“Confidence Man of the Ages”

Abstract

After the Scandals closed its run Fields obtained a role in the Broadway musical play, Poppy, a show crucial to his development as a character comedian. Fields plays Professor Eustace P. McGargle, a small-time manager of an itinerant group of thespians. To play the character, Fields drew on his experience with the crooked burlesque manager James Fulton of The Monte Carlo Girls and other shady carnival types. Responsible for Fields’s appearance was Paul Goodman, Poppy’s producer, who felt he was the best person to play McGargle, a flamboyant small-time con artist, who hawks bogus medicine guaranteed to cure all ailments. On the side he fleeces suckers in gambling games. McGargle becomes the archetype for every small-con rogue Fields plays in films from the Great McGonigle (The Old Fashioned Way) to Egbert Sousè (The Bank Dick). r McGargle belongs to a long line of US con men, a prototypical national figure. To succeed, the con artist needs to gain the confidence of a gullible person. The con man especially flourishes in the US where unbridled individualism morphs into greed: the drive to make money no matter what the means.

Poppy commenced on a September morning in 1883 outside the fairgrounds at Green Meadows, Connecticut. Theatergoers first glimpse McGargle clothed in a pearl-colored stovetop hat; three-quarter length brown fur-trimmed frock coat with large pockets and round bone buttons; black and white checkerboard trousers; high collar with a black bow tie, and black spats. The costume, with slight variations, became the iconic image associated with Fields’s portrayal of 1890s show-biz rogues. Before long, McGargle has established his stand at the fair and is hawking his bogus cure in a burst of oratorical brilliance. Anxious to swindle the villagers in another con scheme, McGargle starts a three-shell or Army Game on the fairground.

During the final act Poppy proves she is the heir of the Foster estate by showing her locket, which contains a picture of her mother. McGargle bids farewell to Poppy, knowing she has finally found happiness and will marry her beau. “One word of fatherly advice before I go,” McGargle says. He pauses long enough to make the audience anxious to hear the advice her kind-hearted guardian will give: “Never give a sucker an even break.” The expression will become a legendary adage associated with Fields.

When Madge Kennedy (Poppy) left the show to return to the movies, Fields became the sole star. The forty-three-year-old trouper had been toiling for twenty-six years on the stage but never billed as a star. The novelist Ludwig Lewisohn praised Fields profusely for his performance in Poppy. “He is the most delicious scoundrel imaginable,” he declared, “He is the astute medicine man, fakir, confidence man of the ages.” Stardom in a successful Broadway show meant that Fields had reached a milestone in his stage career. Fields became the toast of the town due to his performance in Poppy and received excellent reviews. Fields’s performance enabled him to obtain a minor part in Janice Meredith (1924), his first film since 1915.