‘Giant Love’ author Julie Gilbert reflects on her great aunt Edna Ferber in new memoir

There have been many stories about Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean bonding during the production of George Stevens’ epic “Giant” in Marfa, Texas, in 1955. Though not exactly a “Harold & Maude” scenario, the 24-year-old Dean also developed a strong friendship with Edna Ferber, the diminutive Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such classic novels as “So Big,” “Showboat,” “Cimarron,” and “Giant,” who turned 70 that summer in Marfa. Ferber, who never married, was seen sitting on the back of Dean’s motorcycle as they would take rides during breaks. And she even tried her hand at twirling the lasso.

Author Julie Gilbert, Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated grand nice and biographer (“Ferber: The Biography of Edna Ferber and Her Circle”), doesn’t think the two were in love. “He was very young,” said Gilbert, who writes about her great aunt and the making of the Oscar-winning film in her latest book “Giant Love” (Penguin Random House, $35) set for a Dec. 3 publication. “He was very much his own person. He was still finding himself. But do believe two people from equidistant points can meet right in the middle.”

Dean, she explained in a recent Gold Derby interview, “was motherless early. Older women were a big deal for him. I think they found each other in an odd way that is not easily defined. She might have been the aunt, the mother, and the sage or what have you. I don’t know, but she certainly perked up. She was very perky at the time.”

Perky is not a word that is usually used to describe Ferber, who also collaborated with George S. Kaufman on such seminal plays as “Dinner at 8” and “Stage Door.” In fact, she didn’t suffer fools lightly. A member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, she got into an argument with wit and critic Alexander Woollcott, which ended their friendship. Once when Ferber was wearing a double-breasted jacket, Noel Coward remarked, “Why, Edna, you almost look like a man.” Ferber replied, “Why, Noel, so do you.”

Ferber’s novels always featured resilient, strong heroines and well as clear-eyed examinations of racial inequality whether it be miscegenation laws in “Show Boat” Native Americans in “Cimarron” or Mexicans immigrants in Texas in “Giant.”

“Giant,” which was based on her 1952 best-selling novel, spans from the mid-‘20s to the 1950s in the lives of wealthy Texas cattle rancher Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), his strong-willed wife Leslie (Taylor), who abhors the poor treatment of the Latinos, and Jett Rink (Dean), the surly ranch hand who becomes an oil baron after the land he was bequeathed strikes black gold. Mercedes McCambridge, Carroll Baker, Sal Mineo, Dennis Hopper, Jane Withers, and Chill Wills also star.

Besides “Giant,” many of her Ferber’s books were adapted into movies; the 1931 version of “Cimarron” won the Best Picture Oscar and 1926 “Show Boat” became the seminal 1927 Broadway musical feature music and lyrics by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II which, in turn, spawned three films.

Stevens, his producing partner Henry Ginsberg, and Ferber formed a production entity for the film, and the director gave her the opportunity to take a pass on the script though he didn’t use it. (Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat penned the screenplay).

Gilbert explained, “Stevens was wonderful with her, though, tough. He said, ‘You know a lot about many things, but not above a screenplay. You were writing the novel and not the screenplay.’ So, I think she heard that, and she didn’t want to spoil it. She had too much of a good thing going and so she backed off.”

Dean, who died in a car crash Sept. 30, 1955, had finished the film, though his friend Nick Adams had to be brought in to dub Dean’s drunken final scenes because he had slurred his lines to the point that they were undecipherable. Ferber had written Dean a warning note before his death which he never received. She was worried that he would burn out too soon. “It said ‘just take it easy, don’t race through,’” said Gilbert. “And he raced through.”

The film opened nearly 13 months after his untimely death, premiering Oct. 10 in New York. Reviews were strong, especially in the New York Times, which wrote, “Mr. Stevens has made it visual in staggering scenes of the great Texas plains and of passion-charged human relations that hold the hardness of the land and atmosphere.” It added that Dean “makes the malignant role of the surly ranch hand who becomes an oil baron the most tangy and corrosive in the film. Mr. Dean plays this curious villain with a stylized spookiness — a sly sort of off-beat languor and slur of language — that concentrates spite. This is a haunting capstone to the brief career of Mr. Dean.”

As far as box office, the movie earned $30.1 million, making it the third highest grossing of 1956. And “Giant” had the most nominations with 10 going into the 29th annual Oscars, which took place at the Pantages Theatre on March 27, 1957, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Hudson and Dean — it was his second posthumous nom — and Best Supporting Actress for McCambridge.

For the first time in Oscar history, the Best Picture nominees were all in color: “Around the World in 80 Days,” “Friendly Persuasion,” “Giant,” “The King and I,” and “The Ten Commandments.” When the dust settled, it was Mike Todd’s three-ring circus of an extravaganza “Around the World in 80 Days” and the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The King and I” tying with five each with “Around the World” taking Best Picture. Stevens won Best Director, the only Oscar his film received. He previously won the director prize five years earlier for “A Place in the Sun.”

Stevens also won the DGA honor, while Carroll Baker, who played Leslie and Bick’s headstrong daughter, won the Golden Globe for Best Newcomer for “Giant” and “Baby Doll.” Screenwriters Guiol and Moffat were nominated for a WGA award for Best American Drama while the New York Film Critics Circle nominated the film and screenplay. And in 2005, the Library of Congress’ National Film Preservation Board selected the classic for the National Film Registry because it’s “considered to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant to American cinema.”

Ferber would go on to publish the 1958 novel “Ice Palace” about Alaska before statehood and a second memoir in 1963, “A Kind of Magic.” She died of stomach cancer at 82 in 1968.

Though “Giant” the movie has lived on, Ferber hasn’t. Gilbert hopes “Giant Love” will encourage people to read Ferber’s novels. “She’s gone into eclipse,” said Gilbert. “A lot of my life has been devoted to trying to understand what happened, and undo it or reverse time so that people understand how major she was.”

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