This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In his novel The Vanishing American, Zane Grey wrote of one character's disgust for the social atmosphere of the 1920s: She "hated the drinking and smoking of women, the unrestrained dances, the lack of courtesy, the undeniable let-down of morals."
With such sentiments scattered in many of his novels, it comes as a surprise that Grey kept secret diaries with intimate details of his sexual liaisons with numerous women not his wife and that a cache of photographs exists of these women in the nude, some with Grey in the saddle.
Grey, it turns out, was somewhat of a pornographer, even as he railed against what he viewed as the loosening morals of the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
That's the titillating revelation in a new biography of the man some have credited with virtually inventing the modern Western, a staple of U.S. popular culture through the middle decades of the 20th century.
Thomas H. Pauly's pop culture than any other.
Unfortunately, Pauly doesn't make as much of the new material as he could. While the author wasn't allowed to take notes of Grey's secret diaries or make copies of the nude photos from a collection owned by a man identified only as X, he could have written more than a paragraph about them in the introduction and a long footnote.
Surely their very existence says something about the author and his work; his blatant hypocrisy was worth more exploration. If Grey was a pornographer of sorts with his women, could we say the same of his portrayal of the West?
Pearl Zane Gray (spelled with an "a") was born Jan. 31, 1872, and grew up in Zanesville, Ohio. His father, Lewis Gray, was a dentist and strict parent and young Zane grew up despising him. Zane valued time spent away from home fishing, which would become a lifelong obsession. His other obsession, girls, began during this period, too, with teenage crushes and angst. It seems normal adolscent behavior except, perhaps, for his arrest at age 16 in a brothel.
After his father somehow lost a great deal of money, the family moved to Columbus, Ohio, where the spelling of the name changed to Grey.
Zane Grey practiced dentistry for a while alongside his father, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he played baseball and studied dentistry. After graduating, he moved to New York and opened a practice, but he really wanted to be a writer and to be free to hunt and fish.
Grey eventually returned to Pennsylvania but did poorly trying to start his writing career until he went West with a character named Buffalo Jones. Based on his experiences with Jones in the Utah-Arizona border country north of Grand Canyon, Grey wrote Heritage of the Desert, the book that launched his writing career.
In 1905, Grey married Lina Elise Roth. But in announcing his readiness to wed, he wrote her, "I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women." And he never did. The attraction to women evolved into a string of affairs over the years - particularly after he became famous and rich as the leading author of Westerns - until his death in 1939.
Grey became as obsessive about travel (perhaps in part to relieve his frequent depressions) as he was about women and fishing, and he was often gone for much of the year, taking along his girlfriends but seldom his wife.
Dolly, as his wife was known, railed at Grey through their letters but eventually acted as a sort of love adviser to him when he wrote her detailing his problems with other women.
Toward the end, as Pauly details yet another dalliance and trip, the book does not provide enough analysis of what it all might mean. Some of Grey's fans will agree with Pauly that, despite his numerous critics, Grey was a fine writer. Others will still disagree.
Pauly has plowed ground that others can sow for a richer portrait of the man and his works and the West than he produced.