Telegraph Days: A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

  We had a fine burst, Zenas and I. Our six lively girls emerged year by year: Belle, Beverly, Bettina, Bess, Beulah, and Berrie.

  We had a big shingled house two blocks in from the Palisades. The magazine prospered, and Zenas’s rich aunts kept dying, which enabled Zenas to buy bigger and bigger boats, the upshot of which was that—mostly as a stunt—Zenas and four of his sailing friends decided the time had come to sail around the world.

  Although I had my misgivings, I was not the kind of wife to put a stop to an adventure like that. I fell in love with Zenas Clark because of his adventurous spirit—it was a little late to try and make him into a settled, salaried man.

  The four around-the-worlders set off from San Pedro, with myself and the B’s, as we called the girls, and the families of the other bold sailors all gathered at the dock, with plenty of press available. Everybody wished them luck and waved heartily—if stupidly, in my opinion. They had named the boat the Nellie C.

  They made it to Tahiti in good health and great spirits; at least, that’s how it seemed in the pictures they sent back.

  Neither the men nor the Nellie C. were ever seen again—not by us at least. The great waters hold them somewhere: at least, that’s one theory.

  It wasn’t quite the end of Zenas Clark, though, because two years later two Portuguese sailors turned up at the offices of California Skies with a little coffee-colored boy—our little Benjy!—who was Zenas’s son by a Polynesian beauty, I guess, and a boy of such buoyant spirits that he was soon loved by all. The sailors wept when they handed him over: he grew up the darling of the household and the office, merry as the day was long.

  I confess I held back a little, at first, wondering about Zenas. Maybe he wasn’t being rocked in the bottom of the deep—maybe he had just got tired of running a magazine in Santa Monica. Maybe, on another island somewhere, another Benjy was being conceived. But I didn’t get on a boat and go looking for him. If Zenas and I agreed upon anything it was that chastity was a negative virtue which shouldn’t be allowed to impede positive, vigorous people.

  Zenas’s disappearance didn’t long impede me, of course. I was attractive, rich, and free—as the editor of California Skies I got asked to all the balls and events, and I went to them all, trailing my girls after me. Men came and went: bankers, railroad magnates, architects, high-born crooks, and of course, once the movies came along, lots and lots of actors. I saw no reason to tie myself formally to any of them, so I didn’t. My girls grew to become belles in their own right, popular at every soiree. Belle herself had the best business head of anyone in the family, so I eventually put California Skies in her hands—frankly, I felt that if I had to edit one more article on Yosemite I might choke. But the magazine grew until it was a huge operation with a staff of forty. I think Belle might have been swamped had it not been for the arrival of rowdy Charlie Hepworth, the old newsy who had taken such a fancy to me long ago that he had tried to fornicate with me in my telegraph office in Rita Blanca.

  Charlie was cigar-stained and inebriated as ever, but he did know the journalism racket, so Belle and I made him general manager, which worked well for all concerned. Randy old Charlie ran the magazine efficiently and had an abundance of skirts to chase in his off-hours.

  “I still carry the torch for you, though, Nellie,” he told me, from time to time, with a certain light in his eyes.

  “I know you do, Charlie, which is why I don’t intend to put my virtue in jeopardy by crowding up in a telegraph booth with you.”

  Then we shared a big laugh.

  Once I had the magazine in steady hands I decided it was time to do something about the big pile of manuscript that I had continued to scribble on between crises of one kind and another.

  This was my book The Good Deputy, which, once I forced myself to read through it, didn’t seem half bad. By this time I was running a household of some twenty souls: my girls, their beaus, a troop of maids and gardeners and governesses and music teachers. My girls grew up speaking Spanish readily but I wanted them to have French and also some acquaintance with the arts.

  It was on the whole a lively household—we had moved up into the Beverly Hills by then—but not, on the whole, a household very conducive to authorship. So I rented myself a cottage in Pasadena and set about making my manuscript into a book. By good luck I succeeded: my book became the biggest best seller since General Grant’s Memoirs.

  Well, the rich get richer, I suppose. Mainly in The Good Deputy I had just written about a heroine much like myself, who rambled all over the West, as I had. The book sold four million copies—not right off, but eventually—and it was translated into several languages I had never even heard of.

  After that I reigned, for a time—though Virginia-born, I became the queen of California. I opened fairs, made speeches, gave dinners for whatever kings and potentates happened to pass through southern California—and once the movies cranked up, many did.

  Of course, I knew Mr. Griffith and old man Zukor, who seemed old even when he wasn’t—and Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford—and the upshot of it all, once The Good Deputy was published, was that I got asked to write scenarios, a trade at which I proved rather adept. After my vast novel it was a relief to write something short, like scenarios, that I could knock out in maybe twenty minutes.

  So the years sailed on and the Old West, the West of Dodge City, Rita Blanca, and the O.K. Corral, quickly receded into myth. Over in Victorville, California, Western films were being rolled out by the dozen. I even wrote a couple myself, though I never took the trouble to visit Victorville.

  And then, late in 1916, a telegram came that shook me to my core: it was from Bill Cody, and the message was simple:

  NELLIE I’M DYING STOP COULD YOU COME AND SEE YOUR BILL

  Could I come? Would I come? Two hours later I was on a train to Denver.

  2

  I NEVER REALLY lost sight of Bill Cody, nor he of me. In a way I suppose you could say Bill Cody was my lodestar. To lose Bill would have meant to lose a part of myself—the dreaming part. Once every month or two he’d send me two dozen roses—I sent him back champagne, or maybe a fine cognac.

  I read of his triumphs in the great capitals of Europe. The old queen came out of mourning to see the Sioux dance. Little Annie Oakley took Paris by storm. Four kings and a crown prince rode in the Deadwood Stage. The show ran for months on Staten Island, just as Bill had predicted—it hosted millions at the big Chicago Exposition of 1893.

  I knew, too, of Bill’s troubles and humiliations. He tried to divorce Lulu and failed. He sold the Wild West at various times to various people, some of them nice, like Pawnee Bill, and some of them not, like the old press lord Harry Tammen of Denver, who was doing his best to make an event of Cody’s dying.

  I found Bill Cody in a common hotel room in Denver. He still had that great handsome head, and wonderful smile. Other than his clothes, all that was in the room were his pistol and a bottle of whiskey. When we embraced there were tears in his eyes, and in mine too.

  “Bill, is this cheap room the best they can do for you?” I asked. “Why don’t you just go home?”

  He smiled a wry smile.

  “Not up to arguing with Lulu,” he said.

  “All right—then I’m going to move you to a suite. I’m not rich for nothing.”

  I soon had him installed in the best suite in the hotel, which seemed to pick his spirits up a little.

  Handsome as he was, Bill looked bad. He had not lied—he was dying. All the gear he had to move was his pistol, his whiskey bottle, and a shirt or two.

  “I ought to shoot Harry Tammen,” he said. “He sold everything I owned at sheriff’s auction—including my horse, Isham.”

  Then came the old broad smile.

  “Of course, half of it was Pawnee Bill’s, so there’s another man who will always hate me,” he said.

  I had met Pawnee Bill, whose real name was Gordon Lillie, and I knew that though such a betrayal would enrage him, he would nev
er hate Buffalo Bill.

  “Bill, you’ve been a rascal!” I said. And then I broke down and sobbed.

  “But none of us will ever hate you,” I assured him, when I got my sobbing under control. “Gordon will forgive you, as we all have.”

  “Do you know why I brought you here, Nellie?” he asked.

  “Why? I suppose it was to say farewell … what else, Bill?”

  “It’s more than that,” he said. “To me you’ll always be the sassy telegraph lady I first laid eyes on in Rita Blanca.”

  His eyes filled again—I didn’t rush him.

  “I want you to be the one to telegraph the news of my death,” he told me. “The UP’s holding an open wire. There’s a key right in the hotel, set up specially for you. The governor himself had it put in.”

  “Why, Billy,” I said. “I’m so flattered. But I haven’t struck a telegraph key in years.”

  “Nellie, it’s just four words: ‘Buffalo Bill Is Dead!’” he told me. “I want you to be the one to send the news off to the world.”

  “Billy, I’ll try, but I need to practice,” I insisted.

  “So, go practice. But leave the whiskey,” he said.

  I did go practice. The manager had kindly set up a little desk in a kind of closet—if Charlie Hepworth had been there he would have laughed. In a closet that small I’d have little chance of escaping him.

  When I got back to the room Bill looked pretty sunken. He said Johnny Baker, the sharpshooter he had half raised, was on his way from New York.

  It looked to me as if Johnny Baker had better hurry.

  The winter dusk falls early in Denver—shadows soon fell on the Rockies. The whiskey bottle was empty. Bill looked out the window at the great West he had helped build.

  “It was a wonderful spree, wasn’t it, Nellie?” he said.

  “Oh, Bill—it was,” I said.

  I took his big hand—still warm, but the hand of a dead man.

  I allowed myself a private cry and then I marched downstairs like the telegraph lady I had been and sent off to the world the news that a great Western spirit had passed from among us.

  Within the hour regrets came from President Woodrow Wilson and the king and queen of England.

  Johnny Baker arrived, late by two hours. Annie Oakley sent a fine tribute. The world weighed in. And I went home to Los Angeles, heart-broken. I had lost my truest friend.

  3

  BILL CODY DIED in January but wasn’t buried till June, the reason being that Harry Tammen had sweet-talked Lulu Cody into burying Bill in the wrong place; not in the town of Cody, Wyoming, which was named for him, but on the rocky knob called Lookout Mountain, outside of Denver. I didn’t go, mainly from fear that I might kill that black-hearted Harry Tammen. I understand that several of Bill’s old girlfriends showed up, as befits a prince of men.

  I sent Lulu a card of sympathy and later held a luncheon for her when she showed up in California. After all, for most of her marriage, she had been left to be lonely, which eats at a woman. Two years later my brother, Jackson, died, of a tumor of the bowels. He was still deputy sheriff of Rita Blanca, which, of course, by then was a part of the state of Oklahoma. Ted Bunsen was still his boss—he had had no other deputy—but I suppose Teddy Bunsen must have picked up the pace, because he married Naomi, the lady barber, and had nine children. My nieces, Jean and Jan, had grown up and gone to live in Chicago, where Mandy had settled after Jackson died.

  I went to Rita Blanca for Jackson’s funeral—about the only thing that had changed was that the town now had a water tower. My long-bearded friend Aurel Imlah had turned a wagon over on himself while crossing the Cimarron. He drowned, though he had made that very crossing over one hundred times.

  Esther Karoo had gone to live among the Choctaws but Hungry Billy Wheless still ran the general store and the little Yazee museum. My little Banditti booklet was in the thirty-eighth printing.

  After Jackson’s death I took a world tour and then came back and settled into my big house in Beverly Hills. Nellie Clark was still a name to conjure with, in southern California. I gave money to the library, helped start up an opera company, dabbled in real estate, wrote scenarios for various and sundry, and usually tried to have a man of some sort handy. I knew Goldwyn and Mayer and Schulberg and most of the big movie moguls—at least, I saw them at parties.

  But I was a little surprised when the pugnacious Louis B. Mayer, whom I knew very slightly, called me up one day and told me that MGM was making a movie about my early years in Rita Blanca. It was called The Telegraph Lady and the lovely Lilllian Gish had been engaged to play me.

  “Hold on, Louie,” I said. “What makes you think you have the rights to my life?”

  I don’t think he liked being called Louie—anyway, he barked right back at me.

  “Because you did a scenario for D.W. Griffith in nineteen oh six,” he told me. “We bought it, we’re doing it, and all I called you for was to invite you to the set.”

  You know, he was right. I had done a scenario for Mr. Griffith, a fact I had completely forgotten. Scenarios flew thick and fast in those days; most of them died speedy deaths. The last thing I expected was that The Telegraph Lady would surface again.

  Of course, what Louie B. Mayer really wanted was a little publicity—it’s the lifeblood of the movies, after all. So I allowed him to send a big white limousine on the appointed day. We stopped by the office and picked up Charlie Hepworth, the only man in Los Angeles, probably, who had actually seen Rita Blanca in its prime, and off we went to Ventura, or thereabout, where they had found a little stretch of California prairie and built their movie Rita Blanca on it.

  They say that what the movies are really selling is magic—seeing the Rita Blanca that MGM made would have convinced me, had I needed convincing, which I didn’t, of course. Zenas and I had moved to Los Angeles in 1883—we saw the movies come in from the ground up, you might say; but even so, walking through the set of Rita Blanca was something special—it was like walking through my youth—and I suspect Charlie Hepworth may have felt the same. There was Beau Wheless’s general store, and Joe Schwartz’s livery stable, where Zenas and I had first enjoyed one another. There was even hay in it!

  And there was Ted and Jackson’s jail, with the gallows that Jackson had painted on his first day of work as a deputy, so many years ago. They had even built Mrs. Karoo’s house, and Aurel Imlah’s hide yard, and Ripley Eads’s barbershop, and Leo Oliphant’s saloon.

  When I asked the head carpenter how they got it so accurate he smiled and pulled out a stack of about one hundred photographs—to my astonishment I realized that they were the very photographs Buffalo Bill had had Hungry Billy make, so Bill himself could set up the perfect Western town somewhere, once he got his Wild West going, which he had. There’s nothing the research people on a movie can’t find, if you set them to looking.

  How I wished Bill Cody could have been there, for the main idea had been his, and he had had it long ago. He had figured out first what others had figured out later, which was that the thing to do with the Wild West was sell it to those who hadn’t lived in it, or even to some who had. Just sell it all: the hats, the boots, the spurs, the six-guns, the buffalo and elk and antelope, the longhorn cattle and the cowboys who herded them, the gunslingers and the lawmen, the cattle barons and the gamblers, the whores, the railroad men, and the Indians too, of course, if you could find them and persuade them, as Cody had.

  Charlie Hepworth, a big talker, was unusually silent as we walked around—I believe it sobered him a little to see how easily the distant past could be brought back in perfect detail. When the company broke for lunch Miss Gish joined us under a big arbor that had been thrown up. I had met her before—we chatted about actors. Of course, she thought Charlie Chaplin was the greatest man alive, and Mr. Griffith second. Photographers were busy snapping us as we talked.

  After lunch, during which Charlie, who was tongue-tied around actors, took in a bit of grog, we wandered over f
or one last look at the telegraph office where, I guess you could say, I made my name.

  Of course, in real life, the Yazees were dead before I even set foot in the Rita Blanca telegraph office, but in my scenario I had adjusted the facts sequence a little. In the movie Lillian Gish is made to rush out with an old buffalo gun of some sort and come to the aid of my brother, although the buffalo gun misfired and the actor who played Jackson still got to kill all the Yazees.

  Charlie Hepworth was staring at the reconstruction of my old telegraph office with misty eyes.

  “What are you thinking about, Charlie?” I inquired, though I already had a notion.

  “You know exactly what I’m thinking about,” he said.

  “Just let me remind you that no one invited you to drop your pants on that occasion,” I said.

  “Oh, Nellie, stop your yapping!” Charlie said, with a sudden sad look in his eyes. “A man can have his dreams,” he added, with a sniffle or two.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Charlie,” I said in apology—in fact I was not sure how I had meant it or why I even said it.

  We stayed for most of the afternoon, watching them choreograph the Yazees’ wild charge. Stuntmen did the charge several times—nobody wanted to risk an expensive actor falling off in such a melee and getting hurt.

  The photographer took a few more shots of me with Lillian Gish, and then Charlie and I got back into the big white car and purred back toward Santa Monica. When I dropped Charlie at the office he stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking sad.

  “Hey! What’s the matter with you, young fellow?” I asked—in fact I was nursing a sadness of my own, the cause of which I could not quite pinpoint.

  Charlie Hepworth thought about it for a moment, the sea breeze blowing his sparse gray hair.

  “I guess I won’t be seeing that picture, when it comes out,” he said.