No business like show business

http://www.truewestmagazine.com/no-business-like-show-business/

A still of Betty Hutton as Oakley in the There’s No Show Business Like Show Business scene from 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun.

After Annie Oakley beats sharpshooter Frank Butler in a shooting contest, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show manager, Charlie Davenport, sing the words from, what would become the unofficial anthem of the theatre world, There’s No Business Like Show Business, to convince Oakley to join the show. Irving Berlin wrote the song for the 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun, which was reprised in the 1950 movie of the same name, starring Betty Hutton as Oakley.
The message of the musical was that the “show business” of the Wild West Show also applied to Oakley’s real life: just like many women returned to their domestic roles after the conclusion of World War Two, Oakley intentionally loses the final shooting match against Butler so she can gain his love and hand in marriage. This could not be further from the truth.
Yes, the two did meet at a shooting contest, which Oakley won against the well-known Butler. But they fell in love and married years before the sharpshooters joined up with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Butler had no qualms about Oakley’s star status, comfortably serving as her manager during the nearly twenty years they toured with Cody’s show throughout the US and Europe. In fact, the love between the two was so strong that, in 1926, when Oakley died at the age of 66, Butler was so heartbroken, he reportedly starved himself and died two weeks later. Even more, Oakley not only thought women were capable of “male” jobs, she believed they should serve in wars, and offered President William McKinley fifty  “lady sharpshooters” for service in the Spanish-American War of 1898, but he turned her down.
That the cinematic West is not often true to history is such an age-old maxim that Hollywood even put it in a movie: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Attire from that 1962 movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, joined a rifle owned by Oakley, and other show business lots, in bringing Hollywood’s Old West into the hands of collectors. Brian Lebel’s Old West Auction, held on 10 June in Fort Worth, Texas, hammered them all down at nearly $850,000.

Annie Oakley gave a 20-gauge Parker Brothers shotgun, serial number 181313, to Curtis Liston, a fellow Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show performer, as a Christmas gift in 1918; it sold for $170,000.

Rico says he doesn't begin to have that kind of money...