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| "last time it was pink elephants..." |
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| "Oh, Uncle Bill... but I still love him." |
Over the years I've grown comfortable with the idea of never being able to drink again (it's been 15 misera--I mean er-a beautiful years). The sorrows of life are the joys of art, as Ben Hecht would say. If you're an artist or writer, what better sorrow than strong spirits, the beautiful, wild demoness of drink? I was just too weak in the end to keep up with her. I had to let her go. Last I heard she was in Chicago and married with xx beautiful children--but I still love her.
Fields, slowly dying of alcoholism by the time of NEVER, could never shake her from his system the way I did. He tried. But trying isn't comedy and the eternal thirst becomes funny even at its most tragic level, the ultimate in heartbreak, through Fields' blearily-focused lens. I've used the metaphor before of climbing a rocky, snowy mountain as marriage, work, responsibility, chores, mortgages, nagging wife dogging you all the way, sobriety and then, when you're 3/4 of the way up the snowy mountain suddenly a beautiful girl comes sledding past shouting "jump on!" You have only a split second to decide. She's not slowing down. And even though a part of you has vowed to never cheat or jeopardize your home, you just jump on, clamp your hands around her waist and down you plunge, your wife's angry cries disappearing immediately into the background winds... replaced your wild--if strained--laughter.
Then you get to the bottom. And her boyfriend is waiting to punch you in the nose. The three wayward cupid children hover in the air, ripping their arrows from your hide in gentle arcs of pulsing red. She laughs, grabs her toboggan and takes the next chairlift while you lie there, your blood spilling all over the snow. What do you shout to yourself, if you're me or Fields? "Again! Let's go again!"
Again... no quarter given to thy foe, thyself, or rather that barren, bleak dank sphere, that mountain of barren rock you were scaling called marriage, family, work, gutter and lawn maintenance. Fields' love for booze reflects a very clear need to escape all this 'obligation,' to vamoose, to disappear into the mist, down the mountain on booze's reckless sled, and thus to let the vicious roundelay of sleeping, waking, eating, shitting, working, dying, recede like the fading cries of "Harrrr--Rold!" from an outraged shrew wife. Even if the disappearance is only temporary, just time eased from its wearying consistency for half a tick, it's worth any price, any toll on health, wealth, or sanity.
Civilization has, in it's way, never been able to shake this wild demoness. Prohibition just drove the price up, and heightened the camaraderie, the shared joke with the speakeasy passwords. Part of the charm of setting a film like International House in China was the lack of prohibition; Americans came out there to get away from the madness of sanity. Once prohibition was repealed, things went back to normal, like it does a few months after you turn 21 and the thrill of unlimited access without need of a fake license wears off. So being sober means understanding the reality of booze, which is that getting blotto, never measures up to the warm glow anticipation of getting blotto. The buzz is like music, ephemeral, but in actual consumption of booze comes the fallout of hangover, sloppiness, missed deadlines, illness, depression, anxiety, amnesia, and the occasional 'missed launch' wherein you can be so shitfaced you can't stand up and yet horribly sober, miserably conscious of how un-enraptured you are, no matter how drunk you get. (For a great description of this horror, read the last chunk of Kerouac's Big Sur).
People get into this loop with lovers all the time: you see a beautiful girl, meet her, click, it's magic; one booty call later and you shrink in horror just running into her on the street. Why not leave desire just as it is, desire? It sounds sad, but there's a unique freedom in it once you get over the initial sense of hopelessness. The absence of the desired object creates the longing, which is itself the reward. No romance is ever purer than when the lovers are apart. All it takes is the willingness to embrace Lacanian precepts and let them erode your delusions, like those nanobots in GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA arode the Eiffel Tower!
Now there are people who aren't alcoholics, so they don't know the true joy of the terror of addiction, the horror of convulsions and D.T.s or the giddy ecstasy of waking up feeling like death, pouring a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice highball, pounding it down in a single gulp, pouring another one, and sitting down to watch your favorite bender movie, SPECIES or APOCALYPSE NOW, and realizing it's only six AM on a Sunday, not six PM, like you feared. You have the whole day, hours left to try and taper off. For now, down the hatch! The agony and ache of your morning hangover vanishes and is replaced by ecstasy in a matter of minutes. Next thing it's six AM on a Monday, and you're thinking of reasons you can't come into work, putting that scratch in your voice for when you call your boss. Godfrey Daniel!
The best way I've learned to explain it is on a mood count of 1-10, ten being exaltation and ecstasy, 1 being grimly depressed or suffering withdrawal, suicidal. The average person stays around a 5, and getting drunk brings them to a 6, maybe 7, then back down to a 4 for the next morning, then up to 5 again. But the average rating for gamma alcoholics suffering from low affect tolerance, like W.C. Fields and me, is 3, so below everyone else, and then drinking catapults to a perfect 10, then hits the bell and goes sailing downwards, arriving at 1, one way or the other, eventually. If you keep a steady buzz throughout the day, you can manage an extended wobble between 7-9, but the longer you keep that up the more harrowing, miserable, and lengthy your stay down at 1, over that toilet, beholding your skull reflection in the waters, because you're too sick to choke down the booze you need to stop you from being too sick to drink. My friends, when that happens, take a break from your six hour stint hyperventilating over the toilet and lean back on the cold tiles and think, "Erich and Fields were here!" And bask in the comfort that there's literally nowhere else to go but up -- or down to zero. And zero means you're off the scale - unconscious, dead, or having a massive orgasm --neither way. S
Fields made it to zero, as we all must, and hasn't worked a day since, but everyone of us still bouncing up this scale and back down longs to escape it, not just to return to the dubious joy of sobriety or alcohol but to transcend the scale altogether, to die, to be really drowned in a vat of whiskey.... that must be... glorious. But since it's too hard to kill yourself, or become a vampire, drink's a fine second, a temporary respite from the abyss of addiction, which it itself engenders (to paraphrase Nicholas St. John).
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once dear, she drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm indebted to her for," says Fields. It's one of Sucker's more indelible lines, and probably true and it's packed with Lacanian paradox: in ruining his life, this blonde set him free. She was coming by on that sled. She brought him down to the 1 or the 2, allowing for more velocity on the bounce up to 10. And that's what we alcoholics really love, the velocity. To shoot from a 1 to a 10 is way more awesome than going from 5-9. In fact you don't even really make 10 unless you get a good velocity going, a good bounce on the bottom spring. To savor the rush of the climb you need the bungee-style chance to press your face against the mortal coil Boiinnng, even sneer at it as it almost grabs you in its skeletal claws, and then suddenly you're bouncing off again, and all one's minor problems--debt, bad marriages, legal troubles, unemployment, bad reviews--recede-- DING! A winna! Everything but being alive and relatively uninjured is cake, minor little mosquito bites on a man running for his life. Such a man is Fields. In Never he even literally bounces, as if illustrating the blonde paradox.
Booze gets you down, and then it gets you back up, like Maxine in Night of the Iguana. She'll always get you back up. Yet at the same time it's the thing that drove you down to the depths in the first place. The technicolor joy of the first few cocktails is just a brief oasis between vast black and white stretches of inhospitable desert. But drunks are Lawrence of Arabia. Knowing how it almost killed me, still I idealize bourbon, reaching slowly with my outstretched fingers towards the giant Knobb Creek bottle in the liquor store window while Sara McLachlan sings "I will remember you / do you remember me?" in my headphones and gentle rain falls. Or as they say in AA, "happiness is never experienced, only remembered." Lacan might add, "by it's very definition!"
Fields knew this intrinsically, having had a horrible childhood, having run away from home due to an abusive father. He slept on the street or in unheated pool halls while teaching himself juggling. Still, he had no recourse to his messed up existence but to just try and easy does it 'til cocktail hour, and while he may be metatextually wasted out of his mind here and there onscreen (like the ride with the mayor in You're Telling Me) most of the time he's as nimble as a mountain goat, recycling old gags he's been kicking around since the old Follies days, but suddenly punting them through a darkly drunk prism.
(with Carlotta Monti - Fields' mistress)
But Fields had prepared me for just such a baptism of misery. All through the day his magic song echoed through my mind...
Chickens have pretty legs in Kans-assss.
I started smoking that very day.
When in Rome, dive.
I bring up the first day of work story for a reason, and imagining that cozy airplane and comforting song all day created a soft warm feeling that resisted the crushing dehumanization of the copier. It was the first time I didn't need the actual movie to be playing to feel its benefit, SUCKER washed over me like the security possessed by someone who believes in and loves their god, their religion providing them in fellowship and brotherhood that booze provides the drunk in fellowship and isolation. The balm of the Superlonely.
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| "couldn't stand the noise..." |
LEVEL ONE:
The Magic Drunk (oblivion) - altitude of cozy ecstasy
It's no coincidence that my two favorite films of Fields involve copious drinking and air travel of a uniquely Fieldsian character: the autogyro (in International House) and a giant airliner with an open air rear observation compartment and berths like a sleeper car in Sucker. For being 'up in the air' offers its own unique freedom - high in the clouds, free of all responsibility. One is essentially in heaven, Eden, free to drink into oblivion while surrounded by clouds which "look just as fleecy as... clouds" and being waited on by beautiful women.
Chickens have pretty legs in Kansas.... (2x)
Chickens lay eggs
big as nutmegs
Oh chickens they lay eggs in Kansas
Fields sings this awesome song while still in his berth after being woken by the stewardess. we see the women in earshot smiling wistfully, with the rush of the airplane in the background it becomes a scene of bliss, a mirror to the earlier scene of Gloria Jean's gypsy folk song while reaction shots of adoring lambs and donkeys intersperse and the camera tracks slowly back to reveal the diegetic, camera-within-the-shot, and microphone and lighting guys. There's a few feints at America's embattled neutrality involving a big mustachioed Russian with huge silk pants who gets "on the head hitted" with a croquet mallet Fields borrows from an Englishman. "I'm neutral, go ahead" Fields says (we wouldn't officially join the war until the following year). Fields seems to be angling for some humor of how uncomfortable it is trying to share space with a giant in an airport bathroom, but he loses his way and winds up with a gag about shaving each other by accident ("that's a hot one!"), and things you only notice after seeing it a few dozen times, are slowly revealed, ike how Fields quietly robs the Russian giant of the contents of his bathroom kit, just in a manner so slight and steady one basically has to focus only on his hands.
LEVEL 2:
The Plummet (after a bottle of golden nectar)
"Golly! Did he make it?" Oggilby asks.
"Ah, no... no he didn't, Og. Had he been a younger man he probably would have made it. That's the point. Don't wait too long in life."
The Buddha could not have said it better. Then again, instead of taking a chance you can just stay in the airplane, and write a script about jumping... that's the transubstantiation of creativity at work. Just be smart enough to hide your bottle between your feet, instead of on the open air rear observation compartment window sill.
LEVEL THREE:
The Aerie - The Buzzard's Nest
The nest is the ideal halfway point between the uninhibited surrealism of International House and the average family man yarns of Fields' earlier Paramount days - Margaret Dumont is much cooler and more fun as a foil than either Jan Duggan (whose nonetheless pretty great) and Kathleen Howard, whose one-note shrillness can turn off potential fans of Man on the Flying Trapeze and It's a Gift. Dumont connects the film to the Marx Brothers and has her own weird sense of gravitas. As Molly Haskell says "the poise and unruffled splendor with which (Dumont) graces their films is ample testimony to their place in their hearts and in film history." (67) So while we may be somewhat enjoyably shocked by the first appearance of the mother, it's almost a relief to see Dumont since the first thing Fields sees turning around (after Ouilatta looks over his shoulder smiling innocently, "why, mother!") Fields beholds a giant, fanged Great Dane, implying that her mother is in fact the dog --like in The Omen!!
The normal act of the 'old reprobate' is to make moves on the young daughter, and here in this surreal 'nest' there's nowhere else to go on the mesa but down, The mother (Margaret Dumont), Mrs. Hemoglobin and her fanged rottweiler are inescapable. She might move from outraged to flattered and preparing for her own squigilum rubber, but in some ways this even more alarming. The mesa top is small and we can see the whole thing in detail (above), the round bed on which Ouilatta Hemoglobin (Susan Miller) reclines, looking up in calm astonishment. But just as there's no man around, there's no escape from her mother, "a buzzard if ever there was one," as he later explains to visiting engineers Charles Lang and Emmett Vogan (below). So down he plunges. On a subtextual level, the daughter and mother (and dog) are inescapably joined. Just as Sue Lyon in Lolita inevitably turns into Shelly Winters (see Lyon in Winters) there's no freezing Ouilatta in time, she will become a great dane-Hemoglobin hybrid. His best bet for female companionship is celibacy, to avoid the Humbert Humbert trap and stay the good uncle role with Gloria Jean. It's his one redeeming trait.
LEVEL FOUR:
The Russian Village
Director Cline and Fields incorporate one of Gloria Jean's Russian peasant songs via a mirculous scene in the Russian village bar. Fields is told that the buzzard who lives on the mountain top is rich, causing him to immediately have a moment of clarity about his undying love for Mrs. Hemoglobin. As the music swells slow and mysterieux in the background, he notes, eyes a-twinkle, "she has a good heart, too... in fact she seems like an awfully nice woman to me.... now that I come to think of it." The chorus of the Russian villagers grows louder and we cut back to Gloria Jean joining in the peasant song as her wagon rides up to the village ("How do I get to the Russian village?" - as if there's only one) the song and gypsies seem to coast into the town on the unearthly but achingly gorgeous vibe of their song, Gloria Jean wailing over the top in long sustained notes like a theremin, or Louis Armstrong. So the music here functions in a bizarre way: we don't often hear the music of a separate scene leak over into the other and perform an entirely seaparate function. And we're glad to see the pair re-united after Fields' sudden and strange departure.
LEVEL FIVE:
Esoteric Studios - Mr. Pangborn's Office (Reality)
It's always a bit of a wrankler when Pangborn slams the script down because we never get to learn what happens next, and this movie-within-the-movie is so much better than the 'real' that surrounds it. In the reality of Hollywood, Gloria Jean would lose her contract if she popped Pangborn in the proboscis, and if she didn't finish her contract might wind up behind the law suit eightball. Certainly the binding clauses of Hollywood and censorship seem to plague Fields, to the point he's expected to hide his drinking: "This scene was supposed to be in a saloon but the censor cut it out" he says while popping into an ice cream shop for a drink. It is allegedly true, but how- the only real gag in the whole thing is basically just Fields trying to get a scoop of ice cream into his mouth while his straw keeps wilting at the last possible second, and the ice cream vendor guy tries to swat a fly. "It's killers like you that give the west a bad name." One wonders what the original gag was like. Was Fields trying to get a drink to his lips but his hands were shaking so bad he kept spilling the shot? Man, I know that feeling. I've had to lower my lips down around a manhattan glass more than you'll ever know, sucking off the top until my shakes stopped. But oh what a glorious feeling when they did (that rocket up to 10).
And of course the surrounding 'real' part of the film is memorable for the presence of Carlotta Monti (above) as Pangborn's receptionist, whose speaking to presumably her boyfriend when she says "You big hotty-doddy... you smoke vile cigars all day and drink whiskey half the night," which Fields presumes is about him and takes his five for a nickel Stingaroo cigars out of his pocket and leaves them on the table in penance. That's supposed to be the joke, Fields thinks she's talking to him, but she's on the phone, he doesn't see her ear piece. The double weirdness is that Fields is her boyfriend, and got her the part, and he does do the things she surely griped about in real life. Typical then, that Fields would include copious real life in-jokes understood perhaps only by himself, something I try to do in this blog! She's cute with little Norma Shearer arms, but it's sad that wound up an eternal mistress helper to the man and all she got was this part enabling her to complain through the wire-bars of metatextual prism. I've not read her book or seen the movie with Rod Steiger as Fields, as I'm afraid of losing even a gram of my love for the man. As you know from my first day of work story, I need him.
And I still love him.
CODA:
HIS LITTLE NIECE, GLORIA JEAN
In the end, despite being all about the pursuit and abandonment of illusion, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break remains extraordinarily clear-eyed about the moment-by-moment inevitability of mortality. There's no delusion of a happy ending, except that Fields and his niece are going down south for awhile (maybe to Brazil like Orson Welles, on a 'good will' tour). The whole film occurs basically over a day at the studio, from the mom and niece separating for the day's work and talking about Uncle Bill. "Your uncle Bill is too good," the mom says. And he's still too good by the end.
Of course Bill's had cute girl daughters and charges before, from Poppy, Sally of the Sawdust, and has a pretty, loyal daughter in It's a Gift, You're Telling Me, and Man on the Flying Trapeze and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, a less loyal one in It's a Gift and The Bank Dick But this is the first time they haven't been of marriageable age. But they've always been 'good' to him, whereas very young girls and boys, such as Buddy and Butch, Gloria Jean's stand-up bass and accordion accompanists, are shits. When this mischievous pair sling-shoot Field's hat off she picks up a brick to throw back at them. "Count ten!" Fields advises.
But she's also there to add something no comedy could escape in the 40s, songs. What idiot decided comedy needed long musical breaks? Whomever he was, Fields thought he was an idiot too. That said, Cline and Fields refuse to just waste comedic or metatextual opportunities during the numbers. One of the songs, presented as a lengthy rehearsal on a busy under-construction set, is targeted by the film for being insufferably bourgeois even within the film itself, as all concerned groan about the corniness of the Pangborn's lengthy, tedious song. Hollywood's desire for respectability is here in full flower, what Shaw calls the Englishmen's mistaking virtue for being merely uncomfortable, going to see classical music concerts because they like the idea of themselves like classical music. This stuffed shirt squareness was usually the purview of MGM but Universal wanted to at least go through the motions. Fields and Cline are way too hip for any such airs. And we're shown shots of Gloria Jean's, the pianist's, and Buddy and Butch's boredom, and their revenge via spit out cherry pits, and Pangborn's smarmy interest as he conducts, after squashing the boogie woogie song "Uncle Bill wanted me to sing." In other words, Fields may not be able to get the songs he wants for Gloria Jean, or be allowed to go singer-less, but he can damn sure express his contempt for Universal's bourgeois aspirations. And he invites all concerned in on the conspiracy against the Pangborn effigy, even the singer herself.
Gloria's earlier screen test incidentally also involves gypsies. This time we start with her by the fire with he chorus, then slowly pans back as she walks forward, to reveal the camera, sound operator, and so forth. It' not really the first time we've been 'fooled' that way in films, but it serves Fields plans, not to be artsy but to express solidarity with Gloria Jean, and the need to fill the time with interesting reaction shots (lamb, mule, etc.) in a foreshadow of the adoring women smiling as Fields sings "Chickens have Pretty Legs in Kansas."
In other words, Fields loves Gloria Jean, and loves Carlotta Monti, and even, still, the beautiful blonde who drove him to drink, and doesn't even bear ill will to them or even to Pangborn's uptight head of Esoteric Pictures. In fact, he hasn't an enemy in the world (in his eyes at least) and at least none that cause him undue concern no matter how hostile they are. But he's still going down fast, like a plummeting anchor, to that final and eternal level, to the base of the mountain with the waiting boyfriend's fist, to the mighty number zero, where 10 and 1 are just as fleecy as... clouds, where there is no longer a difference between sky, buzzard nest, mountain, village, movie, reality, just the vat of whiskey drowning that all the poor bedeviled guys on fire with thirst dream.
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