Lady at the O.K. Corral (4 page)

To be one more struggling Polish Jew from an unremarkable family was simply not enough. It was adventure Josephine craved, and none of the Jews she knew were a match for her. So she would barely acknowledge her Jewish birth, and no Jewish organization would ever count her as a member. She would reinvent her parents as a wealthy German merchant and his proper German wife, who brought their daughter up to be a lady. Her status as a San Francisco Jew would figure only as a marker of the life she was about to leave behind.

Josephine Marcus would write another story for herself.

EIGHTEEN SEVENTY-SIX WAS
a watershed year—for San Francisco, and for Josephine. Despite the long-awaited completion of a major railroad connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, the depression experienced by the rest of the country had now hit San Francisco hard, exacerbated by a drought that destroyed grain crops and killed cattle. Unemployment rose precipitously. The gaudy excess of Nob Hill millionaires was stirring up a class resentment that was new to the city by the bay. A general fear settled over the city: perhaps the boom of the prior decades was finally over.

The news of major mineral strikes, and of the sudden fortunes to be made in the mysterious regions of the unsettled frontier, was irresistible. “There was far too much excitement in the air for one to remain long a child,” Josephine recalled. There were rumblings of new mining discoveries, sending visions of gold swirling like dust motes in the atmosphere of San Francisco. This could be her destiny, Josephine felt—to take part in this next dramatic round of exploration and building.

Into that atmosphere of anxiety and anticipation came a single spark of rebellion that would reverberate throughout the rest of her life.

THE SPARK CAME
from the stars.

From its first performances in London in 1878,
HMS Pinafore
ignited a global craze. Uninhibited by any international copyright protection, Gilbert and Sullivan's words and music flew from coast to coast, and so did people and sets, aided by the rapid advance of rail transport, which enabled a whole production to be relatively mobile. The bold stroke of having the star of the show utter the word
damn
, the “big D” of the script, was an additional guarantor of financial success to the comic opera's local backers, if not rewarding the “damned” originators, Gilbert and Sullivan. Already wildly popular in England,
Pinafore
became an American sensation.
Pinafore
companies sprang up everywhere, matched to every slice of the American demographic: black, white, German, Italian, professional, amateur, children. With over a hundred different opera troupes active in the United States, the marketplace for performers was brisk.

Enter Josephine.

Already seriously stagestruck, she was taking music and dancing lessons. San Francisco had performance schools to suit every pocketbook, and Sophia chose the McCarthy Dancing Academy, operated by Lottie and Nellie McCarthy and their two brothers. With more enthusiasm than talent, Josephine was enrolled as a voice student under the coach Mrs. Hirsch, whose daughter Dora became Josephine's closest friend. Two coquettes who stood just over five feet tall, Dora and Josephine shared confidences and girlish dreams of fame and romance.

The
Pinafore
business was so hot that bookings were sometimes made before actors were hired. Theater companies recruited actors wherever they could, including neighborhood schools such as the McCarthy Dancing Academy. “We're going to Arizona, girl!” was the stage whisper heard whenever Mrs. Hirsch turned her back. Rumor had it that one handsome young man who had been a favorite of Josephine's and Dora's had already joined a production that was being put together by the popular actress Pauline Markham, who had left a starring role in Lydia Thompson's “Blond Beauties” show to start her own traveling Gilbert and Sullivan company with her husband. As was customary, the new troupe would be named after its female star. The stage sets were built, the venues were booked, and the itinerary was set. But at the last minute, the Markham Company lost some of their actors. Perhaps they had not been paid, or perhaps they revolted when they heard about their destination, the Arizona Territory, where Apache attacks were still much feared.

“Have a little more patience,” the newspapers pleaded, and reported that fresh faces were on the way to join the troupe.

In vain, Mrs. Hirsch strenuously warned her students, including her daughter, about the empty promises of theatrical producers. But her pleas fell on deaf ears. Dora dreamed of being an actress, and when the Markham troupe began recruiting, she jumped at the chance. “Think of it, Josie, we're going on the stage,” she exulted. Josephine caught some of her friend's fever, though in Josephine's case, it was tempered with more than a little chagrin at the pain that she might inflict on her mother. Josephine had confidence in her looks but knew that she was not a great dancer. Perhaps she would be good enough to succeed in the mysterious world of “the Territory.”

In the fall of 1878, with the logic of an eighteen-year-old who dreaded her fate as a Polish-Jewish
hausfrau
, Josephine decided to join Dora, a “giddy, stage-struck girl” drawn away on a grand adventure by an even more strong-willed friend.

The first days of the journey were terrifying. Josephine sailed away from San Francisco in tears, overwhelmed with guilt and the desire to return to her mother. She cried even harder when she sacrificed her thick shining braids to play the part of a British sailor boy, a loss that wounded her vanity as well as her self-assurance, though she took some comfort in the novelty of wearing skintight breeches that exposed her trim ankles.

Her fellow actors seemed like beings from another world. It did not help that Dora had thrown herself entirely into the world of the theater. “You can't stay at home all your life and be an actress,” she taunted Josephine.

Using the stage names May Bell and Belle Hewitt, Josephine and Dora went through Los Angeles, then San Bernardino, finally drawing close to the Arizona Territory, passing through an alien landscape of desert and mountain passes that reinforced Josephine's sense of estrangement, guilt, and doubt.

THE MARKHAM “PINAFORE
on Wheels” troupe performed before capacity crowds throughout the Arizona Territory. In December 1879 they reached Tombstone, a recent addition to the schedule, and still a jumble of miners' tents and a crude facility that passed for a theater. As Josephine walked the dusty streets with the actors and musicians, she might have seen another group of newcomers unpacking their wagons and getting settled: Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and their wives had also arrived in Tombstone.

Markham's troupe was there for a few days and soon back on the road, headed for the next stop on the theatrical circuit. “I remember very little of the details,” Josephine would say later, recalling mostly homesickness but also the occasional thrill of being onstage, feeling as if she floated above the floor. Dora had little sympathy, but Pauline Markham took notice of her protégé's confused state and offered the young girl some comfort.

Josephine's tears for her mother soon turned to terror when the actors were intercepted by fierce-looking riders on horseback. Famed Indian scout Al Sieber led one group, and a local lawman named Johnny Behan led the other. Savages on the warpath! they warned. With great gusto, Josephine later embellished the drama of how she and the other Markham actors were saved from unspeakable atrocities. In her narrative, Mexican thieves became renegade Apache warriors. “If those
caballeros
from Sonore get away without being killed or captured it will be a miracle and really too bad,” reported the
Weekly Arizona Miner
on December 5, 1879, eager to see Sieber and Behan return with their quarry.

Alas, the posses returned empty-handed, no thieves or savages, but by then, Deputy Sheriff Behan had his eye on another conquest.

Not much taller than Josephine, and about sixteen years older, Johnny Behan was a small, dapper man. He was fastidiously groomed, and she thought he looked great on horseback. In contrast to the tightly knit world of the Jews of San Francisco, where everyone seemed to know everyone else, Behan was a total stranger. She had never met anyone like him before: he was no peddler or baker, but a deputy sheriff with a dashing air of authority. She liked his merry black eyes and roguish smile. But most of all, she liked how he concentrated his whole attention on her, looking past all the other girls.

Older and wiser, Pauline Markham warned her young friend about Behan. He was married and had a child. Josephine assured her that their flirtation was but a “diversion from homesickness.”

After some sweet moments whispering with Johnny in the moonlight, Josephine left town with the rest of the troupe, continuing on to Prescott. And then everything fell apart. Pauline Markham unexpectedly dumped her husband and disbanded the company. On January 28, 1880, the San Francisco newspapers raised eyebrows by publicizing the end of the marriage: “Miss Pauline Markham of the Pinafore Troupe, left last night for parts unknown. Domestic difficulty is supposed to be the cause. She left a note to her husband stating that it was no use to follow her. The direction taken by her is a profound mystery.”

Josephine might have chosen to stay in Prescott, but she acknowledged that Johnny had dropped not a word about marriage into his avowals of love. Was he in fact divorced, as he claimed, or was Miss Markham right? Filled with doubt, she contacted her family, and her older sister and brother-in-law dispatched a family friend to bring her home. Although Behan protested that he was a free man, Josephine allowed herself to be taken back to San Francisco. “When you get your divorce,” she told him, “come and see me.”

THE BRIEF ACTING
career of Josephine Sarah Marcus was a secret known only to her immediate family. That first experience in the Arizona Territory set the pattern for the conflicting impulses that would always govern her choices—a hunger for adventure and romance, and a craving for status and respectability. Her failure in this foray from home was a source of humiliation and regret.

Josephine attempted to draw a complete veil of secrecy over this part of her life: “Except for the bearing my escapade had upon what followed in my life and to quiet all erroneous rumors with the truth I should not have felt constrained to relate it.” In fact, she denied that she had ever been on the stage. “I have heard it whispered that before my marriage I was a dancer,” she stated with an excess of dignity. “The rumors placed my dancing career all the way from the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Arizona, to a dance hall in Nome.” Later, she would lead her biographers on a wild goose chase that had her abducted by Native Americans, instead of running away by her own choice.

This first chapter of her adventure was over, and Josephine was back in San Francisco in time to be counted for the 1880 census as a member of her parents' household, which was even more crowded now that the Marcus family included her half sister Rebecca's husband and four children. Little else had changed. Josephine had come home with nothing to show for her adventure other than a mild but inconvenient case of what was probably St. Vitus's dance—a neurological illness that stemmed from a childhood case of rheumatic fever. Josephine blamed her lassitude and sudden lack of coordination on exhaustion and the anxiety of life on tour. Lacking modern penicillin, the common treatment in 1880 would have been a quiet convalescence at home. But Josephine did not take well to the restraints placed on her activities. After the excitement of Arizona, her medical confinement seemed like house arrest. She was pining for Johnny, and chafing at the sense of freedom interrupted.

True to her last command, Johnny did come to San Francisco to plead his case. Undeterred by her departure from Arizona or her return to her Jewish family, he met Hyman and Sophia Marcus and declared his intention to marry their daughter, presenting Josephine with a diamond ring. Although no account remains of the Marcuses' meeting with Johnny, it is not hard to imagine their consternation at Josephine's odd choice. Johnny's religion was the least of his strangeness to Mr. and Mrs. Marcus. Josephine herself vacillated between infatuation and doubt. She sent Johnny away with no promises for the future.

But Johnny did not give up easily. He sent an emissary from Tombstone to intercede on his behalf, thinking perhaps that the respectable wife of a successful attorney would overcome Josephine's reluctance.

He chose his advocate well. Ida Jones (also known as Kitty or Katherine) came to the Arizona Territory with her husband, Harry Jones, a respected lawyer. The difference in age between Kitty and her husband was about the same as between Josephine and Johnny. Behan was indeed an unmarried man, Kitty reassured Josephine, and he loved her most sincerely. Kitty painted a rosy picture of Josephine's future life, how she could tie her fortunes to Tombstone's rapid growth and Johnny's excellent prospects.

It was time for Josephine Marcus to give the frontier another chance. Her misgivings melted away under the pressure of her own boredom and restlessness, as well as Kitty's persuasive arguments. She dismissed her parents' concerns, and they were powerless to stop her. Josephine was in the grip of “an enticement that would beckon to her all her life and that she could never resist—that was the lure of the prospect trail.”

By December 1880, Josephine was back on the dusty road to Tombstone.

Kitty Jones had replaced Dora as Josephine's companion now, completing the last part of her assignment to deliver the reluctant bride into Johnny Behan's arms. Josephine felt comfortable with her new friend's lively southern ways and cheerful disposition. The two women were joined by Mariette (also known as Maria) Duarte, a demure Mexican senorita who, like Josephine, was on her way to meet her future husband. The three women munched on gumdrops, while Kitty kept up a gay stream of chatter to allay the nervousness of the two younger women.