raine granstedt was among the first people Bessie Haley met in San Francisco in the summer of 1926. Eraine was modeling at San Francisco Art Association, where Bessie had arranged for art classes. Two years younger than Bessie, Eraine had already lived longer and harder than most nineteen-year-olds. So much so that she had abandoned her given first name and the infamy it carried.
She was born Irene Granstedt, and grew up twenty miles south of San Francisco in Mountain View, California. In the summer of 1922 she leapt from obscurity to the front page of the tabloids. “Schoolgirl, 14, Shoots Sweetheart!” Irene, said the papers, was having a troubled relationship with her boyfriend, Harold Galloway, seventeen. She borrowed a gun from a friend and, later that evening, pointed it at Harold. He grabbed her hand. The gun went off. Now Harold lay dying, his guts stewing with peritonitis, while Irene languished in custody. For weeks the headlines expounded the story of the murderous maid and her dying beau, with side bars cursing the collapse of society this calamity exemplified. But Harold failed to die. Irene got off with juvenile detention and banishment from Mountain View.

Barely a year later, she made the headlines again. Lying about her age to the judge, she had married

Robert Bleibler, twenty, of Menlo Park. The marriage was annulled in less than a year. Meanwhile, Harold Galloway, who had fully recovered, was being sought for statutory rape of his new fifteen-year-old girlfriend in San Mateo. Harold was a slow learner.

Irene went to San Francisco. The crowd she mingled with might later have been called beatniks or hippies. In 1926, they were bohemians. She remarried, again with short success.

Now she was Eraine, the model. She was single again and living on Hyde Street with her brother Theodore, who was now going by Theo.
Bessie Haley may well have identified with Eraine's man problems. Just two months earlier, Bessie had abruptly quit her job at the ywca in Huntington, West Virginia, and crossed the border to Kentucky, where she married her high-school sweetheart, Earl Helmick. Yet six weeks later she was in San Francisco alone. The short-lived marriage remains a mystery, although many attribute it to an accidental pregnancy. If so, no record of a baby, or the termination of a pregnancy, exists. Regardless, it seemed a short, strange, and loveless marriage.
Bessie took a room with Eraine and Theo. She got a job at Paul Elder's—the biggest and best known bookstore in town and a gathering place for the Bohemian elite. She took art classes in the fall and spring, and in her spare time wrote Wandering Leaves, an unpublished collection of fifty poems. And sometime during the winter, Bessie and Eriane came up with a plan.

One of the most popular weekend binges was a round trip to Los Angeles on one of the huge steamers, the Harvard or the Yale. They were the fastest ships on the water at the time and were elegantly arranged with staterooms, fine dining, ballroom, and orchestra. One could leave Friday evening, dance all night each way and return to work Monday morning exhausted. In the early summer of 1927, Bessie and Eraine booked passage to Los Angeles. They were only going one way, however, with no plans to return.

It must have been a long and magical night. When they arrived, Eraine was no more. It was Greta Granstedt, the young starlet from Sweden, that stepped from the ship, and went straight to Hollywood for thirty-some years of bit-part roles. Bessie Haley, too, stepped ashore with a new destiny. At her side walked the tall handsome rancher she had met on board the night before: Glen Hyde.

Brad Dimock

This is the second in a series of previews from the forthcoming biography of Glen and Bessie Hyde, the honeymoon couple who vanished on their river trip through Grand Canyon in 1928.