W. C. Fields

• "You must come up and see me sometime."
• W. C. Fields

• "My Little Chickadee"
• Mae West

If you look at the films of W. C. Fields ...

Hold, on there! Everybody knows his real name was William Claude Dunkenfield. You read that on popular informational websites on the Fount of All Knowledge. W. C. Fields was just a stage name. Let's get it right!

Uh, not so fast there, my little chickadees. Bill - as his friends called him - was not born William Claude Dunkenfield. The name was Claude William Dunkenfield. This is attested not only in the census records but in lists of early actors where he's listed as "Claude W." There's also a grade school school certificate where the Claude comes first, and his mom and dad also called him Claude. It was a name, we hear, he hated.

Strangely, in earlier newspaper accounts, well after Bill was famous and from the 1930's and yea, even up to the mid-1940's, Bill's "real" name would be listed as Claude William Dunkenfield. It seems that when Bill was alive no one was confused. So why the perplexity with the "William Claude" in our - quote - "modern era" - unquote?

The most likely explanation is speculative but reasonable. Since Bill's stage name was "W. C." everyone without access to early papers simply assumed his birth name and stage monicker had the same initials. So people say his real name was William Claude Dunkenfield.

But it's a moot point because in 1908, Claude William Dunkenfield changed his name legally to W. C. Fields. This was well before he made his first movie. So when you see Bill - as his later friends called him - on screen, you're seeing an actor who's real and legal name was W. C. Fields.

Bill - as we will continue to call him - was famous not just for the manner of his speech - with drawn-out words delivered in sing-song intonation - but its matter. He would often throw out bon mots which the character clearly thought was elegant and elevated speech.

But unlike Mae West, most of whose - quote - "authentic quotes" - unquote - are authentic, you do wonder about the - quote - "authentic quotes" - unquote - of W. C. Fields. Some of the more famous yet questionable of Bill's Fieldisms are:

Anyone who hates dogs and children can't be all bad.

A woman drove me to drink. I never had the opportunity to thank her.

I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.

I'd rather be in Philadelphia. (What he proposed for his epitaph.)

Parboiled, my dear. (When asked how he liked children.)

Just looking for loopholes. (Reply when he was found reading the Bible.)

Without doubt Bill's most famous quote - at least in these lubricious and discourteous times - is the one that refers to his bibulous reputation:

I don't drink water because fish ! in it.

However, research points to the first reporting of this quote in Graffiti: Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing. No problem in principle, of course - except that this book was first published in 1971 - a quarter of a century after Bill died.

When you have a quote appear from nowhere years after its (alledged) delivery, quotemeisters warn us that this is a strong sign of a bogus quote. Such a failure to find a source traceable to the lifetime of the quoters - the quote's provenance, if you will - renders the quote most suspect.

On the other hand, Dr. Harriet Fields, Bill's granddaughter, says the quote is more or less correct, although it has been roughed up in transmission down the years. Her grandfather's actual words, she said, were "I don't drink water because you know what fish do in it."

In this age of debunking, there's another case of a famous line from Bill which has been called into question. This is in the final scene of My Little Chickadee where Bill starred with Mae West. At the end of the movie, the two part amicably:

Bill:	If you get up around the Grampian Hills you must come up and see me sometime.
Mae:	I'll do that - my little chickadee.

One fan of Mae's movies pointed out that here we have one more case where famous a quote is misattributed. It was really Mae who said "My little chickadee" although everyone thinks the line was from Bill!

So we have one more "authentic quote" that has been debunked, u yo?

Weeeeheeeeelllllll, not quite. The truth is that Bill was indeed famous for saying "My Little Chickadee" and well before the movie was released. In If I Had a Million, Joseph Mankiewicz, the screenwriter (at least one of them), has Bill addressing a female character as a "little bird". But Bill thought specificity was better and changed the word to "chickadee".

"My little chickadee" became Bill's trademark endearment, and his cartoon alteregos commonly used the phrase in animated features. And remember that people were even then (slightly mis)quoting Mae as saying "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" So the last scene of My Little Chickadee with its quote inversion was simply intentional self-parody by Bill and Mae, who wrote the screenplay.

Like Howard Cosell of later years, Bill was an easy subject for impersonators. In the radio program Back Where I Come From, the first national broadcast to showcase Woody Guthrie, one of the performers was Len Doyle who appeared as a cornpone comedian. After bantering briefly with Woody and then boasting to the host and New Yorker literary critic Clifton "Kip" Fadiman that he was a "natural born expert", Len delivers his lines in a clear imitation of W. C. Fields.

Len:	Now you take the real facts on the Pet-ri-fiiiied Forest of Ari-zoooo-na.
Kip:	That's right, Len, give us the facts.
Len:	I remembering giving a little lecture up in Bos-ton and I said way out yon-der in Ari-zoooo-na, where it ain't raaaained since Noah and it's so dry you have to prime yourself to spit [laughter]. Yeeeeees - ah - it's so dry the grass widows can't take roooooot [laughter].

Len, by the way, was not really a stand-up comedian. He was a veteran character actor who could assume almost any role and later became famous in the radio series Mr. District Attorney where he played the District Attorney's assistant, Harrington.

Caveat Lector! Bill's own accounts of his youth are, well, embellished if we put it mildly. He did NOT run away from home at age 9 (or 10 or 11) after dropping a box of vegetables on his dad's head. That there were difficulties with his dad is not to be denied but once he became a well-paid performer Bill supported his dad and even paid his way to visit him when Bill was performing in England.

Bill was born in Philadelphia in 1880, and the usual story is that Bill did not go past the fourth grade. However, there are records - newspaper photographs and such - that show him in what would be the fifth grade and he may have even made it to the sixth.

If Bill had an interest in education he could have gone on as his mom wanted him to "make something" out of himself. But he was completely indifferent to formal education and his dad told him if he didn't go to school, then he had to go to work.

That a kid would have to go to work before finishing elementary school seems a major deprivation today. Bill, though, was not in an usual situation. In the late 19th century even middle class kids often didn't go beyond the eighth grade, which at the time was the last grade of what was then called grammar school. High school was an affectation for rich kids, and it was common for scions of the working class to drop out after the first few years of school.

Although he did work with his dad as a deliveryman for a while, Bill preferred jobs on his own. Among the catholicity of his employment was selling newspapers, and Bill said he would call out bogus headlines to get customers. The story goes that he was once hawking his papers by calling out "Five Men Swindled! Five Men Swindled!" When this got him a new customer, after he pocketed the money he began to call out "Six Men Swindled! Six Men Swindled!" A good story is not to be denied.

Bill's first "good job" was working as a "cash boy" at Philadelphia's Strawbridge and Clothiers. This was where the rich folks shopped, and Bill began to realize how disparate was the gap between Philly's Blue Bloods and his own family. But watching the pretensions of the High and Mighty later gave him material for his own characters.

But even the working class had some time for recreation, one of which was going to what were then called music halls. In a day when music, comedy, and drama had to be live music, comedy, and drama, you'd pay a dime to go see a string of acts which would include singers, dancers, comedians, magicians - and jugglers.

It was in Philly's cheap theaters that the jugglers caught Bill's eye. He soon found he had a natural facility for the art and he quickly became a skilled practitioner. A kid could even pick up money juggling on the street corners and soon Bill was good enough to go on stage himself. To their credit, his parents saw his ability and encouraged his move to show business.

Bill's rise was meteoric. At age 17 he was good enough to go on tour, and he was a vaudeville headliner by age 20. In five more years he was a star of the Ziegfeld Follies - the height of professional entertainment.

It was strange that a juggler could make the move to what was then the biggest home entertainment of the time. That was radio which became a commercial product in short order. The first voice transmission over the air was in 1900, and by 1920 there were five commercial stations in the US. In four more years the number had shot up to 500, and by 1930 half of urban households had a radio set in their homes.

Some people were alarmed. One reporter said radio was a "great unknown force" with a "dazing, almost anesthetic effect upon the mind." Another wrote that radio "hypnotized audiences falling under the sway of irrational forces like fascism, communism, or even a corrupt and bankrupt capitalism."

Naturally the public ignored the teeth-gnashing of the self-proclaimed social experts. Instead Americans plopped down in their living rooms and listened to dramas, comedies, variety shows, and even a few - as today rarely heard - educational programs.

What marked the early broadcasts - as contrasted to today - is there was no way to scramble radio waves so that the station could to control who could listen. So anyone could tune in as long as they were within range of the transmitter.

To make money, then, radio shows had to run ads. But seeking out individual business to pay for a one-minute spot is long and tiring work. So to simplify the logistics of drumming up the cash, some shows sought out sponsors, that is, a company with deep pockets that would pay the show's entire costs.

The good news was sponsors insured the show would last at least a full season. The bad news was the sponsors, in effect, owned the program and called the shots. Naturally, they would sometimes incorporate their name into the show's title. So you had The Magic Key of RCA (radios), Camel Caravan (cigarettes), Philco Radio Time (radios), The General Mills Radio Adventure Theater (breakfast cereals), The MGM Theater of the Air (movies), Maxwell House Showboat (coffee), The Ipana Troubadors (toothpaste), The Sealtest Village Store (ice cream), The Carnation Contented Hour (milk), Oldsmobile Program (cars), Sinclair Weiner Minstrels (gas and oil), The Voice of Firestone (tires), The Ford Sunday Evening Hour (cars), and the Philip Morris Playhouse (cigarettes).

And there was The Chase and Sanborn Hour - which touted coffee.

The Chase and Sanborn Hour was a popular comedy and variety show. Who the host was is sometimes a bit hard to determine although actor Don Ameche was officially tagged as such. But among the regulars was ventriloquist Edgar Bergen who appeared with his wooden sidekick, Charlie McCarthy, actress and singer Dorothy Lamour, and baritone Nelson Eddy. On the first shows - from May to August 1937 - Bill was a regular and frequently appeared as a guest after that.

Maybe Bill simply drifted off script, but on his last regular appearance on the Chase and Sanborn Hour he continually flubbed his lines. Or perhaps it was for, well, some other reason. But in any case, despite Don's prompting the skit pretty much fell flat.

Bill still appeared on shows sponsored by Chase and Sanborn. These included The Charlie McCarthy Show where the repartee became legendary.

Bill:	Tell me, Charles, is is true your father was a gateleg table?
Charlie:	If it is, your father was under it.

There was, though, another entertainment genre that had raised its celluloid head as early as the 1890's and would slowly but inexorably muscle in on live performances. This was The Movies. Even during Bill's early vaudeville years, commercial motion picture theaters were operating.

Not many films show Bill's juggling in action. Instead Bill's first film was Pool Sharks in 1915 and is about two men vying for the attentions of a young lady at a picnic. Shot without the intertitle cards to explain what's going on, the two men later repair to a poolhall to determine, we suppose, who will win the fair damsel's hand. Bill sports a most unconvincing false mustache but you can tell it's him. Although he was a good pool player the "trick shots" are clearly stop motion animation.

Development of the movies as an industry was slowed by the First World War and it wasn't until the 1920's that movies really became mainstream entertainment. Although vaudeville didn't die off until the 1930's, more and more people were going to the cheaper and less time consuming "picture shows".

It wasn't until 1924 that Bill's movie career really began in ernest when he appeared in Janice Meredith. Of course it wasn't until 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer that you had sound with the movies, and we had to wait until 1930 with the short film The Golf Specialist to hear Bill talk.

From then on, Bill appeared in over 30 movies - a goodly number before the digital age began cranking them out. Among the most famous are the Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), The Bank Dick (1940), and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). Other notable films were the 1933 Alice in Wonderland (where he played - or at least voiced - Humpty Dumpty) and David Copperfield in 1934 where he played Mr. Micawber who was, if you haven't read the book, one of the good guys.

Three of Bill's movies solidified his reputation for hating kids. These were Tillie and Gus (1933), The Old Fashioned Way (1934), and It's a Gift (1934) all of which featured Ronald Le Roy Overacker, better known as Baby LeRoy. Whether Bill really did spike Baby LeRoy's milk bottle with gin to stop him from crying is open to question.

Then, of course, there was My Little Chickadee.

Mae West and W. C. Fields in the same movie had to be a classic. But it wasn't that popular with the critics who had seen the characters many times over. But the critics hardly mattered since the public really liked the film. It was a hit.

Bill was known for keeping a bottle on the set containing what he said was pineapple juice. The story goes that someone surreptitiously slipped in some pineapple juice. At his next sip, Bill jumped up and said:

Godfrey Daniels! Some sidewinder has put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice!

Edgar Bergen confirmed that Bill did have his bottle of "pineapple juice" into which he would frequently dip. But Bill was was never drunk on the set, Edgar said, and would not tolerate drunkenness.

Edgar, though, was being generous to a man whom he personally liked and professionally respected. Unfortunately and unlike Mae who never smoked nor drank, Bill's drinking was very real. Photographs from his last years clearly show alcohol's effects, and W. C. Fields - no longer Claude William Dukenfield - died on Christmas Day, 1946, age 66 at the Las Encinas Sanatarium.

References

W. C. Fields: A Biography, James Curtis, Knopf, 2003.

The W.C. Fields Films, James L. Neibaur, McFarland, 2017.

Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields, Simon Louvish, Norton, 1997

W. C. Fields from Burlesque and Vaudeville to Broadway: Becoming a Comedian, A. Wertheim, Springer, 2014.

W.C. Fields by Himself: His Intended Autobiography with Hitherto Unpublished, W.C. Fields, Commentary by Ronald Fields, Foreward by Conan O'Brien, W. C. Fields Productins, Inc., 1973, Taylor Trade Publishing, 2016.

"W.C. Fields - American Actor", Encyclopedia Britannica.

They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions, Paul F. Boller Jr., John George, Oxford University Press, 1990.

Children of Hollywood: Accounts of Growing Up as the Sons and Daughters of Stars, Michelle Vogel, McFarland, 2005.

Timelessness of W.C. Fields' Art & Humor, Dr. Harriet Fields.

"The Legend of Whitey: W. C. Fields’ Philadelphia Roots:, Howard Tyson, Darby History.

Graffiti: Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing by Robert George Reisner, H. Regnery Co, 1971.

My Little Chickadee, W. C. Fields (Actor), W.C. Fields (Actor), Edward Cline (Director), W. C. Fields (Writer), W. C. Fields (Writer), 1940, Internet Movie Data Base.

"The Sometimes Bumpy Ride Of Being Joseph Mankiewicz", Mel Gussow, The New York Times, November 24, 1992.

"A Proboscis Worth Preserving", Susan King, The Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2007.

"Back Where I Come From: The Roots of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour", Fred Bals, Medium, May 8, 2017.

Whatever Became of ...? - Giant Annual 1, Richard Lamparski, Bantam, 1976.

"Radio: The Internet of the 1930s", Stephen Smith, American RadioWorks, November 10, 2014.

The A to Z of Old Time Radio, Robert C. Reinehr and Jon Swartz, Scarecrow Press, 2008

Historical Dictionary of Old Time Radio, Jon D. Swartz and Robert C. Reinehr, Scarecrow Press, 2008.

The Myth of W. C. Fields, Roger Miller, The South Florid Sun-Sentinel, April 6, 2003.

"'Are You Eating a Tomato or Is That Your Nose?' - W. C. Fields on Radio: An Overview", John V. Brennan, The Age of Comedy.

"W. C. Fields, Comedian, Dies in Pasadena, Cal.", The Key West Citizen, December 26, 1946, Page 1, Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

"Comedian Prepares for More Acting in Screen World, With Contract Which Calls for His Services in Two Films a Year", Sheilah Graham, The Washington Evening Star, September 12, 1937, Page F-4, Chronicling America, Library of Congress.