The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Let little miss loud-mouth try that one! She had no skill with hand guns and worked only with her .22 rifle. So there was something in my kit that was beyond her, and I enjoyed knowing it. I had no very warm feeling for her.

  Her approach was to belittle me when she could, but William Cody ignored the provocations, preferring to let the two top-billed women in his show settle their rivalries their own way. That is how things went for a few seasons, until we found ourselves headed for England, and Miss Lillian Smith stumbled.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  Almost willy-nilly, Nate Salsbury and I found we had a hit in Annie Oakley. Audiences couldn’t get enough of her. We thought a female shooting act would be a nice addition but little did we know that Annie had such an innate ability to win an audience that she soon became the star of the show. I must say, she was almost as sought after as myself.

  She had a genius for combining the manly art of sharpshooting with a girlish appearance. From the moment she tripped into the arena she seemed the unlikeliest sharpshooter in the world. But Nate, who spent plenty of time up in the stands with the audience, saw at once what he had hired, and began top-billing her. And next we knew, Annie was a draw. She turned the Wild West into a cash cow. People laid out their quarters to see her. Soon we were raking in cash such as we had never seen or imagined. Those were the best seasons we ever had.

  All of which worried us. What if Annie left us? We paid her well but there were dozens of reasons a woman might leave a show like ours, and if she did leave the cost to us would be tens of thousands of dollars at the ticket window. Nate calculated that Annie was worth maybe an additional hundred thousand a season to us. More than that. A show rides its stars. The jobs of everyone in that show depended on Annie. Neither Nate nor I could fathom her plans because she never talked of her future. We gave her the widest leeway to engage in shooting competitions, fearful that she might find us restrictive and leave.

  Nate was all for putting language into the contract about giving us long-term notice and so on, but in the end neither of us dared to do it. We talked of negotiating with Frank Butler but neither of us could do that, either. So months and seasons went by, with Annie drawing huge crowds to our ticket window, becoming ever-greater and better known thanks to Major Burke, who made sure her name was as well known as mine.

  But that didn’t calm our jitters. And then, by golly, I got wind of this little wizard of a shooting girl out in California, and I knew we had an answer. We would hire Lillian Smith, who could pop glass balls as well as anyone. She was fifteen, would be protected by a family guardian while employed with us, was unlikely to get us into any sort of difficulties, and could be built up into just the sort of star that Annie was. She would be second-string, of course, but a sort of understudy who could take over if Annie left us.

  I don’t think Annie was thrilled to have a rival, though Nate and I at first breathed more easily, knowing we had some backup. Unfortunately, neither of us had thought carefully about how Annie would feel about this new girl, and it was plain that Annie was miffed. Indeed, too late, we weighed the possibility that hiring Miss Smith might be just the decision to drive Annie out of the Wild West. But for a while it seemed to work. Lillian was a good act but failed to captivate audiences the way Annie did. Annie was well aware that Lillian was no match, and I thought that might settle it. But it didn’t. You can’t put a boastful girl in a show and have her badger its star, and expect the star of the show to stand and take it. And that, I’m afraid, is the lesson I was too slow to learn.

  Chapter 24

  Major John Burke

  I’ve been thinking of Cody again, and that brought to mind one of the great stories that has followed him around. Not a word of it is true but that just makes it all the better.

  In 1884, Cody’s new partner in the Wild West, Nate Salsbury, was plenty worried about Cody’s drinking. The previous year had been painful for Buffalo Bill. He had first organized the Wild West with Doc Carver, a moody sharpshooter, and the new company had staggered through its first outing in 1883, playing fairgrounds in the afternoons because it lacked tenting and lighting. Carver had a temper and when his sharpshooting went haywire he was capable of smashing his rifle and stalking off.

  I remember standing on the sidelines, watching Carver storm away after a bad session, leaving it to Cody to pick up the pieces which he did with that charisma of his. All those spectators out there had just witnessed failure and anger and a performer who stormed out of the arena. There wasn't much Cody could do but make a lighthearted comment or two and bring on the next act. I guessed the Wild West wouldn’t survive for long unless Carver left it, and I was right.

  Buffalo Bill discovered he couldn’t stand his flamboyant partner, billed as “The Dark Spirit of the Prairie,” and they arranged an amiable split, dividing everything down the middle with a flip of the coin. That’s how Cody ended up with the Deadwood Stage. It had been a miserable year. His eleven-year-old daughter Orra Maude had died of a fever and he was scarcely speaking to his wife, who was blaming him for every sort of domestic trouble and snatching every penny she could badger out of him.

  Cody was broke, boozing hard, weighing divorce for the first time, grieving his sweet girl, and somehow enduring the blame that Louisa heaped on him. And on top of that Carver was unbearable. I think I would have been guzzling too if I had to face all that every hour of every day. The miracle is that he could still ride into that arena, poised and serene, the light shattering off him, and catch the attention of every soul in the place. Drunk or not, miserable or not, he was a real presence out there. Something in his spirit dined on all that attention.

  Those were the months when Cody and his old pal White Beaver Powell were drowning their problems in pain killer each night, which only made Louisa angrier and Cody more miserable. I was there, watching the show fall apart. So was Johnny Baker. And we were wondering if there would be a show the next year. That season Louisa perfected her abuse of Bill. Why didn't he quit and become a respectable baker or a store clerk or bootblack? I had run into that harpy once in a while and learned to give her a wide berth. I don’t know whether to admire Bill Cody for patiently putting up with her most of his life, or to pity him. He didn’t talk about it but Johnny Baker and I knew pretty well what he was suffering.

  So did Nate Salsbury, who had agreed to partner Buffalo Bill but was plainly having doubts about it. Salsbury never much cared for me, but I thought more of him than he did of me and believed he would be a fine partner for Cody if he could keep his vanity in check. That dapper, well-dressed actor and showman knew the business as well as anyone alive, knew how to put a large troupe on the road and make it pay off.

  One spring day, before the 1884 season opened, Salsbury observed his new partner quite drunk, with a grimy plug hat perched on his long, greasy locks, stubble on his cheeks, his whole demeanor unkempt. Salsbury liked to put things in writing. The result was a stern letter to Cody, saying in essence that Cody’s drinking would have to cease or there would be no partnership, no Wild West.

  That much was true enough, as far as I know, but the story that rose out of all of that is much gaudier than the humble reality, which is that a contrite Cody promised to quit drinking during the show season, and more or less kept his word. I’ve heard a dozen versions of the legend, and you can pick whatever one you want to believe; they all make a good yarn.

  The heart of it was that a chastened Buffalo Bill promised his new partner that he would confine himself to exactly one drink a day. Or two or three a day, depending on the storyteller. But Cody carefully neglected to define what constituted one drink. And that permitted the showman to pour himself a schooner, a full glass, a stein, of hooch, and sustain his habit the entire day on a single drink. The magical single drink, like the loaves and the fishes, would never fail the livelong day. According to legend, Salisbury took him to court but lost because there had been nothing in the agreement defining the size of one drink
. The wily Buffalo Bill had pulled a fast one.

  That's good stuff. Ah, if only it were true. There was no such agreement and no such lawsuit, and therefore, no very good yarn to spin. The prosaic reality is that Buffalo Bill Cody did sharply limit his drinking, sometimes abstaining whole seasons, and not once in his life did he miss or damage a performance from imbibing too much spirituous drink. One almost wishes the old boy were as bibulous as his legend.

  Not that Cody was any sort of teetotaler. He was a hard-drinking man until the doctors made him quit a few years ago. No one liked his booze better and no one profited from it so much. Will Cody could turn from an irascible, pressured showman who aging body hurt constantly into a boon companion and old pal in the space of two or three whiskeys. He did enjoy a good binge after each season and once in a while in between, but these were actually rare. He understood something important: when he drank during the show season, the Wild West deteriorated.

  Nate Salsbury was two days younger than Cody, an Illinois man who had fought in the Civil War, was captured and starved in Andersonville, miraculously surviving. After the war he turned to theater and soon was starring in his own show, The Troubadors. He had a good eye, I’ll say that. It was he who spotted Annie Oakley practicing in an empty arena and signed her up even before consulting with Cody.

  He claimed later that the whole idea of the Wild West was his and that without him the show wouldn't have amounted to anything. Cody, he claimed, didn't have an idea in his head. When I read it my opinion of Salsbury dropped hard and fast. He had his virtues, but it turned out he resented Cody’s innate grandeur and never he believed the success of the Wild West rested squarely on Cody’s own magical persona out there in the arena.

  Salsbury always did think I was excess baggage, that I spent too much and achieved too little, but that was just his penny-pinching mentality at work. I got those broadsides out well in advance, bought newspaper advertising, plastered posters wherever we were going, and drew the crowds. Will Cody knew it. I think Salsbury did too but hated to admit to anyone’s ability other than his own.

  After Salsbury took sick and resigned from active management, the Wild West was never as lucrative as it had been. Salsbury died young, I suppose from the ordeal at Andersonville, and his heirs soon sold his share of the show to John Bailey, the great circus man who proved to be as competent as Nate, and at first much kinder to me.

  Salsbury’s great triumph was taking the show to England, something he alone had envisioned as a lucrative venture. He had guessed rightly that the romance of the American West would fascinate Englishmen. He traversed the Atlantic well in advance, knew what he needed, contracted for it, and by the time the Wild West set foot in London, Salsbury had made all the arrangements. He had even extracted a promise from Cody not to drink at all for the show season, a staggering concession on Buffalo Bill’s part. But Cody kept to it.

  There you have it: Salsbury, the tight-lips bookkeeper, and Cody, the vagabond prince. Cody’s gone now, but what I remember is a man whose life sailed beyond pinch-penny economics. Sure he was a spender, sure he sometimes sailed off on a memorable bender, but William F. Cody was a man who gathered children around him and gave them gifts, passed out silver dollars to beggars, handed out passes for orphans, saw to it that his show people were treated well, fed his troupe beef in England, where it cost him a fortune, told his rough cast to behave themselves around a lady like Annie Oakley, assumed the debts of some of his employees, throw a party for any occasion, and took care of the medical expenses of many in his company.

  Did he spend too much? The historians will say so. But I say, maybe Salsbury, and then Bailey, didn’t spend enough. For there was Will Cody, ready with a coin or a check or cash if he could manage it, pouring much of what his show brought in back upon the world, even back upon his Lulu, who received abundant support from him her entire life, even when they were estranged. The secret is this: Cody not only liked people, he loved people, and somehow that all flooded back to him at the ticket window. There's more than economics in a successful show.

  Now he is gone, this man whose life was larger than any I have ever known, who somehow turned his wallet into a bottomless mine from which he could always extract some coins for the needy, or buy shoes for one of his cast, or pay a doctor bill for someone’s child. May the world have more spendthrifts and fewer accountants.

  Nor does it end there, for he was the most loyal of men and once he saw my worth he protected me against all manner of storms, from skeptics like Nate Salsbury, who thought the show didn’t need a skilled advance man, from the Bailey people who tried to fire me, from all the sharks in the sea. Not just me. He threw his protective mantle around Johnny Baker, too, and anyone in the show he thought was valuable, repaying our own loyalty to him tenfold. He would stand straight, redoubtable, fending off those who wanted to tear his show to shreds, fending off bill collectors, sheriffs, confidence men trying the gouge, lawyers threatening to ruin him, fending them all off with that stern gaze that said he would be lightly tampered with.

  Ah, God, he’s gone, and there never was a man like him, and never will be again.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  I am constantly being libeled by people who claim I can’t hold spirits. I can hold my liquor with the best of them and I challenge any man to try me. I grow weary of malicious reports and gossip about me, saying I’ve had to swear off drinking to keep my show together. It’s all tiddlywinks.

  The truth of the matter is that I have never missed a show for any such reason. In all the years of the Wild West I have never failed to give a top-flight performance. I have never been unable to manage the Wild West on the road. I don’t know where these canards come from, but there is envy in them. It is the affliction that befalls all successful men.

  I maintain a fine stock of liquors at all times for company and business purposes. I can mix any cocktail invented and often do. In my hunting camps and lodges I make sure there is a plentiful supply of good sipping bourbon, which lubricates the good company of men out in the wilds. A drink or two is the potion that turns a quiet group into an affable one, which turns the dour fellow into a social one, and which brings forth the stories and legends that make entertainment any evening.

  There are some men who cannot hold their liquor and should not drink. There are others who can do so without impairment. I belong to the latter class. The issue is not whether one imbibes, but whether one imbibes successfully.

  All my public life I have been aware of whispers about me, accusations that I’m a drunk, that I did this or that show under the influence, that I do not control my intake of spirituous beverages. It’s all tiddlywinks.

  I have never understood Temperance people. The task of us all is not to abstain from so pleasurable a habit as it is to control it and prevent it from debilitating one’s life.

  There seems to be no end of gossip about me, fed to the world by unscrupulous newsmen, such as those at the Denver Post. A man in a public position seems to be scrutinized and found wanting no matter what his habits may be. And that includes not merely what he tipples but every other carnal appetite that may affect his behavior or morals or ethics. I reached the pinnacle of my business only to discover that the world is crowded with backbiters and scoundrels looking for ways to topple me.

  But no man has ever proved that drink hurt my career. And in the absence of the slightest evidence of damage to my life and art and career, I beseech the backbiters to cease and desist.

  Chapter 25

  Johnny Baker

  I was the one person Will Cody trusted with his private joys and tribulations. He wanted me to know whatever there was to know, the good and bad, the troubles and embarrassments. Sometimes I was the go-between, talking to Louisa, talking to Will, doing the best I could to help them settle their troubles.

  I didn’t succeed. Louisa had evolved a way of blackmailing him, there’s no other word for it, and it was up to me to deal with it. The tr
ick was to catch him at something, throw a tantrum, and walk off with another chunk out of Will’s hide.

  Will had a few women but not as many as people imagined, and they were the fruits of Louisa’s locked door. I don’t think Will would ever have strayed if Louisa had tenderly welcomed him into her arms. I place the blame squarely on her even if Will didn’t treat her as well as he might have.

  It was always up to me to pick up the pieces. In New York she demolished her room at the Astoria, everything from curtains to mirrors, and of course Will Cody got the honor of paying the bill. That was her trick. If she couldn’t get into whatever suite he was renting or whatever house he was leasing, she would smash up any handy room. Will always sent me with cold cash, a sheaf of greenbacks, to pay the bills and I dealt with several frosty hotel managers or apartment-owners who saw the chance to bilk Will for twice what the damage amounted to. There wasn't much I could do to whittle down those charges, but you bet I tried. Will wanted no publicity and everyone knew it, and that worked out to extortion.

  The woman Louisa hated and feared the most was Katherine Clemmons, the actress. I use the word loosely because she couldn’t act, though Will thought she was divine on stage. She looked rather like him, indeed a female version of him, striking and poised and bright. Maybe that was what mesmerized him, made him believe she was the brightest star in the firmament. She had a seductive way around Will, a touch, a smile, a raised eyebrow, a look that was a promise. She seemed to him to be everything that Louisa refused to be, and it was plain to those of us who knew the colonel that Miss Clemmons owned him, at least for a while.