AS SEEN ON TV: BAT & WYATT (AND YET....)

Now that I'm back from vacation, here's a little something different for the "As Seen On TV" showcase......

In Toobworld, the official televersion of Bat Masterson was played by Gene Barry; Hugh O'Brian is THE Wyatt Earp for Earth Prime-Time. They first shared the same airwaves in the fourth "Gambler" TV movie, "The Luck Of The Draw". But it wasn't until 'Guns Of Paradise' extended episode (yeah, basically a TV movie) that they actually met face to face.

And yet within the frameworks of their TV series 'Bat Masterson' and 'The Life And Legend Of Wyatt Earp', both frontier lawmen thought they had met the other. But that's exactly who they were meeting - "others".

The ersatz Earp with Bat Masterson
"The Reluctant Witness"

The bogus Bat with Wyatt Earp
"Dodge Is Civilized"

The funny thing is, the two impostors look closer to the historical truth than the official televersions. (I think those mustaches help.) But the amount of video enjoyed by Gene Barry and Hugh O'Brian weigh heavily in their favors.

When I said "others", the "Others" from 'Lost', but two men who were impersonating Earp and Masterson. Once again we see that "Famous Impostor Syndrome", also known in the Wold Newton Universe as "Great Detective Syndrome" for all of the impersonators of Sherlock Holmes, has been employed in the Wild, Wild West.

The best splainin for this kind of impersonation would be quantum leaping. Somebody with access to the technology developed by Dr. Sam Beckett, but from farther into the Future, could have been able to leap beyond his own lifetime to impersonate just about anybody during that time on the frontier.

Like a quantum leaper who chose to impersonate Samuel Clemens in one of three episodes of 'Bonanza' which featured the author*, both men made sure they looked like their "leapees", even though people would only see the aura of the men being replaced.

(In the real world, Alan Dinehart III played the Bat Masterson leaper, and Ron Hayes was the Wyatt Earp leaper.)

BCnU!

* "The Emperor Norton" had the quantum leaping Samuel Clemens. Each of the other two 'Bonanza' episodes had different splainins for their televersions of "Mark Twain".

SILKY SMOOTH SPLAININ

"Red Dog" was the last time we ever saw Beau Maverick in Toobworld... as Beau Maverick.

It's the theory of Toobworld Central that by the early 1890's, Beau had found himself up north in Skagway, in the Alaskan territories. But for one reason or another, he needed to lay low; so he used an alias - Silky Harris.

The name "Silky" he chose in tribute to the late, great swindler, Silky O'Sullivan. Although the audiences of the Trueniverse only saw Silky in connection to Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry, "Alias Smith And Jones", it's likely that he had dealings with the Maverick family as well.

In fact, he may have taught Beauregard "Pappy" Maverick - Beau's uncle - everything he knew when it cames to confidence games.

As for "Harris", that may have been a tip of the hat to a young woman who would sometimes pass herself off as "Melanie Blake" or "Modesty Blaine" or "Flo Baker". But her real name was Kiz Bouchet, and Beau came to her aid in Virginia City... which probably didn't sit well with the powerful Cartwright family. As influential citizens of Virginia City, they must have been friends with the powerful men prepared to have Kiz declared insane so that her cousin Melanie could claim Kiz's fortune. (Most of that fortune had been augmented by investments from Kiz's life as a confidence grifter.)

When Beau Maverick turned the tables on them, the Cartwrights probably didn't take kindly to that - especially when they realized Kiz had been "Quick Buck Kate" in San Francisco, who helped shanghai a couple of the Ponderosa ranch hands. But by the time Ben and his boys figured that out (Kiz would always dye her hair blonde when working a scheme.), Beau was long gone from Virginia City.* As for the name of "Harris": when Kiz Bouchet first encountered the Maverick clan, she was posing as "Daisy Harris". "Daisy" almost got Bart Maverick killed because of "The Jeweled Gun". If Beau thought the Cartwrights were still after him after all those years, it wouldn't be safe to go calling himself "Silky Bouchet" in a small mining town like Skagway. (Especially when it appeared they had a few investments in town, like the hotel.) So he chose the first surname used by Kiz as a grifter, "Harris".
And so Silky Harris was "born"... and would live for as long as Beau decided to remain among 'The Alaskans'.....
I get the feeling that all of these Kathleen Crowley characters - and many more! - could eventually land Kiz Bouchet as a special guest in the TV Crossover Hall of Fame, don't you?

BCnU!

* Of course, the involvement by the Cartwrights just happened to be unavailable for the Trueniverse audience to see.....

And that concludes my vacation salute to "Seed Of Deception" and "Red Dog", two episodes of 'Maverick'

AS SEEN ON TV: BARNUM & BAILEY

Nothing like ending a great vacation with a little showmanship......

BARNUM & BAILEY

AS SEEN IN:
'Branded'

AS PLAYED BY:
P.T. Barnum - Pat O'Brien
James Bailey - Dick Clark

From Wikipedia:
In 1875, Dan Castello and William Cameron Coup persuaded Barnum to lend his name and financial backing to the circus they had already created in Delavan, Wisconsin. It was called "P.T. Barnum's Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome". The moniker "Greatest show on Earth" was added later. James Anthony Bailey had teamed with James E. Cooper to create the Cooper and Bailey Circus in the 1860s. Bailey's circus was soon Barnum's chief competitor. He also exhibited "Columbia," the first baby elephant ever born in the United States. She was born in March 1880 in Philadelphia, to "Babe" and "Mandarin". She was euthanized in November 1907 because of aggressiveness. Barnum wanted to buy the elephant, but Bailey turned him down. Instead of continuing as competitors, each man recognized the showmanship of the other, and decided to combine their shows in 1881. In 1882, the combined show enjoyed great success with acts such as Jumbo, advertised as the world's largest elephant. Barnum died in 1891 and Bailey then purchased the circus from his widow. He ran many successful tours through the eastern United States until he took his circus to Europe. Starting on December 27, 1897, he began a tour across the continent that lasted through 1902.

Bailey's European tour gave the Ringling brothers an opportunity to move their show from the Midwest through the eastern seaboard. Faced with the new competition, Bailey took his show west of the Rockies for the first time in 1905. He died the next year and the circus was sold to the Ringling Brothers a year later.
That's how it played out in the real world. But in Toobworld, the two circus giants merged their shows thanks to the mediation of Jason McCord, disgraced Army captain. And it wasn't over an elephant that they wrangled, but an exotic belly dancer. Barnum himself would have been proud of that maneuver to bring in viewers.....

BCnU!

JOI OF MAN'S DESIRING

The 'Maverick' episode "Seed Of Deception" had several great actors - Myron Healey, Frank Ferguson, Adele Mara... and one of the most beautiful women from the late fifties/early sixties television: Joi Lansing.
Ms. Lansing played a resident of Bonita, Ca. named Mrs. Laura "Doll" Hayes. As she told Bret (whom she thought was Doc Holliday), her late husband used to call her "Doll", and even though she didn't much care for it, the name seemed to have stuck even after his death.

Hearing that her name was "Mrs. Hayes" and that she was a widow was a trigger for me as a caretaker of Toobworld - just whose widow was she?The knee-jerk reaction was, of course, Hannibal Heyes from my second favorite TV Western 'Alias Smith & Jones'. The difference in the spelling of the last name was not a problem - we never saw it printed in "Seed Of Deception" and as noted several times in the past here at Inner Toob, the spelling of names in the final credits has no bearing on any given character on TV.

So that wouldn't have been a problem. But the timeline would be.

"Seed Of Deception" takes place around 1872, and Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry were in their prime in the mid 1880's. Otherwise, Laura Hayes was just the type of woman who could have enticed "Joshua Smith" into marriage.

But the idea did provide me with yet a new theory to splain away the recasting of Hannibal Heyes from Pete Duel to Roger Davis, which was caused in the real world by the death of Duel. As these Inner Toob posts are supposed to be about 'Maverick' during my two week vacation, we'll save that splainin for later in the month.

In the meantime, let's just use this opportunity as an excuse to celebrate the beauty of Joi Lansing. In Toob Rock terms, she serves as my "Pictures Of Lily".

TMI? Too bad.






Sadly, Joi Lansing passed away in the early 1970's from cancer.

BCnU........

AS SEEN ON TV: POKER ALICE

Throughout this two-week look at Western historical figures, women have not been represented at all. Hopefully this can be rectified with more representation once I get back to Toobworld Central. After all, we still will be running the feature throughout the rest of August. (If I find enough pictures!)

But in the meantime, we have this one opportunity, so we're going to go all out with the pictures.....

AS SEEN IN:
"Poker Alice"

AS PLAYED BY:
Elizabeth Taylor

From The Legends Of America site:
Alice Ivers Tubbs; aka: Poker Alice (1851-1930) – Perhaps the best known female poker player in the Old West, Alice Ivers actually hailed from England. Born on February 17, 1851 in Devonshire, she was the daughter of a conservative schoolmaster who moved the family to the United States when she was still a small girl. First settling in Virginia, Alice attended an elite boarding school for young women until the family moved again in her teenage years, to the silver rush in Leadville, Colorado.

While there, Alice met a mining engineer by the name of Frank Duffield and the two married when she was twenty. Gambling was a way of life in the many mining camps of the Old West and when Frank, an enthusiastic player, visited the many gambling halls in Leadville, young Alice went along with him rather than stay home alone. At first, the pretty young girl stood quietly behind her husband, simply watching the play. However, a quick study, it wasn’t long before she was sitting in on the games, quickly demonstrating proficiency for poker and faro.
Though she preferred the game of poker, she also learned to deal and play Faro, and was soon in high demand, both as a player and a dealer. At this time, Alice was a petite 5’4” beauty, with blue eyes and lush brown hair. A "lady” in a gambling hall that wasn’t of the "soiled dove” variety was rare in the Old West, and bedecked in the latest fashions, she was a sight for the sore eyes of many a miner.

Traveling from one mining camp to another, the talented young beauty (by this time a widow) soon acquired the nickname "Poker Alice."

At the age of 79 she underwent a gall bladder operation in Rapid City, but died of complications on February 27, 1930. She was buried at St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sturgis, South Dakota.

In her later years, Alice claimed to have won more than $250,000 at the gaming tables and never once cheated. In fact, one of her favorite sayings was: "Praise the Lord and place your bets. I'll take your money with no regrets."
The life of Poker Alice was heavily fictionalized (and her appearance highly idealized) in that TV movie, but then whose isn't? In fact, her last name in the movie was "Moffit" and the Toobworld Central splainin for that is that she must have had yet another husband we never learned about.
"THE MORE YOU KNOW"

A big hand for the little lady!

BCnU!

(This was Inner Toob post #5300)

MORE MARA I: MUCH ADO ABOUT ADELE

Back on July 15, I paid tribute to the late actress Adele Mara by posting a theory about the three characters she played on 'Maverick'. (And it is three characters - according to the book by Ed Robertson, a trusted source for all things 'Maverick', she was not in "You Can't Beat The Percentage".) Since then, I've seen "Seed Of Deception" at the Paley Center For Media and was able to correct some of my earlier statements. (Mainly, I had pegged Myron Healey's character of Jim Mundy as June Mundy's father. Instead, Jim Mundy was passing himself off asher cousin, but in fact Adele Mara's character was really named June Collins and she was Mundy's lover.)

Having now seen all three episodes, I can now firm up my thoughts on their connections through her......

It's only been in the last thirty years, since 'Hill Street Blues' at least, that TV series have become less episodic and instead installed storylines that carried throughout the season, perhaps even through the whole series. And that means those series need to be seen in sequence in order for their overall arcs to make sense.

In the old days, there was just a general premise, and so it didn't matter if you showed episodes out of sequence once a series made it to syndication. And that holds true for 'Maverick'.

The three episodes in which Adele Mara appeared were broadcast in this order:

Seed of Deception
April 13, 1958

The Spanish Dancer
December 14, 1958

The Marquessa
January 3, 1960

But it's my contention that they are to be placed on the Toobworld timeline in the opposite order. When she was passing herself off as the Marquesa Luisa (which as it turned out, she really was - “Ruisenor” is Spanish for “Nightingale”), she was under the sway of the con man Manuel Ortiz. (He and his partners found her working as Lily Nightingale at the Silver Lode Saloon in Tombstone.) But thanks to Bart, she was able to break free of his influence and be herself - whoever that may have been. And she was a quick study of the con - she was able to get $5,000.00 out of Bart just before the cantina in contention burned down. Lily/Luisa planned to go back to Tombstone and use that $5,000.00 to buy into the Silver Lode Saloon. And although it seemed as though she and Bart were kind of sweet on each other when they parted at the end of ‘The Marquesa’, it looks as though they lost contact with each other - if we’re to assume Lily/Luisa and Elena Grande were the same person. (Bart would next meet Elena in the episode “The Spanish Dancer”.) There was a major change in the personality of Elena, if we are to believe that she was Lily/Luisa. And I think the episode gives us the basics to build a splainin not only for why she was now known as Elena Grande, why she was so angry, and why she had a new backstory, but also why she didn’t recognize Bart at first.

When she finally told Bart her story as to why she hated the “gringo”, Elena revealed her true background - her real name was Elena de Galindas and her family’s lands had been stolen by the Americanos. Her father and her older brother had been killed, and they weren’t even given the decency of burial on their own property. Bart guessed that this all happened when she was about ten years old, but I’m thinking it was even earlier - when she was four, about the same age as Luisa Ruisenor when she was supposedly left an orphan after the burning of her hacienda.

As Rod Roddy used to say in the opening narration for ‘Soap’, “Confused?” Hopefully you won’t be, once we take a look at the backstory of Adele Mara’s character of Luisa.

Luisa Ruisenor’s family had been given a land grant for that area near the border many generations ago, granted to the original Marquesa (who bore an amazing likeness to Luisa). It remained in the family, parcelled out to second sons and the like, to keep it all in the family. And one of those neighboring ranches belonged to such cousins, the de Galindas family.

The de Galindas family was driven off their lands and the father killed; the Ruisenors died in the fire that destroyed their hacienda.... It had to be a naked land grab by unscrupulous Texan ranchers.

So now to resolve the question of her identity: was she Luisa or Elena? Toobworld Central is going to claim a little of both.

Luisa Ruisenor and Elena de Galindas were cousins - identical cousins. They looked alike, they walked alike, they even laughed and talked alike. And they were best friends, often staying over at each other’s home. And that’s what happened the night of the fire - Elena was enjoying a sleep-over at the Ruisenor ranch. But if the attack on the de Galindas ranch happened that same night, then there was no one left alive who knew the truth. Save for the old nurse, but she must have come to the wrong conclusion when the horrible truth was learned - the only survivor of the fire was one small toddler, a girl. And everybody assumed it was Luisa Ruisenor.

According to the episode, that little girl was then raised in an orphanage run by nuns until she ran off to become a dancer under the name of Lily Nightingale. And all of her memories from when she was a little girl, which were already overshadowed by the spectre of the fire, were buried deeply in her subconscious. When they finally came back to the surface, coached along by Manuel Ortiz and Bufemia the nurse and, under the threats from Pepe, she came to believe that she was Luisa.But she was Elena de Galindas. She grew up knowing the same nursery rhymes, the same fairy stories as her identical cousin. It wouldn’t be so unbelievable, after the trauma of the fire and the guilt because she survived, that she would come to think that she was Luisa.

Somehow she must have learned the truth when she returned to Tombstone. Perhaps one of the patrons of the Silver Lode Saloon, someone who knew both girls when they were toddlers, recognized some physical feature that could only be found on Elena, and not Luisa.

And this person would have also been able to tell her the truth about her family, and how they died. From that point, Elena was filled with hatred for the “gringos” and with a desire to reclaim what was rightfully hers. Perhaps subconsciously she wanted nothing to do with the claim on the Ruisenor land grant because she knew she was not Luisa. But as Elena, she had a God-given right to the de Galindas estates.

So full of the rage and desire for revenge was she, and with her newly restored memories as Elena, everything she knew from her brief “life” as Luisa was overwhelmed and forgotten - including knowledge of Bart Maverick. This is why she didn’t remember him when she met him again on the road to the Riverhead mining camp in the Sacramento mountains of New Mexico. As to why Bart didn’t remember her at first? Those Maverick boys worked their way through a lot of the women in the wild wild West. If they were going to remember the details when they counted cards, something had to give - like memories of past conquests.....

I imagine that in one of those scenes which the Trueniverse audience never gets to see, Bart and Elena realized that they knew each other during their trip to the mining camp of Riverhead. For whatever reason, they decided to play it as if they had just met and so Bart always addressed her as Elena. Not that it mattered - Elena's anger towards the Americanos now spilled over to Bart as well.
(If you ever get the chance, check out the episode "The Spanish Dancer"; it's the best of the three for Adele Mara. The highlight is the dance in which her anger seethes through her choreography.)

But she decided to throw in with his plan, along with Gentleman Jack Darby, to fleece Riverhead camp boss John Wilson into draining the Blue Rock Mine for them, a flooded mine he lost to Maverick in a poker game. Elena would get an equal third in any profits after their ruse worked. But when Wilson tried to turn the tables on them, it only made them richer - his detonation of the dam brought quartz gold to the surface, which was supposedly worth far more. Now Elena was rich enough to buy back her family's ranchlands and re-establish the de Galindas family name. And once again, Bart lost touch with her, even though their attraction to each other was now more pronounced. And with Bart out of her love life, Elena turned to a rancher near Bonita, California, for her needs.

Since he lost contact with her, there was no way for Bart to know that somehow Elena didn't have enough to get that ranch back, and therefore she had to go along with Jim Mundy's scheme to rob the bank in Bonita - and just her luck, she ran into Bart Maverick a third time. And to make matters worse - his brother Bret was in town as well. When Bart saw "June Mundy" arrive on the stage in the town of Bonita, he introduced himself to her in such a way as to suggest there was no history between them... just in case she wanted to play it on the "down-low". Referring to her careers as a dancer, Bart told her that he thought he saw her perform in Abilene. "Abilene" may have been a pre-arranged code word between them, since that's where her former partner's brother shared a jail cell with Maverick's "friend" Nobby Ned Wingate.

But as I said, some time had passed since the last time they saw each other. Now going by the name June Collins (perhaps because it was more socially acceptable among the mostly white population in those border towns), the dancer understood the sub-text of Bart's greeting/warning. But Elena still decided the gamble was worth it. In that intervening time period, she may have become more jaded, more hardened, and saw that Jim Mundy's plan to rob the bank was her only way to achieve her goal of reclaiming the de Galindas' ranch.

Even though she carried through with her part of the plan (by dancing in the bar across the street in such a way that the hootin' and hollerin' of the cowboys would drown out the sounds of the bank break-in) "June" wasn't so cold-hearted that she would allow anything to happen to Bart. She even tried to warn him away, as well as plead with her co-conspirators not to hurt him when they thought he heard what was going on from his hotel room next door.

After that misadventure in Bonita, we never saw any characters in 'Maverick' who looked like Adele Mara, even though she was the boss' wife (married to the series producer/creator Roy Huggins), and that's because June Collins - the former Elena de Galindas, the former Elena Grande, the former Doña Luisa de Ruisenor, the former Lily Nightingale - was serving a prison sentence in California.....

As to the roles played by Adele Mara in other Westerns, it may well be that June/Elena/Luis had identical cousins. If I can ever track down those episodes*, I'll see if they can fit into this general theory. The idea I'm toying with now is that she was offered a pardon by the Governor - maybe even the President! - if in return she worked for the government as an undercover agent. I'd even bring in Artemus Gordon as her tutor!

But like I said, it will depend on other episodes I find.......

BCnU! * And after writing that in the morning, I saw two of her 'Cheyenne' episodes in the afternoon, courtesy of Netflix online. Although I could make the case for both of them being part of this same scenario, acting as bookends as a matter of fact, I think I'll save that for another post.......