She was different before, you’d remind yourself. Poor Wyatt, you’d think as you left the house.
“How do you stand it?” John asked him once.
“I was no prize, John,” Wyatt said. “She put up with a lot from me.”
THE MAN WHO WOULD IMMORTALIZE Wyatt Earp didn’t know about Mrs. Earp’s peculiarities, but Stuart Lake knew other things in 1928. He knew Lowell Thomas was still making a lucrative career out of selling Lawrence of Arabia. He knew the public remained hungry for stories of individual heroism—even now, a decade after losing a generation of nameless men to the Great War’s senseless slaughter. He knew people were still fascinated by the Tombstone gunfight, and he knew Mr. and Mrs. Earp thought they’d been cheated by Walter Burns.
So right off the bat, Stu Lake offered to split the proceeds of a biography down the middle. I’m proposing a fifty-fifty, horse-high, bull-strong, hog-tight deal, he wrote, demonstrating the lively style he intended to bring to the project. You do the telling, I’ll do the writing and the whipping into shape. As his bona fides, he offered his experience as Teddy Roosevelt’s press agent at the turn of the century: playing up TR’s cowboy persona, framing his adventures so they had maximum political appeal. I am the man for the job, Lake wrote. Give me a chance and I’ll do you proud.
The reply came from a Mr. John Flood, who said he acted as the Earps’ secretary. Mr. Earp was not in good health; Mrs. Earp would need income after his passing. Mr. Flood himself had spent three years interviewing Mr. Earp about his life, but his own manuscript had not been acceptable for publication. He would make his notes available to Mr. Lake. I am not interested for one moment as to financial remuneration, Flood wrote. The purpose is to square Mr. Earp and make provisions for his wife.
Which was damn decent of the man. Or really naïve.
Given Mrs. Earp’s many and shifting concerns, the contract negotiations were something of an ordeal but a week after signing, everything John Flood had written was on Stu Lake’s desk. It took all summer to sift through the material, separating what seemed factual from a great deal of bad dialogue. In September, Lake was ready to meet Wyatt himself in Los Angeles.
Perhaps he should have gone sooner, but Stu Lake hadn’t realized how sick the old man was. And traveling was difficult. Meeting new people meant acknowledging his leg. “Shrapnel,” he’d say briefly. “France, 1918.” His femur had been shattered; survival cost him two years in military hospitals. A long series of awful operations had left Stuart Lake with a heavy limp. His right leg was four inches shorter than his left.
“Virgil’s arm was like that,” Wyatt said. “He’s dead now. They all are. I’m the last.”
Which turned out to be the longest statement Wyatt Earp would make to his biographer. Of course, Wyatt had never been much of a talker, and in his final months, he was fighting a chronic infection and worsening pain.
“He was delightfully laconic,” Lake would recall. “Exasperatingly so.”
Mrs. Earp provided far too much pastry while her husband doled out bare facts, a few words at a time. Stu Lake pumped for names, dates, details. It was like pulling teeth—a process with which Wyatt Earp was familiar, and one that he enjoyed about as much as answering questions. By the end of ’28, the writer considered it more productive to mail written questions, even knowing that Mrs. Earp was answering them on Wyatt’s behalf.
Mr. Lake, my dear husband is not at all well, she wrote the first week of January 1929. Do visit again soon, for I am afraid he is not long for this world.
For once, she was not exaggerating a situation to heighten the dramatic effect.
HE DIED AS HE’D LIVED, nearly silent at the end.
All my life, he thought, lying in bed, waiting for it to be over. On the move. On the run.
A year. Two. Three at the most, and we’d move on. Monmouth, Illinois. Pella, Iowa. San Bernardino, California. Lamar, Missouri.
Wichita. Ellsworth. Abilene. Dodge.
Tombstone.
Denver. Gunnison. El Paso. Austin. San Antonio. Aspen. Salt Lake. Ouray. Coeur d’Alene. Eagle City.
San Diego. San Francisco. Rampart. Nome. Los Angeles.
Forty-seven years more than Morgan got.
Shoulda been me, he thought.
Sadie was at his side when the old desire to leave everything behind rose up in him again.
“Suppose . . .” he began. “Suppose . . .”
Then he moved on, one last time.
FOR GENERATIONS STILL UNBORN, HE WILL LIVE IN SONG
ONE GENERATION DIES AWAY, ANOTHER RISES UP
THE OBITUARIES DID NOT REVEAL THE POVERTY and illness of his final years. They did not mention his widow’s deepening dementia. They paid no homage to John Flood’s years of devotion. They discreetly overlooked the business failures, the booze, the women, the scandals. They rehashed the gunfight and the vendetta, but they did not say, “He upheld the law until he took it into his own hands and crushed it.”
They called him the Lion of Tombstone and sold a lot of newspapers. It wasn’t lying. It was letting a lucrative legend replace an old man’s life.
After the funeral, John Flood helped Mrs. Earp respond to the thousands of condolence letters from admirers of the Walter Burns book Tombstone. John was determined to send a reply to everyone who’d written, and he spent months typing the thank-you notes and getting Mrs. Earp to sign them.
He paid for the postage himself.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1929, Stuart Lake began to realize that he now had the undivided attention of Wyatt Earp’s widow. Her letters were typed and grammatical at first, scrawled longhand and erratically punctuated later. She asked for progress reports and details about how he was handling various elements of the story. She questioned him about publishers and serial rights for magazines and movie options. She wanted to review his work. She exhorted him to tell a nice, clean story with pep.
He agreed to make drinking and saloons incidental to her husband’s life. He was willing to present gambling as the nineteenth-century equivalent of playing golf. Gradually, he found himself creating a Wyatt Earp who was sober and single, fictionally articulate, virtuous and just: the courageous embodiment of frontier justice, fighting Cow Boy crime in Tombstone like Eliot Ness facing down gangsters in modern Chicago. None of it was good enough for Mrs. Earp.
She wanted not just Achilles and Adonis but meek and mild Jesus as well. Stu Lake’s patience began to fray. Mrs. Earp, he wrote, you do not desire a biography but a eulogy! It was a measured response to her interference, so he was stunned when she wrote back to tell him she was withdrawing her permission for the biography, threatening to consult a lawyer if he went ahead with it. Horrified, he wasted hours explaining and reexplaining things she had misconstrued and distorted. Hoping to convey to her that her “contributions” to his work were making a difficult task harder. Reiterating his admiration and respect for her husband. Trying not to hate her.
When the stock market crashed in October of ’29, she panicked, though she had no investments to lose. She begged dear Mr. Lake to publish as soon as possible, pleading poverty and starvation. Stu wrote to John Flood directly and was assured that Mrs. Earp’s sister provided her with an income, but the frantic handwritten letters continued. Please, Mr. Lake! I must have an advance on our royalties. I will soon be out on the street! You and half the population, the writer thought, gimping past breadlines and soup kitchens, wondering how long it would be before he himself joined the destitute on the dole.
At least twice a day for the next eighteen months, he despaired of transforming John Flood’s notes and Wyatt’s monosyllabic mumbles into something worth reading but, week by week, he chipped away at the task. There was nothing else he could do. The alternative was beggery.
AND DAMN IF ALL THE WORK DIDN’T PAY OFF.
When Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal was published in 1931, it became an immediate and enduring bestseller. Stuart Lake’s one and only book would be the solid cornerstone of its crippled author�
�s financial life, and as much as he had come to dislike Mrs. Earp—as much as he resented her endless importuning—he sent half the royalties to Wyatt’s widow, year after year after year.
Mrs. Earp, he wrote once, I am bewildered by your continuing criticism of my portrait of your husband. I did everything I could to ensure that his story would please you.
His biography was indeed everything that Sadie had hoped for and nothing that she dreaded. But by 1931, she was too far gone to read it.
“SHE WAS HERE AGAIN,” Edgar often reported when John got home from work. “Banging on the door and yelling. This has to stop, dear boy.”
“I’ll write to her sister,” John would promise.
Hattie replied just once, making the facts clear. Mr. Flood, I do what I can for my sister though I am myself a widow in poor health. Sadie receives regular payments from Mr. Lake and I provide additional income, but I cannot keep her from gambling her money away or spending it foolishly on frivolous lawsuits. She is her own worst enemy.
“Papa spoiled her rotten,” Hattie told her daughter, Edna. “She’d make a fuss until she got her way. She was always dramatic, and now she’s playing a crazy old lady. Well, let me tell you: Your aunt Sadie is crazy like a fox.”
SHE’D GET ON TRAINS and tell the conductor that she’d already given him her ticket. If he argued, she’d accuse him of trying to extort money from a defenseless old widow. Then she’d cry, and her distress seemed very real. She’d pull the same thing on landlords, who’d write to her sister for the rent because Hattie always sent it. She would go to certain restaurants, blithely expecting to eat for free. “I am Mr. William S. Hart’s guest,” she’d say. And the funny thing was, if the owner sent Hart the bill, the old actor would pay.
Crazy like a fox. Except . . .
Sometimes she got lost. She’d stand on a street corner weeping, and when someone approached to help, she’d open her old leather handbag and show off yellowed newspaper clippings, telling the stranger that she was Wyatt Earp’s widow. “Sure you are, toots,” a Good Samaritan might say. She’d be escorted to the nearest police station, and one of the cops would make sure that she got home all right. She’d feed him stale cake and he’d sit with her a while. Listening to her talk about Wyatt Earp. Wanting to believe her.
SOMETIMES SHE’D DISAPPEAR FOR MONTHS. Edgar would check the police blotters and obits. Then they’d find out that she was with her niece, Edna, in San Francisco or that she’d been taken in by another, more distant relative.
During one such absence, John Flood and Edgar Beaver moved away from the neighborhood they’d shared with the Earps since 1911. When they bought a place on Fourth Avenue in 1939, they listed themselves as “business partners” on the deed. For years afterward, they felt a lingering sense of guilt and relief, knowing that Mrs. Earp was no longer likely to show up at their door, screaming threats and making demands. They closed the book on her sad story.
So did the rest of the world—too busy now with Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito to care about a crazy old lady who claimed she was the widow of a legendary frontier lawman.
After Pearl Harbor, the young men who’d grown up watching bloodless movie gunfights at Saturday matinées joined real armies and fired real weapons that ripped through muscle and gut and brains, shattering bones, pulping limbs, tearing off heads. In the movies, the good guys always prevailed but all through 1942, the Axis powers won battle after battle.
In December of that year, the Selective Service notified men born between 1877 and 1897 that they, too, would be required to register for the draft.
“The war must be going a lot worse than FDR is willing to admit,” Edgar said, “if America really needs a pair of old nellies like us.”
He and John weren’t called up, but like everyone on the home front, they followed the war news obsessively, studying the ebb and flow of battles around the world. There was growing optimism in ’43, and by the end of 1944, the war seemed all but over. The British were pushing forward in Burma. Marines were clawing their way from one godforsaken Pacific island to the next. On the eastern and western fronts of Europe, the Allies were rolling toward Berlin.
Then, in December, Hitler threw everything he had left at the troops along the Rhine, hoping to beat them back before they could invade Germany.
With the titanic Battle of the Bulge in the headlines, the world did not notice the passing of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp. The Los Angeles Times ran a brief obituary, identifying her as “the widow of the picturesque western frontier gunfighter, United States Marshal Wyatt Earp.” The cause of death was listed as a heart attack, with dementia as a secondary factor. She was eighty-two.
No one grieved. By the end of her life, she’d worn out her welcome everywhere. William S. Hart paid for a cremation but didn’t attend the brief service. John Flood was informed, but he and Edgar stayed away. Her ashes were sent to her niece, Edna, in San Francisco. Like Wyatt’s, Sadie’s urn was interred in the Hills of Eternity Jewish cemetery near those of her parents, her brother, Nathan, and her sister, Hattie.
“We live too long,” Wyatt said once. In Sadie’s case, it was hard to argue. And yet, she got her way in the end.
Sadie always got her way.
OVERPOWERED BY MEMORIES, BOTH MEN GAVE WAY TO GRIEF
PEACE NEVER LASTS, BUT WARS EVENTUALLY END. In 1945, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines came home and began making up for lost time. Marrying in battalions, having children in brigades. Snapping up houses in brand-new suburbs. Buying cars and refrigerators. Smoking, drinking, and eating as much steak as they could pile on their plates. After fifteen years of Depression poverty and wartime rationing, Americans denied themselves nothing. It was a giddy era of fads and crazes, and television was the biggest craze of all. Broadcasters struggled to fill hours with shows that advertisers would sponsor. To everyone’s surprise, the most lucrative market turned out to be that army of postwar babies, millions of whom were advancing on kindergarten like a conquering horde.
Every morning, while their weary, fecund mothers stayed in bed, grateful for an extra hour of sleep, those kids sloshed Borden’s milk into bowls of Cheerios or Frosted Flakes or Sugar Pops and sat down in front of the TV, staring at the Indian-chief test pattern until the day’s programming began. Quietly mesmerized by Romper Room, Howdy Doody, Mighty Mouse, and Captain Kangaroo, they sucked in hours of advertising, to the immense gratification of Madison Avenue.
From the start, cowboys were big with the kids. Gene Autry. Roy Rogers. The Lone Ranger, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, The Cisco Kid. Things really took off in September ’54, when Davy Crockett and Annie Oakley hit the small screen. By October, every little boy in America had to have a coonskin cap like Davy’s and all the little girls needed a plastic-fringed skirt and vest for Halloween. In December, they all asked Santa for toy guns and cowboy hats. Slap a picture of Fess Parker or Gail Davis on anything at all—lunch boxes, pencil pouches, cereal boxes—and you could sell millions of them.
Once the little darlings had softened up their parents, the ad agencies went after adults directly and began to sponsor Westerns that would appeal to the whole family. Most early series were adapted from radio shows like Death Valley Days and Gunsmoke, but in 1955, ABC broke new ground by optioning Stuart Lake’s book for a TV series starring Hugh O’Brian.
A reporter from Variety heard that the real Wyatt Earp used to hang around the back lots when movies were just getting started, so he asked around at the studios, and the rumor turned out to be true.
“Wyatt mentioned a fella named Flood was writing the true story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” the old-timer remembered.
So the reporter tracked John down and showed up at the house, hoping for a quote he could use in a piece about O’Brian. “Mr. Flood, I’ve been told that Wyatt Earp said you were like a son to him,” the reporter began. “Do you have any comment?”
John stood in the doorway, not moving, and cleared h
is throat before he spoke. “It’s nice to know Mr. Earp felt that way.”
“What did he tell you about the gunfight?” the reporter asked.
“I have nothing else to say.”
Edgar had retired years earlier but retained a certain sympathy for journalists grubbing up column inches. “Come on, John! Give the kid some material.”
“I have nothing else to say,” John repeated. “Mr. Earp hated talking about the gunfight, and I will respect his preference.” Then he closed the door.
“I THINK WE SHOULD GET A TELEVISION,” Edgar announced the next morning.
“I don’t want one of those ugly things in the house,” John said. “Television is nothing but game shows and fake wrestling. I’d rather listen to music.”
“It’s not all claptrap,” Edgar said, scanning the new fall schedule in the newspaper. “There’s that Edward R. Murrow show, See It Now. Robert Montgomery Presents . . . Armstrong Circle Theatre is doing plays by Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, and Gore Vidal this season.” He looked up. “We never go to the theater anymore, but we could watch some terrific plays right here in the house.”
“Humph,” John said, but he tried to be enthusiastic when Edgar carried home a sixteen-inch Zenith and sat it on a little table in front of the sofa.
Bringing in a good signal was a struggle. Edgar would fuss with the antenna. Adjust the horizontal- and vertical-hold knobs. Move the antenna again. Half the time, the show was over before he got a solid picture. It drove John crazy, as did Edgar’s fascination with aluminum-clad frozen meals called Swanson TV Dinners.
“They’re vile,” Edgar admitted cheerfully, “but part of the experience.”
Edgar loved all this modern nonsense, and John loved Edgar. He gave in to the new rituals with as much good grace as he could muster, but it was with a sense of foreboding that he settled onto the sofa to wait for the premiere of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.
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