CAUSE: He died in Coral Gables, Florida, aged 83, after a short illness.
Sid Field
Born April 1, 1904
Died February 3, 1950
Tragic comedian. Sidney Arthur Field was born in Birmingham, an only child. A tall gangling man, he spent 20 years in show business before becoming an overnight sensation on March 18, 1943, with the revue Strike A New Note. He made just three films: That’s The Ticket (1940) as Ben, London Town (1946) as comedian Jerry Sanford, for which he was paid £30,000, and Cardboard Cavalier (1949) as barrow boy Sidcup Buttermeadow, for which he earned £18,600. Moreover, he appeared in only four London shows, yet many who saw Field regard him as the funniest man they ever had the pleasure to watch.
CAUSE: Playing golf one Sunday in July 1949 he suffered a series of minor heart attacks but finished his game. Three weeks later, a more serious coronary stopped him playing golf. A specialist diagnosed serious heart trouble in August. He went into a nursing home (actually a maternity home) in Wimbledon and suffered another heart attack the day after he was admitted. He was released after six weeks and went on a convalescing cruise to South Africa. On holiday, he suffered yet another mild attack. Once again in England, he went back to work and one day after returning from the theatre he suffered a more serious attack. The following morning he died aged 44 of a heart attack at his home, Arran Cottage, on Wimbledon Common. He left £31,735 18s 8d.
FURTHER READING: What A Performance: A Life Of Sid Field – John Fisher (London: Seeley Service, 1975).
Dame Gracie Fields
(GRACE STANSFIELD)
Born January 9, 1898
Died September 27, 1979
‘Our Gracie’. Gracie Fields was born over her paternal grandmother’s fish and chip shop at 9 Molesworth Street, Rochdale, Lancashire the eldest daughter (of three) of engineer Fred Stansfield (1874–1956). There was also a son. Her mother, Sarah Jane ‘Jenny’ Bamford (1879–1953), was the archetypal stage mother and wanted her daughter to be a star. Gracie left school on February 11, 1910 aged 12 to enter show business and changed her name to Gracie Fields when she was told her real name was too long. In 1913 she branched out into the field of comedy to add another string to her singing bow. In 1916 she became the leading lady in a troupe formed by bald, bespectacled, womaniser Archie Pitt (b. 1895 as Archibald Sellinger) whom she married on April 21, 1923. (Gracie’s sister, Betty, likened Pitt to Svengali and Grace to Trilby in George Du Maurier’s novel. Incidentally, the hat was named after the character, not the other way round.) The marriage wasn’t a happy one. “It was like being married to a balance sheet,” said Gracie years later. Nonetheless, when Pitt’s revue Mr Tower Of London opened in the capital at the Alhambra Theatre, Leicester Square, on February 25, 1924, Gracie became an overnight sensation. During the day she made records, in the evening she appeared at the theatre and when the curtain came down she went into cabaret. The money was rolling in (£700 a week) and Pitt was enjoying the trappings of celebrity. Gracie wasn’t. They lived in a house called Tower on The Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, London N2. “They” happened to be Gracie, Archie and his mistress. In 1931 when they were on the verge of separation he made her into a film star. Her début was Sally In Our Alley (1931) playing Sally Winch and singing the famous title song which Gracie was later to call “that wretched song”. The early films, such as Looking On The Bright Side as Gracie, for which she was paid £20,000, This Week Of Grace as Grace Milroy, Sing As We Go as Gracie Platt, Love, Life And Laughter (1934) as Nellie Gwynn, and Look Up And Laugh (1935) playing Gracie Pearson, were poor but in spite of this they were enormously popular with the public. In 1935 short (5˝5˝) Italian director and film comedian Monty Banks was hired and the quality improved. The films included Queen Of Hearts (1936) as Grace Perkins, Keep Smiling (1938), We’re Going To Be Rich (1938) and Shipyard Sally (1939). In 1938 she made the first of her three films in America but she never became a huge star Stateside. In June 1939 she fell victim to cervical cancer (although she didn’t admit to the illness until 1964) and was admitted to Chelsea Hospital for Women. Bulletins of her health appeared regularly in newspapers and on the radio and prayers were said in churches to aid her recovery. Some even knelt in prayer outside the Chelsea hospital where she was recuperating. She had separated privately from Archie Pitt in 1932 and was now involved with Monty Banks. In January 1940 Gracie was divorced and Pitt married his long-term mistress. Two months later, on March 19, Gracie and Banks were married in Santa Monica. On November 12, 1940 Archie Pitt died of cancer in London aged 45. A more pressing problem presented itself for Gracie. Monty Banks was still an Italian citizen and, as such, could be interned as an enemy alien. He and Gracie went to live in America, taking £34,000 with them. From being the people’s sweetheart she was vilified as a deserter by the press and her popularity hit rock bottom. Even her work for ENSA (nicknamed by a wag Every Night Something Awful) did not endear her to the public. After the war she moved to Capri and slowly began to regain acceptance. On February 18, 1952 she married Boris Alperovici (b. Bessarabia 1904, d. 1983). She became a CBE in February 1938 and a DBE in the 1979 New Year’s Honours List.
CAUSE: She died in La Canzone-del-Mare, Capri aged 81 from pneumonia. She was buried in the non-Catholic cemetery on the island two days later. She was worth £4 million at the time of her death with just £270,153 held in England.
FURTHER READING: Gracie Fields – Muriel Burgess with Tommy Keen (London: Star, 1981).
W.C. Fields
(WILLIAM CLAUDE DUKENFIELD)
Born January 29, 1880
Died December 25, 1946
Misanthropic alcoholic. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of a cockney immigrant Civil War vet who sold fruit and veg. When he was nine, Fields became a juggler, believing himself to become the world’s greatest. Two years later, aged 11, he ran away from home and stole food to sustain himself. He got into several fights and claimed that his trademark nose was the result of a particularly nasty beating. He became ‘Fields’ when he lost the ‘Duken’ and theatre owners always called him ‘Fields’ rather than ‘Field’; he became fed up with correcting them and so became W.C. Fields. In 1913 he appeared on a bill with Sarah Bernhardt, breaking a rule she had made never to work with jugglers. He made his film début in 1915 in a film called Pool Sharks. He signed with Paramount but was dropped because of his poor attitude. In 1932 he signed a contract with Mack Sennett and made four classic short films: The Dentist (1932), The Fatal Glass Of Beer (1933) as Mr Snavely, The Pharmacist (1933) and The Barber Shop (1933) as Cornelius Hare. Under the terms of his contract he was paid his weekly wages in two equal instalments – every Monday and Wednesday. He also wrote many of his films under pseudonyms including Mahatma Kane Jeeves, Charles Bogle and Otis J. Criblecoblis. After the success of International House (1933), in which he played Professor Henry R. Quail, Fields moved back to Paramount and was put under a long-term contract. Unfortunately, the studio didn’t know what to do with him and at first placed him in other people’s films. He was a success in The Old-Fashioned Way (1934) as The Great McGonigle and It’s A Gift (1934) as Harold Bissonette, but was so irritated by his co-star Baby Leroy (b. Los Angeles May 12, 1932, as Leroy Winebrenner) that he spiked the one-year-old’s orange juice with gin. Fields’ own drinking soon got out of hand and he was missing from the screen for two years following his Mr Micawber in David Copperfield (1935) and Professor Eustace McGargle in Poppy (1936). At one stage he was drinking several bottles of martini a day and when he ran out he would summon more by blowing on a hunting horn! It was said that when he went away he took three cases – one for clothes and two for his booze. He gave up drinking for most of 1937 and returned to film-making with The Big Broadcast Of 1938 (1938) as T. Frothingill Bellows/S.B. Bellows. Then he signed a contract with Universal under which he was paid $125,000 for each film plus $25,000 for writing the story. This usually consisted of jottings on scraps of paper (much the same way Benny Hill wrote his TV shows). He also inc
luded rude jokes. He turned down the part of the wizard in The Wizard Of Oz to write a book. He was drunk during the entire filming of My Little Chickadee (1940), annoying co-star Mae West by pinching her derrière and calling her “My little brood mare”. “There’s no one quite like Bill … thank God,” said la West. Writer Leo Rosten said of him: “Any man who hates small dogs and children can’t be all bad.” Fields himself said: “I’m free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.” He distrusted banks and kept small amounts under fictitious names in banks all over the world, including Nazi Germany “in case the little bastard wins”. His last years were plagued with alcoholism and polyneuritis. He married Harriet Hughes on August 8, 1900, in San Francisco. They had one son, William Claude, Jr, who was born on July 28, 1904. The couple separated quite early on and W.C. was henceforth accompanied by actress Carlotta Monti (b. 1907, d. December 8, 1993).
CAUSE: He died on Christmas Day, a festival he professed to hate, aged 66, from a massive stomach haemorrhage in Las Encinas Sanatorium, Pasadena, California. Despite claiming to dislike children, Fields left a large share of his $1.3-million fortune to an orphanage. He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks, 1712 South Glendale Avenue, Glendale, California 91209.
FURTHER READING: W.C. Fields By Himself: His Intended Autobiography With Hitherto Unpublished Letters, Notes, Scripts And Articles – Commentary by Ronald J. Fields (London: W.H. Allen, 1974).
Peter Finch
Born September 28, 1916
Died January 14, 1977
Womanising, hard-drinking he-man. Peter George Frederick Ingle Finch was born illegitimately in a nursing home in Courtfield Gardens, South Kensington, London SW 5, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Wentworth Edward Dallas ‘Jock’ Campbell (b. Gloucestershire, 1887, d. 1974) and Alicia Gladys ‘Betty’ Finch. He was raised as the son of Betty’s husband, George Ingle Finch (b. Orange, New South Wales, August 4, 1888, d. The Grange, East Hanny, Berkshire, November 22, 1970) and Peter didn’t meet his biological father until he was 45. Raised in France, India and Australia, Finch (who was convinced his surname was pronounced Fink) found employment in a variety of jobs including working on The Sun in Sydney before becoming a comedian’s straight man. He turned to acting in 1935, making his first film, The Magic Shoes (1935), the same year although the film never saw the light of day. He was blessed with a resonant voice and Finch soon found himself in great demand on the radio. On April 21, 1943 he married Tamara Tchinarova (b. Bessarabia, 1919) in St Stephen’s, Bellevue Hill, Sydney. Their daughter, Anita, arrived on October 27, 1950. He made a few films including Mr Chedworth Steps Out (1939) as Arthur Jacobs, The Rats Of Tobruk (1944) as Peter Linton and A Son Is Born (1946) before arriving in Britain in 1949 with his mentor Laurence Olivier. He repaid Olivier’s kindness by having an affair with Lady Olivier, Vivien Leigh. It was in the Fifties that Finch came into his own as a leading man, blossoming in the Sixties and appearing on the stage and in films such as The Wooden Horse (1950), The Story Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men (1952) as the Sheriff of Nottingham, The Story Of Gilbert And Sullivan (1953) as Rupert D’Oyly Carte, The Heart Of The Matter (1953) as Father Rank, Elephant Walk (1954) as John Wiley, Father Brown (1954) as Flambeau, A Town Like Alice (1956) as Joe Harman which won him his first Best Actor BAFTA, The Battle Of The River Plate (1956) as Captain Langsdorff, The Nun’s Story (1959) as Dr Fortunati, Kidnapped (1960) as Alan Breck Stewart, The Sins Of Rachel Cade (1960) as Colonel Henry Derode, the lead in The Trials Of Oscar Wilde (1960) which won him a second Best Actor BAFTA, No Love For Johnnie (1961) as Johnnie Byrne which won him a third Best Actor BAFTA, Girl With Green Eyes (1964) as Eugene Gaillard, The Flight Of The Phoenix (1965) as Captain Harris, Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) as William Boldwood which won him another Best Actor BAFTA, Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) as Dr Daniel Hirsh which saw him nominated for an Oscar, Lost Horizon (1972) as Richard Conway, A Bequest To The Nation (1973) as Admiral Lord Nelson, Network (1976) as Howard Beale which won him a Best Actor BAFTA and Oscar and Raid On Entebbe (1976) as Yitzhak Rabin. He divorced his first wife on June 17, 1959 and on July 4 of that year married the actor Yolande Turner (b. South Africa, December 12, 1935, d. London, November 6, 2003) in Chelsea register office. They had two children: Samantha (b. April 27, 1960) and Charles (b. August 1, 1962) before their divorce on November 11, 1965. On November 9, 1973 he married Jamaican-born Eletha Barrett in Rome. Their daughter, Diana, arrived in December 1969. Finch also had affairs with Kay Kendall and Mai Zetterling among many others.
CAUSE: He died in Beverly Hills, California, aged 60, from a heart attack while promoting Network. A lifelong Buddhist, he was given a Roman Catholic funeral service at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Los Angeles and was buried in Hollywood Memorial Park, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood, California 90038.
FURTHER READING: Peter Finch A Biography – Trader Faulkner (London: Angus & Robertson, 1979); Finch, Bloody Finch – Elaine Dundy (London: Magnum, 1981).
Bud Flanagan, OBE
(CHAIM REEVEN WEINTROP)
Born October 14, 1896
Died October 20, 1968
Crazy Gangster. Born in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel (the site of a Jack the Ripper murder) in the East End of London, the fifth son and youngest of ten children of Polish Jewish refugees, his name was changed to Robert Winthrop by the registrar who registered his birth. Aged 13 he developed a magic act – Fargo, the Boy Wizard. In 1910 he walked to Southampton and set off for fame and fortune in America. Stateside, he worked as a paper-boy, a messenger and, for one night only, a boxer. Returning to England in 1915 to sign up for World War I, he met Chesney Allen in Flanders. They were not to meet again until after the war. One Sergeant-Major Flanagan, an anti-Semite, made the Jewish recruit’s life a misery, so Winthrop became determined to get his revenge and make the name of Flanagan laughed at the length and breadth of Britain. Back in civvy street, he formed a number of partnerships adopting the name Flanagan. In 1925 he married Anne ‘Curly’ Quinn in Chester-le-Street. They had one son, Buddy (b. 1926), a difficult person who died of leukaemia in Los Angeles in 1955. In 1926 Flanagan again bumped into Chesney Allen and they formed a duo. At first it was less than successful and they considered becoming bookmakers. In 1929 they made their London début at the Holborn Empire. With Allen, Flanagan was famous for singing ‘Underneath The Arches’, a song he had written. (His last job was singing the theme tune to Dad’s Army.) Among his films were The Bailiffs (1932), Wild Boy (1934), Underneath The Arches (1937), Okay For Sound (1937), Alf’s Button Afloat (1938), The Frozen Limits (1939), Gasbags (1940), We’ll Smile Again (1942), Here Comes The Sun (1944), Dunkirk (1958) and Life Is A Circus (1958).
CAUSE: He died in hospital, in London, aged 72 from a heart attack. He left £29,134 in his will.
Ian Fleming
Born May 28, 1908
Died August 12, 1964
James Bond’s dad. Ian Lancaster Fleming, the man who created the world’s greatest fictional spy, was born at 27 Green Street, in London’s Mayfair, the second of four sons of Valentine Fleming (b. Newport, Fife, New Brunswick, 1882, k. in action Gillemont Farm, France, May 20, 1917 at 3.30am), a wealthy Eton – and Oxford-educated banker who in 1910 became Conservative MP for South Oxfordshire, and Evelyn Beatrice Ste Croix, née Rose (b. 1885, d. Brighton, July 20, 24 or 27, 1964 of a stroke), the beautiful, flamboyant daughter of a Berkshire solicitor. Fleming’s elder brother Peter, OBE, married the actor Celia Johnson (who is noticed elsewhere in this book) on December 10, 1935 and Ian often felt in the shadow of Peter. Fleming was educated at Durnford preparatory school and at Eton College. At Eton Fleming edited a school magazine called The Wyvern. Rather than following Peter to Oxford, Fleming went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in the autumn of 1926. But military life was not to his taste and he left in disgrace on September 1, 1927, after an incident with a woman in which he contracted gonorrhoea. In a bid to salvage his life and reputation he was sent to a finishing school for men in Kitzbühel, Austri
a. There he met a former spy called Ernan Forbes Dennis who, with his wife the novelist Phyllis Bottome, encouraged Fleming to learn languages and write stories. It seemed as if Fleming was destined for a career as a diplomat, only for him to fail the Foreign Office entrance exam. His mother got him a job with Reuters News Agency but then under family pressure he went to work in the City. From 1933 to 1935 he worked for a small bank, Cull & Co. He then joined Rowe and Pitman, a leading firm of stockbrokers, where he was bored rigid. On July 26, 1939 he became personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence. In this secret world Fleming flourished and quickly became a commander, working on anti-German black propaganda. In May 1941 he travelled to America with Admiral Godfrey and wrote a plan for the creation of an Office of Co-ordinator of Information (the forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services, which evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency). From 1941 until 1942 Fleming was in charge of Operation Goldeneye, a plan to maintain vital intelligence should the Germans take over Spain and Gibraltar. It was at this time that Fleming’s interest in writing spy fiction was born. However, after being demobbed on November 10, 1945, he joined the Kemsley newspaper group at 200 Gray’s Inn Road, which owned The Sunday Times, as foreign manager. He later laboured under the name Atticus before his retirement. Fleming used the charm and wit that had made him a successful spy to negotiate a contract that allowed him to take three months’ holiday every winter in Jamaica. In 1945 he had spent £2,000 buying, sight unseen, some land at Oracabessa, on Jamaica’s North Shore where he built a house he called Goldeneye. There he entertained his long-term girlfriend Ann Rothermere (b. Stanway, Gloucestershire, June 19, 1913 as Ann Geraldine Mary Charteris, d. Sevenhampton Place, Highworth, Sevenhampton, July 12, 1981 of cancer), the wife of the owner of the Daily Mail, the 2nd Viscount Rothermere. When her first husband, the wealthy banker Shane Edward Robert O’Neill, the 3rd Baron O’Neill (b. February 6, 1907), whom she had married on October 6, 1932, was killed in action in Italy on October 24, 1944, it was expected that she would marry Fleming but he demurred and instead she married Esmond Cecil Harmsworth (b. May 29, 1898, d. July 12, 1978) on June 28, 1945. Nevertheless, she continued her affair with Fleming and at 11 Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh in August 1948 gave birth to his daughter, Mary, who lived only eight hours. In October 1951 she finally divorced Rothermere and married Fleming in Port Maria town hall, Jamaica, five months later on March 24, 1952. Noël Coward and Cole Lesley were the only witnesses. The Flemings’ only child, a son named Caspar Robert, was born in London on August 12 that year. Noël Coward and Clarissa Eden, wife of the future prime minister Sir Anthony, were among the godparents. James Bond was born on January 15, 1952 shortly after breakfast when Fleming wrote the first words, on a 20-year-old Imperial portable typewriter, that were to become his first book, Casino Royale. The name came from James Bond’s Field Guide To Birds Of The West Indies, a book that Fleming kept on his breakfast table. Recalled Fleming, “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find. James Bond seemed perfect.” He said that the creation was “a counter-irritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married”. Fleming wrote for three hours every morning – between 9am and midday – for seven weeks. The casino of the title, Royale-les-Eaux, is where Bond challenges the Soviet agent Le Chiffre, a.k.a. Herr Ziffer, over the roulette table. The 62,000-word book was published to critical acclaim on April 13, 1953. Thereafter Fleming used his Caribbean holidays to write a James Bond story every year until his death in 1964. Not everyone was enamoured of Fleming’s writing, which he described as being for “warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, aeroplanes and bed”. In 1958 the journalist Paul Johnson criticised the books in The New Statesman for their “sex, snobbery and sadism”. Harold Nicolson wrote in his 1959 diary that Goldfinger had an “underlying atmosphere of violence, luxury and lust … [It is] an obscene book, liable to corrupt”. Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell told the author, “I am a confirmed Fleming fan – or should it be addict? The combination of sex, violence, alcohol and – at intervals – good food and nice clothes is, to one who lives such a circumscribed life as I do, irresistible.” Fleming’s next books were For Your Eyes Only (1960), a collection of short stories, Thunderball (1961), a novel based on a treatment by Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham and The Spy Who Loved Me (1962). On March 25, 1961 his co-writers on Thunderball sued him for stealing their plot. The case would not be settled for two years. It finished in November 1963 with Fleming acknowledging that McClory and Whittingham had written the book with him. McClory received the film rights and disclaimed interest in the novel and went on to co-produce the 1965 box-office smash. (McClory also agreed not to use his Thunderball material for ten years. He was later to remake the film as Never Say Never Again [released on October 7, 1983] and once again starring Sean Connery as 007.) On April 12, 1961 Fleming suffered a heart attack. Then, just as things began to look incredibly bleak (he was suffering marital difficulties as well as health worries), his career took off and his books became best sellers in America, helped by an endorsement from President Kennedy in Life magazine on March 17, 1961. Fleming wrote 12 Bond novels and two collections of short stories. In June 1961 Fleming signed a $50,000 deal with the producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for film options on all the Bond books apart from Casino Royale. This was the first book to be dramatised when on October 21, 1954 it was aired live on American television. Barry Nelson became the first (and to date only) American Bond. Peter Lorre played his nemesis Le Chiffre in this studio-bound version which cost CBS $1,000. When the film version of Casino Royale was made, it was a spoof and a terrible one at that. Released on April 19, 1967 one critic said it was “filled with plot holes you could drive Aston Martins through”. It starred Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Orson Welles and Woody Allen. The first official Bond film Dr No starred Sean Connery and Ursula Andress and opened on October 6, 1962. However, Fleming was not impressed by Connery. His choices were James Stewart, Richard Burton or James Mason but he did not have a say in the casting. Away from Bond, Fleming also wrote the children’s story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which became a successful film in 1968.
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