Calamity Jane, the Stage Musical
Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 1996
Oh Calamity!
It’s just as well Calamity Jane really existed, as no writer of a musical would have dared invent her. While hard-drinking, rough-living wild women were two a penny along the frontier of the Old West, Calamity Jane was something more – beneath the dusty buckskins there beat a sensitive and sentimental heart, capable of love, sympathy and selflessness. She was nicknamed Calamity because it followed her everywhere, but when disaster preceded her, she was always the first to pitch in and help out. As a nurse she once held up a grocery store with the promise “You’ll get paid when the folks I save can walk again.”
She was born Martha Jane Canary on 1st May 1852 at Princeton, Missouri where her folks owned a 200-acre farm. The family moved West by covered wagon in 1863 and Jane made the final break from them in her mid-teens. As civilisation, or at least the frontiersmen’s version of it, spread west across the continent, Jane went with it, selling her services as a muleskinner and outrider transporting supplies to mining camps. Petite, blue-eyed and russet-haired, she quickly built up a reputation for being well able to look after herself. Unwelcome advances were given short shrift; once she shot a man’s hat off with the warning “Next time it’ll stay on your head.” In Indian country where whites – let alone women – were particularly unwelcome she would ride balanced upside down on her saddle, indicating that she represented no threat: “They think I’m plumb loco and leave me alone.”
In her time, she was the only woman worker on the Northern Pacific Railroad, a professional gambler, a gold prospector and a stagecoach driver. By 1870 she had made her way to Abilene, Kansas where she first encountered James Butler Hickok, otherwise known as Wild Bill, a big, handsome roughneck with a legendary past of his own. They were married within a year, the marriage lines apparently scribbled out on the flyleaf of a bible.
Bill was a bit of a dandy, relatively speaking, and at first their pairing seems unlikely. But there was obviously a bond there which subsequent relationships for both could not dissolve. On 25th September 1873 at Benson’s Landing, Montana, Jane gave birth to a daughter, Janey. She was soon placed in the care of a Captain James O’Neil and his wife, but her mother never forgot her. After her death, the good captain passed on to Janey a diary made up of letters that Calamity Jane had written to the daughter she seldom saw. Not only do they prove she was one of the few literate women on the frontier, she was also one of the most entertaining.
Jane and Bill drifted apart as swiftly as they had come together, but it wasn’t a clean break as she was still in the vicinity of Deadwood the day Bill was gunned down playing poker on 2nd August 1876. Even though she would marry again, this time to a Charles Burke in 1885, Jane never forgot Hickok and her final request was to be buried next to him.
In August 1893 she joined the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and with it toured the Eastern States and England, giving displays of sharp-shooting and horse-riding. Shortly after that she found a similar job touring with the Palace Museum Show. This time her act consisted mainly of spinning wild tales about Wild Bill and in particular how she kept saving his life for him. Up until the end she remained a colourful reminder of how the Wild West earned its name.
She eventually died of pneumonia in a hotel room in Terry, near Deadwood, on 2nd August 1903 – twenty-seven years to the day after Wild Bill’s murder. She still lies next to him in the Mount Moriah Cemetery at Deadwood.
The Deadwood Stage… and Others
The main overland transport of the Old West, the stagecoach, was functional in design, dashing in appearance. But as the weather was hard and the trails were rough, it never stayed smart for long, and the thing was always notoriously uncomfortable in use. The most famous model was the ‘Concord’, built by Abbott, Downing & Co of New Hampshire. They were by far the most popular, ranged over the greatest area, and so became synonymous with the word stagecoach.
The size of the team employed to draw the coach depended on the type of terrain or distance to be covered. Six horses or mules was the maximum, made up of leaders in the front, swings in the centre and wheelers in the third rank closest to the driver. They were urged on with cries, shouts, curses and the occasional thrown missile. Calamity Jane was once caught out on the open prairie driving a team through the worst hailstorm she had ever encountered. By her own – not necessarily reliable – account, one stone the size of a coffee cup smashed open the roof, while another knocked the eye out of one of the horses…
By far the most famous stagecoach line – and indeed one of the earliest and greatest success stories of the Old West – was Wells Fargo & Company. It was created by businessman Henry Wells and ex-Pony Express rider William Fargo in the latter months of 1851 to carry gold out of California, and so fast did it prosper that within a year, further banking and express offices had been set up as far afield as Oregon, Hawaii and Australia. At first they only rented space on other lines’ vehicles, but in 1860 they bought a controlling interest in two other companies and so inherited large fleets.
Just twelve years after setting up in business, Wells Fargo owned nearly two hundred depots throughout the country as well as stations just over the border in Mexico. The firm grew as big and as fast as the Wild West itself – and finally faded away with it too, merging into the American Railroad Express Company in 1919. Today the name only lingers on in the Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust Company, but for anyone who loves Westerns it will forever mean whirling wheels in the dust and a sheaf of arrows thudding into woodwork, hooves pounding the ground and the crack of a whip echoing back from the hills…
Deadwood
The Black Hills gold rush of 1875 created a rash of tough mining settlements, and Deadwood Gulch was one of the roughest. Within a year of the first tents being pitched and the first clapboard frontages going up, the population had reached 25,000 with enough gaming houses, saloons and bordellos for all.
Famous visitors, apart from Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, included Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Sam Bass, who all, no doubt, frequented the Green Front Sporting House, or any or all of the terrifyingly-named saloons – Bucket of Blood, Montana, and Nuttall and Mann’s Number Ten Saloon, the scene of Wild Bill’s final and fatal game of cards.
For those who drank less, or simply preferred a show along with their liquor, there was the Gem Theatre. The stage of Bella Union also had variety shows but each evening, once the curtain had fallen, the real business of the night began. ‘Ladies’ would cruise the aisles and retire with their customers to any one of the seventeen private boxes that ringed the auditorium.
In 1879, the town was nearly destroyed by fire, and just four years later more than half its buildings were carried away by flood waters. But the elemental forces of nature were nothing compared to men’s greed for gold and their desire for raucous celebration and entertainment. Deadwood clung on to become a popular tourist attraction where visitors can still see the Adams Museum, the graves of both Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, and, intact, the site of Wild Bill’s last gamble.
Burlesque Theatre
Otherwise known as ‘burleycue’ or ‘leg-show’, the burlesque developed as a ragbag of comic sketches, speciality acts, variety and chorus numbers. As a grand finale, and the most popular part of the night for the audience of prospectors, cowhands and drifters who thronged the Old West saloons, the so-called Extra Added Attraction usually consisted of a lewd belly-dance or ‘hootchy-kootchy’. This kind of thing became particularly popular following the sensational tour undertaken by Lydia Thompson and her ‘British Blondes’ in 1868. They helped lower the tone several notches and were so influential that from then on, no saloon show was complete without a row of chorus girls in stockings flashing their petticoats.
The kind of mission Calamity Jane undertakes in the famous musical to secure top performing talent from Back East was not uncommon. The mining towns and settlements of the expanding frontier liked to keep up with the times, and their inhabitants were prepared to pay for the best. Lillie Langtry was one star who melted more than a few tough old hearts on her whistle-stop tour, including that of the legendary Judge Roy Bean who naturally named his bear after her.
The bear may even have been in the audience to watch her perform. Many saloons and halls were basic in the extreme, all sawdust floors, spittoons and lanterns. But where the pickings were rich, the décor would boast crystal chandeliers, Rococo furnishings, gilt mirrors and brass fittings – not to mention the obligatory gaudy Rubenesque painting behind the bar.
MUSICAL COWBOYS
Out of the thousands of Hollywood films set in the Wild West, only a fistful are musicals. On the other hand, songs have been cropping up in Westerns for years. Who can forget Destry Rides Again featuring Marlene Dietrich’s saloon girl Frenchy husking ‘The Boys in the Backroom’? Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole tunefully plucking their way through the spoofery of Cat Ballou? Or Paul Newman and Katharine Ross flirting, fumbling and falling off their bike to the strains on ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’?
But such moments as these are only fringes on the top of the surrey. Cowboy musicals proper, the ones where song, story and character all have their genesis and being on the frontier, really began with Giacomo Puccini…
La fanciulla del West
Puccini’s opera La fanciulla del West premiered at the New York Met in 1910 and starred none other than Enrico Caruso under the baton of no less a luminary than Arturo Toscanini. It was based on the play The Girl of the Golden West by the king of Broadway melodrama David Belasco, who had also provided the composer with the plot for Madama Butterfly seven years before. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy would star in the 1938 film version, but as so often with proper opera, it is the stage original which is seen more often. The big Act II finale, where Minnie wins her lover Dick Johnson’s freedom by cheating in a game of poker with the sheriff Jack Rance, became so famous that it was used to advertise the show at its Italian premiere in Rome the following June.
Gene Autry
Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935) was the vehicle which launched Gene Autry onto the silver screen in the guise of The Singing Cowboy, although in later films he tended to confuse his genres – while the paraphernalia of the 20th century crowded the background, Gene himself would ride contentedly through the shot on his horse Champion, toting a six-gun and strumming his guitar. Throughout his long and astonishingly successful career he always looked more like a chorister than a cowpoke, and pushed his own brand of Boy Scout morality while amassing a personal fortune through canny merchandising. He was finally rewarded for his services to the sage by being elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1969.
Roy Rogers
The likes of Tex Ritter, Dick Foran and Rex Allen apart, Gene Autry’s only serious rival was one Leonard Slye. With his group Sons of the Pioneers (although ‘grandsons’ would perhaps have been more accurate), he brought a new style of singing to the West – “I think we were the first to do trio yodelling” he suggests, with understandable modesty. But his career really took off in 1938 when he straddled ‘the smartest horse in Hollywood’, adopted a dog called Bullet, and changed his own name to Roy Rogers. In this persona as King of the Cowboys he went on to make over a hundred musical Westerns, some with his equally immaculate partner Dale Evans, and in the process turned such songs as ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ into classics. A devout Christian, when the novelty of the singing cowboy wore off, he replaced the musical interludes with surprisingly brutal action sequences – but still retained enough sense of humour to send himself up in Son of Paleface, wherein hapless dentist Bob Hope ended up in bed with Trigger.
Show Boat
The first serious ‘integrated’ musical seen on the Broadway stage was set in the days of the great Mississippi riverboats of the 1880s and pointed the way ahead for the musical as an art form. Show Boat, based on the Edna Ferber novel, had songs by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, and was filmed three times. The 1929 outing featuring Laura La Plante and Joseph Schildkraut was deemed strictly ho-hum, while many critics feel the second screen version, directed by James (Frankenstein) Whale in 1936, is the best, if only because of Paul Robeson’s magisterial rendition of ‘Ol’ Man River’. In 1951, MGM bought up the rights and all the prints of the previous two films in order to give their remake a clear field. Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson took the leads, with Ava Gardner replacing Judy Garland at the last minute. Although Miss Gardner’s vocals were dubbed for the film by Eileen Wilson, connoisseurs still claim the original soundtrack featuring Ava’s singing voice proves she was unjustly silenced, ably holding her own among such classics as ‘Make Believe’, ‘Why Do I Love You’ and ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’.
Oklahoma!
“No legs, no jokes, no chance” was how one disaffected contemporary characterised the next big ground-breaking musical, Oklahoma!. Richard Rodgers had optioned the rights to Green Grow the Lilacs, a folk play by Lynn Riggs, but his partner of a dozen years and twice as many hits, Lorenz Hart, was not interested in writing a ‘horse opera’. So Oscar Hammerstein agreed to provide the lyrics and book. Agnes de Mille, fresh from Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo was brought in as choreographer, and after changing its name from Away We Go, adding the title song and, at the eleventh hour, an exclamation mark, Oklahoma!, opened in New York in March 1943 – where it ran for the next five and a half years, becoming the longest-running American stage musical up to that point, and winning a special citation from the Pulitzer committee (the only reason it didn’t win the full Prize was because it had been adapted from an existing work). It crossed the Atlantic in April 1947, opening in Manchester with one Harold Leek starring in the role of Curly. By the time the production reached Drury Lane, Harold Leek had become Howard Keel, and another legend of stage and screen was born.
Annie Get Your Gun
Meanwhile, back on Broadway, Dorothy Fields and her brother Herbert had decided to write a show based on the life of the famous female ‘shootiste’ Annie Oakley for their friend Ethel Merman. Rodgers and Hammerstein agreed to produce – for the first time allowing the score of one of their shows to be provided by others than themselves – but Jerome Kern died before he could begin work. So they approached Irving Berlin, the man about whom Kern himself had said “He has no place in American music; he is American music”. Berlin said he would think about it over the weekend. The following Monday morning he turned up with five completed songs, one of which, ‘Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)’, apparently having been conceived in its entirety in the cab on his way home from the initial meeting. Annie Get Your Gun opened at the Imperial Theatre, Broadway on 16 May 1946 and became Berlin’s greatest success, and only the second ‘book’ musical, after Oklahoma!, to run for over a thousand performances. It also provided Ethel Merman with the biggest success of her career. Her bold, brassy, knock-’em-dead style had no greater fan than Berlin himself: “Never write a lousy song for Ethel Merman,” he once warned an aspiring songwriter, “the audience will hear every lousy word of it.” In 1949 MGM paid an unprecedented $700,000 for the film rights, and the subsequent movie proved the high point of Betty Hutton’s career also.
Can’t Help Singing
After years of fighting her corner as a teenage star in the honourable tradition of Judy Garland and Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin made the most of her status as Universal’s top draw when in 1945 she starred in Jerome Kern’s Can’t Help Singing. Location work was done during a particularly hot summer and, while the cast and crew waited for the morning fog to lift, the Divine Miss D would invite everyone into her bungalow-sized dressing room-cum-trailer for champagne and nibbles. By the time conditions were right for filming, she could invariably no longer fit into her costume. “Let’s go home and rest,” she would suggest airily, “we can shoot it tomorrow.” Which they did, making her more popular than ever with everyone but the money men.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Howard Keel’s own star went supernova in the fifties. Having been Frank Butler to Betty Hutton’s Annie Oakley and Wild Bill to Doris Day’s Calamity Jane, in 1954 he took the lead in Stanley Donen’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This shares the distinction with Calamity Jane of being one of the few musicals written directly for the screen, although in Seven Brides’ case the sets are almost perversely studio-bound painted backcloths. But it’s what goes on in the foreground that counts. Even better than Johnny Mercer’s lyrics and Gene de Paul’s music is Michael Kidd’s irresistibly exuberant choreography, which turns such scenes as the bar-raising brawl and the square dance sequence into masterpieces of screen musical art. Unaccountably, Kidd missed out on the Oscars that year, but the score didn’t. In 1980 the show made the journey backwards, as it were, onto the stage in an adaptation by Laurence Kasha and David Lindsay, comprising new songs by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
Margaret Brown, née Tobin (1860–1924) started out as a sweet young thing from the backwoods who by her own pluck and grit, not to mention the help of her husband’s silver strike, managed to claw her way to respectability among the Denver glitterati in turn-of-the-century Colorado. She was portrayed by Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, MGM’s 1964 film version of Meredeth (The Music Man) Willson’s stage musical of the same name. And why ‘Unsinkable’? Because the original Molly was on the Titanic when it went down, only she didn’t, and lived to tell the tale.
Paint Your Wagon
It had taken fifty years for Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Sobbin’ Women to reach the screen as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon took eighteen years to make the same journey from the stage. The film version in 1969 cost $20 million and lasted three hours – too long for some, although even the most churlish critics couldn’t deny the rare quality of such songs as ‘They Call the Wind Maria’, ‘There’s a Coach Comin’ In’, ‘I Talk to the Trees’ sung by Clint Eastwood, and Lee Marvin’s unforgettable and chart-topping in-your-boots rendition of ‘Wand’rin’ Star’. Perhaps Alan Jay Lerner’s desire to get away from the whimsy of his previous hit Brigadoon had tempted him too far down the opposite road. He admitted he wanted to write “a gutsy musical” about the “life and death of a ghost town”, and made strenuous efforts to get the characters and the feel of such a place right. Maybe at the fag end of the sixties audiences were already looking forward too keenly to the new wave of hippy musicals like Hair to want to look back into the past.
But the past, especially in the case of the Old West, is too rich an area to ignore, and it has inspired some of the most exuberant, thrilling and simply gorgeous works Broadway and Hollywood have ever produced. Such classics will never fade, any more than will the blue of the skies over the endless prairies, or the memory of the West itself. So, all together now: “Take me back to the Bla-ack Hills, the Black Hills o-of Dakota…”
WILD WOMEN OF THE WEST
If life on the prairie was hard, in the frontier towns it was worse. Awash with marauding miners, carousing cowpokes and grinning gunslingers, they were no place for a woman who couldn’t hold her own among them. As a 15-year-old girl, Calamity Jane became one of the boys and stayed that way until the day she died. When she was rootin’ and tootin’, she was drinkin’ and gamblin’. But she wasn’t the only one. Here are just a few more Wild Women of the West who one day might yet see themselves immortalised on stage and CD…
Big Nose Kate
According to the 1965 Henry Hathaway film, one Katie Elder had four strapping sons called (in order of star billing) John Wayne, Dean Martin, Earl Holliman and Michael Anderson Jr. But a much more reliably historical figure is the Hungarian-born Mary Katherine Horony. According to legend, which can be very unkind, she was dubbed Big Nose because her proboscis was on a similar scale to the rest of her out-size body. Still, there must have been enough feminine allure there to entrance Doc Holliday. In late 1877, when the Doc was doing a spell in chokey for kebabbing fellow-gambler Edward Bailey, Kate torched the town as a distraction and high-tailed it into the night with her beau in tow. They had a crack at respectability in Dodge City, Kansas, but the card table easily won out over the Doc’s devotion to dentistry, and in 1881 the pair found themselves in Tombstone in time for the famous appointment at the OK Corral. The sheriff sought to implicate Holliday in a stagecoach shooting by catching the pair in a moment of discord and getting Kate to point the finger at her inamorata while in liquor, but when she sobered up she withdrew the charge. If she was hoping to get back into the Doc’s good books the plan backfired, because that tricksy tooth-puller sent her on her way. One legend has it that she met her end shortly afterwards in particularly bizarre circumstances. Apparently she was cruising the Bisbee saloon, looking for custom, when a drunk went berserk and started letting off his six-guns. Kate dived for cover but, because she couldn’t fit the whole of vast bulk behind its inadequate hiding place, a stray bullet found her and there she expired, shot in the bottom. On the other hand, it’s much more likely she married a John J. Howard of Arizona and died peacefully in Prescott in 1940, five days short of her 91st birthday.
Kitty Leroy
It is said that Kitty Le Roy married the first man she met with enough guts to hold his ground while she shot an apple off his head from the back of a galloping horse. Presumably when a woman like that proposes marriage, you don’t turn her down. Texas-born ex-dancer and sometime demon faro dealer Kitty had got through three further husbands by the time she was 26, and pitched up in Deadwood just in time to make the acquaintance of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok at the tables of her Mint Gambling Saloon. Here she enjoyed a good two years of the high life before her final husband proved the death of her. After despatching his spouse, this gentleman then shot himself and the pair were buried together, united tranquilly in death as they had been bumpily in life.
Etta Place
Remember that scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Katharine Ross stands in front of Robert Redford with her hair down and her shift hanging open? The original Etta Place really was reportedly as lovely as that. After spending her teenage years as a schoolteacher in Denver, she took up with the famous pair around the turn of the century, apparently as much in love with them individually as they were with her. In 1902 the ménage decamped east with £30,000 of other people’s money and spent a hectic few days, not to mention a goodly portion of the ill-gotten loot, in the fleshpots of New York before boarding the SS Soldier Prince for South America. Again as per the famous film, for the next five years Etta tended and rode with the two lawbreakers, cooking for them, holding their horses while they went about their unlawful business, and generally giving what succour they required. In 1907, diagnosed as suffering from ‘acute appendicitis’ (common euphemism of the day for pregnancy), she returned to Denver with Sundance and checked in at a hospital for treatment… and thereafter disappears from the written record. Whether she recovered, married, or simply changed her name, and what became of the child, if there was one, we may never know.
Belle Starr
Myra Belle Shirley was born on 5 February 1848 in Washington County to a life of wealth and ease. At the Carthage Academy for Young Ladies she was taught Latin, Greek and the piano and all there was to know about deportment and fine manners. Then at the age of 20, her family’s fortunes depleted by the impact of the Civil War, she met big-talking roughneck James Reed and her transformation into Bandit Queen Belle Starr, ‘Petticoat Terror of the Plains’, began. Like so many women of the Werst before her, she went though several men of dubious character before taking the name of Sam Starr, horse-thief and dilatory farmer. They were caught once, but let off with light sentences by ‘Hanging Judge’ Parker and, following their release, Belle transferred her affections to a vacuous young Native American who went under the colourful name of Blue Duck. Over time her men either died or she left them until, understandably, it became increasingly difficult for her to find replacements. For one thing her once-comely visage had taken on the look of a sack of hatchets, for another she gave as good as she got in domestic disputes and no man of the West saw shy he should ever be on the receiving end of a flying skillet. Her life of crime ended in 1889 when an unknown enemy blasted her out of her saddle within sight of her homestead at Younger’s Bend.
PS
It’s just as well I have a high tolerance for all things Old West, I mean, just look at the amount of stuff we had to produce for this bloody thing – nearly a dozen articles, including biographies (see also Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok in the Biographies section, all lavished on a single show. (The pictures and portraits here, however, are a much more recent bit of whimsy, as I’ve been trying out a fabulous light box I got for my birthday.)
What happened was, the producers not only wanted the standard programme for each theatre, but a lavish souvenir brochure that followed the tour around the country as well, which meant having to fill a lot more pages. Big format too, and you can only enlarge pictures snaffled from library books so far before they start going fuzzy, so we all had to write long. This meant in the ‘Cowboy Musicals’ piece, for instance, it wasn’t just Roy Rogers and Show Boat, I had to drag in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and my dad’s secret pash Deanna Durbin from Can’t Help Singing (nope, me neither). As for the ‘Wild Women of the West’ I was familiar with two of them and knew of a Kate Elder from some similar-sounding film title with reference to her offspring (no relation, apparently), but a fourth, Kitty Le Roy, was virgin territory as far as I was concerned… though not so much for her series of husbands, it turned out.
As usual, we never got to see the show ourselves, so I don’t know whether it retained one of the clunkiest, least self-aware lines I’ve ever heard in a movie. On their way to the ball at the fort, Calamity Jane and Bill Hickock are extolling the beauty of the night in the Black Hills of Dakota, and she says to him, “Don't it thrill yuh, jest to look at them hills? No wonder them Injuns fight so fierce t’ hang on to this country!” Well, quite, C’lam. Probably because it was their country in the first place and they never wanted you trampling all over it to begin with, stinkin’ up the place with that big ol’ sunny smile of yourn and your secret love and all that there white-man stuff and smallpox.