We stopped here to talk with Eric Sorg, 38, actor and Buffalo Bill authority. Sorg has been hooked on Cody since college. He gathered the facts of Cody`s life into a one-man show, ”Cody! An Evening With Buffalo Bill.”
The play, which has been performed throughout the United States and Canada, offers Sorg as Cody speaking from Purgatory. In Cody`s colorful language, salty but never profane, we get a measure of the man. The emphasis is not on the buckskinned legend, but on Cody himself.
”Buffalo Bill, the myth, tears away my enjoyment of Bill Cody, the man,” Sorg told us.
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”I see his life as a Greek tragedy. His last few years were spent fighting bankruptcy and trying to maintain his integrity as a man. He got a telegram in 1916 telling him that everything he owned everywhere had been thrown in the hands of a receiver. The next day, he wrote a letter saying that he had looked at the telegram the entire night. He thought about all the millions he had made and the thousands of people he had helped and the thousands of dollars he had given to charity.
”He realized that people were not as kind as he was and that many of them were basically cruel. That was when the fight was knocked out of him. I think at that moment he wanted to die.”
Sorg becomes Cody again for our benefit:
”You scoffers, you can laugh all you want to at Buffalo Bill. But next time some rascal comes up to you and tells you what a drunken old reprobate Bill Cody was, you look at them and say: `That Bill, he loved to drink and, my god, he loved the women! But say, didn`t he put a half million dollars into the mines down in Oracle, Ariz., and start Ellis County, Kansas` government and start irrigation and homes in North Platte, Neb.?`
” `Didn`t he found the town of Corbet, Wyo., and own the Sheridan Inn, and didn`t a third of the Cody millions start Cody, Wyo.?`
” `Yeah, Bill-he`s nothing but an old drunk-maybe. But what have you done for your country?`
”That sums up my feelings for him,” Sorg said.