The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (36 page)

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Authors: Glenda Riley

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #History, #United States, #19th Century, #test

BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
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swimmer Gertrude Ederle, boxing champion Jack Dempsey, baseball player Babe Ruth, and aviators Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart; in humming the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, or Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II; or in following the lives of film stars Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, whose motion pictures showed in the more than twenty thousand theaters that then spread across the nation.
Despite youngsters' lack of interest, Annie Oakley's image refused to fade. Family members and friends told stories, gradually honing their tales to include what they wanted to remember and believe about Annie and Frank. Even today, those people who remember Annie and Frank reveal their recollections guardedly and are usually careful to put the couple in the best light.
In addition, the very media that replaced the Wild West era and the very stars that eclipsed Annie Oakley's fame eventually created elements of an Annie Oakley legend. The motion picture industry, which Annie never conquered, offered its version of her life, as did authors, reporters, illustrators, collectors, and museum exhibits. Promoting Annie Oakley turned into a small and ongoing industry, one that frequently skewed her image in a different direction than she would have chosen. Media and myth often portrayed her as swaggering and brassy, adding a dimension that is far from what she intended to leave behind as part of her legend.

 

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Chapter 7
The Legend
One of Annie's admirers wrote in 1926 that "nobody" could take Oakley's place. In her eyes, "only one" Annie Oakley would ever exist. Yet today, although nearly everyone recognizes the name Annie Oakley, few people know who Oakley was, either as a person or as a symbol. Frequently, people confuse her with another woman of the era, Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Cannary), even though the two were radically different.
Annie and Jane shared only one thing: both women appeared with Wild West shows during the 1890s and early 1900s. Calamity Jane performed briefly with Kohl and Middleton's Palace Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in January 1896, which advertised her as "The Famous Woman Scout of the Wild West." Kohl and Middleton also claimed that Jane had lived through a "thousand" thrilling adventures, was the "terror" of evil-doers in the Black Hills, and had ridden with Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok. Jane also appeared briefly with a variety of other shows, including burlesque and freak shows, which often billed her as "The Wild Woman of the West."
Apparently, in the arena Cannary did little more than appear in a buckskin outfit, revolvers at each side, and tell stories about what the show's publicity called her "daring exploits." The Palace Museum's poster, which pictured Jane dressed like a man and grasping the barrel of a rifle, suggests that she appeared more as a curiosity than a full-fledged performer. Later, Jane joined Colonel Frederic T. Cummins's Wild West and Indian Congress; at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, she appeared as an authentic western character and sold a less-than-authentic autobiography in which she claimed to be "the Woman Scout who was made so famous through her daring career in the West and Black Hill countries."
Despite the differences between Annie and Jane, they are often linked in the public mind. In 1948, for example, author Stewart H.

 

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Holbrook included Calamity Jane in a book titled
Annie Oakley and Other Rugged People
. Holbrook described Annie as "a merger of dainty feminine charm and lead bullets," but he viewed Jane as a "singularly unattractive" woman and a "camp follower." To him, Jane was little more than "an able consumer of liquor" and ''one of the great and indestructible phonies of the West.''
More recently, novelist Larry McMurtry also included both Annie and Jane in
Buffalo Girls
, a 1990 western. When Jane supposedly sailed to Europe with Cody's Wild West during 1886, she found Annie a rather stiff, even "steely," woman, who had little time for her. This seems plausible, for Jane spent a good deal of time frequenting saloons, an activity that Annie deplored, while Annie spent time practicing, exercising, and resting, pursuits that seemed pointless to Jane.
Contrary to McMurtry's account, Jane never appeared in Cody's Wild West. Consequently, Annie probably never met Calamity Jane; undoubtedly, she would not have liked Jane if she had. These women fell at opposite ends of the spectrum. Yet many people lump them together as daring western girlscowgirls of the Old Wild West.
In part, people's confusion regarding Annie and Jane reveals the numerous changes American women experienced after Oakley's death and the longevity of the myth of the American West, as well as the literary license both these phenomena encouraged. Because Americans altered their views of women, they also rewrote Annie's story. And because they often saw the Old West more as popular culture than factual history, they shaped and bent it to fit their needs. In the process, the heroic, as well as the not-so-heroic, figures associated with the Old West received their share of shaping and bending as well.
As a result, Annie Oakley's legend has not always been what she would have desired. Her story has strayed from the truthsometimes very far from the truthand has changed to fit the values of a particular era. Since Oakley's death in 1926, Annie's image has metamorphosed a number of times. Her characterization began as that of a talented woman who was willing and capable of challenging barriers to women's participation in Wild West shows and sport shooting, but it soon changed to that of a woman who purposely lost a shooting match to win a man.

 

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More recently, Oakley's portrayal has shifted back to an achieving woman forging a path for other women. This process demonstrates the way legendsand images of the people behind themebb and flow. Except during the World War II years, narratives of Oakley's life changed to fit what Americans believed about women and about the American West at a given time.
Annie's legend began to develop as early as 1927, only one year after her death. Oakley's first biographer, Courtney Ryley Cooper, whose
Annie Oakley: Woman at Arms
was released in 1927, had the advantage of writing during a time when American women were exploring numerous activities and areas. In 1920, women had gained the right of suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. During the following decade, significant numbers of women moved into paid labor, the professions, and myriad organizations and reform movements, including the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League, the American Birth Control League, and the antilynching crusade. In 1927, a special issue of
Current History
devoted to "The New Woman" revealed that such leaders as Charlotte Perkins Gilman applauded women's progress in politics, reform, jobs, and professions. In the same month, an issue of
Harper's Magazine
indicated that younger women now wanted everythingcareers, marriage, and the right to individual expression.
Given these attitudes, Annie Oakley provided a perfect role model. To the older group, she stood as an example of achievement and benevolence. To the younger group, she supplied a case study of a woman who had successfully combined marriage, career, and her own talents and interests. Consequently, Cooper was able to present a reasonably genuine Annie Oakley. First, Cooper emphasized Oakley's benevolence. "[She] had done naught but kindness . . . [and] had given of her store of wealth that suffering might be alleviated, the uneducated benefitted by the advantage of books and schooling." Next, he described the hardworking girl and the achieving woman and, in his conclusion, claimed that American men who had seen Oakley perform would always remember her as their first love.
Thus did Cooper's Annie become a success story for women of

 

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the late 1920s. She had worked hard, remained true to her humble beginnings, treated everyone fairly, and achieved money, recognition, and love. Along the way, however, Cooper supplied a number of fabrications regarding Oakley. By drawing liberally and literally on her unfinished autobiography, he repeated inaccurate dates and anecdotes, some of which are still taken as truth.
Soon after Cooper wrote, Hollywood made its first contribution to Annie's legend. Unfortunately, the decade of the 1930s was a less-than-propitious time to make a film about a strong, successful woman like Oakley. Thanks to such stars as vamp Theda Bara, girl-next-door Lillian Gish, sexually free Gloria Swanson, "It Girl" Clara Bow, and "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford, women in films appeared youthful, innocent, feminine, and kittenish rather than secure and successful.
Nor did Oakley's stance as a demure lady fit well with Hollywood images. A 1929 study indicated that Joan Crawford was the leading model for young American women. The chorus girls and flappers she portrayed established a standard of behavior, dress, and makeup for an entire generation of female movie-goers. As one sixteen-year-old girl commented, "These modern pictures give me a feeling to imitate their ways."
Oakley's demeanor as an athlete also appeared stodgy during the 1930s, an era when women sports figures contributed to the nation's growing fascination with female freedom and sexuality. Among such stars were Alice Marble and Helen Wills, who excelled at tennis, Eleanor Holm and Helen Madison, who established swimming records, and Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias, who mastered women's basketball, track, and golf. At the same time, women's softball and basketball teams also flourished. Along with women's sports came light tennis dresses, tennis shorts, and satin shorts for basketball players; women's bare legs soon became a common sight.
Even Annie's persona as a western woman had questionable appeal during the 1930s. Because the Dust Bowl, the wind-eroded area that produced migrants referred to as Okies, came to symbolize the West in many people's minds, the American West increasingly appeared bankrupt. The combination of overcultiva-

 

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tion and drought had caused bare dirt to lie dry and vulnerable to ravaging winds, especially in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Despite relative prosperity in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest, novelist John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
and Dorothea Lange's touching photographs impressed on Americans the tragedy suffered by land, animals, and people in the central West. Other media reported that westerners by the thousands were abandoning their worn-out lands while western states were applying for one federal subsidy after another.
What, then, could a movie version of Annie Oakley's life say to American viewers? It had to portray an attractive woman interested in love and able to get her man, despite the costs. It also had to picture the Old West of opportunity and success rather than the Dust Bowl West of disaster and despair. And, given Hollywood's penchant for the dramatic, it would be wise to incorporate more conflict than Annie's life had included.
The result was Barbara Stanwyck's 1935 film
Annie Oakley
. The film's promoters billed Stanwyck as "Queen of the Roaring 80s" and promised that
Annie Oakley
would "thrill" viewers with a "drama of fighting men and red romance." Despite this turgid publicity, Stanwyck's portrayal of Oakley was spunky enough to gain approval from Annie's supporters. When the movie premiered in Annie's hometown of Greenville, Ohio, a viewer who had known Annie declared Stanwyck ''just like" her.
The movie's plot, however, retold Annie's story in a way that suited the times. It focused on Annie's shooting match with Frank and their subsequent love affair. Borrowing heavily from Cooper's account, the film set the match in Cincinnati in 1876. Toby Walker, the film's name for Frank Butler, was a handsome, arrogant devil. With a sleazy blond woman on his arm, Toby arrived for the match dolled up in a fringed, white buckskin shirt punctuated by shooting medals. Toby provided a stark contrast to Annie in her gingham dress, nondescript hat, and lack of medals or jewelry.
At first, Walker refused to shoot against Oakley, but she eventually goaded him into a match. As Oakley was about to defeat Walker, her mother whispered that she hoped Annie would not cause the "nice young man" to lose his job. Of course, during

 

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the depression of the 1930s, lost jobs posed a great concern to American men, who often watched helplessly as women supported families with meager wages from menial work. Thus, contrary to what Oakley had done in real life, Stanwyck's Annie threw the match. Toby won the shooting match and retained his job with Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
Because Stanwyck's Annie was infatuated with Toby, she too accepted a job with Buffalo Bill's Wild West so that she could be near Toby. Cody's partner broke the news to the all-male troupe by introducing Annie as a "high-minded" and "uplifting" woman, the kind who helped "civilize" the West in thousands of other Hollywood productions. Naturally, Toby returned Annie's interest, even though she was not much of a lady. Stanwyck's Oakley wore short skirts, rode astride, revealed that she had
let
Walker win the Cincinnati match, and continued to outshoot him.
When Cody, characterized as a nice guy and the ultimate entertainer, pitted Oakley against Walker (in fact it was Johnny Baker) in the arena for the "championship" of the world, Annie outshot Toby. After Toby's shooting grew worse from an eye injury and Cody banished him from the show, Annie traveled through Europe with the Wild West, astonishing audience after audience with her shooting feats but yearning for Toby. When the troupe returned to New York, Sitting Bull reunited the pair. Annie fell into Toby's arms, thus creating yet another happy Hollywood ending.
Because Annie, and Frank as well, failed to fit prevailing gender expectations of the 1930s, Hollywood had to alter their images and their stories. Annie became so love-struck that she lost a match and took a job to gain the man in question. Similarly, Toby became slickly handsome and aggressively dominant. And rather than focusing on her career or their long marriage, the film concentrated on their love affair. The film's conclusion implied that love would conquer all and that Annie and Toby would work things out. Of course, Toby's damaged eyesight made it acceptable for him to drop into a secondary position and Annie to continue shooting, if that was what viewers wanted to believe. By ending with Annie in Toby's arms, the film also avoided following the life of a childless career woman with a manager-husband in an

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