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

by Ann Kirschner

  Telling the truth about Mrs. Wyatt Earp was a responsibility that Laing felt she owed to Josephine, to the Cason family, and to history. She was bothered by the distortions that threatened to obscure the Aunt Josie she knew so well. “Eventually, no one will really know about the charming and aggravating little girl who ran away from a good home and into ‘the wild west’ to find the love of her life, but who never forgot that she was Josephine Marcus of San Francisco,” she reflected.

  On her eighty-fourth birthday, Glenn Boyer called Jeanne Cason Laing for the last time. “Are you having trouble with men chasing you?” he inquired, assuring her that he was still “blindingly handsome,” but hadn’t pulled off a seduction in months. Sorry to hear that she too was now using a walker, he blamed her sore back on her ample bosom. They chuckled together like old friends who accepted their losses as long as they were able to laugh, especially at themselves. There was not a speck of self-pity in either one of them.

  AND NOW, ABOUT that curse.

  I guess I should be worried. After all, this is the book that Josephine never wanted to be written. Hide your history, she demanded of herself—or at least control it. The story of the breathless beauty who stole handsome Wyatt away from his hapless wife would shock and alienate anyone who heard about it.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Josephine never dared to believe that she would be forgiven. She cared too much about public judgment to take any chances. Time, however, was on her side. Today, we can see her as a passionate, resilient, unconventional woman, a myth builder for a bold new American era, with a remarkably modern understanding of media and celebrity. But she deserves far more than just forgiveness. She earned her recognition as an artist of adventure who emerged from one cocoon as an immigrant Polish Jew to mine the dynamic energy of the frontier. Even when the frontier mutated into a sterner, more constrained America, she fashioned new fables that fit the legend of Wyatt and Josephine Earp to the new century.

  In that long road trip she took from Tombstone to Hollywood with Wyatt, she was not always the driver, but you can bet that she was never in the back seat. She was the one holding the map and laughing all the way.

  And how ironic that it should fall to another Jewish woman to wonder if Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp would forgive me.

  Or is there a statute of limitations on curses?

  Either way, I’ve decided to believe that Josephine would not curse me for writing her back into American history.

  And long may her story be told.

  | Acknowledgments

  THANKS TO the ever curious Michele Slung for asking that fateful question: How did Wyatt Earp end up in a Jewish cemetery? The year was 2008, and I was thinking about whether I could write another biography.

  My first book was Sala’s Gift, an intensely personal journey through my mother’s history and heroism during the Holocaust. She inspired my passion to uncover the stories of strong women and the circumstances that shape their lives. She and my father Sidney Kirschner are the greatest sources of strength and wisdom for me and for three generations, now including seven beautiful great-grandchildren: Hannah, Michelle, Joseph, Jordan, Nathan, Samuel, and Jacob.

  For this book, I traveled with a powerful posse that assured me that yes, I could juggle a family and another book and a dean’s responsibilities and ambitions.

  Elisabeth, Caroline, and Peter taught me that parenting is surely the most joyous adventure of all, especially in the company of such a remarkable trio, now making their way in the world with heart, soul, and style.

  Josephine never had a best friend. I do, and it is my good luck that Lorraine Shanley allowed the Earps to elbow their way into our Scrabble games and phone marathons. We are opposites only in being blond and brunette and a few other details; we are twins in all the ways that matter.

  When I started writing, Jane and Bob Stine were not yet my machatunim. We hit the in-law jackpot when our families were joined officially by the marriage of our children. Jane’s wit and wisdom informed my efforts at every turn.

  My agent and friend, Flip Brophy, declared that I would finish this book, and so I have: when Flip believes in you, all things really do seem possible.

  Gail Winston, my remarkable editor at HarperCollins, took a mess of ideas and events and characters and led me to the story. She and Maya Ziv and Joanne Pinsher have been wonderful colleagues and friends, and I thank the extended HarperCollins family for creativity and commitment to this book.

  Macaulay Honors College is so much more than my day job; it is my daily inspiration. I am grateful to Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who should win a prize for being my longest-running boss, to my dear colleagues, and to the Macaulay students and instructional technology fellows, especially my gang of hardworking and brilliant research assistants: Dan Blondell, Cecille Bernstein, Virginia Milieris, Savannah Gordon, Katherine Maller, Mary Williams, David Kane, Ayelet Parness, and Gregory Donovan. Thanks for teaching me so much.

  I have tipped my hat to my many Earp history colleagues in the endnotes. I hope you will consider my inevitable mistakes and omissions to be honest ones. A special note of appreciation to Casey Tefertiller, Jeff Guinn, Eric Weider, Mark Ragsdale, and Roger Peterson for a myriad of professional courtesies, plus the fun of shared speculation, and more than one timely shout of “Danger, Will Robinson!” I am deeply indebted to my distinguished panel of first readers: Lynn Bailey, Anne Collier, Bruce Dinges, Karen Franklin, Ava Kahn, and Bob Palmquist. Your knowledge saved me from many an infelicity. To the one and only Glenn Boyer and Jane Candia Coleman, thank you both for welcoming a New Yorker and an “acaDUMic” to Planet Earp, and for opening those doors to the past to which only you have the keys.

  Dr. Walter Cason played an indispensable role as my one true link to Josephine and Mabel Cason. I am grateful for his generosity and grace.

  And finally, to my husband, Harold Weinberg. Ever loving and patient, you have made my choices your priorities. Had medicine not been your calling, you could have been a fine editor. I marvel at the twist of good fortune that brought us together in 1968 to build a charmed life together. I never hesitated to believe in the triumph of Josephine’s nearly fifty-year marriage of love, laughter, and loyalty, because I know we too are on that journey.

  | Notes

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.

  PROLOGUE: IN WHICH I LAND ON PLANET EARP

  4 As Nora Ephron would memorably say of herself: Ephron was interviewed by Abigail Pogrebin in Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk about Being Jewish (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 168–73.

  4 her silhouette still amazed Grace Welsh Spolidoro: Interview by Casey Tefertiller, November 8, 1994. Grace compared Josephine to Dolly Parton.

  5 June 2, 1860: Josephine’s birth records are missing, as is often the case with pre–Civil War birth records in New York City. Josephine herself wanted confirmation of the date: on January 18, 1942, she sent a letter (typed by John Flood) to the New York City Department of Health to ask for records of her birth year, emphasizing that “Josephine Marcus was born in New York City; I am positive.”

  6 See Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Norton, 1988).

  8 “Uncle Wyatt’s old hang out”: From the unpublished diary of Edna Lehnhardt Cowing Stoddard Siegriest, November 27, 1954.

  CHAPTER 1: A JEWISH GIRL IN TOMBSTONE

  13 just before Christmas, 1880: Josephine refers in the Cason manuscript to her arrival as “holiday” time, and told Mabel Cason that her arrival coincided with the death of John Clum’s wife. Mary Ware Clum died in Tombstone on December 18, 1880.

  14 in the province of Posen: Hyman, the son of Abraham and Chana Marcus and apprenticed to his father’s profession as a baker, was likely from Nakel, Posen. Note that spellings are notoriously tricky for nineteenth-century European/American names. Posen is sometimes known as Posnan.
Prussia is sometimes misidentified as Russia. Hyman Marcus is sometimes known as Herman or Henry or Carl-Hyman Marcuse. In the entry for the Marcus family plot in the Hills of Eternity, and on his tombstone, he is Hyman Marcus. Although Sophia is identified as “Sophia Lewis” in most records, her daughter Rebecca (Josephine’s half-sister) was identified as “Levy” in her marriage announcement in the Daily Alta California on May 4, 1870. For a fuller picture of the Jewish migration from Posen and the internal prejudices, see Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering, the Second Migration, 1820–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and Ava F. Kahn and Ellen Eisenberg, “Western Reality: Jewish Diversity During the ‘German’ Period” in American Jewish History, Volume 92, Number 4, December 2004, pp. 455–479.

  16 a remarkable Jewish success story: The Jewish population was between 7 and 8 percent of San Francisco’s total population by 1870, while Jews made up an estimated 2 to 5 percent of New York City’s population. Moses Rischin and John Livingston, Jews of the American West (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 34.

  19 Rebecca married Aaron Wiener: They were married by Reverend H. A. Henry, the rabbi at Sherith Israel, one of two synagogues that had been established during the gold rush. The Marcus family synagogue followed the traditions of the Jews from Posen, while Temple Emanu-El catered mostly to the wealthier and more assimilated German Jews. Aside from the clothing, Josephine had no recollection of the wedding, and Mabel Cason later admitted that she made up the accurate but generic description of the Jewish wedding ritual. In fact, Josephine never revealed her sisters’ married names in her memoir.

  20 a less than perfect German accent signaled “second class”: German/Polish tensions figure prominently and poignantly in Harriet Lane Levy’s memoir 920 O’Farrell Street (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947). As had Josephine’s, Levy’s parents had been born in Posen. Unlike Josephine’s father, her father had been commercially successful. But that made no difference: she too carried the burden of inferiority. “On the social counter the price tag ‘polack’ confessed second class,” Levy recalled. “Upon this basis of discrimination everybody agreed and acted.” These were simply the facts of life: she and her classmates accepted their place below German-Jewish girls “as the denominator takes its stand under the horizontal line.” Like Josephine, Harriet pretended she was German. However, she went on to graduate from Berkeley and moved to Paris with Alice B. Toklas, where she became an intimate of the Gertrude Stein salon.

  21 David Belasco or Gertrude Stein: Neither Belasco nor Stein retained any traditional Jewish ties. Belasco preferred the dramatic fiction of a childhood in a Roman Catholic monastery to his father’s history as former London Jewish clown. Stein, who once proclaimed herself the most famous Jew in the world, left Oakland for Paris, where she would eventually accept the patronage of Nazi protectors to save her life and her art collection.

  23 the popular actress Pauline Markham: Pauline Markham’s real name was Margaret Hall. Daily Alta California , December 28, 1884.

  26 “Miss Pauline Markham of the Pinafore Troupe”: Daily Evening Bulletin, January 28, 1880.

  26 her older sister and brother-in-law dispatched a family friend: Josephine identifies this man as Jacob Marks, a friend of Aaron Wiener (sometimes spelled Weiner).

  34 one of the great migrations of American history: Between 1840 and 1870 about 350,000 people made the trip west, most of them in search of land and minerals. In Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken, 1982), Lillian Schlissel observed that in their private writings, men tended to see it as a “mythic” adventure, while the women were more likely to emphasize the family sacrifices of the journey.

  34 threatened to whip if their parents did not: “Diary Written by Wife of Dr. J.A. Rousseau,” San Bernardino Museum Association Quarterly 6 (Winter 1968). Quoted in Donald Chaput, The Earp Papers: In a Brother’s Image (Encampment, Wyo.: Affiliated Writers of America, 1994), 14.

  36 Sally Haspel: Roger Jay was the first to establish a link between Wyatt Earp and Sally Haspel, also known as Sallie Haskell, in “Wyatt Earp’s Lost Year,” Wild West 16, no. 2 (August 2003): 46. http://www.historynet.com/wyatt-earps-lost-year.htm.

  37 Their friendship was sealed: The relationship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday has been discussed in the comprehensive biography by Gary Roberts, Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend (Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), and in Karen Tanner and Robert K. DeArment, Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). For another point of view, see Andrew Isenberg, “The Code of the West: Sexuality, Homosociality, and Wyatt Earp,” Western Historical Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2009): 139, which argues that Josephine was a “heteronormative” replacement for Holliday.

  37 until she met Wyatt, probably in Fort Griffin: Other accounts have them meeting in Fort Dodge or Fort Scott, as early as 1877 or 1878. Although Stuart Lake declared that during Wyatt’s years in Kansas he “steered pretty clear of entangling alliances,” Wyatt had a girl in every camp. Glenn Boyer discusses these years in Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp (San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor, 1967), 112.

  38 common-law marriages were easy to create: Common-law marriage originated in pre-Reformation England and ended in 1753 when Parliament passed Lord Hardwicke’s Act, requiring all marriage ceremonies to be performed by officials of the Church of England. Nonetheless, common-law marriage traveled across the Atlantic to the Americas. Arizona banned common-law marriages in 1913. See Cynthia Prescott, “‘Why She Didn’t Marry Him’: Love, Power, and Marital Choices on the Far Western Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 25–46. The famous Lotta Crabtree case is even more directly relevant to Wyatt and Josephine; see David Dempsey and Raymond P. Baldwin, The Triumphs and Trials of Lotta Crabtree (New York: Morrow, 1968).

  38 left San Bernardino as soon as he sent for her: Louisa appeared to have been deeply in love with Morgan, but chafed at the famous Earp solidarity, which apparently extended to having her mail opened by Morgan’s brothers. She directed her sister to write to her as Louisa Houston, since “any letter that is not directed to this name is allways opened by my husbands brothers.”

  40 lesbian couple embracing in public: George Parsons’s entry of July 16, 1880, describes this Tombstone scene: “I have seen hard cases before in a frontier oil town where but one or two women were thought respectable but have never come across several such cases as are here. It would be impossible to speak here of some or one form of depravity I am sorry to know of—for bad as one can be and low as woman can fall—there is one form of sin here fortunately confined to two persons which would I almost believe bring a blush of shame to a prostitute’s cheek.”

  41 “Everything was nice if you had money, and we didn’t so it wasn’t”: For two essential articles on the controversy surrounding Allie Earp’s recollections, as filtered through Frank Waters, see Gary Roberts, “Allie’s Story: Mrs. Virgil Earp and the Tombstone Travesty,” http://home.earthlink.net/~knuthco1/Travesty/

  AlliesStory1source.ht, and Casey Tefertiller, “What Was Not in Tombstone Travesty,” http://home.earthlink.net/~knuthco1/

  Travesty/notintravestysource.htm.

  42 Earp’s stepdaughter had married: Hattie Catchim Earp, Bessie’s daughter, is often (erroneously) thought to have run off with one of the Tombstone cowboys. See Anne Collier, “Harriet ‘Hattie’ Catchim: A Controversial Earp Family Member,” Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association (WOLA) Journal 16, no. 2 (Summer 2007).

  46 Johnny Behan with another woman: Some accounts have Josephine returning from a trip to San Francisco and catching Johnny in bed with another woman. Mabel Cason wrote on May 20, 1959, that Josephine “told us about her time in Tombstone, how she had gone there with a theatrical troupe playing Pinafore, that she had met John Behan there and went back later with the understanding that they were to be married, kept house for him, looked after his 10 year old son Albert. She built a house for them with money that her father had s
ent her and some derived from the sale of her diamonds. Finally [Behan] began running around with a married woman and neglecting her—and she met Wyatt Earp.” Original letter is in the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

  46 a likely candidate was Emma Dunbar: Emma Dunbar’s letters to John Behan (Special Collections, University of Arizona) document that they had an affair in Tombstone, though the timing is not conclusive. Emma and Johnny corresponded for years afterward; when she heard that he was headed for Alaska, she warned him that he was not up to the rigors of the frozen north: “My dear boy what in heavens name would you with your dainty ways and white hands do in a country where men who have roughed it all their lives die. . . . You have not the strength or endurance, and why should you go?”

  46-47 disturbing signs that Johnny had contracted syphilis: Although the date when Behan contracted syphilis is unknown, John Gilchriese believed that he was infected in Tombstone. It could have been as late as the mid-1880s. Lynn Bailey reports Behan’s trips to the West Coast for treatment are documented in newspapers of the late 1880s and ’90s. His disease reached the tertiary stage by the early 1890s, and eventually contributed to his early death.

  47 Tombstone’s sex trade was regulated: For discussions of prostitution in Tombstone, see Ben Traywick, Behind the Red Lights (Tombstone, Ariz.: Red Marie’s, 1993); Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Anne Seagraves, Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West (Hayden, Idaho: Wesanne, 1994).