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Zane Grey

Today is the birthday of Pearl Zane Grey (Zanesville, Ohio, January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939 Altadena, California); author and dentist perhaps best known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature.  He idealized the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book. In addition to the commercial success of his printed works, they had second lives and continuing influence when adapted as films and television productions.

During his courtship of Dolly, Grey still saw previous girlfriends and warned her frankly,

But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that…. But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good… I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women.

After they married in 1905, Dolly gave up her teaching career. They moved to a farmhouse at the confluence of the Lackawaxen and Delaware rivers, in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where Grey’s mother and sister joined them. (This house, now preserved and operated as the Zane Grey Museum, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) Grey finally ceased his dental practice to devote full-time to his nascent literary pursuits. Dolly’s inheritance provided an initial financial cushion.

While Dolly managed Grey’s career and raised their three children over the next two decades Grey often spent months away from the family. He fished, wrote, and spent time with his many mistresses. While Dolly knew of his behavior, she seemed to view it as his handicap rather than a choice. Throughout their life together, he highly valued her management of his career and their family, and her solid emotional support. In addition to her considerable editorial skills, she had good business sense and handled all his contract negotiations with publishers, agents, and movie studios. Their considerable correspondence apparently shows evidence of his lasting love for her despite his infidelities and personal emotional turmoil.

The Greys moved to California in 1918. In 1920 they settled in Altadena, California, where Grey bought a prominent Mediterranean-style mansion on East Mariposa Street, known locally as “Millionaire’s Row”. Grey summed up his feelings for the city: “In Altadena, I have found those qualities that make life worth living.”

In Altadena Grey also spent time with his mistress Brenda Montenegro. The two met while hiking Eaton Canyon. Of her he wrote,

I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the Navajo, and the olive of the Spaniards, but her…her skin looked as if her Creator had in that instant molded her just for me. I thought it was an apparition. She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild.

Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23, 1939, at his home in Altadena, California. He was interred at the Lackawaxen and Union Cemetery, Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania.

Quotes

Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is.

Surely, of all the gifts that have come to me from contact with the West, this one of sheer love of wildness, beauty, color, grandeur, has been the greatest, the most significant for my work.

I don’t know which way to turn. I cannot decide what to write next. That which I desire to write does not seem to be what the editors want… I am full of stories and zeal and fire… yet I am inhibited by doubt, by fear that my feeling for life is false.

The sea, from which all life springs, has been equally with the desert my teacher and religion.

The lure of the sea is some strange magic that makes men love what they fear. The solitude of the desert is more intimate than that of the sea. Death on the shifting barren sands seems less insupportable to the imagination than death out on the boundless ocean, in the awful, windy emptiness. Man’s bones yearn for dust.

The so-called civilization of man and his works shall perish from the earth, while the shifting sands, the red looming walls, the purple sage, and the towering monuments, the vast brooding range show no perceptible change.

It was the elision of the weaker element — the survival of the fittest; and some, indeed very many, mothers must lose their sons that way.

• The Desert of Wheat (1919).

To bear up under loss — to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief — to be victor over anger — to smile when tears are close — to resist evil men and base instincts — to hate hate and to love love — to go on when it would seem good to die — to seek ever after the glory and the dream — to look up with unquenchable faith in something evermore about to be — that is what any man can do, and so be great.

Today is the birthday of Betty Parsons (born Betty Bierne Pierson, January 31, 1900 – July 23, 1982); artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism.  She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde.

Gallery

Sailboat, Rockport , 1943-1982, gouache and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Today is the birthday of Tallulah Bankhead (born Tallulah Brockman Bankhead, Huntsville, Alabama; January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968 ); actress of the stage and screen. Bankhead was known for her husky voice, outrageous personality, and devastating wit. Originating some of the 20th century theater’s preeminent roles in comedy and melodrama, she gained acclaim as an actress on both sides of the Atlantic. Bankhead became an icon of the tempestuous, flamboyant actress, and her unique voice and mannerisms are often subject to imitation and parody.

Tallulah was a member of the Brockman Bankhead family, a prominent Alabama political family; her grandfather and uncle were U.S. Senators and her father served as an 11-term member of Congress, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah’s support of liberal causes such as civil rights broke with the tendency of the Southern Democrats to support a more typically aligned agenda and she often opposed her own family publicly.

Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead did have one hit film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat,as well as a brief but successful career on radio. She later made appearances on television as well.

In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, and was infamous for her uninhibited sex life. Bankhead was capable of great kindness and generosity to those in need, supporting disadvantaged foster children and helping several families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

Bankhead’s first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and did not have the patience for it. She did not like Hollywood, either; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him, “How do you get laid in this dreadful place?” Thalberg retorted, “I’m sure you’ll have no problem. Ask anyone.” Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film’s leading men. She later said, “Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper!”

In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, “I’m fifty-four, and I wish always, always, for death. I’ve always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more.”

Bankhead was famous not only as an actress, but also for her many affairs, compelling personality, and witticisms such as, “There is less to this than meets the eye.” and “I’m as pure as the driven slush.” Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants. This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: “There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you’d better put Shakespeare first.”

Bankhead married actor John Emery, the son of stage actors Edward Emery (circa 1861–1962) and Isabel Waldron (1871–1950), on August 31, 1937, at her father’s home in Jasper, Alabama. Bankhead filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, in May 1941. It was finalized on June 13, 1941. The day her divorce became final, Bankhead told a reporter, “You can definitely quote me as saying there will be no plans for a remarriage.”

Bankhead had no children, and had four abortions before she was 30.

An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted wildly about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:

I’m serious about love. I’m damned serious about it now … I haven’t had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long … If there’s anything the matter with me now, it’s not Hollywood or Hollywood’s state of mind … The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! … Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!

Time ran a story about it, angering Bankhead’s family. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again. For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Committee’s “Doom Book”, a list of 150 actors and actresses considered “unsuitable for the public” which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: “Verbal Moral Turpitude”. She publicly called Hays “a little prick”.

Following the release of the Kinsey reports, she was once quoted as stating, “I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor’s clinical notes were old hat to me … I’ve had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself.”

In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to venereal disease. Only 70 lb (32 kg) when she left the hospital, she stoically said to her doctor, “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!”

Rumors about Bankhead’s sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday. Actress Patsy Kelly confirmed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant. Bankhead never publicly described herself as being bisexual. She did, however, describe herself as “ambisextrous”.

Quotes

• I don’t know what I want.
  Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long. I mean, you don’t want the same thing long enough for it to be What You Want From Life in capital letters.
  Well, maybe some people do. Maybe there’s a few simple folks — or maybe a few million, I don’t know — who fix their hearts, and their minds, and their everlasting souls on a thing, and keep on all their lives hoping for it. Living for it. Wanting It From Life.
  But these are the people who never get it.
  • “I want everything” in What I Want from Life (1934) edited by Edmund George Cousins, p. 108

• The cynic says “blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.” I say “blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he can’t always be disappointed.”
  • “I want everything” in What I Want from Life (1934) edited by Edmund George Cousins, p. 108

• Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don’t have the time.
  • As quoted in The Pleasures of Diaries: Four Centuries of Private Writing (1989) by Ronald Blythe, p. 3
  • Variant: Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don’t have time.
    • As quoted in Diaries of Ireland: An Anthology, 1590-1987 (1997) by Melosina Lenox-Conynghim, p. vii

• I was raped in a driveway when I was eleven. … It was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel.
  • As quoted in The Girls : Sappho Goes to Hollywood (2001) by Diana McLellan, p. 134
  • I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. … You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel.
    • As quoted in Somebody : The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando (2011), by Stefan Kanfer, p. 65

Tallulah: My Autobiography (1952)

Tallulah: My Autobiography. University Press of Mississippi; illustrated edition (July 7, 2004)

• I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water — I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.

• No man worth his salt, no man of spirit and spine, no man for whom I could have any respect, could rejoice in the identification of Tallulah’s husband. It’s tough enough to be bogged down in a legend. It would be even tougher to marry one.

• I’m as pure as the driven slush.

• It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work — the night watchman.

• The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.

• I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.

• Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

• Here’s a rule I recommend. Never practice two vices at once.
  • On drinking impacting her gambling abilities

• If you really want to help the American theater, don’t be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.

• Let’s not quibble! I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, “I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.”

• Cocaine isn’t habit forming. I should know — I’ve been using it for years.

• There’s less in this than meets the eye.

Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead (1980)

Brian, Denis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Macmillan Publishing (1980)

• Codeine…bourbon…
  • Tallulah Bankhead’s last coherent words, p. 1

• My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.
  • p. 2

• I’ve tried several varieties of sex, all of which I hate. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic; the others give me a stiff neck and/or lockjaw.

• I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock. If I’m late, start without me.