En route to Kayenta, Shefford is saved from a menacing nighttime intruder by the fortuitous arrival of Nas Ta Bega.80 Shefford’s deepening alienation from whites predisposes him toward this Piute with the same name as the one who accompanied Grey to the Rainbow Bridge. Shefford senses an immediate brotherhood with this “sage and a poet—the very spirit of this desert” (93). As they become better acquainted, Bega’s Indian heritage and mysticism reverse Shefford’s disillusionment with religion and reorient him toward a more fulfilling alternative.
This compensatory theme of kinship and spiritual regeneration was so important to Grey that he modified the actual Nasjah Begay to fit it. Begay did not speak English. During his first trip with Byron Cummings to the Rainbow Bridge, he used hand signals to show the way. Unlike the son of a chief in Grey’s story, the real Begay was an uneducated sheepherder who learned about the Bridge during his upbringing on his father’s farm in a remote canyon midway between the Bridge and Olajato. The Nas Ta Bega of Grey’s story not only speaks English, but also shares Shefford’s discontent with white culture. He tells Shefford that years before, soldiers ignored the appeals of his parents and sent him to a mission school in California. After his successful completion of college fourteen years later, he decided that the “white-man’s God” was not for him, and returned to his roots. Although he has come back to the land and beliefs of his people, he, like Shefford, is despondent—in his case, over all the damage done by whites. This Indian contains more than a little resemblance to Jim Thorpe, the Native American who went to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, starred in football, and returned to his roots in Oklahoma for several directionless, unhappy years. Grey and the rest of the country learned about Thorpe and his past after he returned to Carlisle in 1911 for more football. There he won All-American honors, and then starred in the 1912 Olympics, where King Gustav of Sweden pronounced him the “greatest athlete in the world.”
If the noble Nas Ta Bega was a bold new character for Grey and a precursor for the later hero of The Vanishing American (1925), Grey’s villains continued to be Mormon polygamists. Shefford’s search for Fay Larkin carries him beyond Kayenta to a hidden Mormon village of “sealed wives.” Over the twelve years that have passed since the conclusion of Riders, laws have been passed against polygamy, and federal agents are aggressively enforcing them. Mormons have established secret towns across state lines and beyond the jurisdiction of federal agents in order to preserve their multiple marriages. During the day, only women live in these Arizona towns; at night, their husbands sneak across from Utah to be with them. Here Shefford meets Sago Lily and does not suspect what most readers do—that she is really Fay Larkin. After the two become friends and steal away for secret meetings, Fay reveals her identity and explains that she agreed to be a sealed wife two years before in order to save Jane and Lassiter. While Shefford is at her house one evening, her husband comes to visit, presumably to complete their still-unconsummated marriage. The next day, following a confusing chain of events, he is discovered dead from a chest wound.
As he was writing, Grey fretted that Mormons might be offended over his continuing depiction of them as harsh, close-minded fanatics and recalcitrant polygamists. In order to make these husbands appear more “normal” at the government trial of them for polygamy, Grey has Shefford acknowledge that many men want more than one wife:
His judgment of Mormons had been established by what he had heard and read, rather than what he knew. He wanted now to have an open mind. He had studied the totemism and exogamy of the primitive races, and here was his opportunity to understand polygamy. One wife for one man—that was the law. Mormons broke it openly; Gentiles broke it secretly. Mormons acknowledged all their wives and protected their children; Gentiles acknowledged one wife only. Unquestionably the Mormons were wrong, but were not the Gentiles still more wrong? (97)
Later, another character presumes upon the dreaming that the desert inspires to make a similar point:
See here, son, look things square in the eye. Men of violent, lonely, toilsome lives store up hunger for the love of woman. Love of a strange woman, if you want to put it that way. It’s nature. It seems all the beautiful young women in Utah are corralled in this valley. When I come over here I feel natural, but I’m not happy. I’d like to make love to—to that flower faced girl. And I’m not ashamed to own it. I’ve told Molly, my wife, and she understands (112).
Even more surprising than Grey’s inclusion of these passages is his failure to include more of them. Anyone aware of his ongoing involvement with Lillian and Claire cannot help wondering why he was not more sympathetic toward Mormons and their polygamy. Ever since his first visit to Fredonia, Grey was obsessed with the polygamist elders there. At the time and for years afterward, he had a compelling need to tell others about these strange men without ever plumbing the reasons for his preoccupation. Grey’s reversal of his original intent not to “roast” Mormons is indeed strange. When Dan Murphy, his agent, offered the completed manuscript to an editor for serialization, he forthrightly acknowledged the story’s anti-Mormonism and explained that Zane would moderate it, if necessary,81 and for the novel version, he did eliminate some of his more outspoken comments. Apparently the editors at Harpers worried less about his depiction of Mormons than Fay’s child, since this proved to be Grey’s most significant modification of his original manuscript.82 His elimination of this child had the effect of making Fay appear to be a virgin when she meets Shefford and her husband of two years arrives for his late-night visit. Grey’s fascination with Mormon polygamy was strong enough to suggest an obsession, one too fraught with allure to relinquish but too dangerous to condone. Casting Mormon elders with their “sealed wives” as his villains kept Grey’s story solidly positioned on the side of the approved and acceptable. His limp gestures of support for polygamy sparked no suspicions about his secret life, but they also stifled important inspiration, kept the romances in his novels conventional and wholesome, and checked his inclination toward the erotic and taboo.
The concluding trip to the Rainbow Bridge starts as flight and turns into pilgrimage. Nas Ta Bega and Shefford rescue Fay, who has been wrongly suspected of murdering her husband, and the trio flee to Surprise Valley where they find the much older Jane and Lassiter.83 Aware that they are being pursued, the group heads for the Rainbow Bridge with Bega as their guide. After hanging back to fend off the enemy, Shefford catches up in time to hear Bega announce “Nonnezoche,” and is awed by his first glimpse of the Bridge. Nas Ta Bega stands motionless, silently saying a prayer, and refuses to pass under it. This ritual, which the real Nasjah Begay performed for the groups he guided, accentuates the profound spirituality of the Bridge that Shefford has already sensed, one he does not fully comprehend until he and Fay behold it together, a scene that Lillian depicted in the frontispiece for the first edition of the novel:
There was a spirit in the canyon, and whether or not it was what the Navajo embodied in the great Nonnezoshe, or the life of the present, or the death of the ages, or the nature so magnificently manifested in those silent, dreaming, waiting walls—the truth for Shefford was that this spirit was God.
Life was eternal. Man’s immortality lay in himself. Love of a woman was hope—happiness. Brotherhood—that mystic and grand “Bi Nai” of the Navajo—that was religion (344).
The Rainbow Bridge was so significant for Grey that he would return to it three more times. Whenever he wanted to take a special friend to a special place, he took him or her to the Rainbow Bridge. He took many photographs of the site. One of these was enlarged and hung over the fireplace in his study; several were used as illustrations for autobiographical accounts.84 He favored shots of himself looking at the arch in poses meant to communicate his sense of awe and achievement. During his first visit, he inscribed his name and the date of his arrival—May 13, 1913—on a boulder near the northern base of the arch on which the members of the Cummings-Douglass group had scratched their names. This was done to
create an enduring record that connected him both to the place and to these discoverers.85 In both “Non-nezoshe” and The Rainbow Trail, he wrote the same sentence, “Only by toil, sweat, endurance and pain could any man ever look at Nonnezoshe.” He really should have written “any man or woman.” Years later, he would be dismayed and demoralized by the intrusion of development upon the sites he had visited when they were remote and pristine. But in 1913, he was so inspired by his successful journey to the Rainbow Bridge that he could not imagine—not even in his wildest dreams—that the Colorado River would one day be dammed and transformed into a lake, and that boats would comfortably whisk 300,000 visitors to the Rainbow Bridge each year.
5
Moviemaking and Button Fish: 1915–19
“I am an outcast. I am hunted. If I made you my wife it might be to your shame and sorrow.” …
“Take me,” she cried, and the soft, deep-toned, passionate voice shook Adam’s heart. She would share his wanderings.
“Good-by, Oella,” he said huskily. And he strode forth to drive his burro out into the lonely, melancholy desert night.
—Wanderer of the Wasteland
During the spring of 1914, Grey sent Robert Davis an undated postcard on which he wrote, “You will be pleased to learn that the book you inspired me to write has been for a month the best selling book in the United States.” He did not identify the novel, but his card was a piece of promotion for The Light of Western Stars, with an illustrated scene on the front and an exciting summary of the story on the back.1 Besides urging Zane to write this novel, Davis had agreed to serialize it in Munsey’s, the magazine he edited, and he paid $3,000 for the rights. His contract with Grey stipulated that the serialization begin with the May 1913 issue and that the novel not appear until the run in Munsey’s was completed. When Harpers published Light in January 1914, Publishers Weekly positioned it at number seven on its list for that month and number three for February.2 The journal did not offer a list for March, and by April the novel had dropped to number eleven.3 The Light of Western Stars made the Bookman list only once, number four for the month of April.4
Whether Zane was exaggerating or relying on an alternative source of information, Light was a gratifying success, and a first step toward more ambitious plans. At the time that Davis agreed to serve as Grey’s agent for stage and film rights, he was convinced that Harpers had been slighting these alternative possibilities.5 In the spring of 1913, Edwin Van Brunt, an aspiring playwright, contacted Grey and proposed a dramatization of Riders of the Purple Sage. When Van Brunt and Dolly went to Harpers to secure Hitchcock’s approval for this project, the editor scrutinized them with “a fishy eye” and threw up roadblocks that made both uncomfortable. He insisted that Van Brunt pay Grey $1,000 for the rights and grant Harper and Brothers half of all proceeds. After Dolly intervened on behalf of Van Brunt, Hitchcock agreed to lower Harpers’ return to a third.6 A letter Hitchcock dispatched shortly after this meeting reminded Dolly that Van Brunt “seems to have no regular theatrical connection at present, and seems to have no play produced.” “We are not interposing obstacles in any way,” he insisted, but then added “as a matter of practice, the ‘impecunious genius’ very rarely places a book dramatization.”7
Davis believed that Harpers was too obsessed with its own product and should have been doing more to encourage dramatizations of Grey’s work. Alerting the young author to the handsome sums that might be realized, Davis urged him to plan his novels for this possibility. Unlike Grey, who preferred Lackawaxen and remote locations, Davis enjoyed New York and its diversions; he was an active theatergoer and attended the most popular plays. He was aware of the success of the 1904 stage version of The Virginian with Dustin Farnum in the lead and the Broadway production of The Squaw Man that opened a year later. Even more on his mind in his discussions with Zane was the enduring appeal of revivals of these plays, especially the January 1911 revival of The Squaw Man with Dustin Farnum in the lead and William S. Hart in the same role he played in the original production. Like Grey’s Westerns, these two plays featured fugitives from civilization discovering the invigorating life of the West. In The Squaw Man, the male lead is an English lord whose drab life in England sharply contrasts with the boisterous conditions he discovers out West. These two productions convinced Davis that Grey’s work had stage potential, that Light had special promise, and that he could get producers to pay handsomely for the rights.
Although none of Grey’s novels reached the stage, Zane and Davis quickly grasped that their error lay in direction rather than thinking. The ensuing two years revealed that movies were outdrawing plays and presented far greater opportunity. Again The Squaw Man was a beacon. Following the successful stage revival, Jesse Lasky acquired the film rights. Young, unproven, but certainly not inexperienced, Lasky had been doing stage work for years, and recently had decided that movies were not the threat that many theater people feared. He believed that viewers would soon tire of two-reel displays of action and prefer the kind of drama that plays had always provided. Reassured by the stage success of The Squaw Man, he joined with his friends Cecil B. DeMille and Samuel Goldfish (later renamed Goldwyn) and they persuaded Dustin Farnum to play the lead with an appeal that their collective knowledge of the theater would result in a superior product.
In order to escape the legal outreach of the powerful Edison Company, which closely policed its many patents, the hastily assembled band of players and technicians elected to film The Squaw Man out West. After an aborted plan for Arizona, The Squaw Man began filming in late December 1913 and was released in February 1914. The six-reel result earned the distinction of the first feature to be made in Hollywood and its tenfold return on its investment validated all Lasky’s hopes.8
The success of The Squaw Man showed the way to gold and touched off a rush of variations. Over the previous four years, Tom Mix had appeared in numerous one- and two-reelers about cowboy life, but nine months after The Squaw Man’s release, he completed his first five-reel feature, In the Days of the Thundering Herd. That same year, William S. Hart left the stage to play cowboys in films. After deepening frustration with his initial roles, he appealed to his friend Thomas Ince to allow him to make Westerns, and in December, he achieved his first success with a seven-reel feature entitled The Bargain. The short-action Westerns from before 1914 had rocketed Broncho Billy Anderson to stardom and gained him an annual salary that exceeded $100,000, but the surge of feature-length films prompted a reassessment of his limited acting skills, a cutback in his performances, and more involvement in producing. Two years later, he sold his interest in Essanay and by 1920, he was completely out of filmmaking.
Grey at the Rainbow Bridge. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
In a letter written to Thomas Ince from Long Key, Florida, in January 1915, Grey displayed an informed awareness of these developments:
The enclosed letter is what prompts me to write you about my western stories, for which I have had many offers from moving picture people.
I sold several of my earlier books, among them LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS, to Selig. They have been kept back because of their increasing value. This has opened my eyes. I am waiting for the right man. Maybe you happen to be that man. When he arrives I have a big proposition for him. And it concerns photographing RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, and a number of other books in that wild and magnificent country where I got the stories. It can be done, and the wonderful scenic possibilities would make these plays great.
Does Mr. Hart know my work? I believe if you and he consider me long enough to look into the possibilities, you might see that I have a big thing.9
Grey believed that the Arizona-Utah settings for his novels were both essential and a slighted resource. For years he had been taking a camera on his trips, and his photographs filled his mind with images of spectacular backgrounds for film versions of his Westerns. His characters, like Zane himself, were inspired by desert waste, twisted gorges, and eerie rock formations, and his poeti
c descriptions realized their atmospheric potential. He was, of course, thinking in terms of drama, aesthetics, and verification, but his proposal contained a cost-saving feature that impressed producers even more. Again The Squaw Man pointed the way. Lasky originally intended his picture to be filmed in Flagstaff, but inclement weather and disappointing conditions necessitated a hasty relocation to a barn in Hollywood that would later became a famous landmark. Obviously, Lasky was hoping that the scenery around Flagstaff would give his film a Western look. Since the actual setting for the play was Wyoming, faithfulness to his film’s source was not a concern. Flagstaff’s convenient location along the train line to California was as important as its Western landscape. If Grey’s novels effectively shifted the locus for Westerns from the lush plains and majestic mountains of Wyoming to the arid, dusty Southwest, Hollywood favored this shift because this scenery, whether it was stately buttes, scrub-brush arroyos, or merely weathered barns, was nearby and affordable.
Though his Westerns were best sellers and thus “presold properties,” Zane greatly exaggerated Hollywood’s interest in his work. Like today’s dot coms, the companies that rushed into feature-length Westerns quickly discovered a new market environment that was both complex and treacherous. Less than two months after the opening of The Squaw Man, Selig released The Spoilers, a Western that would be long remembered both for its climactic fistfight between Tom Santschi and William Farnum and for the four remakes it inspired. Selig then purchased the rights to The Light of Western Stars for his next offering. Though The Spoilers fared better than the Westerns of his competitors, even Selig was forced to curtail his plans six months after his first Western premiered. On April 5, 1915, Selig, Lubin, and the Essanay Company (co-owned by Broncho Billy and George K. Spoor, the dominant business partner) affiliated with Vitagraph to form V-L-S-E, with hopes of releasing a new feature each month. The high cost of production and exhibition was not the only reason for this alliance. Initially, these moviemakers depended upon the established General Film Company to distribute their films, but they soon realized that General was not up to the challenges of the new features, and that they, as small companies, could not afford the greater expense and risk of these films. V-L-S-E was to be a superior alternative. Unfortunately, Vitagraph, the strongest member of the group and principal advocate of this strategy, was already in financial trouble and could not deliver on its end of the agreement.10
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