Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend

by Casey Tefertiller

  We finally abandoned work on the manuscript because she would not clear up the Tombstone sequence where it pertained to her and Wyatt.25

  The surviving manuscript is a wonderful blend of trivialities and obfuscation, with long sections on Alaska and horse-racing days in San Diego and San Francisco. Sadie barely mentions her husband's involvement in gambling and sa- loonkeeping and ignores the controversial incidents in Idaho, simply telling of a berry-picking trip in the Coeur d'Alene country. Family pets are described in detail; long mining anecdotes are related. No good deed goes unmentioned, no alibi untold. She barely speaks of her time in Tombstone and says, "He never in all our years together described a gun battle to me. He considered it a great misfortune that he had lived in such a time and under such circumstances that guns had figured at all in his career."

  Sadie spent four years trying to tell her story without ever getting to the best part. The Houghton Mifflin editors knew some of the details from Lake, and wanted the real story with all the juice and sizzle. Sadie Earp had secrets, and she took them to the grave.

  Before she did, however, she still had much more to say. In 1939, Twentieth Century Fox decided to take another stab at Frontier Marshal, with Sadie hired to provide technical scrutiny. She immediately insisted on rewrites, according to the AP story:

  Mrs. Earp said her husband never would have hidden behind a safe while shooting it out with bandits. That was the crucial scene in the story called "Frontier Marshal." But, on Mrs. Earp's insistent say-so, this shooting scene was transferred to the famous O.K. Corral, where Randolph Scott, as Earp, will fight it right in the open with five armed opponents.

  Another scene Mrs. Earp didn't like was one where Scott tosses Binnie Barnes into a horse watering trough.

  "Mn Earp would never have done a thing like that," she protested.

  Miss Barnes explained the necessity of this horseplay and added that she didn't object to the dunking and was sure Mr. Earp wouldn't have minded so very much.26

  While it strays far from the real story, the movie proved a surprise hit, both financially and artistically. Hearst newspaper reviewer Ada Hanifin called it the "dark horse of the year's westerns. It made the goal at the boxoffice, when the studio had marked it for an average 'B' run.... [it] projects a background of realism that camouflages a stereotyped Western formula, in a different setting. It is still a 'B' picture, but a very good 'B."' Hanifin said Cesar Romero as Doc Holliday "has never given a better screen performance."27

  Sadie Earp: movie consultant and budding writer. Things certainly picked up for the irascible widow in the late '30s. But something else attracted her attention. Allie, Virgil's widow, never on the best of terms with Sadie, started talking to a young writer named Frank Waters. Apparently Allie had become frustrated by Sadie's pretensions and the growing acclaim for Wyatt; Allie knew that Virgil had actually been the top lawman for most of their stay in Arizona. Allie had not been overly fond of Wyatt, either, and she completely adored Virgil.

  Allie would visit Waters, pull a flask out of her high boots, and sit and talk a spell. "It didn't take long to discover that Aunt Allie was a character," Waters would later write. "At any provocation she would draw from the hip and fire a tall tale in a Western vernacular that was all Americana and a yard wide. She was hard and sentimental, with old-fashioned customs but startlingly original in thought, and always jovial. This jutting humor marked all her tales. In it was the eternal freshness and unvarying zest for life of those who in turmoil and tragedy remained young in a time when their world too was young."28

  Waters began work on a most unusual manuscript that did not fit at all with the Earp image. As he continued, Sadie became aware of the project and raced to the Waters home. Frank Waters had left on a research trip to Arizona, but Sadie tried to convince Waters's mother and sister to promise he would not publish the manuscript. "My mother was a pretty calm person. She didn't get shaken up by Josephine," Waters said.29 Waters completed his manuscript and put it in the files of the Arizona Pioneers' Historical Society, not to be published for more than two decades, when the legend of Wyatt Earp had grown beyond reality.

  Sadie Earp had another cause remaining. In 1938 she brought suit against Emil Lehnhardt and Edna Stoddardt, her nephew and niece, claiming that they owed her 20 percent of the assets from the oil fields near Bakersfield they leased to Getty Oil. Sadie claimed Wyatt had saved the field for her sister, and that she deserved her portion of the profits. When Sadie could not document her case, the court dismissed the action. Jeanne Cason Laing recalled the unusual family dynamic: "They were always in court together, but they were basically closeknit. When they got out of court they were all friends again."30

  Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp left her mark on Wyatt's saga. She had, indeed, been an important part of making the legend of Wyatt Earp stand as a nice, clean story. With little fanfare, in the midst of World War II, Josephine "Sadie" Earp died on December 20, 1944. Her death certificate said she had developed senility, and the newspapers did not cover any services. Her ashes were buried in Colma, under the gravestone she shared with her husband.

  JOSEPHINE DID NOT SURVIVE TO SEE Hollywood change Wyatt from legend to myth. Although Lake's writings told Wyatt's story with exaggeration and an absence of controversy, they had a strong basis in fact. Hollywood versions often had only a scintilla of fact. Through the '30s and '40s, Hollywood was good to Wyatt Earp, filming three versions of the Earp legend in Dodge City, another Law and Order, and Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die. Only the third one actually used Earp's name, but all had a basis in the accounts of Lake and Burns.

  John Ford, one of the great directors of his era, made a film of the Wyatt Earp story and turned it into a wonderful tale of good and evil. Released in 1946, My Darling Clementine captured the essence of the story without being burdened by either the facts or the furious social questions that swirled around Tombstone. It is considered by many film historians one of the great Westerns ever made, and Ford thought he got the story right or close to it. In a 1964 interview with fellow director Peter Bogdanovich, Ford said, "I knew Wyatt Earp. In the very early silent days, a couple of times a year, he would come up to visit pals, cowboys he knew in Tombstone; a lot of them were in my company. I think I was an assistant prop boy then and I used to give him a chair and a cup of coffee, and he told me about the fight at the O.K. Corral. So in "My Darling Clementine," we did it exactly the way it had been. They didn't just walk up the street and start banging away at each other; it was a clever military manoeu- vre."31 Ford did have a few things a little askew, such as killing off Doc Holliday and Old Man Clanton at the O.K. Corral, plus having the fight in the wrong location, but no one quibbles over details when a movie works.

  Something else had happened during the '30s and '40s. Little pieces of Stuart Lake's book were appropriated as plots for dozens of B movies. The JohnnyBehind-the-Deuce affair, when Wyatt helped stand off a crowd bent on a lynching, showed up time and again, as did several other incidents. The trend would continue when TV found the Westerns in the 1950s and turned them into a nightly staple. In many ways, the life of Wyatt Earp and Stuart Lake's book, along with Owen Wister's The Virginian, were the greatest influences on how a generation viewed the frontier.

  "Now there's a little bit of Wyatt in every frontier marshal on the air," Lake said in a 1959 interview. "Matt Dillon on 'Gunsmoke' is really Wyatt Earp. There never was a marshal by the name of Dillon in Dodge City-although many people think so.1132

  Where Lake erred on the facts, Hollywood compounded the error and delivered a very distorted portrait of the West that would baffle and frustrate the surviving old-timers. The frontier was wild; it was bloody; and it certainly was dangerous. But it was never anything like Hollywood fantasy. The reason the gunfight in Tombstone had drawn such attention at the time was because such things so rarely occurred. Drunks shot each other and lawmen chased down badmen, but marshals just never walked down the streets and shot it out with unconvicted and unin
dicted suspects. Americans had taken great pride in their legal system, and that pride carried onto the frontier where the law was held in the same esteem as it was in Boston. But before the frontier, Americans never truly had to confront the question of how to preserve order when the laws no longer functioned.

  As Hollywood molded the frontier myth, so too grew the mythology surrounding Wyatt Earp. By 1955, eleven movies either used Earp as a character or were clearly based on the Earp saga. After My Darling Clementine, perhaps the most notable were a 1950 remake of Law and Order, starring Ronald Reagan, and the 1955 Wichita, with Joel McCrea in the Earp role.

  In the last half of the 1950s, two separate Hollywood projects would raise the myth of Wyatt Earp to its peak. In 1955, producers Robert Sisk and Lew Edelman kicked off the TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, with a plan to tell the truth. A year later, director John Sturges delivered Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, one of the most dynamic Westerns ever filmed. Both projects tried to tell the real story, but by then the real story had been overwhelmed by myth.

  Sisk and Edelman wanted to produce the first truly adult Western on television. What's more, they wanted to make it historically accurate, something almost unheard of in TV fantasyland. The producers chose the story of the man considered the West's greatest gunfighter, the lawman who tamed three of the frontier's toughest towns, according to Lake's best-seller. By the early 1950s, Wyatt Earp had been glamorized in books and movies. And what better choice for a mature, historically correct Western than the true story of Wyatt Earp? With that plan came the birth of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, which debuted on ABC in 1955 and owned its Tuesday time slot at 8:30 P.M. until the end of the 1960 season when the show left the air despite continuing high ratings.

  To assure historical accuracy the producers hired Stuart Lake as a consultant, an ironic decision considering how Lake had embellished the tale. Perhaps the great irony is that no TV show has had a greater impact on rewriting American history than the show that tried to tell the truth. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp led to a surge of interest in the one-time marshal and set off a spate of research. Even as series star Hugh O'Brian was walking the streets of Hollywood's Dodge City or Tombstone, researchers were poring over yellowed newspapers to learn that some of Wyatt's great early adventures were more fantasy than fact, and that the crucial details of his love affairs and questionable deeds had been completely ignored in Lake's reverential biography. There was no secret wife, no firing in Wichita, no bunco arrest in Los Angeles, no conflict of opinion in Tombstone, and most of all no Sadie to help ignite the Arizona War. He was a hero the way Hollywood wanted it in the 1950s. And, through most of the run, they believed they had the story right, although the show gradually strayed further and further from the truth to provide more dramatic plots.

  The impact of the Wild West TV series carried across the new West. The tourist trade picked up in Tombstone and led to a reconstruction of the town close to the way it was when Earp, Holliday, and the beguiling Sadie Marcus walked the streets. In Dodge City, the main street was renamed Wyatt Earp Boulevard. Towns that had cast aside their frontier foundations were happily moving back to their roots.

  Hugh O'Brian had been the youngest drill instructor in the U.S. Marines at the end of World War II, serving under his real name, Hugh Krampe Jr. Moving to Hollywood after the war, he got a few small roles before landing the Earp part. The show was almost instantly a hit, finishing nineteenth in the ratings in 1957, sixth in '58, tenth in '59, and twentieth in '60, the final season. Toy Buntline Specials became the weapon of choice for a generation of children mesmerized by the first adult Western. Soon after the show began, O'Brian gained entree to the Hollywood social scene, where he made the acquaintance of a Hollywood legend who had met Earp many years earlier.

  "About two months after the show started I was invited to go to a premier by Rhonda Fleming. She was a big, well-known star, and absolutely gorgeous, and here I had to borrow a tux from my agent," O'Brian recalled. "In those days, any time they had a big opening like that, they always had a big dinner afterward at one of the Beverly Hills hotels. After the movie we went to the dinner with all the wheels. When we went in, they kept walking us down near the front, to the really top tables with the biggest stars. As we got to the table, John Wayne stood up. He knew Rhonda, of course, because they'd worked together. Then he turned and shook my hand and said, 'Hey, kid, you do a perfect Wyatt Earp. I knew him, and you're terrific.'

  "About three-quarters of the way through the dinner all the ladies at the table got up and went to the ladies' room together. Wayne was across the table, and he got up and came over next to me. 'No shit. I really think you do a great job, and I knew him.' He also knew Stuart Lake.... He thought he [Earp] was a terrific guy. He thought he was a very ballsy kind of guy that he tried to act like in films. He said, 'I often think of Wyatt Earp when I play a film character. There's a guy who actually did what I'm trying to do [in the movies].' He admired him very much."33

  In so many movies, Wayne played the cool, tough lawman, slow to boil and fast to act. Wayne had been an extra during the late '20s, then received his first starring role in the film The Big Trail, in 1929, the year Earp died. Over the next four decades Wayne personified the West in movie after movie, winning an Academy Award for True Grit in 1969. Wayne's image of the West had been shaped on studio back lots by a few chance meetings with the old marshal. Wyatt Earp, who could never convince Hollywood to tell his story during his lifetime, had his personality portrayed almost every time Wayne put on his Stetson and headed for the set.

  THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF WYATT EARP inspired a new wave of interest in the Tombstone saga, leading researchers to uncover the old unanswered questions that had lingered since Earp rode out of Arizona. There had always been naysayers who questioned the authenticity of Lake's account. As early as 1934, Kansas historian Floyd B. Streeter began studying the arrest of Ben Thompson in Ellsworth and found no corroboration for Lake's story. Eugene Cunningham's classic 1941 Triggernoinetry relied on the Breakenridge version and presented an unflattering portrait of Earp.

  By the late '50s, the debate grew to high levels again. The rush began in several men's magazines and the new generation of Western pulps. The magazines bought into the debate, publishing poorly researched stories and numerous oldtimer recollections. So many old-timers claimed to have witnessed the gunfight in Tombstone that the city council must have put up bleachers along the side of the vacant lot and had George Parsons selling popcorn.

  In 1934, Raymond H. Gardner, writing under the moniker Arizona Bill, managed to sell his frontier recollections for national syndication. He claimed to have witnessed just about everything in the history of the West, including the events that led to the gunfight-he had the good sense to say he ducked when the bullets flew. Unfortunately, he also claimed to have joined the Arizona Rangers years before the force even existed.

  Frank Waters gave a brief digest of Allie's memoirs in 1946 in his book The Colorado. He revealed the existence of Mattie and called Lake's effort "the most assiduously concocted blood-and-thunder piece of fiction ever written about the West, and a disgraceful indictment of the thousands of true Arizona pioneers whose lives and written protests refute every discolored incident in it. "34

  Two first-person memoirs appeared in the late '50s to further contribute anti-Earp fuel. Daniel Fore "Jim" Chisholm and Jack Ganzhorn provided inside stories that sound convincing but fall apart under scrutiny. The legend of Wyatt Earp has been continually plagued by false-memoir syndrome.

  By the time the debunkers went into high gear, they had a vast reservoir of sources, ranging from the actual information Earp had covered up to one-sided Arizona newspaper stories to the many fallacious old-timer tales. The Earp myth had turned to miasma, with defenders and debunkers alike relying on information that was partly false, partly fabricated, and partly fraud.

  As The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp rode into its final seasons on television, sincere and
intelligent debunking works began to appear. Frank Waters conducted further research. He had already talked to several Arizona old-timers and read some of the anti-Earp materials available. In 1960, he finally issued his biography of Allie, The Earp Brothers of Tombstone, which still stands as the classic debunking of the Earp legend. Waters's version is as one-sided as Lake's, offering the Nugget/cowboy view of events in Arizona and leaning heavily on the Sam Purdy stories. He also used the eminently unbelievable Jim Chisholm and the self-promoting Breakenridge as source material, and he added the tales of numerous old-timers who had received the anti-Earp dogma after most of Earp's businessmen supporters left town. The result was a well-written, convincing book presenting the anti-Earp view with intelligence and insight. Had Ike Clanton survived, he would have loved hearing it read to him. However, Allie probably would not have liked it at all.

  Allie's relative, Hildreth Halliwell, lived with Allie for the last years of the old woman's life. In 1967, Halliwell wrote a letter describing the details of Allie's work with Waters:

  When Frank Waters mentions the other books being "a pack of lies" he was really speaking of his own book. I have even consulted an attorney about it but it would be so hard for me to prove that they are lies that it is hardly worth while to get upset about it. He write [sic] like Aunt Allie wanted him to publish the book when in fact she told him she would sue him if he did and you notice he waited until she had been gone almost 20 years before he did publish it....

  I get so mad every time I think of what Frank Waters wrote after spending hours with Aunt Allie getting the true facts that I guess I go berserk. He read her part of his transcript and she told him if he printed it she would sue him so he waited until 20 years after she was gone and then printed a lot of lies and now it would just be his word against mine so there is not much I can do, but seeth [sic].

  No she did not hate Wyatt although she did not like him too well as he was a bit of a show off and took all of the credit for things that Uncle Virge really did, and according to Aunt Allie Wyatt was not too honest and that is the one thing Uncle Virge certainly was. Lake did not publish "Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshall" [sic] until after Uncle Wyatt was gone either and there was very little truth in his book but he wrote it for the movies and that is what caused the national hullabaloo. Uncle Wyatt's third wife was still alive and went along with Lake (for the money), but Lake cheated her out of everything on the book, and she died very poor.35