There were more casualties. In Portsmouth, Virginia, on Saturday, November 11, 1916, Buffalo Bill Cody took his last public bow. Busted flat, he was indentured to other, wiser, more savvy and heartless men, film men, who were working him in anticipation that he would soon drop dead. Now he was a featured player late in a military pageant calibrated to show the grit and determination of a country that didn’t want to fight in Europe, because it did not fight other people’s wars, but which would do so if it was called upon, so look out, because neutrality was just a split second from a knuckle sandwich. That was a difficult message to fit on a marquee, but people enjoyed the marching.

Bill was seventy. Kidney trouble prevented him from sitting on his horse for long. He saluted with a grimace, as if he were hanging off a cliff. Then it was over, his seven decades in the saddle. With the aid of two strong men, he dismounted from his buggy, thinking that it had all happened so fast.

But it is the essence of the sun to rise again, and here our travelogue comes to its conclusion. For the next day’s sun, rising on November 12, 1916, illuminated what one might call “epanalepsis.”

A curious motion was visible more or less every place that anyone cared to look. Figures moved as naturally as dust motes crossing a beam of light, or molecules rushing to fill a vacuum. The whole of America was an especially active beehive for a Sunday. It began early—off the coast of California, miles out to sea, where the searchlight of a lighthouse was in continuous rotation, a battered skiff roared up over the lip of a wave and into view, and under the stark, winking eye of the Fresnel lens, heaving up in the ocean’s spray, there it was, an object in the viewfinder, a traveling idol, an answer to a question no one had even known to ask.

Two-Reel Comedy

Cupid and the
Millionaire

I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price…. I don’t want harmony. I don’t want harmony, out of a love for mankind. I don’t want it.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

“People write me letters and they ask me if I am as wicked as I seem on the screen. I look at my little canary, and I say, ‘Dicky, am I so wicked?’

“And Dicky says, ‘Tweet, tweet.’

“That may mean ‘yes, yes’ or ‘no, no,’ may it not?”

—Theda Bara, Photoplay, 1918

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