The Flivertons

Abstract

The 1920 Follies featured Fields’s hilarious creation, “The Family Ford,” one of several sketches about automobiles that he wrote. This chapter discusses this creation. The routine is a takeoff on the unreliability of Ford’s Model T, nicknamed the Fliverton. But more importantly it is about a dysfunctional family that has its roots in Fields’s childhood and marriage. Fields plays George Fliverton who takes his family and others on an outing to have a picnic. During the trip the car breaks down a number of times. The bossy wife (Fanny Brice) makes her husband’s attempts to fix the car more difficult. The child, played by the talented Rae Dooley, is a precocious child whose misbehavior causes more havoc. As Fliverton tries to repair the car, other sections continually disintegrate. After fixing a flat tire with a spare that is too large, Fliverton drives forward causing the rear axle to fall off and the occupants to be thrown from the car as the curtain descends. Fields wrote a scene illustrating Fliverton as the victim of mechanization (the flivver) and he used the automobile quite often in his work. Most importantly, the sketch depicts Fliverton as a beleaguered victim belittled by a nagging wife and taunted by a mischievous child. Here Fields begins to play one of his signature characterizations—the harassed father badgered by his family, a portrayal that he repeatedly performed on the stage and screen.