SOURCE: "Toward the Black Pussy Cafe," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 21, October 31, 1974, pp. 23, 26-28.

In the following essay, Sheed presents Fields in an unsentimental light, and faults Ronald Fields for his attempts to sanitize his grandfather's autobiography.

Of all the subjects that don't need de-mythologizing, one would have thought W. C. Fields was pre-eminent. With comedians in general it seems important that their life and their work be taken as one. "I hear he writes his own lines" is a phrase that echoes from childhood. The lot of the gag-writer is a bitter one: unless he consents to be a performer himself, like Mel Brooks or Carl Reiner, we don't want to know about him.

Hence, most books about comedians tend to be unsatisfactory. Either they service the myth and give the clown a brain he doesn't deserve ("The trouble with Groucho is he thinks...