Zane Grey

by Thomas H. Pauly

  These developments derailed the filming of The Light of Western Stars and provoked this dejected letter from Grey to Davis on March 26, 1916:

  The bottom dropped out of the “Light of Western Stars” possibility.

  I might have spared you some trouble—and probable annoyance, by not bothering you. Pray accept my apologies.

  No doubt you sold Western Stars for as much as it was worth at that time. If we had held on to it—but regrets are useless. I have tried in every way to do something with these moving picture people. I am not equal to the task. It is a sort of lamb and wolf affair. I quite appreciate what you called me the other day—and by the way that was the second time, the first being in front of my wife—and I am sure I deserve it. All the same it hurt.11

  Zane was already demoralized because he had sold the rights to this novel for $500 in 1914. Selig had purchased them with a shrewd anticipation that their value would increase, but he did not intentionally hold them as an investment as Grey believed. Selig fully intended to make the film and actually started filming it in 1916, but the turbulence within the industry and V-S-L-E prevented him from completing it. Grey was even more dejected by postponement of a film that might have boosted his reputation and sales of his novel. The film was not only shelved indefinitely, but even worse, his sale of the rights barred him from locating someone else to make it.

  Grey in Monument Valley, ca. 1920. From a series of photographs promoting the Valley for filming of his novels. (Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society.)

  Davis argued that Grey should not concern himself with matters like this and embarrassed Grey in front of his wife because he had involved himself with what agents were supposed to do. Two days after his derogatory estimate of Grey’s business sense, Davis sent him a letter with an even harsher demand that he stay away from all financial decisions, and leave those responsibilities to him:

  I have told you several times: you are a rotten business man, and I reiterate it here. The position you occupy in American fiction is a high one and you have earned it by sheer ability, plus courage. I still insist that if I could handle you for the next five years, the Grey family would have a winter and a summer home, built of fireproof material, a retinue of servants, automobiles, boats and flying machines. You never should be permitted to talk to anybody on a business proposition; and every time you go roaming around New York to have a commercial jag, you set yourself back from ten to twenty-five thousand dollars per annum. If I could hurt your feelings often enough to keep you out of New York, except to visit a few friends, there is nothing I wouldn’t say.12

  Before he ever posted this letter, two men arrived and furnished Davis prime examples of his conscientious efforts on Zane’s behalf. In a hastily appended postscript, he scribbled that J. Packard, a motion picture broker, had come to his office and offered a $1,000 for the film rights to Riders of the Purple Sage. Davis explained that he scoffed at this offer, and told Packard that he would have to pay $10,000. This was followed by a second postscript relating that another man named Reynolds (perhaps Sidney Reynolds), from the Fox Film Corporation, had arrived shortly after Packard, and proposed $1,500 for the rights to Riders and $1,000 for The Last Trail. Davis characterized this offer as “brass tacks,” and advised Zane to decide quickly.13 He even posted a telegram stressing the matter’s urgency.14

  It is surprising that Davis scorned the first offer and then pounced on the second for only a slightly higher amount. However, he did so to demonstrate the critical importance of knowledge and judgment. The Packard offer had dismal prospects. Davis assumed that Packard did not have hard cash, and that his contract would be filled with contingencies. On the other hand, Davis knew the Fox offer was solid. Although the Fox Film Corporation had been making films less than a year, it had been exhibiting them over ten years (under different names) and, like Carl Laemmle’s IMP, Fox had an imposing record of success. Davis was confident that he and Zane would get their money, and this film would be made. When Reynolds returned several months later with a similar offer for the rights to The Rainbow Trail, The Last of the Duanes, and The Lone Star Ranger, Davis again urged Zane to accept.15 On an undated postcard from this period, Grey posted Davis a hasty expression of gratitude that anticipated the memorable line from Titantic, “I merely desire to express to you, concerning a matter you loomed largely therein, that The World is Mine.”16

  As great as it was, Grey’s excitement could not stave off second thoughts about these sales. He was never comfortable with the fact that, once rights were sold, filmmakers were free to do as they pleased. His acceptance of Fox’s money allowed it to modify his story, cast whomever, pocket the profits, and even tarnish his reputation should its efforts miscarry. Several months after he sold the rights to Light, Zane deliberated the possibility of starting a film company of his own to protect his interests.17 Amid the turbulence and uncertainties of the fledgling industry, there were few dominant studios and none was as powerful as several would be a decade later. However, the risks, demands, and ruthless competition intimidated Grey and kept him from acting on this wish. A year and a half later, during the summer of 1917, Benjamin Hampton approached him with a tempting alternative whereby he would use Grey’s name and writings to attract financing, confer with him on projects, and personally supervise the filming. Hampton was an ambitious, well-connected entrepreneur who believed that greater size and better integration would solve the problems beleaguering the industry. With a March 1916 letter of commitment from Mary Pickford, whose contract with Adolph Zukor and his Famous Players Film Company was about to expire, he had assembled a formidable group of backers that included Percival S. Hill of the American Tobacco Company (where Hampton had been a vice president), Charles Sabin of the Guaranty Trust, John Prentiss of Hornblower and Weeks, and George J. Whalen of the United Cigar Stores. With their clout and cash, he had his eye on the foundering V-L-S-E consortium. He was preparing to seize control of it, Lasky’s company, and several other vulnerable distributors, and consolidate them into a single large company.18

  Meanwhile, Adolph Zukor learned about Hampton’s ambitious plans and other lucrative offers for Pickford, and he decided that he had to move boldly and quickly. Convinced that the new features necessitated larger capitalization and greater consolidation, like the example of V-S-L-E, he envisioned a more vertical integration of operations under tighter management. He enlisted Jesse Lasky to join forces and take over the Paramount Company. W. W. Hodkinson, the owner of this two-year-old film distributor, had furnished crucial seed funding for The Squaw Man and two-thirds of his company’s business involved handling the films of Zukor and Lasky, who were increasingly unhappy with his demands and fees. Zukor believed that he could not afford to pay Pickford more unless he controlled Paramount. Over April and May, Zukor and Lasky pooled their stock in Paramount, acquired more shares until they had amassed a majority stake, and then forced a buyout upon Hodkinson.

  On June, 17, 1916, these components—Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company, Lasky’s company, along with Paramount—were merged into the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation (renamed Paramount in the 1920s), with Zukor as president, Lasky as vice president in charge of production, Cecil B. DeMille as director-general, and Samuel Goldfish as chairman of the board. Five days later, Zukor signed Mary Pickford to a new two-year contract that guaranteed her a million dollars, a tenfold increase of her previous contract’s salary. A month later, he opened up Artcraft Pictures Corporation to handle the release of her films.19 For the time being, Zukor and Lasky were content with their much stronger company and their retention of Pickford, but several years later, they would add Zane Grey to their collection of stars.

  This preemptive strike left Hampton with an embittered sense of lost opportunity. On August 11, 1916, he wrote to Percival Hill: “Re Pickford, I believe we lost at least a million dollars a year when we lost her. Famous Players and Jesse Lasky Company, on February 22nd, orally agreed to consolidate with us; on our present capitalizatio
n we could have had them with us on a basis of $6,000,000 of our stock. Mr. Zukor now states that he will not consider less than $12,500,000, and declares that a part of it will have to be in cash.”20

  On May 17, 1916, Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton took over Vitagraph, and Hampton and his backers supported this move with an infusion of $250,000, which gave them all the stock in V-L-S-E. In March of the following year, while Smith was away, Hampton’s group seized control of Vitagraph and locked him out. In June, Smith’s partner, J. Stuart Blackton, resigned. In August, Selig and Essanay defected to George Kleine and the Edison Companies, and deprived V-L-S-E of its S-E.

  Hampton had taken over the helm, but his ship was listing badly.21 He quickly struck an alliance with the deposed Hodkinson, who put up funds from the sale of his Paramount stock in return for responsibility for film distribution.22 Hampton then recruited Grey, Eltinge Warner, the owner of Field and Stream, and Rex Beach, another popular novelist, in a final desperate quest to broaden his base of support. During a trip out west over the summer of 1916, Zane wrote to Dolly, “I have a proposition from this Mr. Hampton that is great. He is a partner of Rex Beach. He and Mr. Warner want to organize to exploit my name as they do Beach. It could mean $50,000 a year to me. … Beach is making $250,000 a year!”23 Hampton explained that his company would film Grey’s novels under the name Zane Grey Pictures and release them through Hodkinson. This arrangement allowed Grey to retain his film rights, participate in the process, share the profits, and still have ample time for travel and writing.

  What Davis thought of this overblown scheme can only be conjectured. The collection of his correspondence contains no letters from 1917 and 1918, and the ones that follow reveal that his professional collaboration with Grey had ended. After 1918, the discussion in their letters is cordial and superficial, personal rather than professional. Meanwhile, upheaval, reconfigured plans, and financial uncertainties so disrupted film production that the earliest films of Grey’s novels did not appear until 1918. The first of them, The Border Legion (1918), involved a novel from two years before and was released by Goldwyn under terms for which no records exist. This was followed by Riders of the Purple Sage (1918) and The Rainbow Trail (1918). Both were made by Fox and starred Dustin Farnum’s brother, William, who came to Fox after appearing in Selig’s The Spoilers.24 In the spring of 1916, Selig started shooting The Light of Western Stars with Tom Mix in the lead role, but the erupting problems with V-L-S-E disrupted the filming and occasioned Grey’s complaint to Davis that “the bottom dropped out” on Light. Following his split with V-L-S-E, Selig folded the footage from Light into The Heart of Texas Ryan and sold his film rights to the novel to Harry Sherman, who recruited Dustin Farnum to play Gene Stewart in a production that was distributed by United Picture Theatres of America in 1919.25

  Desert Gold, the first Hampton-Hodkinson film for Zane Grey Pictures, opened in 1919, and Grey’s letter of praise to Hampton illuminates his expectations. Much of the filming was done around Palm Springs, California, far from the Arizona-Mexican border setting of the novel and the areas of northwestern Arizona that Grey had been aggressively promoting for several years, but he nonetheless wrote:

  Let me congratulate you upon the fact that you have put the spirit, the action, and the truth of “Desert Gold” upon the screen. My ideas, wishes, even my hopes, have been fulfilled. This is something that I had despaired of ever seeing.

  Your elimination of the star system is going to revolutionize the motion picture business. You are making a picture of a story to please and thrill the public—not destroying the spirit and plot of a good book to cater to the whim and egotism of a star. Just so long as stars insist on having all the strong scenes of a book, just so long will motion pictures be weak, the producers puzzled, and the audiences slowly growing cold. It is as simple as ABC. The public loves motion pictures. The secret of that instinct is as deep-seated as the instinct for everyone to play. It is love of a good story. It is desire to forget oneself. It is longing to live the ordeal of the hero and heroine. And that instinct is what makes audiences survive in spite of stars who mar the story and exploit only themselves. … Well as I love pictures, I would not pay my fifty cents to see any picture if I knew that this actor or actress, because of the bone-headed conceit of a star, was not permitted to do his very best. Right here is the secret of the dry rot in the movies.26

  Grey’s objection to “stars” represented a telling change. His 1915 letter to Ince expressed high regard for William S. Hart, who was already a star. Given the striking resemblance between Hart and Grey, it is a shame that Hart never appeared in a film adaptation of Grey’s work. Hart impressed Grey because of his conscientious effort to look, dress, and behave like a real cowboy. Grey also liked Dustin Farnum in The Light of Western Stars. When he viewed some early rushes, he reported back to Dolly that Farnum was “very good.”27 Nonetheless, he realized that both these actors from the New York stage were far cries from Emett, Doyle, Wetherill, and the real cowboys of his Arizona outings. The circus stunts and spangled outfits that gained Tom Mix stardom made this disparity unbearable. Grey viewed Mix as the embodiment of everything that was wrong with movies, and his loathing intensified several years later when Mix purchased a residence in Catalina down the hill from his.

  Grey liked Hampton’s adaptation of his novels because he had not capitulated to Hollywood’s star system. In Grey’s galaxy, there was room for only one star—Zane. He objected to actors who thought that they were more important than their roles. One reason he preferred cowboys like the ones he knew personally was their respect for his books and his reputation. Stars were unimpressed and ungrateful. In July 1916, before the Fox films of his novels were released, Zane met both Farnums in Catalina, and R. C., with more than a little help from Zane, wrote an article about the event entitled “Fishing with Famous Fellows.” Being more experienced and more accomplished, Zane urged that the two actors buy expensive, topflight tackle. After they did so, Dustin hooked a broadbill that made off with his equipment and nearly pulled him overboard. Although R. C. mentions that he too lost a marlin, he describes at some length the big one that he landed, and provides a photograph showing his 304-pound “record marlin.”28 This account of the Farnums was meant to be humorous, not uncomplimentary, but Dustin was not pleased with its depiction of him as an inept beginner and its disregard for the 322-pound broadbill that he caught that same season.29 This article soured Zane’s brief friendship with the Farnums and influenced Dustin’s vengeful testimony against him several years later.

  If Grey’s aversion for stars was personal, Hampton’s was financial. His meager, unsure financing placed them beyond reach, and caused his Westerns to fare poorly at the box office and do little to promote Grey’s books. Ironically, the rights to the few novels that Grey sold outright went to companies like Fox that were better funded and solidly committed to the star concept, and their films attracted large audiences. Though Grey bemoaned the fact that he sold these rights too cheaply, got no profits, and lost them forever, the films that resulted did bolster his reputation and sales of his novels. Although Riders of the Purple Sage was the first of Grey’s novels to make the best-seller list, it was not the grand success that many assume. By the early twenties, several of Grey’s early novels were selling as well as Riders, and Betty Zane was doing much better. The recognition that Riders commands today probably owes more to its multiple film versions than to its qualitative superiority to Grey’s other work. Because Grey sold the film rights to Riders early and outright, without any stipulation that they revert to him, as he quickly learned to demand, Fox was able to remake Riders three more times before World War II, most notably in 1925 with Tom Mix in the lead.

  Grey’s involvement with the film industry altered his novels. Pressed by Davis to think in terms of stage and films, he consciously increased the amount of dialogue as well as the circumstances calling for it. Grey also included more action sequences—chases, stampedes, shoot-outs, a
nd, above all, kisses. Stories with these features diminished his personal involvement and started him down the road to mannered variations that were easier to write but less satisfying. As an example of this evolution, The Lone Star Ranger (1915) was a flawed story with a checkered past, and it taught Grey how to finesse writing problems with gunplay and romance. Back in January of 1914, Grey sent Robert Davis a completed manuscript entitled “The Last of the Duanes.” In it, Buck Duane is forced into the perilous life of an outlaw gunman when he is wrongly blamed for a pair of killings. After a series of mishaps that are either bloody or menacing, Buck meets Captain MacNeely, who offers him a pardon to help the Texas Rangers eliminate a troublesome gang.

  Davis himself rejected the story as a serial for Munsey’s with an explanation that “death comes too fast and thick,” and he referenced nineteen deaths to support his point. Conceding that Buck was interesting and unusual, he claimed that he was too “saturnalian” for MacNelly’s proposition.30 A month later, Ripley Hitchcock was put off by the amount of fighting, killing, and gunplay and counseled Grey to try a different tack.31 Grey hurriedly reworked his material into an alternative story about a legendary outlaw recruited by the Rangers that Davis accepted as “The Rangers of the Lone Star” for serialization in the Munsey-controlled Cavalier-All Story Weekly, and the first installment appeared in May 1914. Meanwhile, Grey sold the serial rights to “The Last of the Duanes” to Argosy, and it commenced four months later, while “Rangers” was still running. Although “Rangers” had less “pistol play” than the original “Duanes,” the story was weaker. In order to avoid offending Grey with another rejection, editors at Harpers encouraged him to combine the two stories into a single novel.32 This consolidation eliminated the first-person narrative of “Rangers” and made Buck Duane the lead character throughout. Grey relied on intrigue and gunfights to gloss the ragged stitching of his splice, which is most apparent in his retention of the romances from both stories. In the first half, derived from “Duanes,” Buck’s girlfriend Jennie Lee simply disappears—and so too do his feelings for her—so that he is free and available for Ray, a consolidation of two girlfriends from “Rangers,” whom he meets and woos in the second half of the novel.