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

by Ann Kirschner

  When she arrived in Boston, Josephine went straight to Houghton Mifflin’s headquarters. Despite Lake’s warning that she was unhinged, his editor Kent found himself deeply moved by his encounter with the older woman described as such a harridan by Lake: “She sat at my desk for a better part of an hour, tears rolling down her cheeks in her emotion. She told me of various disagreements with you and with her refusal to meet your requests in some particulars.” He found no signs of mental instability, attributing her emotion to the recent loss of her husband of forty-eight years. Reminding Lake that his relationship with Josephine was not really Houghton Mifflin’s problem, Kent recommended that Lake proceed with greater “tact, patience, kindliness, and forbearance”—all characteristics that Lake had in very short supply.

  Lake finally produced a manuscript. To his surprise, Kent rejected his draft as “bilious and jaundiced,” too long and too pretentious. Complaining that it read more like a eulogy than a vivid biography, Lake’s editor appealed to George Parsons, who agreed that it dragged along and was overly partisan. This was hardly the warm first reading that Lake had expected.

  Josephine returned from Boston, comforted and emboldened. In constant contact with Flood and with her lawyer, she barraged Lake with demands. When he finally forwarded the manuscript, now revised and shortened, she protested that it was still the “blood and thunder” book she most detested, and fired off a long list of complaints. Setting aside any attempt at diplomacy, Lake took direct aim at Josephine’s “constant heckling and interference” and shot back: “I have been patient, tolerant, sympathetic, and understanding. I have wasted hours of time trying to explain and re-explain things which have been misconstrued and distorted. . . . The patience that I own is being strained close to the breaking point.” He abandoned any pretense of hiding his contempt for what he saw as ignorant meddling, suspecting that John Flood was the instigator. “I don’t care what your well-meaning but entirely mis-informed friends and advisors tell you,” he retorted to her questions about possible sales to magazines and movies.

  In one crucial area, however, Josephine was vastly relieved. Lake’s Wyatt Earp was sober and single. Other than one oblique hint, the love triangle was left undisturbed. There are no Mrs. Earps at all in his version of Tombstone, no women or wives for Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, or James. Only Doc’s lover Big Nose Kate and Addie Borland, the milliner who testified at the Spicer hearing, are mentioned. “Mrs. Wyatt Earp” makes one cameo appearance at the very end of the book when Lake inserts her into a scene of affluent domestic bliss: “In San Francisco,” he notes (tongue firmly in cheek), “Wyatt had married Josephine Sarah Marcus, daughter of a pioneer merchant in that city who, as Wyatt put it, ‘was a better prospector and camper than I ever hoped to be.’ Mr. and Mrs. Earp divided their time between their highly profitable oil and mining properties and their homes in Oakland and Los Angeles.”

  Josephine and Wyatt had faced down deadly opponents, escaped bullets and scandals. They outlived most of their enemies. Together they could have withstood anything, but alone, Josephine had lost her center of gravity. The scaredy-cat emerged at last. Stuart Lake proved too much for her.

  JOSEPHINE AND LAKE’S editor surrendered at almost exactly the same moment. Faced with Lake’s intractable opposition to any material changes, and his thinly veiled threats of a lawsuit, Josephine was defeated and contrite. From her lawyer’s office, she dictated an obsequious letter to Lake, in which she promised to cooperate in the future and to rely on Lake to protect her interests. She gave up all of her demands, including changing the title and restoring the dedication to William S. Hart.

  From Boston, Kent accepted Lake’s edited manuscript and sent the author a flattering telegram: EARP IS GOOD JOB MAKES FASCINATING READING STOP.

  Once Josephine and Kent capitulated, Lake turned his attention from writing to marketing, relying on his experience as a press agent. Early serialization of books was an excellent form of prepublication promotion and Lake sold serial rights with great gusto, negotiating to cover the same travel and research expenses that he already tried to charge to Josephine and to Houghton Mifflin. America’s favorite magazine, the Saturday Evening Post , published some of his best chapters under the title “The Man who Brought Law to The Frontier.” If Josephine had not been so angry at Lake, she would have appreciated the placement, since her nieces used to joke that the Wyatt Earp they knew was more likely to hold the Post than a gun.

  Houghton Mifflin had high hopes for Frontier Marshal. The publicity and advertising campaign stressed that readers were finally going to get the one true story: “Wyatt finally did talk! He spent the closing months of his life telling Stuart Lake the story of the Old West that no one else knew.” A reproduction of the handsome jacket illustration was distributed to bookstores, with the caption “He outshot the bad men of the old Southwest.” Lake fired off one marketing salvo after another, and Houghton Mifflin complied with most of them. No detail was too small to escape his attention: when he saw a jigsaw puzzle that had been made from the cover illustration, he objected to the fact that the title did not appear, “not a damn word on the box or puzzle” to cross-promote the book. He constantly monitored sales and bookstore inventory, complaining like any other author when friends wrote to say that their favorite bookstore was out of stock. His most creative idea was displaying frontier memorabilia in major office buildings and bank chains along the Pacific Coast, using enlarged photos, shotguns, saddles, and poker games. The window displays were so popular that they caused traffic jams.

  Frontier Marshal was a runaway success. Wyatt Earp was a child of America’s West, now reborn into the Depression and Prohibition, an era of audacious bank robbers and gang wars. America needed a hero, declared Florence Finch Kelley, who reviewed Frontier Marshal for the New York Times. She compared Tombstone to the fearful lawlessness of Chicago and New York. “What both these cities need seems to be a few Wyatt Earps,” she wrote. “A hundred times the best book written on the Western era,” gushed the Dodge City Globe. “In a day when cool, courageous, steel-nerved men were the rule, Wyatt Earp was the coolest, the bravest, the nerviest of them all,” wrote Joseph Henry Jackson in the San Francisco Chronicle, while in the New York Herald Tribune, Leslie Gannett promised that readers would find that Frontier Marshal had “all the exciting qualities of a dime novel, the added value of authentic history, and the curious virtue that it might be used as a Sunday School text of a Hollywood scenario . . . the blood and thunder and stirring human qualities of the great Norse sagas and of Homer, yet is of our own day and generation.”

  Wyatt’s friends gave Lake their own rave reviews. Congratulating himself and Fred Dodge for having stayed alive long enough to see the book’s completion, John Clum wrote, “I think it is the best story of the old West that has been published. I am sure that Wyatt would like it.” It was indeed “Wyatt’s book,” agreed Fred Dodge.

  A minority of negative reviews complained about the book’s length, and the tedium of reading about a cartoonish Marshal Earp wearing a “halo and a robe.” A few claimed that the Tombstone episodes were drained of drama, more like a “brief for the defense.” A more substantive criticism came from Billy Breakenridge’s champion, William MacLeod Raine. Lake was no historian, and his “incorrect and absurd” account of the gunfight deliberately concealed that the cowboys were leaving town when the “gamblers came down to kill them.” He must have been hypnotized by Wyatt, Raine speculated.

  The popularity of Frontier Marshal pacified Josephine immediately, as did the handsome royalty checks that began arriving from Boston, split evenly between her and Lake. Given the dark days of the Depression and the relatively recent publication of western books by Burns and Breakenridge, the sales were remarkably robust. Although Josephine was miffed that Lake sent her one measly complimentary copy, she was pleased with the money, and gratified by the fulsome praise from Wyatt’s friends. Lake presented her with copies of some fifty favorable reviews.

  However,
after all the fine words with which Lake began their partnership, and the contentious negotiations over contracts and editorial direction, he was perhaps hardest on Josephine after the book was published. To Kent he wrote: “She has done nothing but make trouble ever since Wyatt died, for me. She has not contributed one word of help or information, but has devoted herself to spreading scandal about me. . . . Suppose you think I’m hard, but I know Mrs. Earp from Wyatt’s intimates, over a long period of years. Long ago, one of Wyatt’s best friends told me how to handle her. I hadn’t the heart to take his advice, until I became desperate.”

  Lake and Josephine were like divorced parents with joint custody of Wyatt Earp: the love was long gone, but they could never be free of each other. Perhaps in recognition of that reality, their relationship eventually stabilized. Lake hogged the limelight, but Josephine preferred it that way. Lake had actually managed the writing and publication of Wyatt’s biography with considerable skill, she realized, and the weight of positive reviews was convincing. Perhaps too his confrontational manner—with her, with his publisher, and with anyone else who threatened to get in his way—made it absolutely clear that she had no leverage. Even her lawyer advised her to accept her situation, which after all was not so bad, with a steady stream of royalties and the prospect of lucrative movie deals. With the death of George Parsons, and then William Hunsaker, and then John Clum, Josephine was losing her circle of allies.

  This did not mean that Josephine stayed out of Lake’s way. She tried to stop production of the movies Law and Order and Frontier Marshal in the belief that they placed too much emphasis on Wyatt as a gunslinger. Although the studios did not need her permission to make a movie about Wyatt, they preferred to avoid any legal entanglements. They sanitized the script for the film version of Frontier Marshal, but also downgraded the production. Lake, of course, was furious, because he was counting on box office success to stimulate sales of the book. Josephine mocked the eventual film Frontier Marshal as “no more the story of Mr. Earp’s life than an animated cartoon of Mickey Mouse.”

  The news that Lake’s wife was pregnant took the last heat out of Josephine’s fury. Baby inquiries replaced questions about book sales, copyrights, movie rights, and photographs; she tracked the baby’s due date and reminded Lake that he must let her know immediately whether the stork delivered a girl or a boy. She was one of the first to send a gift and a card to baby Marion Carolyn Lake.

  When Lake first begged Josephine to give him Wyatt’s set of Bancroft’s History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, she refused, but later sent the books as a sign of the growing goodwill between them. Besides, she owed Lake money, and hoped he would enjoy owning Wyatt’s volumes and “apply [them] on the little debt I owe you.” She also began to refer publicly to Lake’s book as accurate, interesting, and the last word on her husband’s life. To reporters who approached her with questions about Dodge City and Tombstone, she developed a standard response: “In the writing of Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, the author, Mr. Stuart N. Lake of San Diego, made a thorough research of the incidents of Mr. Earp’s life.” In fact, she stated, the book was “dictated to Mr. Lake by my husband.”

  Lake would never have another success like Frontier Marshal. For the rest of his life, he would remain fiercely litigious about anything to do with Wyatt Earp. His belief that he had exclusive rights would eventually bring him into conflict with anyone who felt that they too had something to say about Marshal Earp and Tombstone.

  STILL A STRONG woman in her seventies, Josephine tried to resume the nomadic cycle that had once seemed so natural during her five decades with Wyatt. The mining camp at Vidal, which had once been filled with the sound of Wyatt’s deep voice, was silent. She rarely slept there, preferring the Grand View Hotel in Parker, where she reserved the bedroom at the top of the stairs, one with a chamber pot, to avoid a long walk in the middle of the night. With her share of the royalties from Lake’s book and Hattie’s oil wells, she could support herself. In Los Angeles, she occasionally rented rooms in the area where she and Wyatt had lived, but more often saved money by staying with friends like Sarah Lewellen, whom she had known when they were both young women in Tombstone.

  She and Flood corresponded regularly, and he typed her business letters as well as the occasional response to a fan or a persistent newspaper reporter. On Thanksgiving 1931 she wrote to Flood from Oakland, where she was staying with her niece, Edna. Josephine was distracted and overcome by memories of a previous November: “Everything was just lovely, but I missed my dear one. I just kept thinking of our nice dinner you and a few others had just three years ago Thanksgiving Day at our little home in Los Angeles when my dear husband was ill in bed but smiling and said you all enjoy yourselves and I will have mine in bed and he was so happy to have you all with him. I can just hear him say Flood I will have my ice cream now. Oh how I do wish they would let him rest in peace.”

  Now she faced her first Thanksgiving without her sister, who died on April 7, 1936. After Wyatt’s death, the two women had become even closer. Hattie sold Lehnhardt Candies and closed the big house in Oakland, moving into a smaller residence where Josephine continued to be a frequent visitor until Hattie’s death. “I am very lonely for my dear sister and it seems like I have nothing now to live for, my darling husband left me and now my best dear friend has gone away too,” she cried to Stuart Lake.

  The loss of her sister precipitated a medical crisis, just as Wyatt’s death had. Josephine suffered an acute attack of arthritis in her neck and upper arm, which nearly immobilized her for months. She was contending with money problems as well; now that she was not staying frequently with Hattie, she had more of her own expenses to cover. Josephine wrote to Lake of her desire to sell a bearskin rug that had been given to Wyatt by Bill Hart and also confided “I am having some trouble about my interest in the royalty from the oil and I will have to wait until it is settled which I hope will be soon.”

  Hattie’s ashes were scattered among the wildflowers of the Berkeley Hills, as she had instructed. Her chinchilla-trimmed broadtail coat and Russian sable scarf went to Edna, who received half of her mother’s estate, with the other half left to Hattie’s son Emil Jr. If both of her children died, the estate was to be split equally between their children and “my beloved sister, Josephine Earp.” However, the will was silent on the subject of the wells that had been legally transferred by Wyatt to Hattie and then leased in 1925 to Getty Oil. After all the time that Josephine and Wyatt had spent prospecting, it was only these investments that had proved to be significant. They were now generating enough money to be a major part of Hattie’s estate.

  Emerging as the strongest voice of the Marcus family’s next generation, Edna believed that she and her brother owed nothing to Josephine. She was the sole supporter of her two children and had serious aspirations as an artist. If she didn’t have to share with her aunt, Edna could live comfortably on her inheritance. Ironically, Josephine may have seemed too much of a Marcus to Edna, who was eager to begin her life anew with no Jewish connections to slow her down.

  The payments to Josephine, which had once arrived so regularly on the first of the month, simply ceased.

  Josephine inquired, politely at first, and then complained with increasing urgency. After months of entreaties, she filed a lawsuit in 1936 to enjoin Getty Oil from paying royalties to Hattie’s heirs. Neither side really had their heart in the lawsuit, however, and court dates were delayed so many times that the judge threatened to drop the case from the calendar. The relations between Josephine and her family remained cordial during most of the lawsuit. They would appear on opposite sides of the court during the day, and go out to dinner in the evening. The plaintiff, Josephine, babysat occasionally for her great grand-nephew, who was the grandson of the defendant, Edna. In the will that Josephine composed during the lawsuit, she divided her estate equally among her nieces and nephews, referring to each of them warmly by name, leaving a blank for the perso
n or people who would be the ultimate beneficiary of the disputed oil properties, and also leaving another blank for the recipients of future Frontier Marshal royalties.

  Edna idolized Wyatt, and had fond memories of her many visits to the camp near Vidal. But her feelings toward Josephine were strained by the lawsuit. When the court finally agreed with Edna that she and her brother had sole control of the oil leases, with no legal obligation to share with their aunt, there was little reason for them to remain in contact.

  JOSEPHINE SHOULD HAVE been the matriarch of the family, but she presided over an empty table. Hattie’s death and the lawsuit permanently loosened the ties between Josephine and her family. While not absolutely penniless or homeless, she was a lonely old woman, worried about the future, and dismayed about the rift with her niece. She was lost without Wyatt and Hattie, and depressed by the reality that her life of adventure had slipped forever from her grasp. The entire country’s economic depression and the ominous gathering of war clouds over Europe only magnified her diminished personal circumstances.

  But something always turned up for Josephine. She would live to write Wyatt into one more chapter of the American frontier.

  IN 1931 THE explorer Lincoln Ellsworth was planning a historic expedition to Antarctica, hoping to complete the first transcontinental flight. An enthusiastic reader of Frontier Marshal and other tales of Tombstone, Ellsworth wanted to give copies of Lake’s book to his entire crew and to create a shrine to his boyhood hero in the captain’s cabin. Best of all, Ellsworth planned to name his ship the Wyatt Earp.

  Ellsworth wrote to Lake, requesting a photograph of Wyatt in later life. “Charmed to oblige,” Lake responded and crowed to his editor, “Can you beat Lincoln Ellsworth’s naming his ship?” Ellsworth also contacted Josephine, who realized immediately that anyone who did not know Wyatt’s name before would certainly know it now, and would associate him with courage, integrity, and patriotism. With help from John Flood, Josephine gathered together a precious store of memorabilia, including Wyatt’s Colt 41 pistol (oddly, the weapon he brought to the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight), one of Wyatt’s shotguns, and his last pair of wire eyeglasses, worn just one week before he passed away. “I would not part with them if it were for someone besides you,” Josephine wrote.