IN CELEBRATION OF A BANANA, A PINEAPPLE, AND A POMME DE TERRE

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, October 12, 1997

Page: E4

Section: Books

``I thought,'' wrote Tocqueville, ``that the English constituted the most serious nation on the face of the earth, but I have since seen the Americans and have changed my opinion.'' The American man, he observed, ``instead of going in a leisure hour to dance merrily at some place of public resort, . . . shuts himself up at home to drink. He thus enjoys two pleasures; he can go on thinking of his business and can get drunk decently by his own fireside.''

Well, exactly. And how perfectly so many of W. C. Fields's best characters portray this grave citizen, this bibulous seeker of solitude and quiet reflection.

I bring all this up because I have just read ``Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields'' by Simon Louvish (Norton, $29.95). The author's object is to debunk the myths surrounding Fields: notably, that he knocked his father down when he was 11 and lived on the streets until he mounted the stage a few years later; and, of course, that he hated children and dogs. Louvish aims also to show a side of Fields -- that he was a great reader, for instance -- that is little known.

But the great bulk of this two-ton tome is devoted to identifying the acts that influenced Fields and tracing his career from the burlesque and vaudeville stage to the silver screen in excruciating, yet somehow unenlightening, detail. This involves rambling through the ``plots'' of his theatrical sketches and movies, and incorporating great swaths of script. I became so bored reading this book that I thought I might go crazy, and really wondered what the author thought he was up to. After all, he himself points out that Fields's own book, ``Fields for President,'' ``lacks resonance unless read aloud in that unequalled voice. For Bill Fields, every text was a means to an end: The Performance. Without The Performance, it is only a blueprint, a mere shadow.'' Quod erat demonstrandum, is about all I can think of to say here.

By far the best bit of Louvish's work is not really his, but rather Joseph Breen's. Breen was the ``secular vicar of Hollywood,'' the movie industry's appointed guardian of propriety under the Hays Code, and Louvish quotes him on changes that would have to be made in the interests of decency and avoiding offense in ``Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.'' Breen took exception to the huge and, shall we say, unsober emphasis on drinking. He also objected to Fields being ``shown looking at girls' legs or breasts and reacting thereto,'' and thought the spectacle of a teenage girl hitting Fields over the head with a brick was ``the sort of scene which will undoubtedly give offense to parents and organisations dealing with child training generally,'' while ``the man taking out his false teeth strikes us as a piece of business which will give offense to mixed audiences.'' Alert, too, to the moral perils of symbolism, he announced sensibly that ``Any and all dialogue and showing of bananas and pineapples is unacceptable.''

If W. C. Fields is, if you will excuse my French, top banana, Mae West is supreme pineapple in my book. I have just read Emily Wortis Leider's ``Becoming Mae West'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30), an exceptionally engrossing biography that covers West's life up to the late 1930s. (That means it covers both her stage and screen heydays, and drops her before she got involved in spiritualism and other such nonsense.) Leider paints a vivid portrait of a truly mighty woman whose life in private was not, it seems, very different from that of the characters she played. As Cary Grant observed, ``I have never worked with anyone who has as much `she' as Miss West.'' To be sure, though he certainly found it trying to share the set with her, he did allow that she was ``extremely helpful'' in the love scenes.

Mae West's manner of expression is irresistible to me in its mixture of aplomb and insouciance, in its directness and its imagery, particularly -- I hasten to say -- as she addressed those who annoyed her: ``If I didn't have a certain amount of refinement,'' she has the character she plays in her play, ``Sex,'' explain, ``I'd kick your teeth all over this floor.'' For her own diplomatic reasons, she never spoke so plainly to Joseph Breen, who is very much on the loose in these pages just as he is in Louvish's book. Good lord, that man was a trial. He insisted that her movies ``I'm No Angel'' and ``She Done Him Wrong'' be withdrawn from circulation; and so they were until the 1960s, when all sorts of outlandish things began to be set before the public.

Which brings me to a final member of my private pantheon, who happens to be yet another scourge of meekness, blandness, and euphemism. Add to top banana and supreme pineapple la grande pomme de terre: Julia Child. She, who is quite simply the savior of American cooking in the home, is the subject of Noel Riley Fitch's worshipful yet enlightening and entertaining work, ``Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child'' (Doubleday, $25.95). Nothing like Julia had ever been seen on television before she appeared there, in 1963. (Even she seemed rather taken aback upon watching the show for the first time: ``There was Mrs. C. swooping about the work surface and panting heavily,'' she marveled.) I like to imagine what Joseph Breen would have made of such displays as her demonstration of an inferior, drooping baguette. Certainly, some of her early viewers were scandalized by her behavior. ``You are quite a revolting chef the way you snap bones and play with raw meats,'' wrote one worthy soul, while another scolded, ``I have turned off your program before today when you seem bent on wine drinking, but this is the last time.'' There are, I know, some people for whom life is a limp baguette. I only wish they would let the rest of us alone with our raw meats, our glasses of this and that, and the tranquil contemplation of our own business.