Lady at the O.K. Corral (24 page)

It was during this time of close family connection that Josephine confided her money problems to Hattie, who offered her sister a monthly subsidy, which she increased as Wyatt's earnings declined. Hattie became a silent partner in some of the Earps' mining claims and oil wells. Edna sent gifts of clothing to Josephine. In 1920, Wyatt began to explore the oil fields in the Kern River area near Bakersfield, California. He filed for permits in his name, but later transferred these investments to Hattie, with the understanding that Josephine would be entitled to receive 20 percent of any income derived from the oil wells. Wyatt was paid a management fee, which probably helped to soothe his pride in accepting money from Josephine's family.

It was unclear what the future might hold. The wells proved to be profitable, but no one knew how long that would continue. Hattie was younger than Josephine, and both were younger than Wyatt. Presumably, Hattie or her heirs would continue to support Josephine with the income from Wyatt's wells.

Hattie became the lady that Josephine was not: rich, socially prominent, and sophisticated. Josephine was capable of admiring her sister and relishing the way she lived, while being fiercely loyal to Wyatt and the choices she had made as Mrs. Earp. Still, it was a relationship that occasionally irked Wyatt; it reminded him of his financial dependence on Hattie and also took Josephine occasionally away from him to destinations he could not afford, or no longer had an interest in visiting. Hattie often invited Josephine to accompany her to San Francisco events, and they traveled together to New York and Boston in Hattie's own drawing-room train car. “You know I was born in New York City and I am so happy to think I can go and see the wonderful city,” she wrote to Flood, adding with some defiance: “I wrote and told Wyatt don't know how he will like it. I am going just the same as it will be a wonderful trip for me.” It was one of her happiest days when her sister threw a grand party to celebrate Josephine's sixty-fifth birthday on June 2, 1925. “That was a grand luncheon at the Hotel Oakland,” John Flood wrote, after receiving clippings from Josephine about the impressive guest list and elaborate menu. “What a society lady you are; that is right, don't miss anything.” Presumably from Hattie, Josephine received a birthday gift of sixteen crisp $1 bills.

Their sister Rebecca stayed the closest to the Marcus family roots, and occasionally hosted Jewish celebrations attended by Josephine and Hattie. The three petite women were a handsome trio. Josephine and Wyatt attended at least one Passover celebration in San Francisco, probably at Rebecca's home. The sight of Wyatt Earp putting down his gun and donning a
yarmulke
at a seder was never to be forgotten: many years later, one guest told actor Henry Fonda about his impressions of that memorable evening, taking the opportunity to compliment Fonda on having captured Earp so well in
My Darling Clementine.

Josephine entertained her sisters' children and grandchildren for long stays at their desert camp and visits to Coronado Island. They enjoyed her company, while Wyatt, they agreed, was simply easier to adore. They often chafed at what they called Aunt Josie's “suspicious nature.” As their temporary guardian, Josephine was more of a disciplinarian than Wyatt, ready with a stern lecture about the dangers of smoking and dancing. “Coronado had a ferry [to San Diego] in those days,” Edna's daughter recalled. “We were taking the ferry to go to a movie. Instead of that, we went to three! They were westerns! When we came back, we got off the ferry and Aunt Josephine was standing there on the pier yelling and screaming. She was furious. Oh, she was so mad because we had left early and now it was nine at night.” On the other hand, “Uncle Wyatt wasn't a bit upset about it, he just ignored the whole thing.” Josephine would not be the first grown-up to have regretted—or forgotten—her own wild days, and was now finding it convenient to condemn all those things she did when she was young.

THEY WERE AGING
with reasonable grace. If only the devils of Tombstone would stay in the past, Josephine believed she could be content.

Instead, the stories about Wyatt and his brothers never stopped swirling around, occasionally fatuous and fawning, frequently inaccurate, and most often pointing directly back to the O.K. Corral. Before he died in 1912, Johnny Behan was interviewed and portrayed himself as the hero who defended Tombstone against the villainous and violent Earps. Josephine and John Flood recruited Wyatt's friends to correct factual errors and serve as character references. Remind people that it was the “better element” that supported the Earps, people who later became important members of society, as opposed to the cowboys, who died in jail or gunfights, Josephine coached their friends. Her willing army of spokesmen included John Clum and William Hunsaker and George Parsons from Tombstone, as well as younger people of influence such as Tasker Oddie and John Hays Hammond. When the
Los Angeles Herald
wrote about the Earps as “bad men,” George Parsons countered that Wyatt was “a benefit and a protection to the community he once lived in.” He did note the Vendetta Ride as a “notable exception,” but suggested that after the shooting of one brother and the killing of another, anyone would have done what Wyatt did.

Until his death in 1921, Bat Masterson was Wyatt's most effective spokesman, a gifted writer who could always be counted on for a colorful quote. The public's view of Wyatt Earp was greatly shaped by Masterson's early descriptions of Wyatt as “a very quiet man, but a terror in action, either with his fists or with his gun.” In a 1910 interview in the
New York Herald
he defined Wyatt's distinguishing trait: “More than any man I have ever known he was devoid of physical fear. He feared the opinion of no one but himself, and his self-respect was his creed.”

That Wyatt made his living as a gambler was another issue: on this point, both the Earps were vulnerable, though in different ways. In a letter that Flood wrote under his own name, he took his cue from Josephine's oft-expressed argument about the changing times: “That the Earps were gamblers is not for me to question. It seems to have been a part of everyday life on the frontier, during the pioneer period. . . . Times have changed; people think differently. What were established business yesterday are considered vices today, and have been outlawed.”

Flood wrote another point-by-point rebuttal of “Lurid Trails Are Left by Olden-time Bandits,” a particularly inaccurate article that appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
under the byline of J. M. Scanland. No, the Earps had not been driven out of Dodge City by Bat Masterson—Wyatt had served as marshal there with distinction, and he and Bat were lifelong friends. It was Virgil who was the chief of police in Tombstone, not Wyatt. Virgil did not kill Frank Stilwell; Virgil was lying injured in the train that stood waiting in the Tucson station. There was no substance behind the accusation that Wyatt was the mastermind of a bandit gang; he had the confidence of Tombstone's mayor, the Wells Fargo Company, and the town's leading businessmen and respectable ranchers.

And, no, Wyatt Earp was not dead.

“I trust that what I have written, meets with your approval. . . . I could not remain silent after reading the article as it appeared in the
Times
,” Flood wrote to Josephine, who was in their desert camp at Vidal and had not seen the newspaper yet. Josephine was pleased with Flood's spirited defense. Then she picked up the telephone herself and gave the managing editor a piece of her mind: “I told him I wanted to have every untruth corrected and printed in the same sensational manner that [the original article] was printed.”

In the case of the
Los Angeles Times
, Josephine won a major victory—a public retraction. The combined efforts of Wyatt's friends and her own call to the managing editor, as well as the incontrovertible fact of Wyatt's being very much alive, elicited a prominent correction notice under the satisfying headline, “Earps Were Always for Law and Order—Writer's Statements Result in Real Facts Being Given Notice.” Readers were told that it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding by a writer. “Through information furnished by relatives of the Earps,” the
Times
now knew that the Earp brothers had “nothing in common with the bandit gangs, but that, instead, they did everything in their power to protect the people and to uphold law and order.” In fact, the
Los Angeles Times
went so far as to repeat the assertion of relatives that “none of the Earp brothers ever opened a saloon or a gambling house.”

If there was irony in the
Times
retraction, Josephine cared not. She had a strategy for public relations: rapid response, rebuttal with carefully sculpted facts, and character references delivered by influential friends, all topped off with her personal demand for a withdrawal. She brought a modern sense of celebrity to the task of shaping Wyatt's image to contemporary standards and away from his past as a gambler, saloonkeeper, gunfighter, pimp, and womanizer.

She put her plan into effect for the next offending article, this one from a New Jersey newspaper owned by Hearst. She asked Wyatt's friends to reprise their previous letters, and for the personal touch, she commissioned Flood to type a letter to William Randolph Hearst, son of the senator who had traveled under Wyatt's protection decades before. “You know just what kind of a letter I want,” she told Flood. Despite her agitation over the constant barrage of criticism, she lost none of her zest for battle, emphasizing “this time we will
fight them all
.” She wrote in the stream-of-consciousness style that overtook her when she was excited: “Please say that in the early days of Tombstone his father George Hearst came to Wyatt and his brother Virgil asking for protection from some of the toughs in Tombstone as he was going out to look at a mine and Wyatt took him out on horseback and stayed with him for 2 days for which after he returned to San Francisco.” And don't forget the nice watch that George Hearst sent to Wyatt, she added in a postscript, though the watch had been lost long ago to a Mexican pickpocket.

JOSEPHINE AND WYATT
had followed the boomtown circuit since they left Tombstone, always alert to that mysterious signal that was inaudible to mere mortals, the one that whispered of high adventure and glittering treasure. They heard it next coming from their own backyard in Los Angeles.

Hollywood was the next frontier. Josephine believed that it could deliver the dual advantages of making money and burnishing Wyatt's image. Amplified and sweetened, his story could now reach into nearly every corner of the world. Surely it would be strong enough to drown out their enemies.

HOLLYWOOD'S PROXIMITY TO
Los Angeles was accidental; early founders like Cecil B. DeMille were looking for a temperate climate and low property values. DeMille considered Flagstaff, Arizona, but settled on Los Angeles, where it never snowed and real estate was an affordable fifty dollars an acre. From a barn on Selma and Vine, DeMille filmed
The Squaw Man
, the first feature-length Hollywood film, on December 29, 1913. The setting was no accident. Western stories and novels tapped into a wave of nostalgia for the frontier. Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill reenactments still drew large audiences. “Cowboys” were in ample supply in the Los Angeles stockyards, where trail drivers from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada congregated after delivering their herds. The better looking of the men were recruited to the studios, together with their own horses and saddles, amazed that “someone would pay them money just to ride around while someone else took pictures of them.”

Westerns were also a popular subject because a few of the legends were still walking around Los Angeles. Wyatt Earp and his contemporaries were about to undergo the weirdly modernist experience of moving from the real to the based-on, could-have-been version of their own lives. Having crossed the country in a wagon train, hunted buffalo, experienced Indian raids, gunfights, and the rise and fall of the boomtowns, the still living frontier men and women were becoming fictional characters.

Hollywood would tell many stories, and would take advantage of sound, color, and the latest technology, but Westerns would always be on the menu. Important actors played frontier lawmen and cowboys, and the rest just admired them. “You're the bloke from Arizona, aren't you?” inquired Charlie Chaplin, when he was introduced to Earp at a lunch with director Raoul Walsh and writer Jack London. “Tamed the baddies, huh?” Now into his 70s, Wyatt Earp looked the part, still handsome and straight as an arrow. The same articles and books that harped annoyingly on Tombstone and Dodge City had made him famous and drew some of the biggest Western stars to the modest bungalow he shared with Josephine. Directors such as John Ford, Alan Dwan, and Raoul Walsh sought him out for authenticity, patterning their language and appearance after his and inviting him to their sets.

Josephine often accompanied Wyatt to the movies at the Rialto, one of the theaters owned by their old Alaska comrade Sidney Grauman. She loved the movies, and appreciated the obeisance of Hollywood's aristocracy toward Wyatt, though they had little interest in her. However, as the one who worried most about filling the family coffers, she resented the exploitation of the Hollywood Westerns. Everyone seemed to be making money off Wyatt Earp except for Wyatt, she often complained. Hollywood “consultants” were not yet the norm. Wyatt probably could have made some money as an extra, but the one time he tried, director Allan Dwan reported that Wyatt seemed uncomfortable in front of the camera and disdainful of the make-believe antics of actors such as Douglas Fairbanks. Wyatt's experience with Hollywood was much like his experience with reporters. “After he discovered that they paid no attention to what he told them Wyatt's sly sense of humor was directed toward the movie people,” Josephine recalled. “He pulled their legs, telling them the sort of improbable things found in Western fiction stories. To his amazement, they swallowed these tall tales hook, line, and sinker, but were always skeptical of the truth. At this point, my husband gave up in disgust, refusing to have anything further to do with those ‘damn fool dudes,' as he called them.”