When Giants Walked Hollywood

Film

When Giants Walked Hollywood

Sometimes the “business of poltroons” yields a masterpiece despite itself.

Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, by Julie Gilbert, Pantheon, 400 pages.

Some years ago, I asked the movie director Peter Bogdanovich about the unwillingness of movie studios to take more artistic chances. “It’s a business of what you would call poltroons. Cowards,” he said.

I was reminded of Bogdanovich’s clear-eyed diagnosis of Hollywood pusillanimity when contemplating the inevitable industry reaction to Francis Ford Coppola’s recent science-fiction extravaganza with philosophical pretensions, Megalopolis, which is, by any standard, a box-office calamity. Despite its maker having committed $120 million of his own funds to the project, this bizarrely Ayn Randian argument for turning over civic life to quixotic architects has grossed, at press time, less than $10 million in the U.S. 

The movie business will undoubtedly pull in its horns on what it considers needlessly adventuresome movies, but we must remember that the failure of Megalopolis has less to do with its scope than with its particulars: its bumbling performances, its combination of weird visuals and stilted dialogue, and its poorly worked-out contemporary political metaphors. Megalopolis is a nonpareil catastrophe. The lesson should not be to make fewer epics but to make better epics.

Moviemakers seeking an example of a large-scale cinematic saga that resonated with the public need look no further than George Stevens’ 1956 masterpiece Giant, which uses a multigenerational soap opera to paint a picture of life in Texas during a chunk of the twentieth century. The film was based on an equally grandiose novel by Edna Ferber. Like Coppola, Stevens uses bold brushstrokes. He is not simply trying to tell a good story but to capture the flavor—the landscape, the customs, the prejudices, the peculiarities—of a time and place. But the similarities end there. 

Giant, both the Ferber novel and the Stevens movie, is the subject of Julie Gilbert’s immaculately thorough and beautifully perceptive new book, Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film. If the author writes with particular authority, it is because she approaches this material with particular bona fides. Gilbert is a great-niece of Ferber, who was born in 1885 and died in 1968, and whose major novels include So Big and Show Boat, the latter the source for the great musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. 

Gilbert previously authored a biography of her famous relation, Ferber: A Biography of Edna Ferber and Her Circle, in 1978. Gilbert’s background with Ferber, personal and professional, gives her an unusually intimate perspective. For example, Gilbert remembers having once asked her great-aunt whether she experienced loneliness. “Oh, no. Never,” Ferber replied. “The characters in my books are my friends. They provide sustenance.” And surely no other Ferber chronicler could write, as Gilbert does here, that Ferber’s editor on Giant, Ken McCormick, was “a kind, gentle, erudite man, who, as luck and irony would have it, was the editor for my Ferber biography three decades later.”

Above all, Gilbert’s familiarity with her subject allows her to perceive Ferber’s intentions clearly, a rare virtue in an age when the work of past writers is routinely apologized for or simply canceled. Not so with Gilbert, who effortlessly enunciates Ferber’s aims, even while conceding that her novels have fallen out of favor. “Her liberal patriotism could be perceived as eccentric today,” Gilbert writes. “But what is so quaint about upholding the notion of the land of the free? Ferber was able to locate a moral center in her novels. She laid out a clear map of the better and lesser ways to navigate. Her character fought and forgave; they learned and grew.”

Giant recounts the litany of societal changes experienced by Jordan “Bick” Benedict (played in the film by Rock Hudson), who oversees a cattle-ranch empire in Texas. Over the course of the narrative, Jordan sees his way of life sidelined by the ascendant oil industry—represented by upstart ex-ranch hand Jett Rink (James Dean)—and his view of life is significantly altered. Aided by the liberal perspective of his old-money Marylander wife Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), Jordan sloughs off the casual racism he displays towards Mexican Americans to become, by the end, the patriarch of an interracial family. 

To his everlasting credit, Stevens teases out these themes with much artistry and minimal preachiness. Even so, credit must first be given to Ferber, a Jewish woman whose transient upbringing—her father was a dry-goods proprietor who took his family to such spots as Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Ottumwa, Iowa—and encounters with anti-Semitism unquestionably informed what and why she wrote. 

“Ferber was a stickler for accuracy and didn’t believe in ‘divine inspiration,’” Gilbert writes. “She would double back in her writing process if she felt her facts were shaky, and if a new morsel was presented, she would redraft a portion to fit it in.” She even identified the exact breed of cattle likely to be raised in the area in Texas where Bick and family live. Said the biographer of Ferber’s playwrighting partner George S. Kaufman, Howard Teichmann, “She had great personal courage, an overwhelming desire to travel, to seek new people, new places, new ideas.”

Before Ferber had the details, though, she had the big picture—the notion of a hefty and complex novel about the twenty-eighth state. “This assignment I had given myself was as difficult as the state of Texas itself was enormous and diverse,” Ferber said. “It was as Spanish as Mexico; it was as American as ham-and-eggs; it was as Neiman-Marcus as Fifth Avenue; it was as Western as long-horns and cactus.” The book was a notable best-seller, but with its unvarnished depiction of the treatment of Mexican Americans, it was met with—how to put this politely?— conflicted reactions in the state in which it was set. Even in Hollywood, the book was met with some studio reticence, though it was eagerly pursued by leading directors King Vidor and George Stevens.

A native of Galveston, Vidor—whose visionary films included the ambitious An American Romance and the star-bedecked Western Duel in the Sun—arguably had stronger claims to the material than Stevens. Yet it was the younger man, associated with well-made trifles such as the Astaire-Rogers musical Swing Time and the adventure flick Gunga Din, who seems to have had a deeper feeling for the material. Stevens had, after all, not long earlier come home from World War II, a traumatizing and transformational experience that had begun to seep into his mature films, among them A Place in the Sun and Shane. “His altered perspective believed in social change through big-screen dramatic storytelling,” Gilbert writes. “Stevens was intrigued by the fact that she had pissed off the entitled Texas gentry, making her a gen-u-ine pariah.” The two also had politics in common: Both were steady Democrats; she had supported Adlai Stevenson for president and saw in Stevens “a basic decency” that endeared her to him.

Gilbert expertly guides the reader through the writing, publication, and reception of Ferber’s novel, but her book really takes off when she settles into the making of Stevens’ movie. Each phase of production is described with flavor and excitement, including the formation of a screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat—with uncredited contributions by Ferber. Alas, Ferber’s own draft evidently missed the mark. Replying in the margins to a line added by the author, Stevens wrote, sensibly, “Let the picture say this—do all our jokes need explaining?”

Yet, on the whole, Ferber and Stevens shared a certain methodical, even plodding way of working. Studio boss Jack Warner cabled to associates: “WORRIED GIANT ONLY FIVE REELS SCORED.” Even the director’s son George Stevens Jr. conceded the unusual pace: “I worked with my dad on the script and then went in the Air Force for two years and came back and worked with him on the editing.”

Despite its director’s orderly approach, Giant, like most great movies, ultimately benefited from a certain degree of happenstance, especially in casting. Clark Gable sought the role of Bick, but Stevens heeded the counsel of female friend Joan McTavish, who while working at Universal had noticed Rock Hudson in a movie that called for him to age a quarter of a century (as would be required of whoever played Bick in Giant). James Dean ended up playing Jett Rink because co-screenwriter Guiol noticed that the young actor was hanging around—“twirling a rope, just twirling away,” as Gilbert puts it—outside their offices. “This guy was fascinating,” Stevens said. “He wasn’t looking for a part in the film, but Freddie and I said, ‘What would happen if he played this part?’” What happened was that Dean delivered a sensational performance and, before the movie had wrapped, died in a car crash at age 24.

If only Hollywood would find its misplaced courage and make epics as good as Giant again. Seeing it on the big screen, as I did nearly a decade ago, is an almost volcanic experience. In a theater, the film’s storytelling scope and physical vastness communicate the thematic ambition of Ferber’s novel. Gilbert’s book distinguishes itself by not having to labor to make a case for its subject: Giant the novel was a big deal when it was published; Giant the movie was an enormous success when it was released. The book and the movie deserve the superb treatment they are given here. 

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