Zane Grey

by Thomas H. Pauly

  During the same fall of 1925 that Broun was writing these columns, Harry Scherman recruited him for his new Book-of-the-Month Club, which had 46,000 subscribers by the end of 1926, its first year of existence, and over 100,000 by 1929.26 Broun and his associates on the selection committee profoundly influenced the club’s selections, and they soon became the ones that made the best-seller list. Neither the Book-of-the-Month Club nor The Literary Guild, its rival, ever selected a Grey novel for their recommendations, and that eroded sales even more.

  Meanwhile, when Grey returned to Avalon for the summer of 1925, he found a new residence completed and awaiting him.27 At the time of his departure for Nova Scotia the year before, he had speculated that his summer at Catalina might be his last.28 He was so vexed with Tom Mix and the Tuna Club that his mind was set on leaving—and he was oblivious to Dolly’s plans for his hastily acquired property. Two weeks after his departure for South America, she wrote to say that she was already conferring about a new residence. She had met with a young architect who proposed an Italian villa and informed her that the size of house she wanted would cost at least $25,000. She also learned that she would have to pay Wrigley’s Island Company an additional 25 percent. Realizing that Zane’s priority was the lot’s hilltop location and its dramatic views of the harbor and adjacent hills, Dolly was determined to get more for less and to have a house that “fit the topography.” During a recent visit to the site, she recalled the “Indian buildings” that she had seen at the San Diego World Fair and at the Chula Vista golf club, and she decided that a Pueblo-style building with flat adobe walls and protruding beams would be beautiful and appropriate. Not only was this mission style traditional and fashionable, but its Western flavor complemented Zane’s novels. Dolly’s rough floor plan called for his study to occupy the highest position, with panoramic views in all four directions.29

  Ed Bowen and Ken Robertson were with Dolly when she visited the site and they reminded her of the “Indian buildings” that they had seen together. Bowen came from a professional background in construction and had been working for the Greys for more than five years. Initially he did whatever was needed, but his conscientious efforts so impressed Dolly that she increased his responsibilities and allowed him to hire Robertson as his assistant. Both had accompanied her on her cross-country drives to Lackawaxen and her trip to Europe. Although both served as chauffeurs, Bowen’s duties quickly evolved beyond this. He planned the itineraries for Dolly’s trips, handled the reservations, and processed the bills. By 1925, he was her trusted advisor. Because Bowen had done such a good job supervising the third-story addition to the Altadena residence in 1922, Dolly trusted him to convert her ideas for the Catalina house into blueprints and arrange construction.

  Dolly wanted the new residence built while Zane was away in South America, and to be finished and ready for him when he returned in late May of 1925. He had only to move in and do as he pleased—and that, of course, involved a lot of fishing. In “The Log of the Gladiator,” he kept a daily accounting of his fishing over this summer. From June 9 until the middle of August, he and R. C. caught few fish, and Zane did not even spot a broadbill until August 4. A week later, R. C. landed a 343-pound swordfish and the fishing immediately improved. On August 24, both R. C. and Mitchell landed broadbills. The Islander reported that “Catalina experienced its greatest broadbill day in history,”30 and Zane wrote in his journal that “I never experienced anything like this day, since 1914.”31 By the end of the month, the Gladiator had returned to Avalon with six broadbills.32

  Apart from the fishing, things did not go so well. Dolly returned to Lacka-waxen with Bowen and Robertson and left Zane on his own for the summer. Since his return from South America, Grey had been plagued by a series of colds that progressively worsened and threatened to turn into pneumonia. By mid-July he had failed to improve and his doctor advised him to have his tonsils removed. A week after the operation, he was still unable to swallow food, and his weight had plunged to 106.33 On August 5, he went fishing for the first time, but he was so weak that he slept through most of the outing and returned exhausted.34

  The new house brought Grey more problems. He was besieged by waves of tourists seeking to glimpse the famous author or to visit the new Indian museum. He posted a sign declaring that the house was a private residence, but no one heeded it.35 “We are having our trouble with this Indian Museum of yours,” he informed Dolly. Next, the water system failed, and visitors worsened the situation by entering unannounced and using the toilets. Three days before his jubilant comment about the fishing, Zane wrote in his journal:

  Avalon has changed. It is now a cheap, vulgar tourist-resort. The atmosphere has changed … I have grown tired of old sensations. Perhaps it would be well for me to try a change. The publicity now given to me is not pleasant to say the least. People flock up here to my Hopi house and many accost us in the street and wait for me at the pier. … This new house is a mark, a magnet for tourists and people who want to see me. They come, they mean well, but they annoy and distract me.36

  In characteristic fashion, Zane relieved his aggravation by fastening his attention upon his upcoming trip, this time to Oregon. As soon as Dolly returned to Altadena, Ed and Ken started reloading the two family cars so that everything was ready when Zane arrived. Two days after his return, Zane, Mildred, Romer, Mitchell, and Takahashi headed north to link up with Wiborn and his wife.37 During his visit to the Rogue River the year before, his third, Zane had learned that boats had never run the upper reaches of the river. Today, this type of river trip is popular enough to be commonplace, but people then viewed the river’s rocks and rapids as too treacherous for boats. Part of the appeal of this adventure for Zane lay in arranging an appropriate boat. His previous conversations with a local store owner about the trip’s feasibility involved boat design, and Zane was sufficiently impressed to arrange construction of four boats and to recruit a knowledgeable guide. Claude Bardon, whom the store owner suggested, was a commercial fisherman who had worked the lower river, and he showed up with four boats of his own. His twenty-three-foot boats with upraised bow and stern and flared gunnels were prototypes for the drift boats on Western rivers today, and Grey was wise enough to recognize their value and take them, too.

  The ten miles and seventeen rapids that the group covered during the first day on the river were very emotional for Grey. The gentle water at the start allowed him to savor the magnificent beauty of the heavily timbered, mountainous terrain, but the narrowing canyon walls eventually funneled the boats into rapids so treacherous that he had to have Bardon run his boat through one stretch. Later, when Grey lost control through an easier stretch and grounded his boat midstream on a rock, he needed more help to avoid swamping, and his confidence was badly shaken. During a lining of the boats through another difficult stretch, he slipped and landed hard onto a rock. By the time he arrived at the campsite, he was bruised, starved, and exhausted.

  Good food, magnificent scenery, and a two-night layover helped Zane to recover, but the trip’s resumption quickly depleted his energy and convinced him that he had not yet recovered from his operation. Romer’s reckless handling of a menacing rapid narrowly averted disaster and terrified his father. “Youth has no thought or fear of danger,” Zane reflected afterward. “When I went down that wild jungle river of Mexico, the hot adventure had not been modified by cool reason.”38 Now fifty-three, fearful, and ever more dependent upon his guides, Grey worried about his vulnerability, and his state of mind colored his view of his surroundings: “But all wilderness dwellers, hunters and fishermen, and lovers of the forest hate automobile roads, and know they are one great cause, probably the greatest, of our vanishing America. The quail and the trout have vanished from California, and the forests are following. I am glad Romer can still see something of wild America, but I fear his son never will” (191).

  Though he fretted about road-builders, loggers, and miners, Grey was so awed by the wild beauty of the river and the sc
enery that he mused about purchasing real estate, but his thinking was checked by the hard fact that he was in the middle of nowhere and the U.S. government owned everything in view. At Battle Bar and then at Winkle Bar, he noticed mining claims and realized that individuals owned this property and could sell it to him. Following a rapturous description of the open setting at Winkle Bar, its nearby stands of trees and its dramatic cross-river views, Grey wrote, “I fished all of one of the briefest and happiest days I ever had” (207). Though he had not seen a fish or gotten a single bite, he was so impressed by the site and the encompassing range of mountains that he arranged to buy it the following year, in July 1926.

  Grey had poor fishing through most of the trip. “We are not having so good fishing as expected,” he wrote Dolly from a midway point. He should have written “I” rather than “we.” Later in the same letter, he mentioned, “Capt. M has caught over thirty steelhead. He’s sure some fisherman.”39 “I am the most unlucky of anglers,” he reflected at one point when everyone except himself had caught fish (192). This unusual acknowledgment of failure came from the fact that his freshwater fishing experiences had been very limited since he abandoned Lackawaxen for Catalina. Mitchell’s success under these trying conditions transformed Zane into a serious student of his technique. On the thirteenth day of the trip, he finally caught his first steelhead and the last ten days of the trip went much better. He took six out of one hole and ended up with a respectable twenty-five, though far behind Mitchell’s seventy-nine.

  The final stretch of river was a relatively uneventful two-day push except for the rapids at Blossom Bar, which were the worst of the trip. Grey’s description of the perils and Bardon’s acrobatics in dealing with them read like a stirring moment from one of his novels. When he returned to Altadena in late October, he characterized his journey down the river as “one of the hardest trips of all my experiences,” but he concluded that it had “left me richer by its marvelous contrast to the desert.”40

  While Grey was away, Dolly learned that Zane had sold a serial to McCall’s without informing her. During the voyage to the Galapagos, he had helped Mildred with a novel entitled Desert Bound.41 Following their return, she became so despondent over repeated rejections of her work and gossip about their relationship that Grey decided to submit it as a serial of his own to Ladies’ Home Journal. When Currie was slow to respond, he went to McCall’s and secured a prompt acceptance in order to lift Mildred’s spirits before his departure for Oregon.42 Dolly did not concern herself with the wisdom of Zane’s decisions, but she did worry out loud about the potential fallout from this shift of allegiances. “Are you sure you’re clear with Currie?” she asked and went on: “You said you wouldn’t go into these things without consulting me, you know. I presume this is all right, but you do get into a lot of trouble you know.” She conceded that McCall’s’ offer of $50,000 was impressive, but she fretted that Zane’s hasty resort to a new outlet might offend the editors with whom they had had long-standing ties.43

  Dolly’s suspicion of trouble was confirmed quicker than either she or Zane expected. In November, Grey reflected in his journal, “The break I prompted between Editor Currie and me bears some vital significance.” During the last four of their eight years together, Currie had served as editor at Ladies’ Home Journal, and defensively, Zane sought to reassure himself that this break was for the best and that Currie “had begun to put the screws on.”44 True, Currie had advised Zane that the quality of his work was dropping and demanded major revisions to The Thundering Herd and The Vanishing American. He was also aware of the pioneering research studies of reader tastes commissioned by the Curtis Publishing Company, the magazine’s owner, and could see from their findings that Grey’s celebrations of elemental life and his condemnations of current social conditions did little to sell the products of advertisers. However, it was Grey’s decision to take his work elsewhere that ended this deteriorating relationship. “This is another crisis of my career,” Grey reflected. “But where there was once a note of despair in it, there is now victory. I am not yet marked for defeat. I want ten years of prolific writing, some of which will be my best.”45

  Confident of his productivity, Grey was not stressed by the break with Currie and Ladies’ Home Journal. He was now free to sell his work to the highest bidder, and used his upcoming trip to New Zealand to keep the split out of his thinking. He had considered an excursion to New Zealand before purchasing the Fisherman, but it was Alma Baker who finally convinced him to go. Baker was a New Zealander from humble beginnings who married well and made a fortune from contract surveying, tin mining, and rubber planting in Malay. During the First World War, his expansion into aircraft construction added to his already substantial wealth and enabled him to travel the world and to pursue his lifelong interest in fishing. In 1919, Baker visited Catalina, and joined the Tuna Club when he returned in 1920. Grey met Baker at the Tuna Club and their conversations about their fishing adventures made them fast friends.46

  In 1923, Baker returned to New Zealand for the first time in twenty-three years, and discovered fabulous fishing in the Bay of Islands off the north end of the north island.47 Back in Auckland, he spoke so enthusiastically about his success to local newspaper reporters that government agents in the Tourist and Publicity Department solicited his advice on how to promote the country as a travel destination. Baker immediately thought of Grey, whose writings had popularized so many other areas, and suggested that he be extended an official invitation. Consequently, when Baker returned to Catalina during the summer of 1924, he brought Grey photographs of his catches and an invitation from the prime minister of New Zealand. Grey was impressed and quickly agreed to meet Baker in the Bay of Islands in the January following his Galapagos trip.

  On December 29, 1925, Grey, Mildred Smith, Mitchell, and three truck-loads of gear left Los Angeles for San Francisco, where they boarded the S.S. Makura for a voyage that took twenty-six days and covered 7,000 miles. In Urupukapuka, an uninhabited area a few miles beyond Russell, Grey set up camp with his own stoves, cots, tents, and even blankets. After commissioning several local boatmen for himself, including Francis Arlidge and his Alma G, Grey equipped the launches with his own fighting chairs and fishing tackle.

  Over his three months in the Bay of Islands, Grey had the best fishing of his life. He caught a broadbill weighing 400 pounds (the first ever taken with rod and reel in New Zealand waters), a black marlin weighing 704 pounds, forty-one striped marlin (including one of 450 pounds that set a new world record), and seventeen mako sharks. He also landed a 111-pound yellowtail that set another world record.48 Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, New Zealand (1926), his book about this trip, is perhaps his finest book about fishing—not because of the sensational fishing itself so much as his decision to present his success as a tale of woe in which he emerges as the Job of fishermen. This Tales opens with a rush of catches that exceed Grey’s wildest expectations. Over the first two days, he raises six marlin and successfully lands one weighing 226 pounds. On the third day, this bounty becomes even more remarkable when Grey sights three broadbills and hooks one on his fourth pass. After a grueling fight of two and a half hours, the wearying fish manages to break free and Grey has this astonishing reaction, “I could not help deploring the usual manifestation of my exceedingly miserable luck as a fisherman” (43–44).

  Given the propitious start to Grey’s fishing, this echo from his Rogue River trip contains greater dissonance. On the Oregon trip, Grey had merely noticed that Mitchell caught more fish than he did, but Mitchell’s greater success here has the effect of transforming the area’s wealth of opportunity into a cruel trick upon Zane. After Mitchell lands a hammerhead shark hooked by the tail, Grey nicknames him “Lucky Mitchell” and explains: “That sobriquet of Lucky I had once given to Frank Stick, and it surely was deserved; but as Stick was not in the Captain’s class for luck I had to switch the honor” (36). On a day that Grey elects not to fish due to the bad weather and choppy
water, Mitchell returns with his first marlin. Zane again calls him “Lucky Mitchell” and calmly swallows his regret over not having fished. By the end of the second week, Zane has caught thirteen marlin and the fishing is so good that he hopes to catch a rare striped marlin. When he hooks a big one and it bolts in dramatic jumps, he is convinced he has done so, but it breaks free and he laments, “There was no disregarding my bad luck. The loss affected me deeply, as my most cherished ambition for New Zealand waters was to catch one of those great Marlin” (77).

  When Mitchell lands a 685-pound black marlin the next day, Grey withholds comment and steels his determination. This rewards him with a 480-pound broadbill. “The broadbill created a sensation in the little town,” he rejoices. “As late as eleven o’clock at night people were inspecting the fish with torches” (88).

  When Mitchell loses a black marlin and is dejected, Grey counsels him to be pleased that he hooked the elusive fish, advice he himself did not follow when he was in the same position. “I was watching, you lucky fisherman,” he could not resist adding. “Can’t understand why your black Marlin did not jump aboard your boat” (90). An excursion to the Cavalli Islands sorely tests Grey’s mixed emotions of excitement and regret. There he hooks and loses another large black marlin. The next day, as he probably should have expected by this point, he learns that Mitchell is battling a mammoth marlin that has towed his boat ten miles away from where he hooked the fish. When Grey’s boat arrives, Mitchell’s fish has yet to surface, but as he finally draws it up, everyone realizes that it is a black marlin and larger that his previous one. Zane does not fully comprehend the enormity of the fish until the next day when it is hoisted and shown to weigh 976 pounds. “What an unbelievable monster of the deep!” Grey exclaims. “What a fish! I, who had loved fish from earliest boyhood, hung around that Marlin absorbed, obsessed, entranced and sick with the deferred possibility of catching one like it for myself. How silly such hope! Could I ever expect such marvelous good luck?” (99). His letter to Dolly offered an even more candid admission of his anguish: “Yesterday I hooked one nearly as large and lost it through my cursed bad luck. Then to make it worse the Captain hooked another that took him to sea ten miles. But he got it—an appallingly beautiful and magnificent fish. … I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the sight of that fish and my miserable misfortune.”49 “I think I’d sell my soul to catch one like it,” he added in a letter several days later.50 This black marlin set a world record that would endure for more than twenty years.