Tefertiller, Casey.
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
First, some criticisms:
Tefertiller is not as good a writer as
Roberts; in particular, his paragraph structure and organization are dreadful. And I could do without the occasional sententiousness. He also does not seem to be as good a historian as Roberts. Particularly in discussing Wyatt Earp's life in Kansas (i.e., pre-Tombstone), Tefertiller has a tendency to accept the truthfulness of stories for which there is sketchy evidence at best. It's not, to be clear, the inclusion of those stories I object to; it's Tefertiller's decision, having admitted the sketchiness of the evidence, to proceed as if there was certainty they occurred. It also irritates me that Tefertiller lines up the Earp boys--Newton, James, Virgil, Wyatt, Morgan, Warren--but does not even mention the existence of Earp
girls until, around the time Wyatt was leaving Arizona in a hurry, Tefertiller records him deeding some of his property to his sister. (And, of course, the myth about Ike Clanton marrying "Jessie Earp.") I assume, because Tefertiller does not tell me that this bit about the property deed is false, that it is true; therefore, either he should have mentioned the existence of sister(s?) previously (Chekhov's gun holds for nonfiction as well as fiction) or he needs to signal clearly that there is no sister and this property deed story is (a.) Wyatt executing some sort of legal shenanigan or (b.) another untrue piece of the legend.
In a nutshell, then, my criticism of Tefertiller is that he does not organize his facts and his fictions as well as he could, and he is sometimes unclear about the difference between them.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things about this biography which I like. Although Tefertiller is partisan to Wyatt (and clearly has no use for Josephine Sarah Marcus, for which I can't say I blame him), this is the natural condition of the biographer
1, and Tefertiller is doing his honest best to present a balanced picture. He digs into the disreputable parts of Wyatt's life and attempts (in his rather clumsy prose) to explain the Vendetta without trying to excuse it. He does an excellent job of explaining the background of the infamous gunfight: why the Cow-Boys were a very serious problem (they were coming close to inciting a war with Mexico, that's why), why people on various sides reacted the way they did, why it came to seem necessary to Wyatt Earp that he take the law into his own hands (Tefertiller doesn't have much use for Johnny Behan, either). And although he's bad about letting possible fiction stand for fact in relation to Dodge City and Wichita, he's very good about tracking the misinformation that Tombstone exudes like a skunk exudes stink: who started which lie, when and (if possible, which frequently it isn't) why.
One of the most interesting, and saddest, parts of the book is the end of Wyatt's life, living mostly hand-to-mouth in Los Angeles (according to Tefertiller, Sadie Marcus was a compulsive gambler, hence their poverty), going out for ice cream sodas
2 with a friend and the friend's 9-year-old granddaughter, and going up to Hollywood, where he met actors like John Wayne (still at that time Marion Morrison), Tom Mix . . . and Charlie Chaplin. I have to quote director Raoul Walsh's account of the meeting because it makes me itch for a time machine and a video camera. It needs a little set-up: it's 1915, and Wyatt has wandered up to Hollywood with Jack London (yes,
that Jack London, whom he knew in Alaska), and they're talking with Welsh (who is digging hard for stories, although "neither wanted to talk about himself") when Chaplin comes over:
When I introduced my guests, he viewed Earp with evident awe. "You're the bloke from Arizona, aren't you? Tamed the baddies, huh?" He looked at London and nodded. "I know you, too. You almost made me go to Alaska and dig for gold." He sat down and related some of his experiences "when I was a snot-nosed brat in Cheapside."
(Tefertiller 318, quoting Raoul Welsh, Each Man In His Time (1974))
There's something there--something about the fact that
Wyatt Earp met Charlie Chaplin--that just fills me with wonder and delight.
Although I still don't like Wyatt Earp very much, I like him better than I did before reading this biography. (Tefertiller's thesis is that it wasn't
Wyatt telling the self-serving lies that so incensed me when I was reading
Doc Holliday, it was Sadie. And each and every one of Wyatt's co-authors and interviewers.
Wyatt was trying to tell the truth. I'm a little skeptical, but I'll go along.) He was a man convinced of his own rectitude, which I never find appealing, but Tefertiller shows that he was also a man doing his best, flawed though that best might be. And even if I don't like him, I sympathize with him and I understand why he thought he had to do what he did.
Which shows that this is a good biography.
---
1Except in extraordinary cases such as the Earl of Oxford.
2One of my most favorite details in the book is that in Tombstone, Wyatt never touched hard liquor, but went almost daily for ice cream at a parlor on Fourth Street (101).
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