Sharks were so plentiful and so large that Grey decided to concentrate on them. Long before his disappointment in the Galapagos Islands, he had harbored a visceral hatred of sharks, and his new experiences in Australia convinced him they were “engines of destruction.”108 Because many scientists still believed that sharks were not man-eaters, Grey was gathering information for a book to be entitled Tales of Man-Eating Sharks that would recount the many deaths and maimings caused by sharks and discredit this scientific misconception.109
Convinced that sharks were also his best prospect for a new world record, Grey relocated from Bermagui to Bateman Bay, just south of Sydney, because it was reputed to abound with them. There he briefly hooked a whaler shark estimated at 900 pounds and landed a great white shark that weighed 840 pounds.110 However, he did not land his biggest shark until he had returned to the Sydney area. Having learned about the enormous size achieved by tiger sharks, he enlisted the help of Charles Bullen, who had caught the largest tiger shark to date, and for three weeks they fished out of Watson’s Bay. One day as they were plying the waters between the Heads of Sydney, Grey finally hooked his quarry. As cruise ships passed and passengers waved, he battled and prevailed over a 1,036-pound tiger shark and bested Bullen’s record.111
Grey’s preoccupation with fishing left him little time for Sydney itself. Even though his reception there was more enthusiastic and more gratifying than that of his first visit to Auckland, he was more interested in Lola Gornall. He had been writing to her for more than three years, and both were looking forward to their first meeting with high expectations and more than a little anxiety. He had offended Brownie by leaving her back in the United States, partly to save money but also to be free for Lola.112 Although their meeting was the climax of hundreds of letters, it lasted only three days and did not go well. Lola parried Zane’s advances, and he stormed off in a huff. Shortly after he arrived at Hayman Island near the Great Barrier Reef to complete his film, both missed their correspondence and resumed their pen-pal relationship. Since the action footage had already been shot, this location was used for filming the movie’s story line. Although he did no fishing, Zane was intrigued with the myriad marine life of the reef and enjoyed his stay.
Back in the United States in August 1936, Grey wrote in his journal that the Australian trip was “a big success” and added, “I overcame many handicaps, my habit of keeping alone, of being unfriendly. I felt grateful to the thousands of my Australian readers.”113 But his content did not last. The rushes for White Death were disappointing; the film was released with little fanfare and quickly vanished. Grey blamed its poor showing on Bowen’s penurious financing and angrily demanded that he be fired. Trapped between the fragility of Zane’s health and her indebtedness to Bowen, Dolly campaigned for a compromise, but Zane’s intransigence forced her to award Bowen a generous settlement and say good-bye to the last of their long-term staff.114
As part of the financing for the trip, Grey agreed to write a Western about Australia, which he postponed until his return from a fall trip to Oregon. In December 1936, he initiated a log about this project with an assertion of renewed determination: “I want to write this big novel. I have a keen poignant desire to make it great. I shall love the job.” When he finished the novel in early March, he wrote, “I have just finished the largest, and perhaps the profoundest of all my novels.” Ten days later, he finished rereading the entire work and confessed, “At first I thought it wasn’t bad. But I think now it was.”115 The editorial staff at Harpers agreed and consigned the manuscript to its bulging collection of future possibilities. Wilderness Trek was not published until 1944, and the editors eliminated two-thirds of the original manuscript.
The same March that Grey completed his novel, Harpers published his An American Angler in Australia (1937). Grey’s fishing books had always been presented in a large format with much finer printing than his novels. They cost almost twice as much and were targeted at an upscale audience of well-to-do sportsmen who were willing to pay more. American Angler maintained the same format, but paled by comparison. The text was much shorter, only 115 pages that required large print to achieve this length. As usual, there were many photographs, but they were not incorporated into the text as before. Harpers used an economical bunching of the photographs at the end, and there were no ornamental drawings. Grey had hoped that this book would resuscitate his reputation, but the book itself made him look diminished, and Thomas Aitken was ready to say that he was. His review for the New York Herald interpreted the trip as “a personal war on the sharks of New South Wales” and dismissed Grey’s tiger shark as a “scavenger species” unworthy of any list of world records.116
On August 11, 1937, five months after completion of Wilderness Trek and the publication of An American Angler in Australia, Grey suffered a stroke. He had been fishing on the North Umpqua River, and when the temperature topped 100 degrees, he opted for a nap. When he awoke, he knew immediately that something was seriously wrong. Since he had fallen asleep in the sun, he thought he might have suffered sunstroke and retreated to his cabin. Overnight he was stricken with a second, more damaging stroke that left him conscious, but he was unable to speak or to move the right side of his body. The doctor at a nearby Civilian Conservation Camp diagnosed his stroke and recommended hospitalization, but Grey refused, and instead hurried back to Altadena on a train.117
Grey’s recovery was hard and prolonged. For months he could not walk or write. Determined to keep working, he resorted to dictation. During the fall of 1937, Brownie transcribed his autobiography and the first half of Western Union, and she wrote to Lola Gornall on his behalf to explain how his setback had caused the abrupt hiatus in his correspondence. Meanwhile, he practiced his signature in order to regain his ability to write, but his first efforts were a ragged, barely legible scrawl. By the time he returned to Australia for the first six months of 1939, he felt well enough to fish and hooked an 800-pound great white shark. Everyone aboard his boat urged that the sixty-seven-year-old fisherman abandon the fight and not risk his fragile health, but he refused, even though his victory drained him and left him incapacitated for weeks afterward. That summer, he recovered full use of his right arm and leg. This progress, together with final repayment of his debt to Harpers and its decision to publish his recently completed novel, made Grey more optimistic than he had been in years. He wrote in his journal: “In th[e]se two years, I have dictated two novels and a fishing story. And now, as is evident here, I can write fairly well again. And I write resurgent—I shall rise again!”118
Grey with books and fishing tackle, 1938. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
This was his last entry. On October 22, Grey celebrated the publication of Western Union with a book signing at Vroman’s Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. The day went smoothly, and he felt fine when he retired that evening with Dolly to their bed on a screen porch upstairs in their Altadena home. Early the next morning, he awoke gasping for air. When Dolly was unable to help, she contacted the family doctor and dispatched Loren to bring him to the house. Zane was dead of a massive heart attack by the time they returned.119 Later that day, as she was grieving, Dolly picked up the copy of Western Union that he had inscribed simply, “To Dolly from Zane.” With her pen she added, “Gone fishin’ on October 23, 1939.”120
Postscript
Zane Grey died during a resurgence of interest in the Western. Over the years of the Depression, the genre was kept alive by an outpouring of B-films for “double features” that the major studios offered, along with free china, to lure penny-pinching audiences to theaters. Nearly half of all the film adaptations of Grey novels were B-films from the decade of the Depression. These low-budget productions drastically reduced his revenues from film rights, but they, more than book sales, saved him from bankruptcy and inched him back to a modest income. By 1939, Westerns had regained enough popularity to become featured attractions, and moviemakers were again assigning them major directors, established stars, and
handsome budgets. Henry King’s Jesse James (1939), Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific (1939), and George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again (1939) were quickly followed by William Wyler’s The Westerner (1940), Fritz Lang’s The Return of Frank James (1940), Wesley Ruggles’s Arizona (1940), and Michael Curtiz’s Santa Fe Trail (1940). Collectively, these films affirmed that the box office appeal of Westerns was stronger than it had been since the 1920s. In 1940, the film version of Western Union, based on the Grey novel from the year before, was budgeted as a main feature and directed by Fritz Lang with Robert Young, Randolph Scott, and Dean Jagger in lead roles.
Still, the most important of these Westerns, the one most attuned to the future, was John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), which was filmed in Monument Valley and vindicated Grey’s long-standing belief in the valley’s cinematic potential. Back in 1923, Jesse Lasky had approved Grey’s request that the adaptation of his The Vanishing American be made there, giving this film the distinction of being the first Hollywood movie to be set in the valley. John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) employed Monument Valley even more effectively than the earlier Stagecoach, and, in conjunction with Red River (1948), reoriented audiences toward a new “adult Western” that quickly gained unprecedented popularity. By the late 1950s, the Western dominated the cultural landscape—in 1956, 83 of that year’s 272 features were Westerns and by 1961, eight of the top ten serials on television were Westerns, a popularity that is today hard to believe.1
Although the television serial “Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre” was a moderate success, Grey’s books were not featured in this resurgence of the Western in movies and on television. If the movie version of Western Union raised hopes for more and better adaptations of his novels, it contained a telltale clue that filmmakers were thinking otherwise. Twentieth-Century Fox did this film, not Paramount, which had loyally filmed Grey’s new novels for sixteen years. Paramount continued its B-productions, but its Knights of the Range (1940) and The Light of Western Stars (1940) were its last two Zane Grey films. When the major studios rushed into Westerns during the 1950s, they avoided Grey’s stories, and only fringe studios on the brink of collapse, like Republic and RKO, pursued them, and then only because the rights were so steeply discounted.
Meanwhile, sales of Grey’s novels soared, and in a few cases surpassed the returns of the original publication. Although this popularity was aided by the resurgence of Westerns in movies and television, its driving force came from the proliferation of paperbacks. Until 1939, none of Grey’s novels had ever appeared in paperback. During the war, the Armed Forces Editions issued nine titles with paper covers in editions that ranged from 125,000 to 155,000 copies.2 This modest but significant beginning gained more momentum when Bantam included Nevada in its first twenty paperbacks that were released in January 1946.3 Although this Western had sold poorly when it was first published in 1928, it was the hit of Bantam’s slate, and soon became Grey’s top-selling novel.4 Harpers persuaded Dolly to slow the release of Grey paperbacks until it had drawn down the unpublished novels in its backlog. Shortly after Dolly’s death in 1957, Pocket Books convinced Romer and the other members of the Grey family to allow its Cardinal series to carry most of his Westerns.5 By the 1960s, the shelves of paperback galleries bulged with Zane Grey Westerns.
Since its first one in 1924, Field and Stream had periodically published a list of world records, and the 1938 list credited Grey with four.6 But in his 1935 article for Outdoor Life, “Swordfish … King of the Sea,” Thomas Aitken initiated his own list of world records that openly disagreed with the Field and Stream lists. In 1936, he authored an article entitled “Let’s Get Together on Records,” and during 1938 and 1939, he published his own lists in hopes of provoking debate about standards and spurring the creation of a more reliable list of records.7 Michael Lerner, the heir to the Lerner chain of department stores and a well-known figure in the new generation of big-game fishermen, agreed with Aitken. After financing expeditions to Cape Breton and Bimini for the Museum of Natural History, he encouraged and underwrote a major renovation of the two galleries of Grey’s fish at the museum. The 1938 exhibition of “Giants of the Mackerel Family” featured an innovative display of the broadbill’s skeletal structure and a record marlin caught by Lerner. It replaced the exhibit of Grey’s fish and reduced his presence to a single photograph of him alongside his 758-pound tuna. During a trip to Australia and New Zealand a year later, Lerner and Dr. William Gregory met with officers from the major fishing clubs there, and discussed the establishment of a new international organization. On June 7, 1939, four months before Grey’s death, Lerner, Gregory, Heilner, and Francesca La Monte, in association with a group of distinguished anglers that included Ernest Hemingway, founded the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) and based it out of the museum.8 They immediately solicited input from fishing clubs around the world and formulated a new set of standards for world records.
In 1943, the IGFA issued its first list of world records, and Grey was credited with a single catch. Two of his records on the Field and Stream list for 1938 had been bettered. Meanwhile, ichthyologists determined that striped marlin did not grow to 1,000 pounds, which disqualified Grey’s 1,040-pound catches as a misclassification. The IGFA accepted his 618-pound silver marlin until 1954, when it was superseded by one weighing 755 pounds, but ten years later, the IGFA ruled that “silver marlin” was not a legitimate classification and abolished this category.9 For years, both the IGFA and the Tuna Club distanced themselves from Zane Grey and ignored his achievements. But in 1999, when the IGFA relocated to a handsome new building that institutionalized its authority on all matters relating to recreational fishing, it created a hall of fame that included Zane Grey in its first group of inductees. Two years later, it sponsored a special exhibit of his fishing.
At the time of his death, Grey believed that far away, in the waters north of Australia and west toward the Indian Ocean, virgin seas still existed, and he bitterly regretted that he never fished there. Although he had complained for years about the drop in fish populations around Catalina, most of the remote areas of the world that he had fished still held as many big fish as they had for centuries. But in 2003, the front page of the New York Times carried news of a comprehensive study revealing that 90 percent of the big fish have disappeared from the oceans of the world.10 The plunge in stocks of these magnificent fish over the past sixty-five years is deeply troubling, and unless something is done soon to protect them, they, and the sport in which Grey was a true pioneer, will soon disappear forever.
When Grey left for the West in search of new direction for his writing career, the Grand Canyon was not a national park, Arizona was not yet a state, and the Western was not a recognized genre. Although he was born too late to be among the original explorers of the unknown, uncharted regions of the world, he was at the forefront of a new wave of recreational adventurers. Today, readers of Outside and Adventure Travel—backpackers and white-water rafters, along with their guides and outfitters—attest to the widespread popularity of experiences first championed by Grey almost a hundred years ago. The Haas family, the manufacturers of Levi-Straus jeans, purchased Grey’s retreat at the Winkle Bar in Oregon, and Malcolm Forbes acquired Flower Point in Tahiti. Although these properties have been improved in ways that would probably have offended Grey, they are still revered for the beauty and remoteness that first attracted him, and serve as apt memorials to his venturesome spirit.
Although it was perhaps the most successful and most durable form of entertainment during the twentieth century, the Western today has truly become a product of the past. But Grey’s vision of the West still endures. Although he was convinced that his beloved West had disappeared by 1929, his writings have nurtured and still sustain a belief, one impervious to modern development, that life in the West is somehow different and better, that it offers open spaces, breathtaking vistas, and untapped possibilities, and that the last best place still exists so
mewhere out there.
Appendix:
Grey’s World Records
Because there is so much inaccuracy and misunderstanding about Grey’s world records, I am providing a list of them. Since the International Game Fish Association (IGFA), the overseer of world records today, was not established until 1939, the year of Grey’s death, there was no official list or rigorous verification over the years that he fished. However, Grey’s records were not merely self-proclaimed, as some have charged. In 1924, the year of Grey’s first world record, John Treadwell Nichols and Van Campen Heilner, a friend of Grey’s, initiated a list of world records that gained immediate credibility from their affiliation with the American Museum of Natural History. This list was maintained and updated at the museum by Francesca La Monte in a loose-leaf notebook. Unfortunately, the replaced pages of information were not saved. However, their updated list was published intermittently in the influential journal Field and Stream. The entries below note the F & S lists that recognized Grey’s records as well as his books in which they are mentioned. Since a new list sometimes took four years to appear, records, like Grey’s 582-pound broadbill, two sailfish and his first silver marlin, were set and eclipsed between appearances of the lists. Grey’s records were also influenced by evolution of the list itself. Early lists had only one category for tuna and did not distinguish the bluefin from the yellowfin. Consequently neither Heilner nor Grey considered his 316-pound yellowfin, from Cabo San Lucas in 1926, a world record, which it probably was. Conversely, Grey lobbied Heilner to add classifications for “silver marlin” and “tiger shark” in order to be credited with more records.
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