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

by Ann Kirschner

  Lake would never write that story.

  IN 1937 JOSEPHINE named John Flood as her executor, as well as the beneficiary of the polar-bear-skin rug and the Happy Day mines. In this version of her will, she left the copyright and future royalties from her book My Life with Wyatt Earp to the family of Mrs. Addie Schofield Sinclair. Her nieces and nephew and their children were to receive equal shares in her mines. As to the future royalties from Frontier Marshal, she left the beneficiary’s name blank. Forgetful or angry or uninterested in the outcome, she destroyed that will, leaving only Flood’s carbon copy in his files to reveal her intentions.

  In 1944, she owed money all over town, and her rent was overdue. She was living at the home of Mrs. Lon Maddox, at 1812 West Forty-Eighth Street, her third or fourth address in Los Angeles since Wyatt’s death. Her total property included one trunk, one radio, and five boxes of miscellaneous items, estimated at a total of $175. Another trunk remained at the Ackermans’ house, and a third trunk had been removed from the Oakland mansion before Hattie’s death and stored in Edna’s home. She had been selling or giving away whatever would buy her goodwill or a cushion of cash. Her niece Alice had two of Wyatt’s canes and the bearskin rug that had been a gift from William S. Hart. The Casons received some monogrammed linens, a Bible inscribed to Wyatt, and a cameo of Josephine. Those beautiful silver fox furs coveted by Jeanne and Rae ended up around the neck of her lawyer’s secretary. Perhaps she had simply forgotten her promise, or perhaps she owed a debt that she repaid with the furs.

  She composed a new will, just one short paragraph, shaky in syntax and skimpy on details:

  I Josephine Earp in sound mine am sick, and if anything should happen to me I want Bessie Nevitt, to take full charge of all my belongings. She will know my bags copy my full life story will protect picture made of my late husband Wyatt Earp fight for me just if I would do she and her husband Wilfred Nevitt will have full charge and will do just like I want to do. These are my wishes in sound mind.

  “I know you’re in there, Mr. Flood!” In the last year of her life, Josephine had taken to sliding angry notes under John Flood’s door when he was not home, or when he chose not to open the door. Her aggressiveness frightened him, and he began to keep track of her visits with handwritten notations on the back of calendar pages, with quotes from her: “I’ll get back at you—good and hard.” Finding his door locked, she rang the bell and banged on the door. Once she stuck her arm through the screen door to reach the doorknob. He recorded her threats—“I would not open it either if I were you”—in faint pencil on the back of another calendar page.

  Flood’s calendar pages kept growing. He added a few random dates and Josephine’s address, the names of her landlady, her attorney, and some of her debtors. Her bizarre visits stopped sometime in the fall of 1944.

  Josephine died on December 19, 1944.

  A terrible silence followed her death. No immediate family stepped forward to make the arrangements for her funeral; it was William S. Hart and Sidney Grauman who paid for the brief service at the Armstrong Family Mortuary, but neither of them attended. Rabbi Maxwell Dubin officiated, most likely pressed into duty by Sidney Grauman. Her nieces were absent. Mabel and Vinnolia were unaware of her passing for several months. Cremation followed immediately at Westwood Memorial Park. Flood stayed away, though he received a copy of the program from one of Josephine’s friends, who chose the 1936 A. L. Frank poem “The Rose Still Grows beyond the Wall.” Her ashes were later sent to her niece Alice Cohn, who brought them to the Hills of Eternity cemetery, where Josephine would come to rest next to her mother, father, brother, and Wyatt.

  It was six months after D-day, the Battle of the Bulge was still raging, and the British were pushing forward in Burma. Despite a world at war, there was room in the news for a small obituary to run in the Los Angeles Times on the death of the “widow of the picturesque western frontier gunfighter, United States Marshal Wyatt Earp.” Cause of death was cited as a heart attack; her death certificate also listed dementia as a contributing factor. While her passing was noted in some of the places where she and Wyatt had lived, there was none of the outpouring of affection or reflection that accompanied Wyatt’s death.

  Her will was never properly executed. Bessie Nevitt sued unsuccessfully for probate soon after Josephine’s death, and then several creditors began to press claims against the estate. Her landlady retained her personal effects because she had not paid the rent. Flood failed to collect his loan of $157.

  Lake called on Josephine’s family and pressed them to pay her debts to him. He was also searching for a manuscript that she had left behind, presumably in association with their proposed collaboration. Niece Alice Cohn turned the question around to Lake. Having read that My Darling Clementine was in production, she pressed Lake for information about whether Josephine’s manuscript might have been stolen by Bessie Nevitt or Mrs. Maddox. Surely the consent of the family was required for any motion picture sales, she argued, and Josephine’s three nieces were her rightful heirs. As they were soon to find out, however, Lake had no intention of sharing future movie rights payments or royalties with them, or with anybody else.

  Writing in 1952 to an Earp relative who had inquired about Wyatt’s place of burial, John Flood filled in the blanks: the circumstances of Wyatt’s and Josephine’s death, and the names and addresses of Josephine’s living relatives.

  “I am a bachelor,” he noted, “[residing] in a small cottage in the rear of 2020 Fourth Avenue. . . . When you are in Los Angeles, be sure to call. It, probably, will require several months to tell the story although, I promise it will be thrilling enough so that you will not go to sleep while listening.”

  6 | PLANET EARP

  WYATT EARP and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral never went out of style. Almost anything based on western themes and events continued to grab the public’s attention, and making movies and publishing books only became easier after Josephine’s death. The facts about the real person faded away. There were no visitors to a certain Jewish cemetery outside of San Francisco, because Wyatt’s burial place was unknown.

  Nobody was looking for Josephine.

  Not even a world war stopped the interest in Wyatt Earp. Although there would be dozens of biographies, long and short, scholarly and speculative, Frontier Marshal held its position as the most popular. During World War II, some 100,000 American soldiers received free paperbacks, courtesy of the Council of Books in Wartime.

  Lake no longer had to share the money. Ever wily, he convinced Josephine’s family that they should not expect any royalties, since the era of Earp was over, and besides, Josephine died in debt to him. Lake was disingenuous at best: there were several new Earp-themed projects in the Hollywood pipeline, and a newfangled thing called television was about to transform the media world. Wyatt Earp was headed to the next stage of immortality, and Lake preferred to ride alone.

  Tombstone’s hero burst into America’s living rooms on September 6, 1955. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp aired on ABC, with handsome Hugh O’Brian playing the role of Wyatt Earp and a theme song so memorable that it would linger in the audience’s head long after the show went off the air, six years and 249 episodes later. Lake wrote a new edition of Frontier Marshal for teenage readers and served as a consultant for the creation of the television show and its first thirty-five episodes. The story lines were lame, and most episodes featured gunshots so loud and frequent that O’Brian suffered permanent hearing loss. But it was one of the most popular shows on television, shortly followed by Gunsmoke and Bat Masterson. Soon every major broadcast network had a production tied to Wyatt Earp.

  Josephine’s relatives and friends tuned in, too. The show reminded her great-grand-nephew Felton Macartney that he had seen some old steamer trunks in his mother’s basement labeled “Property of Wyatt Earp.” To his disappointment, he found there only stinky old clothing, an address book, and a watch fob.

  OF THE PEOPLE who had been involved with Josephine in
the 1930s and 1940s, a few were still alive. Harold Ackerman was now a wealthy widower who watched a lot of television. He wrote to Mabel how he missed Vinnolia, who died in 1954, and how he wished they could all watch The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp together.

  Mabel hoped some day to finish Josephine’s story. She thought she had found a new coauthor when her son Walter introduced her and Harold Ackerman to his former classmate, John Gilchriese, a devoted historian and collector of all things western. Gilchriese’s sincere interest in frontier life drew the dwindling number of pioneers to him. With a photographic memory and a deep grasp of detail, he remembered the names of their sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters, and in gratitude, they spun their yarns about life in the Old West, and pressed souvenirs and clippings on him. As he traveled all over Arizona, his collection grew from first editions of Jack London and Mark Twain to precious manuscripts and maps, and when he ran out of space in his small house, he rented garages and storage spaces. Eventually, Gilchriese would claim a deeper connection to the people and papers associated with Tombstone than anyone else—and he had the goods to back up his claims.

  Now that Wyatt was the hero of the American living room, Harold was angry all over again about how Josephine and her “shrewish” ways had cheated Mabel and Vinnolia out of their rightful place as narrators of this untold part of Wyatt’s story. “You can’t tell me Wyatt was a killer,” Harold declared. “He lived with Josie for nearly fifty years!”

  NO ONE HAD yet told the story of love at the O.K. Corral. Mabel saw it as a unique woman’s story and wanted to claim a special place for Josephine. She felt the pressure of history and a specific fear that Lake would scoop her yet. “I’d like to be the first to give it to the public,” she said. “I think my sister and I earned that right. And [Lake] got it in a manner, by fraud it seems to me.”

  Harold begrudgingly admitted the value of Josephine’s perspective, since “the estimate of a man told by his wife of half a century should have some element of truth.” He encouraged Mabel to sign a formal partnership agreement with Gilchriese.

  Although she was a far more experienced author than Gilchriese, Mabel took the young man at his word that he could fill in the big holes left by Josephine’s misdirection, especially about Tombstone. She set to work again with her previous manuscript and her voluminous research notes. She knew Josephine better than anyone alive. Who else could speak authoritatively to her history and her distinctive character traits, right down to her “Brooklynese” accent? “I want to give quite an accurate picture of her without making it too derogatory—she had her good points which can be emphasized,” Mabel said, sketching out her portrait of Josephine in advance for Gilchriese. “She had quite a violent temper and was jealous. I’d like to bring that out too. She also said that in their prime Wyatt was jealous of her.” But she knew that she would be stymied once again by the mystery of Tombstone, and looked to Gilchriese to “prime” her on that critical year. “My material is untrustworthy—and perhaps dangerous,” she admitted. “My bombardment of you with letters begins with this,” she wrote on October 6, 1955, and posed a list of the questions that most tantalized her: Did Josephine dance at the Bird Cage Theatre? Was “Little Gay” her stage name? She hoped that Gilchriese would help her locate Josephine’s family.

  They would have been a great team: Mabel’s psychologically rich portrait of Josephine set like a jewel within Gilchriese’s comprehensive knowledge of the era, with her elegant, clear prose bringing Josephine back to life. Mabel worked “day and night” on her draft, fretting about whether the reader would be impatient if she took two whole chapters to get Wyatt and Josephine together in Tombstone.

  Gilchriese, however, shared nothing with Mabel. She knew nothing about his other sources, and would have been amazed to discover that John Flood, Wyatt’s friend and first biographer, was still alive and in possession of a treasure trove of original documents, as well as a deep source of information—and prejudices—about Josephine. Together, Flood and Gilchriese had walked the streets of Tombstone. For the orphaned bachelor Flood, the Earps had been the most meaningful relationship of his life. Still angry that Lake had exaggerated his own closeness to Wyatt Earp, Flood saw Gilchriese as the path to restoring his rightful place. Of course, he had no idea that Gilchriese also knew Stuart Lake and was now acting as double agent with all of them: Cason, Lake, and Flood.

  Recent years had elevated Wyatt in Flood’s estimation and lowered Josephine. He apparently never wrote down his stories about her but shared many of them with Gilchriese. What Flood had seen or heard firsthand, and what Gilchriese invented, would remain unknown. However, relying on stories that were purportedly told by Flood, Gilchriese certainly devalued Josephine’s stock still more among Earp loyalists and enemies alike. He was the source of the story that Josephine had exploited the Cason and Ackerman families for food and shelter during the difficult last years of her life, an accusation rejected by Mabel’s family. Josephine “came with the intention of writing the book, not trying to mooch off them,” Jeanne Cason Laing said. “My mother was sick to death of Mr. Gilchriese and his little tricks.”

  His was a vindictive, imperious, and bitter Josephine: everyone disliked her, but some disliked her more than others and nobody cared when she died. Gilchriese attributed to Wyatt’s niece Alice Earp Wells the theory that the Earps’ fifty-year relationship was held together not by affection and shared history but by some dark secret that Josephine knew about Wyatt. “Get your ass in the kitchen,” Wyatt would snarl, a pattern that would kick off a screaming match, with Josephine hissing at Wyatt about shortcomings ranging from his sexual prowess to his breadwinning capacity, always throwing Johnny Behan in his face as the rival she should have stuck with. Josephine kept Wyatt isolated from his friends and family, and refused to allow him to see his mother or father right before their deaths. Josephine’s compulsive gambling wrecked their finances and left heavy debts all over town, driving a wedge between Wyatt and old friends like Ed Doheny. Josephine was obsessed with money and with her appearance: she refused to attend Wyatt’s funeral because she did not have proper clothes, complaining anew that Johnny Behan would have left her enough money for the damn funeral and a dress. When her husband’s container of ashes was brought to her, she smashed it against the wall and then in a fit of rage, she swept the ashes off the carpet and out the door. Whatever was eventually buried in Colma was NOT all of Wyatt Earp.

  But the most unkind accusation of all was that Josephine was unloved. Gilchriese asserted that Wyatt was infatuated with a married woman in Tombstone, and that he continued their secret affair in Los Angeles. This unnamed woman was beautiful—much more beautiful than Josephine—and Wyatt was much fonder of her than he was of Josephine. The evidence of this was supposed to be a formal portrait of the two of them taken in the famous photography studio of C. S. Fly, inscribed on the back by the mystery woman to Wyatt, and then given by him to Flood, who gave it to Gilchriese.

  Gilchriese shared these stories with other people, but not with Mabel. However, she had already figured out that this new writing partnership was a mistake. She was learning nothing. In her opinion, Gilchriese had turned out to be “a bag of wind.” She warned Harold that they had been taken by Gilchriese, who was a “good salesman” but a poor writer. “I don’t see that he has a bit of material that we do not already have or can get easily,” she wrote to Harold. As far as she was concerned, Gilchriese had broken their agreement.

  Without showing her draft to Gilchriese, she sent it to Bobbs Merrill Publishing Company, and it was rejected.

  Mabel sent Gilchriese a curt and final dismissal of their relationship: “In view of [the publisher’s rejection] and in view of the fact that you do not seem to have material on the Earp story that we do not already have, we will forget about the book on the life of Josephine Earp.”

  At first, Mabel hoped to go forward on her own. She was not deterred by the publisher’s rejection and she was not afraid of
Gilchriese, not even when he threatened a lawsuit and warned that Lake would also prosecute her. Writing at the end of 1955 to her sister, she signed her letter “Mickey de Tough,” and dispassionately analyzed the pros and cons of proceeding alone. “I hate to lay down a job I’ve started,” she said. She felt that her legal position was strong, both with Gilchriese and with Lake.

  But Mabel had little appetite for the protracted strife of a lawsuit. The stress on Harold Ackerman was already showing; he was shocked by the betrayal of his young companion Gilchriese. “Poor Harold—he is so fearful—afraid of life—afraid of death—afraid of men and afraid of himself—it is a pitiable state of mind,” Mabel said to her sister. Was it worth it? “As a Christian I wonder if it has enough of constructive value for me to spend my time and questionable talents on—on the other hand I can sometimes believe that there is something of constructive value in it.”

  Mabel consulted with her husband, who advised her to set aside the manuscript for the second and last time, and suggested that they should have prayed more before signing the contract. “Don’t mention the words Wyatt and Earp when you visit—them’s fightin’ words with him,” she warned her sister.