AS SEEN ON TV: BELLE STARR

AS SEEN IN:
'Maverick'

Since she was hanging out with the "Bubbly Springs Gang", whom I've claimed were all escaped mental patients from some local asylum, I don't think this was the real Belle Starr. But I don't think she was a fellow patient at the place (which I think should be named "Bubbly Springs Asylum".) But she may have been suffering from furor uterinus or nymphomania (terms now replaced by "hypersexuality" and "sexual compulsivity"). After all, it appears she was supposed to be the woman "belonging" to the patient who though he was Cole Younger. However, she was more than willing to throw herself at Bret Maverick. (And although the episode tried to play it chaste for its 1950's audience, I think Bret slept with her the night before the big heist.)

And although she went along with everybody else in the gang in accepting Bret as the gambler/con man Foxy Smith, I think she knew better. That's because I believe she knew the real Foxy Smith. And she was probably knocking cowboy boots with him as well.

It may be that this woman who claimed to be Belle Starr was only play-acting; that there was no real conviction in that identity. I think she may have been a nurse at the facility where all of these so-called outlaws had been locked up. She was Foxy Smith's inside man, as it were, at the asylum and she was the one who worked them all up in the their delusions and facitlitated their escape from the joint.

At the end of the episode, Bret made it pozz'ble for her to escape. So in whatever TV Western in which actress Jean Willes later showed up in a guest-starring role, we could make the assumption that she was this naughty nurse now operating under an assumed name. (Especially if that guest star role was a bad girl.....)

As to the real Belle Starr? Because she had a TV movie about her in 1980, I'm going with Elizabeth Montgomery as the official portrayer of the lady outlaw..... BCnU!