The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  AN UNSENTIMENTAL MAN, Alan LeMay always claimed that his motives for writing Westerns were strictly monetary. But this was misleading. In focusing on the Western, he was writing what he knew best, honoring his own family history and his understanding of the struggle between white civilization and Indian culture.

  His ancestors were pioneers, searching for a promised land on the Great Plains of Kansas, guided by faith and opportunity—not unlike the Parkers of Texas some forty years earlier. LeMay’s ancestors settled in Kansas in the days when buffalo herds were still a common sight and Cheyennes and Kiowas still a tangible threat. Indian abductions were a common theme: two white women, Anna White and Sarah Morgan, had been taken by Sioux and Cheyenne in 1868 and rescued the following year by troops under George Armstrong Custer. Anna White had become pregnant during her time in captivity, and after she gave birth to a half-Indian son her white husband threw her out—standard behavior toward a “polluted” former captive.

  Alan’s paternal grandmother came to Kansas from Denmark in 1870 when she was nineteen. Karen Sophia Jensen was part of a small band of congregants who followed their minister, the Reverend Nels Nelson, across the Atlantic by freighter and then by the new transcontinental railroad to Jamestown, Kansas, where she was one of eleven founding members of the Scandinavian Baptist Church and where she met Oliver Lamay (the spelling would change with the next generation to fit the pronunciation), a hunter and harness maker from nearby Concordia. The couple married on June 24, 1872, and homesteaded 155 acres in a one-room sod house just outside Jamestown. The last major Indian attack took place 140 miles away on September 30, 1878, when Cheyennes rampaged through western Kansas, killing some thirty homesteaders outside the town of Oberlin. These Indians were not the confident, brazen Comanches of the 1830s but desperate escapees seeking to flee captivity on a reservation in Oklahoma and return to their native homeland in the north. No matter. For those in their path, the results were just as lethal.

  Oliver wasn’t much of a farmer, but he was a crack rifleman, reputedly the best in Kansas. Buffalo herds would occasionally storm by on their migration south, and one day Oliver grabbed his rifle and shot a buffalo not far from his front door. The animal rose and charged him, and Oliver threw himself into a gulley. The beast rode over him, collapsed a few paces farther, and died.

  Early death was no stranger. Oliver and Sophia’s three sons survived to adulthood, but their daughter died in infancy. Oliver himself got caught in a blizzard on a hunting trip and developed pneumonia. He died in 1879 at age twenty-six. Sophia, who had no formal education, raised the boys alone, putting all three through high school and college. Her grit and determination clearly served as model traits for Alan’s strong, capable women characters.

  Dan Brown, Alan’s maternal grandfather, was an Indiana boy who lied about his age to join the Indiana Volunteers and went off to fight the Civil War when he was sixteen. He was wounded in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in June 1864 and carried to a crowded slave cabin that served as a makeshift field hospital. Dan lay in the sodden clothes in which he had been wounded on bed straw that was never changed, and subsisted on a diet of hardtack and sowbelly. When he was discharged from the hospital three weeks later, he weighed sixty-seven pounds. But he recovered, survived the war, and married an Indiana girl in 1867; Alan’s mother, Maude, was born in LaPorte, Indiana, six years later. As an old man, Dan told Civil War stories to his attentive grandson, who learned that there was nothing romantic or redeeming about shooting a man or getting shot yourself.

  In 1879 the Browns moved to Concordia on the Republican River in Cloud County, Kansas, where Dan opened a law office, ran for mayor, and bought and sold farmland. It was here that Sophia’s eldest son, John LeMay, met Dan Brown’s daughter, Maude. They were married in 1897 in Indianapolis; Alan was born two years later on North Illinois Street. He grew up there, graduated high school, and then served as a shave-tail infantry lieutenant during World War One—“in which I accomplished nothing,” he later recalled, having never left the States.

  Alan LeMay in 1921, age twenty-two, on a schooner off the coast of Colombia, before he became a full-time author.

  After the war he worked a wide variety of jobs: horse wrangler in Colorado, swamper in Wisconsin, fisherman in Florida, crew member on a schooner in the Caribbean, geologist in Colombia, sparring partner for a welterweight boxer in Chicago. “I’ve also tried several other things,” he later wrote, “none of them for very long, but each, I was told, for long enough.”

  Perhaps it was the breadth of his recent experiences—or perhaps his driving need to find something he was good at—that drove him to become a writer. In any event, within a few months after he entered the University of Chicago in 1919 he was writing stories for money. He sold his first short story to Detective Story magazine in December 1919 and never looked back. Two months after he graduated in 1922, he married Esther Skinner, a girl from back home, and took a job at the Aurora Beacon News, figuring to make a career as a reporter. But he quickly determined that fiction was more his line. He sold a few more short stories, then started on a novel.

  It was, of course, a Western.

  PAINTED PONIES IS SET ON THE PLATTE RIVER in western Kansas, and the heart of the story is the trek of the Cheyennes fleeing the wasteland of the Oklahoma reservation for Nebraska and Wyoming.

  The novel’s hero is a young cowhand named Ben “Slide” Morgan, who shuttles between the prosperous, ever-expanding white world of cowboys, ranch hands, and pioneers and the dying world of the nomadic Cheyenne, unsure whether he himself is white or Indian. The book has an elegiac tone and a rare and intense sympathy for both sides, Indians and pioneers.

  The basic characters and the arc of the plot are ones that LeMay would return to time and again. There is the likable, ruggedly handsome cowboy hero, with a straight, bony nose, prominent cheekbones, and “a face as friendly in expression as that of a six-months pup.” Slide Morgan is a talented rider and a straight shooter who can handle himself in almost any situation that requires nerve, determination, or gunplay. But he is frustratingly tongue-tied when he tries to address the woman who is the object of his affection. Nancy Chase is eighteen, fair-skinned, spunky, and practical, a young woman willing to wait for the man she loves to realize he loves her too. LeMay lingers like a lover himself over his first fictional female creation: “It was a face of gently rounded lines, with quiet lips, and smiling eyes of a hazel color, as if the brown-green of the sage were shot through with flecks of sunlight. Her hair was of the color of misting rain when the sun faintly touches it with a breath of gold.”

  These are characters whose very physical appearance is at one with the unspoiled, natural land they call home.

  But what makes Painted Ponies stand out above the pulp fiction of its era is its powerful and sensitive portrait of Native Americans. Morgan first happens upon a scouting party of Cheyenne while he is fleeing vigilantes after killing a man in self-defense. The Indians spare his life because he speaks fluent Cheyenne and convinces them that he himself is Cheyenne by birth. They take him to their camp, where he meets Morning Star and Little Wolf, leaders of the procession of families heading north in a last-ditch attempt to return to their homeland. Seeing them for the first time is for Morgan “perhaps the deepest thrill he had ever known. Here was a fighting people in the saddle, riding out of a land of death through a gauntlet of United States troops—fighting their way home!”

  Morgan rides with the Cheyenne for several weeks as they make their bid for freedom. The Indian characters are sympathetically drawn, including a young widow, Antelope Woman, and her small son, Little Frog, whose moccasin Morgan repairs using a small piece of leather from his own. LeMay makes no attempt to turn Morgan into a white savior. Morgan admires the Cheyenne’s ways and their doomed crusade, but he has no influence over them, and when they reach territory near his ranch, he breaks off and returns to his own affairs, leaving the Cheyenne to their fate. The Indians fight pitched battles and w
age a deft if ultimately hopeless guerrilla campaign against federal troops until the last 149 Indians are rounded up and imprisoned at Fort Robinson. There they go on a hunger strike to protest being sent back to Oklahoma, then stage a breakout with a handful of smuggled rifles, killing their guards and attempting to flee. All of the Cheyenne are killed—men, women, and children alike, including Antelope Woman and Little Frog—cut down and slaughtered in the snow by soldiers grimly following orders. The victims lose their lives but not their dignity. The Western novel formula strains against something deeper, darker, more complex, and quite modern for its time.

  “To march in the zero weather would have meant death to many,” LeMay writes. “To arrive safely in the southern land would have meant slow death to many more, perhaps all … Morning Star had pledged himself never to return there alive. No surrender! Death might come to them at this place, but it would find them unbending.”

  The other element that makes Painted Ponies surprising and unusual is the ambiguity that LeMay creates around Slide Morgan’s racial identity. Morgan has high cheekbones and dark skin. White vigilantes type him for “a breed” and pursue him murderously. He is drawn to the Cheyenne, who act with honor, as opposed to whites, who kill out of greed or ego. “For all practical purposes, Slide Morgan had gone red,” LeMay writes. Yet LeMay doesn’t steer this plotline to its logical conclusion. Slide inevitably discovers he is indeed white; the reason he knows the Cheyenne language is because he was taught as a small child by a family friend who believed that learning native tongues would foster understanding between red people and white. Still, Slide Morgan’s journey between separate worlds and sensibilities and his own confused identity became a theme that Alan LeMay would return to again and again. No matter how formulaic his plots sometimes became, his stories were always about something. Facts and myths both fascinated him: he used the former to create the latter.

  Painted Ponies was published in 1926 and serialized in four parts in Adventure magazine in 1927. It received decent reviews and sold well enough to get Alan another book contract. After Esther gave birth to their first child, a girl named Jody, the LeMays moved to New Orleans, where Alan worked on two novels about the Mississippi River and the delta region, Old Father of Waters and Pelican Coast. But by the late 1920s he decided that Westerns were his future. He and Esther picked up and moved to San Diego. He broke into the high-end magazines in early 1929 when Collier’s published a short story titled “Cowboys Will Be Cowboys.” He knew he had arrived as a professional writer two years later when Collier’s announced on its cover a serialization of “Gunsight Trail, A New Novel by Alan LeMay.”

  By now he was selling most of his short stories to Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and the Saturday Evening Post. The ones that weren’t sophisticated enough for those venues he farmed out under a pseudonym to Argosy, Adventure, and other potboiler magazines. His rates began to rise: from eighteen cents per word in 1931 to thirty-five cents in 1936. His son Dan calculates that his father published close to sixty short stories in that six-year stretch, plus seven novels and countless serializations. His work was well received. In 1935 the New York Herald Tribune heralded his new novel, The Smoky Years, as “a completely literate Western … Naturally there is a slight trace of formula in The Smoky Years, since it is meant for readers who appear to dote on rubber stamps, but Mr. LeMay has dressed his necessary gambits with generous amounts of good sense and good writing.”

  Success brought rewards. Alan hired a secretary with a British accent for his professional work and an experienced ranch hand for his growing collection of livestock, and started raising horses and playing polo. There were parties, cruises, stylish clothes, a canary-yellow Buick convertible, a Great Dane, and trips to Mexico and Waikiki.

  Inevitably he cooked up a scheme for a dream house—a horse farm, actually, on a twenty-acre rectangular plot outside La Jolla, with an old adobe ranch house, a reservoir, and a peach and apple orchard. He named the two dirt roads bordering the property Boardwalk and Park Place. He bought it in 1936, named it Rancho Una Vaca—“One Cow Ranch”—invested in twenty white-face heifers and a bull, and proceeded to go bust, thanks to the Depression and his own extravagant plans.

  Alan LeMay could write about Western myths, but he couldn’t create his own. “I am now thirty-eight years old,” he wrote to his parents in June 1937. “In review, it seems to me that I have spent most of the thirty-eight years worrying.”

  He was an energetic buzz saw of a man, five-foot-six, with a big head, thick chest, and wide shoulders atop truncated legs. The hand-tooled, high-heeled cowboy boots he always wore added two more inches. His blunt features—bushy eyebrows, sharp nose and chin, steel-gray hair combed back from his forehead—added to the sense of a small, powerful, and explosive package. When he drank too much, the explosions were more likely. Starting in college, where he smoked to stay awake so that he could study and write through the night, he was a two-pack-a-day man with a seemingly permanent cough. When the family doctor prescribed Parliaments, one of the early filtered cigarettes with a small wad of cotton at the end, Alan tried them once and then gave up. “Dad said they tasted like a steam kettle,” Dan LeMay recalled. “He immediately went back to Camels.”

  Pugnacious and constantly in motion, Alan was an amateur boxer, polo player, and—an avocation he suddenly chose to acquire in his mid-fifties—race car driver. The kind of man who, when he discovered he was afraid of flying, willed himself to take aviation lessons to conquer what he called “this shameful cowardice.”

  He was highly critical of his own work and scathing about other people’s. He refused to read anyone else’s manuscript: those naïve neophytes who foolishly sent him theirs in hope of receiving a helpful critique or encouragement got their envelopes back unopened. As he explained to Dan, why give away his valuable insights for free?

  Even when Alan was writing, he couldn’t stop moving, pacing the floor in his study and fashioning giant chains of paper clips. He was always working, always looking for the next great project and the big payday. Vacations were just a drain; he couldn’t afford either the time or the money. Yet for all his outward purposefulness and steely determination, he was a finicky writer, endlessly overhauling entire manuscripts and stalling out from his own self-doubt. “The deadline I believe would actually be a help,” he once wrote to his literary agent in New York, Max Wilkinson, “for it would put a check on the infinite shuffling and reshuffling of the possibilities to which I seem prone. I have a notion that any improvement achieved by countless substitutions of components, all to the same effect, is purely accidental. It’s a rut I get into; but I can make up my mind when I have to.”

  By the late 1930s he and Esther were drinking heavily and fighting constantly, and later that year they separated. Alan moved back to his parents’ house in Aurora, Illinois, with Jody and Dan. Within months he’d met another girl from Illinois, Arlene Hoffman, manager of a local radio station where Alan worked part-time as an engineer. After the divorce from Esther was finalized, he and Arlene got married in Las Vegas in July 1939. He had a new wife, two kids, and a monthly alimony bill, at a time when the magazine business was drying up along with book sales.

  Alan LeMay decided to go where the money was: he moved to Hollywood.

  WESTERN MOVIES HAD SUFFERED a long creative hiatus in the early days of sound, when they were largely exiled to the cheaper studios and the realm of B movies and children’s Saturday matinees. But now they were in the midst of a major comeback and on the brink of a golden age. A-list directors such as Raoul Walsh and John Ford were returning to the genre and carving out a visual style of storytelling that fit the demands of the form, and actors like Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Henry Fonda, and a relative newcomer named John Wayne were thriving.

  Alan had never written a screenplay, but Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount offered him a job as a story consultant. DeMille was looking for “a more primal tint of virility on his palette,” according to Jesse Lasky
Jr., one of his regular screenwriters, and Alan’s ability to turn out alphamale Westerns seemed like just what the self-styled great showman of the cinema was looking for. The job was like a velvet coffin: DeMille paid well but in return demanded sycophancy and trafficked in insult and humiliation.

  DeMille liked to launch a new scriptwriting project with a marathon session aboard his yacht, the Seaward. He summoned Alan just days after the wedding to Arlene—prompting her to tell friends that they had spent their honeymoon on Cecil B. DeMille’s yacht, only she didn’t get to go. The movie at hand was North West Mounted Police, starring Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, and Paulette Goddard, a melodrama about a Texas Ranger, dispatched to Canada to hunt down an outlaw, who falls in love with a nurse who is involved with a Mountie, who in turn … etcetera. Alan’s first screenplay—he shared the credit with Lasky and C. Gardner Sullivan—became a box office hit, but one that he described to his parents as “a hashed-over product, every line hammered down into plastic pulp and cast into some synthetic shape.”

  Still, DeMille admired Alan’s work enough to hire him again for Reap the Wild Wind, another lusty drama, this one set off the Florida Keys, complete with shipwrecks and underwater combat with a giant squid. It starred Ray Milland, Goddard, and Wayne, a veteran B-movie actor fresh from his recent success in John Ford’s Stagecoach. Again, the work began on DeMille’s yacht; Alan described to his parents a sumptuous dinner of Hungarian goose liver, oxtail soup, birch partridge, and peach blanch mango in a rare old kirsch. “In social moments, as at dinner, DeMille becomes a host of the superlative, old southern gentleman type, in violent contrast to his angry tornadoing at all other times,” Alan wrote them.