The Comedian and the Canary

NYT:

The scene unfolded like something out of one of W.C. Fields’ movies. A quick-handed, wisecracking entertainer wowed a packed house, only to find himself grabbed by two police officers after the show, paraded before the flashbulbs, and hauled before a judge, where he was charged with torturing a canary.

The great comedian was, in fact, the star of just such an episode. But it was in the real-life Broadway and environs of 1928, when Fields was topping the bill at the Earl Carroll Theater on Seventh Avenue in a Ziegfeld Follies knockoff called “Earl Carroll’s Vanities.”