Chapter Twelve
THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER I’VE MET
By Louis Nizer
Attorney, author of “What to Do with Germany,”
“Between You and We,” and other books
Reprinted with permission from the January 1953 Reader’s Digest.
Copyright 1953 by the Reader’s Digest Assn., Inc.
There were no doctors in Atwood, Mich.., in 1877 when Rex Beach was born. His father, a farmer, merely got the scissors and a piece of string and proceeded to usher him into world. Almost from that moment until Rex’s death 72 years later, his life was filled with excitement and achievement.
He was one of the most versatile men of his generation. He won two Olympic medals for swimming, was captain of his college baseball team, he was a football and water-polo star on the Chicago Athletic Association teams. In later life he played golf in the low 70’s, and was an expert fisherman and a big-game hunter.
In business he excelled as a scientific farmer, a large-scale grower of gladioli and Easter lilies, and a cattleman.
Above all, of course, he was a writer. He wrote 33 novels, hundreds of articles and short stories, and two successful plays.
This versatility came to him easily. He seemed slow, relaxed and lazy. He said about his writing. “I am slower than a turtle with corns.” In spite of his virtuosity and tremendous success, he was always completely modest and unassuming.
He stood out in any company. He was six feet three, with an athletic, 240-pound body. His broken nose (from his Alaska gold-digging days) and his square jaw and twinkling eyes helped make him conspicuous. He had the qualities of an elephant’s trunk: so powerful it can uproot a tree and so sensitive it can select and pluck a blade of grass.
Never, throughout the many years I knew him, did his inexhaustible fund of knowledge and exciting reminiscences fail to fascinate me, as they did all his hearers. He was a charming talker, and his conversation was liberally punctuated by picturesque phrases. “I seldom get a cold, but when I do it lasts as long as a wristwatch,” he remarked.
Few ever learned of his accomplishments from him. Even his autobiography gives almost no intimate information about himself. When he did mention an exploit, it was disguised in humor. Be described a grueling experience while gold mining on the seashore at Nome: “My hired men shrank from getting wet and shrieked like Vassar girls when the cold surf engulfed them, so for weeks I battled with it practically single-handed. Constant immersion turned me blue; I took on the coloring of a tuna and got so I darted at schools of bait.”
Of gold miners in inland Alaska he wrote: “We ate heartily of baking- powder bread, underdone beans and fat pork. No sooner were these victuals down than they went to war on us. The real call of the wild was not the bowl of the timber wolf, the maniac laughter of the Arctic loon or the mating cry of the moose: it was the dyspeptic belch of a miner.”
Florida became Rex’s adopted state early in life. One night, after being outdoors for 18 hours in below-zero weather, Rex’s father vowed that he would seek a warmer climate. Rex’s mother decided that she liked the color of Florida on the map, so they went to Tampa. Rex’s father fenced a tract, built a small house, and they became squatters under the Homestead Act.
Rex, his two older brothers and his parents somehow survived the backbreaking farm work, and by the time Rex was 14 the family was able to send him to the prep department of Rollins College at Winter Park, Fla. He earned his tuition by running a laundry. Each month his father sent him a check for $3 as spending money. In his will, Rex left $ 100,000 to Rollins College and $ 50,000 to Notre Dame College in Wilcox, Saskatchewan, Canada, to be used as student-loan funds.
Rex left Rollins College one year before graduation because he wanted to study Blackstone in Chicago. He later related his brief experience with the practice of law: “One of the first things I discovered was that all plaintiffs in personal injury suits smell like wet St. Bernards When such a party of the first part and/or his witness in said complaint were confined with me in a closed room, sinus trouble became a blessing.
Rex worried about how to earn his living while going to school. By chance he learned about the Chicago Athletic Association, he wrote later: “The club supported a football team composed of former college stars, offering them, under guise of athletic membership, a postgraduate course in legalized mayhem. The club kept a training table where it flung meat to its pack, and at the news my mouth watered. Somehow I procured a letter of introduction to the captain of the team.
“Where have you played football?” he inquired.
“Football was not played in Florida at that time and I had never seen a game, but I answered, ‘In the South.’
“ ‘What position did you play?’
“Not knowing one from another except by hearsay, I confessed to having played all positions. The captain looked stupefied. He suggested that I take a dip in the club pool. Luckily, I could swim well and do fancy diving. So he said he would try me out.”
For a season Rex played football while he studied law, then he became a star in water polo. The following summer - 1897 - news of the gold discovery in the Yukon threw the country into a fever. Borrowing money from his brothers, Rex bought a sleeping bag, rifle and mandolin and joined the rush.
Of his experiences he wrote: “For three years I worked for myself and other people, stampeding to the scene of new discoveries, prospecting here and there and turning my hand to anything that offered. Once I helped, write a playlet for a Nome variety theater. I could sing and dance in a crude way so I wrote some sketches and played in them.”
Those were colorful years, full of adventure and fun. On his return to Chicago at the age of 24, Rex decided not to follow the law. He began to write. McClure’s Magazine bought his stories and the editor suggested that Rex write a novel.
He wrote The Spoilers, an exciting story of adventure in the gold-strike days. He was paid $ 5,000 for the serial rights; the book became a best-seller in 1906, ultimately reaching 700,000 copies. Rex later turned the novel into a play. Another novel; The Ne’er Do Well, also became a stage triumph.
The movies were just beginning to be important. William N. Selig wanted to make a photoplay of The Spoilers. Rex astutely refused to sell outright, but demanded a royalty of 25 percent of the gross receipts. Later the picture was remade seven times - probably a world’s record. Another producer took Rex’s second novel, The Barrier, at an unprecedented 40 percent.
Rex now organized a company and wrote and produced his own pictures. He negotiated an arrangement whereby Goldwyn Pictures financed and distributed his productions, paying him 50 percent of the net profit.
Fourteen of Rex’s novels and 16 original scenarios were made into successful movies. He was the first to establish the value of authors’ names in pictures and to demand screen credit for them. At the age of 71 he received $ 100,000 for the movie rights to his last novel, the highest price ever paid by a motion picture company for an unpublished manuscript.
Everything about Rex’s life was unusual. He even met and married his wife in an unusual way. Blonde, vivacious Edith Greta Crater was the daughter of a prosperous insurance man in Denver. She and her sister Allene (who later married Fred Stone, the dancer and comedian), stirred by the stories of the North, went to Nome with a party of friends. The country fascinated Greta and she decided to stay.
She bought a small hotel and ran it. It was there that Rex met her. They were married in New York in 1907, just after Rex finished The Barrier. They became dependent upon each other in a love-friendship relationship which ended only with her death in 1947.
When Rex had conquered the film frontier he went on a hunting trip to Alaska with his brother-in-law, Fred Stone. A guide took them to an uninhabited island which was crawling with giant Alaska brown bears. One of them woofed in Rex’s face and, as he remarked later, “sprayed me as if I needed ironing.” He was an intrepid hunter and had a wonderful time.
In middle age he had an impulse to go back to the soil. “Instead of strangling that impulse,” he said, “I allowed it to grow and become more malignant.” He ended by buying 7,000 acres of land near Sebring, Fla.
It soon became evident that farming was not the simple occupation it had been when he was a boy. “Science,” he said, “had conjured into being a bewildering horde of plant pests which could be controlled only by gassing and guessing, spraying and praying.” For a tine he had to dedicate the proceeds from his books to the support of seed houses, fertilizer firms and makers of motorized equipment. But Rex was soon out of the red. Apart from his writings, he ultimately made more than a million dollars in his various business ventures.
Growing Easter lilies and gladioli commercially was then unknown in Florida but Rex learned new techniques and developed a big industry. In one season he sold $ 200,000 worth of lily bulbs. As he gained in experience he bought 2,000 acres at Avon Park and operated one farm for the midwinter and one for the spring crop.
“Strange, isn’t it,” he asked, “that one should pick up the very occupation be hated as a kid? My wife loves flowers and I often bring home so many glads and lilies that I look like an open grave.”
Having demonstrated what could be done with flowers, Rex sold the farms to his superintendents and looked for new challenges. He turned to cattle. He pioneered in growing pasture grasses and clover on sandy land, and with the addition of the minerals which Florida soil lacks. He eradicated ticks. Thus he was a leader among the pioneers who founded Florida’s enormous cattle industry.
Rex was democratic to the core. His servants and assistants were treated as companions in a common effort. He was a profound, individualist, and believed that the lazy and incompetent were entitled to no subsidies. “God gives every bird its food,” he once said, “but He doesn’t throw it into the nest.” He quoted Emerson: “The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.” He thought charity ought to stem from the giver’s good heart and not from the receiver’s claim that be had been unjustly treated by fate or society.
“Life isn’t easy or painless.” He once said. “That’s what makes it a swell adventure. If you remove competition and deny man the rewards of his individual efforts, you reduce life to a monotonous ordeal out of which nobody can take pride, pleasure or profit.”
He detested socialism because it destroys freedom. He liked to tell of the mother mockingbird who, finding her young in a cage, would sometimes bring it poison berries, for it was better to die to than live in captivity. He was profoundly religious and sincerely attempted to LIVE his religious precepts.
Toward the end, Rex found himself gradually descending to helplessness. He was going blind, despite four cataract operations. Soon he could recognize people only by their voices.
Now cancer invaded his throat. For two years he had to breathe through a tube inserted in his larynx, and was fed through a tube inserted in his stomach. He could not turn his neck, or bend, or speak. Still he valiantly finished four fifths of his last novel, The Woman in Ambush.
He was, of course, constantly tormented by pain. To ease his agony the doctors tried nerve-block surgery. He wrote, “I never had anything hurt so and I’ve done some big hurtin’ off and on. The best I can say for a ‘nerve block’ is that it’s awful while it’s going on and is about as uncomfortable as the original pain after it’s done.”
Special injections were tried- the last hope. When they failed, he calmly determined to end his life. In his case it was not an act of weakness; he was seizing the helm when the ship was dashing on the rocks. He had almost choked to death several times on his breathing tube. If he was to die soon, as he knew he must, then he would decide the hour, and triumph at least in being master of the end. On the morning of December 7, 1949, Rex shot himself.
Rollins College buried his ashes, together with his wife’s, on the campus. Atop a white marble column, his bust - inscribed to the “Victor Hugo of the North” - will be enshrined to remind us of man who displayed in his strong character and modest manner the virtues of a great American.
(This article is reprinted from Bulletin Number Thirty Three.
Sebring Historical Society, July 1981. Pages 959-964.)