Page 58 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

the next without success; the tour had to be called off. Buffalo Bill refused to

give up and immediately programmed another play, investing substantial sums
of money—eighty thousand dollars!—with no hope of any return. The result
was a series of resounding flops. The journalists let rip, as if they were taking
their revenge for Buffalo Bill’s unbroken success, as if they wanted to use this
indirect withdrawal of their goodwill to show that they had always been
independent, and that their generosity towards him had been something other
than servility. Finally, the critics savagely exposed the liaison. But the old

entertainer wanted to go on fighting his bad luck. In his dressing room, he
would fix Katherine’s full-length portrait with a melancholy stare. Ah! so he
was the only person who could see those exquisitely slender ankles, that tilted
face and the way she held a pen between her fingers!
But he wasn’t the only person. A millionaire’s son from New York also

noticed them. And he married her. There were endless articles in the gutter
press reporting that the young couple were blissfully happy. For Buffalo Bill
the fountain of youth now ran bitter. But an old lion never loses heart. And
although Katherine wanted for nothing, she was perhaps still fascinated by his
charisma or excited by his theatrics, and she eventually started seeing her old
mentor again. They met in squalid hotel bedrooms, with no thought for
decency. It was like a second honeymoon; after the rows and the

reconciliations, they wept and were reunited, and Buffalo Bill showered his
little chickadee with caresses and small gifts. He worshipped her. She was a
princess, a Sunday princess. And then he wearied of her again. In despair, no
doubt, at the mediocrity of her fate, Katherine would start her morning with
two or three cocktails, and then carry on drinking through the day with
brandy, champagne, and all the things that help you to forget a mean and

thankless existence. Her husband filed for divorce.

The scandalmongers claim—but should we believe them?—that Buffalo Bill
had other mistresses apart from this brash creature; and these weren’t just an
occasional lapse or a passing fancy. There were dozens of them. Everywhere
his bohemian existence had taken him, he had whiled away entire nights
propping up the bar in the company of a few miserable tarts; and from time to
time the old entertainer would even carry off one of his nocturnal conquests
for a few days or weeks. And John Burke would try to assess the possible

consequences, the negative publicity, and in the morning or during the
dreary afternoons, he would scour the acrimonious newspaper articles written