Page 71 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

But all for nothing. Cinema is stealing the last of his spectators. Never

mind! He can make films too! He tries his hand, but there are no audiences.
His films are flops. Buffalo Bill has now played all his cards, and they’re laid
out on the table, greasy and dog-eared. His heart is no longer in it. His features
are etched in every memory, but the caricature with a white horse and a white
hat is all that remains of him. And now everything about him is white: his
goatee beard, and even the hairs on his arse. The snow falls on Cody, warm
and heavy. He’s a grandfather. But he doesn’t have time to take the air, or to

sit his little grandchildren on his big dead knees. The old entertainer is skint,
and he’s also got debts; he’s washed-up and debt-ridden. In the films of his
that have survived, you find him in grotesque pantomimes, making affected
gestures. And when he performs alongside General Miles in a heavily edited
version of the “Battle” of Wounded Knee—which is the name they’ve used

again, one last time, for the massacre—they both appear on horseback, white-
haired and several pounds heavier.
It’s as a simple employee in the Sells-Floto Circus that he will end his
spectacular career. The remains of his Show are sold off at auction, amid
shreds of mist. At present, in return for a hundred dollars a day, he has to
prance about on horseback, and, like Louis XIV in the past, he’s—
unfortunately—obliged to wear a wig so as to preserve his dignity intact and

earn what it owes to the meanest part of creation. It’s even written into his
contract. So here he is, a pathetic figure but a touching sight, at the finishing
post, stripped of the costume that previously sustained him, unwell and on the
rubbish heap. Which is why the leader of the circus orchestra was moved by
the sight of Bill Cody, glimpsed one evening through the open door of his
dressing room, alone, still elegant for his age, a bald old clown obliged, even

now, to make up and prepare for the umpteenth exhibition of his person. And
we too are moved at the sight of this bogus dignity, the old actor gone to seed
after years of life on the road, worn out and exiled in his dressing room.
Buffalo Bill, the creator of the greatest sham of all time, suddenly finds that he
belongs to a vanishing world and is instantly gripped by the great nostalgia.

In January 1917, less than two months after the last performance of his Show,
an ageing William Cody—because he reverted to being William Cody and
using his real name—paid a visit to his sister. Perhaps he began by navigating

the foot of the Rockies for several hours in the cold dust. Then there were a
few streaks of white in the sky, lightning ripped the horizon but not a drop of