Lady at the O.K. Corral (32 page)

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 women 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.

Josephine marched right over to the Waters residence and delivered an ultimatum to Frank through his sister Naomi and his mother. “A very nice-looking short aristocratic woman,” Naomi Waters observed, despite the surprise attack. Josephine told them that her own book would be published soon, and that she had lawyers on retainer who would sue Waters, as they had sued other authors and movie producers.

After she left, Naomi Waters declared, “The tombstones are rattling all over the place.”

“Just one of those women tiffs,” Frank dismissed the confrontation. His sister and mother had voiced their support for him, and hence, this “little dust-up” was probably inevitable.

But in the end, Allie wanted to be true to the family. She could shake her fist at Josephine and Wyatt in private, but she would never allow shame to fall on the Earps through her loose talk. The world would not find out about Mattie's suicide or Wyatt's perfidy from Allie. She was an Earp, after all. Hildreth Halliwell came home to find Allie furiously pacing up and down. Frank had read his manuscript to her. It was all a “pack of lies,” Allie declared indignantly, and she set aside her feelings about Josephine to form a united front against Waters. Stuart Lake soon joined the fray, since he had no interest in competing for Wyatt Earp readers. He accused Waters of listening to the ravings of a senile old woman who wandered the neighborhood peddling worthless goods from door to door. “Wyatt Earp's widow was a problem in herself,” Lake wrote to discourage one publisher, “but she couldn't hold a candle to poor old Aunt Allie.”

Luckily for Josephine, Waters failed to find a publisher, perhaps because of the black cloud of litigation that now hung over his manuscript. By the time Waters finally revealed his version of Allie Earp, the two sisters-in-law, who had nothing in common other than their determination to protect the memory of their husbands, would be dead.

JOSEPHINE HAD NEVER
wanted to see Tombstone again, but in February 1937 she agreed to a research trip, accompanied by Vinnolia and Harold Ackerman. Mabel stayed behind; Ernest Cason worried that she was exhausting herself with the endless writing and research on top of her responsibilities as an art teacher, wife, and mother.

It was Josephine's first visit to Tombstone since she left in 1882. They drove in the Ackermans' car, with side trips to Dodge City and San Antonio for interviews with some of Wyatt's friends, and a reunion with Albert Behan in Tucson. Josephine found Tombstone sadly diminished, the once crowded streets now lined with empty stores and buildings. They stayed at the Tourist Hotel, which stood on the spot where Virgil had been ambushed. Josephine led Vinnolia and Harold to the house where she had supposedly first lived with Kitty Jones and her husband. They visited John Clum's
Epitaph
office and the old ice cream parlor where Wyatt had tipped his hat to Ann Crabtree and her baby. Bob Hatch's saloon bore a plaque to commemorate Morgan's murder. Josephine inquired of the new owners whether they had known Wyatt, and collected a satisfying raft of anecdotes about the Earp brothers, “fine men, capable and courageous officers who did their duty.”

Harold Ackerman drained the last dregs of his patience with Josephine on this trip. Word got around that Mrs. Wyatt Earp was in Tombstone, and as they toured popular landmarks like the Bird Cage Theatre, people gathered around her and asked for her autograph. She managed to alienate even well-wishers. “Everybody is making money off my poor dear husband,” she snapped. Her irritability embarrassed Harold, who cringed when she refused to pay a newspaper boy what she considered to be an exorbitant price for a newspaper. Vinnolia found herself caught between placating her husband and calming Josephine. One old-timer volunteered that he remembered “Mrs. Earp” from when she was “on the line,” and in case these tourists did not know what he meant, he roared, “Whoring!”

Josephine was all too ready to leave Tombstone again. Unfortunately, forty miles out of town, she discovered that she had left her coin purse somewhere and made them drive back to retrieve it.

Josephine discouraged Mabel and Vinnolia from interviewing some of the people who could have helped with their story. They never interviewed Albert Behan or Allie. They never spoke to Josephine's nieces or nephew, who might have filled in some of the Marcus family background, although they too were keeping secrets: Edna never told her third husband or her own children that her mother's family was Jewish, or that her father had committed suicide.

The manuscript progressed to the point where Josephine began thinking about finding a publisher. She had successfully scuttled Frank Waters's project, but her warning about the imminent publication of her own book was just a good bluff; no one outside Josephine and her writing partners had read any of it.

She consulted Bill Hart first. With his encouragement, she wrote to Harrison Leussler, who was still a literary scout for Houghton Mifflin. “Really, Mr. Leussler,” she said, pitching vigorously, “it is going to be a wonderful book. It ought to be another
Gone with the Wind
because I am telling some history that will cause considerable amazement among the old-timers that are left, and that should make interesting reading for a later generation.” Well aware of her previous attempts to censor Lake, Leussler must have been amazed to hear her declare: “I have fully decided to tell the whole story. When you read the manuscript I believe you will be somewhat astonished yourself.”