I’ve always heard that his tombstone has the joke “I would rather be in Philadelphia.” But Someone recently told me it doesn’t really say this.
It’s not on his grave. The story evidently arose from a Hollywood party game. Movie stars were asked to answer a bunch of questions, including, “What do you want on your tombstone?” Fields supposedly wrote “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia” and the story got out.
BTW, Fields also never said, “Anyone who hates children and small dogs can’t be all bad.” The line was from Leo Roston, describing Fields at a dinner.
‘Start every day with a smile and get it over with’
Yeah! I inow. I could Google it. But, what’s the source of those statements?
:D;) :rolleyes:
The second one is easy: Rosten was bitter about his line being credited to Fields and went around claiming it on every possible occasion.
He said it at a banquet in honor of Fields at the Masquer’s Club in Hollywood in 1939. The complete quote, as given in his The Power of Positive Nonsense is:
Note “dogs and babies” which is different from the variations that are usually quoted.
The first one is harder. Fake epitaphs float around everywhere from that period. There are a bunch known for the Algonquin crowd. Whether it was a party game or whether they were done for a magazine article (or both in succession) is hard to say at this remove.
Where the Fields epitaph comes from is ever harder to say. A party? A PR guy? I’ve read it as a quip he made on his deathbed, but its not mentioned in any book ending. But there’s no easy way to go through my Fields bios for this: it’s not in any index.
You can attempt Google, but I suspect strongly that there is no actual original, and that like the Rosten quip, somebody said it for him. Though it would be nice to be proven wrong.
So, Leo alleged this in what year? I’d trust Leo’s assertion, but he’s telling this what?–40 years later?
Fields was born and raised in Philadelphia, so it would natural for him to to rather be there than dead.
“I think I’ll go outside and milk the elk.”
Page 391 to 393 of W. C. Fields by James Curtis.
Rosten in 60s and 70s proclaimed rightful authorship of the line after it was wrongly credited to Fields himself in Bartlett’s Quotations.
A most excellent book by Mr. Curtis, by the way.
Did he say: “I never drink water, fish fuck in it”?
and did Dorothy Parker had “Excuse my dust” as an epitaph?
Rosten’s book provides a several page exposition on the banquet. He might just be making it all up, but I’ve never seen a single refutation of his claim by anybody.
Dorothy Parker’s “Excuse my dust” is one of those jokes.
http://www.therightside.demon.co.uk/quotes/wcfields/
Not WC, but I saw a tombstone in Key West that read:
“I told you I was sick”
Note–I’m not deliberately trying to be contentious.
What year was that Bartlett’s published?
I found an interesting(but probably not very helpful) cite by using Ancestry.com.
From the Helena(MT) Independent, Dec. 13, 1940.
My FINAL answer.
Yes, Rosten said it in 1939.
But he stole it from Byron Darnton, a NY Times reporter, who used it in 1937.
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:7_XGsIG9AjYJ:www.ralphkeyes.com/niceguys/excerpt.htm+"byron+darnton"&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
[www.ralphkeyes.com/niceguys/excerpt.htm+“Byron+Darnton”+ralph+keyes&hl=en&ie=UTF-8"]samclem’s link](http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:7_XGsIG9AjYJ:[url)
Those links don’t work for me so let’s try it again:
http://www.ralphkeyes.com/pages/books/niceguys/excerpt.htm
I call this a “well, um” situation. Yes, somebody said something similar earlier. Did Rosten “steal” it from this source? No evidence one way or the other, at lest none that you’ve given or that Keyes gives. I thereby protest the use of the world “steal.”
The quote manifestly entered the public consciousness after the Masquers banquet in 1939.
Yeah! But, after you finally found the correct link, you DID enjoy my cite/site didn’t you? 
Phrase origins are always interesting. [yawn]
But the difference between us, as I see it from our exchanges, is that you are a word historian and I am a social historian. I’m more interested in the way a word or phrase enters the public consciousness than its formal origin. That means for me Rosten is still the important figure.
Or to use an example from another thread: I find it more interesting that the word flapper re-entered the language in the U.S. in the 1920s concurrently with women wearing flapping overshoes than its being an earlier British usage.
And I also have the same fascination that Keyes does with the way sayings change to make them more memorable or to associate them with famous figures: social changes, in other words.
Our interests are convergent rather than identical. So I did really enjoy that page - but perhaps not in the same way you did.
Doesn’t say. H. Allen Smith used it in Lost in the Horse Latitudes in 1944 and Rosten in the 1960s began to claim ownership…
The dinner where Rosten used the line was at the Masquers’ Sycamore Street clubhouse on Feb. 16, 1939.
(Ibid, p. 391)