as a store "cash boy"--a trying occupation for a boy as sorely tempted as Fields was. Then, at the age of 14, he became a juggler in an amusement park. After that, his only work was to make people laugh.

Getaway Money. As Biographer Taylor sees it, Fields's whole life was shaped and distorted by his childhood experiences. "Fields's early grapples with things like hunger, frost, bartenders and police gave him a vast, watchful suspicion of society and its patterns." As a comedian, he appealed to the streak of fundamental pessimism lurking in everybody. In grownups, children and animals he always expected the worst--and he was usually right. Audiences found it uproarious.

Actually, Fields was just doing what came naturally. He was eternally suspicious, intensely competitive and even at the peak of his career morbidly fearful of poverty. To avoid sudden bankruptcy, he developed the habit of starting small bank accounts all over the U.S.; at one time he had 700 of them. Once Gene Fowler saw an eye-filling roll of bills, $4,000 worth, in Fields's pocket. Asked what the money was for, Fields answered in a tone that closed the discussion, "It's getaway money."

Blackjack Patrol. Fields squirmed at the thought that there might be comedians as he. He even accused Baby LeRoy of trying to steal scenes from him. Once, to get even, he spiked the infant's orange juice with gin, and when it thereupon fell asleep, shouted with glee: "The kid's no trouper. Send him home."

His world was a paranoid Luna Park lit by alcohol and filled with ingenious contraptions for the exercise of harmless aggression and idiosyncratic suspicion. To find out if his servants were stealing canned goods, he set up an elaborate Dictaphone apparatus. To scare off kidnapers, he would prowl his grounds at 2 a.m., armed with blackjacks and carrying on loud conversations with fictitious bodyguards. He never made his peace with the world because he saw no good reason to be at peace with it.

He became the idol of a cult, presided over by Authors Alva Johnston and Gene Fowler (who turned over all his notes to Biographer Taylor). An ex-newspaperman and author of some of The New Yorker's smoothest profiles on amiable eccentrics, Taylor strings out the Fields anecdotes (first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post) with skill and devotion, content to be entertaining about one of America's greatest entertainers.

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