Who was Wyatt Earp?
Late in his life Henry Fonda, at dinner with a producer named Melvin Shestack, recalled meeting an old man who said he had firsthand knowledge of a memorable Fonda character, Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier lawman of John Ford’s classic My Darling Clementine. The man said he “had met the old marshal several times as a child at the turn of the century, at his family’s Passover seders in San Francisco.” Fonda thought the man was putting him on until years later he read a newspaper story which confirmed that Wyatt Earp was indeed married to a Jewish woman. “I wish now,” Fonda told Shestack, “that I’d talked to the man a bit longer.” What Fonda might have found out was that Wyatt Earp’s ashes lie next to those of his common-law wife of forty-seven years in the Halls of Eternity Memorial Park, in Colma, California. In October of 1957, when Earp’s fame was at its peak with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral riding high on the box office and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp in the top five on te
