Edna Ferber didn’t want James Dean to play Jett Rink, the wild farm hand turned millionaire oil magnate from her 1952 novel Giant. ‘
She had envisioned someone bolder for the film adaptation. At least someone more famous! Dean was an angelic-faced 24-year-old engineer whose film debut (in the 1955 drama East of Eden) had yet to appear.
“What about Robert Mitchum?” it continued to bother the film’s director, George Stevens. “I heard he’s free.” But Stevens urged the seven-year-old writer to at least meet the unknown Dean for lunch.
She did, and according to Ferber’s niece, Julie Gilbert, author of the new book “Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Texas Novel, and the Making of an American Film Classic” (Pantheon, out Tuesday), she was hit. “Wot a boy!” she wrote to her sister soon after.
Dean can be cheeky, humorous. His condescension and volatile acting style often annoyed his actors and angered his directors. But he turned on the charm for Ferber.
And he was just so cute. She gave Stevens her approval to dump him—against, perhaps, her better judgment.
“Once in a while—rarely—one encounters a dazzling human being who is clearly marked for destruction,” she later wrote. “Such was this young Jimmy Dean.”
“Giant Love” brings to light Ferber and Dean’s unlikely friendship. Gilbert even suggests that her Pulitzer Prize-winning aunt was in love with the tortured young actor. “In the photo you can see the look on her face when they are together,” writes Gilbert. And he, apparently, loved her too.
“Giant” was destined to be great. Ferber’s novel was a huge bestseller, a multi-generational family saga about wealthy cattle ranchers at the dawn of the Texas oil boom. The eccentric Rock Hudson and the incandescent Elizabeth Taylor were set to star.
Dean looked nothing like Ferber portrayed the book’s antagonist, Jett Rink. Jett was a “muscle”, with a “strangely powerful bull-like neck and shoulders”.
Dean had a lean body, a weakness of spirit and a painful beauty.
But Stevens — who spotted her at Warner Bros. much twirling a lasso—thought his counterintuitive casting might bring some extra frisson to the film.
“Giant” began filming in May 1955. It was a grueling shoot. Stevens had his actors come in early and sit in hair and makeup in the punishing Texas heat, even if they didn’t have a scene.
The dean was under such control. He complained, was attacked by the group and fought with Stevens.
Once, before shooting a scene with Taylor, he left and peed on the floor.
The crew watched in astonishment as he returned to complete his lines in a glorious display.
Dean later admitted to his friend Dennis Hopper that he behaved shockingly not out of impudence, but because he was nervous.
“I figured if I could go and pee in front of all those people, I could come back and do everything in the movie,” he said.
Additionally, Dean and Hudson butted heads as the two vied for Taylor’s attention. “He was hard to be around — full of contempt,” Hudson said.
Dean wasn’t a star yet. “Rebel Without a Cause,” the film that catapulted him into an icon of youth angst, wouldn’t be released until “Giant” had almost finished filming.
So Stevens didn’t find his diva status fun or warranted. Ferber was in Alaska, researching her next book, while the cast and crew worked away in Marfa, but she often wondered about “Jimmy” and worried about his “wrong ways.”
When the production moved to Los Angeles, she took him to California to be with her.
In Hollywood, Ferber and Dean were joined at the hip.
They had dinner together. On stage, he would make her laugh and teach her to spin a lasso.
He even took her for spins around the Warner Bros. lot on his motorcycle. Gilbert paints a lifelike pint-sized picture of Ferber with her “freshly done Elizabeth Arden hair, a pretty polished cotton dress, Ferragamo shoes and a big pocket book, pacing around, held by the waist of 24-year-old Jimmy. Dean.”
Dean shot his last scene in September in Los Angeles.
The day after, in September. On the 30th, 1955, he took the 550 Porsche Spider, crashed and died.
The movie wasn’t even closed.
When Taylor arrived on set, her eyes puffy from crying, an irate Stevens shouted that Dean “wasn’t worth the self-indulgent tears that had driven him into hysterics”.
“Giant” was released in 1956, massively late and over budget, running 3 hours and 21 minutes.
It was a hit though. Stevens won the Academy Award for Best Director, and Hudson and Dean were both nominated for Best Actor.
But it’s legendary because of Dean: his unsettling, volatile performance, his dangerous sexuality and his tragic end.
Ferber wrote several more books until her death in 1968, aged 83. When Gilbert went through her things, she found an 8×10-inch photo of Dean—”top hat with wild, thick hair, hanging from a cigarette, shirt open to mid-chest”—she had written on “Edna” from “Jett Rink”.
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Image Source : nypost.com