Zane Grey Read online

  ZANE GREY

  ZANE GREY

  His Life, His Adventures, His Women

  THOMAS H. PAULY

  University of Illinois Press

  Urbana and Chicago

  Frontispiece: Zane Grey and mountain lion pelt, ca. 1909

  First Illinois paperback, 2007

  © 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  3 4 5 6 7 C P 5 4 3 2 1

  The Library of Congress cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

  Pauly, Thomas H.

  Zane Grey : his life, his adventures, his women /

  Thomas H. Pauly.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03044-4 (cloth : acid-free paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-252-03044-3 (cloth : acid-free paper)

  1. Grey, Zane, 1872–1939.

  2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography.

  3. Adventure and adventurers—United States—Biography.

  4. Grey, Zane, 1872–1939—Relations with women.

  5. Western stories—History and criticism.

  I. Title.

  PS3513.R6545Z83 2005

  813′.52—dC22 2005009413

  PAPERBACK ISBN 978-0-252-07492-9

  For Suzie (my wife),

  and Anne (my sister),

  and our adventures together.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1. Wayward Youth: 1872–90

  2. Quest for Direction: 1890–1905

  3. Adventurous Apprentice: 1906–10

  4. Pursuit of the Dream: 1911–14

  5. Moviemaking and Button Fish: 1915–19

  6. Calamity: 1920–23

  7. Movin’ On: 1924–25

  8. Fresh Starts and Farewells: 1925–30

  9. Undone: 1930–39

  Postscript

  Grey’s World Records

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  One of the best parts of this project was all the kind, interesting people who aided my search for information. Early on, while I was deliberating whether to write this biography, I decided that I needed to meet with Loren Grey, Zane’s son and the current head of Zane Grey, Inc., and find out what he thought about this possibility. During our first luncheon together, which lasted over three hours, he was remarkably open about his father’s secret life and very interested in what I had learned so far. He reassured me that he and the rest of the family no longer wished to suppress the truth about Zane. So long as he could read the finished result and did not object to my treatment, he would allow me to quote from the unpublished writings of his father and mother. Several years later, after more lunches and memorable conversations, he granted me this permission.

  Although Loren did not allow me immediate access to his holdings of photographs, letters, and journals, he informed me that his materials and those owned by his sister, Betty, had already been photocopied by professors Candace Kant and Joe Wheeler, and he encouraged me to contact them. Both responded warmly to my letters and agreed to share what they had. Candace did an enormous amount of photocopying and mailed me several huge boxes that included many helpful books and articles. Joe invited me to visit him, and provided me a room in which to examine his carefully catalogued materials. Not only was his library impressive, but he freely shared with me all that he had found and learned as well.

  Further investigation carried me to Pat Friese, the daughter of Claire Wilhelm Carlin. When I contacted her and asked if she knew about Claire’s relationship with Zane Grey, she said that she indeed did and was positively excited that I was interested in her mother. She told me immediately about her many letters and photographs as well as the ten journals that Claire had written during her trips with Zane. She invited me to see everything and, shortly after I arrived, I learned that Elma and Dorothy had been frequent visitors to her home while she was growing up. Pat recalled their animated conversations with her mother and convinced me that they lost little of their spunk as they aged. She spent a whole summer with her aunt Lillian in Arizona. She was pleased that I thought her mother and her friends were remarkable women. Better still, as I cautiously informed her about their unconventional lives, she grew even prouder of them.

  George Houle and Dan Brock were equally generous. George has bought and sold Grey materials for years. I explained that I was a scholar and not a collector, and he nonetheless allowed me first to examine his extensive holdings and later to quote from them. Dan Brock and his friend Stan Vath are collectors of tackle and own many rare and unusual items. When I called for information about Grey’s 18/0 reel, I learned that he had a large collection of Grey materials that ranged far beyond tackle. I was lucky enough to visit him during a major exhibition of his fishing tackle. Bridget McMahon not only enlightened me about the typescript that launched my investigations but also showed me many letters that she had not included. However, the high point of my peregrinations was the day that X (who asked that his name be withheld) allowed me to see his collection of photographs and journals that confirmed and far exceeded my long-standing suspicions.

  Although very few of Grey’s letters and journals were in library archives when I initiated my research, I nevertheless incurred a huge debt to librarians along the way. Ben Helle promptly answered my early questions about the Grey materials at the Ohio Historical Society and Liz Plummer responded quickly to more recent appeals from me. At the Beinecke Library, George Miles and Leigh Golden did all they could to ensure that my visits went smoothly and gained me the information I was seeking. I also wish to thank the staff at the Cline Library at the University of Northern Arizona; Gail Morshower, the librarian at the IGA Museum; Mary Francis Travelli at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum; Leila Wiles at the library of the Izaak Walton League; Dorothy Moon at the Zane Grey Museum (Lackawaxen); Frank Slaughter at the Archives of the Church of Christ of the Latter Day Saints; Edna Smith at the Altadena Historical Society; Ralph Getson at the Maritime Museum, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia; Gail Myker, local history librarian in Middletown, N.Y.; Tim Miller at Flatsigned Books; and especially the interlibrary loan staff at the library of the University of Delaware. The Free Library was an invaluable resource for rare books and obscure periodicals and I hope that the city of Philadelphia will continue to fund this magnificent cornerstone of its cultural heritage.

  Many individuals contributed to this book. Professor Philip Rulon, who published a sampling of the letters of Dolly and Zane in the Missouri Review and then mailed me a photocopy of Bridget McMahon’s typescript, belongs at the top of this list, but I am grateful as well to Donna Ashworth, Robert Ebbeskotte, Mike Farrior, David Karpeles, Harvey Leake, Charles Mangnum, Ed Pritchett, Rose Jane Rudicel, Anthony Slide, Jon Tuska, and my colleagues George Basalla, Carl Dawson, Kevin Kerrane, Drury Pifer, and Stan Weintraub who read portions of my book and offered helpful suggestions. Jerry Beasley, who gave generously of his precious time, provided exceptional advice and encouragement at a low point in this project. I am also indebted to several students who uncovered valuable information that I have used: Karen Baltz, Eliza Cogbill, Julie Goodwin, Jennifer Herst, Brian Packett, Carly Riskus, Joanna Schumacher, and Danielle Sepulveres.

  Finally I want to acknowledge the financial support I have received from the University of Delaware and my three travel grants from the Historical Society of Southern California. I don’t know what I would have done without my good friend Keith Markolf who always let me stay with him during my visits to Los Ange
les and had to listen to ever more about Zane.

  Illustrations

  Frontispiece: Grey and mountain lion pelt, ca. 1909

  Grey in Arizona, 1920

  Grey and friends in Long Key, 1916

  Grey and Zanesville home, 1921

  Earliest photograph of Zane Grey

  Lewis Grey

  Grey in Penn baseball uniform, ca. 1895

  Grey at time of Penn graduation, 1896

  Lina Elise Roth, ca. 1900

  Dolly and Zane camping, ca. 1904

  Jim Emett, ca. 1907

  Pawnee Bill, Buffalo Bill, and Buffalo Jones, ca. 1909

  Cover of Field and Stream, March, 1911

  Grey and Nasjah Begay, 1913

  Map of Grey’s Arizona trips

  Elma Schwarz and Lillian Wilhelm, 1912

  Interior of Wetherill Trading Post with Lillian, Elma, Louisa Wetherill, and her daughter, 1913

  Wetherill, Lillian, and Elma at Betatakin, 1913

  Grey at the Rainbow Bridge

  Grey in Monument Valley, ca. 1920

  Grey and his children, Romer, Loren, and Betty, 1917

  Grey and his first broadbill, 1917

  Claire Wilhelm and Dorothy Ackerman, ca. 1918

  The successful author, ca. 1925

  Grey and Louise Anderson, 1922

  Launch of the Gladiator, 1921

  Mrs. Keith Spalding and her broadbill, 1921

  Wetherill, Grey, and Jesse Lasky on the Rainbow Bridge trip, 1923

  Mildred Smith, 1925

  Grey and his world-record tuna, 1924

  The Fisherman, ca. 1925

  Grey’s Catalina residence, ca. 1925

  Grey on Rogue River, 1925

  Mildred Smith’s residence, ca. 1928

  Grey in Lackawaxen, 1929

  Grey and his 1,040-pound striped marlin, 1930

  Grey and Berenice Campbell, ca. 1931

  Grey with books and fishing tackle, 1938

  ZANE GREY

  Introduction

  “Most people are as they are. You can’t change them. I change always. But then I am not normal, not ordinary in any sense.”

  —Zane Grey, Letter to Claire Wilhelm Carlin, September 3, 1932

  On November 26, 1939, Zane Grey’s wife of thirty-four years, Dolly Grey, responded to a note of condolence from Dan Beard, a distant friend, who had written when he learned about Zane’s death:

  My thanks to you and Mrs. Beard for your letter of sympathy. Zane’s passing was so sudden and unexpected that I can’t realize it. Somehow, it seems to me that he is just away on one of those adventurous trips he loved so much—and perhaps he is.

  It was splendid of you to say that you considered Zane a man of great genius. I know that he was, but I also know that it takes a man of great genius to recognize one of his ilk.1

  Given the remarkable success of her husband’s career, the defensiveness in Dolly’s comment about her husband’s “genius” is surprising. Grey was the best-selling author in America during the 1920s and a major contributor to the Western genre’s rise in popularity. In nine of the ten years from 1915 through 1924, Grey had a new novel among the top ten best-selling novels for the entire year.2 Moreover, Westerns of his from before and after these dates achieved the monthly list.3 At the time of his death, Harpers, his publisher since The Heritage of the Desert (1910), estimated that sales of his novels exceeded 17,000,000 copies.4 “The greatest selling author of all time,” its press release of this information claimed. “In sales Zane Grey is exceeded only by the Bible and the Boy Scout Handbook.”

  The extraordinary commercial demand for Grey’s books did not bring commensurate critical respect. Reviewers regularly condemned his novels, and their hostility was intensified by his success. By the time of his death, this animus was so virulent that it infected his obituaries, and made Dolly grateful for Beard’s kind praise for her husband. Grey’s obituary in the New York Times included this negative appraisal from fifteen years before: “His art is archaic, with all the traits of archaic art. His style … has the stiffness that comes from an imperfect mastery of the medium. It lacks fluency or facility; behind it always we feel a pressure toward expression, a striving for a freer and easier utterance.”5 The overlap of Grey’s death with that of Opie Read, another Western author, moved Burton Rascoe to write a reflection for the prestigious Saturday Review in which he praised Read and bludgeoned Grey: “It is difficult to imagine any writer having less merit in either style or substance than Grey and still maintaining an audience at all.”6

  The mean spirit of these last respects gave the New York Times second thoughts, and elicited a special editorial in defense of Grey—one, however, that did not relinquish its low opinion of his novels: “Grey’s novels were immensely popular. It is easy to sniff at his work; nonetheless it was honest work. He thought and wrote clearly. Whatever of the conventional melodramatic lay in his subject or his method, his books are of the clean and bracing outdoors. Therefore they are as odious as tracts to those who want their literary diet copiously peppered. Wouldn’t a little tolerance in these matters be useful?”7 Although it had ignored his work for years, the New Yorker was likewise bothered by this ill will in Grey’s death notices, and countered with praise that was less qualified and more appropriate: “We do not like the haughty tone the Herald Tribune has seen fit to adopt in speaking of the late Zane Grey. The critics, it remarks loftily, will eventually reduce him to the position of one ‘who also wrote.’ Come, gentlemen. This was a great writer, rich in invention, prodigal with his action, juicily romantic.”8

  Contrary to the negative assessments of these critics, Grey was, in fact, a skillful writer who combined easy readability with artful embellishment. He was justifiably wounded by negative appraisals of his work. In the Western, he found an outlet for his considerable talent and strong beliefs in the spiritual value of the outdoors. Grey did not invent the Western, but he did profoundly influence both the popularity of the genre for most of the twentieth century and the more durable appeal of the West as alternative culture. Other writers like Bret Harte and Frank Norris wrote about the West before him, but Grey’s romantic stories ranged beyond the actual locales and authentic history and made the region fabled and legendary. His fantasies became those of the nation.

  Public libraries keep Grey’s Westerns on their shelves today because their patrons regularly check them out, but few of them realize that when he started to write, the Western was not the genre we take for granted, and the Southwest was still a vast wasteland devoid of water, people, and cultural value for those who lived elsewhere. He was neither the first nor the only writer to see the rich potential in these limitations, but he was without equal in transforming the area’s hot, dusty landscape into grand, colorful settings for exciting, eventful dramas. One of the reasons his stories were more believable and compelling when they first appeared than today is because their locus then was so far away from and so unlike the developed, humdrum, workday world of the East.

  His poetic descriptions of desert conditions and the myriad changes wrought by the sun’s movement and quick shifts in weather rendered them variably wondrous and menacing. His chases and stampedes, in conjunction with his gunslingers and outlaws, transformed this atmospheric stage set into a gymnasium where men were tested and cured of ailments acquired from too much civilization. His books showed that one of the greatest benefits of this locale was its prospect for romance: the recurring likelihood that his rehabilitated hero would find there a woman who was his equal, whose interests and capabilities had been similarly enlarged, and whose responsiveness and loyalty inspired confidence that their love would be fulfilling and would endure.

  Although Grey’s Westerns were seminal in getting people all over the world to believe that the arid American Southwest was especially panoramic and conducive to vigorous activity and romance, he could never have accomplished this Herculean feat by himself. He can only be understood and appreciated in terms of his connect
ion to an emerging popular culture that was bigger and more influential than any individual writer. A large measure of his achievement came from being ahead of a mammoth wave of popular interest in his material. Behind his work and looming over it was a formidable entertainment industry just discovering the value of best sellers and the appeal of movies. This carnival of entertainment showered Grey with wealth, but shackled him to its demands. He was repeatedly frustrated by a publishing industry that disliked his attempts at innovation as much as his critics. Early on, he recognized the cinematic potential of his work, but he never understood the filmmaking industry. He deeply regretted his outright sale of film rights to his early Westerns, and failed to grasp how much his novels benefited from the multiple remakes that his “mistake” made possible. The filmmaker whom he initially entrusted with his stories was a hustler whom Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor, the wily founders of Paramount, had already outmaneuvered and doomed to failure. When Zane Grey Pictures lurched toward bankruptcy, Paramount took over the foundering company and shrewdly marketed Grey’s work like chilled soft drinks for a thirsty audience.

  Despite the many hours he spent writing his books in longhand, Grey’s life was as “juicily romantic” as any of his novels, and far more unusual. Had he not been a talented baseball player, he never would have attended college—an education that trained him to be a dentist. In 1903, at the age of thirty, he quit dentistry to become a writer. His first five years of feverish work yielded meager pay, and five more brought only a living wage. His black depressions over his slow progress were alleviated by a passionate love of the outdoors and adventure. In 1906, Grey and his wife took a honeymoon trip to the Grand Canyon, and saw it during the early stages of its development into a tourist attraction. In 1907 and 1908, at a critical juncture in his early career and prior to Arizona’s achievement of statehood, he returned to the Grand Canyon for two hunting trips for mountain lions and was among the first to travel its new backcountry trails. These trips started him writing Westerns and inspired many more return visits. He was one of the first white men to reach the Rainbow Bridge, and more than twenty years before John Ford discovered the magnificence of Monument Valley, Grey actively campaigned to have his Westerns filmed there.