Arts & Culture

The Jewish First Lady at Legendary Lawmaker Wyatt Earp's O.K. Corral

Josephine Marcus Earp Finally Gets Her Due

By Hilene Flanzbaum

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Another difficulty of writing this biography stems from Marcus Earp’s determination to protect her husband’s reputation (and by extension, her own). She spent a great deal of energy, especially in the last 20 years of her life, whitewashing events. She told outsized lies to her biographers and to Earp’s — one being that Earp never owned gambling saloons; later in her life, when she finally talked about the saloons, she denied that he housed prostitutes upstairs. (He did.)

Marcus Earp seemed less concerned with her family’s disapproval than with how history would judge Earp. Her consuming passion was to keep hidden from the world that Earp’s abandonment of his second common-law wife led to poverty, depression and eventually suicide. As for the famous “vendetta ride” of 1882 in which Earp killed at least three people to avenge the murder and maiming of his two brothers, it is great stuff for movies, but certainly, at that time, it was not perceived by all as moral or admirable, as it is today. Today, in fact, you can relive the Wild West and buy tickets to “retrace Earp’s heroic Vendetta ride” — evidence perhaps that Earp has emerged as a hero rather than as the villain many thought him to be while he lived.

As would appear true for most wives of that day, Josephine Marcus Earp could not imagine an identity separate from her husband’s. Although Kirschner tries to find one for her, the facts, at least as presented here, do not support it. Though Marcus Earp had to be adventurous in order to leave her parents’ conventional San Francisco home at the age of 17 (to go on the stage), and then eventually travel with Earp to unsettled and primitive terrain in Tombstone and Nome, Alaska, the reader gets precious little of her own adventures — other than her faithful attempts to make her husband’s home comfortable.

Earp was building saloons and gambling parlors, and his wife was housekeeping, all the while feeling resentful about being left out of the action, and angry at her husband for engaging in illegal activities. Her reactions are understandable enough, but hardly the stuff of fascinating biography.

There’s an inherent problems with biographies of the wives of famous men. For such books to be successful, the subject herself has to emerge as a character of substance. Memories of Marcus Earp’s character leave the reader wondering. By some accounts, she was sneaky and shrewish, a compulsive gambler and a burden to Earp; others described her as charming, clever, a great hostess and a loyal companion to the famous sheriff. I suppose such traits are not mutually exclusive, but most of the time, I wondered what Earp saw in her — other than her looks. By all accounts, she was unusually beautiful: thick, dark hair; black, vivid eyes, and really stacked. Regardless, she does not emerge as a character that can stand alone. Rather, the reader learns a great deal about Wyatt Earp and the history and mythology that surround him, as well as the worthwhile story of the disappearance of the American frontier.

Perhaps it is a tribute to Kirschner that I am left wondering about Earp’s wife: how her parents really felt when their 17-year-old left home for such uncharted territory; how she coped with Earp entertaining prostitutes while she was left alone in a little hut in Nome, arranging furs on their bed. How many mistresses did Earp really take? And was she really a compulsive gambler? Marcus Earp’s story and its holes will remain with me. If I were a fiction writer, I would jump on this opportunity to re-create the woman’s story. Novelists out there — I see a best-seller in the making.

Hilene Flanzbaum is the Allegra Stewart Chair of Literature at Butler University, where she also directs the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. She writes frequently about Jewish American culture.