The Water Hole

THE
WATER
HOLE
A Western Story

by Zane Grey

Copyright © 2014 by Zane Grey, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved.

Published by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency
October 2014

Second Edition
First Ebook Edition

Trade: 978-1-4815-2849-8
Library: 978-1-4815-2848-1

Foreword
by Jon Tuska

Zane Grey’s public image was that of a family man. He fathered three children with his wife, Lina Elise, known familiarly as Dolly. First born was his son Romer, followed by his daughter Betty, and finally by a second son Loren. Loren would pursue a career in psychology, earning a doctorate, teaching and writing on the subject. It was Loren Grey who pointed out to me that his father’s fascination with polygamy had its origin in his own personality. Zane Grey was highly critical of Mormonism in 1912 in Riders of the Purple Sage: The Restored Edition (Five Star, 2005) in which all three of the principal female characters, although they don’t know it, are actually half-sisters and daughters of the same Mormon patriarch. By 1915 when Grey wrote The Desert Crucible (Five Star, 2003), the sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage, his attitude toward Mormon polygamy had somewhat softened. He observed in this novel: “One wife for one man—that was the law. Mormons broke it openly. Gentiles broke it secretly…Unquestionably the Mormons were wrong, but were not the Gentiles still more wrong?”

Grey’s lifestyle changed with increasing affluence and popularity. Two of his girlfriends went along in the Grey party when he visited Nonnezoshe, the great Rainbow Bridge of the Navajos, for the first time. Afterward girlfriends almost invariably accompanied him in his travels, a situation that deeply wounded Dolly. Yet his numerous affairs with women seemed to inspire him in his Western romances as much as his discoveries of magical places in the wilderness. Mildred Smith, called familiarly Millicent by Grey, became his personal secretary. She was often attired as actress Lois Wilson would be when she brought Grey’s heroines to the screen in Paramount films of the 1920s, and at times Smith went without Zane Grey on location with the film crews in Arizona. It is known that Smith began editing and contributing plot ingredients and ideas for how characters behaved in Grey’s fiction as early as 1918 in War Comes tto the Big Bend (Five Star, 2012). Dolly in her correspondence with Grey often warned him against permitting Mildred to influence his writing. Grey tended to declare her contributions minimal and on one occasion confessed to Dolly: “I did take M’s advice about a little of the rewriting. To be honest it helped me to get her point of view.”

There was a degree of secrecy in Grey’s dealings with women. He was attracted primarily by their beauty. They would communicate by letters with him that were written in code. Grey also used code to record diary entries about what he once described to Dolly as his “inamorata”. His daughter Betty recalled to me an incident in which her father remarked to her mother within Betty’s hearing that it was Mildred’s express desire that he should divorce Dolly and marry her. Indeed, it was this statement that prompted Dolly to move into her own bedroom and not, as Frank Gruber wrote in Zane Grey: A Biography (World, 1970), because Grey “worked late at his writing and did not want to awaken Dolly upon retiring.” Dolly’s defense was to make a life for herself, but she organized Zane Grey, Inc., and acted as conservator for the money Grey’s work earned even after Grey’s death.

Initially Mildred lived in Grey’s home on Catalina Island, before moving into the smaller replica of that home Grey had designed for her on the mainland. If Fay Larkin was a sealed wife of a Mormon kept hidden in seclusion in The Desert Crucible, Mildred Smith was no less so in this home Grey gave her. Through the many years of typing and editing Grey’s manuscripts, Smith discovered she had literary ambitions of her own. In the early 1920s she collaborated with Grey on four stage plays. With the exception of the first of these, the plays all had contemporary settings, and traces of Mildred’s work can certainly be detected in all of the contemporary stories that Grey wrote during the fifteen years Mildred was with him. The first of these collaborative stage plays was Amber’s Mirage.