Cure For The Common Cody

In mid-June, Farrell "Mack" McMahon of Garden City, Missouri, woke up, smoked the first of many cigarettes and came to a decision. Then he went into town and had his hair cut for the first time in ten years. Long white locks fell to the floor, along with the remains of his billy goat beard and pointed white mustache.There,"

Next, Mack went shopping.

"I bought normal clothes," he says."Modern. Every day for ten years, I'd been wearing the boots and the vest and the buckskin and all that there"

At Mack's Country, all "that there" now lies heaped in the corner: three pairs of thigh-high riding boots; a reproduction circa-1893 saddle, embellished with Angora goat hair; a buffalo-nickel-encrusted show harness; a bevy of bullwhips; a "naughty Nelly," used by authentic cowboys for boot removal; and much, much more, including several versions of a white cowboy hat, its rim bent back on the right side, just like Buffalo Bill Cody's.

"There's a lot of theories why," Mack explains. "Maybe his hat got that way from running into the wind on his horse, or maybe it was some style left over from the Union Army, but the true story is that Buffalo Bill Cody had to be able to see if he was going to shoot straight."

Discussing such arcane details of Buffalo Bill Cody's life comes as naturally as breathing to Mack, who has spent the past decade as a high-profile Buffalo Bill reenactor. Less in character is his sudden decision to cut his hair, quit show business and look to the future instead of the past. Although Mack has yet to issue a definitive reason for this move -- he has at least twenty to choose from, he says -- he's determined to cut all ties to Cody. And so on August 18, all of the Buffalo Bill bric-a-brac he's acquired over the last ten years will be auctioned off in Garden City.

"Mack McMahon professionally portrayed Buffalo Bill Cody as he traveled throughout the U.S. for many years performing at hundreds of shows until his retirement today," pronounces the flier for the auction, which bears a marked resemblance to the posters Buffalo Bill himself used to promote his Wild West shows. "He has accumulated an unbelievable collection of Buffalo Bill props, Artifacts, Costumes, Promotional Items & Memorabilia. This will be a lifetime opportunity to purchase in one day what Mack 'Buffalo Bill' McMahon has spent many years and thousands of miles accumulating. You won't want to miss the very special event."

The repercussions of this special event will be huge -- not just in Missouri, not just in Colorado, where Buffalo Bill was buried, but in the rest of the Western-obsessed world, everywhere from EuroDisney just outside Paris to the London headquarters of British Airways to Germany, where cowboys and Indians, real or imaginary, are treated as royalty.

News of Mack's auction has set into motion a migration of Bills, dozens of whom will converge on Garden City this week, hoping to find more of what a working Cody needs to have. And it has also raised the bittersweet notion that even the Greatest Showman on Earth (or his reasonable facsimile) can't hang around forever.

"A lot of the Bills working right now are just plain long in the tooth," says Ralph Melfi, a middle-aged Bill from suburban Denver. At the auction, those reigning Bills may for the first time catch sight of their rightful heirs.

"This thing is going to be a crowd," Mack says. "People are coming from ten states. We're going to need hot dogs, sodas, chips and all that there just to feed them all. I'm expecting a whole lot of people and a whole lot of Bills."

The most authentic Cody accessory Mack is selling could be his horse, Jake, a seasoned show-business veteran who can do forty tricks in the showring and will nod or shake his head to answer polite questions. Mack claims that he saved Jake from the rendering plant, then spent thousands on his training. He says he will miss his equine partner more than any of the hundreds of faux cowboys and saloon ladies he worked with during his decade as Bill.

"Yeah, but when I make up my mind, that's it. There's no turning back," Mack concludes. "Once I started with Bill, I sold and sold and sold to keep my show going. My wife finally tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Honey, hey dummy, you are broke.'"