Every Christmas Needs a Grinch

After dispensing with all the secular and commercial celebrations, holiday season can be seen as the ultimate victory of good over evil, a triumph of redemption, and the promise of salvation for mankind. Of course victory cannot be achieved unless there is an enemy over whom triumph can occur. Doctor Seuss understood this well when he created the Grinch, and Frank Capra demonstrated his appreciation of this principle when he inserted the evil Mr. Potter into “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Who would care about a movie in which Jimmy Stewart went off to college, travelled the world, returned to marry Donna Reed, and live happily ever after? No one. We need the dramatic tension supplied by Lionel Barrymore, the epitome of greed, foreclosing on decent families, preventing our hero from realizing his life’s ambitions, and stooping to outright theft in his effort to bankrupt his good-hearted competitor. In a very real sense, it is the antihero who makes possible the victory of Christmas’s ideals.

From 1915 – 1946, Hollywood had its own personal antihero in actor William Claude Dukenfeld, better known as W.C. Fields. Fields’s misanthropic nature was legendary. It’s almost as if Dickens has a premonition that someone like Fields was on the horizon. Approached by charity workers for a holiday donation, Fields told them, “I’m sorry, I gave all my money to the SEBF.” When Fields’s companion asked him what the SEBF was, he replied, “Screw Everybody But Fields.” Groucho Marx recalled the time that he was invited to Fields’s home: “He used to sit in the bushes in front of his house and shoot at people with a BB gun. Today, he’d probably be arrested.” While musing about the possibility of being offered the part of Scrooge in a production of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” Fields stated, “I‘d only do it if I didn’t have to repent at the end.

Ordinarily, this kind of cruelty would probably prove too much for audiences to swallow. Fields’s genius, however, was evident in the way in which he combined his natural misanthropic nature with great comic talent. He usually played the bumbling drunk constantly besieged by a nagging wife, monstrous kids, an ngry mother-in-law, and a nasty boss. Frequently, Fields’s family ganged up on him. In “The Bank Dick” (1940), his young daughter asks her mother if she should bounce a rock off father’s head. Her mother replies, “Respect your father, darling. What kind of rock?”  Sometimes strangers even got to persecute him as well. In the same film, a little brat makes fun of Fields’s large bulbous nose. The kid’s mother pulls the boy away, “You mustn’t make fun of the gentleman, Clifford. You’d like to have a nose like that full of nickels, wouldn’t you?” After such treatment, the audience no doubt sympathized with Fields when he threated to heave a waste basket at them as they departed.

On one occasion, Fields was able to give full vent to his comedic venom by directing it at a ventriloquist’s dummy – Edgar Bergen’s famous Charlie McCarthy. Fields and his inanimate foil conducted a long-running feud that delighted radio listeners. Fields would refer to the dummy as a wood-pecker’s pin-up boy or a termite’s flophouse, and threaten to cut him up into venetian blinds. One time Fields asked if it was true that his father was a gate-leg table. Charlie fired back, “If it is, your father was under it.”

For those who found Fields a bit too much to bear, it might have been some consolation for them to learn that he died a sad, alcoholic’s death. Fields was never able to stay sober for long, and very likely planned to go as he did. During Groucho’s visit to the Fields residence, he was escorted up to the attic where his host showed him an estimated $50,000 in liquor was stored. Groucho described the scene: “I’m standing there, and Fields is standing there and nobody says anything. The silence is oppressive. Finally, he speaks, ‘This will carry me 25 years.’” Unfortunately, he would not live that long.  Fields spent the last 22 months of his life in a sanitorium, and on Christmas Day – a holiday he reputedly despised – he died at the age of 66 from an alcohol-related gastric hemorrhage.

W.C. Fields played characters we were meant to laugh at. In the movies, he was Larson E. Whipsnade (“You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man”), Cuthbert J. Twillie (“My Little Chickadee”), and Edgar Souse - pronounced Soozay - (“The Bank Dick). The fact that he was often the target of the movies’ humor, softened his trademark abuse of women, children, and pets. While his particular brand of antisocial behavior was not presented as an obstacle for a film hero to overcome, it was a humorous, creative variation of this theme. And audiences are still laughing.