The Honorable Cody

by Richard S. Wheeler

  But that vamp had a price, which was abundant support for her career. Will paid the tariff, underwriting an entire stage show, A Lady of Venice, and putting it on the road on her behalf. He squandered, I hear, fifty thousand dollars to put her before her public, and only when the critics laughed and the seats remained empty, and irate theater owners were demanding their minimum guarantees, did Will come to his senses.

  I can imagine the scene, though I wasn’t there.

  “Sorry, Katherine, I can’t afford to keep the doors open.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t afford it?”

  “Katherine, my dear, you’re playing to empty houses.”

  “Well, if that’s how you feel about me, I’ll find someone who cares.”

  She left him in a huff as soon as his subsidies stopped. He declined to add to his losses, went off bear hunting, and she stormed out of his life, at least for the moment. The truth of it is that they saw each other again, but never openly, and I was the only one in the show who knew about it. They were poison to each other. I privately loathed her. She was everything a woman shouldn't be.

  Eventually she married Howard Gould, son of the financier Jay Gould, and wallowed in all the money she would ever want. But she was a rover girl and in 1907 he sued her for divorce, naming Cody. Will told me what happened. Gould’s lawyers showed up one day and offered him fifty thousand dollars to testify against her at the divorce trial. That was a lot of money. Instead, he sprang up and ordered them to get the hell out of his tent. I liked that. Will couldn’t be bought, not even for a fortune. But when he told me about it he added a little smile and a wink.

  If I revered him it was because of things like that. He was one of God's natural gentlemen, and there wasn't a self-righteous atom in him.

  As the years went by, he began to hurt a lot. He had been banged up many a time, particularly when he tried to ride a buffalo bull known for its bad temper and ended up in a hospital for a couple of weeks. He could numb his pain with spirits, and did sometimes, but he knew spirits were a danger. So, most of the time he simply bore his pain, straightened himself out, boarded the white horse whose reins I was holding, and off he would go into that arena, looking like a young man, erect, his posture perfect, every move graceful. And no one would know he was hurting, the small of his back in particular. But I knew. He hid nothing from me and seemed grateful to have someone who would share in his private miseries.

  “Johnny,” he would say. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. Why don’t I retire?”

  Indeed, he was constantly thinking of retiring. And he was always too strapped to do it.

  Those retirement tours, one year after another, sound cynical. How better to boost the ticket sales than to announce that this would be the last season, the last time to see old Buffalo Bill Cody. And maybe he thought of it that way. But the odd thing was, he meant it each time and then would change his mind. He wasn’t a cynic and didn’t want to fool people. That just wasn’t in him. He would announce that he was going to retire, go through a season aching in every bone, announcing his farewells before huge crowds, ride off stage in an aura of sadness...and next year decide to try it again, just one more year.

  “Ladies and gents,” he would say before the throng, “you’re seeing Buffalo Bill one last time. Old Bill’s going to say farewell and Godspeed to each of you, and I hope the memory of the Wild West remains sweet in your minds, through the long years to come. And so my friends, it’s good bye...”

  “Mr. Cody, when are you really going to retire?” I once asked.

  One time he gave me his truest answer. “Johnny, I already have,” he said quietly. “I’m not even out there in front of people riding that white horse. That’s just a husk of me, a puppet, waving at those people. I’m out riding the hills again, that’s where I am.”

  “How are you feeling?” I might ask.

  “Johnny, I never felt better.”

  He always never felt better. But I knew the truth of it. I knew that years of being on the road, living in canvas tents without heat or good air, years of riding the rails, years of lifting luggage, years of getting onto his horse when he was fevered or when he was worn down, all of that had exacted a terrible toll upon William F. Cody, a toll that gaunted his body, hollowed his cheeks, stooped him in spite of his determination to stay erect, burned the flesh off his body so that his suits bagged around him. Sometimes, during those final years, when I slipped into his tent I would find him cradling his head in his arms and once when he looked up at me his cheeks were wet.

  I thought to myself, Will Cody’s going to go until he drops, and it will probably be in the middle of a show. I was wrong. He did complete that last terrible year of 1916 with the Miller 101 show. That was the year he began to ride out there in a carriage, sternly sitting like a king. That was the year I had to lift him into his saddle because he couldn’t pull himself up. The year when he looked sadly at the horse and knew there was not enough left in William F. Cody to ride that proud mount in a few circles out in front of the folks.

  This past year has been hell for me and when the news came, I wasn’t surprised. Whenever possible, that last tour, I would put him in a hotel and not in a drafty tent. I would pick him up, drop him off in a motor car, bundle him up on cold days. The end was fitting; he stayed in the show until he died. He stayed there even when he was only a relic and people were eager for something else, the rodeo acts the Miller Brothers had injected into the show, the riding and roping and bulldogging. But there was William, straight out of the old century, taking one last ride, and the public liked that too.

  He was all right until Harry Tammen broke him. Will Cody was still a proud man on a horse, still someone who somehow caught every eye in an arena, simply by sitting there as if he owned the whole earth. Then the Denver Post got a hold on him, and from that moment I watched William Cody disintegrate. Not without a struggle, though. He wasn’t a quitter. But suddenly he was short of breath, his eyes sank deep into his skull and he peered out on me with an old man’s gaze. It was no fun to see it and I knew from day to day, hour to hour, that Tammen had, in a way, executed Buffalo Bill. By that time we had worked a couple of seasons for the Sells Floto Circus and this last season for the Millers, and all the while the Hon. William F. Cody was trying to pay off his debt.

  I asked him, only a few weeks ago about the future.

  He eyed me with those watery blue eyes. “Let the show go on,” he said in a raspy voice, for his own melodic voice was deserting him.

  That's the time I cried. Let the show go on. I don’t know how I can, with my limited resources. But I’ve been the show’s stage manager for years; I know the business better than anyone else except Major Burke, and I think I just might do it.

  That name, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, has been bought and sold so many times I don’t know who owns it. Nor will I try to get it back. Let it die with Will Cody. Let it become valueless in the hands of those who stole it from him. “Wild West” doesn’t belong to anyone; it’s become a term for a type of show, and I’ll have a Wild West on the road next season or by God die trying.

  I’ll take it out there to big towns and small, and when I fill up those stands I’ll talk about my friend, my father, my mentor, Buffalo Bill, and I’ll tell them that this is the show Buffalo Bill wanted to have live after him, and then I’ll run that show just about as it was run in the grand times when the Deadwood Stage rolled through the arenas of the world.

  And if I’m lucky, and William Cody’s spirit rides along with me, the world will see the Wild West for another generation, and then I imagine those moving pictures will take over and the world will see the wild west for another century. And the world will know, somehow, that it all stems from Will Cody and his idea of putting the old west right onto stage, and taking the old west across the world.

  (From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)

  If the show is to go on, Johnny Baker’s the man to do it. He knows everything there is to k
now about putting a Wild West on the road. He won’t have my name to help him along. Harry Tammen owns my name, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, but I think Johnny could manage. There have been several successful Wild Wests that never employed my name, not least the Pawnee Bill show.

  This new century’s advancing fast and now war clouds loom in Europe. Unless something is done, young Americans will lose their understanding of what the past century was like and how the West was won. It’s all so easy for them now; they just hop onto a Pullman and steam anywhere safely and in hours instead of weeks and months. They scarcely know what it was to live in a wild land.

  I don’t think motion pictures can do it. It’s not the same as seeing a real horse, or smelling livestock, or hearing the rattle of a stagecoach. It’s all black and white, too. And without sound. That’s why movies have limited uses. In the Wild West I can stage a whole drama much better than actors in a black and white and silent film. To make a film work you have to include the subtitles, so everyone is reading and not paying attention. That’s why I think the Wild Wests will be around long after the novelty of films wears off. People prefer something as close to reality as can be put on a stage or an arena, and that means that the Wild Wests of this century will do just fine, long after I’ve gone to my reward. There’s going to be Indians ready and willing to work, buffalo, longhorns, wagons and coaches, and anyone with imagination, like young Johnny, can turn them into something exciting, something that will bring hordes of good folks to the ticket windows just as they have for the thirty years I’ve been with the Wild West.

  I took Baker under my wing when he was a North Platte ragamuffin, and look at him now. He’s as smooth and keen a fellow as any I’ve ever known and has a head for business. I think that’s because I taught him everything he knows. He came to me as a fair hand with livestock and a rifle but all the rest of his ability is what I managed to convey to him. Now the time draws near when there will be a changing of the guard and it is my deepest wish that Johnny pick up the reins and carry on.

  He will oversee my burial. I want a simple tomb up above Cody and I’ve shown him the place. I’d like to rest there, a shepherd watching over the city that came to be named for me. It does my heart good just to think about it.

  Chapter 26

  Gene Fowler

  A story every other day, and don’t spoil the merchandise. That was a tall order but I didn’t doubt I could come up with enough Cody material to last for months. Hell, the man had generated more copy than an encyclopedia, and all I had to do was snitch a little here and there. It’s called research if you do it right.

  Still, the family was grieving and no one wanted to talk to a reporter, especially one of Harry Tammen’s bloodhounds. Not even Louisa, who, I thought, had made her own devil’s bargain with my boss. Wily old Tammen has been raking in the pennies from school children and proceeding apace to build his Cody mausoleum atop Lookout Mountain, along with a well-scraped road negotiable by any tourist with a double-low gear on his flivver. One of these days they’ll plant the colonel up there. For the time being he resides in the Olinger mortuary as an honored guest, well guarded against snatchers who might hie him off to Cody, Wyoming.

  I knew suddenly what I would do: I would interview Harry Tammen himself, and the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. Chubby Harry, with innocent, hurt blue eyes, a sweet smile, and shark teeth. Ah, yes. The things I knew about Harry and his partner in crime, Freddie Bonfils. The fact is, Harry had buffaloed Bill Cody and that was a story or two or three.

  It takes a certain genius to purchase the most celebrated showman in the world, but Tammen was not lacking anything in the cranium department. When he was barely able to swill booze legally he was head hooch dispenser at the palmy Palmer House in Chicago. Only a few cherubic years later he was head mixologist at the posh Windsor Hotel in Denver, where he rubbed elbows with the rich and the famous. Then he quit and opened a curio shop, which was the beginning of his collecting mania. Somewhere in there he met Bonfils who was running an illegal lottery, and of course the cannibal pair teamed up to see who they could eat.

  Next they bought the decrepit Denver Post and converted it into its gaudy modern format, with red headlines and yellow news collected by stiffs like me. But did that end their lust for toys? Never. They bought a dog and pony show and named it after their sports editor Otto Floto, and had themselves a circus.

  With all that, some semi-contentment reigned in the red room upstairs, but not for long. The great granddaddy of all traveling shows was not a circus at all but Cody’s Wild West, and for years Tammen had been suffering concupiscent dreams about it. He wanted to own the colonel, goatee, lovelocks and all. He wanted the colonel to be his wind-up toy, his very own Jupiter in the heavens of show business.

  I approached the matter delicately and got a warm response.

  “Why, sure, Fowler, come on up, and I’ll give you a heart-to-heart confession. It’ll make good copy.”

  That sounded ominous. I did not have the power of absolution but not even the Pope could absolve Harry Tammen. I tucked a stubby pencil into my notepad and trampled the stairway until I reached the dread Red Room, where Denver’s fate was often decided on whim, and occasionally by the flip of a coin.

  Tammen eyed me cheerfully, a fat yellow stogie poking from some pouty orifice between chubby cheeks. He had a humidor full of dollar Havanas and another full of six-cent Baltimores. He offered me a Baltimore and I pocketed it. I could trade it for a counter lunch.

  “Fire away, my boy,” he said, as the end of his stogie lit up orange and crackled. The smoke rose, oddly red in the red room. “Ask me anything. There’s no censorship here, just unvarnished truth and heartfelt soul-wrenching feeling.”

  I pulled my pencil out, donned spectacles, and got down to business.

  “Mr. Tammen,” says I, “tell me how you and Buffalo Bill became partners.”

  “Childish admiration,” says he. “Long ago, when I was, ah, floor supervisor at the Palmer House, he’d come in, trailing his retinue, shedding sunlight. That’s how he was, those golden fringed buckskins and that silky brown hair creating a sensation in a city full of black broadcloth suits.

  “I says to myself, now there’s a real man. Now this man Cody, he doesn’t have a mean bone in him. He’s kind to shoeshine boys, treats women with all due respect, forks out silver dollars to tagalong youngsters, sets up drinks for everyone in sight, and I says to myself, Harry, you’ve got to meet this magnifico, because he’s the finest you’ve ever come across.”

  I jotted all this down, and he waited patiently. I swear he could read my writing upside down.

  “Well, Fowler, next thing I knew, I was supervising at the Windsor right here in Denver, and old Buffalo Bill wandered in from time to time, and he was even grander than before, inviting orphans to see his show for free, patting dimpled little girls on their heads, smiling kindly at the flirts in a way that let them know he temporarily loved his dear old Lulu, and setting up drinks. And I says to myself, Harry, if you could ever partner with a man like that, you’d see your life bloom.”

  “So how did it happen?” says I.

  Tammen sucked long on his Havana and tapped the ash off. “Actually, he came to me and offered me half of his show,” he said. “He liked me.”

  I listened intently. Now we were getting into whopper territory.

  “He offered you half?”

  “He did. ‘Harry,’ says he, ‘I’m a little pressed at the moment. Gordon Lillie has put the squeeze to me, half the cost of wintering the show, and I can’t raise it. Now, Harry, you’re an old circus man and you know everything there is to know. Suppose you buy my half of the show?’”

  This was getting pretty thick so I wrote it slowly. My pencil refused to record whoppers and I had a time getting it down.

  “His half?” says I. “For what?”

  “Well, we won’t discuss business here, Fowler. We worked out the details, he signed some papers, and I had
half of the Buffalo Bill Wild West.”

  “I thought it was a loan you made him. That’s what you said before.”

  “A loan? Fowler, you’re innocent about gentlemen’s agreements, a virgin in the field of finance. Reporters never see any money so how can you write about it? What you call a loan was a purchase. It’s true that we had Lillie to deal with, and Cody hastened to assure Lillie that the contract with me didn’t mean anything, but of course it did. I was Cody’s partner now or intended to be by the end of the season. Now that was a bad year, lots of rain, not many tickets sold, and by the end of the season the Two Bills Show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Exotic East, was running deep in the hole and by the time they reached Denver, I could see that my partnership with my hero, the Honorable Cody, was in danger. So we foreclosed.”

  “Ah...” says I, “we foreclosed?”

  “The printing bill, young fella. Posters, broadsheets, programs, all that. Ink, ink, ink! They couldn’t pay the bill. That’s our subsidiary, you know, the printing company. So I thought, Harry old boy, here’s your chance. The fattest chance in the universe. We can extract Cody from his failed partnership with Pawnee Bill and make this great American hero a part of the Post’s own happy family, a part of Sells-Floto, a part of Denver, Colorado. We could combine the shows, Buffalo Bill and the Sells-Floto Circus, and we’d have the proudest show in the whole United States. Clowns and Indians. Calliopes and war whoops, high-wire acts and the Deadwood Stage.

  “So we forced them into involuntary bankruptcy, and after some legal swordplay, ah, make that 'amiable negotiations,' we auctioned off the whole Two Bills show. Miller’s 101 outfit bought most of it. And of course we kept the name, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and I shook hands with the great showman himself. Gordon Lillie wasn’t happy about it but there wasn’t anything he could do and that was the end of the Pawnee Bill Show.”