Lady at the O.K. Corral (33 page)

Of course, she did not really mean it.

Josephine fought with Mabel and Vinnolia every step of the way back to the O.K. Corral. Her fabrications about her early life began to confound even these two women who wanted to believe her. Serious researchers, they corresponded with libraries and archives in California and Arizona, determined to verify Josephine's accounts through independent research. For instance, had she actually been part of the Pauline Markham troupe? That much could be substantiated by contemporary references to the McCarthy school, as well as newspaper articles about Pauline Markham and her Arizona tour. They had observed firsthand how Josephine could dance the hornpipe upon request, well into her eighth decade.

But Mabel and Vinnolia could not ignore the mounting number of discrepancies and inconsistencies. Her father was a wealthy industrialist in one conversation, a silk merchant in another, always an upper-class German, never Prussian or Polish, and never a modest baker. She told them that young Josephine Marcus had been captured by Indians and rescued by the dashing young sheriff Johnny Behan. She came to Tombstone to marry Behan and was Albert Behan's governess by day, the houseguest of her friend Kitty Jones by night. When Behan proved faithless, she fell in love with the dashing, heroic Wyatt Earp and flew to his side during the terrorizing moments of gunfire at the O.K. Corral. When she became the lawfully married Mrs. Earp, she was always faithful, never jealous, and only gambled once in a while. Despite her natural tendency to be a “scaredy cat,” she was willing to follow her handsome husband into one exciting adventure after another. She adjusted and embellished the story of young Josie to lead naturally to the elegant and socially prominent Mrs. Wyatt Earp, who sounded suspiciously like the elegant and socially prominent Mrs. Emil Lehnhardt.

The other Josephine, “the belle of the honky tonks” or the “two-bit Helen of Troy of Tombstone,” as Stuart Lake called her behind her back, was nowhere to be seen. There would be no hint of the existence of Mattie Blaylock Earp. The story of Wyatt's brief marriage to Aurilla Sutherland was fair game, since her poignant death would not compromise Josephine's whitewashed narrative. Josephine had little fear that anyone would discover Wyatt's common-law relationship with the prostitute Sally Earp; Josephine herself may not even have known much about Wyatt's intimate acquaintance with the brothels of Peoria.

As for Wyatt, Josephine's memoir retained just enough of the reluctant gunfighter to live up to the “manhood extreme” image first sketched by Bat Masterson. Her Wyatt Earp was a hero in touch with his feminine side, a domesticated and tenderhearted former sheriff who baked a superior lemon pie and wept over the flowers as he gardened in the moonlight.

Once again, Josephine set out to produce a “nice clean story.” This would likely be her last chance to put a twentieth-century halo around Wyatt's violent nineteenth-century past and clean up her own history.

But it was too late: her biographers had glimpsed the real Josephine, the lusty adventurer still lurking within this old lady with the expressive dark eyes.

Mabel and Vinnolia stubbornly clung to their commitment to a truthful memoir. They knew that Josephine's portrait of Wyatt was idealized and incomplete. Harold Ackerman complained that Josephine “doesn't want us to see that [Wyatt] did anything other than teach Sunday school!” They doubted that she had ever been married in any legal ceremony, religious or secular.

They weren't prudes, though: they were open-minded, liberal thinkers, and tried to assure Josephine that they did not judge her. They slowly drew from her some of the truth: She had run away from home to become an actress, and Johnny Behan wanted more from her than babysitting for Albert. Wyatt had been a gunfighter, a gambler, a saloonkeeper, and a womanizer, before and after he met Josephine. They sympathized with her fear of exposure, but they could not convince her that some unspoken statute of limitations had run out, and that she would not be vilified for any of these transgressions. Even when they confronted her with some of the real history they had uncovered, Josephine would say, “I don't want to use that story; it makes me look like a bad person.” And, of course, Mabel and Vinnolia still knew nothing about Mattie.

“We finally came to realize that [Josephine] was not giving us a vital part of her story, although we had a finished manuscript. She was not telling what happened at Tombstone or how she met Wyatt. Because of her actions we realized that something had happened at Tombstone that she simply would not reveal,” said Mabel's daughter Jeanne.

The manuscript was “finished,” but it bore all the hidden scars of something written with an uncertain voice and a hole in the middle of its heart.

Josephine and the sisters selected their favorite chapter and sent it, complete with illustrations by Mabel, to Harrison Leussler at Houghton. His response was guarded. “I like the style of the writing,” he said, and complimented Mabel's original watercolor drawings. Overall, he noted that the manuscript showed considerable promise. However, he would have to wait and read the whole thing. “I have no doubt that you are writing an interesting story, but it is just simply a case of finishing it. You are perfectly right in telling the story of your life and I do feel that there will be enough interest in your own experiences to make this an interesting volume,” he ended somewhat coldly.

Josephine called his response “a mixed up affair” but she thought they had received at least a blinking green light from Leussler and Houghton Mifflin.

Unbeknownst to Josephine or her cowriters, Leussler immediately sent their draft chapter to Stuart Lake. His motivation was probably to protect future sales of
Frontier Marshal
and keep its author happy, but his action was premature at best, and Mabel later considered it underhanded. Of course, Lake wanted the Cason-Ackerman manuscript buried at the bottom of every publisher's slush pile.

Ultimately, though, it was neither Lake nor Leussler who sabotaged Josephine's planned memoir, but Josephine herself. The battle over what was in and what was out of the book had escalated after her return to Tombstone. The same arguments between biographers and subject went back and forth: Wyatt must not look bad; Josephine should appear to be a respectable woman; tell the truth.

After one particularly stormy session, Josephine declared that she was finished. She wanted the manuscript destroyed.

The fire was prepared. Josephine Earp watched Mabel Cason feed papers into the flames. One by one, hundreds of typewritten pages turned into ashes. As the pages were consumed, Josephine evoked a curse against anyone who would disturb the secrets of the past.

Mabel and Vinnolia had spent years preparing this manuscript. They had fed and housed “Aunt Josie” and carefully researched and cheerfully ghostwritten and coaxed and edited and followed her whims—and now they were destroying four years of work at her command.

They agreed to abandon the project, but they had no fear of her hex, which they took to be some kind of Jewish superstition. They had invested so much time in the project that they believed they had a perfect right to trick her. Some of what they had written was based on their own research, not interviews with her. Each of them kept copies of their sections, as well as their notes and rough drafts. Safely stored, unbeknownst to Josephine, the secret manuscript would the “last chance for history,” they felt, and should be preserved for some future purpose.

There would be no hard feelings, however, at least not from Mabel and Vinnolia or their children. They remained sincere in their affection for Josephine. Their husbands were less forgiving. Ernest Cason regretted the endless time that Mabel had spent on the dead manuscript and declared that henceforth, “Wyatt Earp was a dirty word.” Harold Ackerman had an even longer list of grievances. When Josephine accused his son of stealing from her (the money was misplaced), Harold found her an apartment and moved her belongings. Vinnolia protested to no avail. Harold agreed to store some of Josephine's things in a trunk in his basement, but the woman herself had to go.

Josephine would spend her last years with friends or in cheap rentals. She kept in touch with Flood and Mabel, and had long visits with Sarah Lewellen, her old friend from Tombstone. She was friendly with her landlady, although she was also usually behind in her rent. She had some new friends, Wilfrid and Bessie Nevitt and the Sinclair family, who were kind to the increasingly forgetful and needy old woman. None of her friends, old and new, seemed to know each other; she seemed to prefer that nobody had the full picture of her life.

Edna relented and made a small settlement upon her aunt, paying her retroactively for some of the years that the ownership of the oil wells had been in dispute. Nevertheless, Josephine continued to borrow money. John Flood remained a frequent target. Millionaire Ed Doheny put her in his “Dead Beat” account book, with standing orders to his staff not to admit her again. Leussler and Lake exchanged sarcastic notes on how much they would allow her to borrow. Lake recommended her for a job as a film consultant on a film,
Belle of the Yukon
, perhaps out of pity, perhaps to ease her growing demands for advances on their shared royalties.

She was now almost the age that Wyatt had been when he died. She had lived without him for more than ten years. Like the two women she had met so long ago, the maid in Salt Lake City and Baby Doe Tabor in Denver, she had ended up childless and penniless, protective of her husband to the bitter end. She was a frail old lady, weighed down by a large black knit purse that she always carried. At the least sign of interest, she would snap open the purse's large shell-shaped catch and bring out a stack of newspaper clippings, crumpled and worn with folding and refolding. Beneath them could be glimpsed one hundred bills wrapped in toilet paper, and yellowed calling cards engraved “Mrs. W. Earp.”

The clippings were not about Wyatt Earp, however, but about Hattie Lehnhardt. “My poor dead sister!” she exclaimed, showing a visitor the articles about her sister as chief executive of Lehnhardt's of Oakland, a business and society lady, presiding over formal lunches and opening night at the San Francisco Opera.

When Harold and Ernest permitted a visit, she returned to Mabel and Vinnolia, who were still fond of her, as were their daughters. Rae had a new beau, a devotee of
Frontier Marshal.
Josephine warmed to the intelligent and sincere young man immediately, but spent the afternoon talking about the Marcus family, her poor dead sister, and the accomplishments of her nieces and nephews, with nary a word about Wyatt to the disappointed suitor.

Her private reticence did not translate to any relaxed vigilance when it came to Wyatt's public reputation. Reading an announcement of a forthcoming article about Wyatt Earp in
American Weekly
, she asked Flood to write once more under her signature to William Randolph Hearst. “Will you please be so kind as to halt the story, until it has been well advised and that I be granted consideration,” she requested. “Such would be in keeping with the regard of your father for Wyatt Earp and the fondness of Wyatt Earp for your long remembered father. With all this, I am carried back, in memory, to the perilous days of Tombstone where the firm friendship of the one for other developed.”

Perhaps it was this effort that spurred her to make one last run at publishing her story. With Flood's remarkable forbearance, she commissioned a series of letters to a short but powerful list of potential collaborators, including film connections such as Sol Wurtzel of Twentieth Century-Fox and Edward F. Cline of Universal Pictures. To Walter Coburn, who had previously been on the short list as her collaborator, she wrote, “For several years past, I have been gathering together material for a story, somewhat in the nature of a biography.” Coburn declined again, citing other commitments. Josephine went on to make inquiries of William S. Hart as well as her old friends at Houghton Mifflin. Her last hope—and one that cost her much in the way of dignity—was Stuart Lake: “Perhaps you have good news for me; that you are prepared to commence work on my story. I trust that such is the situation, and that I shall not be disappointed longer, nor my friends either.”

Had the timing been different, and had her health and memory not been an issue, Lake might have finally written another book about Wyatt Earp. His editors, despairing that Lake would ever finish his long-promised book on Wells Fargo, encouraged him. Josephine had taken to calling him at odd hours, and he found her “lonely and forlorn.” Some unknown person had conned her out of most of her nest egg, and by the time Lake discovered the theft and hired an attorney on her behalf, the damage was done. “I know who turned the various tricks,” Lake said, but never revealed the culprit. He had not lost his interest in the story that he had been denied so many years before. With his old bravado, he wrote to Houghton Mifflin that he finally had the real story of Tombstone. “Within the last year or so Mrs. Earp broke down and came clean with the whole works.” It would be the basis of a new film, he promised.

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.