Epitaph (72 page)

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.