HOLLYWOOD WAS THEIR LAST BOOMTOWN.
That’s where they met John Flood. They met actors like Tom Mix and William S. Hart there, too. Charlie Chaplin said hello to them once, and so did the famous writer Jack London. But John Flood was the important one. John would be the son they never had.
After Alaska, they spent years in the California desert, prospecting for silver and gold and oil, but settled life grew more alluring as they grew older, especially after they saw their first movie. They were in town buying supplies when The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903. Fascinated, they returned to the theater over and over, trying to work out what was fake and what was real.
“The office is just painted canvas and props,” Sadie whispered, “but they must have put the set right next to real train tracks.”
Wyatt muttered about the things the movie got wrong. “You wouldn’t hit anybody if you waved a gun around like that,” he’d say, but what bothered him most was the way the actors pretended they were shot. “Nobody throws their arms up in the air and staggers around like that. You just fall.”
“They need someone like you to tell them how it really was,” Sadie decided.
Wyatt scoffed, but when Sadie got an idea in her head, you couldn’t pry it loose with a crowbar. Whenever they were anyplace near a movie theater, they’d go see the newest Westerns and she’d start in on her consultant notion again. Eventually she wore him down and when Wyatt was in his sixties, the idea began to seem like it might pay off.
“Suppose . . .” he began one night. “Suppose we try Los Angeles.”
She was past the change by then, plump and plain, but Sadie screamed and clapped her hands like a little girl. “Oh, Wyatt, it’s going to be grand! We’ll meet movie stars and live in a real house and I can bake and maybe they’ll even put you in a movie! You’re handsomer than any of those actors.”
They packed up and headed for Hollywood in the summer of 1911 and rented a little house on the edge of town. Wyatt started hanging around the back lots where the weekly one-reel Westerns were being filmed, hoping that studios making movies about the “Old West” would pay him well for his firsthand knowledge.
To his dismay, nobody seemed to give a damn about getting things right, so he fell back on faro, as he always had when they hit a new town and needed a stake. Sadie was having fun fixing the little house up—recutting quilts for curtains while the bread dough rose—when a policeman came to inform her that her husband was in jail.
She had to use the rent money to bail Wyatt out. He wouldn’t tell her what happened. Wouldn’t speak at all until they got home. He seemed stunned. Not befuddled, but weary. “Faro’s illegal here,” he said finally, and that was all she could get out of him.
With the faro bank confiscated as evidence, they had no cash for rent or an attorney. Then the press dredged up Tombstone and the Sharkey-Fitzsimmons fight again, and the next morning, it was all over the papers: NOTORIOUS MARSHAL ARRESTED IN RAID ON BUNCO GAME!
Wyatt was ready to go back to the desert, but Sadie wasn’t willing to give up on Hollywood before they’d had time to make a mark there. Taking matters into her own small hands, she whipped up a chocolate-caramel layer cake and brought it to their landlady, in lieu of rent.
“It isn’t fair!” she cried as the landlady forked into the cake. “There were two other men involved, but my husband got all the terrible publicity. Everything was put on him because he’s Wyatt Earp! Now we need a lawyer, and we are not rich people. Please, could you just wait a week or two our payment? Hattie Lehnhardt is my sister. I know she’ll send us something to tide us over. My husband would be so grateful if you could give us a little time.”
Doing the notorious Wyatt Earp a favor had a certain risqué appeal. Hattie Lehnhardt was the wife of the fabulously wealthy Emil Lehnhardt, “California’s Candy King.” And the cake really was good.
“Well,” the landlady said, finishing a second piece, “I can wait a few days for the rent. In the meantime, we have a neighbor who might be able to advise you.”
“A lawyer? One who’ll work for free?” Mrs. Earp asked. “Have another slice! This is one of my husband’s favorite recipes.”
“Mr. Flood is a mining engineer, not a lawyer, but he’s so smart and very organized! He is an orphan and a bachelor, poor man. He has a roommate, but I think he’s lonely. And much too thin! He’d benefit from some of your baking, Mrs. Earp. Would you like an introduction?”
The answer was yes, so the landlady invited Mr. Flood over that evening and offered him a piece of Sadie’s cake.
“Mr. and Mrs. Earp haven’t any children, and they are getting on in years,” she told him. “I think they’d enjoy it if you visited them now. Why not say hello and see if there isn’t something a nice young man like you could help them with?”
THIRTY-THREE IN 1911, John Flood wasn’t all that young, nor was he as lonely as that friendly matchmaker believed, though he was indeed a very nice man.
He was only three when the famous gunfight took place, but he’d read the papers and knew the stories. Naturally, he was curious about the infamous Wyatt Earp. So when Mrs. Earp sent a note asking him to visit the following Sunday, John accepted the invitation.
There was coffee and a plate of perfectly browned macaroons set out on a crisply ironed tablecloth. Everything was neat as a pin and spotlessly clean in the ramshackle little house, though the coffee was in chipped mugs, the faded tablecloth had been repeatedly mended, and the table beneath it was a rickety old thing, tipsy on the uneven floor.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mrs. Earp said, all pudgy warmth and bustling hospitality. “How dreary! What a dreadful little place!”
“Oh, no, it’s lovely,” John lied.
“Well, believe you me,” Mrs. Earp confided, putting a flirtatious hand on his arm, “after all those years out in the desert—prospecting for gold and oil with Mr. Earp—any place with a roof and no snakes is a palace in my book. Wyatt, come and meet Mr. Flood!”
Dressed simply in khaki trousers, his white cotton shirt buttoned all the way up, Wyatt Earp was tall and trim, with a full head of silver hair and a neat white mustache. Straight as a lodgepole pine, he towered above John, who was thirty years younger and a slender five feet four. Looking up at that suntanned, handsome face, John was for a breathless instant eight years old again, the age he’d been when his father died.
He took the large, strong hand the old man offered and . . .
That was that. He fell in love.
“SHOULD I BE JEALOUS?” Edgar asked when John came home, burbling about the visit.
“No!” John cried, startled, as he often was, by the way Edgar just seemed to know things. “No, but . . . it’s nice, somehow. I fixed their table, and they were so grateful!”
John Flood and Edgar Beaver had been together only a short time by then, but among the things Edgar just seemed to know was this: There was a part of John that needed a family, that yearned to be somebody’s son. John had lost both parents and his only sister in quick succession when he was very young, and while John himself never made that connection, he was aware from the beginning of the deep satisfaction he found in helping the Earps.
The couple seemed a little lost in the modern world. Neither had been educated much beyond the basics. Although they knew John wasn’t a lawyer or an accountant, to them, a college man was a college man, even if he’d run out of money before he finished the engineering program at Yale. He wasn’t able to offer much more than moral support after the bunco charge, but he celebrated with them when the charges were dismissed because the police had bungled the raid, arresting Mr. Earp before the faro game got under way. Soon the Earps were relying on him for advice about electricity, and the new income taxes, and where to find a good dentist, and he solidified his position as their adviser when he suggested that they lease one of their more promising oil claims to Mrs. Earp’s sister.
“Mrs. Lehnhardt has the capital to develop a well,” John told them, “and she could provide you a steady income from the royalties.”
Hattie agreed to the deal. The well came in. The yield was moderate and Hattie’s checks were small but they were regular and made all the difference to the Earps financially. John was pleased with how things turned out.
It wasn’t a chore to visit them every Sunday afternoon in those early years. Mrs. Earp always had fresh coffee and pastries on the table, and all three of them loved to talk about cinema. The Earps always went to the Saturday matinées, though they often found the newsreels disturbing, especially after 1914, when war broke out in Europe.
“What in hell are they fighting about?” Mr. Earp asked John, but nobody really understood that.
“No more war talk!” Mrs. Earp would declare. “It’s much too dreary!”
Movies were more fun. Not surprisingly, the couple favored Westerns. Mrs. Earp liked Tom Mix and thought he was very funny. Mr. Earp thought the actor’s big hats and fancy costumes were ridiculous, but admired his trick riding. In his opinion, William S. Hart movies got a lot of things right, though it bothered Mr. Earp more and more that every movie had a gunfight like the one in Tombstone.
“You’d think street fights like that happened all the time,” he’d say. “And the movies make people believe you could tell a man’s character from the color of his hat. It wasn’t like that.”
“They’re turning my husband’s life into money,” Mrs. Earp would complain, “and we aren’t getting a penny, Mr. Flood. It just isn’t fair!”
Mr. Earp’s dismay and Mrs. Earp’s indignation came to a head in 1922, when the Los Angeles Times printed a series of sensational articles about Wyatt’s exploits in the Old West, based on an exclusive interview with the notorious old marshal about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
“A man came by and asked a lot of questions, but my husband told him to leave,” Mrs. Earp told John. “The paper just made up the answers!”
“Made me sound like an idiot,” Mr. Earp grumbled. “I never woulda said Doc Holliday was a ‘merry scamp.’”
“I don’t see how they can print stories about my husband without his permission,” Mrs. Earp said. “It’s not fair, Mr. Flood. They’re making money from his story, and we aren’t getting a penny. Surely that’s not legal! There must be something we can do.”
“I have a friend . . .” John said cautiously. “Edgar is a journalist. Perhaps we can consult him on the matter.”
THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, over coffee and an excellent applesauce spice cake, Edgar Beaver read the clippings Mrs. Earp had saved, and listened to Mr. Earp’s concerns about the articles, and felt for himself the responsibility of being asked for advice by an earnest old man and his anxious old wife.
“What’s required is a letter to the editor,” he told them, accepting a “second slice of cake” pressed on him by Mrs. Earp, who may not have noticed that he’d already had two pieces. “Don’t complicate it with outrage or emotion, Mrs. Earp. All you need is a calm, factual letter correcting the errors in the article.”
He finished the third piece of cake, but when Mrs. Earp began to repeat for the fourth time that it couldn’t possibly be legal to print things like that and complained again about people making money by slandering her husband, he stood and excused himself, saying, “I’m afraid I really must dash.”
John stayed on to help the Earps compose their letter, refuting the article’s objectionable content, point by point. A few days later, the Los Angeles Times printed a retraction.
“You did it!” Mrs. Earp cried when he arrived that afternoon, wrapping him in a jubilant, cushiony embrace. “John, dear, you did it!”
“Thank you, son,” Wyatt said quietly, offering his hand.
It was the first time they’d called him anything but Mr. Flood, and John was touched to his heart. He’d never seen Mr. and Mrs. Earp happier, and yet . . .
When he got home, he was depressed and uneasy.
“Something’s wrong with Mrs. Earp,” he told Edgar, “but I just can’t quite . . . put my finger on it, I guess.”
Edgar’s judgment was unclouded by affection. He’d known after that third slice of cake. “Wyatt is a magnificent old thing, but Mrs. Earp reminds me of my aunt Lillian. Mark my words, dear boy. She’s already a little batty and she’s going to get worse.”