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

by Ann Kirschner

  Close friends drifted away. The younger members of the Welsh family, with whom Josephine and Wyatt had stayed for long periods of time in the desert and Los Angeles, had a strong preference for Wyatt over Josephine—as if it were necessary to choose between them. They made no secret of their contempt. “She was worthless, I didn’t like her, folks just put up with her on account of Mr. Earp,” Christenne Welsh said. At a time when money was tight and families were struggling to feed their children, Christenne and her sister Grace believed that Josephine was stealing food from their mother’s kitchen. They accused Josephine of leaving a frail Wyatt alone in an empty house with nothing to eat, while she spent her days playing cards, commuting on the “big red” train from Los Angeles to San Bernardino. In their view, Wyatt was a “normal gambler” who enjoyed a friendly poker game in the Vidal country store, while Josephine was a “compulsive gambler” who would return from a day at the tables and head over to the Welsh home to scrounge for food. If she was seen coming up to their door, their mother told them to hide under the bed, hoping that she would go away.

  While the Welsh family found it easy to turn away from the widow Earp, John Flood remained steadfast. Drawing on a surprisingly deep well of patience and compassion, he endured Josephine’s querulous complaints that he was ignoring her or mismanaging her mining properties. The two of them shared the sharp pain of grief and loss. Flood remained committed to Wyatt’s legacy and successfully petitioned the postmaster general in Washington to rename the tiny town near their mining claims as “Earp,” recommending the proposed namesake as “an estimable citizen and much beloved by all who know him in this country.” He continued to handle Josephine’s considerable business correspondence and urged her to sell the mines and, above all, to clear her mind of business conflict: “Yes I know the weather is hot, the flies are a pest, and the mosquitos are worse. . . . Let us set aside the gossip, the envies, the jealousies and all the other useless things of life, and save the situation.”

  Josephine was particularly anxious about the fate of the Happy Day mines, once the source of such heady expectations. Mine transactions required site assessments and good faith negotiations for which she had neither the training nor the temperament. Wyatt had always handled their mining affairs, with help from John Flood and other experts. Josephine was understandably a novice, but instead of trusting her advisers, in her inexperience she was prone to a suspiciousness that bordered on paranoia. She would agree to a deal, only to back out at the last minute, alienating the professionals and even some of the friends who were trying to help her. She could swing from grief-stricken widow to aggressive, arrogant negotiator in an instant, as she did in response to a friend who offered assistance: “I do wish I could have my dear husband back again, I have surely suffered since he is gone, but I am going to fight for what is mine to a finish, and I have good backing too.”

  As the terrible year of 1929 came to a close, Josephine was a woman alone with her thoughts. She was nearly seventy, and struggling to make decisions without consulting Wyatt, as she had during her entire adult life. Flood did his best to lift her spirits. “Take hold on life all over again; you are just in the middle of it,” he exhorted with a burst of religious fervor. “I know that grief is not easy to bear, but life is a riddle—who knows the answer! A wonderful Creator—how grand is the world, all full of His glory!” He urged her to seek distraction in golf, tennis, swimming, horseback riding, taking in the new movie at Grauman’s. Although he suggested gently that she consider hiring a private secretary, he volunteered to answer the crush of correspondence after the funeral. Some of those who sent condolence cards and flowers, like Edward Doheny, received individual responses under Josephine’s signature. Flood also composed several form letters, one for admiring peace officers, and one for reporters who were asked to respect Wyatt’s wish for “silence in the news columns.”

  To Stuart Lake’s dismay, he became the new center of her life. She sent letters and telegrams, called him at home, and asked him to visit frequently. She wanted assurance that he was making progress on the book. Lake appealed to Bill Hart for help in keeping Josephine at arm’s length, and also asked for a recommendation to his publisher, whetting Hart’s appetite with hints that Wyatt had told him things that no one else knew, not even Josephine. With a mild reproof, Hart reminded Lake that Wyatt’s death was still a fresh wound, but then agreed to write a strong personal recommendation to his editor at Houghton Mifflin, urging him to make a deal for “my dear friend’s life story.”

  Acting as his own agent and lawyer, Lake negotiated with considerable skill and prescience. He received no advance, but he retained secondary rights such as serialized magazines and movies, downplaying to the publisher what those might be worth in the future. Josephine’s participation was written into the publishing contract, indicating an equal division of royalties. By the fall of 1929, Lake sent Josephine a contract for her signature, with some triumph that the terms of the deal were “exactly as we wished them—maybe a little better than I had full right to expect.”

  Josephine constantly asked to see Lake’s work in progress so that she could correct errors and monitor his adherence to the “nice clean story” of Wyatt as peace officer, loving husband, and frontier leader. Without consulting Lake, she promised the book’s dedication to Bill Hart.

  She had moved from the Seventeenth Street bungalow she had shared with Wyatt to the nearby home of her Tombstone friend, Sarah Lewellen. Her main activity was research for Lake, “ransacking” her memorabilia and reaching out to the dwindling number of Wyatt’s friends from Dodge City and Tombstone. She found photographs of Wyatt and his brothers, but Lake’s request for an Earp shotgun proved more difficult. Josephine and Wyatt had stored several boxes and trunks in San Francisco, which were apparently destroyed in the fire of 1906. Bat Masterson’s widow had little to offer, since she had given Bat’s personal possessions to Alfred Henry Lewis, author of The Sunset Trail.

  One of Josephine’s best sources of information about the Tombstone years was her sister-in-law, Allie Earp. Allie and Hildreth had enjoyed the Sunday visits with Josephine and Wyatt, but now the last of the Earp brothers was gone. When Josephine came around alone, she was received with polite cordiality. Allie’s memory was sharp, her tongue even sharper, and she knew far more than Josephine about the Earps in Tombstone. She reminisced fluently and cheerfully. She too had lost most of her memorabilia, including a scrapbook that was destroyed in a hotel fire in Oklahoma, but she still had a few treasures that she passed to Josephine.

  “I wonder what Sadie is up to,” her niece recalled Allie saying. “She must be asking for all this information for some reason.”

  Josephine never mentioned a word about a book. Nor did she put Lake and Allie in direct contact; Allie was senile, Josephine told him, an old lady who couldn’t tell him a thing.

  It hardly mattered, because once Lake had run through the material that he requested from Josephine, he barely spoke to her. When he asked for an extension of their contract to allow him another six months, Josephine reacted with anger and some suspicion. What was taking so long? She turned to Flood for help. Given his own failed efforts to write Wyatt’s biography and a growing mistrust of Stuart Lake, Flood must have found his situation acutely uncomfortable. Only a few years before, he had been the one under Josephine’s thumb, enduring her demands for speed and her editorial tyranny. “Writing a story is not an easy task; much more time is required, usually, than one may imagine,” Flood wrote tactfully, apparently resisting the natural impulse to remind Josephine that he knew her “hints” all too well.

  When Lake found himself on the receiving end of Josephine’s constant reminders that his book “must be entirely different from all others,” nothing in the “blood and thunder” mode, he displayed none of Flood’s restraint. Lake had no particular affection or respect for Josephine, who was a constant drag on his time and an annoyance to an experienced, self-confident writer.

  Researchin
g Wyatt’s early years as a lawman, Lake ran up a considerable tab and billed Josephine for his expenses. He and his wife took an extended trip to Tombstone, soaked up the local atmosphere, and met with some of the people recommended by Josephine and others. “I bought me a pair of overalls,” he congratulated himself. In the courthouse vault, he found juicy details on the checkered past of Johnny Behan, who had been indicted several times after Wyatt Earp left town, with charges ranging from “minor thefts of official funds to felonies of scandalous proportions.” Lake also discovered that Johnny had run away with “his best friend’s wife”—presumably Emma Dunbar. None of the previous Tombstone historians had done anything like this level of sleuthing, he bragged: not Burns, nor Bechdolt, nor Raine, nor Breakenridge.

  “I have not tried to interpret Wyatt Earp,” Lake pledged. “I have told of the old West as simply as I might.” But by the time he began to write, Wyatt was dead, and there was no check on Lake’s exuberant press-agent style of history. He was after the legend, not the life, and had no hesitation in making up quotes and pumping up thin anecdotes with additional material that made for a better story, while claiming that all his information was carefully documented and out of the mouth of Wyatt Earp.

  Meanwhile, to the dismay of his editors and Josephine, Lake missed deadline after deadline, sometimes taking off a few weeks from the biography to “turn a quick dollar” and churn out some lucrative magazine articles. As the delays stretched out from weeks to months, and Josephine had not seen a single page, she began to suspect that Lake was actually working on a different book. She pounced on the publication of a novel called Saint Johnson as confirmation: the tale of a brother’s vengeance in corrupt Tombstone was clearly based on the Earps. Despite Lake’s strenuous denials, she accused him of using William R. Burnett as a pen name.

  Aligning Wyatt’s life and career to the mores of Prohibition and the Depression would have been difficult for any author, let alone one with Lake’s mythmaking talents. In the early days of their collaboration, Lake sought to placate Josephine, sometimes appealing to her friends for advice and moral support. “I have nothing but respect for Mrs. Earp’s sentiments, the fullest regard for her idolatry of her husband’s integrity,” he protested to Hart. Now he hinted to Hart and others that Wyatt had preapproved his manuscript, implying secret knowledge that Wyatt had not shared with his wife: “I have never had the heart to tell Mrs. Earp that Wyatt and I managed to sneak in quite a few talks together, away from her.” Fearing that her long-dreaded exposure was at hand, she appealed to Hart, who rebuked Lake with a sharp reminder that “the memory of her husband is very dear and vital to her.”

  The thought of Lake walking around Tombstone and talking to the old-timers must have struck terror into Josephine’s heart. She had every reason to fear that he would stumble over her relationship to Johnny Behan and the sordid tale of Mattie Blaylock Earp.

  This time, her fears were well founded. Lake smelled a big story in Josephine’s past. He learned that Sadie Mansfield, the prostitute who had been cited as a central figure in Johnny Behan’s divorce, had followed Behan to Tombstone, where she raised her prices and became known as “Forty Dollar Sadie.” Perhaps Sadie Mansfield was Sadie Marcus, he theorized. Both women were from Europe, and their families had lived in New York before traveling west. That Sadie Mansfield may have been from Germany, and Sadie Marcus from a mostly Jewish province in Prussia, was hardly in Lake’s calculus. He shared his theory with Leussler, who had spent decades scouting old Western stories and agreed to use his own sources in Tombstone to probe into the possibility that Josephine had been a prostitute.

  “Do you remember in our conversation, the last time we met there was a certain person mentioned called Forty Dollar Sadie?” Leussler wrote. “I just wanted to tip you off to the fact that the wrong supposition was taken when we suspected a friend of mutual acquaintance of being this person, because it is not so. They are two separate distinct people. B.B. [presumably Billy Breakenridge] knew them both and when I next see you I will tell you a damn good story about forty dollars. But don’t, for goodness sakes, think it is the person we both thought it was.” In case Lake did not get his broad hint that “the person” was Josephine, Leussler continued with a strong recommendation that Lake let “her” see the manuscript as soon as possible.

  So maybe Josephine wasn’t that Sadie, but something still seemed fishy to Lake. Knowing nothing about her brief history with Pauline Markham’s Pinafore troupe, but having some evidence to tie her to Behan and believing that she had been a performer, he concluded (and attributed to Bat Masterson) that Josephine had been a dance-hall girl, “the belle of the honkytonks, the prettiest dame in three hundred of her kind.” And from those near-facts, he spun a tale close to the truth: “Johnny Behan was a notorious ‘chaser’ and a free spender making lots of money. He persuaded the beautiful Sadie to leave the honkytonk and set up as his ‘girl,’ after which she was known as Sadie Behan.”

  Lake was off in a few ways: the love triangle of Behan-Josephine-Wyatt was not “Tombstone town talk,” as he asserted. The inquest and other legal proceedings around the gunfight never once mentioned Josephine. Her relationship with Behan never appeared in the newspapers, nor did Allie Earp acknowledge that Josephine and Wyatt had an affair in Tombstone. In focusing on Josephine, Lake missed the bigger story that was hiding in plain sight: Wyatt Earp, the subject of his biography, had a wife in Tombstone, and that wife had come to a very bad end. Despite Lake’s self-congratulations on his extensive research, he failed to find Mattie in his interviews with Wyatt’s friends, and he missed the paper trail in the public documents. She was identified as Mrs. Wyatt Earp in the 1880 census, in real estate records, in mining claims, and in the Tombstone newspapers.

  “Should I or should I not leave that key unturned?” Lake demanded of his editor, Ira Rich Kent. Already impatient with Lake’s slow pace and purple prose, Kent brushed off Lake’s circumstantial case against Josephine: “I don’t see how you can very well tear away Mrs. Earp’s entire covering and leave her completely exposed after 50 years of what we will assume to be a faithful and virtuous life.” Besides, Kent “already knew the general facts about Mrs. Earp’s status at Tombstone,” presumably from his agent Leussler. So Kent urged Lake to leave out Josephine by name but to include some “general statement to the effect that it was understood that a part of at least the trouble between Behan and Earp arose from their disagreement over a girl”—and get on with the important business of finishing the book.

  Never one to admit defeat, Lake did a quick reverse and assured Kent that he would find another way to get the “woman interest into the Tombstone chapters.”

  Had Lake discovered the truth about Mattie Earp, he would probably have buried the story anyway. Would the public cheer for a hero so flawed that his actions led his abandoned wife to prostitution, drug addiction, and suicide? Great storyteller that he was, Lake would likely have shrugged his shoulders and cheerfully relinquished the juicy scandal, since he saw more profit in building up Wyatt than in using his women like bullets to knock him down.

  Lake and Leussler conspired to keep Josephine in the dark, especially about the proposed title, Wyatt Earp, Gunfighter, which Leussler predicted will “hit her right between the eyes. . . . My suggestion is that you make a change in the title, for her eyes, and when the book is submitted if the publisher changes it back as you originally titled the story—why of course you won’t know anything about the matter as the publisher sometimes makes such a change. Get the point?”

  Whenever Lake and Josephine did talk, they quarreled. Lake chose a photograph of Wyatt in shirtsleeves; Josephine objected that a coatless Wyatt would be taken for a “tough.” She warned that Lake was making her sick; in fact, she was suffering from severe headaches that had been diagnosed as some kind of “growth on the brain.” Resisting the entreaties of her sister and niece to go to the hospital, she declared melodramatically that she wished to have completed her review of the
manuscript before “the unexpected might happen and I should pass away as Mr. Earp.” Perhaps she did have a brain tumor, Lake told his friends, but his diagnosis was a lot simpler: Josephine was crazy. “She is undependable, mentally; unbalanced, psychopathically suspicious.”

  Still convinced that Lake had written Saint Johnson, Josephine was furious to learn that the objectionable book was being filmed by Universal. She spent $700 with a private detective to prove Lake’s guilt (the detective found nothing). As a last resort, she set off across the country to plead her case directly with Lake’s publisher.

  This was only her second trip to the East Coast. Before she left, she had dinner with John Clum and then stopped off in Texas to visit with Fred Dodge. They had already heard from Lake, who began courting them before Wyatt’s death. With bland hypocrisy, Lake assured Wyatt’s old friends that Josephine was still his trusted partner and collaborator: “Mrs. Earp is to share [the book’s profits] with me, now that Wyatt is no longer here. That was provided for in our agreement, but would have been the case anyway. We signed the paper as a matter of record for possible publishers. Between us, we needed none.”

  Clum and Dodge suspected no duplicity on Lake’s part and conferred on how they might best serve as Josephine’s advocate. “It was sad to see her so worn and troubled, and so alone,” Dodge sympathized. “Evidently she is inexperienced in handling business matters. I suppose Wyatt attended to everything.” He suggested that she give Clum power of attorney to represent her in the publication business. They shared her disdain for Saint Johnson. Those books were worthless, Dodge and Clum agreed, except as “samples of the trash that is being gotten out and sold on the wave of popular interest in the old west. It would make you, and me, and Wyatt, if he were still here, think that we had never been in Tombstone.”