Frustrated by such problems, Carley goes back to New York City, but she finds herself discontented there. Her return to the West and bonding with Flo awaken her to the error of her Eastern outlook. When she subsequently encounters several women like her former self, Carley launches into a vitriolic tirade, much longer than the following excerpt that, like Beast, decries developments that were bringing about social change and undoing the taboos that pressued Grey to hide his secret life:
“Nothing wrong!” cried Carley. “Listen. Nothing wrong in you or life today—nothing for you women to make right? You are blind as bats—as dead to living truth as if you were buried. … Nothing wrong when these young adolescent girls ape you and wear stockings rolled under their knees below their skirts and use a lip stick and paint their faces and darken their eyes and pluck their eyebrows and absolutely do not know what shame is? Nothing wrong when you may find in any city women standing at street corners distributing booklets on birth control? Nothing wrong when great magazines print no page or picture without its sex appeal? Nothing wrong when the automobile presents the greatest evil that ever menaced American girls? … Nothing wrong when some husbands spend more of their time with other women than with you? Nothing wrong with jazz—where the lights go out in the dance hall and dancers jiggle and toddle and wiggle in a frenzy. … Nothing wrong with you women who cannot or will not stand childbirth? … You doll women, you parasites, you toys of men, you silken-wrapped geisha girls, you painted, idle, purring cats, you parody of the females of your species—find brains enough if you can to see the doom hanging over you and revolt before it is too late!” (247–49)
Diatribe supplants story in this embarrassing transformation of Carley into the woman Glenn wants and finally marries. As an outpouring of the social protest that had been festering within Grey for years, this rant sorely lacked analysis and serious thought. Grey failed to realize that his girlfriends had more in common with the new women he was attacking than with the increasingly dated heroines of his stories. At the time that he created them, Betty Zane and Madeline Hammond were strong women ahead of the times, but by the 1920s, conduct like theirs had grown old-fashioned. Grey’s efforts to keep his secret life out of his Westerns produced a strident, dissonant voice riven with conflict when it finally spoke. Not only did this outburst expose how reactionary Zane had become but, even worse, it also revealed that the capitulation of his long-standing alienation to the expectations of his culture had left him out of touch with it. Having a hidden life more attuned to the Jazz Age than the editors of Success magazine ever imagined, Grey responded to those conditions with anachronistic condemnation.
Although the final installment of The Call of the Canyon ran in Ladies’ Home Journal in March 1922, the novel version did not appear until January 1924. By June 1923, Grey was filled with misgivings about the novel’s looming publication. If Flaming Youth caused Grey to worry that Call might be behind the times when it appeared, The Code of the West, which he was completing when he read Flaming Youth, intensified this anxiety. Rascoe’s denunciation of “the code of conduct implicit in Mr. Grey’s novels” made this title a poor choice. However, the story line was an even greater problem. Georgiana is the lead character and an obvious variation of Carley. She is sent West to live with her sister by her mother who worries about her flirtatious behavior and hopes the West will cure her. Unfortunately, Georgiana, like Carley, is too accustomed to the behavior she has learned in the East. Her openness to kissing fosters fights, firings, and rumors of promiscuity. In order to save her and her reputation, a cowboy named Cal Thurmond forces her to marry him. This makes Georgiana very unhappy, but she eventually discovers that he is a fine person and that he really does love her. Gradually she learns to give into love and to relinquish her foolish ways. Her concluding assertion “I want to be your real wife!” completes her conversion into a Westerner. When he was working on Code, Zane did not worry about this novel’s pronounced resemblance to Call because it was contracted to run in the Country Gentleman, not Ladies’ Home Journal. However, this carryover helps to explain why The Code of the West was the first of his serializations not to follow as a novel. Harpers elected not to publish Code, and this Western did not appear as a book until almost a decade later.
* * *
Ironically, the third reason for Grey’s distress was his compulsive fishing, which had been a long-standing source of consolation. Most of the trips mentioned in his interview for Success involved fishing. For years, Grey had been defending these trips as a necessary stimulus for his writing. Besides using them to escape from the demands and distractions of home life, he believed that his articles about his experiences bolstered his reputation as a sportsman and validated his authority on matters relating to the outdoors. However, his mounting investment of time, effort, and money in his fishing adventures produced problems other than Dolly’s complaints. His determination to be innovative and accomplished made him increasingly competitive, contentious, and disliked.
On July 26, 1920, during his summer stay at Avalon, Grey landed his second broadbill, an impressive 418-pound specimen that challenged him with a grueling ten-hour battle. The only larger broadbill that had been caught with tackle was the 462-pound monster W. C. Boschen boated in 1917. Grey’s catch justified his preparatory regimen of rigorous physical exercise and his hyperbolic proclamation: “Let no fisherman imagine that he can land a fighting swordfish with soft hands.”81 Grey was so exhilarated that he declared this battle to be the most taxing of all his adventures so far:
R. C. and I believe that the 1920 season was not only the hardest ordeal we ever endured, but the most dangerous experience of any kind we ever had. Lassoing mountain lions, hunting the grizzly bear, and stalking the fierce tropical jaguar, former pastimes of ours, are hardly comparable to the pursuit of Xiphias gladius. It takes more time, patience, endurance, study, skill, nerve, and strength, not to mention money, of any game known to me through the experience of reading.82
Grey’s triumph vindicated his repeated claims that Xiphias gladius was the most challenging game fish in the ocean and so increased the stature of the broadbill that the Tuna Club felt pressured to reconsider its bias toward tuna.
This success inspired Grey to acquire a special boat for broadbill. Even though he had already spent a staggering amount during 1920 on his properties in Avalon, Altadena, and Arizona, he wanted this boat too badly to hold back or economize.83 After obtaining a set of blueprints that accommodated his special needs, he took them to the Wilmington (California) firm of Fellows and Stewart and contracted for the boat to be finished for the next season.
Residents of Catalina had witnessed more and more powerboats over the preceding five years. Claire’s record of changes in 1920 begins: “All summer long the bay has been full of boats—yachts and launches and skiffs of every description. The island seems to have drawn a bigger and gayer crowd this year.”84 This surge of boatbuilding was started by fishermen and driven by revolutionary fishing tactics. George Michaelis’s Juanita, Tad Gray’s Ramona, and James Jump’s Ranger confirmed the greater range and maneuverability of these boats, and altered the relationship of boatmen to their clients.85 As wealthy members of the Tuna Club acquired powerboats of their own and contracted captains for them, other boatmen were pressured into acquiring new boats in order to preserve their business and independence.
Like these other fishermen, Grey had his new boat designed to take full advantage of the latest tactics, tackle, and boat technology. The expensive new powerboats also offered important statements about their owners’ success. In 1921, when Wrigley started bringing his Chicago Cubs to Catalina for spring training, the “gayer crowd” noticed by Claire quickly became more evident and more ostentatious. The prominent businessmen and Hollywood celebrities drawn to the island were buying boats to keep others apprised of their wealth and success.
Since his return to Catalina in 1914, Grey had regularly hired Captain O. I. Danielson and repeatedly mentioned both h
im and his wonderful boat in his articles.86 In 1920, this association suddenly ended. In one of his published articles, Grey explained that this parting was caused by his late arrival and an unexpected surge of demand that had most of the captains already contracted,87 but the true reason for the split was Danielson’s acquisition of a new boat. At the end of the 1919 season, Danielson decided that his Leta D was sufficiently outdated to arrange for Fellows and Stewart to build him a new Leta D II.88 Arthur Parsons and Dan Phillips, two wealthy businessmen-turned-fishermen, financed this purchase in order to lure Danielson away from Grey.89 Grey was not especially bothered over the loss of Danielson; his published references to Danielson contain telltale hints of friction with him. On the other hand, the hiring away of Danielson by fellow Tuna Club members was upsetting.
In his article entitled “Xiphias Gladius,” Grey claimed that he hired Sid Boerstler as a replacement for Danielson because Boerstler lacked broadbill experience and Grey wanted someone he could train.90 Actually, Boerstler was both an accomplished boatman and a second choice. During May, Zane fished with A. E. Eaton and became frustrated when Eaton’s smelly, old, unreliable Leona kept breaking down.91 Grey decided to hire Boerstler because of his Blue Fin not just because the boat was more reliable, but also because it had recently been built for him by Fellows and Stewart.92 Fellows and Stewart was not the only boatbuilding company in southern California, but it definitely commanded the greatest respect among Catalina fishermen. As the name of his boat implies, Boerstler thought of himself as a tuna fisherman, but his willingness to deploy his skills and new boat according to Grey’s wishes enabled them to catch more marlin than any other boat their first year together.93 By season’s end, Grey was so convinced of the advantages of the Blue Fin that he contracted Boerstler to work for him exclusively, and then arranged for Fellows and Stewart to build him an even better powerboat of his own.
Grey wanted his Gladiator to avenge the piracy of Danielson, to proclaim his success as a writer, and, most of all, to make him Catalina’s most accomplished fisherman. Its name, derived from the broadbill’s Latin designation Xiphias gladius, was meant to broadcast Grey’s recent decision to “fish exclusively for swordfish.”94 The surviving records of Fellows and Stewart furnish revealing insights into his thinking about this project. The contracts for the Leta D II and Blue Fin have disappeared, but they undoubtedly resembled the boat ordered by George Farnsworth, the most respected among Catalina’s captains. He was at the helm when Boschen landed his record broadbill, and Boschen bequeathed $10,000 to him when he died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1918.95 The contract for Farnsworth’s Grey Gull specified a twenty-eight-foot launch that cost $4,300. The contract Grey signed on October 7, 1920, called for construction of a fifty-three-foot hull. The $9,000 requested in that contract paid only for the wooden frame and shell. On December 15, 1920, Grey agreed to pay an additional $7,260 for furnishings, fittings, and motor.96
The Gladiator was meant to make a big impression, and it did. The boat was the talk of Avalon well before its arrival on April 11, 1921, and that event occasioned a centrally positioned article and accompanying photograph on the front page of the Islander, the local newspaper. This article recounted the innovations pioneered by Catalina fishermen as important background to the significance of this new boat: “There seemed nothing more to be desired. But now comes the fifty-three-foot palatial craft of Zane Grey, fitted with every contrivance that the builders, Fellows & Stewart, and angling experience could suggest. … It marks a new era in fishing enthusiasm.”97 R. C., again with Zane’s assistance, would bolster this promotion with an article for Field and Stream entitled “Tuna Fishing Yesterday and Today.” Opening with a recollection of the dories from a decade before, it summarizes the history of the powerboat’s radical alteration of sportfishing. Again the Gladiator is characterized as new zenith in the surge of boat building.98
Launch of the Gladiator at Fellows and Stewart Shipyard, San Pedro, California, March 1921. (Courtesy of Dan Brock.)
Mindful of the risk in these ambitious claims, Grey was determined that his Gladiator deliver. Consequently, on June 19, after battling a giant broadbill for seven and one-half hours until it broke free, Grey quickly informed the local newspaper of his epic contest. With another front-page photograph of the Gladiator topped by the headline “Deep Sea Battle Catalina,” the Islander reported: “If the true fish tale is ever written of the thrilling fight with a monster swordfish that lasted more than seven and a half hours, the writer of western fiction will tell of the hope and expectancy, the extensive preparation, the long search and fruitless efforts; then of the grueling misery and physical torment that all resulted from a thread that was strained.”99 Over that same summer, Zane, R. C., and Boerstler boated many marlin, but the broadbill lived up to its reputation for elusiveness. The big one that got away remained their greatest success.100
On October 13, 1921, two weeks after Grey and his friend, “Lone Angler” Wiborn, left to go hunting in Arizona, Mrs. Keith Spalding landed a 426-pound broadbill after a fight of an hour and twenty minutes. Her fish surpassed Grey’s 1920 catch by eight pounds. Although it did not outweigh Boschen’s record broadbill, hers was four and a half inches longer.101 Though mismatched against her enormous adversary, Mrs. Spalding had substantial experience and verified skill. Born Eudora Hull, she had inherited the 5,000-acre Rancho Sespe near Pasadena, and later donated much of the property for Cal Tech’s campus. She was married to Keith Spalding, who had come to California ten years before from Chicago where his family owned the A. G. Spalding Sporting Goods Company.102 His future wife interested him in Catalina, and both became avid anglers. The year before her record broadbill, she caught a 116.5-pound tuna that should have qualified for a blue button because she followed club regulations for tackle and tactics.103 However, she was not a member because the club did not admit women, and this policy was not changed when her husband was elected president of the club in 1921.104
The ripples set off by “the little lady and her big fish” spread to the mainland, where the Los Angeles Examiner made Mrs. Spalding’s catch into a frontpage story spoofing the sport’s macho biases:
Men, it’s happened at last!
Take off your hats and hand the angler’s laurels to a member of the fair sex, and boast no more of the fish you’ve hooked … what makes the triumph all the greater for the gentler sex lies in the fact that Zane Grey, noted writer, and Arthur Parsons, wealthy San Francisco manufacturer, have been fishing all year for a broadbill with only a coat of sunburn to reward them for their efforts.105
A contemporary reader of Field and Stream might have expected the Grey brothers to be strong supporters of Mrs. Spalding’s achievement. The July 1921 issue of the magazine had carried a lead article by R. C. entitled “Sea Fishing for Women,” and his position was very similar to that of the Examiner. “The day has come when men can no longer corner outdoor sports nor hold all the records for outdoor achievements,” it begins. “Women have taken their stand beside men in the open with the same success that they have met in the world of affairs. We are proud of them!”106 After mentioning the large fish that Mrs. R. C. Grey had caught, the account dwells on the even bigger fish landed by “Miss Dorothy.” With accompanying photographs of a fetching Dorothy Ackerman, the discussion recounts her success with sea bass and tuna. There is even a photograph of a long expanse of beach with a skirted figure in the distance that could have illustrated Grey’s journal description of his walk there with her. Zane was indeed proud of his venturesome companion and her fishing successes.107
Mrs. Keith Spalding and her broadbill (426 pounds), Catalina, October 13, 1921. (Courtesy of Mike Farrior, Tuna Club)
Since he was hunting in Arizona when Mrs. Spalding caught her broadbill, Grey did not learn about it until his November return, and the only record of his reaction dates from months later. In late June 1922, Dustin Farnum and Nelson Howard encountered him on the streets of Avalon and asked his opinion of Mrs. Spal
ding’s catch. He replied that she was neither big enough nor strong enough to land such a huge fish. He maintained that her boatman, K. S. Walker, deserved most of the credit because he had maneuvered his boat to deliver the bait and then backed up to the hooked fish and gaffed it before it realized the threat and initiated a fight.108 Although Grey was repeating what other fishermen had already said, he was speaking carelessly to Tuna Club members who disliked him and his outspoken opinions.
On July 1, Howard reported Grey’s remarks to the board and called for a censure. After discussion of the problem and the awkward facts that Mrs. Spalding was married to the current club president but was not a club member, the board approved a motion that Grey be summoned to a special meeting on July 3rd.109 In an account of this incident that was first published only four years ago, Grey wrote:
I was not long in sensing the hostility of the majority of them, and that here, for them, was a welcome opportunity. … I must say that they tried to make the hearing rational and fair, but their voices were drowned in the insults of Mr. Howard and the ridicule of Mr. Ray Thomas. It was all so astonishing to me that I could not have said a word, even if they had given me a chance. I was not a practical person and knew little or nothing about business meetings and conferences. I was not slow to grasp, however, the hatred and maliciousness manifest by them.110
Nonetheless, Grey conceded the accuracy of Howard’s report and his lack of proof for his claims. The board demanded that Grey retract his remarks and send Mrs. Spalding an apology. “Considering that the defendant was a lady,” Grey explained, “and one whose courage I admired, I decided on that score to retract and apologize.”111
Grey’s account and surviving Tuna Club records agree on the main components of this episode, but differ sharply on what happened next. Grey claimed that he resigned the next day.112 Tuna Club records show that he did not actually resign until March 31, 1923, a full eight months later.113
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