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

by Ann Kirschner

  The next few years brought severe aftershocks of a more personal kind. Forty-eight-year-old Nathan Marcus, only recently returned from Alaska, died soon after the earthquake, though the cause of death was listed as diabetes. He was buried next to his father. Nicholas Earp outlived two of his three wives and five of his nine children, and died at ninety-four in 1907 in the Soldier’s Home near Los Angeles, identified in his obituary as “father of the noted Earp boys.” Lucky Baldwin died on his ranch in 1909, a still vigorous eighty-year-old who left behind a diminished but still substantial fortune in California real estate.

  Times were changing. The only constant was Tombstone, constantly lurking in the background, threatening to reveal the secrets of the past.

  “OF COURSE YOU know all about the trouble Mr. Earp got mixed up in,” Josephine wrote on August 2, 1911. She and Wyatt had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and Wyatt was arrested in a so-called bunco scheme (con game, in today’s parlance) on July 21, 1911. A man who initially put up the money for a friendly game of faro had tipped off the police when he realized that he was the intended mark.

  As if to underscore the bewildering changes that twentieth-century life was presenting to an aging Wyatt Earp, the man who had made his living as a frontier gambler was arrested for running a card game in a big-city hotel. He tried to hide his identity at first, but his alias was quickly pierced, and then the other three perpetrators were all but forgotten: it was Wyatt’s name that made the headlines. Reporters linked the arrest back to Wyatt’s record as controversial Arizona marshal and referee. Thirty years after the O.K. Corral, and fifteen years after the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons debacle, the national headlines proclaimed, “Notorious Marshal Who Disqualified Fitzsimmons Arrested in Raid.” Wyatt was saved from a possible jail sentence only because the police bungled the case: they had instigated the raid before the game had actually begun. Wyatt and his associates were released.

  Josephine was miserable over Wyatt’s arrest, but stalwart in his defense, insisting “Everything was put on to him just because he was Wyatt Earp.” For help in this crisis, she turned to John Flood, a young engineering graduate of Bucknell and Yale who had been introduced to the Earps by a Los Angeles neighbor. With no family of his own, the unmarried Flood admired Wyatt like a devoted son. His relationship with Josephine was less reverent, but for Wyatt’s sake Flood hid his irritation with the often bossy Mrs. Earp. Flood became their legal and financial adviser, real estate agent, and engineering consultant. He was their secretary, typing their letters, sometimes taking dictation from Josephine. Efficient and organized, he kept careful records and carbon copies of their correspondence.

  If Wyatt had intended the card game to help their financial situation, he had made it even worse. The couple had to hire a lawyer and use their property as collateral. But in the court of public opinion, Wyatt was well defended by his influential and articulate supporters, the posse of old friends who came to his aid with their words instead of their guns. In former days, Wyatt himself had coordinated the defense. Now, it was Josephine and Flood protecting him and orchestrating these outpourings of support. “Mr. Earp knows his friends believe in him. And for strangers, he cares not,” she declared stoutly to Flood after Wyatt was released from jail.

  Josephine foresaw the need for greater vigilance in managing Wyatt. “This will teach him a lesson never again to enter a gaming club,” she hoped. She wanted him to be known as a gentleman who owned real estate, horses, and mines. A day at the track, wearing fine clothes, and drinking champagne with Lucky Baldwin: in her view, that’s where Mr. and Mrs. Earp belonged.

  So she wanted to believe—except that Lucky Baldwin was dead, and Josephine could no longer fit into her beautiful gowns. Wyatt had nearly found himself back in the “cold and silent calaboose.”

  What was commonplace at the frontier had been pushed to the margins of American society. Wyatt was caught on the wrong side of the pendulum that swung back and forth between taboo and tolerance. Gambling tables were forbidden, and now an even bigger change was coming: Prohibition. Wyatt had owned or operated ten saloons in six towns in six different states. He and other saloonkeepers had been more than convivial alcohol salesmen; they had played essential roles in frontier communities as bankers, information sources, and political conveners, furnishing the government with much needed tax revenues. Now the crazy quilt of state regulations about alcohol distribution was being gathered together into an unstoppable national movement.

  When Prohibition was proposed in Arizona in 1909, the Tombstone Epitaph editorialized: “If the present and proposed prohibition laws and antigambling laws become effective in Arizona, Tombstone will become as prosaic and goody good as a New England church town. Shades of Holliday and Earp, how times have changed.”

  Remarkably, Tombstone itself would soon be dry, an early casualty of state-enacted prohibition six years before the rest of the country closed its bars and saloons.

  JOSEPHINE HAD ALWAYS been the unpredictable one in the Marcus family, the one who seemed to invite the question, “What will happen to her next?” It was her sister Hattie, however, who suddenly eclipsed even Wyatt’s arrest and the advent of prohibition.

  “Rich, but Weary of Life, Confectioner Kills Self” was the unexpected headline on January 27, 1912. Hattie’s husband, Emil Lehnhardt, was found dead in the basement of his store, a self-inflicted bullet wound in his head. No one had gauged the depths of Emil’s depression or even knew that he had a gun. Known to all as “Oakland’s Candy King,” a pillar of the community, Unitarian church, and Masonic order, he personified the self-made man, a first-generation American who had arrived in San Francisco as a traveling salesman and built Lehnhardt’s from a local sweet shop into one of the largest confectionary businesses on the Pacific coast, employing 140 people. He was about to open another factory, this one primarily for exporting to Pacific markets.

  Lehnhardt had recently lost his sister after a long illness that left her paralyzed. After he too experienced a series of minor strokes, the doctors warned that he might be similarly afflicted. He accepted his doctors’ recommendation to retire and authorized Hattie to sign checks. Son-in-law Estes Joseph Cowing was recruited to become general manager of the business. Cowing had married Edna Lehnhardt in October 1908, and they had two children, Emil and Marjorie.

  Hattie and Josephine were still struggling to regain their balance from Emil’s suicide when their mother, Sophia Marcus, died on August 19, 1912. She had been living in Hattie’s large home since the death of Josephine’s father. Sophia was identified as a “pioneer of the state” in the obituaries. Despite her dramatically different path, Josephine had always remained close to her mother, who inspired Josephine’s love of nature. It was her mother’s lullaby, “Lieber Gott,” which haunted Josephine in her first lonely days as a young runaway with Pauline Markham’s Pinafore troupe. Now there were three members of the Marcus family in the Hills of Eternity cemetery. Both Josephine and Wyatt had lost their parents, another sign that their age was catching up with them.

  For more than five years, Hattie and her son-in-law ran the business together but then a third family cataclysm occurred when Edna got divorced. An aspiring artist, Edna moved back into the family home at Oakland with her children. Hattie took over Lehnhardt’s and became a well-known businesswoman of the Bay Area, featured in the society columns as a philanthropist and supporter of the San Francisco Opera Association and other cultural organizations, and listed in Who’s Who among the women of California.

  Josephine traveled continually to Oakland during these trying years. “I am particularly glad to know that Edna is well again after her sorrow and trouble,” John Flood wrote sympathetically.

  It was during this time of close family connection that Josephine confided her money problems to Hattie, who offered her sister a monthly subsidy, which she increased as Wyatt’s earnings declined. Hattie became a silent partner in some of the Earps’ mining claims and oil wells. Edna sent gifts of clothi
ng to Josephine. In 1920, Wyatt began to explore the oil fields in the Kern River area near Bakersfield, California. He filed for permits in his name, but later transferred these investments to Hattie, with the understanding that Josephine would be entitled to receive 20 percent of any income derived from the oil wells. Wyatt was paid a management fee, which probably helped to soothe his pride in accepting money from Josephine’s family.

  It was unclear what the future might hold. The wells proved to be profitable, but no one knew how long that would continue. Hattie was younger than Josephine, and both were younger than Wyatt. Presumably, Hattie or her heirs would continue to support Josephine with the income from Wyatt’s wells.

  Hattie became the lady that Josephine was not: rich, socially prominent, and sophisticated. Josephine was capable of admiring her sister and relishing the way she lived, while being fiercely loyal to Wyatt and the choices she had made as Mrs. Earp. Still, it was a relationship that occasionally irked Wyatt; it reminded him of his financial dependence on Hattie and also took Josephine occasionally away from him to destinations he could not afford, or no longer had an interest in visiting. Hattie often invited Josephine to accompany her to San Francisco events, and they traveled together to New York and Boston in Hattie’s own drawing-room train car. “You know I was born in New York City and I am so happy to think I can go and see the wonderful city,” she wrote to Flood, adding with some defiance: “I wrote and told Wyatt don’t know how he will like it. I am going just the same as it will be a wonderful trip for me.” It was one of her happiest days when her sister threw a grand party to celebrate Josephine’s sixty-fifth birthday on June 2, 1925. “That was a grand luncheon at the Hotel Oakland,” John Flood wrote, after receiving clippings from Josephine about the impressive guest list and elaborate menu. “What a society lady you are; that is right, don’t miss anything.” Presumably from Hattie, Josephine received a birthday gift of sixteen crisp $1 bills.

  Their sister Rebecca stayed the closest to the Marcus family roots, and occasionally hosted Jewish celebrations attended by Josephine and Hattie. The three petite women were a handsome trio. Josephine and Wyatt attended at least one Passover celebration in San Francisco, probably at Rebecca’s home. The sight of Wyatt Earp putting down his gun and donning a yarmulke at a seder was never to be forgotten: many years later, one guest told actor Henry Fonda about his impressions of that memorable evening, taking the opportunity to compliment Fonda on having captured Earp so well in My Darling Clementine.

  Josephine entertained her sisters’ children and grandchildren for long stays at their desert camp and visits to Coronado Island. They enjoyed her company, while Wyatt, they agreed, was simply easier to adore. They often chafed at what they called Aunt Josie’s “suspicious nature.” As their temporary guardian, Josephine was more of a disciplinarian than Wyatt, ready with a stern lecture about the dangers of smoking and dancing. “Coronado had a ferry [to San Diego] in those days,” Edna’s daughter recalled. “We were taking the ferry to go to a movie. Instead of that, we went to three! They were westerns! When we came back, we got off the ferry and Aunt Josephine was standing there on the pier yelling and screaming. She was furious. Oh, she was so mad because we had left early and now it was nine at night.” On the other hand, “Uncle Wyatt wasn’t a bit upset about it, he just ignored the whole thing.” Josephine would not be the first grown-up to have regretted—or forgotten—her own wild days, and was now finding it convenient to condemn all those things she did when she was young.

  THEY WERE AGING with reasonable grace. If only the devils of Tombstone would stay in the past, Josephine believed she could be content.

  Instead, the stories about Wyatt and his brothers never stopped swirling around, occasionally fatuous and fawning, frequently inaccurate, and most often pointing directly back to the O.K. Corral. Before he died in 1912, Johnny Behan was interviewed and portrayed himself as the hero who defended Tombstone against the villainous and violent Earps. Josephine and John Flood recruited Wyatt’s friends to correct factual errors and serve as character references. Remind people that it was the “better element” that supported the Earps, people who later became important members of society, as opposed to the cowboys, who died in jail or gunfights, Josephine coached their friends. Her willing army of spokesmen included John Clum and William Hunsaker and George Parsons from Tombstone, as well as younger people of influence such as Tasker Oddie and John Hays Hammond. When the Los Angeles Herald wrote about the Earps as “bad men,” George Parsons countered that Wyatt was “a benefit and a protection to the community he once lived in.” He did note the Vendetta Ride as a “notable exception,” but suggested that after the shooting of one brother and the killing of another, anyone would have done what Wyatt did.

  Until his death in 1921, Bat Masterson was Wyatt’s most effective spokesman, a gifted writer who could always be counted on for a colorful quote. The public’s view of Wyatt Earp was greatly shaped by Masterson’s early descriptions of Wyatt as “a very quiet man, but a terror in action, either with his fists or with his gun.” In a 1910 interview in the New York Herald he defined Wyatt’s distinguishing trait: “More than any man I have ever known he was devoid of physical fear. He feared the opinion of no one but himself, and his self-respect was his creed.”

  That Wyatt made his living as a gambler was another issue: on this point, both the Earps were vulnerable, though in different ways. In a letter that Flood wrote under his own name, he took his cue from Josephine’s oft-expressed argument about the changing times: “That the Earps were gamblers is not for me to question. It seems to have been a part of everyday life on the frontier, during the pioneer period. . . . Times have changed; people think differently. What were established business yesterday are considered vices today, and have been outlawed.”

  Flood wrote another point-by-point rebuttal of “Lurid Trails Are Left by Olden-time Bandits,” a particularly inaccurate article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times under the byline of J. M. Scanland. No, the Earps had not been driven out of Dodge City by Bat Masterson—Wyatt had served as marshal there with distinction, and he and Bat were lifelong friends. It was Virgil who was the chief of police in Tombstone, not Wyatt. Virgil did not kill Frank Stilwell; Virgil was lying injured in the train that stood waiting in the Tucson station. There was no substance behind the accusation that Wyatt was the mastermind of a bandit gang; he had the confidence of Tombstone’s mayor, the Wells Fargo Company, and the town’s leading businessmen and respectable ranchers.

  And, no, Wyatt Earp was not dead.

  “I trust that what I have written, meets with your approval. . . . I could not remain silent after reading the article as it appeared in the Times,” Flood wrote to Josephine, who was in their desert camp at Vidal and had not seen the newspaper yet. Josephine was pleased with Flood’s spirited defense. Then she picked up the telephone herself and gave the managing editor a piece of her mind: “I told him I wanted to have every untruth corrected and printed in the same sensational manner that [the original article] was printed.”

  In the case of the Los Angeles Times, Josephine won a major victory—a public retraction. The combined efforts of Wyatt’s friends and her own call to the managing editor, as well as the incontrovertible fact of Wyatt’s being very much alive, elicited a prominent correction notice under the satisfying headline, “Earps Were Always for Law and Order—Writer’s Statements Result in Real Facts Being Given Notice.” Readers were told that it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding by a writer. “Through information furnished by relatives of the Earps,” the Times now knew that the Earp brothers had “nothing in common with the bandit gangs, but that, instead, they did everything in their power to protect the people and to uphold law and order.” In fact, the Los Angeles Times went so far as to repeat the assertion of relatives that “none of the Earp brothers ever opened a saloon or a gambling house.”

  If there was irony in the Times retraction, Josephine cared not. She had a strategy for public relations:
rapid response, rebuttal with carefully sculpted facts, and character references delivered by influential friends, all topped off with her personal demand for a withdrawal. She brought a modern sense of celebrity to the task of shaping Wyatt’s image to contemporary standards and away from his past as a gambler, saloonkeeper, gunfighter, pimp, and womanizer.

  She put her plan into effect for the next offending article, this one from a New Jersey newspaper owned by Hearst. She asked Wyatt’s friends to reprise their previous letters, and for the personal touch, she commissioned Flood to type a letter to William Randolph Hearst, son of the senator who had traveled under Wyatt’s protection decades before. “You know just what kind of a letter I want,” she told Flood. Despite her agitation over the constant barrage of criticism, she lost none of her zest for battle, emphasizing “this time we will fight them all.” She wrote in the stream-of-consciousness style that overtook her when she was excited: “Please say that in the early days of Tombstone his father George Hearst came to Wyatt and his brother Virgil asking for protection from some of the toughs in Tombstone as he was going out to look at a mine and Wyatt took him out on horseback and stayed with him for 2 days for which after he returned to San Francisco.” And don’t forget the nice watch that George Hearst sent to Wyatt, she added in a postscript, though the watch had been lost long ago to a Mexican pickpocket.

  JOSEPHINE AND WYATT had followed the boomtown circuit since they left Tombstone, always alert to that mysterious signal that was inaudible to mere mortals, the one that whispered of high adventure and glittering treasure. They heard it next coming from their own backyard in Los Angeles.

  Hollywood was the next frontier. Josephine believed that it could deliver the dual advantages of making money and burnishing Wyatt’s image. Amplified and sweetened, his story could now reach into nearly every corner of the world. Surely it would be strong enough to drown out their enemies.