Edna Ferber did not want James Dean to play Jett Rink, the brutish ranch hand turned dissolute millionaire oil magnate from her 1952 novel “Giant.” ‘
She had imagined someone brawnier for the movie adaptation. At least someone more famous! Dean was a 24-year-old angel-faced ingénu whose film debut (in the 1955 drama “East of Eden”) hadn’t even been released yet.
“What about Robert Mitchum?” she kept pestering the film’s director, George Stevens. “I hear he’s free.” But Stevens urged the septuagenarian writer to at least meet the unknown Dean for lunch.
She did, and according to Ferber’s great-niece Julie Gilbert, author of the new book “Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film” (Pantheon, out Tuesday), she was smitten. “Wot a boy!” she wrote to her sister immediately after.
Dean could be impudent, moody. His petulance and inconsistent acting style frequently annoyed his costars and infuriated his directors. But he turned on the charm for Ferber.
And he was just so cute. She gave Stevens her approval to cast him — despite, perhaps, her better judgment.
“Occasionally — rarely — one encounters a dazzling human being who is obviously marked for destruction,” she later wrote. “Such a one was this young Jimmy Dean.”
“Giant Love” brings Ferber’s and Dean’s unlikely friendship to light. Gilbert even suggests that her Pulitzer Prize-winning great-aunt had a crush on the tortured young actor. “One can see the look on her face when they are together in photos,” Gilbert writes. And he, apparently, loved her too.
“Giant” was destined to be big. Ferber’s novel was a major bestseller, a multigenerational family saga about wealthy cattle ranchers at the dawn of the Texas oil boom. The hunky Rock Hudson and the incandescent Elizabeth Taylor were set to star.
Dean looked nothing like how Ferber portrayed the book’s antagonist, Jett Rink. Jett was a “muscular” lout, with a “curiously powerful bull-like neck and shoulders.”
Dean had a lean build, a soulful vulnerability and an aching beauty.
But Stevens — who spotted him on the Warner Bros. lot twirling a lasso — thought his counterintuitive casting could bring some added frisson to the movie.
“Giant” began filming that May, 1955. It was a grueling shoot. Stevens made his actors come early and sit around in hair and makeup in the punishing Texas heat, even if they did not have any scenes.
Dean chafed under such control. He complained, stormed off set, and fought with Stevens.
Once, before shooting a scene with Taylor, he stepped away and urinated on the ground.
The crew watched stunned as he returned to finish his lines in one glorious take.
Dean later admitted to his friend Dennis Hopper that he behaved so shockingly not out of insolence but because he was nervous.
“I figured if I could go and pee in front of all those people I could get back and do anything on film,” he said.
Moreover, Dean and Hudson butted heads as the two competed for Taylor’s attention. “He was hard to be around — full of contempt,” Hudson said.
Dean was not yet a star. “Rebel Without a Cause,” the movie that catapulted him into an icon of youthful angst, wouldn’t come out till “Giant” was almost done filming.
So Stevens did not find his diva attitude amusing or warranted. Ferber was in Alaska, researching her next book while the cast and crew toiled away in Marfa, yet she frequently asked about “Jimmy” and fretted over his “errant ways.”
When production moved to Los Angeles, she hightailed it to California to be with him.
In Hollywood, Ferber and Dean were joined at the hip.
They dined together. On set, he would make her laugh and taught her to twirl a lasso.
He even took her for spins around the Warner Bros. lot on his motorcycle. Gilbert paints a vivid picture of the pint-sized Ferber in her “freshly done Elizabeth Arden hair, a pretty polished cotton dress, Ferragamo shoes, and a large pocketbook, speeding around the lot holding on to the waist of 24-year-old Jimmy Dean.”
Dean shot his last scene in September in Los Angeles.
The day after, on Sept. 30, 1955, he got his 550 Porsche Spider, crashed and died.
The movie hadn’t even wrapped.
When Taylor arrived on set, her eyes puffy from crying, an irate Stevens yelled that Dean was “not worth the self-indulgent tears that had sent her spinning into hysteria.”
“Giant” was released in 1956, massively delayed and over budget, running a whopping 3 hours and 21 minutes.
Yet it was a smash. Stevens won the Oscar for best director, and Hudson and Dean were both nominated for best actor.
But it is legendary because of Dean: his unnerving, volatile performance, his dangerous sexuality and his tragic end.
Ferber wrote several more books until her death in 1968, at the age of 83. When Gilbert went through her belongings she found an 8×10 inch photo of the Dean — “high hat of wild, thick hair, cigarette dangling, shirt open to mid-chest” — he had inscribed it to “Edna” from “Jett Rink.”
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