John Flood and Edgar Beaver had been together only a short time by then, but among the things Edgar just seemed to know was this: There was a part of John that needed a family, that yearned to be somebody’s son. John had lost both parents and his only sister in quick succession when he was very young, and while John himself never made that connection, he was aware from the beginning of the deep satisfaction he found in helping the Earps.
The couple seemed a little lost in the modern world. Neither had been educated much beyond the basics. Although they knew John wasn’t a lawyer or an accountant, to them, a college man was a college man, even if he’d run out of money before he finished the engineering program at Yale. He wasn’t able to offer much more than moral support after the bunco charge, but he celebrated with them when the charges were dismissed because the police had bungled the raid, arresting Mr. Earp before the faro game got under way. Soon the Earps were relying on him for advice about electricity, and the new income taxes, and where to find a good dentist, and he solidified his position as their adviser when he suggested that they lease one of their more promising oil claims to Mrs. Earp’s sister.
“Mrs. Lehnhardt has the capital to develop a well,” John told them, “and she could provide you a steady income from the royalties.”
Hattie agreed to the deal. The well came in. The yield was moderate and Hattie’s checks were small but they were regular and made all the difference to the Earps financially. John was pleased with how things turned out.
It wasn’t a chore to visit them every Sunday afternoon in those early years. Mrs. Earp always had fresh coffee and pastries on the table, and all three of them loved to talk about cinema. The Earps always went to the Saturday matinées, though they often found the newsreels disturbing, especially after 1914, when war broke out in Europe.
“What in hell are they fighting about?” Mr. Earp asked John, but nobody really understood that.
“No more war talk!” Mrs. Earp would declare. “It’s much too dreary!”
Movies were more fun. Not surprisingly, the couple favored Westerns. Mrs. Earp liked Tom Mix and thought he was very funny. Mr. Earp thought the actor’s big hats and fancy costumes were ridiculous, but admired his trick riding. In his opinion, William S. Hart movies got a lot of things right, though it bothered Mr. Earp more and more that every movie had a gunfight like the one in Tombstone.
“You’d think street fights like that happened all the time,” he’d say. “And the movies make people believe you could tell a man’s character from the color of his hat. It wasn’t like that.”
“They’re turning my husband’s life into money,” Mrs. Earp would complain, “and we aren’t getting a penny, Mr. Flood. It just isn’t fair!”
Mr. Earp’s dismay and Mrs. Earp’s indignation came to a head in 1922, when the Los Angeles Times printed a series of sensational articles about Wyatt’s exploits in the Old West, based on an exclusive interview with the notorious old marshal about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
“A man came by and asked a lot of questions, but my husband told him to leave,” Mrs. Earp told John. “The paper just made up the answers!”
“Made me sound like an idiot,” Mr. Earp grumbled. “I never woulda said Doc Holliday was a ‘merry scamp.’”
“I don’t see how they can print stories about my husband without his permission,” Mrs. Earp said. “It’s not fair, Mr. Flood. They’re making money from his story, and we aren’t getting a penny. Surely that’s not legal! There must be something we can do.”
“I have a friend . . .” John said cautiously. “Edgar is a journalist. Perhaps we can consult him on the matter.”
THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, over coffee and an excellent applesauce spice cake, Edgar Beaver read the clippings Mrs. Earp had saved, and listened to Mr. Earp’s concerns about the articles, and felt for himself the responsibility of being asked for advice by an earnest old man and his anxious old wife.
“What’s required is a letter to the editor,” he told them, accepting a “second slice of cake” pressed on him by Mrs. Earp, who may not have noticed that he’d already had two pieces. “Don’t complicate it with outrage or emotion, Mrs. Earp. All you need is a calm, factual letter correcting the errors in the article.”
He finished the third piece of cake, but when Mrs. Earp began to repeat for the fourth time that it couldn’t possibly be legal to print things like that and complained again about people making money by slandering her husband, he stood and excused himself, saying, “I’m afraid I really must dash.”
John stayed on to help the Earps compose their letter, refuting the article’s objectionable content, point by point. A few days later, the Los Angeles Times printed a retraction.
“You did it!” Mrs. Earp cried when he arrived that afternoon, wrapping him in a jubilant, cushiony embrace. “John, dear, you did it!”
“Thank you, son,” Wyatt said quietly, offering his hand.
It was the first time they’d called him anything but Mr. Flood, and John was touched to his heart. He’d never seen Mr. and Mrs. Earp happier, and yet . . .
When he got home, he was depressed and uneasy.
“Something’s wrong with Mrs. Earp,” he told Edgar, “but I just can’t quite . . . put my finger on it, I guess.”
Edgar’s judgment was unclouded by affection. He’d known after that third slice of cake. “Wyatt is a magnificent old thing, but Mrs. Earp reminds me of my aunt Lillian. Mark my words, dear boy. She’s already a little batty and she’s going to get worse.”
NOW LET ME WIN NOBLE RENOWN!
GIVE THE BARD HIS SHARE OF HONOR
WYATT, TOO, HAD SEEN THE SIGNS, BUT SENILITY is slow and sly and subtle. Small strokes—pinpricks of the brain—change people little by little. Those who watch dementia creep up to claim a mind make light of early lapses. They explain away the repetition and strange behavior. They try not to see what’s happening.
Sadie had always been dramatic. She’d always had a tendency to dwell on things. And when she was just getting started on some mania, it could seem quite reasonable for a while.
“What we need is an authorized version of the gunfight,” she decided after the Times backed down. “You have to set the record straight, once and for all. John Flood can write it up. It’ll be no trouble at all for a college man like him! He’s here on Sundays anyway.”
John was charmed by Mrs. Earp’s confidence that he could tell her husband’s story properly. Though dumpy and frumpy at sixty-two, Sadie still had a way of shining her eyes at a man and making him feel he could accomplish anything, simply because she had faith in him. Wyatt was slower to yield to her enthusiasm. He hated talking about the past in general and Tombstone in particular. When anybody brought the gunfight up, he’d plead, “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” But Sadie insisted, over and over, that an authorized version of the story was required. Wyatt would give John Flood the facts. John would type it up, the way he’d typed the letter to the Times. That would settle things once and for all.
When Mr. Earp finally agreed to cooperate, John felt honored to be entrusted with the old man’s memories. He himself believed that he could compose a calm, factual rendering of the events in Tombstone.
And so it began.
Sunday after Sunday, John Flood and Wyatt Earp worked their way through the mules, the stagecoach robbery, Kate’s drunken accusation, the deal with Ike, the gunfight, the maiming of Virgil, the murder of Morgan, and the vendetta that followed.
“It’s heartbreaking,” John told Edgar. “It’s hard for him to talk about what happened. Mrs. Earp is getting more and more upset. She didn’t witness any of it herself, and Mr. Earp tells her not to listen, but she refuses to leave while he’s talking.”
At first John thought she was being brave, facing up to the truth of her husband’s violent life. Sometimes, though, he got the feeling that she was monitoring what John heard. Once, when he asked, “When did you and Mrs. Earp meet? Was that before the gunfight?�
� she stopped the conversation cold. And if Mr. Earp started to talk about his brother James or his sister-in-law Bessie, Mrs. Earp was adamant: This was not material for a William S. Hart movie.
“Movie?” John asked, startled. “Is there going to be a movie?”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Earp said breezily. “My husband’s story is perfect for William S. Hart. You’ll write the screenplay. Mr. Hart will make a movie that tells the story of Tombstone as it ought to be told, and all our money worries will be over!”
John glanced at Mr. Earp, who rolled his eyes and shrugged.
“Mrs. Earp,” John said carefully, “I am competent to write letters for you and Mr. Earp, and I’m doing my best with the Tombstone story, but that’s not the same as writing a screenplay! What you’re asking me to do . . . Well, it’s like expecting a sandlot ballplayer to break into the big leagues.”
“Oh, but just imagine your name on the credits, dear! Screenplay by John H. Flood! It’ll be so exciting!”
“Bill Hart! That old ham?” Edgar said when John got home that night.
“Mrs. Earp is convinced that a movie about her husband would be a hit. She wants me to write a letter to Mr. Hart and offer him an option on the story.”
“Hart’s completely washed up, dear boy. He’s been trying for years to get his magnum opus financed. Nobody will touch the project.”
John looked miserable. “It’s . . . very difficult to say no to Mrs. Earp. I know it sounds crazy, but I . . . I want to do this for her.”
She was the closest thing John Flood had to a mother. He found it inexpressibly sweet when she called him “John, dear,” and Edgar was fairly certain the old girl was fully aware of that.
“Well,” Edgar sighed. “I suppose there’s no harm in trying. Send the letter. Let Bill Hart be the one who disappoints her. Then she’ll blame him, not you.”
EDGAR WAS RIGHT: William S. Hart was box office poison in 1923.
The first in a long line of Shakespearean actors to leave legitimate theater for harlot Hollywood, Bill Hart had arrived in Los Angeles at the age of fifty. He got work almost immediately in a series of one-reel cowboy movies, which were already madly popular in 1914. Nobody seemed to mind that his acting was stagey and mannered and stiff. Audiences would pay to see anything that moved in those days, and studios were satisfied with anything that made a buck. But Bill Hart had spent two years of his childhood living on the Minnesota frontier. Like Wyatt Earp, who was sitting in the dark watching those Westerns, he was annoyed by the absurd screenplays and the stupid mistakes in those early oaters. So he began to write and produce his own movies.
That’s when his career really took off, for his films portrayed the Old West with a zeal for authenticity that was immensely appealing to those who were sentimental about a by-gone era, which had lived ugly but read romantic and ennobling. A William S. Hart movie brought “wilderness” and “pioneer days” inside theaters. Grown-ups could gaze at dramatic painted landscapes without heat or dust or rattlers. Children could enjoy the gun play without catching a stray bullet. And everyone—including Bill himself—was captivated by the character he played in every film. A good bad man.
A man who did wrong for the right reasons.
For almost a decade, William S. Hart was the biggest celebrity in the world, but as moviegoers grew more sophisticated, his acting began to seem laughable. Box office revenues fell. The fan mail disappeared. By 1923, Bill Hart was a has-been, and he knew it. Which made it all the more thrilling when he got a letter signed by Wyatt Earp.
During the past few years, that letter read, many wrong impressions of the early days of Tombstone and myself have been created by writers who are not informed correctly, and this has been a concern I feel deeply. I am now seventy-five and realize I am not going to live forever. I want any wrong impression to be made right before I go away. The screen could do all this, I know, with yourself as the master mind.
Later on, Bill Hart found out that the letters from Wyatt were written by a man named John Flood, who’d looked after the aging Earps for years. Still later, Bill learned that Flood had to rewrite everything over and over, for Mrs. Earp was never satisfied with how he put things, even if she’d dictated the letter to start with. Even later, Bill came to understand that it was Mrs. Earp who felt such deep concern about Wyatt’s reputation, not the old lawman himself. But when he got that first letter, Bill Hart wrote back personally.
Yes, he agreed, Westerns were popular but—regrettably—not William S. Hart Westerns, according to the big studios, anyway. Fed up with their negativism, Bill was busy trying to produce his first independent film. At the moment, he wasn’t able to take on Mr. Earp’s project, though he sympathized with what he thought was Wyatt’s distress. It makes my hair stand on end when I read things about the West that are not true. I can imagine what it must mean to one like yourself, who has been through it all, to have false stories printed about you.
He closed by urging Mr. Earp to find a good writer to tell his story and promised to take a look when it was all down on paper. He meant exactly what he said: He’d take a look. His letter was not an option contract, let alone a promise to produce a movie.
But that’s not how Sadie would see it.
WHEN THEY GOT THE LETTER from William S. Hart, she felt like a girl again. How long had it been since the dreary world seemed so full of promise? Ages and ages and ages!
Dear John’s idea about the oil royalties had saved them from destitution, and now his screenplay would make them rich! Of course, she was a little frightened as well, for there were elements of her husband’s story that concerned her. Things that would not be right for a William S. Hart movie. “What Mr. Hart wants is a nice clean story, with pep!” she’d tell John.
That became her constant refrain: John must write a nice, clean story, with pep. “Keep it clean,” she’d remind him when he left each Sunday evening, and she’d give a conspiratorial wink before she added, “You know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Earp,” he’d say. “I’m not sure I do know what you mean.”
Sometimes she’d laugh and say merrily, “Of course you do!” But sometimes she’d wring her hands and insist again, “It has to be clean!”
“Clean, clean, clean! She sounds like Lady Macbeth,” Edgar remarked at the end of ’23. “Methinks that lady doth protest too much. I know what you and I are hiding, dear boy. I wonder what dirt Mrs. Earp has under her rug.”
Draft after draft, John did his best for her, trying to guess what she wanted. Pep seemed to involve making up dialogue, but John Flood was a middle-aged engineer and not much given to imagining lively conversations among men who were about to shoot one another. Clean was easier. Clean meant that neither gambling nor saloons could be mentioned. Faro was considered a bunco game now, and Prohibition was national law. Mrs. Earp wanted nothing in the story that could cast a shadow on her husband’s reputation as an incorruptible lawman. At the same time, she was buying bootleg whiskey for Wyatt and laughed the inconsistency off when John asked about that as gently as he could.
Mr. Earp almost always had a glass in his hand, though John never saw him drunk. The old man would nurse a shot for an hour or more and then pour himself another. “Takes the edge off,” he said once. “Softens things, some.”
When John asked about how slowly he drank, Mr. Earp looked surprised. “Never thought about it before, but . . . That’s how Doc Holliday used to drink. Little by little. Unless his chest was real bad . . .” He drifted off for a time. That was happening more as he moved into his late seventies. “Doc was a real good dentist,” he said then, and his eyes came back to John’s. “He was a real good man. Better’n me. He spoke the truth when I didn’t want to hear it.”
All the same, to please Mrs. Earp, John took any reference to liquor out of the manuscript.
“It has to be clean,” she’d say every Sunday as he left. “Keep it clean, John, dear!”
MONTHS TURNED INTO YEARS. John knew that wha
t he was writing was bad, and it was getting worse by the week. Every Sunday Mrs. Earp asked for changes that snarled the story and introduced logical errors. She never made these demands where Mr. Earp could hear her. She’d pull John into the kitchen or follow him out the door and put that flirtatious hand on his arm and smile up at him from beneath her lashes.
“John, dear, you can’t write about that,” she’d say on days when Mr. Earp had recounted something violent or illegal. “It’s much too dreary! Much too . . . complicated. The story needs more pep!” More phony dialogue, she meant.
Sometimes, though, she’d speak up and argue with her husband.
“It drove a lot of men crazy,” Wyatt told John Flood in 1925. “The way Ike Clanton repeated things. How slow he was to get what you were saying.”
“But you trusted him?” John asked.
“I guess. Yeah. When I made the deal, I trusted him. That was probably stupid.”
“Ike was stupid, not you,” Mrs. Earp snapped.
Mr. Earp looked at her. “We both got hit a lot when we were kids, Sadie. Hell, you’re supposed to hit kids. Spare the rod, spoil the child. But Ike’s father, and mine? They was a lot worse than most. People talk about knocking sense into a kid, but getting hit like that can scramble up your thinking.”
He turned back to John Flood, who was startled by how worked up the old man was getting.
“I saw it when Milt Joyce bashed Doc Holliday. It was the same with Curly Bill. Maybe Ike got hit so much, he never got over the scrambling. And he got hit again the night before the gunfight. And then he was drinking because he was so scared Doc Holliday would tell the Cow Boys about Ike ratting on them. Don’t you remember, Sadie? I told you the night of the gunfight! I told you it was my fault!”
“It wasn’t your fault! None of it was your fault!”
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