Zane Grey

by Thomas H. Pauly

  Grey’s return to Avalon for the summer of 1916 ended his run of success. Though he landed the first marlin of the season, his regimen of daily outings was cut short by the breakdown of Danielson’s boat. His catches following its repair did not approach those of the previous season. He salvaged an article about his eventful first day on which he hooked and lost two marlin. As support for his calm acceptance of defeat, he offered the surprising declaration: “I do not fish for clubs or records. I fish for the fun, the excitement, the thrill of the game.”68

  All this fishing convinced Grey that he needed a boat of his own. During his previous winters in Long Key, he had rented a boat, and for his 1916 visit, he hired Sam Johnson to work as his captain. After relying upon him to evaluate his needs and wants, he arranged for a twenty-six-foot launch to be built for him in St. Petersburg. Following a down payment of $750 in the late spring of 1916 to start construction, he discovered that he was so strapped for cash by September that he feared he might have to default. Meanwhile, Dolly wanted to acquire some adjacent property in Lackawaxen and to renovate the main residence. Her estimated cost of $2,000 equaled the amount outstanding on the boat, and even that $2,000 exceeded their available assets. Dolly believed her plans should have priority and went to Duneka at Harpers for an advance to cover them. Zane was mortified by this public revelation of their financial needs and the likelihood that this loan would place his boat beyond reach. He complained to Dolly, “That $750 was the first payment on a boat that, as I told you, was to cost more than $2,500. I did not see why I could not get a boat, the same as poorer men buy automobiles. And a good boat was life insurance, in a way. Now I can’t get the boat and I lose the $750.”69 For a man who never learned to drive, this was compelling logic. In order to raise money for his boat, he sold Blue Book the rights to The U. P. Trail, entitled “East and West” at the time and serialized as “The Roaring U. P. Trail”; the sale brought him $6,000, a full $4,000 less than Hitchcock advised him to seek.70 Dolly withheld comment at the time of this decision, but lashed out at Zane several weeks later over some shipping charges. “I do so enjoy paying express & freight bills,” she wrote. “And the way you casually mention buying a few little things ‘but don’t worry; the bill can’t be for more than $500,’ makes me have dysentery. You’re almost dead broke. Don’t you know it? Quit buying so much.”71

  Contrary to Zane’s insistence that his boat was a wise investment, the Betty Zane was a crushing disappointment from the moment he took possession of the craft. Following its maiden voyage at Long Key in January, 1917, Zane admitted to Dolly, “The boat is some ‘tippy’ believe me, and one by one we got sick and had to come in. Rome is afraid to take chances with his stomach. I wish the damn boat was on the bottom of the sea. It is more trouble than anything I ever had.”72 Five days later, the situation worsened. The engine seized and Grey learned that several pistons had cracked. Replacements were so difficult to locate and came from so far away that the boat had to be stowed. By the time the parts arrived, Zane had left for Arizona. Dolly did little for his state of mind when she complained about the payments to Captain Johnson who had no boat and nothing to do.

  The distress and conflict provoked by the Betty Zane was symptomatic of deeper problems. Since his trip to the Rainbow Bridge in 1913 with Lillian Wilhelm and Elma Schwarz, Zane had steadily added to his circle of companions. A year later, when he returned to Long Key and Kayenta, he brought Lillian and her sister Claire, who was sixteen.73 The decline in the family business and the poor health of her parents obliged Lillian and her five brothers to fend for themselves. Since Claire was the last born and twelve years younger, Lillian believed that she needed help, and she persuaded Zane to include both of them on his trips. Zane also added Polly Hunter to his entourage. The main objective of his 1914 trip was to investigate the San Francisco peaks. Believing the outing to be too strenuous for the girls, he arranged for them to stay with Louisa Wetherill while he left with Al Doyle.

  On November 20, 1915, Dolly gave birth to another son. Initially, she and Zane decided to name him Zane too. Several months later, they reconsidered and named him Loren instead, a decision made so close to the issuance of the birth certificate that Zane had to be crossed out and Loren penned in above it.74 Over the summer in Lackawaxen and fall in Middletown, Zane made a special effort to be an attentive parent to his other two children, a role he preferred to play with dutiful letters. In order to lighten Dolly’s responsibilities while she recuperated, he hired two professionally trained secretaries, Mildred Fergerson, a local girl, and Mildred Smith, who had been working for a film company in New York City. At a local dance, he met the attractive, vivacious Dorothy Ackerman, who eventually became the central figure of this fluctuating retinue.

  Claire’s 1916 journal of her stay in Long Key reveals that Lillian, Elma Schwarz, and Mildred Fergerson were there too, and that Long Key was no longer the rude, hastily modified railroad camp that Zane first visited in 1911. Claire would note the visits of Andrew Carnegie, J. Dexter Biddle, and Jack Dorance, the owner of the Campbell Soup Company. She also reports sighting the yacht of Edward L. Doheny, the Los Angeles oilman who built the railroad connection that carried Zane to Tampico. Doheny was in Long Key socializing and talking business with wealthy Easterners in flight from northern winters; he too was drawn to the camp’s warmth and exotic charm. Zane’s young, beautiful, well-dressed companions must have made a powerful impression on these visitors. Striking, animated, and outgoing, they would have been much noticed when they entered the communal dining room, lending flair to his table and facilitating access to the social activities—if he wanted. Since Grey was by nature reserved and antisocial, he often used his retinue as a barrier. “The Goelets, Vanderbilts, Dominicks, and other swells are here,” he once informed Dolly. “And I would prefer in the moment to be somewhat detached.”75

  Grey and his children, Romer, Loren, and Betty, 1917. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)

  The 1917 visit that was marred by the breakdown of the Betty Zane brought Grey a harsh reminder that life with these women was not always glamorous and exhilarating. Over the preceding fall, he had a series of tempestuous disagreements with a young housemaid named Emmeline, who had been helping Dolly with the children and whom Dolly once characterized as a “wild erotic creature.”76 In August, 1916, Emmeline gave Dolly a journal in which she had recorded lengthy notations on her relationship with Zane. Dolly did not want to read it, but did so because Emmeline insisted. She then wrote Zane a long, remarkably calm letter. Stating that she had learned “terrible things,” she insisted she would not be “a woman cheated” and “rant and tear and act natural.” Allowing that he may have helped some of the young women in his retinue, “those other bits of fluff,” she charged that he had harmed Emmeline, and twice she urged him to give up his selfish desire to “own the girl body and soul” and be a friend instead.77

  At the time, Grey was in Catalina with R. C., his wife Reba, and other friends. In Avalon, he had always stayed at the Metropole Hotel, but this larger group made him aware of its limitations. When he shared this with Dolly, she fired off a less understanding response:

  I haven’t quite made up my mind whether or not you meant that letter seriously. Somehow I think you couldn’t so insult my intelligence. And yet it sounds serious—it sounds like your childlike innocence. How can you be so supremely egotistical & selfish as to drag your tender young friends & sensitive relatives to a “hole” like Catalina where there is “no nice place to eat. No nice accommodations. No amusements—not one damned thing to do.” You see I am quoting you. Poor Doc, poor Claire, poor Mildred Smith, poor Lillian, poor Elma, poor Mildred Fergerson, poor Reba, poor, poorer, poorest Rome. Oh, my God! How I pity and sympathize with them! Why did they ever leave their happy homes—or your happy home? Such a fate! I wonder if you remember your letter. It was a masterpiece. It should be published from an altruistic point of view. Think of all the wives left at home (I don’t know of any) who would be infinit
ely comforted & uplifted by its contents.78

  Three weeks later when Zane departed for Arizona with his entourage of women, his self-absorption provoked ever greater resentment and irony from Dolly:

  Dearly beloved One—love-of-my-life devoted Husband, You are a wonder! You are the greatest man on earth! There never was anyone like you, even remotely resembling you (honestly). After they made you the mold was broken. If you wanted to, you could be the biggest writer in the United States. As an author you are preeminent, as a fisherman unexcelled, as a hunter (well, I couldn’t swear you wouldn’t climb a tree, if a bear got after you—you see I’m being strictly truthful) but anyway, as a hunter you are twice as brave, as a manager of the fair sex you are superhuman, and as a husband you are … PUNK!!79

  By this point Dolly’s anger was besting her wit and detachment. Rather than try to defuse the situation, Zane was more inclined to go to war:

  As I understand you now, and better than ever, what you have never had and what you want in a husband. Well, I did my best, which was little enough, I suppose. And now I pass. You can have the freedom you want and you can get the husband you want. I hope to God you find him.

  As for me, I’d rather go to hell than stand your scorn and bitterness and discontent any longer. If I must continue to be made to feel as you have made me feel lately, I do not want your love, or you as a wife, or as anything. For a long time I have seen the futility of my life. … This year you have been particularly bitter, hard, satirical, and mean and unjust. … The pity of it all is that I know I could have gone far, if I had been believed in. But no woman will stand for anything that excludes her from all. She would rather a man be a failure, so long as he was bound to her. You have stood for more than any other woman ever did stand, but at the expense of my nerve, my dreams, and now my future. You have been rotten to me.…

  My friends are not what you think them. They all have weaknesses, as indeed the whole race has. But they are worth it to me, all and more than I have given them. If as you say, they must fail me, one by one, then I say that when that day comes I am done for good and all. Nothing could have been any crueler, any more a mortal blow to me than for you to say that. These girls have kept something alive in me. And now it is dying.

  He follows with an extended discussion of his relationship with Emmeline, and contends that she had written “emotional rot” and yielded to a “debauch of agony.” He, on the other hand, had been good to her and never misled her. “She swore she would share me with my other friends,” he defensively proclaims. “When she came to L- and found she was not the all she had supposed, then she failed me. Let her pass.”80

  Zane was hoping that Dolly would send Emmeline away and eliminate his headache, but it quickly got worse. Prior to his January 1917 departure for Long Key, Emmeline informed his other girlfriends about her mistreatment. Concluding that Emmeline had indeed been mistreated, Elma and Mildred turned against Zane. As he had unwittingly predicted, he soon was “done for good and all,” and the breakdown of the Betty Zane simply added to his woes.

  These developments altered Zane’s feelings toward Dolly. The woman responsible for his grief in September was forgotten, and he beseeched her for support and solace. In familiar fashion, he appealed to her to ease his burden of woe and empowered her to rescue him. Immediately, she relinquished her attacks, redirected the blame, and salved his guilt:

  You are exceedingly unfair to shove the blame of your friends’ defection off on me, or to say that E. poisoned them is ridiculous. Don’t worry that they’ve gone back on you—if there was anything in that, they wouldn’t be with you. And if they’re making trouble for you, they are an exceedingly ungrateful bunch after all you do for them. And if, to quote you, “they might be so many rag-dolls” for all the good they do you, you’d better send them home. Rag dolls at the Florida prices are somewhat expensive luxuries.

  I say this—the girls know perfectly well what they are doing and what they are getting from you. If they didn’t want to be with you, they wouldn’t. For them to make trouble for you is ungrateful, to say the least.81

  Dolly dispatched another long letter to Elma seeking to heal the rift and prevent her defection. On February 19, Zane responded, “I didn’t ask you to write the girl, but I’m pleased that you did, and thank you now, that I can say. Things like that make me feel warm inside for you.”82

  Dolly’s decision to act on behalf of her rivals rather than against them left her compromised, insecure, and unsatisfied. A couple weeks before Zane’s departure from Long Key, she presumed upon the improvement in their relationship, and entered into a bantering exchange about “Kifoozling.” “I am dying to be kifoozled—and nobody here to do it,” she announced, and then added, “You have only an eye for fish.”83 Both liked the slang term and its sexual implications, and playfully used it to tease each other, but underlying tensions soon caused the joking to turn dark and antagonistic. On March 14, Dolly wrote, “Your amazing, amusing, infuriating letter came this morning on the wings of a large and untimely snowstorm. … Do you realize that you have offered me a mortal insult ? You say, ‘Let’s be good comrades this year without a great deal of “k———ing.’’’ You imply that I’m—well, something unspeakable—a—a mink or something like that. Know then, my dear man, that you’ll have to crawl around on your knees before I’ll ever allow you to approach me again from that direction. Besides my spiritual and intellectual nature is beginning to dominate to the exclusion of the physical.”84 “Yours of March 14 is at hand,” Zane shot back, “And I would rejoice if I knew I were to go to H- before I ever receive another such letter from you.”85

  Dolly did not realize that Zane’s offensive remark was prompted by a disintegration of his truce with the girls and an angry spat with R. C. In a fit of pique, he fired both Elma and Mildred and sent them home. As protection against his looming isolation, he wrote to Claire and Lillian and requested that they meet him at the train station when he returned to New York City. Dolly, who was already vexed, became more so when she learned this, and announced that she would not meet his train if Lillian and Claire were there. “I have been upset for days, and am now sick,” he explained to Dolly. “If I am no better when I reach N.Y., I will go to a hotel. … I have lost my friend, and next will be my family. I seem to have a mortal deathly sickness within me. Poisoned! Ever since I came down here you have been satiric, bitter, and rancorous, except in one letter. And under the circumstances I think you had better not meet the train next Saturday.”86

  Although Zane and Dolly did connect, he did not remain in New York long. A week later, he was in Middletown visiting his mother, who was well, but cantankerous, and his sister Ida, who was cheerful and busy. When he was reminded that Ida was fifty, he was plagued with thoughts about the passage of time that kept him awake all night. When he left Middletown for Lackawaxen, the weather turned overcast and cold. Alone there, he plunged into a deep depression and wrote in his journal:

  Love of life, love of youth, love of beauty, love of passion, and their expression, that is my burden, my tragic doom, and the years roll by on fleet relentless wings. I know that I am too much a man to despair utterly under this inevitable blow, when it falls. But between that hour and this there is agony … I am all alone. No one understands, no one would care.

  The looming prospect of war worsened his dejection. Recalling that he came from “a family of fighters” and a great-grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War, he was tormented over his intense opposition to the current conflict. The young men who rushed to enlist following the declaration of war against Germany in April seemed foolish to him, and plagued him with vivid imaginings of destruction and carnage. The sight of rafters upon the flooding Delaware evoked happier times, but brought more gloom when a canoe overturned and a young girl drowned. The isolation that was supposed to inspire him rendered him unable to write, except in his journal, and left him with a “hopeless, morbid, sickening, exaggerated mental disorder.”87 In a reco
llection of this period a year later, Zane wrote to Dolly, “Let me forget my breakdown. I am ashamed that I hurt you by it.”88

  The arrival of his family in May helped, but it took Dolly and his alma mater to lift his spirits. Penn invited him back to its June 1917 commencement, and awarded him an honorary master’s degree. This recognition brought him much-needed reassurance that his Westerns were respected and not merely popular. Following completion of The Rainbow Trail, he decided to resume Shores of Lethe. “And now I’m ready, after years and waiting and agony, to begin the great story,” he wrote in his journal in March 1914. Keenly aware of the social criticism inherent to his early Westerns, he had wanted for many years to write a novel that would make it forthright and explicit. When he resumed his journal after a year of no entries, he confided, “I stopped writing because I was ashamed to chronicle the continued break-downs.”89 Desperate for familiar terrain and sure footing, he immersed himself in The U.P. Trail, but he was displeased with the results and had a hard time placing the serialization. Dolly’s suggestion that they take a long trip together helped even more than his honorary degree from Penn. Since their second trip to Tampico, on which she had gotten so sick, Dolly preferred to stay at home and care for the children. However, Zane’s recent depression convinced her that he sorely needed attention and another trip. She planned a complement to their honeymoon trip that would cover the northern half of the country. She proposed that they take the train from New York City to Chicago, turn north toward Minneapolis, cross the Dakotas and Montana to Seattle, and head south to California. Hoping to repair the damage from Long Key, she invited Mildred Fergerson and Dorothy Ackerman to accompany them.

  Four days after the July 7, 1917, departure, the group left the train in West Glacier, Montana, for a week of touring Glacier Park and taking long boat rides out of Many Glacier and St. Marys. Next, they stopped for four days in Spokane. Before he left home, Zane wrote in his journal that he would be seeking “new material for my work” and hoping “to forget this awful war the world is struggling with.” “I hate the ways of men and politics and business and war,” he added.90 Frustrated by a third breakdown with Shores of Lethe and his thwarted yearning to comment on contemporary developments, he proposed to write a modern Western that featured ranching conditions that his readers expected, but linked them to the ongoing war. Grey initiated research on this project at a luncheon with members of the Chamber of Commerce in Spokane, Washington. There he learned about the nearby wheat industry and met A. Duncan Dunn, a regent for Washington State University, then the state’s agricultural college. Dunn informed him that discontent among laborers and their unreliability had become a major problem for local wheat growers. A Spokane newspaper reported that when Grey was told about local activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (I. W. W.), a militant labor union that had staged major strikes around the country, he asked, “What is it, a union?” and then wondered, “Can’t the farmers harvest the wheat themselves?”91 Later, he learned about the so-called Bloody Sunday of November 5, 1916, when several Wobblies, as members of the I. W. W. were called, were slain in Everett during a fight over free speech. By the time he resumed his trip, Grey had decided that Wobblies were a serious threat to wheat production and that he would make them the villains of his novel.