The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (37 page)

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Authors: Glenda Riley

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

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Page 212
era that deified motherhood and assigned men the breadwinner role.
Despite these and other distortions, the film had several admirable qualities. It presented Annie as a woman who could outshoot men. It allowed Toby (Frank) to say he was proud of Annie's achievements. And, if viewers cared to look beyond Annie's and Toby's superficial characteristics, the film portrayed Annie as a clean-cut, talented woman and Toby as a sensible, caring man at a time when most western women in films and literature were "good" women, including the ultimate civilizer, or were "bad" women, including prostitutes, femmes fatales, and vamps, while western men were typically presented as heroes, villains, or buffoons. When compared with subsequent western women in filmsnotably Marlene Dietrich, who in 1939 played the sexy Frenchy, the owner of the Last Chance Saloon in
Destry Rides Again
, or Jane Russell, who in 1943 played the sensual Rio, primarily a sex object for Billy the Kid, in
The Outlaw
Stanwyck's
Annie Oakley
had much to recommend it.
Stanwyck herself came to like and respect Oakley. When she learned that the town of Greenville planned to erect a bronze plaque in Annie's honor near Annie's girlhood home, Stanwyck sent a one-hundred-dollar check to Mayor Frazer Wilson of Greenville. Stanwyck may have diminished Oakley somewhat in her screen role, but she honored her by supporting the plaque.
During World War II (194145), however, Annie's incipient legend almost disappeared. Such concerns as raising troops, recruiting industrial workers, and producing armaments claimed Americans' attention. A massive shift in ideas regarding American women began soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The U.S. government called women from their homes to provide a temporary labor supply while men went to the front. Although women had absorbed numerous messages telling them that wife- and motherhood gave meaning to their lives, the War Manpower Commission created Rosie the Riveter to persuade women to rethink employment outside the home.
Soon, posters featuring Rosie covered buildings and billboards across the country. Dressed in overalls, her hair in a bandanna,

 

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Rosie also appeared in advertisements, newspapers, and magazines. Songs called "Rosie the Riveter" and "We're the Janes Who Make the Planes" went to the top of the charts. Even Hollywood pitched in with such films as
Swing Shift Maisie
.
Oakley, who had championed women as workers and suggested that they participate in World War I, would have approved of the consequences for American women. Between 1940 and 1945, women in paid employment increased by more than so percent. In 1940, 11,970,000 women worked outside their homes, but in 1945, 18,610,000 did so. Most of the other two-thirds of the female population worked by volunteering for the war effort, especially in such organizations as the Red Cross and the Office of Civil Defense, and by raising victory gardens, growing and canning their own foods, collecting tin cans and newspapers for reuse, selling war bonds, and entertaining troops in USO canteens, much as Annie had done during World War I.
At the same time that women's visibility increased, the West regained some of its importance in American eyes. It supplied not only troops but also foodstuffs and mineral resources to both the U.S. government and the Allied powers. Still, most Americans paid less than full attention to western heroes, either historical or current. Instead, books, radio programs, and moving pictures emphasized the war. Romance and conflict continued, now set against the background of a defense plant or a military hospital.
In spite of the rising importance of both women and the West, few people thought about Annie during the war. Those who did remember Oakley focused more on her patriotic value and expertise with firearms than on her achievements as a woman or a westerner. One of Oakley's few recognitions came from the U.S. Maritime Commission (now the Maritime Administration), which named a ship after Oakley on September 12, 1943.
This was one of the "Liberty" cargo ships, first produced in 1941 after German submarines had badly crippled the merchant shipping that supported the Allied war effort. The Liberty shipssimply designed, mass-produced cargo shipswere all named after famous Americans, beginning with Patrick Henry. The California Shipbuilding Corporation at Los Angeles completed the
Annie Oakley
on August 21, 1943. Under the Lend Lease

 

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program, the British Ministry of War Transport took command of the vessel. The ship served under the British flag until April 1945, when a German torpedo sank it in the English Channel.
In that year, as World War II ended, another organization paid homage to Oakley's memory as an expert shooter. At the home of the American Trapshooting Association in Vandalia, Ohio, near Dayton, officials inaugurated a special event in honor of Oakley's memory. The ATA urged other gun clubs across the country to hold similar memorial shoots.
When the war ended in 1945, Annie's legend revived, but in an altered milieu. Beginning in 1945, American women lost their fleeting recognition. As they returned from the front, men pushed women out of their wartime jobs. Soon child-care facilities closed. In 194-5, the U.S. Women's Bureau reported that 80 percent of working women wanted to keep their jobs; when laid off, they turned instead to clerical, department store, and service work.
Rosie herself hung up her acetylene torch and headed home. Thousands of posters, advertisements, and pamphlets informed American women that the crisis was over; they could return home to produce a new and larger generation of children to replace the many Americans killed in the war. The back-to-the-home movement had begun.
At the same time, the American West gained increased recognition and importance. During the postwar years, many people questioned traditional institutions and social values, worried about ethnic and racial problems, and lamented the power of the welfare state. As a consequence, Americans increasingly longed for what they believed were the good old days. For many, the good old days meant the Old West, an era that exercised the power of nostalgia and now appeared to be a perfect past.
With women's stock falling and the West's rising, the Annie Oakley legend faced difficulties. Would it play more to prevailing beliefs regarding women or to those regarding the West? In 194.6, Oakley's niece Anna Fern Campbell Swartwout took the first tack. In her version of Annie's life,
Missie: An Historical Biography of Annie Oakley
, Fern portrayed her aunt as a woman rather than a pseudo-westerner. Fern described Annie as a woman of "rare

 

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genius," a person of "tireless energy," and the most "unselfish character" she had ever known.
Unfortunately, Fern lacked a sense of chronology and occasionally revised events according to her own standards of propriety. Fern also drew heavily on Annie's autobiography, which she may have helped her aunt write and which she edited for newspaper publication shortly after Oakley's death. Or perhaps Fern copied directly from the autobiography, for the same incidents, and even some of the same wording, appear in both the autobiography and
Missie
. As a consequence, Fern's book is strongest in conveying her own memories of time spent with Annie and Frank.
Like Fern, brother-and-sister writing team Dorothy and Herbert Fields played the women's more than the western angle when they wrote a "book" about Oakley's life. Titled
Annie Get Your Gun
, the story was intended for production on the musical stage. The Fields explained that they "dreamed" up the show for the "wonderful Merman," actress Ethel Merman. When producers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II agreed to produce their version of Annie's life, the Fields were delighted. They said they appreciated Rodgers and Hammerstein's assurances that the stage play would remain true to the book, but they never explained why they took Annie's story one giant step further away from fact.
On May 16, 1946, Ethel Merman opened as Annie at the Imperial Theater in New York City. She played to viewers who were eager to escape to simpler times, before mass death, war camps, and atomic bombs, and who also longed for such traditional values as honesty and hard work. Many viewers, in the throes of the back-to-the-home movement, also believed that women should marry and bear children. Little wonder, then, that the playbill pictured a girlish Merman who wore a short-sleeved, knee-length, fringed dress with dark stockings and moccasins and who looked more like Peter Pan than Annie Oakley. As the play progressed, Merman switched to a fringed and sequined suit with hat, gloves, and boots to match. Given Merman's very feminine character, it is unsurprising that the show featured Annie's supposed loss of the shooting match to Frank.

 

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Reviewers in Nutley, New Jersey, Annie's one-time hometown, proved critical. One claimed that if Oakley's hardships were known, she would seem even "more fabulous" than the show portrayed her. Merman replied that she had no desire to replicate Annie's difficulties. "If the show included all of Annie's hardships it would be a melodrama, and I'd be a wreck." Another Nutley reviewer titled his critique "Pistol Packin' Annie" and interviewed Annie's friend, Mrs. William Longfelder, who portrayed the real Annie as a quiet, soft-spoken, and unassuming person. But, Longfelder noted, the real Annie would not score a hit on the musical comedy stage.
In fact, the musical wowed audiences. The Fields gave the public the Annie they thought it wanted, and they were obviously right. The show ran for three years, for a total of 1,159 performances. Decca Records also released a six-record set of 78-speed phonograph records of the original cast singing the show's score. And, beginning in 194.7 at the Texas State Fair, Mary Martin took the show on a road tour and later presented it on television.
The following year, in 1948, Stewart H. Holbrook, author of
Annie Oakley and Other Rugged People
, credited
Annie Get Your Gun
with "bringing back" Annie Oakley, whom he described as "a combination of Lillian Russell and Buffalo Bill . . . draped in gorgeous yellow buckskins and topped with a halo of powder-blue smoke." Of course, Annie never wore buckskin and would have blanched at being compared to either Russell or Cody, but Holbrook was right about one thing: the musical
Annie Get Your Gun
kept Annie's story in the public eye. Many of Annie's achievements, including her influnence on American women, had disappeared in the process, but Annie herself lived on the musical stage.
Also in 1948, a comic book released by National Comics in New York presented Annie as a feminine, glamorous figure. Here, an accidental blow to Dale Evans's head turned her into the long-dead Annie Oakley. As Oakley, Evans, who wore makeup and feminine clothing and who looked, according to one of the male characters, "real purty," became the "Two-Gun Terror of the West." She single-handedly destroyed a violent gang and cleaned up Boom City. By rolling Ethel Merman, Dale Evans, and an

 

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imaginary western gun moll into one character, this rendition of Annie Oakley fulfilled the era's definition of feminine women and the comic-reader's need for thrills and excitement.
During the 1950s, the saga of Annie Oakley underwent further modification. This occurred, at least in part, because ambivalence concerning women rent the decade.
On the one hand, back-to-the-home advocates lauded the virtues of traditional womanhood. In 1956,
Life Magazine
described the ideal American woman as a wife, hostess, volunteer, ''home manager," and "conscientious mother." In addition, such long-running televisions series as
I Love Lucy
and
Father Knows Best
portrayed women as homebodies while actresses Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds revealed women's innocent side.
On the other hand, women were leaving their homes by the thousands for paid employment. In 1950, women accounted for 29 percent of the paid work force in the United States; by 1960, this figure jumped to almost 35 percent. At the same time, the number of working mothers rose by 400 percent. Women themselves obviously had reservations about the back-to-the-home message.
Could the authentic Annie Oakley fit into this contradictory situation? Sometimes. In 1954, Ohio author Walter Havighurst's fictionalized but reasonably accurate account
Annie Oakley of the Wild West
presented a feminine yet strong woman who survived both hardships and accidents. Annie worked hard, adhered to her principles, and succeeded in both her marriage and her career.
In Hollywood, however, motion pictures, which catered to what the public wanted and seemed willing to pay for, had no place for such an Annie. Most filmmakers wanted more romance; others tried to please as many viewers as possible with their portrayals of both women and the West.
As a result, in western films during the 1950s, most actresses, notably Dale Evans, Rhonda Fleming, and Ruth Mix, played sidekicks or, in other words, proper helpmeets to their men. An occasional exception occurred when such major stars as Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck played tough-minded women who controlled their own lives. Yet, even in these films, landing a man and marrying proved paramount. Thus, in 1954, in
Johnny

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