Soap-Opera Star Realizes Dream in Indian Pageant

Marie Cheatham, a soap-opera actress who dreamed as a child of being carried away by an Indian, had her dream come true and then some. She got carried away by a tribe.

Cheatham, of Studio City, crossed the line between make-believe and real life when a lifelong interest in Cynthia Ann Parker, the white mother of the last chief of the free Comanches, led both to an acting role as Cynthia Ann and to adoption by the Comanches.

Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnaped from a fort on the Texas frontier in 1836 at the age of 8 by Comanche raiders who killed her father and two uncles. After growing up as an Indian, she married a Comanche chief and gave birth to Quanah Parker, one of the most charismatic figures in American Indian history.

Parker succeeded his father as chief in 1867. At first he successfully fought the U.S. government, most notably in the Battle of Adobe Walls. Later, convinced that the Indians’ only choice was accommodation with the white man or death, he led the Comanches--who were among the fiercest and most determinedly independent of the Plains Indians--to accept life on the reservation.

Known for Soap Role

Cheatham, better known to afternoon TV viewers as the unscrupulously nasty Stephanie Wyatt of “Search for Tomorrow,” now plays Cynthia Ann in an annual pageant that began as the highlight of an unusual trans-ethnic family reunion, the gathering of the Parkers.

Each year the Indian Parkers of Oklahoma, descendants of Cynthia Ann and her husband, Chief Peta Nokoni, meet with their cousins, the white Parkers of Texas. The white branch of the family is descended from the members of Cynthia Ann’s family who survived the raid in which she was kidnaped.

Hundreds of Parkers from both sides of the family attend the reunion, which is held alternately at Ft. Parker, Tex., scene of the first bloody meeting of the families, and Ft. Sill, Okla., where Quanah Parker and 400 followers surrendered to the Army in 1875. His descendants live nearby, in Cache.

Re-Enacts Battle

The pageant re-enacts the story of the battle of Ft. Parker, the romance of Cynthia Ann and Peta Nokoni, the birth of Quanah, the capture of Cynthia Ann by Texas Rangers after 25 years with the Comanches, and her death 10 years later.

It tells the tale of Quanah Parker’s battles, surrender and adaptation to the swiftly changing America of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when he became a highly successful businessman and elder statesman of the Indian nations. He also joined Theodore Roosevelt’s Republican presidential campaign and appeared in an early Western movie.

Members of the family play their ancestors, Indian and white, in an outdoor pageant, “The Squaw with Blue Eyes,” that runs about 1 1/2 hours and requires a village of Indian tepees and herds of horses.

Cheatham became interested in the story of Cynthia Ann Parker in part because she has a small amount of Indian blood herself and in part because she was looking for a role that would be a change of pace from the two soap-opera characters she has played in the past 22 years, the witchy Stephanie Wyatt and the sweet, perpetually put-upon Marie on “Days of Our Lives” between 1963 and 1973.

Sought Different Role

“When I came here, all big-eyed and brown-haired, fresh from Baylor University in Waco, Tex., I began playing all these big-eyed, innocent characters, all of them victims like Marie,” said Cheatham, who is today a striking blonde of 45. “Then I went to New York, lost 10 pounds, became a blonde, and overnight I was the high-toned bitch of all times, Stephanie Wyatt.”

Cheatham, who said she is about one-sixteenth Cherokee and Choctaw, said that, when she was growing up, she had heard--and daydreamed--about Cynthia Ann Parker.

“And I’d think of how when I was a little girl in Oklahoma, I’d lay out on this wonderful porch that had been washed so often the wood was furry. I’d lay there in the afternoon in the summer and look down at the river, and up to the hill on the other side, instead of napping as I was supposed to be doing, and fantasize about how this wonderful, handsome Indian on a white horse would ride over the top of that hill and carry me away.

“That’s pretty heady stuff for a young girl, just a ticket to the moon. I began to think, why not tell that story?”

Hoping to turn the story into a movie script, she began researching the lives of Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker, in archives and museums from Texas to London. “They have quite a collection of Comanche artifacts in the Victoria and Albert Museum” in London, Cheatham said.

Visited Star House

She went to Cache, Okla., to see Star House, the rambling wooden mansion where Quanah spent his last days, and met Vincent Parker, great-great grandson of Quanah Parker.

“I said, ‘I’m Marie Cheatham. I’m doing some research on the story,’ and that was met with ‘Uh-huh, ho hum, yes.’ You know, politely ind

cating, ‘Yes, you’re one of the 18 or so that are.’

“But the more I talked to him, the more excited we got because my research paralleled his. He said, ‘I’ve been trying to put together a pageant’ and I said, ‘Oh, what a good idea. What you’ll need is some big-name performer to come down and be in it,’ and he said, ‘Well, you’re a name. You come down and be in it,’ and I said, ‘I’d love to!’ ”

“So I played Cynthia Ann in the first pageant, in 1981.”

‘Will You Be My Daughter?’

She said that, while eating lunch after that first event, the grandson of Quanah Parker, Baldwin Parker Jr., turned to her and said: “ ‘I have many rooms in my house. I have many rooms in my heart. Will you be my daughter?’

“It made me cry, I was so pleased and so happy and so proud to be asked to be his daughter,” Cheatham said. “This was really very meaningful to me, because I had just buried everybody in my Cheatham family--my mother, my father, my grandmother and my grandfather--within a space of two years.”

When she said yes, Marie Cheatham, fifteen-sixteenths Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch with a smidgen of Cherokee and Choctaw blood, was adopted by the tribe and given the name “ Tahtsi-Nupe Wy-a-Puh, “ Comanche for “Star Woman.”

‘They Treasure Me’

“I was really in need of a family, and here God just comes along and gives me a new one, and now I have a father and a mother whom I honor, and they treasure me. And I have Vincent Parker for my brother. He came out here to be in my wedding last year. It was wonderful.”

The pageant was repeated at the Parker family reunions--as a performance open to the public--in 1982 and 1983. In 1984, the pageant was not performed because of Vincent Parker’s illness, she said.

This year the pageant was moved from the family reunion and made a special performance last month at Quanah, Tex., a town named in honor of the old chief. The town was celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding.

She said she still hopes to make a movie of the story. It’s on the schedule of a production company, First American Film Capital, which she and her husband, Patrick Searcy, formed with two partners.