Born to a wealthy family in Chicago, Lincoln Ellsworth had studied engineering and trained as an aviator, successfully flying over the North Pole in 1926. He completed four expeditions to Antarctica between 1933 and 1939, using as his base the Norwegian herring boat Fanefjord. This was the boat that he planned to refurbish for his next Antarctic journey. It would carry an entire engine in spare parts below deck, as well as Ellsworth’s plane and a wild pig being fattened for a New Year’s feast. And this was the boat that would be reborn as the Wyatt Earp.
Why change the name? Ellsworth asked, answering his own question in one of his early dispatches. The choice of Wyatt Earp connected his voyage of exploration specifically with the American frontier and American individualism, “all the best qualities in pioneering and development.” It had been America’s manifest destiny to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and now it was Ellsworth’s dream to plant the flag on the southernmost margin of the planet.
Because of public fascination with Ellsworth’s exploits, Wyatt’s name was featured prominently in the newspapers at least once a month for six years, sometimes in several articles on a single day. In the New York Times alone, 227 articles appeared, with headlines such as “Wyatt Earp Sails On in Foam-Crested Sea.” The name of Wyatt Earp was indelibly linked to a national adventure that captured the American imagination.
The four voyages of the Wyatt Earp make for breathless reading even today. The “staunch little ship” fought its way through subpolar storms and vast ice packs—not unlike Josephine’s experience during her Alaskan journey. The suspense hardly ended when Ellsworth finally planted the American flag on Antarctica. During his flight across the continent, he was forced down by a blizzard and missing for almost two months. As his crew struggled to reach him, Josephine and the world read eagerly: “Wyatt Earp Off on Ellsworth Hunt” . . . “Wyatt Earp Braves Dangerous Waters” . . . “Ice Halts Wyatt Earp” . . . “Storm Aids Wyatt Earp.” Ellsworth’s rescue dominated the news, even on a day when Edward VIII ascended to the throne of England and Dr. Joseph Goebbels addressed 18,000 cheering members of the National Socialist Party in the new Deutschland Hall, demanding new colonies to fuel the growth of Germany.
Josephine was overwhelmed with pride, as if Wyatt himself were animating the intrepid explorers. The global triumph of the Wyatt Earp went a long way toward assuaging the long years of public excoriation—perhaps even better than the praise and the royalty checks from Frontier Marshal. Surely she would triumph yet over her petty money problems and private terrors of discovery and humiliation.
Perhaps, Josephine reasoned, the time had come for her to return to the stage.
THE TOMBSTONE MEMOIRS and sensationalized “true life histories” that began with Bat Masterson and continued with the early dime novels had never stopped, and now a new crop appeared. Frontier Marshal was the catalyst for much of this activity; Lake’s idealized account infuriated people like Doc Holliday’s former lover, Big Nose Kate, who was none too pleased with her role as Doc’s whore. Kate wanted to set the record straight and was collaborating with a writer. John Clum wrote It All Happened in Tombstone and published one of the few biographies of a western woman, Nellie Cashman. He became a popular lecturer on the frontier experience. George Parsons died without publishing his diaries, but Fred Dodge’s notes for his memoir eventually appeared as Under Cover for Wells Fargo.
Josephine was most incensed about Pioneer Days in Arizona by Dr. Frank Lockwood, which portrayed Wyatt and his brothers as cold-blooded killers who stalked the Clantons and McLaurys to their deaths at the O.K. Corral. As an academic, Lockwood should have been more impartial and historical, she scolded, more like Lake. Instead, Lockwood relied on Breakenridge’s Helldorado and produced a book that “teems with misinformation.”
It was Wyatt’s way to ignore criticism, but incited by Burns, Breakenridge, Lockwood, and emboldened by Ellsworth and Lake’s success, Josephine had had enough: “It is time that I had something to say,” she declared, “I am writing the story of my life.”
She discussed her plan with John Clum and with John Flood, who offered their assistance; like Wyatt, she would need a writing partner.
IN 1936, JOSEPHINE noticed an obituary entitled “Wife of Gunman’s Kin Dies,” which identified the recently deceased Alice Earp as the wife of Wyatt’s cousin and a resident of Los Angeles. Josephine tracked down the family mentioned in the article; they had not known that Wyatt’s widow was alive but invited her to visit.
Josephine arrived the next day. Instead of the rotund, windblown Josephine who presided over the Earp campsite, a newly slender and attractive older woman descended from a taxi, carrying a bakery box with a fresh cake inside. She was barely over five feet tall, and instead of her old shapeless housedress, she wore dignified and expensive-looking clothes. This first visit was lively and affectionate, as if they were indeed discovering long-lost relatives. They were eager to hear about her life with their famous cousin. And how exciting for Josephine to discover that these nice Earps were also writers and history buffs.
Perhaps they would be proper stewards of her story.
Perhaps, she suggested, they might collaborate on her memoir.
Her hosts were Mabel Earp Cason and Vinnolia Earp Ackerman, the daughters of William Harrison Earp, Wyatt’s cousin. As children in rural Texas, New Mexico, and Mesa, Arizona, they had grown up surrounded by recollections of the frontier and the Earp brothers. Seeing Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was a highlight of their childhood. At a time when laborers were paid a dollar a day, they could hardly believe that Chief Sitting Bull was paid $1.50 for one signed autograph. They never met Wyatt, and to them, Tombstone was important not as the site of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral but as the place where their parents had chosen to be married, simply because the location was convenient and fun.
They were raised with a spirit of tolerance and independence, and an emphasis on education. A poor but sociable young girl, Mabel recalled walking through “chippy town” to get to school, and befriending some of the prostitutes, who were nice to her and to her hardworking mother. The family went through the worst of the Depression in a Texas farmhouse, where men would come to the back door every day asking for food. The sisters had clothes but sometimes no shoes.
They moved to California in 1934, and Mabel became an art teacher and writer/illustrator of children’s books, while Vinnolia was eventually promoted to a senior position as head technical writer for a pharmaceutical company. They were both married; Mabel and Ernest Cason had five children, Vinnolia and Harold Ackerman one son.
The sisters had never written a book together, but responded enthusiastically to Josephine’s proposed collaboration. They liked her story, and they liked her. Their husbands were less enamored of Josephine, but both felt that the project had some potential to make money.
Recognizing that Josephine was lonely and living in a state of genteel poverty despite her good clothes, both families invited her to stay with them while they planned the book. Except for the husbands, all of them grew fond of her. What began as a temporary visit lengthened into a cycle in which she would stay with Mabel, then Vinnolia, for months at a time, and then return to other friends in Los Angeles while Mabel and Vinnolia wrote up their notes and continued their research. In the Depression era, taking in elderly relatives and stranded friends was commonplace; the Casons lived in a four-bedroom house, with grown children who were coming and going. Now it was “Aunt Josie” who became part of the extended Cason-Ackerman family.
Josephine brought Mabel and Vinnolia a large stack of research notes that had been started by the friends she had already consulted about her memoir, a short list that included Clum, Parsons, and Hart. And then the three women set to work: the interviews were conducted mostly by Mabel, with Vinnolia taking notes in her expert shorthand. Sometimes Mabel’s daughter Jeanne sat in on the interviews, listening with fascination to the stories of the old West. The sisters decided to break the story
into two sections: Vinnolia would write about the events leading up to and including Tombstone, while Mabel would work on life after the O.K. Corral.
The sisters were captivated by Josephine’s deep love and respect for Wyatt. She cast herself as Wyatt’s traveling partner and foil, never as the center of attention. Although Mabel and Vinnolia were both working mothers and respected partners in their marriages, they accepted her willing subservience as charmingly anachronistic. “Wyatt spoiled her, and she was his little pet,” Mabel’s daughter Jeanne recalled. Josephine was totally devoted to Wyatt’s memory, even “worshipful,” as well as protective of his image and reputation. A romantic teenager herself, Jeanne felt that she was hearing from a woman who adored her husband, and was sharing the stories of a successful marriage, albeit one never blessed by any church.
But in their private discussions, the adoring wife acknowledged some deep dents in her hero’s armor. Wyatt had affairs while they were together, Josephine confided to the sisters, and she even hinted at the existence of a previous wife. “She told us other things that indicated that, while Wyatt was a fine peace officer and a very brave man, he didn’t have the best of principles where women were concerned,” Mabel recalled. Josephine admitted that she was often jealous of these other lovers and told Mabel about one case in which she threatened one persistent woman with an umbrella. Wyatt too was protective of her, though she was less forthright about any dalliances of her own. Their frequent squabbles usually ended in Wyatt putting on his hat and going for a walk.
The book gave Josephine a new lease on life, and the Casons and Ackermans became her new family.
“We had no reason to feel warmth or affection towards her when she came into our lives in her old age but we were all extremely fond of her,” Jeanne recalled. “A cute, cute, elfin personality,” who always arrived with a fresh cake. She had lost weight in recent years and dressed neatly, usually in black, with her hair combed back and pulled up in a knot. Her face was powdered, her lipstick was skillfully applied, and she had a few treasured pieces of jewelry. “Let me polish up the old furniture,” she said before she went out, and then she would check her makeup and tidy her hair. For special events, she wore a white scarf around her neck or one of her beautiful silver fox furs, which she promised to bequeath to the Cason girls someday.
She must have been a striking beauty in her time, Mabel’s son Walter Cason observed. Josephine’s expressive large brown eyes and her substantial bosom were still her most memorable features; although her figure had lost its sharp curves, her eyes still shone brightly. She was a considerate guest who had to be coaxed to join family photographs and to play in the family poker games. Fastening on a crisp white apron, she prepared excellent meals, specializing in leg of lamb, Swedish meatballs, biscuits, and corn bread. She gave impromptu cooking lessons to the young Cason women and took a great interest in their romantic life. “Our parents had taught us that education came first,” Jeanne said, but Aunt Josie was more concerned about whether the smart, ambitious young women would find appropriate husbands, especially Rae Cason, who was studying for medical school. Josephine bought some soft little yellow felt chickens and instructed the girls to tuck them in their bras. “If you wear this, you’ll find Mr. Right,” she promised.
Josephine encouraged their love of the theater, and when the Cason sisters went to see a performance of HMS Pinafore, she waited up to hear everything about the evening and the production. And then she got up and “danced that hornpipe straight through,” recalled Jeanne. “You knew without any doubt that she had danced that many times in her youth. I can see her now, her big beautiful dark eyes were sparkling, very expressive, sometimes soft, and you could see the years fall away from her.”
The younger Casons often chauffeured Josephine to the Ambassador Hotel for lunch with Sidney Grauman, her old friend from Alaska, or to the MGM lot, where they waited outside impatiently, imagining that she was inside with Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, or Samuel Goldwyn. Not all the visits were social. Despite her share of Lake’s sale of movie rights, and her occasional work as a paid technical consultant, she seemed always to be threatening a lawsuit over the use of Wyatt’s name, and was evicted from at least one Twentieth Century-Fox set. The next time Josephine pitched herself as a technical consultant, for a Columbia Studio film titled The Pioneers, she was rejected.
The Casons assumed that Josephine had some special connection to the Hollywood moguls because of her religion. In fact, Judaism was a subject of great interest to the well-educated Cason family, who were Seventh-Day Adventists, and they were disappointed that Josephine was cheerfully ignorant. She did like to talk about Jewish food and tell Jewish jokes, and indulged herself in nasty insults against Jews as cheap and low-class. “The worst thing she could say about anybody was that they are just nothing but a kike,” recalled Leonard Cason, who remembered her as a “charming funny little old maddening Jew.”
The woman who had once relished simple food around a campfire and slept contentedly under the desert skies became a restaurant terror. She could really drive you crazy, Jeanne and her sister Rae recalled. A night out with Josephine usually began with a movie at the downtown Paramount Theater, and ended with dinner at Townsend’s restaurant. Josephine would order her favorite: a nice steak, with all the trimmings. But then the torture would begin. “I was an easily embarrassed teenager,” Jeanne admitted. “She would order salad, pick through it, wrinkle her cute little nose, call the waitress over, say the lettuce was wilted, or the tomatoes were soggy, point her index finger at it, and say, that salad is not good, I don’t want it, take it away! Everybody in the restaurant was dancing a jig to make her happy, and I think she enjoyed the attention.”
Josephine’s tendency to be suspicious increased as she aged. She feared that people were trying to steal her money, her letters, and the map to her secret mining claims. Harold Ackerman worked from home and had more daily contact with Josephine than was good for either one of them. Where Mabel’s husband Ernest was mild-mannered and retreated to his pipe when annoyed, Harold showed his irritation. Resentful of Josephine’s presence and her time with Vinnolia, he took so many long walks that his family considered Josephine a great form of exercise.
When she was not staying with the Casons or the Ackermans, Josephine rented a room in downtown Los Angeles or stayed with friends. The Casons were aware that she was in and out of litigation with her family, but Josephine always seemed to have ready cash. Every once in a while, she would change the names on her mining claims, putting them in the name of Mabel’s husband or her children. She kept promising Leonard Cason that she would buy him a car when her book was published or when her mines paid off.
Although she was no longer pumping her for information, Josephine continued to visit Allie Earp. It was an unpleasant surprise to discover that Allie was cooperating with a writer. So far, Josephine had managed to keep prying eyes away from Allie, who had the potential to say plenty about her dear friend Mattie Blaylock Earp. Lake had accepted Josephine’s excuse about Allie’s senility and failed to interview her. Josephine spun a similar falsehood for Mabel and Vinnolia, and mocked Allie as illiterate and ignorant. But now another writer had found Allie. After all this time, Josephine was facing exposure again.
Aunt Allie was well known in her Los Angeles neighborhood, a vigorous walker who marched up and down the streets in her old-fashioned clothes, usually making her last stop in the home of the Waters family, where she would take a rest and put her feet up, a flask of whiskey just visible over the top of her little boot. “We all loved Aunt Allie because she had such wonderful stories and an Irish wit,” said Frank Waters. Despite her tiny size and advanced age, Allie was still feisty and ready to tell the story of her beloved Virgil’s heroism to anyone who was interested.
Frank Waters was interested in everything about Allie. Wonderful authentic material had fallen into his lap, a big new story from a fresh perspective—and it was all about the famous Earp brothers and the w
omen who loved them. A writer and devotee of Carl Jung and George Gurdjieff, Waters saw Allie as the voice of truth that would validate his preconceived portrait of Wyatt Earp as a publicity-seeking exhibitionist, the ringleader of the criminal Earp Brothers gang, and the representative of the predatory corporate culture that had destroyed the environment and the frontier.
They began to meet regularly. It was easy to get Allie to talk about Virgil, to reminisce about him, and to praise him. But gradually, Frank began to draw her out about Wyatt and the other Earp women.
Waters was loading a shotgun and pointing it at Josephine’s heart.
Josephine was unpopular in the Halliwell household; for starters, she was Jewish. In the 1930s, when Los Angeles and the rest of America were experiencing a spasm of anti-Semitism, Allie’s niece found no need to hide her contempt. Josephine was “a typical little Jewess,” Halliwell declared. Allie blamed Josephine for Mattie’s death, and revealed that Josephine and Wyatt had held back the discovery of the Happy Day mines when they could have shared the news—and the possible wealth—with Virgil and Allie. She did not then know about Josephine’s royalties from Frontier Marshal, or her list of grievances would have included Josephine shamelessly pumping her for information to feed Lake. “I guess he gypped her too,” Hildreth Halliwell concluded, never knowing that Josephine had already received thousands of dollars in royalties.
Under persistent questioning from Josephine, Allie disclosed that she had been meeting with the young writer Frank Waters. There would be none of those stories, Josephine declared. In a minute, they were fighting like the two strong and angry old ladies they were. It would have been difficult to predict the victor of their confrontation. At eighty years old, Allie Earp had more wrinkles but otherwise looked, sounded, and dressed pretty much the way she had in Tombstone. At seventy-eight, Josephine was no longer the doe-eyed teenager in Wyatt’s shadow, and she had decades of experience on the public relations battlefield.
Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp Page 22