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November-December 2006
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Vita: Zane Grey
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| Grey relished photographic records of his exploits and travels: at center, on the Rogue River, Oregon, in 1925, and, counterclockwise, in his University of Pennsylvania baseball uniform around 1895; in Monument Valley, Utah, around 1920; and in Nova Scotia in 1924 with his 758-pound tuna, his first world record. |
| Photomontage by Naomi Shea. Zane Grey on horseback courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society. All other photographs of Grey courtesy of his son, Loren Grey. |
During a summer escape in 1900 to bucolic Lackawaxen on the upper Delaware River, he met Lina “Dolly” Roth, 11 years younger, a New York doctor’s daughter who enthusiastically supported his yearning to become a writer. After their marriage in 1905, her substantial inheritance enabled him to quit dentistry and write full time. Their cross-country honeymoon trip carried them to the Grand Canyon at the dawn of its tourist appeal. Grey was captivated by the canyon’s natural splendor. He would return there twice more for mountain-lion hunts with rugged outdoorsmen who reminded him of Ebenezer and inspired Heritage of the Desert, his first western, published in 1910 when he was 38. For the next 15 years, he returned annually to the Southwest to find new material for more books.
During the honeymoon, Grey also visited California’s Catalina Island, the recognized birthplace of saltwater angling with rod and reel. Although his first saltwater attempts there did not go well, they inspired new trips to Mexico and the Florida Keys. Eventually he returned to the intensely competitive scene in Catalina, besting and offending most members of its elite Tuna Club. In 1924, he struck out for Nova Scotia, where he landed a 758-pound tuna, his first world record, and developed an insatiable thirst for “virgin seas” and big fish. Purchasing a three-masted schooner, he sailed several months later for the Galápagos Islands. On later voyages to New Zealand, Tahiti, and Australia, some lasting nine months, he increased his list of records to a dozen. By 1936, he was endorsing a broad range of tackle and was widely regarded as the world’s best angler. When slugger Ted Williams, another avid fisherman, was once asked who else he would like to be, he replied, “Zane Grey.”
A hitherto unknown aspect of these myriad excursions, whether in the Southwest or on the seven seas, is the young, beautiful, and venturesome women who accompanied Grey and, as he believed, furnished valuable inspiration. “By women men live. A man is drawn unto a woman…at the bottom of all the great stories lies the power of a woman,” he wrote in an early journal. On his memorable first trip to Utah’s Rainbow Bridge in 1913, he traveled with two of Dolly’s cousins, and his entourage soon expanded to four girlfriends. These relationships were seldom brief encounters or casual flings; three of the women remained with him for more than 10 years. Dolly knew about his companions and discussed them with her husband in their many letters. Despite anguish and sharp-tongued complaints, she accepted the situation because she was convinced that he was an artist and genius and she correctly understood that he probably would have been overwhelmed by his many depressions without her loyal support. (Some of the “other women” became her close friends and remained so long after Grey’s death.) Ironically, Grey made Mormon polygamists the villains of his early novels, but his letters, diaries, and personal conduct reveal that his true feelings were far more complex.
“I want fame,” Grey boldly asserted at a low point in his early career when his submissions were routinely rejected. He then added, “I want to be free.” Although both his aspirations were realized beyond his wildest dreams, his driven need for bigger, better, and more gained him precious little contentment.
Thomas H. Pauly ’62, professor of English at the University of Delaware, is the author of Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women (Illinois).
