Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp Read online

  | Map

  | Dedication

  FOR JOEY, MY FIRST HERO

  | Epigraph

  Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there.

  —Nora Ephron, Wellesley College commencement address

  I don’t have to speak, she defends me.

  —Robbie Robertson, “Up on Cripple Creek”

  | Contents

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue:

  In Which I Land on Planet Earp

  1

  A Jewish Girl in Tombstone

  2

  The Fourth Mrs. Earp

  Photo Insert

  3

  The Greatest Mining Camp the World Has Ever Known

  4

  Waiting for Wyatt

  5

  Josephine’s Last Trail

  6

  Planet Earp

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books

  Earpnotes

  Sources

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue | IN WHICH I LAND ON PLANET EARP

  DID YOU know that Wyatt Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery?”

  Just hearing his name threw me back to my childhood in Jackson Heights, New York City, sprawled on the floor in front of a black-and-white television, watching Westerns with my big brother Joey, dressed up in his special shirt with braided trim and snazzy snap buttons and black cowboy hat and shiny gun in a faux leather holster slung around his hips. Joey and I tuned in and pretended to walk the streets of Tombstone every week, together with millions of Americans, young and old.

  Joey was my hero, and Marshal Earp was his.

  Brave, courageous, bold . . . and Jewish?

  That’s how it all started, just an innocent question from a friend who thought (correctly) that I would be intrigued by the incongruities between anything Jewish and anything Tombstone-ish.

  This first burst of curiosity about Wyatt Earp’s final resting place and religion was easily satisfied. I soon learned that Wyatt, the only man to emerge unscathed from the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, was not Jewish but had lived with a Jewish woman for nearly fifty years. She buried him next to her parents and brother in a family plot at the synagogue-affiliated Hills of Eternity cemetery outside of San Francisco.

  And that was my introduction to Mrs. Earp.

  As children when Wyatt Earp ruled the airwaves, we didn’t know that he had a wife, certainly not a Jewish wife from New York. I was a Jew from New York! So each revelation about a woman named Josephine Sarah Marcus evoked new images that made me smile, especially the thought of Wyatt Earp going home for chicken soup after a tough day fighting for truth and justice in the dusty streets of Tombstone, Arizona.

  I quickly became far more interested in Mrs. Earp than in her famous husband. Contradictions piled up like a freeway collision. How had a beautiful girl from San Francisco via New York and Prussia ended up in Tombstone? While the rest of her immigrant family climbed out of poverty and into bourgeois respectability, why had Josephine run away? What inspired five decades of adventure-seeking that took her from the Arizona Territory to California, Nevada, and Alaska, and then, finally, to Hollywood?

  The historical record on Josephine was thin. None of the early articles and books about Tombstone—and there were many—even mentioned her existence. On the other hand, the history of Wyatt Earp and the Arizona Territory sank deep roots into the American psyche. Books about Wyatt’s exploits became best sellers, movies played to full houses, and historical reenactments drew large crowds. Wyatt Earp was big business, then and now. Try a random Internet search today, and the O.K. Corral will pop up in a motley assortment of links to political contests, basketball championships, and stock traders fixing interest rates. On Wikipedia, the story of Wyatt Earp is told in twenty-six languages, but Josephine was, until recently, nowhere to be found.

  On October 26, 1881, Wyatt, his handsome brothers, and Doc Holliday strode down Tombstone’s main street and confronted a quartet of murderous cowboys and thieving cattle rustlers near the O.K. Corral. Less than a minute and dozens of bullets later, three men were dead and three were injured. Wyatt Earp walked away without a scratch.

  The gunfight never loosened its iron grip on the public’s imagination. For more than a century it has remained an important symbol of American culture, evoked in the wake of every contemporary tragedy, from Columbine to Gabrielle Giffords, an enduring reference point for our national obsession with guns and violence and revenge. Along the way, “cow-boy” lost the hyphen and mutated from lawless marauder to the Maverick Man. Tombstone and the O.K. Corral became intertwined with other powerful themes of American history: industrialization, urbanization, seismic shifts of attitude toward gambling and alcohol and prostitution, and the end of the American frontier.

  I thought I knew the story. But I knew only one version. The O.K. Corral is a story with a thousand variations. There is, for instance, the Marxist script that casts the Earps as the repressive embodiment of a capitalist regime, determined to impose law and order on the frontier to keep profits flowing. In the Manichean narrative, Wyatt Earp is a defining figure in the dynamic interplay of good and evil.

  As Josephine and I became better acquainted, I wanted to hear the human version that restored to its center the real life of one woman caught up in the frenzied atmosphere of the most famous frontier boomtown. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was a love story, fought over Josephine Marcus, a woman of beauty and spunk barely out of her teens, escaping the restrictions of birth and seeking adventure, independence, and romance.

  SHE HAD BEEN born on the wrong side of the tracks. For the rest of her life, Josephine would characterize her father as a “wealthy German merchant,” but that was one of her cover-up tales. Her mother and father were from Prussia and subject to the deep-seated prejudices of German Jews against their Eastern European cousins. They had neither the connections nor the education nor the wealth to launch their daughter into the highly stratified German-Jewish aristocracy of nineteenth-century San Francisco.

  Although she never experienced anything as dramatic as a spiritual crisis or loss of faith, Josephine was indifferent to being Jewish and believed that she could leave her family history behind. As Nora Ephron would memorably say of herself, Josephine was not in denial; she acknowledged that she was a Jew, but being Jewish was not in the top five things she wanted you to know about her. Her few nostalgic references to home were linked to her mother and some affectionate Yiddish blessings and songs. An accomplished cook, she preferred biscuits and other southern specialties to the schmaltz of her childhood. She relinquished all personal ties to Judaism or any organized religion, preferring a kind of loosely held pantheism that peeked out occasionally when she was overwhelmed by the grandeur of the Californian desert or the wild Yukon River. Wyatt Earp had more Jewish friends than she did. In the rough and paranoid years of her later life, she stooped to label her enemies “kikes” or “sheenies.”

  And yet when she confronted her greatest crisis, she turned back to her family’s faith and buried her husband among the Jews of San Francisco.

  Josephine was street-smart and intuitive, playful and fearless and headstrong. A mixture of naive and sophisticated, she had no interest in politics, and no one remembered her picking up a
book or a newspaper. She yearned to be a lady, while spending much of her life among gamblers and gunfighters. She was a man’s woman, with a handful of female friends. None of her husband’s status as popular culture hero would rub off on her: there would be no television shows or theme songs about her, no lunch boxes with her image.

  Josephine was beautiful. With her spectacular figure, piles of dark hair, and strong features, she must have looked like a Victorian-era Penelope Cruz, commanding every male eye in Tombstone. As an older woman, her silhouette still amazed Grace Welsh Spolidoro, a close family friend but no fan of Josephine’s: “Her bosoms came in the front door before her body did! She was humongous, and she was a small lady. Little hips, little legs, but those things were the biggest things I ever saw.”

  Josephine was bold, and she was funny. She had a laugh that was described as “the tinkling of champagne glasses” and a gift for mimicry that delighted children. She had a nose for adventure, and feared little other than ennui—and snakes. She remained close to her family, always a caring and attentive aunt and great-aunt, but she sought a permanent escape from the narrow, predictable future that she foresaw for herself, caught up in the German-Polish divide.

  Unlike her sisters, she chose a life of excitement over a home and children. The girl who ran away from home at eighteen lived to be an old woman of eighty-four without ever having a single permanent address. Or a legally binding marriage contract. Josephine never said, “I do,” only “I will.” But her lifetime partnership with Wyatt Earp was indeed a marriage, with the power to withstand the tempests of infidelity, the pressures of sudden wealth and slow poverty, and the anxieties of aging and illness.

  Once hooked on uncovering her story, I acclimated myself to a strange new place I called Planet Earp. Here, Wyatt Earp had his passionate supporters and detractors, and everything about Josephine was controversial, down to her age and name. Although her parents and her siblings had undisputed birth dates, Josephine remained unsure as to her own, not only because it suited her to be as young as possible, but because no public record existed to confirm the date that she believed to be correct: June 2, 1860. A sizable group of authenticated photographs testified to Wyatt Earp’s undeniable good looks at any age, while there was not a single undisputed photograph of young Josephine, only ones in which she looked more Sophie Tucker than Penelope Cruz.

  Even her name was contentious. From 1881 until 1929, Wyatt mostly called her Sadie, a nickname from her middle name, Sarah. After Wyatt’s death, she could not bear to be Sadie and insisted on Josie only. But some denizens of Planet Earp mocked her preference of Josie as pretentious or a vain attempt to hide her past. I discovered that I could stumble over some fatal tripwire if I used the wrong name. Heads would shake with disapproval. Sources would dry up. Conversations would end.

  And so I called her Josephine.

  JOSEPHINE MARCUS EARP wasn’t the only woman erased from western history; with few exceptions, Planet Earp was inhabited only by men. The early chroniclers of frontier lore, writers like Walter Noble Burns, Frederick Bechdolt, and William Breakenridge, seemed to have no wives, mothers, daughters, lovers. At least, they didn’t write about them. When Western writers did insert an occasional dance-hall girl back into the landscape, her portrayal was often crude and lifeless. And more recently, when modern historians did begin to pay attention to Wyatt’s women, the stories were often inaccurate and filled with ugly caricatures. Whenever I heard Josephine described as “shrewish,” I suspected that the writer really meant “Jewish.”

  Josephine had the right to her own story. Feminist scholar and writer Carolyn Heilbrun might have been writing about Josephine when she pointed out that denouncing women as shrill or strident—accusations often made about Mrs. Earp—was another way of denying them power. Josephine had the additional complication of belonging to an immigrant Jewish family. She aged into an America that would experience a wave of anti-Semitism, especially in the 1930s, when Josephine was at her least likable, a querulous old lady recovering from the death of her lifelong partner.

  Would Josephine be furious to have been all but rubbed out of the pages of history, or relieved?

  I wanted to answer that question, not to provoke a discussion of misogyny or anti-Semitism among Western writers and historians, though I could argue that one was long overdue, but because I had news: there was a woman at the O.K. Corral.

  Only a handful of people even knew that she was there, and few recognized that she was at the apex of a love triangle as the former fiancée of the Cochise County sheriff, the champion of the cowboys’ cause and Wyatt’s political rival. She fell in love with Sheriff Johnny Behan, only to discover that she had chosen poorly. He wooed her with promises of marriage, but she would soon find herself alone in the hostile climate of a frontier boomtown, where a single woman in need of food and shelter could easily find herself working as a prostitute.

  None of her contemporaries knew why Josephine Marcus came to Tombstone, or why she left. As eyewitnesses died off, it became harder and harder to follow the trail of broken promises and festering secrets. But fascination with Wyatt Earp and the West increased. He became famous as the iconic American lawman, a stoic, ambiguous figure at the heart of the ultimate American morality play, sometimes wearing a badge and defending the law, and sometimes in pursuit of vigilante justice. “Manhood extreme,” as his friend Bat Masterson described him, this improbably handsome man attracted a remarkable variety of loyal friends, from Doc Holliday to Senator George Hearst to Endicott Peabody to Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Successive generations used him as an archetype from which to fashion contemporary versions of a lawman who stalked the streets of gangland Chicago, the jungles of Vietnam, and more recently, zombie-postapocalyptic landscapes and alien battlefields of outer space.

  Before the archetype, there was a man. The real Wyatt Earp lived with the same woman for most of his adult life. Little has been known about that woman or her critical role in shaping the life and legend of Wyatt Earp. Until now, hers was just one more untold tale of the women of the West. Yet our national narrative is flawed, our canvas incomplete, until Josephine Earp makes her entrance, which is the purpose of this book.

  Josephine spent decades shaping the public face of Wyatt Earp. Her motivation was complex, even contradictory: to give immortality to the legend of Wyatt Earp and to erase the dark shadow that Tombstone cast over their life. She dreaded anything that came close to the unsavory, violent truths that were the foundation of their long life together. If her pleas and tears did not suffice, she threatened lawsuits against anyone who threatened to reveal the secrets of their past. She and Wyatt came to dread the very mention of Tombstone—yet Tombstone was undeniably the wellspring for her subsequent adventures, and Wyatt’s everlasting fame. “Surely there is something more pleasant to talk about,” Wyatt would say to inquiring folks. Josephine hid her tracks so well that when her own niece visited Tombstone, she called it “Uncle Wyatt’s old hang out,” with nary a word about her aunt.

  When Josephine finally agreed to tell her story, she recruited two Earp relatives, Mabel Earp Cason and Vinnolia Earp Ackerman, but even to them, she could not bear to reveal the truth.

  Never sure whether she should speak or be silent, Josephine destroyed one version of her memoir and put a curse on anyone who dared to publish it.

  The result was that for more than a hundred years, most of what was written about Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp was a lie—and no one told more whoppers about Josephine than she did herself.

  What was she hiding?

  CURIOSITY BECAME OBSESSION. I fell in love with Josephine, the flamboyant, curvaceous Jewish girl, the restless romantic with a persistent New Yawk accent. She began her nomadic life on horseback and in stagecoaches, and would later travel by railroad and eventually ride in her own car, always moving, always looking for the next destination, making and losing fortunes, driven by what Wallace Stegner called “the incurable Western disease.” She would be at home in
the deserts of the American Southwest and the boomtowns of the Alaskan gold rush, in the opulent hotels of San Francisco in the Gay Nineties, in rough mining camps, gaudy gambling casinos, racetracks, and boxing arenas, and finally she would be received among the royalty of Hollywood. As Mabel Cason’s son told me, she was the most aggravating, frustrating, interesting woman he had ever met, as far from “plain vanilla” as you could get.

  I set out to find answers to the mysteries of the woman at the O.K. Corral. I wanted to understand how a woman could survive in the crazy boomtowns that were Tombstone, San Diego, and Nome. How did she fuel her bottomless capacity for self-invention? What sustained her lifelong partnership with a man of uncommon charisma and complex heroism? Her life enveloped me as the untold tale of a private woman every bit as interesting as her husband. I wanted to understand this woman of contradictions: the young runaway who stayed close to her family, the Jew who shunned other Jews, the rebel who could never make up her mind about whether she should be the lady or the tramp. Josephine sought to cover herself with a cloak of respectability, but she couldn’t quite make it stretch over a life that was as unpredictable and dynamic as the American frontier itself.

  Wyatt and Josephine lived together for forty-seven years. She drew her strength from him, but she was the one who managed his business, signed his letters, and entertained his friends. He was buried with tears and eulogies and coast-to-coast headlines, while she died practically destitute and friendless.

  All of which brought me back to the gunfight of October 26, 1881.

  I WENT TO TOMBSTONE. I walked its streets, thinking about its peculiar place in history, how it was at one time destined to become the capital of Arizona, only to be practically abandoned after its precious metals were depleted, the bankers, brothels, and booze long gone. The mines that once operated twenty-four hours a day were open only as tourist attractions. At the annual Helldorado festival, created in 1929 to keep Tombstone alive as a business and tourist center, the streets filled up with thousands of Wyatt Earp wannabes, riding in stagecoaches, waiting for hourly reenactments of the gunfight, and ready to twirl a bushy mustache for photographs. Lost in the town’s tacky present was the drama of the once sharply drawn factions of another century: Confederate loyalists versus abolitionists, rural cowboys and ranchers versus townsmen and capitalists. They voted for different parties, and they read different newspapers. Even their clothes were distinct, with the urbane Earps on one side in long black coats, and the cowboys on the other side in their farm clothes and bandannas. They collided at the O.K. Corral, a place named in honor of President Martin Van Buren, nicknamed “Old Kinderhook” after his hometown in upstate New York.