Lady at the O.K. Corral (31 page)

Hattie's ashes were scattered among the wildflowers of the Berkeley Hills, as she had instructed. Her chinchilla-trimmed broadtail coat and Russian sable scarf went to Edna, who received half of her mother's estate, with the other half left to Hattie's son Emil Jr. If both of her children died, the estate was to be split equally between their children and “my beloved sister, Josephine Earp.” However, the will was silent on the subject of the wells that had been legally transferred by Wyatt to Hattie and then leased in 1925 to Getty Oil. After all the time that Josephine and Wyatt had spent prospecting, it was only these investments that had proved to be significant. They were now generating enough money to be a major part of Hattie's estate.

Emerging as the strongest voice of the Marcus family's next generation, Edna believed that she and her brother owed nothing to Josephine. She was the sole supporter of her two children and had serious aspirations as an artist. If she didn't have to share with her aunt, Edna could live comfortably on her inheritance. Ironically, Josephine may have seemed too much of a Marcus to Edna, who was eager to begin her life anew with no Jewish connections to slow her down.

The payments to Josephine, which had once arrived so regularly on the first of the month, simply ceased.

Josephine inquired, politely at first, and then complained with increasing urgency. After months of entreaties, she filed a lawsuit in 1936 to enjoin Getty Oil from paying royalties to Hattie's heirs. Neither side really had their heart in the lawsuit, however, and court dates were delayed so many times that the judge threatened to drop the case from the calendar. The relations between Josephine and her family remained cordial during most of the lawsuit. They would appear on opposite sides of the court during the day, and go out to dinner in the evening. The plaintiff, Josephine, babysat occasionally for her great grand-nephew, who was the grandson of the defendant, Edna. In the will that Josephine composed during the lawsuit, she divided her estate equally among her nieces and nephews, referring to each of them warmly by name, leaving a blank for the person or people who would be the ultimate beneficiary of the disputed oil properties, and also leaving another blank for the recipients of future
Frontier Marshal
royalties.

Edna idolized Wyatt, and had fond memories of her many visits to the camp near Vidal. But her feelings toward Josephine were strained by the lawsuit. When the court finally agreed with Edna that she and her brother had sole control of the oil leases, with no legal obligation to share with their aunt, there was little reason for them to remain in contact.

JOSEPHINE SHOULD HAVE
been the matriarch of the family, but she presided over an empty table. Hattie's death and the lawsuit permanently loosened the ties between Josephine and her family. While not absolutely penniless or homeless, she was a lonely old woman, worried about the future, and dismayed about the rift with her niece. She was lost without Wyatt and Hattie, and depressed by the reality that her life of adventure had slipped forever from her grasp. The entire country's economic depression and the ominous gathering of war clouds over Europe only magnified her diminished personal circumstances.

But something always turned up for Josephine. She would live to write Wyatt into one more chapter of the American frontier.

IN 1931 THE
explorer Lincoln Ellsworth was planning a historic expedition to Antarctica, hoping to complete the first transcontinental flight. An enthusiastic reader of
Frontier Marshal
and other tales of Tombstone, Ellsworth wanted to give copies of Lake's book to his entire crew and to create a shrine to his boyhood hero in the captain's cabin. Best of all, Ellsworth planned to name his ship the
Wyatt Earp
.

Ellsworth wrote to Lake, requesting a photograph of Wyatt in later life. “Charmed to oblige,” Lake responded and crowed to his editor, “Can you beat Lincoln Ellsworth's naming his ship?” Ellsworth also contacted Josephine, who realized immediately that anyone who did not know Wyatt's name before would certainly know it now, and would associate him with courage, integrity, and patriotism. With help from John Flood, Josephine gathered together a precious store of memorabilia, including Wyatt's Colt 41 pistol (oddly, the weapon he brought to the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight), one of Wyatt's shotguns, and his last pair of wire eyeglasses, worn just one week before he passed away. “I would not part with them if it were for someone besides you,” Josephine wrote.

Born to a wealthy family in Chicago, Lincoln Ellsworth had studied engineering and trained as an aviator, successfully flying over the North Pole in 1926. He completed four expeditions to Antarctica between 1933 and 1939, using as his base the Norwegian herring boat
Fanefjord.
This was the boat that he planned to refurbish for his next Antarctic journey. It would carry an entire engine in spare parts below deck, as well as Ellsworth's plane and a wild pig being fattened for a New Year's feast. And this was the boat that would be reborn as the
Wyatt Earp.

Why change the name? Ellsworth asked, answering his own question in one of his early dispatches. The choice of Wyatt Earp connected his voyage of exploration specifically with the American frontier and American individualism, “all the best qualities in pioneering and development.” It had been America's manifest destiny to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and now it was Ellsworth's dream to plant the flag on the southernmost margin of the planet.

Because of public fascination with Ellsworth's exploits, Wyatt's name was featured prominently in the newspapers at least once a month for six years, sometimes in several articles on a single day. In the
New York Times
alone, 227 articles appeared, with headlines such as “
Wyatt Earp
Sails On in Foam-Crested Sea.” The name of Wyatt Earp was indelibly linked to a national adventure that captured the American imagination.

The four voyages of the
Wyatt Earp
make for breathless reading even today. The “staunch little ship” fought its way through subpolar storms and vast ice packs—not unlike Josephine's experience during her Alaskan journey. The suspense hardly ended when Ellsworth finally planted the American flag on Antarctica. During his flight across the continent, he was forced down by a blizzard and missing for almost two months. As his crew struggled to reach him, Josephine and the world read eagerly: “
Wyatt Earp
Off on Ellsworth Hunt” . . . “
Wyatt Earp
Braves Dangerous Waters” . . . “Ice Halts
Wyatt Earp
” . . . “Storm Aids
Wyatt Earp
.” Ellsworth's rescue dominated the news, even on a day when Edward VIII ascended to the throne of England and Dr. Joseph Goebbels addressed 18,000 cheering members of the National Socialist Party in the new Deutschland Hall, demanding new colonies to fuel the growth of Germany.

Josephine was overwhelmed with pride, as if Wyatt himself were animating the intrepid explorers. The global triumph of the
Wyatt Earp
went a long way toward assuaging the long years of public excoriation—perhaps even better than the praise and the royalty checks from
Frontier Marshal
. Surely she would triumph yet over her petty money problems and private terrors of discovery and humiliation.

Perhaps, Josephine reasoned, the time had come for her to return to the stage.

THE TOMBSTONE MEMOIRS
and sensationalized “true life histories” that began with Bat Masterson and continued with the early dime novels had never stopped, and now a new crop appeared.
Frontier Marshal
was the catalyst for much of this activity; Lake's idealized account infuriated people like Doc Holliday's former lover, Big Nose Kate, who was none too pleased with her role as Doc's whore. Kate wanted to set the record straight and was collaborating with a writer. John Clum wrote
It All Happened in Tombstone
and published one of the few biographies of a western woman, Nellie Cashman. He became a popular lecturer on the frontier experience. George Parsons died without publishing his diaries, but Fred Dodge's notes for his memoir eventually appeared as
Under Cover for Wells Fargo.

Josephine was most incensed about
Pioneer Days in Arizona
by Dr. Frank Lockwood, which portrayed Wyatt and his brothers as cold-blooded killers who stalked the Clantons and McLaurys to their deaths at the O.K. Corral. As an academic, Lockwood should have been more impartial and historical, she scolded, more like Lake. Instead, Lockwood relied on Breakenridge's
Helldorado
and produced a book that “teems with misinformation.”

It was Wyatt's way to ignore criticism, but incited by Burns, Breakenridge, Lockwood, and emboldened by Ellsworth and Lake's success, Josephine had had enough: “It is time that I had something to say,” she declared, “I am writing the story of my life.”

She discussed her plan with John Clum and with John Flood, who offered their assistance; like Wyatt, she would need a writing partner.

IN 1936, JOSEPHINE
noticed an obituary entitled “Wife of Gunman's Kin Dies,” which identified the recently deceased Alice Earp as the wife of Wyatt's cousin and a resident of Los Angeles. Josephine tracked down the family mentioned in the article; they had not known that Wyatt's widow was alive but invited her to visit.

Josephine arrived the next day. Instead of the rotund, windblown Josephine who presided over the Earp campsite, a newly slender and attractive older woman descended from a taxi, carrying a bakery box with a fresh cake inside. She was barely over five feet tall, and instead of her old shapeless housedress, she wore dignified and expensive-looking clothes. This first visit was lively and affectionate, as if they were indeed discovering long-lost relatives. They were eager to hear about her life with their famous cousin. And how exciting for Josephine to discover that these nice Earps were also writers and history buffs.

Perhaps they would be proper stewards of her story.

Perhaps, she suggested, they might collaborate on her memoir.

Her hosts were Mabel Earp Cason and Vinnolia Earp Ackerman, the daughters of William Harrison Earp, Wyatt's cousin. As children in rural Texas, New Mexico, and Mesa, Arizona, they had grown up surrounded by recollections of the frontier and the Earp brothers. Seeing Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was a highlight of their childhood. At a time when laborers were paid a dollar a day, they could hardly believe that Chief Sitting Bull was paid $1.50 for one signed autograph. They never met Wyatt, and to them, Tombstone was important not as the site of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral but as the place where their parents had chosen to be married, simply because the location was convenient and fun.

They were raised with a spirit of tolerance and independence, and an emphasis on education. A poor but sociable young girl, Mabel recalled walking through “chippy town” to get to school, and befriending some of the prostitutes, who were nice to her and to her hardworking mother. The family went through the worst of the Depression in a Texas farmhouse, where men would come to the back door every day asking for food. The sisters had clothes but sometimes no shoes.

They moved to California in 1934, and Mabel became an art teacher and writer/illustrator of children's books, while Vinnolia was eventually promoted to a senior position as head technical writer for a pharmaceutical company. They were both married; Mabel and Ernest Cason had five children, Vinnolia and Harold Ackerman one son.

The sisters had never written a book together, but responded enthusiastically to Josephine's proposed collaboration. They liked her story, and they liked her. Their husbands were less enamored of Josephine, but both felt that the project had some potential to make money.

Recognizing that Josephine was lonely and living in a state of genteel poverty despite her good clothes, both families invited her to stay with them while they planned the book. Except for the husbands, all of them grew fond of her. What began as a temporary visit lengthened into a cycle in which she would stay with Mabel, then Vinnolia, for months at a time, and then return to other friends in Los Angeles while Mabel and Vinnolia wrote up their notes and continued their research. In the Depression era, taking in elderly relatives and stranded friends was commonplace; the Casons lived in a four-bedroom house, with grown children who were coming and going. Now it was “Aunt Josie” who became part of the extended Cason-Ackerman family.

Josephine brought Mabel and Vinnolia a large stack of research notes that had been started by the friends she had already consulted about her memoir, a short list that included Clum, Parsons, and Hart. And then the three women set to work: the interviews were conducted mostly by Mabel, with Vinnolia taking notes in her expert shorthand. Sometimes Mabel's daughter Jeanne sat in on the interviews, listening with fascination to the stories of the old West. The sisters decided to break the story into two sections: Vinnolia would write about the events leading up to and including Tombstone, while Mabel would work on life after the O.K. Corral.

The sisters were captivated by Josephine's deep love and respect for Wyatt. She cast herself as Wyatt's traveling partner and foil, never as the center of attention. Although Mabel and Vinnolia were both working mothers and respected partners in their marriages, they accepted her willing subservience as charmingly anachronistic. “Wyatt spoiled her, and she was his little pet,” Mabel's daughter Jeanne recalled. Josephine was totally devoted to Wyatt's memory, even “worshipful,” as well as protective of his image and reputation. A romantic teenager herself, Jeanne felt that she was hearing from a woman who adored her husband, and was sharing the stories of a successful marriage, albeit one never blessed by any church.

But in their private discussions, the adoring wife acknowledged some deep dents in her hero's armor. Wyatt had affairs while they were together, Josephine confided to the sisters, and she even hinted at the existence of a previous wife. “She told us other things that indicated that, while Wyatt was a fine peace officer and a very brave man, he didn't have the best of principles where women were concerned,” Mabel recalled. Josephine admitted that she was often jealous of these other lovers and told Mabel about one case in which she threatened one persistent woman with an umbrella. Wyatt too was protective of her, though she was less forthright about any dalliances of her own. Their frequent squabbles usually ended in Wyatt putting on his hat and going for a walk.