 Edna Ferber
W. C. Fields
Edna Ferber worked for a number of years as a news reporter in the Midwest before moving to New York City in 1912. After her novel "So Big" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, she quickly followed up with the hit play
"Show Boat" (so successful and financially remunerative, she called it her "oil well"). Ferber was fond of wearing tailored suits well before they became fashionable. One day, she arrived at the Algonquin Hotel
wearing a suit that was very similar to one that the English actor Noël Coward was wearing. Ferber and Coward were friends (she once described him as her favorite theater companion) and Coward saw an
opportunity to engage in a bit of playful badinage with one of his favorite people. Carefully looking her over, he observed, "Edna, you look almost like a man." Ferber looked Coward over in a similar manner
and came back with a classic riposte:
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"So do you."
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W. C. Fields died at age sixty-seven on December 25, 1946, his life cut short by his notorious alcohol consumption (by some accounts, he drank as much as two quarts of gin a day). Some wags thought it was a
fitting irony that Fields died on Christmas, the one holiday he despised the most. As he lay in his hospital bed shortly before his death, Fields was visited by the actor Thomas Mitchell, a good friend. When Mitchell
entered Fields' room, he was shocked to find the irreligious Fields paging through a Bible. Fields was a lifelong agnostic, and fervently anti-religious (he once said that he had skimmed the Bible while looking for
movie plots, but found only "a pack of wild lies"). "What are you doing reading a Bible?" asked the astonished Mitchell. A wiseacre to the end, Fields replied:
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"I'm looking for loopholes."
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