Carlotta Monti and Cy Rice's W.C Fields & Me boasts perhaps my all-time favorite dedication. Where humbler scribes dedicate tomes to mothers and husbands and lovers and grandparents and dear, dear departed friends Monti wholly eschews false modesty, quipping "I dedicate this book to myself, for the many years of loving service and kindness I willingly gave him."
Over the course of Monti's briskly readable memoir of her fourteen years as the kept woman of cinema's all-time favorite misanthrope, her smartass dedication becomes deliciously passive-aggressive. Far from the narcissistic ego trip her dedication would suggest, W.C Fields & Me is the work of a supremely insecure pop-culture footnote who all but edits herself out of W.C Fields' story. Where others (Angela Bowie, cough, cough) use self-serving memoirs to assert the central role they played in their famous lover's life and career Monti seems content to bask in Fields' outsized shadow, to laugh at his jokes, mix his drinks and, in an especially fawning bit of business, tape-record and transcribe Fields' comic lectures.
W.C Fields & Me, which was adapted for the big screen in 1976 with Rod Steiger as Fields and Valerie Perrine as Monti, is consequently long on W.C Fields and suspiciously short on Carlotta Monti. It's less the story of the tumultuous love affair between a buxom young beauty and a cantankerous comic genius than an endless avalanche of cute W.C Fields anecdotes in which the lady-author makes occasional appearances.
When Monti met Fields during a studio-mandated photo op he was a legend and she was a starlet, just another pretty face and phenomenal figure in an industry where exotic beauties are a dime a dozen. During their fourteen years together, Fields' star rose and fell while Monti's career flat-lined. By taking her as a live-in lover Fields gave Monti the role of a lifetime as the loyal mistress to a great man but it was a role with strict limitations: since he was already married (to a wife he never saw and is barely mentioned) a wedding ring was out of the question. Since he hated singing, Monti wasn't allowed to flex her vocal muscles, professionally or otherwise. And since he was a famously cheap bastard, he kept her on a tight leash financially.
There is a wonderfully telling moment late in the book when an apparently contemplative and melancholy Fields tells Monti that he won't be around forever and that he wants to provide for her after he's gone. Eureka! All those years of enduring Fields' playful barbs and drunken whims are going to pay off! She'll finally be granted the freedom and security that comes with a nice little nest egg. Though the lady-author professes not to care at all about money, or envy Fields' vast wealth, Monti's mind immediately races to giddy visions of trust funds and inheritances and generous endowments. Then Fields lowers the boom and tells her that he is going to provide for her after his death–by giving her some useful business advice. D'oh!
The W.C Fields that emerges in the book is xenophobic, cheap to the point of perversity, guzzles pitchers of martinis from sunrise to sunset, refuses to let aspiring opera singer Monti sing and left Monti with little more than a bed and a treasure trove of precious memories despite being a millionaire. Oh, and he's also a deadbeat dad who refuses to so much as meet his teenaged son. Yet Monti manages to give each of these glaring weaknesses a positive spin: so he's a lovable drunk, an endearing cheapskate, and a delightful, playful misogynist.
But there are some character faults Monti has a hard time depicting in a positive light. Here's Monti and Rice on Fields' delightful racism:
Added to a list of Woody's pet hatreds were the Germans and Japanese of World War II. Anyone he met whose eyes were not considered normal by American optical standards, he imagined to be a Nipponese spy. Likewise, a person with an accent whose identity he couldn't fathom qualified as a German agent.
He was certain that the delivery boy from a liquor store he patronized was a German juvenile spy–"just learning the business" as he put it. He called the store owner on the telephone to seek information on the youngster's background.