Gentle Grifter

Neither age, pain, nor liquor had dulled the intent and raffish gleam in his eye. His distrust of property men, doctors and small children was undiminished. His voracious love of life and laughs had not failed, and he still eyed the world with the spurious heartiness of a man with an ace up his sleeve. But his body was flabby and old, and his fiery, bulbous nose had become a shocking badge of suffering. Last week, after 67 years, death finally hoodwinked W. C. Fields, the noblest confidence man of them all.

His career had lasted more than half a century. He had been a vaudeville juggler and a big name in musicomedy for decades before the sound track was invented. But millions would remember only one W. C. Fields--the gentle grifter who convulsed them in the '30s as a star of motion pictures and the radio.

His comedy was based on the oldest precept of the cardsharp and the carnival grifter--"everyone has a little larceny in his heart." When he kicked Baby Le Roy, interrupted a moment of fraudulent grief to execute a moth, or eyed a sheriff with ponderous injured dignity, his audiences admitted their spottiness of soul and rejoiced.

Alone in the Big City. As Larsen E. Whipsnead of the radio, or Cuthbert J. Twillie in My Little Chickadee, he was simply being himself. He was born Claude William Dukenfield, son of a poverty-stricken Philadelphia family. When he was about eleven he crowned his father with a heavy wooden box in retaliation for a whipping and ran away from home. He slept in alleys and on porches, often awoke in agony from cold. He stole milk, crept into saloons to snatch free lunch. He was always using his fists and always coughing (he later discovered that he had had tuberculosis), but he never went home. At 15 he was forcing himself to practice juggling 16 hours a day.

Even when he was making $125 a week in vaudeville he could never quite believe that he had really evaded hunger & cold and had outdistanced the police. He worked for laughs and applause with a Neanderthal ferocity.

Once in the Ziegfeld Follies he discovered Comedian Ed Wynn making faces at an audience from beneath the billiard table over which he was brandishing his famed bent cue. He conked Wynn with the cue, knocked him cold, beamed at the applause and went on without interruption.

W. C. Fields had little to do with many things that have happened in the U.S. recently, but almost everything to do with the Duke and the Dauphin and others who peopled Mark Twain's piazza. Not for Fields was the jet-propelled gagging of the radio studios, as fast and inhuman and footless as a new transcontinental speed record. His tempo was adagio.

An Enemy of Dogs. All his life he gloated over soft, warm beds. He was afraid of dogs--he thought they saw through the disguise of his prosperity. And though he suffered occasional grandiose outbursts of generosity, he hoarded his money with fierce cunning. Then in the crash of 1929 he lost it all ($250,000). Broke, aging, he headed back to Hollywood. He did not reach the zenith of his motion picture career without battles. He distrusted directors. He had no faith in writers (although he occasionally tried to steal their lines) and wanted to do his own stories. He finally had his way. Result: an impressive string of successes--David Copper field, Poppy, Bank Dick, My Little Chickadee.

But illness gradually beat him down. He spent his last years cloistered in a huge house on Los Angeles' De Mille Drive. He had plenty of money (approx. $800,000) and an automobile with a silver-plated engine. He lolled in bed, peered out the windows with binoculars, and indulged his gargantuan appetite for liquor. Beyond mellowing him it seemed to have little immediate effect--he could juggle three cigar boxes after a quart of Irish whiskey --and he refused to give it up. He had 700 cases of beer in his house, and quart jars of martinis in strategic spots.

Months ago his liver and kidneys proved to be in disrepair, and his condition was not alleviated, he said, when the doctors confined him to "a whitish fluid they forced on helpless babies." A decade ago, when he was seriously ill with pneumonia, he emerged from a coma to greet his despairing friends with the comment: "Oh, ye of little faith." Last week Fields could not make it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.