Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp

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Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp Page 19

by Ann Kirschner


  “YOU DO THE telling and I, the writing and whipping into shape,” proposed an enterprising young writer named Stuart Lake to Wyatt. Just before Christmas, 1927, Lake tracked Wyatt down in the desert to propose that they collaborate on a biography. He had once worked as a press agent for Theodore Roosevelt, and had attended but never graduated from Cornell—credentials that meant nothing to Josephine or Wyatt, until he dropped the one name that did matter: Bat Masterson.

  Lake’s approach was straightforward and businesslike, promising less a masterpiece of art or history than a work for hire: “I am certain that we could work out a plan including division of labor and remuneration that would be mutually satisfactory.” Wyatt responded with some warmth, but postponed their next meeting for a period of time that stretched from a few weeks to six months. He was ailing all that winter, some days entirely unable to leave their camp.

  Josephine knew that this was likely to be their last chance. Their fortune had slipped through their fingers. Wyatt was no longer working, and as their money pressures mounted, she found the responsibilities of caring for an aging husband, even one as beloved as Wyatt, to be sometimes overwhelming. Their dream of prospecting bonanzas was long over. They had moved to another Los Angeles bungalow, this one at 4004 West Seventeenth Street, and for the first time, Wyatt acknowledged that his health “was not as rugged” as he would like. They were watching every penny, annoyed by the barrage of books and films about Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, none of which returned any money to them. To supplement Hattie’s monthly subsidy, Josephine was forced to borrow money from old friends such as oil tycoon Edward Doheny, who had once worked with Wyatt at the Oriental Saloon and was now one of the richest men in America, living in a grand French Gothic chateau in the same West Adams neighborhood as the Earps’ modest bungalow. It was harder to get an audience with Doheny than with the pope, quipped the Los Angeles Times, but for Wyatt’s sake, Doheny admitted Josephine and paid some of her most pressing bills.

  Lake was offering them a fifty/fifty “horse-high, bull-strong, and hog-tight” split. While he had no publisher yet, Lake inspired confidence that he could be the one to write that clean and lively story.

  By the early fall of 1928, they’d reached an agreement, and Lake was ready to sit down with Wyatt Earp.

  Although Josephine dreamed of securing Wyatt’s legacy, she could hardly have imagined that she would succeed in commissioning a work that would endure for generations and become the sturdy cornerstone for Wyatt Earp’s reputation into the twenty-first century.

  LAKE WAS AWARE of Flood’s previous attempt, and requested copies of his detailed notes and drafts. Head held high, Flood turned it all over and said, “I am not interested for one moment as to financial remuneration; the purpose is to square Mr. Earp.” Flood’s honorable stance was the only compensation he would receive for his patient, if uninspired, work as Wyatt’s first authorized biographer. Nor did he receive any credit from Lake, although Lake described “reading and rereading the clippings and Mr. Flood’s manuscript” in the first few months as he prepared for his interviews with Wyatt. His working notes show continual reminders to himself to “see Flood for detail.” In later years, Lake would assess Flood’s contribution with more ego than honesty and eventually dismissed it entirely: “Flood’s so-called manuscript of memoirs contributed exactly nothing to my job: literally, I kept as far away from it as possible. . . . Wyatt never dictated anything of his career to him . . . beyond one quick skimming I never read it until after my book was out.”

  Wyatt tried again to cooperate but was no more forthcoming than he had been with Flood. Lake found his subject “delightfully laconic, or exasperatingly so.” He considered whether Wyatt’s long silences were due to the constant barrage of criticism about his past actions. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he assured Wyatt, “nothing that will not bear the light in the eyes of any open minded judicious man or woman. . . . You were one man who had nothing to fear from history. . . . Things have changed somewhat it is true, but most of the world knows that in the days with which the most of our story will deal men lived differently than now. We must be as frank about that as about anything else.”

  However, Wyatt hardly needed Lake’s reassurance; he was not a man given to self-doubt, and he had a blunt appreciation of his own strengths and weaknesses. His silence was simply his style. “I was pumping, pumping, pumping, for names and incidents and sidelights; all of which Wyatt could supply but none of which he handed out in any sort of narrative form,” Lake complained. To bring color to Wyatt’s dry recitation, he eventually resorted to putting words in Wyatt’s mouth, as he later admitted: “Wyatt never ‘dictated’ a word to me. I spent hours and days and weeks with him—and I wish you could see my notes! They consist entirely of the barest facts.”

  Lake lived in San Diego but came to Los Angeles to interview Earp about six times. Josephine was always there. Lake was restless about her presence and her frequent consultation with lawyer Bill Hunsaker, warning that this kind of “red tape” would impede his progress. There was talk of a visit to Tombstone, but Wyatt was too weak to travel. Josephine responded on Wyatt’s behalf to Lake’s long lists of questions, correcting facts along the way and debunking myths such as the widespread notion that gunfighters tallied kills with notches carved in their guns. It was Josephine to whom Lake turned most often for photographs and clippings. She threw herself into this new role as research assistant, consulting with her family, with Allie Earp, with Bat Masterson’s family. Sadly, much of what Lake sought had been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

  By late fall, with his research well under way and several interviews with Wyatt under his belt, Lake complained playfully that the writing was going too well. He finally read Helldorado, useful mostly for its “mistakes and misstatements,” but he was concerned about the copyright that Breakenridge had imposed on Wyatt’s photograph. A new portrait would have to be taken. In the meantime, Lake made plans to join Josephine and Wyatt in Vidal for the winter, and was ready to pack up his typewriter and books. But when the time came, Wyatt did not have the strength for the move. Then Lake himself fell victim to a serious case of the flu. Bedridden for months, he had no way of knowing that he was losing the last precious months of Wyatt’s life.

  WYATT’S CIRCLES GREW smaller in the waning months of 1928. Bill Hart wrote often, with warm valedictories about “how glad I am to be considered your friend.” A steady stream of friends and family continued to visit the bungalow. Josephine’s grandniece Alice remembered her last visit: “I can still see him. He came to the door, straight as an arrow.” John Clum was a frequent visitor. Playwright Wilson Mizner came by, entertaining Wyatt with songs from his old repertoire at Considine’s Hall in Nome. Tom Mix came from the movie set to spend hours with Wyatt; according to screenwriter Adela Rogers St. John, one of the last journalists to interview Wyatt, he and Tom Mix were serious readers of literature and history, as well as enthusiastic consumers of newspapers and magazines. “A high grade man of the green cloth,” the local bookstore clerk noted on Wyatt’s file. He and Tom Mix read Shakespeare together, especially Hamlet, so talkative a man that “he wouldn’t have lasted long in Kansas,” joked Earp. Always eager to emphasize that they did not really kill a man before breakfast in Tombstone, Wyatt observed “there are more corpses in Hamlet than there was in the O.K. Corral, and with less reason.” After all, he added, we killed none of the wrong men like Hamlet did, with a nod of sympathy to “poor old Polonius.”

  Even in his last year of life, Wyatt had a powerful effect on women. Adela Rogers St. John declared that she would never forget seeing Wyatt as he rose from a chair to greet her, “straight as a pine tree, tall and magnificently built. I knew he was nearing 80, but in spite of his snow-white hair and mustache he did not seem, or look old. His greeting was warm and friendly but I stood still in awe. Somehow, like a mountain or a desert, he reduced you to size.”

  Nineteen twenty-eight was a seas
on of loss. Tex Rickard and Newton Earp died the same week. Tex Rickard was nearly twenty years younger than Wyatt, while Newton was ten years older. Josephine considered not telling Wyatt, but his doctor advised her to be honest. Tex’s untimely death from a ruptured appendix was mourned by thousands of people who filed past a gaudy bronze casket in the middle of Madison Square Garden. Newton had a Grand Army funeral. The brothers had not been particularly close, but the double loss still hit Wyatt hard.

  “I can’t plan any more to climb the hills and hit the drill,” Wyatt mused to Hart. He refused to consult a physician until Josephine recruited Dr. Fred Shurtleff, a prominent physician who was president of the Los Angeles County Academy of Medicine and had served as a deputy sheriff in the frontier and a police captain at Alcatraz. Wearing boots and slinging a saddlebag over his shoulder, Dr. Shurtleff looked every bit the “cowboy doctor” who belonged at the bedside of Wyatt Earp.

  On Election Day 1928, Wyatt left the house one last time to have another photograph taken for Lake’s book and to cast his vote for Al Smith, the Democratic candidate in the presidential election. Wyatt may have once been a staunch Republican, but the old saloonkeeper had announced that he would cast his vote for whatever candidate stood against Prohibition. Josephine apparently never exercised her right to vote.

  Wyatt spent Thanksgiving Day in bed, with his big cat Fluffy nearby. Flood and a few other close friends came to visit; Josephine would recall later how pleased he was to have company on a day that they had always celebrated together, complete with his favorite ice cream dessert.

  On January 12, 1929, John Clum visited with a friend from Alaska, and there were some hollow jokes about whether Wyatt might return to Nome. Dr. Shurtleff stayed all day, as did a nurse. During Wyatt’s long and restless night, Josephine kept watch. It would always puzzle her what he meant when he sat up suddenly, and said, “Supposing—Supposing . . .”

  “I wish I knew what was troubling him.” Josephine turned his last words over in her mind. “I should like to finish the sentence for him.”

  On the morning of January 13, 1929, Dr. Shurtleff was reading aloud from Alfred Henry Lewis’s 1905 book The Sunset Trail, about the frontier exploits of Bat Masterson and the Earps, and had just finished a passage about Doc Holliday when Wyatt died.

  THE PASSING OF Wyatt Earp was a national news story. “Out from the colorful past of the old West stepped these friends of Wyatt Earp,” began one article that named each of the remarkable pallbearers, including John Clum, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Wilson Mizner, Charles Welsh, and Judge Hunsaker. The sight of the distinguished group, many of them leaning on canes and weeping openly, struck a chord of nostalgia as “a reunion of the sturdy men and women who knew Wyatt as a wiry, six foot two gun officer of the law in mining town, cow camp and almost anywhere along the frontier where trouble was apt to pop loose.” Although Wyatt was most often eulogized as frontier gunman and courageous defender of law and order, he was also beloved by the Hollywood film community. Dr. Thomas Harper presided over the open casket service, which was held at the Pierce Brothers Mortuary, a chapel of the Wilshire Congregational Church, where Wyatt and Tom Mix had been frequent visitors. Edward Doheny sent an elaborate floral arrangement. Lake was there, still weak from the flu, summoned by a telegram from Josephine.

  Josephine did not attend the funeral. In her place, her sister Hattie rode with John Flood in the cortege. Longtime friends Grace Welsh Spolidoro and her mother helped with the details of Wyatt’s cremation and served as witnesses, together with Flood and Hattie.

  Josephine’s absence attracted little notice. This was a day for the public to say good-bye to Wyatt Earp. She may have been overcome by grief or unnerved by the long months of constant nursing. As she knew from previous crises, such as her friend’s childbirth in Alaska, Josephine’s bravery had its limits. Unlike Wyatt, she did not face the darkest moments of life and death with equanimity.

  Josephine considered bringing Wyatt’s ashes to Vidal, but her thoughts returned to her childhood and to San Francisco, Wyatt’s favorite city. It had been decades since she had any overt Jewish affiliation, but in all the difficulties she was facing, here was one relatively simple, available choice.

  She waited a long six months to decide, but finally, accompanied by her nieces, she took the train from Los Angeles with Wyatt’s ashes in an urn, held tightly in a satchel on her lap, braced against the rattling and lurches of the train, and brought him to the Hills of Eternity cemetery outside of San Francisco. It was the place where her parents and brother were buried, and there was room for Wyatt and, someday, for Josephine.

  Never suspecting that Wyatt Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery, his acolytes would search for another thirty years before finding his grave.

  5 | JOSEPHINE’S LAST TRAIL

  LESS THAN a year later, some of Wyatt’s pallbearers found themselves back at Tombstone.

  In 1929 the current editor of the Tombstone Epitaph and a group of local boosters suggested creating an event called “Helldorado” as a rousing celebration to mark the old town’s fiftieth birthday. Tombstone badly needed some good news; having survived fires, the death of the mining industry, and the shootout at the O.K. Corral, the town continued to lose jobs and prestige to nearby Bisbee, which was now vying to replace it as the seat of Cochise County.

  As a move to demonstrate political viability, Helldorado failed. The county seat moved to Bisbee. As a publicity stunt to launch Tombstone’s next life as a tourist destination with a whiff of the frontier West, it succeeded beyond its creators’ wildest dreams.

  No stagecoach or horses required: Tombstone was now an easy drive from Tucson in a newfangled automobile, just a nice day trip along U.S. Highway 80, the “Broadway of America.” The plans for the event came together very quickly. Helldorado would be a four-day extravaganza where the whole town spruced itself up to welcome its guests, many of them wearing their best western whiskers and boots, a street party where history took a back seat to braggadocio and pageantry, complete with parades, bands, contests, and brightly painted Indians in war bonnets. “They cleaned the Bird Cage Theatre out, the first time in forty years, and every male within 30 miles is trying to raise a beard,” joked Harrison Leussler, who attended the first Tombstone reunion as the western scout for Houghton Mifflin, the Boston publishing company that had carved out a strong market in frontier-themed books. Although Tombstone lost many of its earliest buildings in the fires, Schieffelin Hall and the Bird Cage Theatre were still standing. And of course, despite modifications over the years, there was still an O.K. Corral.

  Of the 400 pioneers who were invited, 343 attended. Fox sent a crew to film the entire event for later release in movie theaters. As a highlight, visitors were invited to attend dramatic reenactments of the Earp-Clanton gunfight, with cowboys and lawmen shooting blanks at each other three times a day. No murder, no mayhem, and no booze.

  Former mayor John Clum led the parade. He had accepted the organizers’ invitation to join an honorary advisory committee, along with Breakenridge, Burns, and others. But Clum came home disgusted by “this style of rip-roaring, Helldorado publicity for poor old Tombstone.” Nothing had replaced mining as the engine of economic development, and Clum saw no future for the town other than the exploitation of its violent past.

  Hearing Clum’s account, Wyatt’s friend Fred Dodge was glad he had stayed home. “The battles fought for law and order in Tombstone were no moving picture affairs,” he wrote to Clum. “Good men, who were our friends, met wounds and death there. It is an offense to us and to them to reproduce these things as an entertaining spectacle, an incident, for it is not possible to show what necessity lay back of them and made them inevitable.”

  For the rest of the world, opening day of Helldorado would forever have a different significance. October 24, 1929 would thenceforth be known as “Black Thursday,” the day when the American stock market crashed.

  Josephine was not invited to Tombstone. She would not have
gone anyway, but when she heard about the O.K. Corral reenactments, she started writing letters to friends and government officials. Her lawyer, William Hunsaker, patiently instructed her in the laws of libel, which held that she was not entitled to sue for defamation of a dead person, no matter how beloved or deserving. Arizona governor George Hunt answered her objections with a promise to take up the concerns of Wyatt Earp’s widow with the mayor of Tombstone. The mayor of Tombstone followed up with more letters to Josephine from the town’s leadership and the organizers of Helldorado, all reassuring her that they were “pro-Earp” and that the staged shootout was “history and reenacted just as it happened.” The current U.S. marshal took the opportunity to blame Johnny Behan for everything—and then inquired when he could expect his copy of Stuart Lake’s book.

  The cowboy faction was no more pleased with Helldorado than Josephine: they had already complained that the reenactment was a one-sided glorification of Wyatt Earp and his murderous brothers.

  HELLDORADO AND THE stock market crash were among many sources of distress for Josephine in 1929. Wyatt had been her anchor for nearly fifty years. They had no permanent address, but it had always been the two of them in whatever temporary place they called home, rarely apart for more than a few days. His friends and his enemies had testified to the power of his presence and his strong will; all that had been taken away, and Josephine hardly knew what to think or do. “I miss my dear husband,” she lamented in almost every letter she wrote, regardless of the subject or recipient.

  She went back and forth between rented rooms in Los Angeles, her sister’s home in Oakland, and the desert camp, but no place felt comfortable. Her sister had been her closest friend in the years leading up to Wyatt’s death, but now she too was suffering from a combination of business problems, ill health, and anxiety. Hattie’s biggest concern was her daughter Edna, who had recently lost her second husband, which left the young mother of two alone again.

 

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