Man on the Flying Trapeze

Everyone seems to know the story of W. C. Fields, the old curmudgeon of classic film comedy, the hater of children and dogs, who ran away from home at the age of eleven to live in the streets of his home town, Philadelphia; the clown who opened more than 700 bank accounts around the world under a host of incredible names...
The only problem with this familiar tale is that it is completely untrue. This is the first book to relate in detail William Claude Dukenfield's artistic path to the cinema, disentangling the facts from the pack of lies and myths mischievously nurtured by the man himself.
Following meticulous research in a host of archives, including Field's personal scrapbooks, Simon Louvish lovingly traces the origins of Fields's comedy in his self-authored vaudeville sketches, then follows his career from stage to silent screen, revealing the sources of his great talkie routines, and highlighting his later tragic struggle against studio heads, censorship, alcoholism and illness; in the course of which he created some of the greatest gems of screen humour.
Man on the Flying Trapeze is the story of an artist whose greatest creation was himself - a fully achieved, imaginary person, who was to subsume his creator. It is the saga of a performer, which begins when the horseless carriage was still an amazing invention, and ends in the jet age. In the words of the Great Man himself: 'It's a funny old life: man's lucky if he gets out of it alive!'