Kurt Bodden, who was also there last night at the W.C. Fields celebration, reminds me that there were a couple of brief mentions of alcohol in the panel discussion. I guess I was just amazed there was so little discussion of the man's drinking. Many years ago, as I recounted here, I got to meet and chat with Carlotta Monti, who was Fields's companion or mistress or whatever you want to call her. Obviously, she knew him better than most people and she spoke of his imbibing as akin to his breathing, and couldn't talk about him at all without mentioning it constantly.
Something I'm always wary of is the tendency to extrapolate a full portrait of someone based on a very brief contact with the person. I know a guy who'll tell you Phil Spector is (present-tense) a great and stable human being because that's how he was during their one fifteen minute encounter twenty-some-odd years ago. There are people I worked with and I got one impression of them the first week or two of our association…and a quite different one after a few more weeks or months.
I don't think it's always as easy to say what kind of person someone was…and certainly not via selected anecdotes. On top of that, as Leonard Maltin noted last night and has emphasized elsewhere, a lot of published histories are just plain wrong. People who should know what someone was like have been known to write fiction about them. At times, people even lie or get things horribly awry in autobiographies. A few years ago, a writer I knew quit a job co-writing the autobiography of a Famous Hollywood Figure because the F.H.F. kept insisting on his versions of certain events that were clearly disproven by surviving documentation, up to and including the time and place of his birth. You couldn't even believe what the Famous Hollywood Figure said about himself, let alone what casual acquaintances had to say.
Those of us who never met an important, compelling legend like W.C. Fields have to rely on the researchers and the memories of the dwindling number of folks who knew him. Some of what they say is certainly true and some probably isn't and to sort it all out is probably a better juggling act than even Fields himself ever performed. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should just recognize that it ain't as easy as we'd like it to be.