Other readers were offended by the blatant miscegenation in his romance. Marian is a white missionary and her involvement intruded not just a cultural difference but a racial one as well. In the original manuscript, Grey was determined not to mute this problem. During their discussion of marriage, Nophaie voices concern that their children would be half-breeds, and Marian indignantly replies: “You mean the white people who have damned the Indian? The civilization that sends men like Blucher and Morgan to improve Indians? So they would call our child a half-breed. Let them! And I would fling in their faces that I thanked god he was half Indian, this red blood might be proof against white blood he must inherit from me.”80 At the story’s conclusion, the couple beholds a mass of “broken Indians” from a failed revolt moving toward the reservation and the setting sun, and Nophaie observes: “It is … symbolic, Marian. … They are vanishing—vanishing. My Nopahs! Only a question of swiftly flying time! And I too—Nophaie, the warrior! In the end I shall be absorbed by you—by your love—by your children. It is well!”81
The firestorm of objection to this social criticism and miscegenation worried Lasky that it could jeopardize his big budget production of The Vanishing America, and during their trip to the Rainbow Bridge he entered into delicate negotiations with Grey about amending the story. Through well-orchestrated appeals and production delays extending through the summer of 1924, Lasky gained concessions and shrewdly waited for the original controversy to settle and disappear. When the film was released in October 1925, Grey’s missionaries and bureau agents were consolidated into a single villainous trader, and Nophaie ended up dead. Initially, the staff at Harpers capitalized on these developments to delay the novel, and then cautiously urged that it too be changed. Beleaguered and defensive, Grey wrote to his editor in May 1925 that the requested modifications were destroying the honesty and integrity of his work:
This is the first time in my life I have been driven away from the truth, from honor and ideals, and in this case, from telling the world of the tragedy of the Indian. It is a melancholy thing. I wonder what effect it will have upon me.
I sent back to you most of The Vanishing American novel, cut as much as I could bring myself to do it. The remainder, which was fine, I destroyed upon receipt of Briggs’ letter. I will rewrite the conclusion and strain every faculty to give the novel a tremendous climax.
It is a very good thing for my publishers that I am able to do this and not fall prey to morbidness and gloom and hopelessness, such as would affect most writers confronted by this situation.82
His rewrite did not eliminate the mistreatment of the Indians by missionaries and government agents, but it was greatly reduced. In his amended conclusion, as in that of the film, Nophaie dies from a gunshot wound. His final exchange with Marian in the novel was reduced to three sentences, and they contained no reference to marriage. Despite his outspoken objections, Grey once again did rewrite. However, this capitulation was more momentous. Grey turned away from social criticism in the Westerns that followed and ever more toward women and distant places to satisfy his needs.
Grey compensated for this disappointment with fence mending. On the heels of the letter of understanding that so lifted Zane’s spirits, Dolly sent him another one in which she revisited his strained relations with his girlfriends and counseled, “You’ll be much happier, if you try to take people as they are—for the best in them—than in trying to constrict them to an impossible ideal.”83 Dolly’s generous defense of her rivals counseled her husband to be more accepting of the women who had offended him. Sensitive to the trauma of his recent depression, she urged him to be less possessive and less judgmental. Once again, she was modeling the advice she was offering, and the first improvement was her own marriage. Over the months that followed, she and Zane spent little time together and their reunions seldom lasted more than a few days. If they were, by tacit agreement, avoiding each other, their letters bubbled with an outpouring of affection and their penpal marriage was again a happy one.
By following Dolly’s advice and emulating her example, Zane found his relationships with Mildred and Lillian also improved, and they too encouraged him to be more forgiving. After many months of silence, Zane suddenly wrote to Claire in June 1924, confessed that Lillian and Mildred had “jumped all over me for neglecting you since you were married,” and proceeded to explain:
If I have hurt your feelings by not writing or seeing you, I’m sure sorry and haven’t a single excuse to offer, but lack of time. My intentions were always good. I can see, of course, that your marriage would not make the least change in your old friendship for me. Nor should it make one in me. But now that I’ve gotten a look at the thing I find there is a difference. For years when I came to N. Y., I’d find you thin, sick, frail, biting your finger-nails, etc., and all at once drag you out of that situation and put you on your feet again. It was the best of reasons why I should think of you. Now all that is past. You are well, happy, you have a fine husband, and you do not need me any more. There are others who do. That, and that only, is why I have not been as formerly. I have not changed in the least. It is life that has changed.84
During the 1923 Christmas season, Claire was hit by an automobile while crossing a street in New York City. Her right leg sustained multiple breaks and her doctors feared that the leg would have to be amputated. In March, as the leg responded to treatment but Claire still faced a long recovery, Zane wrote, “I sure hope that by this time your cheerful, optimistic spirit has had an opportunity to get busy again.” As a gesture of goodwill intended to bolster her spirits, he offered her $100 a month to do secretarial work for him.85 When her rehabilitation went well and her marriage did not, Claire accepted Zane’s offer and she was such good company on the fall trip to Oregon that Zane invited her to come along with Jess and Lillian on his trip to South America.
Prior to the abortive deer drive, Grey learned that his schooner was ahead of schedule, and that its renovations would be completed in time for the spring 1925 trip to South America that he originally planned. In early December, the finished ship, renamed Fisherman, left Nova Scotia for the Panama Canal. Several days into the trip, it ran into a raging gale and had to battle menacing seas for twelve days until it reached Santiago, Cuba. On the second day of the next leg, the new captain from Nova Scotia overruled his officers, cut between two dangerous reefs, and ran aground. The stranded yacht quickly attracted a crowd of natives intent upon looting. Fortunately, their attack was repulsed and high tide freed the ship. In Panama, a thorough inspection revealed a damaged keel, but it did not take much time to repair. Grey immediately hired Boerstler to replace his incompetent captain.86
On January 15, 1925, Zane, Claire, Lillian, and Jess left from San Pedro on a commercial steamer to connect with the refurbished Fisherman in Panama and strike out for the Galapagos Islands. Their entourage also included Mildred Smith; George Takahashi, his cook; Chester Wortley, a professional cameraman from Lasky Studios; Zane’s son Romer and his friend Johnny Shields. At the time, Romer was fifteen years old and for several years had been exhibiting a headstrong, rebellious behavior that worried his parents. They had sent him to a military school, but he was unhappy and frequently in trouble there. For years, Zane sought to avoid a repeat his father’s mistakes by not being a parent. “The children are beautiful—and all satisfying,” he once wrote to Dolly and then candidly admitted, “Only I can’t stand them long at a time. They disrupt me—separate me from my mind.”87 From his childhood memories, Loren is today able to recall only a single occasion on which his father spent the entire day with him.88 With festering guilt, Zane speculated that his absence may have contributed to Romer’s waywardness, and decided to include his son in his outings. On the trip to Nova Scotia, Romer missed only a few days of school, but he was so enthusiastic about the fishing that Zane decided to include him and his friend on the much longer trip to South America. This time, Romer missed most of his junior year in high school.
Grey’s choic
e of the Galapagos Islands as his destination was strongly influenced by a trip recently completed by a team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society. In 1924, William Beebe supervised a book on the group’s findings entitled Galapagos, World’s End. The part of greatest interest to Grey was the chapter on game fishing written by Robert G. McKay, who had done deep-sea fishing in both Florida and Catalina. McKay reported that the waters around the Galapagos and the Cocos Islands contained swarms of bait fish, exciting mackerel, and many leviathans: “Several savage and unseen strikes carried away leaders or broke new hooks. What these were we have no means of knowing: we do know that they were too heavy for our frail tackle.”89
Grey took special note of McKay’s comment on swordfish: “We worked hard to find the sword-fish family. We saw them,—gigantic ones—but in the short time at our command we were not fortunate enough to land one.”90 The best part was his summary: “The fish have not been fished on these grounds and are abundant, have plenty of food, are consequently in excellent fighting condition and run to great size. The fishing grounds are not marked by charts and guides, as in Florida and this adds a pleasant factor,—here you are exploring and fishing at the same time.”91 In short, these distant islands were uncharted waters and a golden opportunity for more records.
Despite his luxurious accommodations, Grey conceived of his trip as an exotic adventure akin to his early trips to Mexico and Arizona. Even though he had spent countless hours aboard boats, he usually returned to port at day’s end, and seldom remained on the water overnight. This would be the first time that he was out of sight of land for an extended period of time. During the first days of the voyage, he reveled in the grandeur of his yacht and the magnificence of the expansive ocean. Like the young Richard Henry Dana on his voyage from New England to pre–gold rush California, he could not take his eyes off the expanse of sail propelling him toward unknown possibilities:
The motion of the ship was stately and beautiful, and the soft ripple of water, the creak of the booms, the flap of the canvas, were strange to me. I stayed on deck for hours. It was something staggering to realize where I was, and to look out across the dim, pale, mysterious sea. The worries and troubles incident to this long-planned-for trip began to slough off my mind and to leave me with gradually mounting sensations of awe and wonder and joy. I was going down the grand old Pacific; and there was promise of adventure, beauty, and discovery.92
Grey’s scant record of his other days at sea suggests that once his initial intoxication wore off and he adjusted to the ship’s roll, he retreated to his cabin and dutifully churned out manuscript. Still, his elegant stateroom was not the comfortable refuge that his den at Altadena and his bungalow at Long Key had been. During a raging storm near Tower Island, a crew member reported a steamer nearby. When Grey’s keen eyesight failed to locate it in the crashing darkness, he was tormented with imaginings of disaster. Claire wrote in her journal that the turbulence pitched her about the boat so that she “felt as though she had been beaten with a plank for my ribs and body ached and I was sore to the touch all over.”93 The peak of the storm paralyzed Zane, Lillian, and several others with fear, but the battered Claire was “quite thrilled” and fought her way up the steps “to see what I might see of the storm.”94
The Fisherman, ca. 1925. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
Grey was much relieved when Boerstler and Mitchell successfully maneuvered his ship to its distant destination on time and without any course corrections. The lush vegetation of the Cocos and Perlas Islands, their cascading waves of flowers, and the erupting flocks of birds impressed him as truly exotic. On the other hand, the desolate Galapagos Islands were “one of the wildest and lonesomest places in all the Seven Seas” (56). Grey’s strained efforts to convey the eerie beauty of these islands betray a discomforting awareness that they were too different from his beloved Avalon and Arizona. In a candid aside on the Cocos Islands, he admits, “It was one place where I would not have cared to stay long. There are places too primitive for the good of man” (42).
The fishing was even more disappointing. McKay’s report had noted the ravenous sharks around the islands and their intrusion upon the fishing. As he explained, “Large fish are wary of attacking other large fish, but the moment either one seems to be in trouble or incapacitated he immediately becomes a victim. The attack seems more savage than the kill of the jungle, and the smell of blood arouses much the same instinct among fishes it does among the jungle carnivora.”95 Grey’s concentration upon the positive initially caused him to discount this drawback as a familiar hazard. However, the fishing around the Cocos and Galapagos Islands left him increasingly shaken by the ferocity and menace of the numerous sharks. Any sizeable fish that he hooked immediately attracted predators and was devoured. One large fish was reduced to a grisly shredded head before he could be landed (29). When he hooked a wahoo, “fully six feet long, round as a telegraph pole,” the onslaught of sharks so distressed Grey that he stopped his reel and broke off the fish (80).
Although the quantities of fish were as great as McKay had claimed, Grey was troubled by the absence of large game fish. Luckily, he did land “the largest dolphin I had ever seen” (55), and its weight of fifty-one-and-a-half pounds earned him a second world record. However, this was a large version of a small species rather than a big fish, and it brought him little sense of accomplishment. This drought, combined with the unappealing scenery, the torrid heat, and ever-present sharks, sapped his energy and exhausted his interest. As an outlet for their anger and frustration, Zane and R. C. turned to sharks, but the three they caught were sweaty, grueling work. They agreed that sharks were game fish, but Zane admitted that “I never had a moment’s comfort” (84). In her journal, Claire records that she returned from a long outing to find a harpooned shark suspended from a yardarm of the Fisherman. Looking to her like a sailor that had been executed by a naval tribunal, she observed that the hanging was “the men’s way of expressing their disappointment.”96
In early March, the Fisherman arrived back in Panama and headed north. A week later, off the coast of Panama, a school of whales and numerous dolphins were sighted. Soon, sailfish appeared and became more numerous. On March 20, the day after the yacht reached Zihuatanejo, Zane spotted thirteen sailfish, hooked several, and finally caught the first one of the trip. “Doc is in a much happier condition of mind,” Claire jotted in her journal. “I think the spell of ill-luck has been broken.”97 Over the next week, Zane and R. C. landed five large sailfish, each over 100 pounds, and Zane capped this good fortune with one weighing 135 pounds that eclipsed Keith Spalding’s world record by three pounds.98 The following day, while he was using light tackle, Zane hooked a giant black marlin. Estimating its weight at over 600 pounds, a world record for sure, he battled it valiantly for four hours before it finally broke loose.99
During his stop in Zihuatanejo, Grey had an “opportunity to study the natives” (138), and he presented his findings in a paragraph. He judged the men of the tribe to be violent, and he mentioned two killings by males over perceived interference with their marriages. He offered six decidedly “romantic” photographs as proof for his claim that the lives of these people were “most natural and romantic” (138). Claire, Lillian, and Mildred were far more interested in the villagers, and they spent most of their time in Zihuatanejo getting to know them. Claire found the women fascinating and admirable, and she questioned why the men elected to go fishing instead. Though her Spanish was rudimentary, she was so sincere and warm in her outreach that the native women referred to her as “cara—muy cara.”100
On April 8, the Fisherman reached the Gulf of California, and in Cabo San Lucas, the crew dropped anchor amid a congestion of commercial fishing boats and a yacht from Los Angeles. Grey beheld American goods being unloaded on the dock, and rejoiced at this first evidence of the culture that he had left behind. Ironically, at the most developed spot on his itinerary, he finally located the
spectacular fishing for which he had been searching. On his first day, he caught eight large Alison tuna from the yellowfin family, three over 150 pounds and his largest a hefty 218 pounds. He lost three others almost as big, and broke the socket on his chair fighting one of them. R. C. and Mitchell did more damage to the chair with their large fish, eventually rendering it unusable. Grey was so exhilarated by the group’s total of thirty-one tuna by the end of the second day that he questioned the captain of a commercial boat about their marvelous success, and he learned that his luck was not unusual. Unlike Catalina, where yellowfin had been declining for years, the numbers and size of them around Cabo had been strong for the previous eight years. The boatman explained that the situation in Catalina was not due to commercial fishing, as Grey had maintained in “Avalon the Beautiful,” but rather to a shift in migration that kept the fish further south. This informant revealed that, south of San Diego, he had seen concentrations of albacore that extended a hundred miles, and fishermen had filled their boats to capacity without diminishing the populations.
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