Calamity by Karen R. Jones

Author:Karen R. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300212808
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER SIX

“HOW THE WEST WAS SUNG”

FEMININITY AND FAKERY ON THE HOLLYWOOD

FRONTIER (1935–60)

In a press piece entitled “Calamity Jane’s Own Story is Told Again,” the Buffalo Bulletin (May 1935) related how Billings resident L.J. Covington had recently unearthed a copy of Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane, By Herself (1896). Covington had purchased the pamphlet directly from Canary in 1900, and, for 35 years, it had been gathering dust on a shelf. Reflecting on her life, the editorial related a tragic tale of a fading star selling a rudely constructed narrative (not in the best English, with long paragraphs and poor sentence structure, it said), and a simpler, plain-speaking time in which several pages sufficed to distil the essential elements of a famous life. Calamity Jane, it pointed out, was “perhaps as well known a woman as has ever appeared on the American scene,” but struggled to make any money from her fame, working alone and without the assistance of modern-day marketing agents and professional publicists. Today, the Bulletin mused: “heavy royalties would await her life story ‘told by herself’ and she would receive heavy money for the screen rights, serial rights, even the dramatic rights.”1

As it turned out, the next three decades brought an expansive multimedia treatment of Calamity Jane that catapulted her into the stratosphere of frontier celebrity.

This chapter explores the various takes on her life and legend that appeared from the mid-1930s through to the end of the 1950s—a period that saw the “golden age” of the western and the arresting inscription of the frontier imaginary under a celluloid gaze. Movies narrated “how the West was won” and wowed cinemagoers with Technicolor vistas of a big-sky landscape roamed by sturdy Stetson-wearing heroes and villains. Of particular importance was the incorporation of Calamity Jane as a subject of the Hollywood canon, from her appearance as a significant character in Cecil DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936) to a superstar lead in the musical Calamity Jane (1953), still the most popular example of Canary-ana to date. As the latest iterations in a folkloric imprint long in the making, cultural representations in these years picked up the trail where their forerunners left off, with an added twist of frontiering fantasy. Retaining her trademark identity as a buckskin-clad curiosity, Calamity Jane also made the (unlikely) transition to stride across the silver screen as a domestic siren for the nuclear family. Feisty, fresh-faced, and resolutely feminine, the mid-century “female scout” communicated the gender politics of containment. She didn’t smoke, cuss or drink, and, when under the taming gaze of Bill Hickok, eagerly slipped into the role of adoring romantic companion. As usual, however, there were alternative readings to be made that spoke to the subversive prospects of female masculinity. Thus, while mainstream media applauded celluloid fables of de-wilded conformity on the heterosexual frontier, Doris Day’s tomboyish Calamity was outed, adored, and her “butch cut” hair imitated by British gay women in the 1950s, her academy award-winning hit Secret Love received with knowing glances. Interestingly, both

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.