Go Behind the Scenes of James Dean’s Last Movie ‘Giant’ With New Book
, a new book by Edna Ferber’s great-niece Julie Gilbert, is out now and offers an intimate look into the writing of the novel Giant and the making of the classic 1956 Hollywood film directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. The film was especially iconic as it was Dean’s final film role before his untimely death on Sept. 30, 1955, but both it and the novel were the subject of controversy — especially in Marfa, Texas, the small border town where it was filmed and where Ferber drew her inspiration for the novel.
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opens up about Ferber’s career, from her time as a reporter to a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and her experiences working with actors in Hollywood. We were able to get a sneak peek into the book, which also details behind-the-scenes stories of the making of Giant. Read on for excerpts from the book, courtesy of Gilbert and Pantheon Books.
Who Was Edna Ferber?
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Midwest-raised Edna Ferber was not a radio or television personality, nor was she profiled frequently by the press. She was a serious and prolific writer, who happened to be female, but her novels — especially So Big, Show Boat and Cimarron — had broad appeal, bringing her fame and ardent readership that lasted for more than half a century. But she is hardly ever read anymore. Unlike a “classic” writer, forever green on student’s reading lists, Ferber’s popular novels have all but vanished. Ferber died on April 16, 1968.
Casting Conundrums
Director George Stevens and Edna Ferber / Everett Collection
Ferber knew her Leslie. However, “her” Leslie wasn’t yet cast. She thought she very much wanted Grace Kelly, and Burt Lancaster for Bick, and Robert Mitchum for Jett. During this time of script versions and revisions, casting feelers had been put out and the search was definitely underway. In retrospect, those three might have carried too much Hollywood varnish on them. Although both Stevens and Ferber agreed on Grace Kelly as the best Leslie candidate, it was Stevens who zeroed in on Elizabeth Taylor. This could have been tricky, knowing, as Stevens did, how proprietary Ferber was about her heroine. Taylor won on one count. She had given a stunning lead performance for Stevens in A Place in the Sun in 1951. Well, and Grace Kelly turned it down.
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After Grace Kelly had turned down the role, Ferber was happy with the eventual choice of Elizabeth Taylor to play Leslie. She was actually chosen not by the director but by Rock Hudson. Stevens, who had been gratified by Taylor’s performance in his first Oscar-winning movie, A Place in the Sun, had given Hudson several choices of who was to play opposite him, with Taylor being one of them. Stevens wanted Hudson happy, and Hudson, who had formed an affinity for Ferber, wanted her to be pleased with his “new wife.” I’m not sure that Ferber was ever told about Stevens’s deferral to Hudson in selecting the role of her prized heroine.
For the male lead, many actors were considered for the cast of Giant. Clark Gable aggressively went after the role of Bick, but Stevens felt that his presence would not benefit the story as much as that of a younger actor who could age over the required decades. He also turned down the agents of Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck, Sterling Hayden, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda and James Stewart.
Richard Burton was Considered for the Role of Jett Rink
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection
In a quirky bit of potential casting, Richard Burton had been considered for, and had considered, the role of Jett Rink, but turned it down before he could be rejected. He wrote to [director George] Stevens from Spain, where he was filming Alexander the Great, “I have worked at the ‘Texas’ material. But to no avail. I just don’t seem to drawl in the right places and my ‘You-alls’ don’t quite come off. There are quite a few Texans staying at this hotel — Castellana Hilton — and my efforts totally fail to impress them.”
How the Cast Got Along
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Taylor and Hudson were an immediate duo, more intimate and affectionate off camera than their roles in the movie dictated. Their bond had solidified during the first week or so in Marfa, prior to James Dean reporting to the set. They both had easygoing temperaments and loved to laugh and to flirt innocently. They were both married unhappily. At that time no one was openly gay.
Dean altered the dynamic of the shoot as well as zeroing in on the bond between Hudson and Taylor. He refused to be the third wheel, and taking advantage of Taylor’s kindness, he began actually repositioning their chairs so that she was angled away from Hudson and toward him, where he would fret about things, gossip, and make her laugh at clownish antics. Hudson became the disgruntled odd man out, forcing him to either drop Taylor or vie for her — which he chose to do. To invoke another big Western movie, theirs was a “duel in the sun.”
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Perhaps Hudson had more of an agenda or backstory with Dean than it would have seemed. Certain truths were not spoken of back in the mid-fifties. Hudson had a good deal on the back burner. He was a closeted gay man embarking on a heterosexual marriage of convenience. His stardom was hitched to a studio-planned personal life. He was to be married to a woman and entirely discreet about everything else. According to various sources, Hudson fell deeply into a platonic love with Taylor but was also attracted to Dean. In the beginning of filming in Marfa, when Hudson and Dean shared a house, Hudson purportedly enjoyed dressing in drag in the privacy of this rented home. Dean deplored this as well as the overtures that Hudson made toward him, hastily moving out and into a room at the Hotel Paisano.
After Dean’s Death
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Supposedly, Taylor’s face and eyes were badly swollen from crying through the night, which evoked a stern reaction from Stevens, who said that Dean was “not worth the self-indulgent tears that had sent her spinning into hysteria.” Rock Hudson corroborated this version of the “break-up” between Taylor and Stevens: “George was not very kind to her . . . Elizabeth is very extreme in her likes and dislikes. If she likes, she loves. If she doesn’t like, she loathes. And she has a temper, an incredible temper which she loses at any injustice. George forced her to come to work after Dean’s death. He hadn’t finished the film. And she could not stop crying.” Reportedly the climax came when Taylor unleashed, “You are a callous bastard! I hope you rot in hell!”
James Dean’s Connection to Giant After he Died
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There was a bit of lore connected to Marfa, and therefore to Giant and James Dean. This was known as the Mystery Ghost Lights of Marfa. These Marfa night lights, which physicists speculated were caused by a finite amount of mass and energy, were already infamous in the area. Some said they were lantern-like shapes, leading and lighting the way among the foothills of the Chinati Mountains, returning after sunset each evening. Dean was transfixed by this lighted path, rushing out to watch it night after night. After his death, the glow of these lights seemed to be stronger, and a myth grew up that they were the headlights of his long-lost Spyder racing car.
Setting the Scenes
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There were no tumbleweeds to be found around the area, a truckload of them was brought in from California. There didn’t seem to be any oil-producing wells around, so a mock rig was erected for the scene where Jett Rink strikes oil. And the estate that Ferber had conceived in the middle of the vast lands of Reata was a $250,000 expense to be constructed by the Warner Bros. crew, shipped to Marfa, and assembled by another crew imported for just that task. When a scene was depicted featuring Christmas at the Benedicts’, a Douglas fir was cut down in the Sequoia National Forest and transported to the set.
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