W.C. Fields from the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the Screen

Arthur Frank Wertheim is the author of  W. C. Fields from Burlesque and Vaudeville to Broadway: Becoming a Comedian (2014). The first volume of  a three-part series on the comedian’s life and career, it has already been hailed as the definitive biography of a famous American comic iconoclast and cultural icon. He has also written several books on twentieth-century American culture, including Vaudeville Wars, The New York Little Renaissance, and Radio Comedy. He has co-edited three volumes: The Papers of Will Rogers and edited Will Rogers at the Ziegfeld Follies and American Popular Culture. A former American history professor at the University of Southern California, USA, as well as visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, his awards range from a Fulbright grant to teach at the University of Indonesia to a fellowship on biography at The Norman Mailer Center, USA.

Introduction.- Prologue. Becoming a Character Comedian.- Part I. 1915 - A Momentous Year.- 1. Confronting Florenz Ziegfeld.- 2. Pool Sharks and His Lordship’s Dilemma.- Part II. The Beleagered Sportsman.- 3. Spoofing Croquet.- 4. Lampooning Tennis.- 5. The Frustrated Duffer.- Part III. Entr’actes.- 6. The Three Musketeers.- 7.  Bessie and Hattie.- 8. Fields’s Well Never Went Dry.- 9. From the Midnight Frolic to the Front Lines.- Part IV. Lampooning the Dysfuntional Family.- 10.  The Flivertons.- 11. The Breakup with Ziegfeld.- Part V. Broadway Stardom.- 12. Oh, what a Scandal!.- 13. “Confidence Man of the Ages”.- 14. Two Legendary Iconolasts Converge.- 15. The Comic Supplement.- 16. A Follies Farewell.- Epilogue. Fields Encounters D. W. Griffith.- Appendix. The Ziegfeld Mystique.