WYATT, TOO, HAD SEEN THE SIGNS, BUT SENILITY is slow and sly and subtle. Small strokes—pinpricks of the brain—change people little by little. Those who watch dementia creep up to claim a mind make light of early lapses. They explain away the repetition and strange behavior. They try not to see what’s happening.
Sadie had always been dramatic. She’d always had a tendency to dwell on things. And when she was just getting started on some mania, it could seem quite reasonable for a while.
“What we need is an authorized version of the gunfight,” she decided after the Times backed down. “You have to set the record straight, once and for all. John Flood can write it up. It’ll be no trouble at all for a college man like him! He’s here on Sundays anyway.”
John was charmed by Mrs. Earp’s confidence that he could tell her husband’s story properly. Though dumpy and frumpy at sixty-two, Sadie still had a way of shining her eyes at a man and making him feel he could accomplish anything, simply because she had faith in him. Wyatt was slower to yield to her enthusiasm. He hated talking about the past in general and Tombstone in particular. When anybody brought the gunfight up, he’d plead, “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” But Sadie insisted, over and over, that an authorized version of the story was required. Wyatt would give John Flood the facts. John would type it up, the way he’d typed the letter to the Times. That would settle things once and for all.
When Mr. Earp finally agreed to cooperate, John felt honored to be entrusted with the old man’s memories. He himself believed that he could compose a calm, factual rendering of the events in Tombstone.
And so it began.
Sunday after Sunday, John Flood and Wyatt Earp worked their way through the mules, the stagecoach robbery, Kate’s drunken accusation, the deal with Ike, the gunfight, the maiming of Virgil, the murder of Morgan, and the vendetta that followed.
“It’s heartbreaking,” John told Edgar. “It’s hard for him to talk about what happened. Mrs. Earp is getting more and more upset. She didn’t witness any of it herself, and Mr. Earp tells her not to listen, but she refuses to leave while he’s talking.”
At first John thought she was being brave, facing up to the truth of her husband’s violent life. Sometimes, though, he got the feeling that she was monitoring what John heard. Once, when he asked, “When did you and Mrs. Earp meet? Was that before the gunfight?” she stopped the conversation cold. And if Mr. Earp started to talk about his brother James or his sister-in-law Bessie, Mrs. Earp was adamant: This was not material for a William S. Hart movie.
“Movie?” John asked, startled. “Is there going to be a movie?”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Earp said breezily. “My husband’s story is perfect for William S. Hart. You’ll write the screenplay. Mr. Hart will make a movie that tells the story of Tombstone as it ought to be told, and all our money worries will be over!”
John glanced at Mr. Earp, who rolled his eyes and shrugged.
“Mrs. Earp,” John said carefully, “I am competent to write letters for you and Mr. Earp, and I’m doing my best with the Tombstone story, but that’s not the same as writing a screenplay! What you’re asking me to do . . . Well, it’s like expecting a sandlot ballplayer to break into the big leagues.”
“Oh, but just imagine your name on the credits, dear! Screenplay by John H. Flood! It’ll be so exciting!”
“Bill Hart! That old ham?” Edgar said when John got home that night.
“Mrs. Earp is convinced that a movie about her husband would be a hit. She wants me to write a letter to Mr. Hart and offer him an option on the story.”
“Hart’s completely washed up, dear boy. He’s been trying for years to get his magnum opus financed. Nobody will touch the project.”
John looked miserable. “It’s . . . very difficult to say no to Mrs. Earp. I know it sounds crazy, but I . . . I want to do this for her.”
She was the closest thing John Flood had to a mother. He found it inexpressibly sweet when she called him “John, dear,” and Edgar was fairly certain the old girl was fully aware of that.
“Well,” Edgar sighed. “I suppose there’s no harm in trying. Send the letter. Let Bill Hart be the one who disappoints her. Then she’ll blame him, not you.”
EDGAR WAS RIGHT: William S. Hart was box office poison in 1923.
The first in a long line of Shakespearean actors to leave legitimate theater for harlot Hollywood, Bill Hart had arrived in Los Angeles at the age of fifty. He got work almost immediately in a series of one-reel cowboy movies, which were already madly popular in 1914. Nobody seemed to mind that his acting was stagey and mannered and stiff. Audiences would pay to see anything that moved in those days, and studios were satisfied with anything that made a buck. But Bill Hart had spent two years of his childhood living on the Minnesota frontier. Like Wyatt Earp, who was sitting in the dark watching those Westerns, he was annoyed by the absurd screenplays and the stupid mistakes in those early oaters. So he began to write and produce his own movies.
That’s when his career really took off, for his films portrayed the Old West with a zeal for authenticity that was immensely appealing to those who were sentimental about a by-gone era, which had lived ugly but read romantic and ennobling. A William S. Hart movie brought “wilderness” and “pioneer days” inside theaters. Grown-ups could gaze at dramatic painted landscapes without heat or dust or rattlers. Children could enjoy the gun play without catching a stray bullet. And everyone—including Bill himself—was captivated by the character he played in every film. A good bad man.
A man who did wrong for the right reasons.
For almost a decade, William S. Hart was the biggest celebrity in the world, but as moviegoers grew more sophisticated, his acting began to seem laughable. Box office revenues fell. The fan mail disappeared. By 1923, Bill Hart was a has-been, and he knew it. Which made it all the more thrilling when he got a letter signed by Wyatt Earp.
During the past few years, that letter read, many wrong impressions of the early days of Tombstone and myself have been created by writers who are not informed correctly, and this has been a concern I feel deeply. I am now seventy-five and realize I am not going to live forever. I want any wrong impression to be made right before I go away. The screen could do all this, I know, with yourself as the master mind.
Later on, Bill Hart found out that the letters from Wyatt were written by a man named John Flood, who’d looked after the aging Earps for years. Still later, Bill learned that Flood had to rewrite everything over and over, for Mrs. Earp was never satisfied with how he put things, even if she’d dictated the letter to start with. Even later, Bill came to understand that it was Mrs. Earp who felt such deep concern about Wyatt’s reputation, not the old lawman himself. But when he got that first letter, Bill Hart wrote back personally.
Yes, he agreed, Westerns were popular but—regrettably—not William S. Hart Westerns, according to the big studios, anyway. Fed up with their negativism, Bill was busy trying to produce his first independent film. At the moment, he wasn’t able to take on Mr. Earp’s project, though he sympathized with what he thought was Wyatt’s distress. It makes my hair stand on end when I read things about the West that are not true. I can imagine what it must mean to one like yourself, who has been through it all, to have false stories printed about you.
He closed by urging Mr. Earp to find a good writer to tell his story and promised to take a look when it was all down on paper. He meant exactly what he said: He’d take a look. His letter was not an option contract, let alone a promise to produce a movie.
But that’s not how Sadie would see it.
WHEN THEY GOT THE LETTER from William S. Hart, she felt like a girl again. How long had it been since the dreary world seemed so full of promise? Ages and ages and ages!
Dear John’s idea about the oil royalties had saved them from destitution, and now his screenplay would make them rich! Of course, she was a little frightened as well, for there were elements of her husband’s story that concerned her. Things that would not be right for a William S. Hart movie. “What Mr. Hart wants is a nice clean story, with pep!” she’d tell John.
That became her constant refrain: John must write a nice, clean story, with pep. “Keep it clean,” she’d remind him when he left each Sunday evening, and she’d give a conspiratorial wink before she added, “You know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Earp,” he’d say. “I’m not sure I do know what you mean.”
Sometimes she’d laugh and say merrily, “Of course you do!” But sometimes she’d wring her hands and insist again, “It has to be clean!”
“Clean, clean, clean! She sounds like Lady Macbeth,” Edgar remarked at the end of ’23. “Methinks that lady doth protest too much. I know what you and I are hiding, dear boy. I wonder what dirt Mrs. Earp has under her rug.”
Draft after draft, John did his best for her, trying to guess what she wanted. Pep seemed to involve making up dialogue, but John Flood was a middle-aged engineer and not much given to imagining lively conversations among men who were about to shoot one another. Clean was easier. Clean meant that neither gambling nor saloons could be mentioned. Faro was considered a bunco game now, and Prohibition was national law. Mrs. Earp wanted nothing in the story that could cast a shadow on her husband’s reputation as an incorruptible lawman. At the same time, she was buying bootleg whiskey for Wyatt and laughed the inconsistency off when John asked about that as gently as he could.
Mr. Earp almost always had a glass in his hand, though John never saw him drunk. The old man would nurse a shot for an hour or more and then pour himself another. “Takes the edge off,” he said once. “Softens things, some.”
When John asked about how slowly he drank, Mr. Earp looked surprised. “Never thought about it before, but . . . That’s how Doc Holliday used to drink. Little by little. Unless his chest was real bad . . .” He drifted off for a time. That was happening more as he moved into his late seventies. “Doc was a real good dentist,” he said then, and his eyes came back to John’s. “He was a real good man. Better’n me. He spoke the truth when I didn’t want to hear it.”
All the same, to please Mrs. Earp, John took any reference to liquor out of the manuscript.
“It has to be clean,” she’d say every Sunday as he left. “Keep it clean, John, dear!”
MONTHS TURNED INTO YEARS. John knew that what he was writing was bad, and it was getting worse by the week. Every Sunday Mrs. Earp asked for changes that snarled the story and introduced logical errors. She never made these demands where Mr. Earp could hear her. She’d pull John into the kitchen or follow him out the door and put that flirtatious hand on his arm and smile up at him from beneath her lashes.
“John, dear, you can’t write about that,” she’d say on days when Mr. Earp had recounted something violent or illegal. “It’s much too dreary! Much too . . . complicated. The story needs more pep!” More phony dialogue, she meant.
Sometimes, though, she’d speak up and argue with her husband.
“It drove a lot of men crazy,” Wyatt told John Flood in 1925. “The way Ike Clanton repeated things. How slow he was to get what you were saying.”
“But you trusted him?” John asked.
“I guess. Yeah. When I made the deal, I trusted him. That was probably stupid.”
“Ike was stupid, not you,” Mrs. Earp snapped.
Mr. Earp looked at her. “We both got hit a lot when we were kids, Sadie. Hell, you’re supposed to hit kids. Spare the rod, spoil the child. But Ike’s father, and mine? They was a lot worse than most. People talk about knocking sense into a kid, but getting hit like that can scramble up your thinking.”
He turned back to John Flood, who was startled by how worked up the old man was getting.
“I saw it when Milt Joyce bashed Doc Holliday. It was the same with Curly Bill. Maybe Ike got hit so much, he never got over the scrambling. And he got hit again the night before the gunfight. And then he was drinking because he was so scared Doc Holliday would tell the Cow Boys about Ike ratting on them. Don’t you remember, Sadie? I told you the night of the gunfight! I told you it was my fault!”
“It wasn’t your fault! None of it was your fault!”
“I made the deal with Ike and he got scared, and—”
“You can’t write that, John! The gunfight was not my husband’s fault!”
“I’m not going to lie, Sadie!”
“Wyatt, it’s not lying. It’s just making the story simpler, so people can understand it right!”
“My goodness! Look at the time!” John said, leaving them to battle this out on their own.
THEN THERE WAS THE SUNDAY when Ann Ellen appeared.
“John, dear, I’ve been thinking,” Mrs. Earp said, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “There really ought to be a little romance in this story. Every William S. Hart movie needs a leading lady! Let’s call her Ann Ellen. Quite a pretty girl of . . . let’s say nineteen. She’s in awe of Wyatt Earp. Sheriff Behan is in love with her, but she really did like Wyatt better. The sheriff was very jealous, and of course that made things difficult for Wyatt, too.”
“Oh, ho!” Edgar cried when John brought this tidbit home. “So that’s the dirt under her rug? A love triangle? How disappointing! I was hoping for something juicier.”
There was something juicier, of course, and Sadie regretted bringing up romance as soon as John Flood left the house. As the week passed, she became increasingly distressed, imagining the salacious curiosity that might be aroused if “Ann Ellen” were introduced to John’s screenplay. Why, some nosy reporter might travel down to Tombstone and interview old-timers about that love triangle. Those old-timers might remember not just Josie Marcus and Johnny Behan but Wyatt and Mattie Blaylock. Worse yet, they might recall a girl who went by the name of Forty-Dollar Sadie, who certainly wasn’t Josie Marcus, but . . . Well, mistakes could be made. There were people still living in Tombstone who hated Wyatt. One of them might be cad enough to reveal how Josie had supported herself during the months between Johnny Behan and Wyatt Earp.
And if that was dragged out into the light . . .
No romance, she decided over and over. I must tell dear John. No romance. It’s all too dreary. Dreary dreary dreary.
All week long, she went over it in her mind, afraid that she would forget in daylight what was a maddening circle of words in the darkness. No Ann Ellen. No romance. I must tell John. It’s all too dreary.
SO. NO ANN ELLEN. Ann Ellen was evidently too much pep for a William S. Hart movie, but John Flood’s relief did not last long. Every time he thought the manuscript was finished, Mrs. Earp would make some new demand or insist on more changes, all while pleading with him to finish the story so Mr. Hart could get that movie made and they would all be rich.
“John, dear, I’ve been thinking. Let’s take some of the emphasis off Tombstone, shall we? That story has too much blood and thunder, don’t you think? It’s much too dreary!”
“John, dear, I’ve been thinking. You really ought to write about our adventures in Alaska as well.”
“John, dear, I’ve been thinking. Mr. Hart loves stories about childhood on the prairie! Let’s add some things about Mr. Earp’s youth in Iowa.”
Every few weeks, Mrs. Earp would dictate another letter reporting fictitious progress on a screenplay that John Flood couldn’t possibly write and that Bill Hart would never produce. Then John would go home and take a headache powder.
“Dear boy, it’s been two years of Sundays!” Edgar complained in 1925. “Tell her you quit. Tell her you have beriberi and you’re going to New Guinea for the cure. Tell her anything, but stop this insanity!”
“EDGAR,” JOHN ASKED ONE NIGHT IN 1926, “do you know anything about a writer named Walter Burns?”
“Never heard of him. Why?”
“He’s contacted the Earps. He wants to do a book about Tombstone.”
Edgar sat up straight. “Then he’s brilliant! Perfect for the job! A Shakespearean genius with great commercial instincts. Tell Mrs. Earp he’ll make them rich and famous. We’ll change our names and run away to Mexico. With any luck at all, she’ll never track you down.”
“Don’t be flippant.”
“I can be flippant or I can be murderous,” Edgar replied grimly. “That woman has stolen three years of your life! She’ll never be happy, and that makes you unhappy, and that makes me unhappy. I swear, John, this is a quadrangle worthy of Freud. I’m ready to kill your mother figure so you can sleep with your father figure and be done with it!”
“I’m serious, Edgar.”
“So am I.”
“Just . . . find out about Burns, will you?”
A few days later, Edgar dropped a folder of notes on the table in front of John. “Walter Noble Burns is a Chicago literary critic. Competent reviews of important authors—H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, Edith Wharton. He just published a biography that makes a hero out of a vicious little killer named Billy the Kid. It’s selling like crazy. Sam Goldwyn bought the movie rights for ten grand.”
“Then why do you look like you just sucked on a lemon?”
Edgar sat down across the table. “Word is, Burns is a shameless plagiarist and every fact in his book is questionable.” There was a long pause. “Look, the Earps are your friends, not mine, but I can’t help thinking that Wyatt deserves better.”
John’s face went blank, then lit up. “Edgar! Why don’t you write the biography?”
“I’d rather be buried alive.” Edgar said promptly. “Besides which, I write for a living and I don’t accept payment in pastry. No . . . If Mrs. Earp wants someone to throw buckets of literary whitewash on Tombstone, then Walter Burns is her man. Get him to visit the Earps and for the love of God, make sure that they say yes.”
BUT THEY DIDN’T.
The moment Burns mentioned doing research in Tombstone to supplement his interviews with Wyatt, the deal was dead for Sadie. For Wyatt, refusing Burns was a matter of loyalty to John Flood, along with sheer fatigue, for he was in his late seventies by then, suffering from what he called “plumbing troubles” and mortally tired of talking about the old days.
“We already got a fella writing about me,” he told Burns. “He’s worked on it for three years. I’d hate to change horses now.”
“So I’ve been scooped? Ah, that’s too bad,” Burns sighed with apparent good grace, though he was thinking, Then why in hell did you ask me to come all the way to Los Angeles? “Who’s the publisher, if I might ask?”
There wasn’t one. John Flood’s manuscript had been turned down by every house in New York, and the rejections were brutal. “All but unreadable.” “Stilted and florid.” “Diffuse and pompous.” Not even a cover letter from William S. Hart had helped. Wyatt didn’t go into all that, but he admitted that John’s manuscript was not up to snuff.
“Suppose . . .” he suggested. “Suppose you take what John’s written and polish it up for us?”
A retort about “editing amateur work gratis” formed in Walter Burns’s mind, but it was quickly suppressed by the prospect of getting access to research that could be pirated. “I’d be happy to take a look at it for you, Mr. Earp. And perhaps you and I could still work together . . . What if I were to focus my Tombstone story on Doc Holliday?”
“That’d be real good,” Wyatt said warmly. “Doc got blamed for a lot he didn’t do. I’d like to square things for him before I die.”
But Wyatt Earp was front and center when Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest came out, in 1927.
“Listen to this, John!” Edgar cried gleefully, reading in bed. “‘His hair was as yellow as a lion’s mane, his voice as deep as a lion’s. He suggested a lion in the slow, slithery ease of his movements and his gaunt, heavy-boned, loose-limbed, powerful frame.’ Does that sound like a crush to you? Is Burns married?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care! Edgar, the man lied to Mr. Earp’s face. He said he was going to edit my manuscript and write a book about Doc Holliday.”
Edgar continued to read in a radio announcer’s baritone: “‘Roughly molded by the frontier, he had the frontier’s simplicity and strength, the frontier’s resourcefulness and its unillusioned self-sufficiency.’ Is ‘unillusioned’ a word? ‘He followed his own silent trails with roughshod directness . . . Whatever he did, he did in deadly earnest. He was incapable of pretense: cold, balanced, and imperturbably calm.’ My God! It just goes on and on! ‘A natural master . . . Brains and courage . . . The dominant qualities of a leader . . . ’” Edgar looked up and saw John scowling. “What?”
“Edgar, he said he was writing about Doc Holliday. Mrs. Earp is furious.”
“She wanted a hero. Burns delivered. I can’t see why she’s upset.”
“Well, she is, and you have to come with me tomorrow. I’m afraid she’ll have a stroke if she doesn’t calm down about this book. She wants to file a suit against Burns. Mr. Earp is worn out with it, and I can’t get her to give the idea up. Maybe she’ll listen to you—she still talks about how you got the L.A. Times to back down.”
“But I didn’t! I just told you to write a letter!”
“Edgar, please!”
It came down to this: John Flood loved the Earps. Edgar Beaver loved John Flood. “All right,” Edgar said. “All right, but just this once.”