This article appeared in the November 1, 1947 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Herbert Ravenel Sass was a journalist who was obsessed with his home state of South Carolina so it’s no surprise he should eventually tackle Anne Bonny. Obviously, this was the property acquired for the eventual Jacques Tourneur movie of the same title, but the movie really didn’t use…any of it. Lol. Sass qualifies his narrative with much hedging about what ~may have been~, so at least he’s somewhat transparent about the fact that he’s making it all up.
Much like Charles Johnson before him, Sass takes his sweet old time getting to Anne and spends several paragraphs on an inconsequential Spanish man. James Bonny is “a young hanger-on and worshiper of Captain Rackham.” He sails with Charles Vane to fish the Spanish wrecks and then they go to Charleston in spring to meet with fences. He sees Anne riding in a coach on Bay Street and is immediately infatuated with her. His fence tells him who she is and where she lives and he goes to her house, where Anne Fulworth appears as a Cockney servant. James finds Anne in the backyard with two ugly gentlemen callers and realizes that Anne is ignorant “of the formidable potentialities of her charm”. He swoops in and marries her before she can figure out she can do better than him.
Anne’s father tells James his life story and cuts them off from his fortune. (He wanted her to marry one of the ugly guys.) James and Anne arrive back in Nassau in June with Anne Fulworth (who just goes by Fulworth). At night in their hotel room Anne looks out the window watching celebrity pirates pass by with their molls and James is immediately terrified that she will leave him. He knows that “It would be better to kill the woman while she slept or else disappear. But the kind of love he had for her made both these courses impossible”. For a while Anne holes up in the hotel with Fulworth sewing until she’s ready for her close up.
Then on the big night she goes to a tavern with James wearing her new dress, and everyone goes silent due to her sexiness. She chooses Calico Jack as her mark, whose girlfriend attacks her. They fight, and it was all “carefully contrived in advance because–so she told Fulworth–‘that was the stuff to enchant these swine.'” According to Sass, James “awakened her to a sudden and exultant awareness of her powers” after which she became determined to find “a mate as strong as herself.” She gets bored with Jack who is sexy but not as ambitious as her. She starts thinking that if they get caught and put on trial, Jack would be hanged, but she’s pretty sure they wouldn’t want to hang a hot piece like herself. Sass says that at the trial, all the wealthy men in the courtroom were checking her out, and he suggests the possibility that one of them removed her from jail to become his mistress.
Sass writes that after the trial “the completeness of her disappearance is not only mysterious but suggestive.” Hmmmm is it? I guess it must be if you say it is…Sass suggests that Anne Bonny is also the character from a local ghost story about Fenwick Hall, an 18th century plantation house on the Stono River. According to Sass’ posited version, “Lord Fenwick” had been Calico Jack’s crooked business partner, and attended his trial to try to help him–but then helped Anne instead, and she became mistress of Fenwick Hall. James found out what happened to her and chased her down. She agrees to run away with him, but Lord Fenwick catches them and has James hanged from a tree. But it’s a happy ending, because finally Anne has found a suitably evil mate. Aww!
Before the story was changed during the making of the eventual Tourneur movie, and before Anne Bonny was turned into the more transparently fictional Anne Providence, Boxoffice magazine reports in 1948 that Susan Hayward was in talks to play the “fiery, red-headed” title role. Hayward’s 1940s repertoire was fittingly noir- and western-heavy, but as history tells us, Walter Wanger was not involved with the production after all and the part of Tourneur’s desexified Anne Providence ultimately went to a brunette Jean Peters.
Depictions of John Rackam, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read 