Skip to main contentIn that select group of actors who became cultural icons only after death (James Dean, Louise Brooks, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe), W.C. Fields, at first, seems the most unlikely member. The irascible vaudevillian, who sported a nose that Kenneth Tynan described as "a doughnut pickled in vinegar" and who barked insults and excuses out the side of his cheroot-stuffed mouth, was definitely an acquired taste in his day. But in the late '60s, during the formation of a popular counterculture, Fields, in the words of his biographer James Curtis, "became a potent symbol of cynicism and rebellion to the generation of his grandchildren." But it was a long journey from juggling dishes in a grind house to gracing the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Books on Fields have become a cottage industry since the Vietnam War years, but Curtis (who has also written excellent books on directors James Whale and Preston Sturges) has finally created the definitive biography. He's also written it in a witty style that completely captures Fields' world and would have appealed to the great wordsmith: "Bradenburgh's Dime Museum...whose principal attraction was Eight Female Barbers, an octet of buxom incompetents who shaved and shampooed male volunteers in an instructive mix of sex and bloodletting."
We take Fields' quick wit and verbal dexterity for granted, but Curtis reveals that, to find work to survive, the comedian had to leave school before he could fully read and write. But Fields was born at the same time as the vaudeville movement, in the same city that gave it life: Philadelphia. Before long, Fields was part of the business, and he quickly became one
of the most famous jugglers of the world.
Fields was actually terrified to speak on stage, so he devoted his energy to becoming a great pantomimist, reasoning that he could speak universally through gesture. But once he'd perfected his acts, he allowed himself some ad-libbing on stage, and these impromptu bons mots began to be eagerly awaited by his audience. Fieldsian patter was born.
Curtis' book, like Fields' life, serves as a history of popular
entertainment in America, charting the move from vaudeville and
burlesque to the grandiose Ziegfeld Follies, on to the "automatic vaudeville" of cinema, to talkies, radio and the first stirrings of television. W.C. Fields is rich in backstage and studio detail and history: Miner's Bowery Theatre was the first to employ the dreaded vaudeville hook in 1899; Fields' film Million Dollar Legs (1932) disappeared in America but was hailed as a surrealist masterpiece by Man Ray in Paris and played a year on the Left Bank.
Most of all, Curtis has written a great Dickensian tale of a young Pip who becomes the greatest Micawber of all time; it's a rags-to-riches tale packed with the drama and absurdities of a life fully lived. Profligate and tight, four-flusher and honesty itself, Fields, in Curtis' sympathetic and penetrating study, again becomes a tonic against a new age of suckers and rubes.
W.C. Fields: A Biography
By James Curtis
(Knopf, 593 pages, $35)
James Curtis will present the opening night of the Northwest Film Center's W.C. Fields retrospective. See also Screen listings. Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave., 221-1156. 8 pm Thursday, April 24. $6.50 (including Fields triple-bill).
WWeek 2015