PROFESSOR Eustace McGargle, Figley E. Whiteside, Ogg Ogilby, J. Pinkerton Snoopington, T. Frothingell Bellows, Cleopatra Pepperday, Mahatma Kane Jeeves ... the grandiloquent cadences of the names enable one to hear in the mind's ear the bombastic drawl of the great juggler, comedian, screenwriter and master bacchant, the idol of drinkers everywhere, William Claude Dukenfield, W.C. Fields.
His lifespan - from 1880 to 1946 - covered the development of American entertainment from burlesque, vaudeville and musical revues to silent motion pictures and movies that resound. He succeeded all the way, pleasing the public and critics on tours of the US, Europe and Australia and as a star on Broadway and in Hollywood.
By 1919 he was making $6,000 a week. By the time his liver and kidneys gave up and he was taken away by "The Man In The Bright Nightgown", as Fields called death, he was a rich man. His will provoked clamorous litigation by his estranged wife and mistresses, avowed and actual, past and present.
Simon Louvish, a Glaswegian brought up in Jerusalem, the author of nine novels and a producer of documentary films who now teaches at the London International Film School, has written a monumental biography of Fields that should satisfy his most avid fans. It is long, thorough, well illustrated and written with such affectionate appreciation that it seems complimentary even when Louvish calls his subject "the world's greatest liar".
Fields assiduously cultivated a mythical persona, a fictional representation of his life and character, which has long been popularly accepted as factual. He encouraged interviewers to put it about that he was an irascible misanthrope who particularly hated women and children and a paranoid miser who hoarded cash in hundreds of bank accounts under preposterous pseudonyms. "He was forever inventing and reinventing himself," Louvish writes,
"supplying the audience with the act it wanted, or the act he had trained it to demand."
With access to the archives of the Fields family, including letters, diaries and scrapbooks, the biographer portrays the public curmudgeon as a gentler, more generous person in private than he pretended to be. However, as Fields aged and became a more and more "prodigious imbiber of the amber nectar", reality and myth blurred together. He grew into the part he performed. Louvish does not flinch from recording his hero's peccadillos; the portrayal stops well short of hagiography.
Every performance of Fields's long career, on the stage, in films and on the radio, from 1898, is listed in the book's appendices. They show how thriftily he recycled his original sketches. Dreading plagiarism by rivals, he registered some of his favourite scripts at the Library of Congress for copyright protection: An Episode on the Links, for example, and Just Before The Battle, Mother, The Family Ford and An Episode at the Dentist's.
No matter what the storyline of his screenplays, he often contrived to insert his famous golf and pool routines, and there were few reels without liquid refreshments. When Mae West was his coauthor, differences of opinion became apparent.
Of the 45 films in which he appeared, those most fondly remembered must surely include Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, My Little Chickadee, Man on the Flying Trapeze, and that classic of classics, The Bank Dick in which, as Egbert Souse (pronounced Soozay), he takes coins from his child's piggybank and replaces them with an IOU. Furthermore he made memorable contributions even to films beyond his control; he was a good Humpty Dumpty and a perfect Mr Micawber.
Fields wrote of an occasion in his youth when he was "soaked to the huff" by rain: "My abhorrence and loathing for water fructified, in my receptive adolescent brain.
In his maturity, he always declined offers of water to drink, pointing out what amorous fishes do in it.
His masterpiece was his own nose. Naturally round and rubescent, it was greatly enlarged by acne rosaces and inflamed by dry martinis until it attained the size, redness and texture of a very large strawberry. Unlike J.P. Morgan, who submitted his comparable nose to medical treatment and cosmetic concealment, Fields flaunted his nose as an emblem of defiance of his wife and other prohibitionists who exacerbated the stressful inconvenience of alcoholism.