page_title: W. C. Fields
section_title: Illness and career sideline
hierarchical_section_title: W. C. Fields / Illness and career sideline
caption_attribution_description: Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy with W.C. Fields on The Chase and Sanborn Hour
context_page_description: William Claude Dukenfield, better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler, and writer. Fields' comic persona was a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist, who remained a sympathetic character despite his supposed contempt for children and dogs.
  His career in show business began in vaudeville, where he attained international success as a silent juggler. He gradually incorporated comedy into his act and was a featured comedian in the Ziegfeld Follies for several years. He became a star in the Broadway musical comedy Poppy, in which he played a colorful small-time con man. His subsequent stage and film roles were often similar scoundrels or henpecked everyman characters.
  Among his recognizable trademarks were his raspy drawl and grandiloquent vocabulary. The characterization he portrayed in films and on radio was so strong it was generally identified with Fields himself. It was maintained by the publicity departments at Fields' studios and was further established by Robert Lewis Taylor's biography, W. C. Fields, His Follies and Fortunes. Beginning in 1973, with the publication of Fields' letters, photos, and personal notes in grandson Ronald Fields' book W. C.
context_section_description: In 1936, Fields' heavy drinking precipitated a significant decline in his health. By the following year he recovered sufficiently to make one last film for Paramount, The Big Broadcast of 1938, but his troublesome behavior discouraged other producers from hiring him. By 1938 he was chronically ill, and suffering from delirium tremens.
  Physically unable to work in films, Fields was off the screen for more than a year. During his absence, he recorded a brief speech for a radio broadcast. His familiar, snide drawl registered so well with listeners that he quickly became a popular guest on network radio shows. Although his radio work was not as demanding as motion-picture production, Fields insisted on his established movie star salary of $5,000 per week. He joined ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy on The Chase and Sanborn Hour for weekly insult-comedy routines.
  Fields would twit Charlie about his being made of wood:
  Fields: "Tell me, Charles, is it true your father was a gate-leg table?"
  McCarthy: "If it is, your father was under it!"
  When Fields would refer to McCarthy as a "woodpecker's pin-up boy" or a "termite's flophouse", Charlie would fire back at Fields about his drinking:
  McCarthy: "Is it true, Mr. Fields, that when you stood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, 43 cars waited for your nose to change to green?"
  Another exchange:
  Bergen: "Why, Bill, I thought you didn't like children."
  Fields: "Oh, not at all, Edgar, I love children. I can remember when, with my own little unsteady legs, I toddled from room to room ..."
  McCarthy: "When was that, last night?"
  During his recovery from illness, Fields reconciled with his estranged wife and established a close relationship with his son after Claude's marriage in 1938.
caption: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy with Fields on The Chase and Sanborn Hour, c. 1945
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