Lady at the O.K. Corral (27 page)

Just one word of caution, Raine warned: “Old Wyatt Earp is still on deck” and might threaten Breakenridge with a libel suit, as he had already attacked Raine for his “Helldorado” article. “He has told his story so long he thinks it is true.”

BILLY BREAKENRIDGE WAS
living alone at the Old Pueblo Club in Tucson, where he served as the president of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society. Walter Noble Burns's book had fired him up; it was well written and entertaining, “but as a history it is all buncomb. It is the story told to him by Wyatt Earp while Burns visited him last fall.” As for the “Earp Gang,” as he called them, Breakenridge scoffed at the idea that they were honest officers; Burns and Frederick Bechdolt had it all wrong. They had fallen under Wyatt Earp's spell. Breakenridge was particularly incensed with Wyatt's claim to have killed the infamous Johnny Ringo during the Vendetta Ride. “A mass of lies,” Behan's former deputy declared.

“I am not an educated man,” he conceded, and “chasing train robbers was sport alongside of trying to write a book.” Still, Breakenridge devoted himself to the task: he researched the original testimony from the Spicer hearing, conducted interviews with old-timers, and ferreted around the Tombstone newspaper archives.

One of Houghton's most experienced editors, Ira Rich Kent, agreed to edit the manuscript, and at eighty-one, Breakenridge was extremely gratified to find himself the published author of
Helldorado: Bringing the Law to the Mesquite
. He was particularly thrilled with compliments from John Clum, who had helped with some fact-checking, and now addressed him as “my dear ‘Helldorado' Breakenridge,” congratulating him on a “rip-roarin'-snortin' title” and a surefire best seller.

Breakenridge and
Helldorado
replaced Burns and
Tombstone
as the target of Josephine's wrath. Where Burns had idealized Wyatt, Breakenridge cast him as the villain of a lurid tale, portrayed with a sneer and innuendo as the leader of the “so-called law and order party.” Never identifying the
Nugget
as the house organ of the cowboys, Breakenridge relied on its highly politicized reporting. Wyatt escaped gunshot only because he wore a bulletproof “steel vest,” Breakenridge contended. Behan was treated sympathetically, and of course Breakenridge gave himself a starring role.

Wyatt was genuinely shocked. He wrote to Breakenridge with uncharacteristic pathos: “I have always felt friendly towards you, and I naturally thought you had the same friendly feeling toward me.” Despite Albert Behan's advance warning, it was too late for an injunction, so Josephine orchestrated a flurry of letters of protest to publisher Houghton Mifflin, and to their first-respondent group of well-placed friends. A complaint to William MacLeod Raine yielded the cool disclaimer that he had not independently verified statements made in the book, but deferred to Breakenridge.

Burns's book was annoying, but it did not rip open old wounds as
Helldorado
did. Because Breakenridge was a Tombstone eyewitness, his account would carry considerable credibility. “Very interesting,” Wyatt noted sarcastically to Breakenridge's assertion that the Clantons and McLaurys were unarmed. “This probably explains how Virgil Earp, Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday were wounded during the fight.” With more nerve than logic, Breakenridge even copyrighted one of Wyatt's most recent photographs.

Josephine's frustrations multiplied. Flood had failed as a writer. Burns had published a flattering version, but the Earps had no share in his success. Breakenridge accused the Earps of heinous acts of violence and corruption. Other accounts were reported to be in the works: even George Parsons was talking about publishing his diaries. Sympathetic to Josephine and Wyatt's distress, Hart suggested other writers such as Rex Beach and Walter Coburn, but neither one was available.

Wyatt's legendary strength was waning. He was in constant pain from a chronic bladder infection. He refused to consult a physician until Josephine delivered an ultimatum. As both of them feared, a physician in Los Angeles recommended immediate surgery. When Josephine returned from making all the hospital arrangements, she found Wyatt packing his suitcases for the desert. “You can have an operation if you want it,” he told her with a grin.

They left that afternoon. It would be his last winter in the desert.

“
YOU DO THE
telling and I, the writing and whipping into shape,” proposed an enterprising young writer named Stuart Lake to Wyatt. Just before Christmas, 1927, Lake tracked Wyatt down in the desert to propose that they collaborate on a biography. He had once worked as a press agent for Theodore Roosevelt, and had attended but never graduated from Cornell—credentials that meant nothing to Josephine or Wyatt, until he dropped the one name that did matter: Bat Masterson.

Lake's approach was straightforward and businesslike, promising less a masterpiece of art or history than a work for hire: “I am certain that we could work out a plan including division of labor and remuneration that would be mutually satisfactory.” Wyatt responded with some warmth, but postponed their next meeting for a period of time that stretched from a few weeks to six months. He was ailing all that winter, some days entirely unable to leave their camp.

Josephine knew that this was likely to be their last chance. Their fortune had slipped through their fingers. Wyatt was no longer working, and as their money pressures mounted, she found the responsibilities of caring for an aging husband, even one as beloved as Wyatt, to be sometimes overwhelming. Their dream of prospecting bonanzas was long over. They had moved to another Los Angeles bungalow, this one at 4004 West Seventeenth Street, and for the first time, Wyatt acknowledged that his health “was not as rugged” as he would like. They were watching every penny, annoyed by the barrage of books and films about Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, none of which returned any money to them. To supplement Hattie's monthly subsidy, Josephine was forced to borrow money from old friends such as oil tycoon Edward Doheny, who had once worked with Wyatt at the Oriental Saloon and was now one of the richest men in America, living in a grand French Gothic chateau in the same West Adams neighborhood as the Earps' modest bungalow. It was harder to get an audience with Doheny than with the pope, quipped the
Los Angeles Times
, but for Wyatt's sake, Doheny admitted Josephine and paid some of her most pressing bills.

Lake was offering them a fifty/fifty “horse-high, bull-strong, and hog-tight” split. While he had no publisher yet, Lake inspired confidence that he could be the one to write that clean and lively story.

By the early fall of 1928, they'd reached an agreement, and Lake was ready to sit down with Wyatt Earp.

Although Josephine dreamed of securing Wyatt's legacy, she could hardly have imagined that she would succeed in commissioning a work that would endure for generations and become the sturdy cornerstone for Wyatt Earp's reputation into the twenty-first century.

LAKE WAS AWARE
of Flood's previous attempt, and requested copies of his detailed notes and drafts. Head held high, Flood turned it all over and said, “I am not interested for one moment as to financial remuneration; the purpose is to square Mr. Earp.” Flood's honorable stance was the only compensation he would receive for his patient, if uninspired, work as Wyatt's first authorized biographer. Nor did he receive any credit from Lake, although Lake described “reading and rereading the clippings and Mr. Flood's manuscript” in the first few months as he prepared for his interviews with Wyatt. His working notes show continual reminders to himself to “see Flood for detail.” In later years, Lake would assess Flood's contribution with more ego than honesty and eventually dismissed it entirely: “Flood's so-called manuscript of memoirs contributed exactly nothing to my job: literally, I kept as far away from it as possible. . . . Wyatt never dictated anything of his career to him . . . beyond one quick skimming I never read it until after my book was out.”

Wyatt tried again to cooperate but was no more forthcoming than he had been with Flood. Lake found his subject “delightfully laconic, or exasperatingly so.” He considered whether Wyatt's long silences were due to the constant barrage of criticism about his past actions. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he assured Wyatt, “nothing that will not bear the light in the eyes of any open minded judicious man or woman. . . . You were one man who had nothing to fear from history. . . . Things have changed somewhat it is true, but most of the world knows that in the days with which the most of our story will deal men lived differently than now. We must be as frank about that as about anything else.”

However, Wyatt hardly needed Lake's reassurance; he was not a man given to self-doubt, and he had a blunt appreciation of his own strengths and weaknesses. His silence was simply his style. “I was pumping, pumping, pumping, for names and incidents and sidelights; all of which Wyatt could supply but none of which he handed out in any sort of narrative form,” Lake complained. To bring color to Wyatt's dry recitation, he eventually resorted to putting words in Wyatt's mouth, as he later admitted: “Wyatt never ‘dictated' a word to me. I spent hours and days and weeks with him—and I wish you could see my notes! They consist entirely of the barest facts.”

Lake lived in San Diego but came to Los Angeles to interview Earp about six times. Josephine was always there. Lake was restless about her presence and her frequent consultation with lawyer Bill Hunsaker, warning that this kind of “red tape” would impede his progress. There was talk of a visit to Tombstone, but Wyatt was too weak to travel. Josephine responded on Wyatt's behalf to Lake's long lists of questions, correcting facts along the way and debunking myths such as the widespread notion that gunfighters tallied kills with notches carved in their guns. It was Josephine to whom Lake turned most often for photographs and clippings. She threw herself into this new role as research assistant, consulting with her family, with Allie Earp, with Bat Masterson's family. Sadly, much of what Lake sought had been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

By late fall, with his research well under way and several interviews with Wyatt under his belt, Lake complained playfully that the writing was going too well. He finally read
Helldorado
, useful mostly for its “mistakes and misstatements,” but he was concerned about the copyright that Breakenridge had imposed on Wyatt's photograph. A new portrait would have to be taken. In the meantime, Lake made plans to join Josephine and Wyatt in Vidal for the winter, and was ready to pack up his typewriter and books. But when the time came, Wyatt did not have the strength for the move. Then Lake himself fell victim to a serious case of the flu. Bedridden for months, he had no way of knowing that he was losing the last precious months of Wyatt's life.

WYATT'S CIRCLES GREW
smaller in the waning months of 1928. Bill Hart wrote often, with warm valedictories about “how glad I am to be considered your friend.” A steady stream of friends and family continued to visit the bungalow. Josephine's grandniece Alice remembered her last visit: “I can still see him. He came to the door, straight as an arrow.” John Clum was a frequent visitor. Playwright Wilson Mizner came by, entertaining Wyatt with songs from his old repertoire at Considine's Hall in Nome. Tom Mix came from the movie set to spend hours with Wyatt; according to screenwriter Adela Rogers St. John, one of the last journalists to interview Wyatt, he and Tom Mix were serious readers of literature and history, as well as enthusiastic consumers of newspapers and magazines. “A high grade man of the green cloth,” the local bookstore clerk noted on Wyatt's file. He and Tom Mix read Shakespeare together, especially
Hamlet,
so talkative a man that “he wouldn't have lasted long in Kansas,” joked Earp. Always eager to emphasize that they did not really kill a man before breakfast in Tombstone, Wyatt observed “there are more corpses in
Hamlet
than there was in the O.K. Corral, and with less reason.” After all, he added, we killed none of the wrong men like Hamlet did, with a nod of sympathy to “poor old Polonius.”

Even in his last year of life, Wyatt had a powerful effect on women. Adela Rogers St. John declared that she would never forget seeing Wyatt as he rose from a chair to greet her, “straight as a pine tree, tall and magnificently built. I knew he was nearing 80, but in spite of his snow-white hair and mustache he did not seem, or look old. His greeting was warm and friendly but I stood still in awe. Somehow, like a mountain or a desert, he reduced you to size.”

Nineteen twenty-eight was a season of loss. Tex Rickard and Newton Earp died the same week. Tex Rickard was nearly twenty years younger than Wyatt, while Newton was ten years older. Josephine considered not telling Wyatt, but his doctor advised her to be honest. Tex's untimely death from a ruptured appendix was mourned by thousands of people who filed past a gaudy bronze casket in the middle of Madison Square Garden. Newton had a Grand Army funeral. The brothers had not been particularly close, but the double loss still hit Wyatt hard.

“I can't plan any more to climb the hills and hit the drill,” Wyatt mused to Hart. He refused to consult a physician until Josephine recruited Dr. Fred Shurtleff, a prominent physician who was president of the Los Angeles County Academy of Medicine and had served as a deputy sheriff in the frontier and a police captain at Alcatraz. Wearing boots and slinging a saddlebag over his shoulder, Dr. Shurtleff looked every bit the “cowboy doctor” who belonged at the bedside of Wyatt Earp.

On Election Day 1928, Wyatt left the house one last time to have another photograph taken for Lake's book and to cast his vote for Al Smith, the Democratic candidate in the presidential election. Wyatt may have once been a staunch Republican, but the old saloonkeeper had announced that he would cast his vote for whatever candidate stood against Prohibition. Josephine apparently never exercised her right to vote.