The Intriguing Part about the Half Truths and
Tall Tales That Dog this
Western Legend is that Many came from Martha
Jane Cannary herself
by
David Hofstede
Martha Jane Cannary, or Calamity Jane, was a great Western hero, a force for justice in lawless territory. McLaird: "No, she was not a lawman." OK, then, she was an outlaw, the way Jane Russell played her in The Paleface. McLaird: "Well, she ran around with some outlaws, but I could never confirm that she was ever involved in anything nefarious." But she was a sharpshooter, like Jean Arthur in The Plainsman. That's the real Calamity. Legend has it she once won a $50 bet by shooting a hole through a hat hanging in the back of a saloon. McLaird: "She was maybe above average with a gun, but she was never Annie Oakley." But what bravery. Who could forget Doris Day driving that Deadwood stage through hostile Indian territory? McLaird: "Calamity Jane didn't drive the stage." Next you'll be telling me that she never sang "Secret Love." McLaird: "Uh, No."
So who was the real Calamity Jane, anyway? "She was a woman who violated all the standards of women of the day," says McLaird. "But she was also one of those effervescent, bubbly women that everybody liked, and she had a strong sense of wanting to be respectable. She seems to represent the same thing as all the old badmen of the West, who did good in a short, quick, dirty way." Predictably, Hollywood whitewashed the seamier side of Calamity's story, which included alcoholism and prostitution, while focusing on fictitious exploits such as her work as a scout in the service of Gen. Crook, her service alongside Gen. Custer in Indian campaigns in Arizona, and her romance with Wild Bill Hickok. Calamity herself kept the legends alive, through interviews and public appearances. "When reporters would bring up the rumors about her, she would halfway confirm them," says McLaird. By 1895, when she visited Deadwood for the first time since the 1870s, she had already become famous. She was hired to go onstage and deliver her life story. The account was eventually printed, and it's a great read, packed with drama and adventure. Say this for Martha Jane, she knew how to tell a story. "When I joined Custer I donned the uniform of a soldier," she said. "During that time I had a great many adventures with the Indians, for as a scout I had a great many dangerous missions to perform and while I was in many close places always succeeded in getting away safely, for by that time I was considered the most reckless and daring rider and one of the best shots in the Western country." "That's just Calamity bragging," McLaird says After Martha Jane Cannary died on August 1, 1903, it was the movies that kept her legend alive. She was one of the more popular characters in the silent era, the subject of at least five films for which records survive. But it was Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Plainsman (1936) that secured her place in the Western pantheon. Jean Arthur plays Calamity as a feisty, whip-snapping hellcat who helps tame the frontier alongside Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison) and her lover, Wild Bill Hickok (Gary Cooper). "I loved it," said McLaird. "It's one of my favorites, but it's completely make believe." Actually, at the time of Buffalo Bill's exploits, young Calamity was only 15 years old, and still living with her family. The scenes with Hickok were fabricated accounts, though the couple's romance has evolved into one of the great stories of the Old West, and figures prominently in most films featuring Calamity Jane, including Young Bill Hickok (1940), Badlands of Dakota (1941), The Raiders (1964), and the disappointing 1966 remake of The Plainsman starring Abby Dalton as Calamity.
In The Paleface (1948), Jane Russell plays Calamity as an outlaw recruited by the government to breakup a gun-smuggling ring. She uncovers their plot by posing as the wife of a cowardly dentist (Bob Hope). "One of my favorite scenes is where she shoots all these Indians from hiding so Hope gets all the credit, then tells him later he'll be a legend. Of course, it's a legend based on nothing, which happened a lot in the Old West," McLaird says. Like The Plainsman, it's all lies but lots of fun. Russell twirls her guns with aplomb, and Hope croons "Buttons and Bows," the Oscar winner that year for Best Song. Five years later, another Oscar-winning song, "Secret Love," was introduced by Doris Day in another film about Calamity Jane. It became a standard and one of Day's greatest hits. The musical Calamity Jane was Warner Bros.' unsuccessful attempt to rival MGM's Annie Get Your Gun; the less-than-dynamic plot had Jane promising to deliver a famous singer to the Deadwood saloon, and bringing the wrong girl by mistake. Day's gumption and enthusiasm keeps the movie afloat, but just barely. Day's Calamity Jane, like most previous attempts, made no secret of the fact that it was fiction. But two television treatments, Calamity Jane (1984) with Jane Alexander and Buffalo Girls (1995) with Anjelica Huston, were loosely based on letters that Jane supposedly wrote to Bill Hickok that were never sent. These letters were published in 1941 as part of a diary of Calamity Jane that later turned out to be fraudulent. "A woman named Jean McCormick claimed she was the daughter of Calamity Jane and Bill Hickok and tried to prove it with the diary and letters. Evidently she wrote all those letters herself," McLaird reveals. "That's where the story originated of her riding with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show." Both films also show Calamity having Hickok's child after he's murdered, and giving up the baby to an English couple who were unable to have children of their own. Years later, during the Wild West Show's European tour, she has a poignant visit with the child, a daughter named Jean. "Pure fiction," says McLaird, "though Calamity had two children in real life."
Buffalo Girls, an adaptation of Larry McMurtry's popular book, didn't connect with viewers the way his Lonesome Dove did, at least on television. It was well-cast, well-mounted, and, at nearly three hours, almost torturously dull. The Jane Alexander version hits the same high spots in half the time. But Anjelica Huston wears the buckskins well, and Sam Elliott as Hickok was inspired casting, though he draws those aces and eights much too early in the film. After more than two dozen films and TV shows, we're still no closer to knowing the real Calamity Jane, and that's just how she would have liked it. "She loved fame," says McLaird, "but every time people would bring up stories about her, she'd say, 'That's a pack of blankety-blank lies.' Then she'd go on and tell her own lies." |
©2001 Cowboys & Indians