A Vocal McGargle Emerges

Abstract

One day during Fields’s long Los Encinas Sanitarium stay, a nurse brought a radio to his room. Temporarily unable to read due to an eye problem causing double vision, Bill vehemently refused to have a radio by his bedside at Las Encinas Sanitarium. To his surprise, his radio became an “inseparable” companion. Fields therefore agreed to make congratulatory remarks honoring Zukor’s twenty-five years at Paramount via a hookup from his bedside on January 7, 1937. This short innocuous repartee on the Zukor program launched his radio career. Fields’s comments gained the attention of executives in the radio department at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, which asked Fields to join their show, The Chase & Sanborn Hour starring the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his alter ego, the brash precocious dummy Charlie McCarthy. By the time Bill left Las Encinas in late March, he was convinced that the airwaves were a means to make money and to keep his name before the public on the Bergen-McCarthy broadcast. Bill’s debut on the hour-long inaugural broadcast of The Chase & Sanborn Hour set the tone for all the guest spots that followed. His appearances operated on a sure-fire formula. Fields and Charlie hurled name-calling and insult jokes at one another, a war of words to see who could top the other with a cutting rejoinder. Fields’s pungent voice was perfect for the aural medium. The way he uttered his lines on the studio’s microphone became the key feature of his performance. Radio humor depended on the voice to create a character. Sound effects might duplicate physical action but without the power of speech the broadcast fell flat. Huddled around the radio in homes across America, audiences heard Fields’s voice crystal clear. Its tone, inflection, and rhythm made the comedian’s barbs bristle and the boisterous characters he imitated very real. Fields’s imbibing (nearly two quarts of liquor daily) and beet-red bulbous proboscis were prêt-à-porter fodder for smart-aleck Charlie’s barbs. During the 1930s, Fields’s alcohol consumption became increasingly part of the characters he played. Bill’s show business persona as a drinker and his imbibing in private were so strongly linked together that it became difficult to tell one from another. Fields quits the show as a regular guest in September 1937 citing several factors: ill health, lack of good script material, the pressure of a new show every week, and the fear of eventually flopping. Bill’s most persuasive reason for quitting was that he had finally received an offer to star in another Paramount picture.