SOURCE: "The One and Only," in The Time of Laughter, Little, Brown and Company, 1967, pp. 171-95.

In the following excerpt, Ford offers his personal recollections of Fields.

W. C. Fields is generally acknowledged to be the supreme comic artist of his time, in my own opinion the funniest man who ever lived, and he was even funnier offstage than on. His drawn-out rasping voice was the same, of course, but he had an infectious giggle, a falsetto he-he-he-he-he like the chirp of a cricket, which I never heard him use in his professional work. His everyday speech was extravagantly florid. "Methinks," he would intone, "there's a Nubian in the fuel supply." Due to his zealous reading of the eighteenth-century English romanticists, their stilted phraseology came naturally to his lips—"Betwixt" or "Forsooth" or "Hither and yon"—and he was the only person I've known to start a sentence...