In the 1930s, Americans didn’t believe sharks ate people.
Hollywood celebrity novelist Zane Grey knew they did, and came to Australia to big game fish in 1935 and 1939. The great white shark rarely attacks humans, but it was Grey’s holy grail and he fished at Bermagui, Batemans Bay, Hayman Island, Lady Musgrave Island, Sydney Heads and Port Lincoln.
He also acted as himself in White Death (1936), a feature film about catching a great white off Hayman Island.
Zane Grey wrote over 100 novels and short stories. His literary output contributed to 112 films and 3 television series. Starting with the publication of his first book Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912, he became regarded as a major force in establishing the underlying mythologies of the Western genre.
Grey had a clause in his Hollywood contracts insisting the films he wrote should be shot on locations where his novels were set. This opened up the startling landscapes of America’s south-west (such as Monument Valley) to many Americans who were seeing them for the first time.
At his peak in the 1930s, Grey’s novels and his Hollywood assignments earned him $350,000 a year. In today’s terms, that’s millions a year.
Enough for him to arrive on our shores with a retinue of helpers, including a business manager, three cameramen, several boats, tents, copious fishing gear (valued today at $AU1,350,000) and 166 suitcases, requiring a two-ton truck. His elaborate camps were set up with kitchens, sleeping tents, temporary wooden floors and even offices where he could continue writing and managing his business.
His arrival in Australia was very big news. Some have even suggested the mass hysteria over Grey’s swashbuckling fishing expeditions in Australia are only matched in this country by the arrival of The Beatles.
Author of The Last Days of Zane Grey, Vicki Hastrich writes: “We just went crazy for him. As far as I can tell there were something like nine of Grey’s films in circulation when he arrived in Australia in 1935.”
The media fiercely chased him for fishing tales, Western stories, photos, interviews and public appearances. Writing home to his wife Dolly in the USA, Grey said between 250 and 500 visitors came to his Bermagui camp each day hoping to see him.
Hastrich writes: “The constant incursions on his privacy at the Bermagui camp were becoming intolerable. The stream of stickybeakers wandering through had never stopped, all of them wanting something…One woman walked through the camp on the morning after the Zane Grey birthday party: there were no people, she said, but she did see the remains of his birthday cake left out on a table. This qualified as news, as did many other petty invasions.”
Grey said of Australia: “This is the greatest country I have ever visited…the finest fishing in the world…You are developing an individual race, somewhat like the south-west Americans. The New Zealanders are more English than the English.”
Despite the patronizing attitude to First Nations people in the cast of White Death, Hastrich says: “Grey had seen Aboriginal people as intelligent, skillful and knowledgeable – qualities rarely ascribed to them by white Australia.”
This very readable account of Grey in Australia is exhaustively researched. It details all of his fishing expeditions, his prodigious spending, his precarious financial state, his numerous extramarital affairs (some scandalous), his plans for Australian novels and his literary legacy. But love affairs and letters back to Dolly apart, we don’t get too many insights into the man. One, however, is his reaction to reading John O’Hara’s ‘dirty’ BUtterfield 8. He burnt his copy in the camp fire, then argued with defenders of the book on his staff, who promptly quit and returned to the States in disgust.
Made on a budget of $AU2,700,000 and shot on Hayman Island in Queensland, White Death can be found on three YouTube files, although sound drops out for 10 minutes. Grey, on screen for the first time in a feature film, plays himself, and it makes a lucid definition of near unwatchable, wooden acting.
Grey’s business manager Edwin G. Bowen directed, produced and edited. It was his first, and his only, feature film and it plays like an embarrassing amateur production. The predominately English voices are just one of its cringe-worthy offerings. So too is the portrayal of First Nations people, the lame comedy and the atrocious acting.
Then there’s the shark. The best parts of White Death are the footage of Grey fishing for swordfish. But decent shark footage eluded him, and as for the great white, the crew had to paint one shark white and also construct a model for other shots. The fakery is hopeless, and the pathetic chase for the great white sucks whatever life was left out of the film.
White Death bombed and there’s no evidence of it ever being released in the USA.
In 1939, only months before his death in California, Grey caught several great white sharks off Port Lincoln, but the fish of his life, a 17-foot great white escaped.
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