Lady at the O.K. Corral (25 page)

It was the rare actor who brought authenticity to the screen; one exception was Tom Mix, a former ranch hand from Oklahoma. The “King of the Cowboys,” Mix made over 160 films and was a frequent visitor when Wyatt and Josephine were in Los Angeles, sometimes accompanying Wyatt to the racetrack. William S. Hart was another Earp acolyte. Where Tom Mix was a rough-and-ready showman, Hart was classically trained, as comfortable in a Shakespearean tragedy as he was in a Western. He looked the most like Earp, according to director Raoul Walsh: Hart was “stone-faced, steely-eyed, was law and order behind the hammers of his six guns . . . projecting the same cool, efficient authority of Tombstone's renowned marshal.”

In a series of films, Hart aimed for a gritty portrayal of the West, with an emphasis on realism that endeared him to Wyatt. He had a special interest in the O.K. Corral that began even before they met in person. “It haunted his mind,” Hart's son recalled. He took lessons from Wyatt in the fast draw, and proudly displayed a whip that Wyatt had given him. A popular writer and savvy businessman, Hart mailed a thousand pictures weekly to his fans. His children's books, based on the adventures of “Bill Hart's Pinto Pony,” were sold in bookstores and, at Hart's expense, distributed free to public libraries.

Hart became an important adviser to Josephine and Wyatt at a time when Hollywood was getting ready to invade Tombstone. Josephine was used to fighting public relations skirmishes, but this battle called for more sophisticated weapons and strategy.

The story of the O.K. Corral was being shaped for the modern era and new media. To her relief, there were no parts yet for the young Josephine Marcus, and the role of Johnny Behan was downplayed or diffused into different characters. Wyatt Earp, however, was front and center. It was Wyatt who emerged unscathed from the first hail of bullets, Wyatt who caught the fallen Virgil and Morgan in his arms, and Wyatt who led the Vendetta Ride. Lawman or vigilante? Avenging angel or ambitious politico? Peacekeeper or stagecoach robber? These were the alternative roles that would determine Wyatt's legacy. Tombstone was inescapable. The benign labels that Josephine had cultivated for Wyatt—capitalist, prospector, businessman—had little chance against a dramatic lone figure who counted kills in notches on a gun barrel. She would have to work harder to salvage his reputation within the tenacious tale of Tombstone.

As the old-timers died off, the memoirs of the remaining eyewitnesses became all the more precious. Josephine was convinced that Wyatt's biography would be the most compelling best seller of all. The story was there: all they needed was a writer. Wyatt resisted mightily. He deflected most inquiries, even from friends and family, with a question of his own: “Isn't there something more pleasant we could talk about?” Josephine's nieces could not imagine him as a gunfighter in the “wild and wooly west.” When his nephew Bill Miller pumped him for stories about the Vendetta Ride, Wyatt would only admit to killing Frank Stilwell, which he claimed with pride.

Josephine's determination gradually softened Wyatt's opposition. He was concerned about his health and finances. Defensive strategies and counterattacks could take them only so far, especially since the passing of some of Wyatt's most stalwart defenders, like Bat Masterson. Since books and movies were obviously going to be made, she argued, they should take an active role in shaping them—and should share in the profits. She wore down his objections. “I have never put forth any effort to check the tales that have been published. . . . Not one of them is correct . . . what actually occurred at Tombstone is only a matter of weeks. My friends have urged that I make this known on printed sheet. Perhaps I shall,” he concluded. “It will correct many mythic tales.”

Some writers were politely rejected. An early offer came from novelist Forrestine Hooker, daughter-in-law of the prominent Arizona rancher Henry Clay Hooker, who had sheltered Wyatt's posse and defied Behan's orders back in Tombstone. Hooker drafted a manuscript that she showed to Wyatt, and although she was clearly his advocate, Wyatt turned her away. His refusal was less about literary discernment or doubt of a woman's ability to tell his story than about his lingering reluctance to stir up more notoriety. Another aspirant was Dr. Frank Lockwood, Dean of the University of Arizona. Wyatt refused again, though he and Josephine were impressed with Lockwood's academic credentials and granted him an interview.

Surely they had the best partners right under their nose, Josephine suggested: their trusted friends John Flood and William S. Hart. Flood already served as their public voice, writing letters that Josephine commissioned, often with specific language and approaches discussed by Josephine and Wyatt, typed by Flood, and signed by Josephine under Wyatt's name. It was an unusual three-way collaboration, but it worked. Their personal and financial lives were intertwined, as Flood became their adviser in the desert mining and real estate interests that still anchored their cycle of Los Angeles summers and desert winters.

Josephine hoped that Wyatt's biography would be the basis for a William S. Hart film. In July 1923 Wyatt (i.e., Josephine and Flood) wrote to Hart with a formal proposal: “During the past few years, many wrong impressions of the early days of Tombstone and myself have been created by writers who are not informed correctly, and this has caused me a concern which I feel deeply. You know, I realize that I am not going to live to the age of Methuselah, and any wrong impression, I want made right before I go away.” Hart would be the “mastermind,” the producer and director as well as the star who would portray the real Wyatt Earp. With Hart's blessing, and the promise of access to Wyatt and Josephine, Flood set to work.

He had already spent nearly twenty years with the Earps, but Wyatt had been as reticent about discussing Tombstone with him as he had with everybody else. Josephine knew some details gleaned from Bat Masterson and from snatches of conversation around the desert campfires in the early days of prospecting with Wyatt and his brothers. For the rest, Flood turned to some of the old-timers. Sol Israel, now an agent for a California vintner selling alcohol for medicinal use, was particularly helpful and eager to support his old friend. John Clum and others agreed to be interviewed.

Surely the best source would be Wyatt himself. But Flood found his idol and friend of many years, now his subject, to be the man described by Bat Masterson: preternaturally calm, steely-eyed, intimidating—and laconic.

At Wyatt's request, the men met alone, usually in Los Angeles, sometimes for a few hours and sometimes for an entire afternoon of probing questions and terse responses. Flood dated each of their interviews, taking extensive notes that he transcribed into a detailed outline and shaped into a draft. Wyatt's memory was remarkable. Now deep into his seventies, he recalled names, dates, locations, and physical descriptions, even names of children. They spent hours rehashing the actual gunfight. As Wyatt spoke, Flood prepared a detailed diagram that placed each participant on the specific spot he occupied that day, and captured Wyatt's telegraphic style in his notes: “Doc Holliday was about 5'10 ½", slender, good looking, died Colorado Springs—order of the Odd Fellows,” he wrote. ‘Morgan looked most like Wyatt. Little lighter than Wyatt. Handsome fine complexion. [Tombstone mining executive] E P Gage gave Morgan Earp a horse, mistaking him for Wyatt . . . Curly Bill, about 5'11 ½" straight, looked like a Cherokee Indian, heavy build, 180 lb., was solid.”

Josephine was Flood's first reader and the one who kept an eye on the clock, mindful of Wyatt's fatigue. She kept Hart engaged through lively letters under Wyatt's signature that promised that “the script which I am having written will be ready in a short time.” However, progress was slow. Flood had the difficult task of portraying Wyatt Earp while adhering to Josephine's vague ideas about domesticated adventure and romance. She and Flood had endless discussions about what to put in and what to leave out, which she followed up in cryptic orders (“you know what I mean”). Although an outsider could hardly have understood her references, she urged him to throw away her letters immediately after reading, and to seal his envelopes with wax.

A clean story full of true facts, pep, and romance. Those were Josephine's constant refrains to Flood while he was writing throughout 1925 and 1926.

Josephine realized that they were in trouble almost immediately. Flood was simply not a writer. Although he alone had special access to Wyatt, it was hard to pull anything but the bare details from a subject who preferred a sharp glance full of meaning to a fulsome paragraph. Nor was Josephine a skillful editor. Her instincts were good: she knew something was wrong, but had no idea how to fix it. Flood's writing was wooden even when narrating the most exciting parts of Wyatt's life. So she pressed her suggestions again and again in her staccato style—write about Wyatt's early days driving teams from San Bernardino to Salt Lake City, his bravery in Dodge City, his rescue of a young girl and her mother from a Wichita fire, Rex Beach playing the banjo for the dancers in Rampart. She volunteered the services of her well-educated nieces. She passed along advice from Hart and from one of Jack London's daughters and from one of her cousins. In fact, she consulted everyone she knew, and all of them seemed to have something worthy to propose. Hollywood was waiting, she reminded him. “Just think John H. Flood pop up on the screen.” When glory and bribes did not work, she tried guilt and threats. Sometimes she sounded like a mother scolding her young son: “So hurry up now like a good boy and finish it up as soon as possible,” adding an even more humiliating postscript: “Now be a good boy and do as I ask of you, for just this one time. And I will buy you a sucker.”

At least she could be sure that Mattie and young Josephine were written out of Flood's manuscript completely. Her instructions to Flood were all in the third person, always about what “he” or “they” did, as if she had not been there herself. Her reticence was not limited to Tombstone. “They had a gay old time getting up to Alaska,” she reminisced, but it was only Wyatt's bold actions that she wanted him to include. “Cut out you know what—I mean as we want a good clean story and one that will pass too and yet be full of the truth and lots of pep in it too.” It is not clear how much Flood actually knew about the censored matters: the women upstairs at the Dexter, the story of Mattie Blaylock, Josephine's year as Mrs. Behan, perhaps a simmering scandal or two from Wyatt's popularity with the women of Harqua Hala, San Francisco, and Nome.

A clean book also meant a very dry Wyatt Earp.

Even though alcohol was not illegal during Wyatt's heyday, it was now, and no one knew when Prohibition would end. Josephine needed to mold a Wyatt Earp who complied not only with the laws of the 1880s but also with the laws of the 1920s. What sort of lawman would Wyatt Earp be if he broke the law, even laws that did not exist yesterday?

Thus was born the notion that Wyatt hardly drank a drop. Wyatt does appear to have been somewhat abstemious, but he was no teetotaler. Wyatt's friend, Charlie Welsh, who always kept a flask of wine or whiskey on his dining-room sideboard, was known to disappear regularly for days “to see property,” the family euphemism for a drinking binge, and Wyatt was his chosen companion for some of these trips.

No alcohol and no Josephine, but Wyatt's story should really have romance, Josephine insisted. At least love had not been outlawed, though social mores had certainly changed since Tombstone. “There must be a woman in it,” Josephine emphasized. After all, the book was intended as the basis for a future script, and “you know how Hart likes to make love,” she teased Flood.

In fact, Josephine was looking over their past as if it had been a script. Wyatt must always have the starring role, and her own character would be absent or scattered into surrogates.

Just once, in a remarkable 1925 letter, Josephine lowered her guard. She suggested that Flood explain it was a woman who triggered the personal animosity between Wyatt and Johnny Behan. This letter was the closest Josephine ever came to telling the truth about her role at the O.K. Corral.

“Call her Ann Ellen,” she coaxed Flood. “Quite a pretty girl age 19 years,” her pseudonymous Ann Ellen would be “in awe of Wyatt,” and even though Sheriff Behan was in love with her, “she really did like Wyatt and Behan was very jealous and that of course made it hard for Wyatt too.” Perhaps because of the potentially explosive connection between “Ann Ellen” and young Josephine Marcus, this story never made it into Flood's final version, nor did Josephine ever allude again to the story of Ann Ellen.

The faithful but humorless Flood stuck to the basics. The resulting manuscript was dry as dust.

“
AT LAST! THE
story is finished,” Flood declared early in 1925. But it was not. For another year, Flood continued to interview Wyatt and draft new versions under the pressure of Josephine's latest brainstorm. Although she constantly urged him to finish quickly “for Wyatt's sake, for my sake,” she suggested that he expand his scope to include Wyatt's boyhood and later Alaskan adventures. Flood wanted to concentrate primarily on the years in Kansas and Arizona. It would take far longer to produce a complete biography, but he was resigned to the necessity of following Josephine's direction. “A romance might be the best thing. I don't know. I will have to think it over,” he muttered aloud.

The deadline kept slipping. Josephine worried that Bill Hart would lose interest. Still more ominously, Wyatt was growing weaker. Her letters trace his lack of appetite and diminishing strength. “I am afraid he is not long for this world,” she fretted.

Although much younger, Flood too was in poor health. He experienced eyestrain so severe that he was bedridden and blindfolded for two days. With almost sadistic timing, Josephine chose this time to send him one of her longest letters, written in cramped handwriting on pale blue note paper. “Well, Mr. Flood, I am afraid this letter will be very hard on your eyes. So don't you try to read it all at one time,” she ended with a hollow warning.