All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar

Literate and raunchy, wildly colorful and meticulously researched, Vernon's third self-described ``historical fiction'' recreates the real-life saga of Baby Doe Tabor (nee Elizabeth McCourt), a gold digger from Oshkosh, Wis., who married wealthy Colorado mine owner Horace Tabor, became a society lady and lost her entire fortune. Baby Doe is portrayed here as a selfish, sexually voracious, bitchy social climber; yet her love for the oafish, blustering Horace, and for their daughter, Silver Dollar, is touching. In Vernon's (Peter Doyle) assured hands the characters exhibit fierce dignity and manic energy. Scandal attended the 1883 marriage of 26-year-old divorcee Baby Doe and her 52-year-old lover of a decade. On his deathbed 16 years later, deeply into debt through bad investments and reckless spending, he urged Baby Doe to hold on to the Matchless Mine in Leadville, Colo. She lived through the Depression in a shack beside the unproductive silver mine, consorting with hobos, seeking refuge in Jesus and inhabiting her fantasies, dying in 1935. Silver Dollar, a burlesque dancer and prostitute in Al Capone's Chicago, wrote songs, poems and sensational novels. Quoting verbatim from letters and newspaper articles and from records of Oscar Wilde's 1882 lecture stop in Leadville, Vernon has fashioned a classically American, true-grit saga of greed, dreams and delusions. His frisky prose races along like quicksilver, exuding vitality and quirkiness in equal parts. (Sept.)