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Con Men and Henpecked Husbands W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon 2 53 He’s the high-stepping Romeo of Hollywood. The latest and newest of Big Sheik daddies. The complete and total answer to any number of little blondes’ prayers. Only he doesn’t know it and isn’t bothered. That’s W. C. Fields. With that nose, crimson and glaring like a lantern on a detour sign, that funny little walk with the knees popping well out, to say nothing of the stomach, those shrewd little blue eyes that have seen everything everywhere, and the whole ensemble (and, oh, the voice!) topped by straw colored hair—well, here is something! Photoplay, December 1934 The above description of W. C. Fields comes from a peculiar article titled “A Red Nose Romeo,” written as the comedian was establishing himself as a topbilled draw at Paramount Studios. Not as tongue in cheek as one might expect, the piece is the rare occasion of a publicity article overtly sexualizing a male comic.While not suggesting the same levels of sexual icon status as Mae West, author Sara Hamilton characterizes the eccentric comedian as an unlikely object of fascination to the usually glamour obsessed Hollywood. She writes that as the comedian goes “goose-stepping away from the set” the young women “hang from dressing-room and studio office windows calling, ‘Yoo-hoo, Mr. Fields!’” Fields is also “the favorite with every man in town, from the biggest producer to the lowliest extra. He’s Hollywood’s man of the hour, I tell you.”1 The joke of the article is that Fields remains blissfully unaffected by all this attention ,with him characterized as showing“glorious indifference to the ladies.” This is attributed to Fields being rejected by a“pretty cute number” during his early days as a traveling juggler. This young woman unknowingly laughed one 54 | chapter 2 evening, “Oh, Mr. Fields, that is the funniest false nose I’ve ever seen”—the implication being it was just the comic’s real nose.2 Of course, being from a 1930s movie magazine, these stories are not particularly true. At this point in his life, Fields had fathered two estranged children and remained separated from a wife he financially supported. At the time of the article, the fifty-four-year-old comic was far from indifferent to younger women and had started a long relationship with Carlotta Monti, a twenty-something actress and model.3 But this biography has little to do with the public perception of Fields being sold in Photoplay, which highlights the complicated position male comics held during the era. To Paramount, Fields was now an above-the-title star of profitable films, but he is not a leading man in a traditional sense. He is not to be presented as particularly self-aware of his sexuality like Mae West. His physical imperfections, his eccentric behavior, his drinking, and his invented past all contribute to the image of a fascinating sexual icon, yet one queered here in the sense that he lives an asexual existence removed from the “norms” of libidinous Hollywood behavior through his“glorious indifference.”In essence, he is a nonleading man, eschewing idealized manliness to explore something removed from“normal” behavior and, as posited in chapter 1, denaturalizing heterosexual protocols. As theorized in the previous chapter, especially in contrast to his My Little Chickadee costar, Mae West, Fields serves as a fascinating model of buffoonish masculinity in his ability to represent gender denaturalization through his performances of failed male bravado. As Cuthbert J. Twillie in that film, he emerges as a buffoonish male on screen who mockingly reflects the fragility of masculinity in his “drag” appropriations of the roles of sheriff, masked bandit, and newlywed husband. For this chapter, I examine his solo films in detail to add historical specificity to this paradigm to understand the cultural underpinnings defining his queered comedy performances. As the following will show, Fields can be classified as the most dynamic (if not problematic) male comic of the era in that his films so overtly examine issues of heterosexual male angst, the hegemony’s anxieties toward changing industrial and gendered landscapes. When revisiting much of his work today, many viewers might be surprised by how far his comedy takes traditional comedic maleness and pushes it into dark and revelatory territories.With this in mind,this chapter examines some of his most fascinating and personal work: The Old Fashioned Way (1934), It’s a...

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