Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women by Thomas H. Pauly (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s Zane Qrey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women. By Thomas H. Pauly. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 385 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by David Fenimore University of Nevada, Reno Secret sex diaries? Outdoor orgies? Open marriage? Brokeback Mountain and now this? “The poor cowboy!” Zane Grey once exclaimed. “Who is there to save him from oblivion?” The bull is now officially out of the chute regarding the amorous exploits of Pearl Zane Grey, DDS, whose thoroughly modem sexual mores would shock the “good girls” and chivalric gunmen he replicated in a legion of popular Westerns. Not only is this biography of “Doc” Grey the most candid and comprehensive to date, but it does long-deferred justice to the person who can accurately be called Grey’s“better half.” For over three decades, while her hus­ band spent up to ten months a year on the trail, Lina “Dolly” Grey assiduously edited and sometimes partially rewrote his scrawled manuscripts, negotiated and signed publishing and movie deals, invested his earnings, encouraged him to undertake new writing projects, fought his legal battles, and, not inciden­ tally, raised their children, managed the sprawling Los Angeles household, and found time to take creative writing courses and serve as one of the first female presidents of an American bank. Furthermore, over the last few decades rumor has solidified into the fact that Dolly tolerated, sometimes at great emotional cost, her husband’smultiple and often simultaneous adulteries. On occasion she even advised him on these relationships with a traveling seraglio of much younger “nieces,” “secretaries,” “literary assistants”— all euphemisms for what both Doc and Dolly called his “girls.” Based on their prolific correspondence, private diaries, and much addi­ tional research, Pauly tracks Dolly’s private and public lives alongside those of her husband. Only Stephen J. May’s chapter “My Dear Dolly” in his Maverick Heart: The Further Adventures of Zane Grey (2000) has done anywhere near as well at telling her story. Pauly provides excellently restored and never-before-published photo­ graphs to augment the familiar publicity shots of the intrepid outdoorsman as mounted caballero, the gear-crazy Grey fondling his fishing rod, the absentee patriarch posed on the lawn with his children, and so forth. We even gaze on the curiously contemporary faces of the principal Grey concubines. What Pauly does not show us— because he cannot, even had he wanted to— is Grey in flagrante delicto: the newly discovered “photographs taken by Grey of nude women and himself performing various sexual activities” and the contents of “ten small journals, written in Grey’ssecret code, that contain graphic descrip­ tions of his sexual adventures” (10). Like all previous scholars, Pauly needed to seek the cooperation of Grey’ssole surviving child, Loren, who retains control 8 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 7 over a large part of Grey’spapers. In the case of the aforementioned diaries and photographs, Pauly says he was allowed to inspect them and publish a general description but not to quote or otherwise reproduce them. Nevertheless, he excerpts plenty of passages from letters referring explicitly to Grey’s often contentious liaisons and the peculiar conjugality he and Dolly somehow sustained. In sorting out this scattered body of correspondence, Pauly acknowledges his debt to earlier editors and biographers such as Candace Kant, Joe Wheeler, and G. M. Farley, but he surpasses these worthy predeces­ sors in using this material to present an ambitiously detailed and carefully contextualized account. Furthermore, the novels themselves are not neglected. Following the lead of May and Jane Tompkins, he goes so far as to map Grey’s plots and characters against the author’speripatetic life, reading them as imagi­ native transformations of struggles with his active libido, his recurrent bouts of depression, and the various commercial, domestic, and sporting worlds through which he wandered. By showing a polite regard for Grey’s accomplishments but a healthy skep­ ticism of his character and talent, Pauly finally exorcises the sycophantic spirit of...