Zane Grey

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by Thomas H. Pauly


  These accomplishments equipped Dolly to manage Zane Grey, Inc., and this position, much more than her bank presidency, transformed her into a resourceful, determined, and successful businesswoman. She converted Zane’s former study into her office and spent many hours each day coping with bills and clients. Up to 1930, her negotiations with editors had been polite and easy. When they complained about Grey’s work or did not offer enough money, she proposed a reasonable compromise and the matter was settled. She seldom had to go elsewhere. However, the rejections and financial pressures of the Depression produced a momentous change in the devoted wife who had patiently reviewed her husband’s work and hesitantly suggested changes. The woman who could not bring herself to modify the masquerading woman in West of Pecos in 1930 was by 1933 ready to do anything to sell a manuscript. When she judged “Horse Heaven Hill” to be a weak effort, she reworked it before submitting it to a magazine (but was still unable to get it accepted).64 She also counseled her husband on the current preferences of editors and readers. She urged that “Twin Sombreros” not be a sequel to West of the Pecos but the start of a new series instead. She instructed that future submissions to the Country Gentleman should be limited to 40,000 words and structured as three installments.65 Cuing these suggestions to her own program of self-improvement, she urged Zane to “readapt yourself to present conditions.” Boldly declaring that he had “fallen into ways of self-indulgence, into vanities of position,” she advised, “Believe me, no one is too proud to retrench these days. It is those who do not when they ought to who are looked down upon.”66

  By January of 1933, Grey’s income had deteriorated to the point that he was receiving only $200–300 a month from Harpers and quarterly installments of merely $2,500 from Paramount. During that month, RKO lapsed into receivership, and Dolly feared that Paramount would default on its upcoming installment.67 The payment did arrive, several weeks late, but Paramount-Publix, its theater chain, lapsed into receivership two months later, forcing out Lasky and jeopardizing both the studio and its contractual agreements. Dolly restricted herself and Loren to a budget of $50 a month.68 By April, the total funds available in the checking accounts she and Zane held were only $1,393.01, and Zane’s personal savings account had sunk to $1,250.69 In May, Dolly wrote, “The last month has been the worst, financially, in our existence.” Miraculously, Paramount sent its payment, and she was able to add $500 to Zane’s savings account; but she dismissed his hope for $1,000 as the equivalent of $1,000,000 under current conditions.70 By mid-1934, Grey estimated his debt to exceed $160,000.71 That year, in its May issue, Country Gentleman published “Outlaws of the Palouse” (later renamed “The Horse Thief”), the last of his stories to be accepted and published by the slick magazines that once clamored for his work.

  Dire straits necessitated radical action, and Dolly persuaded the makers of Camel to pay Zane $1,000 to endorse its cigarettes as “an ideal smoke for fishermen.” This promotion of a long-standing aversion prompted Zane to remark, “I am ashamed to admit what I would allow for $1,000.”72 Bowen arranged for agent Tess Slessinger to represent Grey, and Slessinger secured him a contract for a comic strip about King of the Royal Mounted with the King Features Syndicate.73 Embarrassed over this further tarnishing of his name for money, Zane delegated the assignment to Romer.

  In 1932, several years after Zane had taken Lady John Cecil (Cornelia Van-derbilt) fishing in New Zealand, a young member of the Vanderbilt family asked to be included in one of his fishing trips, raising fresh hopes for funding for the world voyage, but the rich heir later backed out.74 As an alternative, Zane wrote Ernest Hemingway and unsuccessfully proposed that they team up for a “giant world fishing trip to make a picture.”75 Sensing his fragility as these pipe dreams evaporated, Dolly scrimped so that he could return to the South Seas with Wanda for the first six months of 1933, but under severely restricted terms. Grey’s boats, which were costly to maintain and impossible to sell, sorely strained his depleted resources. During an especially bleak assessment of the Fisherman II, Dolly informed Zane about a former millionaire who sank his palatial yacht because he could neither sell it nor pay its mooring fees and taxes.76 Grey’s interest in Tahiti and Flower Point waned now that he did not have a boat there and could not afford to have one built, as he had done so often in the past. Ironically, other problems solved this particular one. In New Zealand, the Frangipani was threatened with seizure for back taxes and bills. The arrival of the Depression there had inflamed such fierce anti-Americanism by his 1933 visit that Grey resolved never to return.77 Unable to pay the cost of shipping as he did in 1928, he got Peter Williams to run the Frangipani to Tahiti.78 This necessitated a daring crossing of 2,500 miles of open sea and a risky evasion of New Zealand authorities, but it got Grey’s favorite fishing boat to Tahiti for the price of gas.

  This venture was the trip’s only success. “Again I was forced to come back from Tahiti because of lack of funds,” Grey wrote in his journal back in Al-tadena. “I am not quite ruined financially, but I cannot see any hope of future trips, especially the big one. … If I quit now, writing, going, fishing, loving, romancing, I am through.”79 Unfortunately, his 1933 trip to the South Seas ended his relationship with Wanda. The heat and financial strains made this seven-month excursion as much of an ordeal for her as the two earlier trips to Tahiti had been for Berenice. Her seasickness was so violent and prolonged that Dolly openly questioned the power of her Christian Science.80 However, it was Zane’s waffling, more than her sickness, that provoked Wanda to decamp. As he explained in an October entry in his journal: “W’s defection is the climax of terrible blows that have ruined me, almost broken my heart. To be sure she loves me. But I will have to marry her to hold her. That is impossible. I cannot alienate my children and crush my wife just because I have been madly in love with a younger woman.”81

  Zane’s distress over the loss of Wanda was part of a much larger fear that his whole life was falling apart. His entry about Wanda began with speculation that he might never again write in his journal. He had always maintained his journals as testimonials to his much-tested-but-never-defeated faith in himself and his work, but here he dejectedly concedes that he has lost confidence and turned into a “madman.” His catalogue of his reversals ends with the bleak, unprecedented admission, “At this writing I am sick and tired of life. I do not care to live any longer without the thrill, the adventure, the love, the passion, the achievement that I’ve had for twenty-one years.”82

  At this time, Grey compensated for the loss of Wanda with a flood of letters to Lola Gornall, a poet living in Australia. She sent him a first letter expressing her admiration for his books in April 1933 while he was in New Zealand. He responded to her from Tahiti and explained how the intense anti-Americanism had spurred him to leave New Zealand sooner than he planned.83 By August, he felt that he knew her well enough to admit that his “wife and three children did not keep me from several terrible love affairs.”84 By the end of 1933, when Grey was back in Altadena with Dolly and therefore was not writing to her, this sporadic correspondence quickened to several letters a week, and their relationship evolved into a torrid literary affair; Grey taught Lola his secret code, and both used it to achieve greater intimacy. Between 1934 and 1938, he would send over 500 letters that included numerous newspaper clippings, cartoons, and tokens of affection.

  In November of 1933, Grey attended a social event at the University of Southern California with a new acquaintance whom he described as “sophisticated, daring, a flirt, and pagan and intellectual.”85 He was referring to Brownella (“Brownie”) Baker, who became his next and last secretary. She had been a sorority sister of Marge Bowen, Ed Bowen’s wife, while they were attending USC, and Marge introduced her to Zane. Brownella reciprocated Zane’s show of interest, and in May 1934 he wrote in his journal, “Romance and love not only abide as always but seem more poignant and beautiful and vivid and sweet. Eternal gratitude to B. B.!”86

  Brownie was another burs
t of sunshine upon Zane’s gloom, but she, Lola, and a modest improvement in his financial situation were not able to mend his broken spirit. During 1935, as the movie industry emerged from the shadow of bankruptcy, Paramount resumed its quarterly payments for movie rights, even though they were down sharply from 1929. That year, Grey kept brief, daily entries in a calendar book left over from the year before. He apparently started this alternative journal on an impulse but then maintained it as a record of his moods and experiences. However, the book contains only entries from the first two months of the year because someone, probably Dolly, ripped out the pages for the rest of the year. Every three or four days in the pages that survive, Zane has drawn a heart alongside a date, presumably to record one of his assignations with Brownie, but even more revealing are his equally frequent notations of sickness and depression.87 “I doubt that I ever will get back to the big magazines,” he wrote to Alvah James during the same January of 1935. “They never forgave us because they once had to buy my novels, and I had the nerve and the poor judgment to allow my novels to appear in Colliers, McCall’s, the American, and Country Gentleman at the same time.”88 The following July he confessed to Dolly, “I have not yet gotten hold of myself to work, or write, or fish.”89 Two weeks later, he added, “I am not keen about Australia or Tahiti or any place. This is serious.”90 The previous fall, on November 8, R. C. died suddenly, and the loss of his brother annihilated Zane. Having regarded R. C. as his closest friend since their childhood together, he was devastated by his belated realization that his compulsive traveling had sundered their relationship, grieving that they had spent little time together over the previous three years. He continued to mourn R. C.’s death through 1935, and two years afterward he wrote that his brother’s death had been “on my mind ever since, in lonely hours, on the sea, in the forest, in the dead of night.”91

  Dolly believed that Zane’s persistent depression, his lack of vitality, and his diminished interest in fishing were indeed “serious.” She could see that the demise of his grand voyage impaired his responsiveness to alternatives; her sixty-two-year-old husband was, for the first time in his life, looking his age. In the past, trips, even the planning of them, had always lifted his spirits, but ever since the ill-fated voyage of Fisherman II, his trips to Oregon and Tahiti had failed to do so. She could see that it would take years for the sputtering improvement in their finances to realize the trip of his dreams, but she was determined to send him to Australia. Officials in the government there had extended several invitations like the one from New Zealand, which greatly reduced the prospective costs and offered him access to one of few areas of untapped promise he had yet to fish.

  Zane’s despondent admission to Dolly that he was “not keen” about even this prospect was aggravated by a festering realization that his stature as a fisherman, like everything else in his life, was declining. The 1928 exhibition at the Museum of Natural History was probably the apex of his reputation and his 1,040-pound marlin from 1930 had burnished it. But there had been no triumphs since. During his previous three visits to the South Seas, his only big fish was a 170-pound sailfish, which brought him another world record, but his experiences were either too uninteresting or too traumatic for him to complete his projected Tales of Coral Seas. The major magazines on sport no longer wanted his articles and he had to place them in relatively obscure journals like Motor Boating.92

  Without new records and major publications, Zane had to rely on endorsements to sustain his preeminence. Since the mid-1920s, he had allowed the Ashaway Company to associate his name with its Swastika fishing lines. Though Ashaway gave him only free line in exchange for his endorsement, the company’s promotion treated him like the world’s greatest angler. In 1927, it distributed a slick booklet with a cover photograph of men unloading his world record tuna. A page inside contained a cluster of photographs of anglers who had previously held the world record for broadbill, while a picture of Grey with his current world record broadbill took up the entire page that followed. By 1932, the South Bend Tackle Company was offering a full line of Zane Grey lures. That same year, Arthur Kovalovsky asked Grey to try his state-of-the-art reel. He wrote Kovalovsky a letter proclaiming his enthusiasm for the reel and allowed it to be used for promotion.93 Grey’s most influential endorsement was for Hardy Brothers, England’s premier maker of fishing tackle since 1873. Alma Baker spearheaded the firm’s introduction of saltwater equipment and paved the way for Hardy’s introduction of a Zane Grey reel in 1929.94 Unlike endorsements today, Hardy’s boost to Grey’s reputation did little for his ailing bank account. Although the company sent him products to test and granted him a discount on purchases, it gave him only two free reels and insisted that he pay for his orders. Grey nearly withdrew his endorsement in 1933 when Hardy sent him a letter referencing his delinquent account and threatening legal action if he did not settle it soon.95

  Hardy’s promotion of its Zane Grey reel gained Grey’s international recognition but also embroiled him in ruinous rivalry. By the late 1920s, the small but influential British Sea Anglers’ Society had grown very optimistic that a world-class tuna would be caught off the northwest coast of England in the area near Scarborough. In 1930, one of its members landed one weighing 735 pounds.96 In 1932, Col. E. T. Peel, another member, caught a 798-pound tuna that bested Grey’s oldest record and brought England its first world record. Hardy took out full-page ads in the Society’s Quarterly stating how both anglers had used Zane Grey reels.97 On September 11, 1933, L. Mitchell-Henry surpassed Peel with a 851-pound tuna, and he emphatically did not use a Zane Grey reel.

  Mitchell-Henry represented an expanding field of competitors who were replacing Grey on the current lists of world records and making him defensive and acerbic. Worry over his slipping authority had already tainted his articles about fishing, and in one, he had injudiciously attacked Mitchell-Henry for refusing to fish from a power launch and for employing a 72-thread line, forcing the fish to tow his dory until it died.98 In a follow-up entitled “Some Arresting Facts about Modern Sea Angling,” he invoked the current rules of the Tuna Club as a basis for more criticism of Mitchell-Henry.99 Offended by these public denunciations, Mitchell-Henry struck back with an article in the April 18, 1931, issue of The Fishing Gazette that reviewed Grey’s own account of his 1,040-pound black marlin according to the rules he had enumerated in “Some Arresting Facts about Modern Sea Angling” and found him guilty of four major infractions. The Fishing Gazette was an obscure English journal, but Mitchell-Henry reached serious fishermen with his book Tunny Fishing (1934) that discussed his world record tuna and included his article attacking Grey.100

  Had Mitchell-Henry been a lone voice of opposition, Grey could have dismissed this catfight as a careless run-in with another fisherman who was as ambitious and opinionated as himself.101 However, Thomas Aitken, the current editor of deep-sea fishing for Outdoor Life, upset Grey even more than this Englishman by ignoring him. Aitken, like Mitchell-Henry, believed that Grey’s reputation as a fisherman was overblown and suspect. In “Swordfish … King of the Sea,” written for the magazine’s July 1935 issue, he discussed the catches of Boschen and Mrs. Keith Spalding, but did not mention a single one of Grey’s. Even worse, in a large box in the center of his article, he offered a list of “World’s Record Catches” that mentioned only Grey’s 111-pound yellowtail from 1926. Blatantly dismissing Grey’s three records on Heilner’s most recent list, he accompanied his list with the statement: “confusion of species and failure to file complete data leaves records open.”102 The month following this article, Grey complained in his personal journal about the “discrediting of my fishing records by envious, jealous, and little men.”103

  Despite Zane’s claims of indifference to Australia, Dolly pushed ahead and did all she could to make the trip possible. After persuading the Australian government to help with expenses, enlisting Cook and Manor to handle the bookings, and arranging for Peter Williams to come from New Zealand to be his boatman, sh
e approved a plan for the fishing to be converted into a feature film and for Emil Morhardt and Gus Bagnard to do the camera work. She also sent Ed Bowen along to monitor finances. On the eve of his departure in late December 1935, Dolly handed Zane a letter to be read after he was under way in which she wrote, “There is no question that mentally and physically you have gone forward a great deal in the last year, that your fund of understanding of humanity has increased; and that this will manifest itself in increased richness and depth in your work. … I have never lost my faith in you and in your work; but I knew that adjustment might be a long and painful process. Now I am sure that you are ready to gird on your armor again and leap into the battle. My love and hope and faith go with you, and in this spirit.”104

  Grey arrived in Sydney in time to celebrate the New Year and left soon afterward for Bermagui, an enclave 275 miles south, already known for big fish although it had been fished for only three years.105 He set up camp on a bluff overlooking the ocean in a grove of eucalyptus with plenty of open space. On January 11, his first day of fishing, he rolled two big marlin, drew a strike from another, and landed one weighing 300 pounds.106 Although he had been advised that the fishing would not be good until February, this was an auspicious start, and his good fortune continued. Over the seven-week stay, Zane landed five more marlin between 250 and 300 pounds and a 480-pound black marlin that attracted a large crowd to see the biggest swordfish caught there so far.107

 

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