I have absolutely kept my word to you about the writing, and I will never publish a word again that you do not go over. Part of the trouble with M-was that I refused flat to accept any change in my MS, or anything written in it by herself. It is all right for her to correct any errors, and to cut when necessary. But I absolutely refused to listen to her ideas of what was wrong here and there. So we quarreled. She has sworn a dozen times that she will quit her job upon arriving home. I certainly do not want her any longer unless she changes.71
Mildred’s failure to find a publisher for Desert Bound left her so upset and despondent that Zane intervened and rewrote it. His hasty resort to McCall’s for an acceptance not only offended Currie and ended his long association with Ladies’ Home Journal, but also committed him to the dangerous practice of selling his serials to the highest bidder rather than to faithful clients who had purchased his work for years. When no one was willing to produce Amber’s Mirage, Zane reworked the play into a novel and had to fend off complaints from Dolly about allowing his involvement with Mildred to influence his writing. “Again and for the last time I think you have exaggerated M’s claims about my work,” he wrote in defense of his decisions. “She acknowledged that she had claimed to be of assistance to me. But even if her friends or folks have augmented that claim to the extent of starting gossip, I doubt that it can ruin me. … I did take M’s advice about a little of the rewriting. To be honest it helped me to get her point of view.”72
Grey treats his indebtedness to Mildred as minor, but his financing of her new house suggests that it may have been greater than he was willing to admit. By 1928, she had been with Grey for over fifteen years and was his companion on the long, demanding trips of the previous three years. By his own admission, she was also more than a typist on Desert Bound and Amber’s Mirage, which he sold as serializations for $70,000. Because Mildred wanted a house of her own in Altadena, she pressured Zane for financial support. As he explained in the same letter to Dolly in which he acknowledged Mildred’s editorial help: “About the house in Altadena, she (Mildred) is in despair about the expense. And I really believe that I will have to take it off her hands, by giving her what she has paid out on it. Several thousand on building, and somewhat more on furnishings. And that’s all.”73 Mildred’s house was an adobe structure of 4,200 square feet and had a Pueblo styling similar to Grey’s Avalon residence. Ed Bowen supervised its construction and Margaret Sears was hired as landscape architect. Clearly, Mildred’s secretarial wages were inadequate for the mortgage payments. When she could not meet this obligation, Zane assumed her payments and covered the cost of her furnishings. In the absence of any recorded comment from Dolly, one can only speculate how “faithful Penelope” reacted to the grand new house across town that her husband had financed for the alternative woman in his life.
Grey’s hectic, transient, unconventional life during the recent years contained ample amounts of frustration and discontent, but he no longer suffered from the debilitating depressions that had plagued his writing career through the crisis of 1923. In a March 12, 1928, entry in his personal journal, he reflected, “The old black mood rarely visits me now.”74 A month later, this realization spurred him to reread one of his journals and track the ebb and flow of his emotions in the past. Shocked to discover how dark and despondent he had been, he nonetheless rejoiced at how strange and unfamiliar those moods now seemed to him. “I find I have succeeded in rising above the old black moods,” he exulted.75
Grey remark about the disappearance of his “old black moods” occurred following his return to Altadena from a stay in Long Key from January through March of 1928. This was his first visit in four years and, following a comment on his positive mental health, he wrote, “Beautiful as ever, but my travels in the Pacific have spoiled me for Florida. Even the fish looked amazingly small.”76 Grey’s trips to the South Seas had not only carried him far away from Long Key, Lackawaxen, Catalina, and Arizona, but had also distanced him from the emotions associated with these locations. Although his disappointment here was neither great nor surprising, it was real and portentous since he never again returned.
A year later, in May 1929, Grey was in New York talking with editors and decided to take a side trip to Lackawaxen, which he had not visited since 1922. The fifty-seven-year old Zane encountered changes that disturbed him far more than the ones at Long Key. In a letter to Dolly about his experience, he explained that he had been struck by the passage of time when he boarded the train. The schedule and regulations were very different from the ones he had known, and because the new reservation system would not issue him a ticket, he had to use his influence to secure one. To his surprise, the train no longer stopped in Lackawaxen, and he had to get off in Port Jervis and take a car from there to his residence. The trees and foliage of the surrounding area had grown so much they seemed like a jungle, and his encounter with the old buildings set off a tidal wave of memories and emotions:
I was overcome with the beauty, the sadness, the loneliness, the desertedness of it all. Oh Dolly, the rooms are haunted. There are our spirits there. I thrilled and I wept. I recalled everything. I felt the cold of the old cottage, I saw you in bed. I heard Romer’s tiny wail. I heard the wind, the river. For the first time I went into the room where my mother died. Something strange came over me there.
The dust, the dirt, the decay, the river reproached me. Why have we not taken care of those places? They are a first and great part of our lives. Love, struggle, work, children, all came to us there. … Perhaps the strangest impression, of which I was not conscious at first, is that of going back after all these years—going back alone, I mean, and changed as I am, drew me in a circle back to the days of struggle, of agony, of growth. It would be great for me to return there, and stay a while to roam, and walk, and dream, and ponder. It would be a spiritual consummation, a realization, a most splendid experience for my creative power.77
But he did not linger or ever return. In characteristic fashion, he bolted for somewhere else. A week later he was in Newfoundland fishing for salmon. Originally, he had planned to go to Norway on what would have been his first trip to Europe, but when he realized that Newfoundland was closer and offered better fishing, he canceled the Norway trip.78
In August, he went to Arizona in order to “show my West to Romer and Betty.”79 There he gathered not only his two children but also a large a group that included Mildred, Takahashi, and Bob Carney, a friend of Romer’s who would marry Betty a year later. Zane had arranged an ambitious itinerary involving Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, the Havasupai reservation, and a month of hunting at his lodge near Payson. The high point was to be a horseback excursion to the Rainbow Bridge.
Zane Grey in Lackawaxen, May 1929. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
When Grey arrived at Flagstaff, he was immediately struck by how much the city had changed. Cars and tourists had replaced the cowboys and horses that once filled the streets. The rude, dusty town in which he watched a jury of weathered locals deliberate the fate of Jim Emett back in 1907 had disappeared and been replaced by a bustling center of commerce best exemplified by the new three-story Monte Vista hotel.
Grey’s dismay over this development and change was intensified during the automobile trip to Kayenta. He immediately missed the horseback rides of his previous visits, and his misgivings about the outing were confirmed when the cars had difficulty with several stretches of quagmire. When he encountered Indian men in coveralls and their women in cheap store-bought dresses, he saw cultural annihilation, and his dismay intensified when he learned that the area’s wild horses had become diseased and had to be shot.80 In the guest book at the Kayenta Trading Post, he penned a troubled reflection on how different the area was from eighteen years before when he first visited it:
It was in the heyday of its existence, colorful, bustling, primitive, beautiful, dominated by the splendid spirit of the pioneer Wetherills. … Peace and prosperity pervaded Kayenta. Love of the In
dian and service to him.
In the succeeding years on each visit I saw a slow change working. Time is cruel. The years are tragic. The pioneers could not stay the approach of deadly civilization. In 1923 I felt the doom of the Navajo. 1929 showed me the truth of the vision I had felt—the ghastly truth of the vanishing American.…
But the desert remained the same. The so-called civilization of man and his works shall perish from the earth, while the shifting sands, the red looming walls, the purple sage, and the towering monuments, the vast brooding range show no perceptible change.81
When he departed with his party for the Rainbow Bridge, Zane worried that Night, his horse, might be too spirited for him and opted for a gentler one. En route, he was drained by the heat and a severe case of diarrhea. The trip “damned near killed me,” he confessed to Dolly,82 and the emotional toll was greater than the physical. He was disturbed by the abandoned hogans along the way, and the only people he saw were white tourists. At the Bridge, the antics and lack of respect by the youngsters in his group left him questioning whether he should have returned. By day’s end he was so troubled and depressed that he could not sleep. His insomnia spurred him to a final solitary visit to Nonnezoshe and to write this poignant, unpublished account of his final night at this special place:
Sleep seldom visited me … [and was] quite impossible owing to the noisy youngsters. Nonnezoshe did not rouse my reverence in them. But at last they fell asleep. By midnight everyone in my party was asleep, leaving the lonely canyon, the bridge and a melancholy owl to silence and to me.
Then I began my night quest. I prowled like a panther seeking prey, but that was only because I could not sit or stand long at one point. It seemed as if I was trying to find a place where Nonnezoshe would explain its mystery.
After hours a belated moon, misshapen and weird, passed the ramparts alone and flooded the canyon with strange light, unearthly and beautiful, I watched this moon go down until again the mystic shadows dominated. It was three o’clock when I softly trod among the sleepers, lying prone. Betty with her fair face upturned to the sky. Romer with his dark face upturned to the sky. They slept the sweet deep sleep of youth, with no knowledge of my lingering over them in the dead of night, with the cursed, menacing shadows of Nonnezoshe hovering over me.
I stole away back to my bed, where I sat under the cedar, looking up. And all seemed magnified. Between the moon-blanched cliff and the dead black wall, which reached to the stars, the glorious thing arched. The silence was so unbroken that I could hear the beating of my heart. Silence of stone! It was a sepulchre. At that hour it seemed the most sublimely lovely phenomenon of nature in all the world. Impossible not to dwell on the spiritual power in the rocks, or the beauty of life, or the meaning of God, and the certainty of immortality! Some day Nonnezoshe would crash. Someday the sands of the desert would bury its shattered remnants. But of what?
Nas ta bega [dead since 1918] came to me then. He was there in the shadow—the soul of the Indian, I did not question or doubt. I grasped that truth to my living soul. He gazed up at Nonnezoshe with me, but while he understood, I could not pierce beyond the physical confines of that lonely canyon.
The moon went down, the chasm darkened, the bridge took on spiritual form, gray in the hour before dawn. It changed, it lightened. Lo! Day had come, cool and wan. And I returned to the spectacle of giant walls connected by the crescent of stone, waiting through the ages to fall.
My party was the first to visit Nonnezoshe during 1929, and here it was late September. It was unlikely that there would be another this year. And I would never come back. Airplanes might in the future zoom over Nonnezoshe Boco; grasping men, despoilers of beauty, might blast an automobile road down that canyon, but the Red Indian trail was fading forever.83
The hunting trip cemented Grey’s decision never to return. As he was preparing to go to the Tonto Basin, he learned that the hunting regulations had been changed since his previous trip and that the season would not open until a month later. Since he had already arranged for a film crew to cover his hunt in October, he applied for a special permit to shoot some “pig-killing” bears near his cabin. His meeting with Tom E. McCullough, the resident game commissioner, went well and he left confident that the state game warden would approve his telegrammed request. However, the warden immediately called a special meeting of the game commission in Phoenix to deliberate the matter. The meeting attracted state residents who knew that the area was under review for game preserve status and vehemently opposed exemptions. Because the dispute involved a famous author, newspapers covered the hearings and made the situation worse for Grey. His request was denied, and he construed the decision as a personal vendetta.84 “I was refused a special permit and insulted publicly by the state Game Warden,” he complained to Dolly. “The Game Commissioner of Flagstaff, a two-faced-[word intentionally left out] who pretended to be friendly to me over there, got up in the meeting on October 5 and roasted me vilely.” Grey explained that he wanted to cancel his plans and leave immediately, but decided to stay so that everyone with him was not inconvenienced and disappointed.85
As with his resignation from the Tuna Club, Grey initially stifled his vexation and belatedly decided a public statement of his position was necessary. On October 10, 1930, he wrote a letter to the Coconino Sun announcing that he would never again return to Arizona. He openly acknowledged his resentment over the handling of his special request, but stressed that this was not his only reason. He maintained that the deserts and forests of Arizona were being sacrificed to the commercial interests of lumbermen, ranchers, hunters, and especially tourists. Each was intent upon money and oblivious to the consequential depletion of precious resources. The agencies that were supposed to protect these resources were pawns for these interests, and the beauty of Arizona’s wilderness was imperiled.86 The Arizona that he had explored and loved for so many years would soon be gone forever, and henceforth, he would write without visiting the state that had long served as vital inspiration for his dreams and fiction.
9
Undone: 1930–39
No chance of selling a picture now—they’re all retrenching and laying off. Everyone is busted. Everyday one hears of millionaires losing everything. You may have read many things—they’re all trying to spout optimism, but meanwhile the rout goes on.
—Dolly Grey, Letter to Zane, June 8, 1931
Common understanding of Depression history holds that it began on October 24, 1929, when the stock market “crashed.” On that day the Dow Jones Average gave up thirty-four points, or 9 percent, on trading volume that was three times normal. The selling actually started in September when the market hit a record high of 386. Black Thursday, as the 24th came to be known, saw an across-the-board plunge that erased paper profits for the year so far. Moreover, the decline continued through the rest of October and persisted into November. By November 13, the DJA had dropped to 198,which represented a 40 percent loss of its September value. Over the winter, stocks steadied, reversed, and gradually recovered almost 75 percent of the ground they had lost. When the DJA clawed its way back to 294 by April 1930, confidence revived, and many believed that prosperity would be back soon. A punishing, unremitting slide followed and pushed the DJA to a low of 41 on July 8, 1932. The specious hope of 1930 evaporated, as stocks fell to 25 percent of their 1929 high, and some were hit even harder.1 This corrosive scenario, with its deceptive signs of hope and wrenching betrayal, helps to explain Grey’s disregard for the state of the economy in 1930 and its catastrophic consequences.
In his first journal entry following the calamitous October week of 1929, Grey, either oblivious to the crash or too self-absorbed to be bothered, wrote, “I cannot get used to the great airplanes, roaring over head during the day.”2 He still perceived widespread prosperity, and wanted to use his wealth to get as far away as possible. For 1929, his total income reached $340,717. Colliers paid him $80,000 for serial rights to “The Yellow Jacket Feud,” and American Magazine fo
rked over $65,000 for “The Drift Fence.” Country Gentleman got “Rustlers of Silver River” for only $50,000, but this was part of a package that guaranteed Grey similar payments for two more serials. Paramount sent its usual $40,000 for the film rights to Fighting Caravans and remained solidly committed to him.3 Since Dolly owned few equities, the fall sell-off had little immediate effect upon her investments. The problem for her and Zane was spending rather than losing. “I am sorry you are broke,” he complained to her from Arizona in October. “You always are broke unless at a time when I have just given you some money. Your big interests have absorbed all the cash and credit you can get, and threaten to absorb mine. But nothing doing anymore, my dear. It’s more important (to me) that I buy stuff I want and take the trips I plan than for you to buy this and that for investment.”4 In order to sustain his extravagant lifestyle, Zane, like many well-to-do Americans, spent his earnings and ignored his indebtedness. He still owed money on his automobiles, boats, and properties, and relied on hefty advances from Harpers to make ends meet. Since the demand for his work was still strong despite the drop in sales for his new novels, he dismissed the worry about the economy as unwarranted.
The losses Grey noticed were his old friends. While he was in the East visiting publishers and Lackawaxen in May 1929, he looked up Elma and Claire in New York and Dorothy in Boston. Both Elma and Claire had married during his involvement with Louise, and Dorothy had returned to the East for good in November 1923. Prior to her final visit to Altadena, Dorothy started dating Nick Dalrymple, and in December 1924, they married.5 By 1929, Zane was resigned to the fact that these friends of many years had moved on with their lives, but their indifference toward him hurt. “Do you know that you are the only person left in the East who ever writes me,” he wrote to Claire in February 1930. “Dot is a rotten letter writer and there’s no sense in looking for news from her and I don’t want to hear from Elma.”6 The month before, he severed ties with Sid Boerstler, who had been his boatman since 1920. During the previous trip to Tahiti, Boerstler had offended Grey by taking up with a native prostitute and getting so far out of shape that he was unable to complete a hike to a mountaintop in Raiatea.7 This trip was so taxing for R. C. that he resolved never again to visit the South Seas and cost Zane the friend he valued most.
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