Dolly did not need the news that arrived from Suva in early May. Zane informed her that his yacht was “a white elephant” and that “there was something terribly wrong with it.” His crew was the worst ever—by far. He found that they had borrowed money against his account without his knowledge or permission. The captain was a drunken incompetent “whore-master” who sailed perilously close to reefs and surely would have hit one had someone not frantically signaled him to change course. The inept chief engineer damaged six engine bearings and forced Zane to dry-dock his yacht in Suva for assessment and repairs.44
These tribulations strained Zane’s relationship with Berenice. Conceding that she was “lovely to look at, sweet of disposition, honest and unselfish, conscientious about work, etc.,” he complained that she had presented him “the most exasperating, most damnable situation I’ve ever had.” She socialized too much, and her seasickness was violent and persistent. Her takeover manner had disintegrated, and several times he came upon her on her knees praying. Worst of all, she would have nothing to do with him, and claimed that he had exploited her. “I think she gave me encouragement enough at home in Altadena,” he defended himself. “She was eager, responsive, passionate, and what not.” Unsure of what to do, he speculated that he could “become a eunuch for her,” but he did not think it would help. The voyage had deteriorated into such an ordeal that he considered ending it, and only reneged because Carney and his children vehemently objected.45
Before she received these laments, Dolly concluded that the financial situation was too dire for the trip to continue, and she wired Zane to return immediately. In a follow-up letter sent to Tahiti, she apologized for “hav[ing] to shut down on your trip,” and explained that she was hiding from process servers. A demand from Harpers for additional security for their $100,000 debt forced her to post her jewelry, and she had recently dipped into their collection of silver dollars in order to pay for food. She was so frustrated over the objections to The Trail Driver that she contemplated changing the masquerading girl herself, but found the challenge too daunting. When McCall’s offered her half of its previous payment to serialize it, Dolly immediately accepted and appealed to the editors to keep the fee a secret. Unfortunately, this $40,000 windfall still left her so strapped that she stopped attending movies. She estimated that their earnings for the year were already spent, and beseeched Zane to restrict his purchases to essentials. “I have been fighting for my sanity,” she appealed. “Doc, if you don’t help me, I can fight no longer.”46
“Your letter to Bob [Carney, Zane’s son-in-law] just about finished me,” Zane responded:
How in God’s name you could owe $300,000 on this yacht simply dazes me. I’ll about kill Bowen, and be liable to believe Mildred’s claims about him. You were all insane to let the work go on, and send the yacht.
My extreme figures—the farthest I dared go—were $100,000 after initial investment & engines. That included the whole cruise.
I am knocked cold. But I’ll defer any more until my return.
The situation here is abominable. This d—little vile port lives on slander, gossip, rumor. Because we are returning and selling some supplies, it has gotten nosed about that I have failed and [am] ruined.47
Rumors of Grey’s financial problems were so widespread in Papeete that he was unable to cash a check or run an account, and had to sell spare fuel and tackle in order to raise money. His belated realization that his “big trip” and ill-considered yacht were responsible for his plight crushed him. A year and a half before, he had blithely informed Claire about the $300,000-plus estimates for his renovations, but they were now so central to everything that was going wrong that he was unable to accept responsibility for them. Fortunately, second thoughts persuaded him that anger and blame were inappropriate and counterproductive. Confessing that Dolly’s news “struck terror into my heart,” he strove to be conciliatory and admitted that he had wrongly underestimated her fears about their finances. “All I ask,” he concluded, “is that you stick to me in this most critical of my vicissitudes.”48
Berenice and Zane hopped a steamship back to the United States and left Bob, Betty, and Loren in Papeete to return with Fisherman II. When he arrived back in Altadena in August 1931, he reopened one of his personal diaries and wrote:
The great cruise was a failure. M. K. S. [Mildred Smith] started me downhill in Oct. [1930] by her defection and poison talk. The Mitchells and Guilds did the same. Mitchell was crooked, and had been stealing from me for years. After fleecing me, he began to drink hard and died of heart disease in three months. [Mitchell died in Altadena a month before Grey’s return.]
I was far better without these people. But the financial depression overtook me. I was forced home. And I may lose everything. The magazines and picture business have flopped for the time being.
I am deeply in debt, with no way in sight of raising money for notes due.
It is a critical time for me.49
As in the past, Grey decided that writing more novels would solve his problems, but the magnitude of his debt and the dearth of interest in his work withered his resolve; over the summer and fall of 1931, he was too despondent to write. Realizing that home life in Altadena confined him and worsened his depression, Dolly encouraged him to go fishing for steelhead in Idaho in September and then scraped together funding so that he could return to Flower Point for the first three months of 1932.
By departure time, Zane and Berenice had patched their previous rift, and she agreed to accompany him, but the heat and more sickness were another ordeal for her, and when they returned to the United States, she left Zane and moved to San Francisco. However, this parting was complicated by earlier agreements that added to Zane’s woes. At the time that she initially informed him about her hitchhiking adventures, Berenice revealed that she hoped to convert them into a novel, and Zane encouraged her with helpful suggestions about structuring and developing her story.50 When he later realized that her work was less promising than Mildred’s, he took it over, reworked it, and sold it for serialization as “The Young Runaway” to the Pictorial Review for $30,000. Grey rewarded Berenice with a contract granting her 15 percent of royalties from the novel. Although Wyoming, the novel version of “The Young Runaway,” did not appear until 1953, fourteen years after Grey’s death, Berenice took her agreement to an attorney shortly after her relocation to San Francisco, and Dolly had to negotiate a settlement. She handled the matter so tactfully and so amicably that Berenice lowered her royalty to 5 percent in return for a typewriter and an automobile that Dolly deducted as a business expenses. “Hereafter, my dear,” Dolly advised in a letter informing her husband of this agreement, “let the literary end of things remain strictly in the family.”51
In May 1932, while Dolly was negotiating this settlement with Berenice, the sixty-year-old Zane wrote in his journal, “The December last I met a young woman who came to work for me and who has exerted a remarkably good influence.”52 He was referring to Wanda Williams, whom he had originally met four years earlier when she was dating Romer. Zane had considered her as a replacement for Mildred, but did not invite her to become his secretary until Berenice decamped. Wanda was a Christian Scientist, and her positive outlook greatly impressed him. Ever since he broke away from his father’s fundamentalism, Zane had avoided denominational religion and fulfilled his spiritual needs with nature at undeveloped locations, notably the Rainbow Bridge. However, his recent reversals had so demoralized him that he was deeply grateful for Wanda’s cheerfulness and optimism and he credited them to her religion. Although he balked at the religion’s opposition to science, he perceived Wanda and her equally animated parents as products of its influence and grasped Christian Science like a lifeline: “To stop worry, doubt, fear, the thinking of evil, of injustice—the change to belief, confidence, power! I can attribute these to W—if not directly to Christian Science. I do not believe I can ever be a true Scientist. But I have gained some of its splendid truths, and I shall
never let go of them. It is only when the tiger of my passions ambushes me—and I do not think—that I fail.”53 “I have been helped a great deal by W—in my attitude toward people, things, feeling, thinking,” he observed in another journal entry about Wanda and her Christian Science religion. “I recognize its [Science’s] single worth. It will take time for me in this regard. But I am sure that this and its influence have helped me out the darkened depth I was in.”54
Grey’s hiring of Wanda and a summer visit to Oregon enabled him to write again. Over the first half of 1932, he worked frenetically, and completed or rewrote “The Young Runaway,” “The Lost Wagon Train,” Thunder Mountain, Knights of the Range, and “Bitter Seeps.” But the sustained exertion took a heavy toll on his fragile health. As he wrote to Claire:
I had written steadily for 7 months, the hardest spell I ever put in. And that during the period of my trouble, the least of which, bad as it was, was only financial. Up in the Oregon woods, on the Umpqua, I fought it out. I was run down from all these things, so I was prey to poison oak and a severe cold in my chest; and I damn near died. Night after night I was out of my head part of the time, when I awakened alone in the morning, all my vitality was at lowest ebb. I would have to sit up in bed until the bad spell passed.55
In writing to Claire, Zane accentuated the positive and implied that his tremendous exertion had liberated him from his black hole, but several weeks later, he confessed to his journal, “It is a terrible time. I do not know what to think, what to do, which way to turn.”56
Once again Zane trusted that long days of writing would be his salvation, but this time the inevitable return of his energy and optimism was long-delayed and short-lived—brief upturns in a relentless decline. Over the fall of 1932 and during the entire year following, Dolly could not place a single serialization. Magazines, hard hit by the plunge in advertising and subscriptions, were themselves strapped, and editors noticed that Grey’s work had lost its freshness and appeal. Harpers continued to publish one and sometimes two Grey novels each year, but with the solitary exception of Western Union (1939), which appeared days before Grey’s death, all were written before 1932. West of the Pecos (1937) and Raiders of Spanish Peaks (1938) derived from serials published in 1931, and The Code of the West, his only novel for 1934, dated from 1923. Harpers consigned his new manuscripts from after 1932 to its bulging store of collateral that was looking more and more like a graveyard.
These developments eroded Grey’s authority at home and inspired Dolly to become more resourceful and independent. Years before, he and Dolly had agreed that she was entitled to half of his earnings, and she maintained records that carefully calculated her half. Basically this agreement acknowledged what California law would have granted her in a divorce and allowed her to hold bank accounts in her name, but bills and expedience kept her from living by this division. Although she and Zane bickered constantly over excessive spending, of which both were guilty, his huge income had always rescued them from a hard reckoning or ruinous conflict. However, the precipitous drop in his income and their staggering debt necessitated a stricter accounting and better enforcement. When Zane returned from the ill-fated voyage of Fisherman II, Dolly informed him that henceforth she would make monthly deposits to his bank account from the funds she received, and he would be responsible for all his bills. Because she was no longer able, she would not provide additional distributions or backup coverage.
Given Zane’s long history of doing as he pleased and her own capitulations, Dolly realized that they could not alter their engrained behavior without a better system, and Ed Bowen helped her to develop one. Over his ten years with the family, Bowen had evolved from a majordomo on household matters to an overseer of Dolly’s construction projects, and more recently into a trusted financial advisor. From his background in construction and the knowledge of business he acquired from Lloyd Wright, Grey’s attorney, he was able to educate Dolly on the advantages of incorporating her husband’s holdings. In the past, Zane had repeatedly fumed over his huge tax bills, and Dolly had recently withheld tax payments in order to make ends meet, but this strategy had simply worsened the couple’s staggering debt. Bowen showed Dolly how incorporation could reduce Zane’s tax rate and qualify him for more deductions. Given the worsening state of the economy, Bowen believed that the IRS would be more favorably disposed toward Grey as a failing company than as a failing individual. The biggest drawback to incorporation was its greatest benefit: in order to convert Zane Grey into Zane Grey, Inc., Grey’s finances would have to be handled like those of a business and adhere to strict accounting rather than the vicissitudes of Dolly’s largesse.57
The benefits of incorporation were too great for Zane to oppose, and he reluctantly signed the necessary paperwork during the summer of 1932. Within weeks, he was chafing at the consequential constraints and complaining about Bowen. Relieved to have the blame shifted, Dolly felt obligated to stand up for Bowen and did so in this August letter to Zane:
I have no brief for Bowen. He has made just as bad mistakes as the rest of us, but he has learned and profited by those mistakes in experience to the point of not making them or any similar ones again. He has handled our creditors as no one else I know could or would have handled them. Even now they have continually to be placated and soothed. If you wish that job, you may have it. I won’t do that. … If you are not satisfied with Bowen’s conduct of the business, you are at perfect liberty to make any change you wish, but at least you must be fair to him and just not say you don’t want to talk to him or see him or have anything to do with him. If you are dissatisfied, or wish to make accusations, or to kick him out, come out with it and be straight and above-board. It is your business and your corporation and you should be intelligent about it. … Possibly Bowen could get much farther than be connected with the Z. G. Corporation. He is not the kind to stand still, wherever he is, and in one way or another is going to make a name for himself. Perhaps I have been selfish in wanting him to stay on with us, because I know his possibilities, and at this writing I know of no one else that I think able to take his place, or do the things he has been doing.58
Unlike Zane, who buckled under pressure, Dolly acquired a new resilience and determination. “I shall no longer be motivated by fear, as I have in the past,” she wrote in the same letter. “All of you [the family] have taught me a rather bitter lesson and that is, that I can get along alone. As a matter of fact, it’s what I have been doing most of the time.”59 For years, Zane’s trips and long stays away from home had caused her to feel like a single parent. Having long thought of herself as a mother first and foremost, she learned early in her marriage to fend for herself. Over the 1920s, she began to chafe at the obligations and constraints of this role and started taking trips on her own. Moreover, her years of handling Zane’s finances and of dealing with his editors had gained her a wealth of experience far beyond that of most wives and mothers. Her local bank in Altadena recognized this, and in appreciation for her substantial business, appointed her its president, more an honorary position than a full-time job. As one of the very few female bank presidents at the time, Dolly used her position to learn about banking operations and the financial problems of others, but she developed no illusions of importance. Fearing that her conscientious efforts to be a loyal wife and good mother had impaired her, she complained to Zane, “I’m afraid that my life job has been too highly specialized for me to be good at anything else.”60
The devastation of the unfolding Depression spurred Dolly to do something about her “specialization” and low self-esteem. Her awareness of her personal limitations led her to perceive the ongoing financial crisis as a healthy disruption of the existing social order and invigorating redefinition of achievement. “It’s a new deal all around,” she echoed Roosevelt. “Those who continue to wallow in the past and its errors are going to fall by the wayside.”61 Dolly worked to improve her confidence and outlook with surprisingly modest undertakings. The bank president decided
that she needed to be her own secretary and to acquire the skills she had been paying others to perform. First, she worked to become a proficient typist. Back in 1924, she had tried typing, but quit when she realized that she could use Zane’s secretaries and that they did a much better job. By the end of 1932, she was typing her own error-free letters, saving herself both time and money. Since she and Zane had relied on chauffeurs since they purchased their first car in 1917, she learned how to drive. She was not only pleased with the consequential cost-saving and convenience, but she also discovered that she preferred the economical Chrysler sedan over the fancier but unwieldy Lincoln.62 During 1933–34, she conscientiously attended courses on public speaking and creative writing, and they too improved her confidence. Even though Dolly was learning only rudimentary skills and hardly equipping herself for the intensely competitive labor market, her initiative functioned as a reckoning with her personal limitations and gained her new confidence. As she explained in defense of her course on public speaking, “The whole thing is merely an inferiority complex and fear I have discovered, and I am systemically running my fears into the ground. It has become a matter of survival.”63
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