The Honorable Cody Read online

  Well, old men can be frank. I think I was smitten by her and could never come to grips with it. I hope she and Frank will forgive me for it. Nothing untoward ever passed between us and I remember her now as the Missie I might have loved if Fate had not given us each to another.

  Chapter 7

  Julia Cody Goodman

  Early in January Doctor East and I took Will to Glenwood Springs, hoping the medicinal waters might revive him. My brother was feeble and simply worn out. We had to lift him in and out of the hot water, and he would tremble, sad-eyed, when we settled him into a wheelchair. Nothing helped and we knew the end was near.

  At that time I thought perhaps Will was ready for death. He had lived his three score and ten plus a year or so more, and had enjoyed a full measure of what God gives us. We brought him back to Denver and put him to bed. He slept intermittently and a few days later he died. But now, as I think back, I think Will yearned for a few more years.

  We summoned Louisa and she was a forbidding presence in May’s household, never comfortable with Will’s family. Not even the imminence of death melted the glacial cold. It had always been thus. She envied every bit of affection Will had ever bestowed upon his sisters, and worse, she schemed constantly to undo anything that Will had done for us.

  I found her very tiresome. I wanted only to be at Will’s side as he sank but Louisa tried to exclude us. When she brought Father Walsh to comfort Will, as she put it, May and I waited in the parlor, unaware of what was transpiring. It was an ancient story with us. I have come to pity Louisa and always did pity Will, who had to put up with her ravenous hungers and malice mixed with piety.

  After Will had built the Welcome Wigwam outside of North Platte, he found life so unbearable there because of her that he built Scout’s Rest nearby and moved into it, giving his Lulu, as he called her, the other home. He needed a manager for his farm properties and persuaded my husband Al Goodman to take over, though I was reluctant to leave Kansas for those barren grasslands farther west. But we did manage Will’s properties for several years.

  Then Will’s daughter Arta married Horton Boal and the young people wanted to run the ranches. Or rather, Louisa wanted them to. Louisa began to badger Will about it until he caved in. We had been doing a good job so we were astonished when Will, embarrassed, explained that the Boals would be assuming the management. Sadly, my husband and I turned over Will’s Nebraska properties to the Boals and returned to Kansas. But the Boals were inept, ran the ranches into the ground, and poor Will did what he had to do, discharged them and summoned us to run Scout’s Rest once again, which we did with great success.

  When his daughter Arta died a few years later, Louisa blamed the death on Will, accusing him of breaking Arta’s heart. Imagine it! Just how he did that Louisa didn’t explain and didn’t have to. The accusation was what counted. Will always treated his children as generously as he knew how but Louisa nurtured a grudge against him in the bosom of all his children. That’s the sort of woman Louisa is, cruel and self-obsessed and eager to wound. Imagine blaming a man for his daughter’s death. I don’t know how Will stood it but he did, and that speaks of the greatness of my brother. I think maybe Will died, at the last, from the relentless belittling he endured from Louisa.

  As Will sank the press began a frenzy of speculation, much of it invented by reporters. It was reported that he played cards, affably sitting around dealing out hands. Actually, he lay pale and quiet, sleeping much, watching us distantly when he was awake, knowing that life was steadily ebbing and he would soon never see us again.

  He said only a few things and one of the most heartfelt was his wish that Johnny Baker would make it to his bedside in time. Johnny didn’t. His desperate train ride clear across the country from New York brought him to May’s door too late. Will would have liked to say goodbye to the little cowboy who came to be the son Will lost when Kit Carson Cody died as a little boy.

  I remember how Johnny arrived in a rush, stepped gingerly, fearfully, through May's door and discovered the man he idolized all his young life was gone, the bed empty.

  “Oh, God,” he said, and knelt beside that bed, overwhelmed by sorrow. Johnny cried.

  It was much the way I felt, too, that loss of a dear younger brother that left me so hollow. Louisa didn’t linger. Scarcely had Will breathed his last than she saw no purpose in staying in May’s house, and she caught a hack back to her hotel. Little did I know then that she was already conspiring to undo her husband’s last wish, that he be buried above the Wyoming town he created and named and made his true home.

  I know that May was relieved and grateful to have that dark presence removed from her house. I know I was. Louisa had barely spoken to us even in that time of rising sorrow when we, as a family, should have drawn together in our grief, opened our arms to each other. But in Louisa’s eyes we Cody sisters were rivals for Will’s affection, and that didn’t change an iota, even until death. The sad thing about that was that Will lavished his affection on all of us and there was no shortage of love to go around. I think back now with utter horror at Louisa’s icy and imperious conduct. We Cody sisters are all widows and never did I feel more the widow, unprotected by husband or my strong and loving brother, than I did at that sad hour.

  Cody, Wyoming, was and is my home and I wanted Will to be buried there up on the hills rising toward the Rockies where I could sense his presence. After Al died, Will asked me to manage his new Irma Hotel there in Cody, and I did and still do. Will tried to give his and my sister Helen some real estate that he held jointly with Louisa but his wife wouldn’t sign the deed, and thus frustrated him. Eventually, Will gave Helen the Cody newspaper, which she ran until her death. Cody, Wyoming, was filled with Codys and that was where Will intended that he should spend eternity.

  I have heard dark rumors that Louisa accepted money from that terrible Harry Tammen to bury Will in Denver. I don’t know the truth of it but I would not put it past her or him. Neither loved Will enough to honor his last wish. He was merely someone to exploit.

  A few years ago Will wrote me in anguish about his marriage, calling it a lie, a misery. At that time he expressed his hope for a divorce. Well, it didn’t happen the way he had hoped. He told Lulu he would gladly give her all of his Nebraska property if only she would let him divorce her. Louisa agreed, or so he thought. So he deeded all the Nebraska property that he still possessed to her only to find her welshing on the arrangement, contesting his divorce and keeping the property to boot. Can you imagine it?

  I know Will finally found other women and took solace in them, and I can’t approve because he was married. But I can understand and forgive him for it because his Lulu had shut her door to him, treated him with such cruelty for the sin of being in show business that he finally turned to the gentle arms of others for those sweet consolations that had been denied him. I think there are times when traditional morality doesn’t apply and I only hope he found the sweetness of our sex in the embrace of others.

  I read about the decision to bury Will there in Denver on the front page of the Post. Where else? I had plucked the paper from May’s doorstep, read it, and raced to her with the news. That was how we found out about Louisa’s arrangements. Louisa had not consulted us.

  “Oh, no,” May said, and sat down in the nearest chair. She and I sat in her sunny parlor, aching for things to be different, aching for the sweet reconciliation we had hoped for, wrought by

  Will’s death.

  There was nothing we could do. Will’s funeral was in the hands of a man he detested so much he was ready to shoot him. Harry Tammen and his vile partner, Fred Bonfils, swiftly planned the whole funeral, trumpeting every detail in their gaudy newspaper. Will would not receive a dignified funeral; it would be just another carnival of the sort that had stamped everything done by those cutthroats. It would begin with a parade, the way all circuses do.

  Louisa had gotten her thirty pieces of silver; Tammen had gotten another circus.

  “Let
’s not attend,” I said.

  “We have to,” May replied, and I knew she was right.

  We went with a heavy heart to that Elks Lodge and found Louisa there ahead of us, darkly imperious, bulge-eyed, and with only Irma at her side. The funeral was tender and I was very proud of Will, proud to be his sister, feeling blessed by the love and protection he had poured out upon Al and me, and each of my sisters.

  It was only when I returned to Cody that I was hit so hard by Will’s absence. There I was, surrounded by Will, living in a city he founded, in a grand hotel he had built, in a town that prospered from his irrigation project on the eastern slope of great mountains that formed the backbone of Yellowstone Park. He belongs there. He surely does, and unto my last breath I will grieve for Will.

  The Irma Hotel still radiates Will. It really is too large for a small town but its spacious rooms, fine restaurant and saloon, handsome western landscapes that hang on its walls, all speak to me of my brother. I have a photo of him standing beside a touring car in front of the Irma, looking just as commanding before that mechanized horse as he did when mounted on one of his several white chargers. I smile to look at it. He might pose before a motor car, but they terrified him and never once did he drive one and considered them the devil’s own contraptions.

  That dear fraud of a photo will have to suffice. That and my collection of Cody things; the hundreds and hundreds of dime novels, the great broadsheets and programs from his shows, the gifts he lavished on me. I adored him. Did any sister ever have so grand and sweet a brother?

  (From Colonel William F. Cody’s Memoir)

  It was only after a year or two of marriage that I began to fathom that Louisa didn’t approve of my family. We Codys were farming folks, settlers like most everyone else, getting a living from the land. But she came from a comfortable St. Louis merchant family and she hadn’t lacked for anything in her young life. Her father had immigrated from Alsace-Lorraine while her mother was American-born. The family lived in the French Quarter of St. Louis. Louisa had a convent education which deepened her desire for a respectable marriage. I don’t know much of what is taught in convents but whatever she learned from the nuns, it didn’t prepare her for the life she was entering.

  In a way, I pity her for that. She couldn’t have known she would find herself in show business and surrounded by raffish sorts. Everything within her rebelled at the life I had chosen, not only as a scout on the borders of Nebraska and Kansas but as a theater man. Little did I realize, young as I was, what a convent education truly meant to her and how deplorable she found my colleagues and comrades not only on the frontier, but in all the branches of theater and circus and show life. I could scarcely introduce her to my dearest friends for she would yank her pale white hand free and retreat from us, having already convicted my friends of looseness.

  Instead of the sedate life she had thought would be hers, she met me, a young man of the borders, an army scout, Indian-fighter, a man with a few good yarns to tell. She loved to hear my stories. She was bright as a berry and I was smitten, so I exaggerated my derring-do, spun yarns about wild Indians, stampedes, buffalo hunting, and performing dangerous missions for the army, and she fell into some sort of swoon.

  We were married by a justice of the peace since I was not of her Catholic faith, and I took her west with me. It didn’t take her long to discover that life on the borders is hard and uncomfortable, so the seeds of unhappiness were planted soon after we had wed. I knew no other life and felt no remorse about it; we were living exactly the life I had described to her, which had enchanted her on her sofa but not when we lived in a rude cabin at Fort McPherson.

  Still, I was a married man and I wanted her to be happy. She would bear my children and I hoped for a comfortable hearth and home where we would be at peace in the bosom of our household. I tried for a while managing an inn but she only found fault in it and was soon accusing me of mismanaging it, by which she meant that I poured the profits down the throats of our guests. In other words, my friends drank up our living.

  She didn’t like life in military posts or anywhere on the borders so increasingly I made my living where I could, and visited her infrequently. She raised our family largely by herself, having no taste for my life. Neither could I find any solace in city life or congenial employment there. She had married a wild hare and we were stuck with it. Because of all that, I have a great tenderness toward her which abides within me now and forever. I don’t suppose we were suited but who can stay young love from its appointed course? We hungered for each other. I feasted on her face and form. She yearned to caress mine. We married. I have within me a whole tableau of delights, of joyous moments, of intimate laughter, of tenderness bestowed and received. Who can say we were ill-suited? I never dreamed it, not then anyway. And to this day, in spite of all the grief, I view her with admiration as a formidable and virtuous woman.

  We resolved our differences through distance. I was away, supporting her in my fashion; she was home, feeding and nursing and schooling and clothing our little ones. It seemed to work, that impossible wedlock. Only it swiftly deteriorated. The heaviest blow came at the end of our Buffalo Bill Combination stage show season, when I heartily kissed goodbye the various ladies of the cast scarcely imagining I was doing anything untoward. Louisa stormed about it, though the departing hugs were truly innocent. Her storms never ceased and a door closed, and with one or two brief exceptions never again did I embrace my wife. And never again was our marriage the same though it took many years for me to resolve to make a life for myself.

  But if I changed, she did, too. She plainly envied the joyous life I was living and was starved for affection though she could return none. I found some success at last and I began to do things for my sisters, whose own lives had been marked by financial stress. I kept Louisa and the children not just comfortable but in affluent circumstances, and yet it was not enough. If I favored any sister or her husband with any gift, or any land, or anything of value, Lulu stormed all over again, as if no Cody was worth my attentions. It was not just money; if I should spend a happy week with my sisters or their families, Louisa grew resentful. She starved for anything and everything I could give to anyone, and grew determined to take it all. And so my marriage turned into something darker, a project to siphon from me all that I earned and to make me guilty about anything I did for others. And that became a burden that weighted my shoulders the rest of my days.

  The sad thing is, in time, with success, I had plenty of money to go around and plenty of affection to go around, and the more of it I gave to those I loved, the more of it I had to give away. But she was insatiable and wanted it all.

  Chapter 8

  His Majesty King George V

  George Frederick Ernest Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

  When word came of Cody’s death my chancellor brought it to me at once and I cabled my earnest condolences to Mrs. Cody. The American had been a great favourite among us, indeed, among all the crowned heads of Europe. I greatly lamented the loss and have been reflecting on that extraordinary man ever since.

  I was present in 1887 when Cody and his Wild West set foot in England for the first time and soon erected a great show-ground at Earl’s Court on the West End. I was embarked on a naval career, little imagining what the future would hold for me when my older brother, the Duke of Clarence, died. I saw the showman then and several times later on. But I always knew he was more than a showman. He embodied something about our Island race that I have never quite put into words but can only sense.

  All that was during the reign of my grandmother, Victoria Regina. My father talked of it the rest of his life. Here was a barbaric spectacle right in the heart of civilization. Londoners marveled as workmen threw up the tents, built the stands, cared for buffalo and wild horses and long-horned cattle, while cowboys in outlandish garb spun their lariats over these beasts. But none of that inflamed us so much as the red Indians, strong coppery men, some with wives and babies, an oriental cast to
their faces, barbarous in their strength. It was all the rage of London to visit Earl’s Court and see the Yanks set up their show.

  Nothing like it had ever been seen in England.

  My grandmother, the queen, soon heard of it and was filled with unusual curiosity. She had for many years cloistered herself in permanent mourning for the Prince Consort, and nothing would change that or so we all supposed. Even before the first exhibition, Cody was a success. A stream of visitors poured into Earl’s Court, and the erect frontiersman greeted them all and showed them a few of the tricks and scenes they soon would be seeing. He greeted others from his quarters at the Metropole Hotel. Sir Henry Irving soon was out there greeting Cody, and then Ellen Terry, and then Gladstone himself. It wasn’t only Cody who fascinated them all; Miss Oakley, that amazing markswoman, was quietly greeting my countrymen and demonstrating her astonishing skills.

  At last, on May 5, after weeks of mud and mire, Cody was ready to give a few selected people an advance look at what was to come, and he invited my father and mother, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales and Alexandra the Princess, and all of their children. We were seated, along with our entourage, in a royal box draped with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes.

  I shall never forget it, the wild whoops of the red Indians, got up in war paint and feathers; the cow-boys as they were called, the Deadwood Stage, half mired in mud, and the way the Indians attacked it. And Annie Oakley. The little thing got right down to the business of demolishing everything she aimed at. I am keen on shooting and never have I seen such feats as she performed. I remember when two clay pigeons were launched, she leapt over a table, plucked up her shotgun and destroyed both before they fell to earth. How I cheered that sweet thing, so fetchingly attired in fringed skirts richly embroidered, and a loose fitting blouse and vest so she could perform unhindered.