William Fifield

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William Fifield (1916-1987) was an American novelist and nonfiction writer. He published several works on Jean Cocteau and recorded “Jean Cocteau: A Self-Portrait, A Conversation with William Fifield in French.” He also recorded a conversation with the mime Marcel Marceau.

A short story writer, he won an O. Henry Award in 1943. He was awarded a Huntington Hartford Fellowship in 1960. Wwwf22345 (talk) 01:16, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

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William Fifield (1916-1987) was an American novelist, nonfiction writer, and essayist. He published several works on Jean Cocteau and recorded Jean Cocteau: A Self-Portrait, A Conversation with William Fifield in French. He also recorded a conversation with the mime Marcel Marceau.

A short story author, he won an O. Henry Award in 1943. He was awarded a Huntington Hartford Fellowship in 1960.

Early life and education

William Fifield was the older of two sons born to the Reverend L. (Lawrence) Wendell Fifield and Juanita “Nita,” maiden name Sloan.

In 1945, Branch Rickey, the president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, made the decision to sign Jackie Robinson for the Dodgers in the presence of the Rev. Wendell Fifield at the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn. Robinson integrated the major leagues in 1947. Rev. Fifield was a friend of Rickey and was, at that time, the minister of Plymouth Church. The church was known as a center of abolitionist activity under its founding preacher, Henry Ward Beecher.

William Fifield was born in Chicago on April 5, 1916. He was the nephew of the Rev. James W. Fifield, Jr., the brother of Wendell Fifield. Their father was also a Congregational minister.

William Fifield grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Seattle, Washington. He attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, graduating magna cum laude as the student body president in 1937.

Wartime service

Fifield was a conscientious objector during World War II, working as a C.O. at three Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps. The first was in Big Flats, New York. It was an experimental farm, using trees and grasses to control soil erosion; they were grown on site and shipped out to states in the Northeast. The C.O.s worked the land.

His second camp was at Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island) in New York, where a number of the C.O.s were given rations, subjected to a starvation experiment meant to replicate the conditions on a life raft. According to the CPS Web site for his C.O. worker number, 2819:

The project may have taken place at Metropolitan Research Unit, New York Medical College (?) and ran from February 1945 through January 1946. The American Friends Service Committee served as the oversight agency. Over a dozen men were assigned as volunteers.

The experiment sought to find the kind of rations to stock on life boats, the effects of drinking salt water, and ways to replace evaporation of body liquids while on a life raft. Several CPS men drank salt water; some ate the official navy rations.

One of the findings of the life raft ration studies was that a simple ration of candy and water was best for lifeboat diets.

The third camp was a mental hospital, the Philadelphia State Hospital, known as Byberry, which had staff shortages during the war. The C.O.s served as orderlies and ward attendants, some on wards with violent patients. They brought their pacifist beliefs to the handling and restraint of the patients, igniting a reform of how the mentally ill were treated.

His younger brother, Robert Edwin, went to war on the Pacific front, joining the U.S. Army Air Forces. He became a sergeant. He died at the age of 20 as a tail gunner over Kyushu, Japan, in July of 1945, two weeks before V-J Day.

Career

Immediately after graduating from Whitman College, William Fifield went to work as a radio announcer, first for CBS and later for NBC. In addition to announcing, he became a program director and wrote scripts for “Suspense,” “Lights Out,” “The Whistler,” and other shows from the golden age of American radio. He also wrote for Orson Welles’ radio programs. While working in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, he began publishing short stories in national magazines, winning an O. Henry Award in 1943 for his story “The Fishermen of Pátzcuaro.” The O. Henry prizes are "widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction," according to the Atlantic Monthly.

In 1950, he moved to Europe to become a full-time writer. The author of several novels, he also wrote essays, a biography of Modigliani, an illustrated history of the great sherry-making families of Spain, and the Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits, a classic reference work. He was its co-author with the wine promoter Alexis Lichine.

His novel The Devil’s Marchioness was about the notorious seventeenth-century poisoner, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

He received a Huntington Hartford Foundation Award in 1960 for creative writing. The fellowship funded a stay of one to six months at an artists' colony in Rustic Canyon, a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. It ran from 1951 to 1965 and was supported by Huntington Hartford, a philanthropist and A&P supermarket heir.

During the nearly forty years he lived in Europe, he met and developed friendships with many of the most talented creators of the twentieth century. His book In Search of Genius includes his conversations on the creative process with writers and artists he considered geniuses: Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Jean Giono, Jean Lurçat, Roberto Rossellini, Robert Graves, and Marcel Marceau.

The Paris Review published his interviews with Picasso, Cocteau, and Graves, reprinting the last two in the literary magazine’s Writers at Work book series. Caedmon Records (now Caedmon Audio) released two of his recorded conversations: Marcel Marceau Speaks (recorded in English), as well as Jean Cocteau: A Self-Portrait, A Conversation with William Fifield in French. In 1973, Editions Stock in Paris published a full-length version of the Cocteau interview, Jean Cocteau par Jean Cocteau. The following year, a monograph Fifield wrote about Cocteau’s life and works, Jean Cocteau, appeared in the Columbia Essays on Modern Writers series, Columbia University Press.

Fifield’s Cocteau works are part of a bilingual series, La série Cocteau / The Cocteau Series, reissued by the Times Two Publishing Company.

William Fifield returned to the United States in 1985 and spent the last two years of his life in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. At the time of his death, on December 14, 1987, he was working on the publication of a long novel about the Renaissance, Bull Borgia.

Family life

He married his first wife, the Oscar-winning actress Mercedes McCambridge in 1939. They had a son, John Lawrence Fifield, born in 1941. He was later adopted by McCambridge’s second husband, Fletcher Markle, a Canadian television producer, and took the last name Markle. He was a highly regarded futures trader. Educated as an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, he went to work at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he worked for the wealthy Stephens brothers, the owners of Stephens Inc., an investment banking firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. He eventually embezzled funds from the company, crediting the winning trades to a secret account he had opened for his mother. After this was discovered, in the fall of 1987, he was fired from Stephens Inc. He tried to make reparations with the company, but McCambridge refused to cooperate. Distraught, he shot and killed his family (his wife Christine, 45, and their daughters Amy, 13, and Suzanne, 9), then committed suicide.

Fifield’s second wife, also an actress, was Donna Hamilton (now Donna Shor). She had become a starlet at Twentieth Century Fox in 1946 at the same time as Marilyn Monroe, with whom she shared a dressing room. The studio later chose her over Monroe, releasing Monroe from her contract. During her time at Fox, Hamilton was a protégée of Joan Crawford. She had the lead female role in Gunmen of Abilene. It starred Alan "Rocky" Lane, later the voice of the talking horse "Mister Ed," and is on YouTube

Fifield and his second wife had a twin boy and girl in 1954: Brian Robert, a real estate agent and computer consultant near Charlotte, North Carolina, and Donnali, a writer and editor in San Francisco, California. She is William Fifield’s literary executor. She translated and adapted the U.S. version of the companion book for the movie March of the Penguins (2005), originally published in France, and is the author of the family memoir William & Wendell: A Family Remembered.

His third wife, Aaltje Guyt (now Aaltje Verhille), was a Dutch model. Their daughter, Edwina, born in 1968, owns and operates a freight service in Asunción, Paraguay.

Legacy

The Times Two Publishing Company is reissuing his work in a digital archive.

The papers of William Fifield and other members of his family are stored at Archives West, Orbis Cascade Alliance, William Fifield Papers.

Selected works

Audio recordings

• (1966) Jean Cocteau: A Self-Portrait, A Conversation with William Fifield in French Caedmon Records. Issued on vinyl and as a cassette, released with a bilingual French/English transcript. The French side of the transcript was reproduced by Éditions Écriture in 2003 as “Un Autoportrait,” a text in Jean Cocteau: 28 autoportraits écrits et dessinés (1928-1963).
• (1971) Marcel Marceau Speaks Caedmon Records. Recorded in English. Issued on vinyl and as a cassette. Reissued on CD in 2000 by the Times Two Publishing Company.

Fiction

• (1943) “The Fishermen of Pátzcuaro.” O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1943 Doubleday, U.S. ed. Herschel Brickell. Prize-winning short story that originally appeared in Story magazine.
• (1943) “Tom Wolfe Slept Here.” Story Jubilee Doubleday, U.S. eds. Whit and Hallie Burnett. Reprint of a short story from Story magazine.
• (1957) “Summerhill Madhouse.” The Paris Review. Spring-Summer issue. Short story.
• (1957) The Devil’s Marchioness Weidenfeld, U.K., and Dial Press, U.S. Historical fiction about Madame de Brinvilliers. Reprinted by Avon Books, U.S., in 1971.
• (1959) Sign of Taurus Weidenfeld, U.K., and Holt, U.S. Novel about a Jewish refugee who becomes a fortune teller and finds, to her surprise, that she actually has psychic powers.
• (1960) Matadora Weidenfeld, U.K. Novel about a female bullfighter. Translated into German by Johannes Piron and published by Stahlberg Verlag in 1961 as Matadora, Herrin der Stiere.

Nonfiction

• (1964) "Jean Cocteau, The Art of Fiction, No. 34." The Paris Review. Issue 32, Summer-Fall. Interview of Cocteau, published in English.
• (1964) "Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview." The Paris Review. Issue 32, Summer-Fall. Includes a discussion by Cocteau of Picasso’s creative method.
• (1967) "Joyce's Brother, Lawrence's Wife, Wolfe's Mother, Twain's Daughter." Texas Quarterly. Essay.
• (1968) "Picasso Indian Summer." The Paris Review. Fall issue. Interview of Picasso.
• (1969) "Robert Graves, The Art of Poetry No. 11." The Paris Review. Summer issue. Interview of Graves.
• (1973) Jean Cocteau par Jean Cocteau: Entretiens avec William Fifield Éditions Stock, France Full-length transcript of Fifield’s Cocteau recording. Translated into Italian by Raphaël Branchesi and published by Castelvecchi Editore in 2013 as Jean Cocteau secondo Jean Cocteau.
• (1974) Jean Cocteau Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, Columbia University Press, No. 70. Monograph on the artist and author.
• (1976) Modigliani William Morrow, U.S. Biography of the artist, with interviews with members of his family.
• (1982) In Search of Genius William Morrow, U.S. Conversations on the creative process with Picasso, Cocteau, and others.

Wine writing

• (1967) Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits Knopf, U.S. History, culture, and information on wines and spirits around the world.
• (1978) The Sherry Royalty Edición Sexta, Spain Illustrated history of the sherry families of Spain, published in English.