 Thanks for coming today. My name is Rebecca Taffel. I work with Elizabeth Sackler at the Foundation, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, and we work alongside the Sackler Center staff here to provide additional programming here at the Center. So I'm thrilled to welcome you all today here to hear Anne Kirschner speak about Josephine Marcus-Erp, the focus of her most recent book, Lady at the Okay Corral, the true story of Josephine Marcus-Erp, and thank you for coming on this beautiful fall day. For the past six years, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has continued to fulfill its commitment to the past, present, and future of feminist art. Using its award-winning exhibition and education spaces, the Sackler Center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions, dialogue and debate about feminist art, theory, and activism take place here in the Sackler Center's Forum, and groundbreaking exhibitions are held in its feminist art and her story galleries. Right now, currently on view, you can go see the Kathy Kovitz prints from war and death portfolios. We are currently installing our fall show, which is a solo show that features the work of the contemporary Brooklyn-based artist Wangechi Mutu, so I hope you'll come back for that when it opens. But the center is more than its gallery spaces, it's a place that celebrates open discourse, conversation, and the exchange of ideas, and that's sort of what Elizabeth Sackler envisioned for this space. She cannot be here today, unfortunately, because of some ongoing health issues, but she asked me to to let you know how delighted she is that Anne is here to join us today and to share her story of Josephine Earp, the woman who was Wyatt Earp's common law for nearly 50 years, the woman who sparked the world's most famous gunfight, and the woman who shaped the legend of Wyatt Earp and the Wild West. So just a little bit briefly about Anne. She is a writer and the university dean of Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. She began her career as a lecturer in Victorian literature at Princeton University, where she earned a PhD in English. Her career as an entrepreneur in media and technology includes the creation of satellite and internet businesses for the NFL and Columbia University's online education company FABM. A frequent contributor to conferences and publications, Anne Kirchner was named one of New York magazine's millennium New Yorkers and honored as a distinguished graduate of Princeton University and the University of Buffalo. She serves on the board of directors of Apollo, public agenda, the Jewish Women's Archive, and Princeton University graduate school leadership council. Besides Lady at the OK Corral, she is the author of Stala's Gift, published in 2006 by Simon and Schuster. The story of her mother's wartime rescue of letters from Nazi labor camps and it's available in German, Polish, Chinese, French, and Italian editions. The original letters are in the permanent collection of the New York Public Library and are the subject of a traveling exhibit in the U.S. and Europe, a theatrical play, Letter to Sala by Arlene Hutton and a documentary film, The Letter Carrier by Marie Nussle. So without further ado, please help me welcome Anne Kirchner. Thanks very much. I can't imagine a more fun and appropriate person to be, appropriate place to be than the Sackler Center today. I took a walk around Judy Chicago's dinner party and really just no more inspiring groups with all due respect to our camera person. It's lovely to have an audience of women too. So what I'd like to do is just read you the first couple of pages of Lady at the OK Corral and then take you on a little bit of a travelogue of some of the images around Josephine's life and then maybe we can talk a little bit about this very unusual woman. So the opening to the book is called In Which I Land on Planet Earp. Did you know that Wyatt Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery? Just hearing his name threw me back to my childhood in Jackson Heights, New York City, sprawled on the floor in front of a black and white television set watching westerns with my big brother Joey, dressed up in his special shirt with braided trim and snazzy snap buttons and black cowboy hat and shiny gun in a faux leather holster slung around his hips. Joey and I tuned in and pretended to walk the streets of Tombstone every week together with millions of Americans young and old. Joey was my hero and Marshall Earp was his. Brave, courageous, bold, and Jewish. That was how it all started just an innocent question from a friend who thought correctly that I would be intrigued by the incongruities between anything Jewish and anything tombstone-ish. This first burst of curiosity about Wyatt Earp's final resting place in religion was easily satisfied. I learned that Wyatt, the only man to emerge unscathed from the gunfight at the Okei Corral, was not Jewish but had lived with a Jewish woman for nearly 50 years. She buried him next to her parents and her brother in a family plot at the synagogue-affiliated Hills of Eternity Cemetery outside of San Francisco. And that was my introduction to Mrs. Earp. So that is how it all started and if you want to know what my brother Joey looked like with that faux holster and I'm going to walk around. I'm going to walk around a bit but here's my brother Joey and there's me. And some of you may remember TV sets like that. Some of you may be able to sing the Wyatt Earp clean song while you're there or while you're there. Sound familiar? I won't try and sing the whole thing to you but I can guarantee you most of the time I talk to people they really they really know about it. And when I started this book I thought well this is as different from my mother's Holocaust story as we could possibly get back to the American West. But little did I know that as I get to figure out Josephine's family history I was right back in Poland again. Because this is the area where Josephine was from the province of Posen in Prussia and right down here is where my mother was from. So that's the only thing Josephine and my mother had in common. My mother would want me to tell you that. She's 89 and whenever I go to give a talk the first thing she says to me afterwards is did anybody come? She'll be very happy that you were that you were here. But this is where Josephine's family was was from and her parents came from the province of Posen to New York around 1850 and Josephine was born in 1860 in New York. But her family did not prosper in New York. Her father was a baker and was very important to make a living and if you were living in New York at that time you were reading one of the many, many Newish language newspapers that were in New York at the time there were always letters from San Francisco. People from San Francisco were writing to people in New York through the newspaper saying so exciting here there's so much opportunity and so a lot of Jewish immigrants did what the Marcus family did was they had a second cop of immigration. They came to New York around 1850 Josephine was born in 1860 they spent a civil war in New York and then as soon as the civil war was over and it was they were able to try it again off they went to continue to see fear of their fortune this time in San Francisco. And the only way to get there in those days was to go down the east coast of the United States by the time they went the Islas of Panama was was open so they were able to go through North Panama canal to the railroad and then back off the coast of California by steamer and the reason this picture was of such interest to me is that when the San Francisco that they arrived in so now it's about 1870 was was a very exciting place and the Jewish community in San Francisco was at least as well developed as the Jewish community in New York and similarly stratified so if you were a German Jew chances are you belong to the other class of the Jewish community in San Francisco but if you were a Polish Jew or from someplace other than Germany you tended to be lower class less affluent you went to different schools you went to different parties and I think that's one of the secrets of the secret motivations behind what happened to Josephine so um so here's the here's the synagogue for the the Germans Temple of Manuel and here's the synagogue for everybody else that was called the sheriff of Israel and this fellow is here because his name is Isaac Benjamin and he went traveling around the United States visiting the Jewish communities and been writing about them and he wrote very much about the stratification of the Jewish and the Jewish community to the extent where if a if a Polish Jew was in need and the the money from the channel or organizations was controlled by the Germans they likely would not support the Polish Jew in time of need so it was it was really you know a sort of a weird sort of form of anti-Semitism within the within the Jewish community um so Josephine being a young beautiful girl and that's not Josephine I'll tell you who that is in a minute um Josephine didn't want to be second class anything um she had a younger sister who was much more did much better in school was was sort of a good Jewish girl in a way that Josephine was was not and she chafed at the restrictions in the in the community and so when she was in that 18 years old she was she had been taking dancing lessons and um San Francisco was full of the news of the boom towns of the American frontier and um the Pinafore Society um there were Pinafore HMS Pinafore rages throughout the United States every town had an HMS Pinafore troop and Josephine was recruited by one of those to go off to the boom towns and do her little quartile dance as part of the um part of the cast of HMS Pinafore she was recruited by an actress named Pauline Markham um and again this is one of dozens of troops that were that were going out out west and so um Josephine joined this group went out to the to the west and um Walsh was there um and that made Josephine I might tell you a little bit about that picture you made while she was there she caught the guy of a sheriff and um she felt well that this guy's this guy's pretty pretty cool um his name was Johnny Bean and he wanted to marry Josephine and so when the when the performances ended she went back to San Francisco told her parents that she was going to go to this place full tombstone to be with this man Johnny Bean and his wife now we know Josephine was wildly attractive and we know that because of what happened to her later in life um but there were no verified pictures of Josephine as a young woman um these are two that are said to be Josephine um and I've had some of the use of forensic expert look at these pictures as well as some of the others and the best I can tell you is those might be Josephine but I and you'll see a little bit uh of her later on what she actually looked like later in life but she goes off to tombstone she goes by train and by stagecoach she ends up there oops back back okay here we go um she ends up there and this is Johnny Bean um she takes up with Johnny Bean she's not married but he says he's going to marry her but it doesn't take long before Josephine realizes that Johnny Bean is a dirty dog he has no intention of marrying her and um and so she leaves him and you know sometimes we talk about um very inspired by being at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for for feminist art sometimes we talk um about if you could go back in history and um and live it any other time what I've noticed is when that question is posed to men um there were times that they think it would be cool to go back in and live again but really there were no other times for women when women had a lot of choices and when we think about Josephine Marcus in tombstone after she's right away from home she's an actress not much of an actress she comes to tombstone to marry this guy Johnny Bean and he turns out to be a bad guy who's running around with all kinds of other women and easily with prostitutes what is Josephine going to do she really doesn't want to home again because she's going to home and tell her parents she she failed um well she needs wider and wider and Johnny Bean undoubtedly knew each other tombstone was a very small place and they were both alone in with different jurisdictions um and here's wider if you have any doubt as to why Josephine was interested in and why it um there were probably many reasons but surely among them was the fact that wider was drop dead gorgeous um wider and his brothers for about six foot six foot one six foot two um the four of them were tall range and big mustaches flesh and blue eyes i'm sorry ladies this was a very low level of men um now Wyatt had come to tombstone not long before and he and his brothers all had common law wives it wasn't that uncommon at the frontier for men not to get and women not to get legally married there weren't that many people you know ministers whatever to legally marry them um it was just a much more informal time um so why is there with his common law wife this is Maddie Blalock um and uh he's he's got a law man job he's got a law man job um and sometime during the year 1881 Josephine and Wyatt met and fell in love um so Wyatt at this point is cheating on his common law wife this was by the way already his third wife but be that be that as a name um Wyatt actually was i believe serially monotonous um as opposed to to to johnny bein but all of this sets up the story of the gunfight of the okay corral and this was one of the things that really interested me in the in the story um the gunfight of the okay corral i have a google alert on okay corral and every single day usually several times the day the okay corral is evoked in one way or another sometimes it's about um it's about gun control sometimes it's about um a basketball game sometimes it's about a congressional standoff but the idea of the gunfight at the okay corral really has deep roots in the american psyche and we we think about it as the story of the woman versus the cowboys but it was actually much more complicated than that um and i'm not going to spend that much time talking about the gunfight except to say that what no one ever talks about when they talk about gunfight was that johnny bein was on one side of it Wyatt Earp was on the other side of it and both of them had been just his lars so this is not only a story of you know all these good and evil issues that we talk about when we talk about the gunfight at the okay corral this was also a love triangle with josephine and and rival lars um after the gunfight at the okay corral Wyatt was the only one who was unharmed um and um there were several legal battles right afterwards and Wyatt set out to find the men who had tried to kill him and had in fact killed one of his brothers and almost assassinated the second one and that's known as the vendetta ride um so the aftermath of the gunfight at the okay corral lasted several months during that time josephine went did go home to san francisco the gunfight was a story everywhere in the world as far as well as Australia we were writing about the gunfight at the okay corral so i can only imagine what it's like for josephine which he goes home to mr and mrs morgess and says well i've left tombstone um but now i have a new man in my life here to meet him very soon um and in fact in 1882 after Wyatt has killed about four other people again the aftermath of the gunfight at the okay corral he comes back he comes to san francisco to pick josephine up and that was the beginning of the next 48 years that they spent together um this map will show you a little bit of where their adventures were you can see most of them were in the we're in the west um but from 1882 until Wyatt's death in 1929 um josephine and Wyatt were rarely apart um and so for me this was a rediscovery of the building of the american west not only the western part of the united states but even up there as far as san francisco um actually sorry alaska but the most fun adventure i had when we were talking a little bit about it before we began it was really in no alaska um Wyatt and josephine had an incredible nose for adventure they never lived in the safe place for very long they never owned home they were totally ruthless they never had children in the family josephine so they just kept moving and a lot of it was around here but then towards the turn of the century when the alaska boat rush began they went up to alaska as well and over the course of three years they became enormously successful in alaska not so much from low mining but from what Wyatt called mining the miners being a solid keeper um a gambler and when they left san francisco they left the equivalent of seven million dollars and really could have coasted for the rest of of their life um but planet safe was never in their vocabulary so having made several fortunes they can they continued on to pretty much spend it spend it all they spent most of their time during the winter in the california desert and this is a bona fide picture of josephine and their dog erby and their squire and this is out in california desert i've actually gone out there and it is totally in the middle of nowhere um and it really gave me insight into josephine's character on the one hand she wants to be late she wants to be sophisticated on the other hand she loved roughing in with Wyatt and was ready to match him adventure for for adventure um and wherever wherever he went she was she was by his side um the frontier really shifted around 1910 1920 and the real american frontier was replaced by the story of american frontier and that was really the birth of hollywood and the early westerns and here's tom nex and william s hard they were all great friends of of wyatt's that really became the place where the legend of two stone the legend of white earth was shaped and one of the many ways which josephine struck me as a thoroughly modern woman was this very modern sense of celebrity that she had um she didn't want to be the man guy who shot people up after the gunfight at the okay corral she wanted you to think of him as the guy with the white hat the really the really good guy and so as the story of two stone began to be told um she was very active in censoring it and shaving it wherever wherever she could and the greatest success she probably had was in the first big biography of moine urb which was called frontier marshal she very much shaped that story it was a death cellar when it was published and has remained in print ever since in fact when in world war two the author steward lake met general eisenhower and suggested that all the troops should be frontier marshal and so all the all the gis were reading this story um why even to the end of his life was that darn good looking fellow he's just that the only one from from that era who lived to be 80 years old um josephine you know she got a little dumpy and uh but very very very sweet face and that picture of her really helped me to be able to authenticate some of the some of the other pictures um and his his death as you can imagine was um was the greatest tragedy of her life this is a um this is a a piece that was written by the doctor who was taking care of white earth when he died he was reading him a story about tombstone when when white actually died in 1929 um which was a national news story again white earth was very famous in his own time um this was the the telegram that josephine said to steward lake the one who wrote that first best-selling biography telling him when the um when the funeral was was going to be um and the lineup of of people including william s r and tom dex who went to white's funeral was really a story of the father of s and so white's passing became very much a sense of what did the very frontier mean and what would be left a bit in in the future um josephine put it on for 15 more years and again very much focused on white earth's legend that we should be thinking about him as a as a good guy and she caught a very lucky break when leakin ellsworth who was a an arctic explorer had read frontier marshal who's very interested in white earth and wrote to josephine and said that he wanted to put a little shrine on the boat that was going to go to antarctica and he wanted to name his boat white earth um josephine immediately sees the um the romance of this and gave um gave steward lake white earth's last glasses and um one of his shot films and a couple of other things and so white earth um leakin ellsworth went on to antarctica and um you have no idea how big a story this was i put ahead one more picture the new york times had hundreds of stories about leakin ellsworth and when he was lost at sea which went on for several weeks um the front page of the new york times continually was reporting on the whereabouts of this little ship the white earth this is an era when you know hitler is ascending to power um george sort of fifth advocates doesn't matter whatever it is the white earth continues to be a front page story and so it renewed all of that sense of white earth as a hero as an american story rubbing individualism freedom exploration all of that all that good stuff um maybe it was the um the success she had with leakin ellsworth here's josephine over here kind of looking like a proper widow um she thought maybe it was time for her to tell her story and i'm not getting you're familiar with the book that i i i deeply love counten hybrids writing women very much about what what women's biographies are all about and about the right of women to tell their own story um having spent so much of their life trying to tell a quiet story of josephine then thought well maybe it's time now for me to tell my story she met some relatives of whites um these these two women and she commissioned a memoir that would be her memoir that she would be telling them about but the closer they got to the real story of what happened in tombstone the more nervous she became not only was she very nervous about you finding out that she had been the lover of johnny b and before she met white but the real story that she was the most worried about was what happened to Wyatt's previous wife matty blelock after Wyatt left her for for josephine um she descended into prostitution drug addiction um and eventually killed herself and she got my cursing why that why i had had left her and that she had nothing left to go for and she killed herself that was the story that josephine most didn't want you to know and so as the earth relatives got closer to what had really happened josephine got more and more nervous until eventually she said to them you know we're not going to do this the story um they went back with her to tombstone while they were researching the the story um but josephine really um she couldn't she couldn't stand it she couldn't take the risk um and so they burned the manuscript she put a curse on it um she's she put a curse on anybody who tried to tell her story which so far i have not seen the the effect of what i can tell you my mother said don't do this book you know josephine come get you but i i think and we can talk about that later josephine come in come and get me um and then towards the real end of her life and this is 1943 um and josephine would be dead at a year later um she descended probably into dementia and began writing really angry and paranoid notice to um to all of white's white's old friends um she died 1944 um as opposed to white urbs death which was a national news story um we paid a whole lot of attention to josephine dying although it was a story in the news um she was buried in in that family plot and it was the same plot um outside of san francisco that she had buried uh white in and so there they there they sit now um and uh it's the most visited grave in the hills of eternity uh sanitary and in coma california and um you know i guess for me the key story or the key takeaway is that this notion of the america frontier is a very deep one in our in our psyche um but how can you tell the story of america west without understanding tombstone from the long end and white earth and how can you tell that story without your story the women to the picture um because for so many decades you've read these stories and there were no women as if these men had no wives or lovers or mothers or or sisters um so for me the great joy in the story was really putting josephine back in the picture um because that's back in the life so extraordinarily interesting um and with that i'd like to see if you guys have any questions and um tell a little bit more about josephine i mean i have two questions about actually and one is that since i did not watch the early television shows i really don't know what to at okay her out was about but then also i was interested in her whether her whether she represented the pioneer spirit of that era that we read so much about and that i'm a little bit familiar with having come from out west but women really had to overcome so much and so i was wondering if that was true that's why i have two questions so um so the first question about the gunfight at the ok corral um tombstone was um tombstone had two very different factions um even though it was just small city um there were democrats and there were republicans there were people who were ranchers um and some of those who were involved in making sure that there was enough beef for for people to eat in the tombstone and then there were the miners who thought that everything should be to protect the mining interests there were people who have represented had been involved on the um representing the south during the civil war and then with those who represented the north so all of those were sort of different fault lines in um if you look at it from a historical or a thematic perspective um if you look at it from a personal perspective these were guys who really didn't like each other it was why josephine and why johnny b who had you know this quarrel over over josephine um they had people who had gambling um fights with each other um you know just people who just plainly needed each other um and all that sort of boiled up over the course of a month so on this one day on october 26th 1881 um some of them were sort of hung over and some of them had guns and they shouldn't have guns and there was this confrontation not actually at the ok quarrel but at a lot next to the ok quarrel so even the name is a little bit misleading so that's the story of the of a gunfight and three people were killed and why again was seeking revenge um the second question is a more complicated question you know josephine has a role model of josephine representing the spirit of the west you know she wasn't she wasn't the traditional american frontiers woman i think it's a much more complicated story than that the bottom line to me about the story of the american movement is the ability to revenge oneself it's an immigrant story as well as an american story and to that extent i believe she really does represent the spirit of the american frontier but it's you know it's it's more complicated than simply you know the the stereotype of the american frontiers woman out on the ranch protecting the homestead and her and her children does that answer thank you um particularly fascinating why her jewish is three did she i noticed that a rabbi did her uh yes in her religion did she continue to practice her even when she was out there she did not lower she did not tombstone had an active jewish community um it was called the tombstone he grew benevolent association many of the bulletins had jews who were either working as as on the the miners or the um the peddlers or the i mean there were active jewish communities everywhere once josephine left home she really never actively pursued being jewish at all even no had a jewish community and that was one of the things i found so so interesting she didn't deny being jewish everyone knew she was jewish but she was kind of indifferent to it it didn't it didn't animate her in in any way why it had more jewish friends than she did um so her her identification as a jew she really sort of put on the back burner once she left home the only place it came absolutely to the forefront was when she was trying to decide what to do with why it's ashes she returned to her jewish community and buried him next to her parents in a jewish cemetery so you know it's so i learned more about the um the jews of the barricade west and the jews of alaska and again and again we'll be confronted by the reality that josephine really kept herself separate from them and one generation later there were no jews left in the in the family although josephine had no children her her siblings had children and they've got to know quite a few of those you have them oh yeah now that that part's been absolutely wonderful the picture of uh of lincoln ailsworth and the wider ship that's inscribed where josephine came from josephine's was that in california? yeah jewish people persecuted or or um separate at all in the frontier period that you're describing was there a distinction made? the question of jewish integration or discrimination in the west is a very interesting one by and large no um jews were very very well integrated into the the business community which is to say that there weren't you know anti-semitic actions here here and there but by and large um they were very well integrated the most um most brutal racism was really against chinese people who had been brought in large of the work on the on the railroad um and african americans was just tremendous discrimination against them um but i found very little against the jews especially in san francisco you know that showed you the picture of the steamer coming into san francisco marver on on the jewish high holidays they would stop the steamer service in san francisco out of respect for the the jews of san francisco which you know it's kind of like stopping the subways um in new york we don't even do that in new york or the new yorks have a very large jewish population so i hope some of you will um learn more about her um and i'm very grateful for your for your interest and um and uh to mine her together with the list of the saklar in this center is really a great joy for me so um thank you very much for coming