The Sunday Gentleman (22 page)

Almost all the Merriwell sagas were written under pressure. When he worked in Maine, Patten sometimes delivered his uncorrected manuscript, at a dead run, to the clerk aboard the passing mail train to New York. Once, to obtain a week’s vacation, he manufactured 50,000 words in seven days. But he liked to point out that he was painstaking when compared to several of his contemporaries. Ed Wheeler, to make a deadline, once did a 30,000-word Deadwood Dick novel in forty-eight hours, and Colonel Prentiss Ingraham once topped this mark by completing a 33,000-word Buffalo Bill story in twenty-four hours.

But if Patten was not the fastest, he was surely one of the most prolific scribes of all time. True, Alexandre Dumas, père, turned out 1,200 books, but he employed a factory of hired hands. Patten, single-handed, ripped out 208 of the 245 Frank Merriwell paperbacks (each book containing four of the
Tip Top
stories), 415 other nickel novels featuring characters like Lefty Locke and Bill Bruce of Harvard, and 25 hard-bound volumes—in all, about 40 million words, half of them devoted to Merriwell, and with an estimated total circulation of 137 million copies.

Patten’s publishers were constantly fearful that he might fall ill or for some other reason one day fail to meet his weekly deadline. To protect themselves, just as play producers hire understudies for their leading actors. Patten’s publishers kept a stand-in writer in the wings, with three pseudo-Merriwell stories written and ready to go. The stand-in, who was never needed, and who went on to create his own Merriwell in Lanny Budd, was Upton Sinclair.

The constant grind, the seventeen-year search for new situations, kept Patten in hot water. The prep school days at Fardale were relatively easy. Frank Merriwell, when he had time off from boxing, wrestling, track, football, and his outstanding sport, baseball, was busy converting enemies into friends. Bart Hodge, whom Merriwell had floored at the railway station and whose life he later saved, as well as Jack Diamond, who still recognized the Confederacy, and Bruce Browning, a tough Goliath, were all bullies who succumbed before Merriwell’s missionary tactics.

Early in the series, young America gradually learned of Merriwell’s past. His father had been a wealthy mine owner, addicted to gambling, who had disappeared in the wild West. Merriwell’s inheritance consisted of a school allowance, a ring bearing peculiar scratchings, and an eccentric guardian named Professor Scotch. In Fardale, a mysterious group of mobsters tried to abduct Merriwell and steal his ring. Needless to say, Frank outwitted the thugs.

In due time, Merriwell was matriculated in hallowed Yale. The Ivy League had seen nothing like him before. He played only in the last minutes of football games, and won them all, especially when pitted against Harvard. During track season, he was constantly being kidnapped, rendered unconscious, and tied down, only to appear miraculously in time to gallop off with a victory in the last lap of the critical relay. But baseball was his specialty. Great hurlers have come and gone since Merriwell—Matty with his fadeaway, Faber with his spitter, Hubbell with his screwball, Feller with his fast one—but none ever mastered, or came near mastering, Merriwell’s untouchable double-shoot (it curved in two directions on its way to the plate).

For game after game, though drugged by the blackest villains, Merriwell would escape some distant barn or dungeon to capture and foil the heavy and his henchmen, and to return to the diamond in time for the last of the ninth. Usually as he staggered on the field, to thunderous acclaim, Yale had the bases loaded, two outs, and trailed helplessly by three runs in the last of the ninth. Dark day for Old Eli, and then Merriwell strode to the plate. A pitch. A swing. A mighty home run.
Merriwell
!

Sometimes, though, to break the monotony, Patten would permit Merriwell only an ordinary single, as witness:

“Coulter tried to fool Frank with an outcurve on the next delivery. He believed Merriwell would bite at it, and he was right. But right there Coulter received a shock, for Merriwell leaned forward as he swung, assuming such a position that the ball must have hit him had it been a straight one. It had a sharp, wide curve, and passed at least ten inches beyond the plate. Passed? Not much! Merriwell hit it and sent a daisy-cutter down into right field, exactly where he wished to place it.”

Merriwell won so many athletic contests for Yale that Hey-wood Broun was moved to recollect, years later: “After the first eight or ten years, some of the readers began to complain. They said that, even though he was a fictional character, Frank shouldn’t be allowed to stay in college so long. Eight years is a long time for a man to play on a varsity football team—even at Yale.” This criticism brought an immediate and indignant rebuttal from Patten, who insisted that Frank had never gone to Yale a day over four years and he could prove it. As a matter of fact, Broun’s memory was faulty.

But keeping Merriwell in college for the proper four years—yet busy for seventeen years—required literary juggling that eventually led Patten into a nervous breakdown. When the series was at its popularity peak, Merriwell was already a junior. Fearful of allowing Merriwell to graduate too soon, thereby making him ineligible for further college sports. Patten had racked his brain for a solution.

Suddenly inspired. Patten made his hero drop out of college. The scratchings on Merriwell’s inherited ring proved to be a map of a gold mine in the West. Transferred to paper, the map fell into the hands of Frank’s enemies. Merriwell left Yale, and raced his rivals toward the mine. After surviving an ambush, and other inconveniences, Frank staked out his rightful claim. Thereafter, he remained on the loose. He went to work on a railroad and settled a strike. He routed train robbers. He plunged into Darkest Africa to slay a lion and save blonde Elsie Bellwood, attractive daughter of a sea captain. He sought Inca treasure in the crags of Peru. He hurried to Europe to engage a depraved French adversary:

“Frank Merriwell’s movements had been equally as swift as his adversary’s. The instant the light went out, he swung his body far to one side and thus, it happened that Bruant’s hands grasped nothing when he made that savage clutch across the table. But the violence of his spring flung the table against Frank, who was unable to extricate himself, and over they went with a crash upon the floor. A curse escaped the lips of the strangler. He caught hold of Merry, and it was wonderful how swiftly his hands leaped up to the throat of the young American and fastened there. Frank felt that the supreme moment had come…Judging well where to hit, Frank Merriwell struck Bruant down in the dark. He found his way across the room to the door, flung his shoulder against it, and burst it open. The old man in the front shop stared at him open-mouthed. ‘Monsieur,’ said Frank quietly, ‘the man in the back room needs the services of a skilled surgeon.’”

Returning to Yale in time to clout another winning home rim against Harvard, Merriwell learned that his father had remarried before dying, and left him a half brother somewhere in the Rockies. Merriwell’s college days were almost over, and the half brother, Dick, had been planted by Patten to perpetuate the paperback series. After a hair-raising odyssey, Frank finally located the wild, unruly Dick, a fifteen-year-old who could converse with animals and who was being raised by an Indian. After enrolling his half brother in Fardale, Merriwell graduated from Yale, barnstormed the country with his double-shoot, took over the , Bloomfield Home for Wayward Boys (the boys resented Frank at first, but learned to love him), and finally married and produced Frank, Jr.

The energy expended by Merriwell in these acrobatics would have required in any normal citizen the constitution of a Hercules supplemented by an ample supply of Benzedrine. Merriwell needed neither. Conditioning was the major factor in his success. For one thing, he avoided liquor. “Though, once I had him take a drink,” Patten has recorded, “just to prove to my millions of readers that he was not an insufferable goody-goody. A gasp of horror swept across the nation that week.”

Too, Merriwell despised cigarettes, and warned his half brother off coffin nails, thereby inspiring the impressionable Dick to sermonize to a roommate, “Tucker, you’re a jolly chap, and I like you, but I wish you’d cut those little paper-wrapped devils out of your list of friends supposed-to-be.” Merriwell also frowned on cursing. The strongest expletive ever to cross his lips was “Gosh hang it all.” His lone weakness, inherited from his father, was gambling, a vice which, happily, he finally conquered.

Patten always resented remarks that his brainchild was too much the Galahad. “They laugh about Frank’s bravery,” he once told an interviewer, “but, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t so brave. He was scared often. Much more important was his loyalty, something that boys esteem more than anything else. No matter how hard pressed Frank might be, he never played anybody a dirty trick. Of course, it was my business to see that he was hard pressed in every story. He was always getting into jams, so that if he would only turn against his friends he could make a million dollars. Of course, he never did it”

Merriwell, as any middle-aged reader will remember, had a lively, if unsubtle, sense of humor. He was a practiced ventriloquist, and turned his bewildered cronies into swivel-heads. Once, he placed a turtle in the bed of a jumpy friend, and rolled on the floor in glee at the result. And he never failed to double up at the speech of his sidekick, Harry Rattleton, a word-mangler, who would say, “I seel filly—I mean, I feel silly.”

‘ As for the ladies, Merriwell was a gay dog when the occasion demanded. True, he rarely had time for anything more demonstrative than saving them from runaway horses or massive abductors, but he did manage to kiss Inza Burrage twice during the Fardale years. For a long time, he could not decide between the spirited Inza and the softer Elsie. Patten was about to have Merriwell wed Elsie, when a storm of protest halted the marriage. “I liked Elsie better,” Patten admitted, “But I got so many letters from readers favoring Inza, that I had to have him marry her instead. The readers seemed to like the girl who went out and did things, as Inza did, rather than the clinging-vine type like Elsie.”

In 1913, Patten ended what he had begun in 1896, ended what he liked to call “the longest serial story ever written.” After he switched to writing for another pulp magazine, Street & Smith assigned three writers to carry on the Merriwell saga. The half brother, Dick Merriwell, who had not mastered the double-shoot and was somewhat windy, and Frank, Jr., who was merely a pallid edition of his famous father, pushed on for three more years of trial and tribulation at Yale, before they were suffocated by the novelty of the nickelodeon.

Patten had made little more than a livelihood out of Merriwell. Now he turned his back on his old friend, to see what he could do on his own. Patten became, successively, a magazine editor, a Hollywood scenarist for Norma Talmadge, a free-lance writer. Worried that he’d been typecast by Merriwell, eager to prove he could write on other subjects, he began producing successfully for
True Story
magazine and
Saucy Stories
. “That stuff made me pretty sick,” he admitted, “but it convinced the editors and won me a new market.” Meanwhile, he returned to his first love, playwriting. A whodunit.
The Invisible Power
, was accepted by Sam Harris, shelved by an actors’ strike, and never revived.

Finally, with the bases loaded against him, Patten called Merriwell in from the bullpen for one last fling. Actually, Merriwell had never been out of Patten’s thoughts. He had hovered over his brainchild like an anxious mother hen. Once, an editor of the Junior Literary Guild had blasted the Merriwell series. “They are too easy to read. They pander to all our outworn and shoddy old shibboleths, have almost no content, are sentimental and sensational.” Patten had defended his character then as “honest, manly, patriotic” and insisted he had never heard of a single criminal who’d read Merriwell.

Obtaining, at last, the copyright on Merriwell, Patten put him to work again in comics, columns, and on the radio. And in 1941, at a publisher’s request, he wrote a modern, full-length novel called
Mr. Frank Merriwell
, in which his hero, now middle-aged, dwelt in a bungalow called The Nest, with matronly Inza. Merriwell had two children, the presidency of the Town Improvement Society, and the desire to rescue America from isolationism. He was the old dependable, true-blue Merriwell, roaring at a crooked lawyer, “Neither browbeating nor cheap mockery will get you very far. Judge Grimshaw.” In this novel Merriwell thrashed four ruffians with a cane, and turned on those who would frame him with, “Get out of here, you filthy tools of a vile master!” In the end, the villain, who could never “restrain a corner of his thin upper lip from lifting sneeringly,” was soundly subdued by the aging Merriwell.

The book caused hardly a ripple in the sea of American letters. But one review, in the New York
Herald Tribune
, warmed the old author’s heart. “You may have, if you want them, all the slick novels about pretentious society females, whose souls are riddled with neuroses that would make a small-town high school girl blush with shame, but for good, clean heartthrobs and unsuppressible tears down the cheek, give us Frank Merriwell every time.”

Although Gilbert Patten, a handsome, athletic, six-footer, looked like Merriwell until the very day of his death, at seventy-eight, in 1945, he was anything but his hero in private life. He married three times. He was a chain smoker and a poker fiend. He was never quite sure he cared for the young boys who were his audience. He hated travel. Twice he started West to get color for his stories, only to turn back once at Omaha, and the next time at Denver.

He liked Mark Twain, but not Tom Sawyer. He enjoyed reading Deadwood Dick, but thought his greatest competitor, Horatio Alger, was poor at plotting. He regretted, above all else, that he’d never gone to college. He regarded laughter as the greatest of medicines. “I believe in one hearty laugh a day. It’s my safety valve.” He enjoyed almost every day of his life. “Life has always been a grand adventure for me, even at its dullest. It’s still the greatest invention I know of.”