Telegraph Days (36 page)

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 never 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.

B
ILL 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 for 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.

“Why not, Charlie?”

He shrugged. “Once is enough to live your life through, ain't it?” he asked.

I wanted to get out and hug him, but Charlie turned and stumbled off.

The Telegraph Lady
came out and was the hit of the year. Of course, I was invited to the fancy premiere—but I didn't go—and I was never tempted to see that picture.

For once that well-known liar Charlie Hepworth had said something true.