Novelist Frank Bergon was born in Nevada in 1943 but grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where his family, of Basque ancestry, owned a ranch. Bergon headed east to earn degrees at Boston College and Harvard University. He taught literature for many years at Vassar College in New York, but his heart and imagination never left the West, the setting of most of his books. In his new essay collection, Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man: The New Old West, Bergon displays an acute awareness of what has changed and what has endured in the West in the past 70 years, especially when it comes to how the region’s myths influence its popular perception and the behavior of its inhabitants.
Bergon juxtaposes the idea of the Marlboro Man — the cigarette company’s most famous model was a rancher Bergon knew well, Darrell Winfield — with the 2014 Bundy standoff over grazing rights in Nevada. The men who instigated that conflict, Bergon writes, were inspired in part by the tobacco company’s promotion of an ideal: the independent, assertive, heroic Westerner of yore. Throughout these essays, Bergon highlights the feedback loop between how myth, movies and advertisements style the West, and how Westerners actually live in it today.
One of Bergon’s friends urges him to write a book about their high school classmate, Fred Franzia, the wine businessman behind Trader Joe’s famed Charles Shaw wine label, more commonly known as Two-Buck Chuck. “He’s brought wine into the homes of more people than Gallo or Mondavi or any other winemaker,” Bergon’s friend says. “In Napa his name is anathema. They don't like good wine at two dollars.”
Bergon portrays Franzia as the sort of independent firebrand the West is known for in a colorful essay that details the origins and underbelly of the California wine industry. Franzia had expected to inherit his family’s wine business, but when his father and uncles sold it to the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, the Franzia name became off-limits to him for business purposes. Scarred by its loss, the scrappy Fred established the Bronco Wine Company, “the largest vineyard owner in the United States.” Franzia styled himself as an iconoclast, battling, for example, with the Napa Valley Vintners Association, which urged the passage of a law forbidding wines made with non-Napa grapes from using the word Napa on the label. In response, Franzia “immediately produced a wine with Napa grapes called Napa Creek,” that retailed for just $3.99. Though critics scoff at Franzia’s inexpensive wines, they have won awards at blind-judged competitions.
Bergon tells his stories in a roundabout manner rather than chronologically, shifting from a present-day incident to an anecdote from the recent past, then detouring into something even further back. His essays have the rhythms of reminiscence, moving casually from one idea, image or memory to the next. At times, this meandering style can be confusing, but the casual structure underscores Bergon’s larger point that all these Western stories are connected, and that the practices and people we associate with the “Old West” survive in the New West today, in surprisingly different but still-recognizable forms.
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