The Mark of Zorro (2 page)

McCulley's own sequel, republished in 1928 as
The Sword of Zorro,
is quite different from Fairbanks's film sequel. In it the governor of California, far from reforming, is enraged that Don Diego Vega and the
caballeros
of Los Angeles have thwarted his malevolent plans. In revenge, he conspires with Captain Ramón to have a band of pirates raid and ravage the city, kidnapping Lolita Pulido as his personal reward. (Captain Ramón had been killed at the end of the first novel, but McCulley needed him for the sequel and resurrected him, retaining the Z that Zorro carved on his forehead.) “What knaves!” exclaims Barbados, the pirate captain, “I would rather be an honest pirate than a politician any day!”
⁴
When pirates attack on the eve of Don Diego's wedding, Diego and his friends fight them off and pursue them. Now in his Zorro costume, Diego outdistances his companions, dives off a cliff into the ocean after the ship that is carrying Lolita, and climbs the ship's anchor chain. He manages to hide on board and communicate with Lolita. Eventually discovered, he single-handedly fights the entire crew, in an episode that McCulley may have designed with Fairbanks in mind. The rest of the novel involves treachery, hair-breadth escapes, and the final rescue.

McCulley went on to write two more Zorro novels,
Zorro Rides Again
(1931) and
The Sign of Zorro
(1941), and fifty-seven Zorro novellas and short stories. His last Zorro story, “The Mask of Zorro,” was published posthumously in April 1959, following his death on November 23, 1958.

Several of his other novels are also set in the romanticized California past of
Zorro-Captain Fly-by-Night
(filmed in 1922 and published in 1926),
Black Grandee, The Caballero, Don Peon
(billed as “A new novel of Romance and High Adventure in Zorro-Land”),
Don Renegade, Senor Vulture, Señor Devil-May-Care, The Devil's Doubloon,
and
Señor Avalanche-but
none of them achieved Zorro's enduring mythic legacy.

McCulley was born in Ottawa, Illinois, on February 2, 1883, the same year as Douglas Fairbanks. As a newspaperman, he worked mainly in New York. He began publishing fiction in 1907 and moved to southern California the next year. A self-styled history buff, he researched the time of the early missions to provide a more substantial background for some of his period fiction. In 1944, he shifted from Argosy
(as All-Story Weekly
had become) to
West.
In addition to his novels and stories, he collaborated on many low-budget films, mainly for Republic and Monogram, that included Gene Autry's
Rootin' Tootin' Rhythm,
the Hopalong Cassidy
Doomed Caravan,
the Cisco Kid movie
South of the Rio Grande
(1945, with Duncan Renaldo), and a Zorro-type swashbuckler
Mark of the Renegade
(1951, with Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Roland).

Besides the novels set in the California of Zorro, McCulley wrote dozens of Westerns and nineteen mystery novels. The most popular of the mysteries, recently reprinted,
was The Black Star
(1924), featuring a masked criminal mastermind. At the scene of his crimes, he pastes black stars, just as Zorro leaves a Z. Though the ingenious Black Star is finally outwitted and captured, McCulley brought him back in three sequels. Like Don Diego Vega, the protagonists of many of these novels have a dual identity. The back cover of the Wildside Press's reissue of
The Black Star
says that McCulley “virtually invented the masked-avenger genre with such characters as the Green Ghost, the Thunderbolt, and the Crimson Clown.”

Thus McCulley set the precedent for the masked and/or dual identity villains and crime-fighting heroes of adventure comics. Zorro was the first caped crusader, and Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, acknowledges his indebtedness. Growing up in a tough part of the Bronx, Kane proposed that the gang he belonged to call themselves “The Crusading Zorros.” They wore black masks and tried to swashbuckle around the neighborhood. When he created
Batman
in 1939, Kane recalls, “Zorro's use of a mask to conceal his identity as Don Diego gave me the idea of giving Batman a secret identity. Like the foppish and wealthy Spanish count, Bruce Wayne would be a man of means who put on a facade of being effete. Zorro rode a black horse called Toronado and would enter a cave and exit from a grandfather clock in the living room. The bat-cave was inspired by this cave in
Zorro.
I didn't want Batman to be a superhero with super powers.... So I made Batman an ordinary human being; he is just an athlete who has the physical prowess of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who was my all-time favorite hero in the movies.”
⁵
The Batman story begins when Bruce Wayne's parents are murdered on their way home from seeing The Mark
of Zorro.
⁶

The difference between Zorro and most comic book heroes is that he has no advanced technology, no exotic weapons, no supernatural powers. He has no invulnerability, is not faster than a speeding bullet, cannot fly, contort, and expand himself like plastic, nor can he turn into a human torch, swing on webs, or climb walls like a spider. His costume is simply black clothing and a mask. Though he occasionally brandishes a pistol, he relies on a sword (in one story McCulley points out that once you have fired a flint-lock, you are temporarily unarmed, but you do not need to reload a sword), and his transportation is a horse. He does not need special effects. In short, he is entirely human, much more like the reader or audience than the superheroes of the comics and their film versions. His antagonists—corrupt, greedy politicians and their ruthless, bullying henchmen—are equally human and vulnerable. But he does have an extra kind of power in his dual identity, and to that extent acquires a special power when he is Zorro:

 

In
The Sword of Zorro,
he is even more explicit: “I find that I have a dual personality, and the tamer part of me is not working at present. I am Zorro, the daring in love and war.”
⁷

It is generally acknowledged that a probable inspiration for Zorro is Baroness Orczy's 1905 novel,
The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Both protagonists use an alias and conceal their daring adventures behind a pose of ineffectuality. However, there are more differences than similarities between them. The Scarlet Pimpernel in real life is Sir Percy Blakely, who poses as a foolish fop. Don Diego is not so much a fop as he is listless and languid, complains constantly of the “turbulent times,” and pretends to abhor all danger and violence, preferring to spend his time with poetry and meditation. More significantly, the Scarlet Pimpernel's daring consists of rescuing French aristocrats from the Reign of Terror, whether they have been honorable or tyrannical. To do so, he uses various disguises but has no distinctive Pimpernel costume and outwits the terrorists rather than fighting them. In the novel and the first two film versions (1935 and 1950), he is not a horseman or a swordsman and is already married. His French wife does not learn of his double identity until almost too late.

In
The Mark of Zorro,
Don Diego is an aristocrat, but he is far more democratic than the Scarlet Pimpernel. Most of the oppressed people that he defends or avenges are poor, mainly Indians or padres who have been robbed or beaten. The only aristocrats that we see being oppressed are the Pulidos, who have been impoverished by the wrath of the governor after they antagonized him. Zorro, of course, helps them, particularly because he is in love with Señor Pulido's daughter Lolita.

Yet he is not entirely democratic. In the Zorro stories, McCulley's characters lay great importance upon a person's being of excellent blood. We are frequently reminded that the Vegas themselves are of the finest blood. Her being so is one of the reasons his father wishes Don Diego to marry Lolita Pulido. The issue of blood comes up eighteen times in McCulley's
The Mark of Zorro
and numerous times in subsequent Zorro narratives. But what does blood mean? Except for the Indians (“natives,” McCulley usually calls them), everyone in the novel is Hispanic. In actuality, many Spaniards of pure
sangre azul
had been born in Mexico, the population of which was so intermixed that by the eighteenth century it had devised an official
casta
system to define social, and thus economic, status, distinguish supposed subgroups from those of pure Spanish background, and identify various divisions among the racially mixed population. Paintings were made to illustrate the racial combinations.
Casta
lines were fairly fluid, but status was defined by
limpieza de sangre,
from the pure-blooded Spaniard on down through Indian, Mexican, African, and Arab.
⁸
The insistence on pure Spanish blood is thus something of a fantasy. McCulley was probably not aware of the official casta status, but he follows the formula whereby most heroes and heroines of romantic fiction are aristocrats. Though there were Spaniards who made their way to California, usually via Mexico, many of the
hacienderos
were Mexican or, after the missions were secularized, Indian.

The opening title cards to Fairbanks's 1925 sequel
Don Q, Son of Zorro,
put the whole issue of noble, meaning “pure” Spanish blood, quite bluntly. “In the long chain of noble names—warriors, conquerors, statesmen—whose brilliant lives are written in the story of Spanish conquest, the name of De Vega stands well to the fore. A De Vega stood with Balboa when he discovered the Pacific. A De Vega fought with Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. On ‘The Night of Tears,' when Cortés drenched the new world with the best blood of old Spain, a young De Vega died in armor. Though the home of the De Vegas has long been on California soil, the eldest son of each new generation returns to Spain for a period of travel and study.” Of course McCulley did not write this and may have been more sensitive to the tragic aspects of the conquest of Mexico and Peru. But the fact remains that the Vegas continually boast of their being of the best blood. The aristocratic “De” was not added until the second film; it was dropped in the 1940
The Mark of Zorro
but reappeared as “de la Vega” in Disney's
Zorro
and subsequent films.

In Zorro's world, being of excellent blood also means that a man should be virile, dashing, athletic—qualities that Don Diego Vega seems to lack. “The
hidalgo
blood which coursed his veins never seemed to set Don Diego afire. He did not join other young caballeros in their feverish adventures but read poetry and cultivated roses, which made men decide that he was nothing but a fop and a spineless jellyfish.”
⁹
On the other hand, having noble blood does not just mean having an aristocratic heritage; it also signifies behaving honorably, demonstrating noblesse oblige. As Fray Marcos tells Don Fernando in McCulley's The Caballero, “High birth and power bring many obligations and responsibilities to the one who possesses them.... Persecution and oppression are deplorable things which call for the swift attention of those high in the land.”
¹⁰
Knowing this turns Don Diego Vega into Zorro, but some
hidalgos
are ruthless and dishonorable. Captain Ramón claims to have good blood, but he is a knave who repeatedly tries to force himself sexually upon Lolita Pulido, who accuses him of lacking “gentle blood,” despite his ancestry.
¹¹
In
The Sword of Zorro,
the pirate Barbados tells his lieutenant, “Pirates and rogues we may be, but we can take lessons in villainy from some of the gentry who bear the names of
caballeros,
but have foul blood in their veins.”
¹²
To save Diego from being tortured to death, Lolita will promise to wed Captain Ramón but will stab herself after the ceremony to escape a dishonorable marriage. “The blood of the Pulidos tells me to do that!”
¹³

In the Mexican
casta
paintings, only a Spaniard can carry a sword, the symbol of aristocracy. Thus when a murderous
hidalgo
says of Zorro, “were I sure he was of proper blood, I'd cross blades with him and carve out his heart,” Zorro replies, “My blood is better than your own, Carlos Martinez.”
¹⁴
The masked man repeatedly has to assure someone he is about to fight that his blood is better. Sometimes, he says he is demeaning himself when he duels with someone who does not have noble blood.

Occasionally, someone who lacks a noble blood line can demonstrate nobility of character. In
The Sword of Zorro,
the crew of a trading schooner give their lives to try to rescue Lolita; all are killed by the pirates. When the pirates plan to slowly roast Don Audre Ruiz at the stake, Sergeant Gonzales volunteers to take his place, whereupon Don Audre replies, “Whatever your birth and station, you are now, in my estimation, a
caballero
and a brave man.”
¹⁵

Lest pride in one's aristocratic lineage become arrogance, McCulley provides an antidote in
The Caballero.
In this novel, set in “the very early 1800s, Don Fernando Venegas begins as an elegant, arrogant snob, ”glancing down upon this world from beneath drooping lids as though the very best of it was unworthy of his consideration.“
¹⁶
Attacked by a cruel and corrupt nouveau riche, he outfences the man and kills him. The governor calls it self-defense, but Fray Marcos says Don Fernando could have merely wounded his opponent but instead killed with malice in his heart. His sin “must be washed away by humility, broken pride, anguish.” Father Marcos therefore imposes a penance upon this
hidalgo
”who feels that few men are his equal, who knows nothing of the trials and sufferings of those he deems lesser men.“
¹⁷
Don Fernando confesses that he hardly ever gave the peons a thought. Now for three months, he is to become one of them, to give up his name, exchange his rich apparel for rags, and labor, eat vile food, and sleep on the earth as the lowly do, submitting with humility to being despised, kicked, or even lashed by the highborn.
¹⁸