W. C. Fields, Born January 29, 1880

The most public warrior in the fight against prohibition, W. C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fields is one of the most quotable entertainers in history:

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.

His father was a vegetable peddler, and W. C.’s attitude was not always congruent with that of his old man. Wes Gehring records:

An eleven-year-old Fields had left a small shovel in the yard. His father stepped on it [and was struck] in the shin. Young Fields found this funny, and father promptly bounced the shovel off the boy’s head. Fields . . . eventually decided upon, and successfully executed, the dropping of a wooden crate on his father’s head. Feeling that it would now be difficult to maintain any working rapport with Mr. Dukenfield, not to mention the inherent dangers of such one-upmanship, Fields ran away from home.

Although Fields was intermittently on reasonable terms with his family, he left home for good during his teen years and worked in vaudeville with an act consisting of juggling and visual gimmickry. In his thirties he joined Ziegfeld’s Follies for several years and then began a career in Hollywood. Fields’s unusual voice and curmudgeonly demeanor were his most notable traits, and the consumption of alcohol was a central motif in his work.

Fields disdained society, religion, and niceties. The only movie role of traditional literary merit Fields occupied was that of Mr. Micawber in the George Cukor–directed production of David Copperfield (1935). Charles Dickens was Fields’s favorite writer. More in the direction of his penchants, Fields starred in My Little Chickadee with Mae West in 1940. Among his many other noteworthy films were International House (1933), The Bank Dick (1940), and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941).

Fields’s love of alcohol did not serve his longevity; in the mid-1930s he fell into poor health. Although he rallied and returned to film, his earlier prediction of living for a century did not pan out. Although there are many different stories about what his final words might have been (“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia” is a myth), the simple truth is that Fields died quietly at a sanitarium in Pasadena on Christmas Day 1946.

-Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery
 

Cited:
Curtis, James. W. C. Fields: A Biography. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003.

Gehring, Wes. W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.