HOW A SHORT, NEARSIGHTED FARMBOY FROM INDIANA BECAME A
GIANT
ALONG WITH HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTARS
ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND ROCK HUDSON
Hollywood was abuzz with the news that director George Stevens was going to make the all-star spectacular film epic of the year, the screen adaptation of Edna Ferber’s best-selling 1952 novel, Giant, set in the Lone Star State.
In July of 2002, when the US Postal Service issued an 83¢ stamp honoring the literary legacy of Edna Ferber, collectors realized that, based on a printing plate error, some were missing the blue, black, and ocher-colored ink that would otherwise have been included in their print runs.
The value of those judged as “aberrant” immediately shot up to around $500 each, and the recognition quotient of Edna Ferber skyrocketed.
The novel had enthralled thousands of Americans, but not many Texans. As John Barkham in The New York Times wrote: “Miss Ferber makes it very clear that she doesn’t like the Texas she writes about, and it’s a cinch that when Texans read about what she has written about them, they won’t like Miss Ferber either.”
In reference to a saga that sprawled across three generations of sweeping historical changes, critic Robert Tanitch wrote: “The Lone Star State was turned into a symbol, a giant symbol, for all that was the least estimable in America: It’s moneygrabbing materialism, its thick-skinned self-interest, its profligacy and vulgarity, its low-browism, its snobbery and racism, its narrow-mindedness, its self-satisfied isolationism, and its spiritual impoverishment.”
Set for release in 1956, Warner Brothers had budgeted it at five and a half million dollars, a staggering sum of money in the Eisenhower era.
Now at the peak of his acclaim, California-born George Stevens was a deeply respected kind of Renaissance figure with a career that had included stints as a director, producer, screenwriter, and cinematographer. As the head of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II, he’d taken newsreels of the Allied landings on the bloody beaches of Normandy. Later, he filmed the liberation by U.S. troops of the notorious concentration camp of Dachau.
He’d already won the Best Director Oscar for his 1951 A Place in the Sun, and was Oscar-nominated for his 1953 Western, Shane.
The trio of leads that Stevens would focus on first included Bick Benedict, patriarch of what becomes an oil dynasty and his wife, Leslie Benedict; and his employee, an upstart ranchhand-turned-wildcatter, Jett Rink. Giant also contained many lesser roles for which established stars would compete.
Bick is a strapping, tall, and handsome Texan, the owner of the sprawling Reata Ranch that’s almost the size of the state of New Hampshire. The cattle baron is proud and a bit of a chauvinist in that he treats women like second-class citizens, perhaps granting Mexicans third-class status.
George Stevens, perplexed, possibly based on an issue associated with James Dean.
The film opens when he’s in Maryland with the intention of purchasing a champion black stallion. There, he falls for the beautiful and somewhat calculating Leslie on her father’s horse farm. Unlike most of the women he had known, she’s intelligent and a bit of a liberated woman, rather strong willed and high-spirited. Ignoring certain warning signs, he is spellbound by her beauty, marries her, and hauls her back to his sterile, arid, and searingly overheated ranch.
She’s appalled at some of the conditions she finds there, including the Jim Crow class distinction between rich and poor and the horrible treatment of Mexicans.
A lesser role, but one far more colorful was that of a poor local rancher, Jett Rink, who works for the Benedict family. Edna Ferber described him as “a character threatening sexual danger. He was a brute, a savage, dirty, belligerent, irresponsible, sadistic, a sullen, loutish kind of boy, who bore a grudge against the world.”
“He was all right when he behaves himself,” she wrote. “But when he drinks, he goes kind of crazy. He’s a kind of genius, Jett is. He’ll probably end up a billionaire—or in the electric chair. Put him in a car and he goes crazy.”
It was almost as if she were describing James Dean.
When Jimmy heard through his lover, Arthur Loew, Jr., that the role of Jett Rink “might suit you as tight as a rubber on your dick,” he rushed out and bought the paperback edition of Giant, which he read cover to cover in three days. He later told Loew, “That’s me, boy. I’m Jett Rink. If I grab that role, I can escape being typecast as a sinister adolescent.”
Loew promised to approach Stevens and to pitch him for the role of Jett. To Jimmy’s dismay, he learned that the director had already sent the script to Marlon Brando. Once again, these two Method actors would each be in consideration for the same role. Brando sent the script back, rejecting the part as “too small.”
Stevens also considered Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, Anthony Quinn, Jack Palance, and Gordon McCrae for the role of Jett.
Right before reaching his final decision, Stevens came up with the idea of putting Richard Burton into the role as a “hell-raising wildcatter” in love with Bick Benedict’s wife, Leslie.
Had Richard Burton accepted the role of Jett Rink in Giant, his affair with Elizabeth Taylor might have begun years before he co-starred with her, (as depicted above) as Marc Antony in Cleopatra.
As it turned out, Burton was not available. “It would have been a challenge to me as an actor,” he said. “Having a Welshman speak with a Texas drawl.”
[Later, after Burton learned that Elizabeth Taylor had been cast as Leslie, he ran into Stevens one night at Chasens in Los Angeles. In the men’s room, he whispered, “I’m sorry I wasn’t free to play Jett Rink. It would have given me a chance to introduce Elizabeth Taylor to my Welsh dick.]
After losing Burton for the role, Stevens offered it to Alan Ladd, who, unknown to the director at the time, was despondent to the point of suicide, and drinking heavily. He dreaded facing the camera, and was undergoing a lot of personal hell, including fear of a blackmail attempt from one of his hustler lovers, who was threatening to tell all to Confidential unless he surrendered $10,000 in cash.
“Lightning didn’t strike twice,” said Alan Ladd. He was referring to my “idiotic decision” to reject the role of Jett Rink in Giant. Ladd had scored a big hit when George Stevens cast him in the Western, Shane (see above).
Stevens had gotten along smoothly with Ladd during the filming of their 1953 blockbuster, Shane. With that in mind, he sent him the first draft of the script for Giant.
Ladd read the script that night and eagerly telephoned Stevens the next morning. “I’m your Bick Benedict!”
Stevens was aghast. He hadn’t told Ladd that he wanted him for the lesser role of Jett.
“There’s no way in hell I could make a midget like Ladd play a tall, strapping Texan,” Stevens told his aides. “Stand him on crates to make him taller?”
Stevens got back to Ladd with, “No, no, Alan, I want you to play Jett Rink!”
“I’m not going to play that shit,” Ladd said. “A flamboyantly corrupt Texas oil millionaire who begins life as a dirty little punk? Not for me, buddy.”
He hung up on Stevens, but two years later, he told a reporter, “Turning down the role that went to James Dean was one of the biggest mistakes of my career.”
What Ladd had rejected, James Stewart went for in a very big way, even though Jett Rink would be a radical departure from the good guys he usually played on screen. Perhaps that change of pace was the reason he wanted to star as Giant’s corrupt ranch hand.
Nothing illustrated “New Hollywood” vs. “Old Hollywood” better than the rivalry for roles between James Dean and James Stewart. Stevens called it “The Battle of the Two Jimmy’s.”
Stewart was pushing fifty (actually forty-seven years old) when he campaigned for the role of Jett Rink. From the beginning, Stevens didn’t want him. “If he were twenty years younger, he could have handled it with that drawl of his, his beanpole physique, and his shy, gulping manner,” Stevens said. “Being in a Western was no problem. He’d come to personify the American West as much as John Wayne. I could make a younger actor old with makeup, but there was no way I could make Stewart a young man—even with all the makeup in the world.”
“It was one of my greatest embarrassments to have to call Stewart and turn him down for the role,” Stevens said. “After all, he was one of the greatest of all screen actors. I didn’t feel so bad for him, however. After all, he’d just had a hit opposite Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).”
“I finally decided the role should go to Dean,” Sevens said. “The guy had been hounding me for days to get that juicy part. I called him to tell him to transform himself into a Texas ranger. ‘The role is yours,’ I promised him.”
Stevens believed that Jimmy would be ideal in the opening scenes, when Jett Rink was a young rancher. But since he has to age into a drunken, battered 45-year-old for the film’s final scenes, the director worried that he might not pull them off, even with heavy makeup and graying hair.
Actually, he’d been aware of Jimmy’s acting ever since he’d watched his teleplay, A Long Time Till Dawn. He told a reporter, “It was the first time that I ever watched anxiously during the credits so I could find out who this brilliant, sensitive actor was.”
After Stevens had East of Eden screened for him, he congratulated Elia Kazan. “I found the kid’s performance mesmerizing,” Stevens said. “I was sorry I lost your boy, Brando. I’d wanted him to play Jett Rink. But getting Dean might be even better.”
“Working with Jimmy will be an experience you’ll carry with you to your grave,” Kazan said. “I’ll say no more.”
—Grace Kelly to James Dean
After Jimmy agreed to play Jett, Stevens turned his attention to casting the two other leads, Bick and Leslie Benedict.
Producer Henry Ginsberg , in a phone call to Stevens, recommended Marlene Dietrich for the role.
“Are you out of your mind?” Stevens responded. “As far as it is known, Marlene was born in 1901, or maybe even in the 1890s. She’d be perfect if we adapted Leslie as a grandmother, and if we rewrote the character as a German. The answer is ‘no.’ She’s too old, and too Teutonic.”
Jennifer Jones, with the understanding that she’d have to age from a young bride to an older woman during the course of the film, was the first to personally lobby Stevens for the juicy female lead.
More than a decade before, Jones had won an Oscar for the somewhat sappy religious tear-jerker, The Song of Bernadette (1943). She promised Stevens that if he’d give her the role of Leslie Benedict, she would win another Oscar—“and put your big movie on the map.”
He thought she was “too syrupy” for the role, his mind set on Audrey Hepburn. Flying to New York in July of 1954, he visited the petite actress, who was appearing at the time on Broadway in Ondine.
Almost from the beginning, Hepburn and Stevens disagreed over the interpretation of the role. She wasn’t really interested, anyway, telling Stevens, “I hear Texans eat rattlesnake for breakfast.”
What Might Have Been: Actresses considered for the role of Leslie Benedict included TOO GLAM! Marlene Dietrich (depicted in 1951 in No Highway in the Sky; TOO PIOUS AFTER SONG OF BERNADETTE! Jennifer Jones, as she appeared with Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun (1946); and the very cosmopolitan but NOT PARTICULARLY CONVINCING AS A RANCH HAND, Audrey Hepburn.
Within a week, Hepburn was no longer in the running.
Grace Kelly in her very-fashionable, much-reviewed-by-fashion-writers black dress, as she appeared in Rear Window.
His telephone kept ringing throughout the rest of the year. He decided that Eva Marie Saint would be perfect for the role, only to learn that she was pregnant with a baby due in April.
Stevens then began to focus on Grace Kelly, who had just made such hits as Dial M For Murder (1954) with Ray Milland, and Rear Window (also 1954) with James Stewart. Her interpretation of the female lead in The Country Girl (1955) with William Holden and Bing Crosby would later be awarded with an Oscar.
Jimmy’s lover, Arthur Loew, Jr., through his direct pipeline to the executives at MGM, learned that Grace had wanted the role of Leslie so badly that she was willing to go on suspension, refusing to show up for the filming of Jeremy Rodock with the aging Spencer Tracy.
As all of this was happening, Jimmy was spending many of his nights in Nicholas Ray’s suite at the Château Marmont, a venue that was by now so familiar to him that management seemed to think he was a permanent resident.
By coincidence, he learned that Grace was living within a bungalow at the same hotel. He hadn’t seen her since their previous encounter in New York.
Ray noted a smirk on Jimmy’s face. “Don’t tell me you’ve bedded her, you little devil!”
“Something like that,” Jimmy said. “My dream might be coming true. Starring in a movie with Grace Kelly.”
The next morning found Jimmy, in a bathing suit, beside the hotel’s swimming pool, from a position with an unobstructed view of the door to Grace’s bungalow.
When she emerged from her quarters, she was putting on a pair of white gloves as she headed toward the lobby. “Hi Gracie!” Jimmy called out to her as he emerged from the pool. [“I imagined I was a male version of Esther Williams, trying to look as sexy as possible,” he later told Ray.]
She kissed him on the lips as he wrapped himself in a giant bath towel.
“Well,” he said. “What have we here? The most beautiful girl in New York is now the most gorgeous gal in Hollywood.”
“I’m glad you think so,” she said. “Now I hope the world will agree with you.”
“They will, I predict,” he said.
“I’m terribly rushed right now,” she said. “and I’m running late. Perhaps we’ll get together sometime.”
Fearing that he was losing her forever, he said, “I just heard from Arthur Loew. MGM is considering lending you out for Giant. And Stevens has more or less given me the third lead of Jett Rink.”
Grace stopped in her tracks, focusing on him with renewed interest.
“Is that so? Then by all means, we must get together. Are you free to drop by my bungalow at four tomorrow afternoon?”
“I’ll be there with my Stetson and some Texas cowboy boots,” he promised.
She gave him another gentle kiss on the lips. “I will hold my breath until you’re on my doorstep.”
Over pillow talk, late the following afternoon, she shared her anxieties with him. “I’m afraid to go on a location shoot in the Texas desert. I’m a city girl.”
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’ll have me to protect you.”
“I’ll consider that, but only on one condition,” she said.
“What might that be, princess?” he asked, ironically referring to her as “princess” long before she actually became one.
“That you don’t fall in love with me. Too many men fall in love with me.”
Over the next ten days, Jimmy paid four visits to Grace’s bungalow. Once, he invited her to lunch in the Hollywood Hills, at a restaurant with a scenic view. Although she seemed serenely cool with his driving, back at the bungalow, she admitted, “That’s the last time for that. I was terrified every time you came to a curve in the road. This psychic, Frank Andrews, once told me that I’d be killed one day in a car crash.”
Jimmy admitted to Ray, “I’ve had to deny you and everybody else sex because I’ve been saving it for Grace.”
But one afternoon, Jimmy learned that he was paying his last visit to Grace’s bungalow. She told him that she was not going to play Leslie in Giant. “MGM is not going to lend me out. Another thing, I learned that George Stevens really doesn’t want me in the role. He prefers Elizabeth Taylor.”
She went on to tell him something else. “I want you to understand,” she said. “My dance card is very full. You’re sweet, cuddly, and adorable. I’ll always have the fondest memories of you. Got to run now.” Then she gave him a gentle farewell kiss on the lips.
That night, Jimmy told Ray what had happened. He didn’t seem surprised. “I was a bit taken aback that Grace took up with you in the first place. She’s known to prefer older men. Established stars. You’re just small fry.”
“But unlike some of those grandfathers, I can always produce a reliable erection.”
The next afternoon, Jimmy, at the pool, was joined by his least favorite author, Gore Vidal. “I heard Grace has given you the brush-off.”
“You might call it that,” Jimmy said.
“Well, she’ll be doing another picture, and she’s sure to have an affair with her leading man. Just think of it: Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, William Holden, Bing Crosby, James Stewart. She refused to make a movie with Spencer Tracy, but I hear he’s fucking her anyway. Now she’s going to star in a movie with Cary Grant. Oh, did I leave out Clark Gable from Mogambo?”
As Jimmy was exiting from the pool area later that afternoon, he spotted Grace heading for her bungalow. When the face of the man who was accompanying her came into view, he recognized that it was the much married actor, David Niven.
[More than six months after Jimmy’s death, Grace abdicated her throne as Queen of Hollywood to become a mere Princess of Monaco, based on her (relentlessly publicized) marriage to Prince Rainier.
She would eventually die in a car crash at the age of fifty-two in September of 1982.]
***
During several tense weeks, Elizabeth knew that the role she coveted, that of Leslie in Giant, was almost beyond her reach. George Stevens, who had directed her so brilliantly in A Place in the Sun, “seemed to want every other actress in Hollywood, but considered me chopped liver, I guess,” Elizabeth told her husband, Michael Wilding. “But I want that part, and I’m going for it. Imagine a script that calls for me to transform myself from a beautiful young bride to a grandmother. Oscar, you’ve got Elizabeth Taylor’s name written on your ass!”
When it became clear that Grace Kelly would not be available, Elizabeth jumped with joy and headed for Benny Thau’s office to beg him to have MGM lend her services to Warner Brothers.
There was still one problem: MGM didn’t want to lend her. “I had to go on a sitdown strike…well, almost,” she said to a reporter. “Dare I say blackmail in certain quarters? No, don’t print that…it wasn’t exactly blackmail.”
Then, she engaged in a big brawl with Thau. “I think he wanted me to play Lassie’s mother—or some such shit—in a sequel.”
She finally won out, “but my bruises were black. I got no extra money. MGM took it all for the loan-out.”
When at last they become convinced that Elizabeth was the right actress for the part, the executives at Warner Brothers offered $250,000 for her services, even though her contract called for her to make only $100,000 a year from MGM at the time. MGM pocketed the difference.
***
Once she signed for the role of Leslie, Elizabeth insisted that “the only actor to play Jett Rink is Monty Clift.”
Knowing what a good actor he was, Stevens went along with her proposal until Warner’s insurance underwriters advised Jack Warner that “Clift is just too god damn risky. We won’t insure him.”
Stevens, even at this early stage in the compilation of Giant, was already hearing rumbling suspicions that Jimmy might carry some baggage with him. As expressed so colorfully by biographer David Brett: “Jimmy was already being hailed as a lost cause, a cock-hungry schizophrenic, a pre-‘Brat Pack’ prima donna, whose only truly happy, but not entirely sane moments occurred when he was creating merry hell.”
Stevens was forced to delay the filming of Giant to accommodate his three big stars. Elizabeth was pregnant; Hudson needed to finish shooting All That Heaven Allows with Jane Wyman; and Jimmy still had scenes to shoot for Rebel Without a Cause.
During his selection of candidates for the male lead, the character of Bick Benedict, Stevens was bombarded with phone calls from William Holden, Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable. At least a dozen other Hollywood males also made their voices heard.
Lying on different massage boards at their gym, John Wayne told Forrest Tucker, “I’m gonna play Bick Benedict.”
“Like hell you are,” Tucker responded, lying nude on his board. “The role calls for a big dick.” Then he ripped the towel off Wayne. “As you can plainly see, my Moby Dick is six times the size of yours.”
Sterling Hayden said: “Forrest Tucker is too drunk to play the part. I’m the right size to play Benedict . . . in all departments.”
William Holden, as the doomed writer, Joe Gillis, in the 1950 movie that made him a star, Sunset Blvd., starring Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond.
Robert Mitchum said: “I’ve practically got the role of Bick Benedict sewn up! Stevens has always had a hard-on for me. I can just see billboards across America: ROBERT MITCHUM AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR STARRING IN GIANT WITH JAMES DEAN.”
Mitchum had also been considered for the role of Jett Rink
“With a chest like I used to have, I didn’t mind going topless in a movie,” said Robert Mitchum, pictured here in the 1962 Cape Fear. “I was considered for both Jett Rink and Bick Benedict.”
Late one afternoon, a call came in from Ross Hunter, the producer of Magnificent Obsession (1954), starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. “I want you to consider Rock for this part. He’s going to become the biggest macho male star since Gable.”
Universal, however, didn’t want to lend Hudson, rushing him instead into another soapy tearjerker with Wyman, All That Heaven Allows (1955). But when it became clear that Hudson could fulfill his obligations to both films, he persuaded Warners to let him star in Giant. “I had to let a lot of guys at Universal suck my cock to get the role of Bick,” he later told Elizabeth.
Before deciding on Hudson, Stevens had more or less made up his mind that the role of Bick Benedict should go to William Holden. Hudson later recalled that on the day the announcement was made that he would be the male star of Giant, he entered the studio sauna nude, only to discover an equally nude Holden sitting on a slab of marble.
Hudson would describe the incident’s irony to Elizabeth: “Here I was, the new star of Hollywood, confronting an aging star with my better body, a bigger dick, and a more awesome presence. I felt embarrassed for Holden.”
Some Hollywood historians have suggested that the casting of Giant, more than that of any other picture, represented “a changing of the guard in Hollywood,” based on the fact that box office champions of yesterday [James Stewart, Clark Gable, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Sterling Hayden, Gary Cooper, and William Holden] were rejected in favor of new, postwar stars such as James Dean and Rock Hudson.
Newly arrived in Hollywood for the filming of The Rack [a war drama based on a play by Rod Serling and released in 1956], Paul Newman invited Jimmy for an afternoon swim at the Château Marmont. Newman was anxious to learn about how filming was progressing on Rebel Without a Cause.
Jimmy told him that Warner Brothers was cracking down on the script, especially as regards the implied homosexual attraction between his character that of Plato. “Sal and I are playing a trick on them. I told him to look at me with moonglow eyes. It’ll be obvious to audiences that he’s in love with me.”
He also claimed that he had been lobbying to get Mineo cast in the role of a Mexican soldier in Giant. “If I’m going to be shipped off to a remote outpost in Texas, I’ll need a fuckmate with me. I can’t take a chance of finding someone on the hoof there.”
“Don’t you think Sal is a bit young for you?” Newman asked.
“I take the position of the Emperor Caligula,” Jimmy answered. “As long as they’re out of the womb.”
Later, Jimmy asked him to go with him to a car race, but Newman turned him down, pleading another engagement.
“When I’m racing, it’s a more powerful thrill than any drug,” Jimmy claimed. “I feel like I’m not of this earth. I feel like a real man. I answer to no one. I’m in control of my universe.”
Newman, too, seemed intrigued by car racing, promising, “Sooner than later, I bet we’ll be racing together, maybe even competing for the gold.”
Although the two men didn’t notice her, Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, was checking into the Château Marmont with her mother, Paula.
She later recalled seeing the two actors in their bathing suits. “They both had slender bodies, not beefed up, but perfect in every way, like Michelangelo’s David. They had thick hair, Paul’s being wavier. Paul had this habit of touching his finger to his nose when talk got a little rough. I saw him do that a lot at the Actors Studio. Lying on a pad side by side, they were the epitome of male beauty. I understood why men turn gay. Each of them could have posed for a Renaissance painter, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, not just Michelangelo.”
The next weekend, Newman did agree to drive down the Pacific coast for a weekend at a roadside motel outside Laguna Beach. After a night of heavy drinking, they went back to their motel and fell into bed together, too tired to make love. As Jimmy would later tell Nicholas Ray, “We were too exhausted and too intoxicated that night, but came the rosy glow of dawn, we made up for it.”
Ex-con and bisexual, Rory Calhoun, depicted above, was sacrified and savaged by Confidential magazine and a conspiracy of Hollywood agents and casting directors.
Over lunch that day, Jimmy promised Newman that, “I’m going to do everything in my power to get you cast as Bick Benedict in Giant. We didn’t get to work together in East of Eden, but the two of us will be dynamite on the screen together. Both of us can take turns fucking Elizabeth Taylor.”
“I don’t understand,” Newman said. “I’ve heard that George Stevens has already cast Rock Hudson.”
As a western star, Paul Newman survived his rejection for the role of Bick Benedict in Giant, moving on to play the male lead in Hud, depicted above.
“Don’t let that worry you,” Jimmy said. “The shit’s about to hit the fan. I’ve heard that Confidential has been on Rock’s tail for some time. They’re going to expose him as a homo. Rock is certain to be fired from Giant before shooting begins. It’s all over for him. The part will make your career after that Silver Chalice shit.”
[At the last minute, Henry Willson, Hudson’s agent, made a deal to expose (and sacrifice) another of his stars, Rory Calhoun, in lieu of his bigger, more profitable client, Rock Hudson. Consequently, it was revealed that Calhoun had spent time in prison years before becoming a Hollywood star.
Hudson stayed in the cast of Giant, and Newman went on to star in the boxing saga, Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), cast as Rocky Graziano. The role had been earmarked for Jimmy, but his fatal car crash abruptly ended that dream.]
The sixteen-year-old actress, Susan Strasberg, had long admired James Dean. In her memoirs, Bittersweet, published in 1980, she wrote: “He fascinated me. He epitomized an iconoclastic approach to life, opposed to the more measured, intellectual cadences I was accustomed to.”
She also said that during her stay at the Château Marmont, “Nick Ray, Jimmy, my mother, Paula, and I used to go out for dinner. Jimmy borrowed one of Nick’s jackets, which made him look like a little boy dressed in his father’s clothes.”
Soon, Jimmy and Susan were dating without their chaperones. The Hollywood Reporter took notice. “James Dean courts Susan Strasberg in jeans, a dirty pair at that, a leather jacket, and scruffy cowboy boots. Susan is as happy as if he had dressed in a tuxedo.”
The couple were seen at dives on Sunset Strip.
She was in Hollywood because Vincente Minnelli had cast her in The Cobweb (1955), which Jimmy was to have starred in. His role went to John Kerr, his rival and former lover. The other stars included Charles Boyer, Richard Widmark, Lillian Gish, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Grahame, and Oscar Levant, who had become Jimmy’s friend.
Jimmy was anxious to learn how the shoot was going.
Susan claimed, “I’m cast as a hypersensitive, paranoid teenager. Call it type casting.”
One morning, Susan introduced Jimmy to the former silent screen great, Lillian Gish. He told her that he’d once appeared in a teleplay with her sister, Dorothy.
“Of course you did, my dear,” Gish responded. “I was offered the role, but turned it down. When it was shown on television, I had another engagement.”
Two days later, Susan claimed that she had one big scene in The Cobweb. “I was a nervous wreck. I went out to take a breath of fresh air. As I was standing there, gasping for breath, Jimmy roared up on his motorcycle.”
“I came to take you for a ride,” he said. “Hop on!”
“I can’t leave. I’m due back on the set in a little while.”
“It won’t take that long,” he said. “It’ll relax you.”
“I really want to,” she said, “but I don’t know.”
“Then shit, do it!” he commanded. “C’mon!”
She later recalled, “I wasn’t used to hearing the word shit used around my family.”
Soon, she was on the cycle behind him, holding on for life. “The wind whipped my hair over my face, stinging me. I leaned closer, my face buried in his leather jacket.”
The next morning, Jimmy awakened early and paraded out from Ray’s suite in his briefs, jumping into the pool, perhaps hoping it would wake him up.
He became aware that there was another swimmer in the water. When her head surfaced, he realized he was staring into the face of Greta Garbo. He’d heard from Ray that she was in residence at the Château Marmont, occupying one of the penthouses.
“Morning,” he called to her. “I’m Jimmy Dean.”
“And I’m Harriet Brown,” she said, rather coldly, swimming away.
“That was the extent of my conversation with Miss Garbo,” he later told Ray.
***
For reasons rather obvious, Susan left out the behind-the-scenes details of her brief fling with James Dean.
Years later, in New York in the 1970s, Darwin Porter escorted her to a number of gala events, often followed by dinner at Joe Allen’s, where she preferred to go.
Gradually, she confided in him why she couldn’t write about her brief affair with Jimmy. She relayed how he took her to his rental property that looked like a hunting lodge, in the Hollywood Hills. “He took my virginity. I didn’t like it. Messy stuff, but he told me that the next time would be easier, smoother, and better.”
“He was right. I almost fell in love with him before he disappeared from my life. As the weeks went by, and he was away making Giant, I became pregnant. My mother denounced me and threatened to have Jimmy killed. She told me that my father must not find out. Vincente Minnelli knew this doctor. I had an abortion. Lee never found out.”
Many biographers have assumed it was lyricist Richard Adler who took Susan’s virginity. “I misled them. I told them that Richard was my first love affair. There’s a difference between a love affair and losing your virginity. After Jimmy, there were so many other men—Cary Grant, Richard Burton, Warren Beatty, even Marcello Mastroianni.”
Ten years after her seduction by Jimmy, Susan married actor Christopher Jones. Six months later, she gave birth to his child, Jennifer Robin. Ironically, Jones had long ago been labeled as “The New James Dean.”
In Bittersweet, she quoted Jones’ opinion of Jimmy.
“He was a great actor. A fucking saint. That’s why he had to die so young.”
“Chris was more obsessed with Jimmy than I was. In his private little study, he had at least six pictures of Jimmy on the wall. He looked more like Jimmy than all the other imposters wanting to carry Jimmy’s banner after his death. Chris wore his rebel badge with pride, and, like Jimmy, was a war with society. He started out with such promise. But there was this damn thing called drugs.”
“As the years have gone by, I’ve had two regrets. First, I didn’t have Jimmy’s kid. I was also up for the Luz Benedict II in Giant. For a while, I thought I had it wrapped up. I was looking forward to going on location with Jimmy. The last time I saw him, he dropped by our bungalow. One of my saddest moments was when he told me the role I had coveted had gone to Carroll Baker.”
—James Dean
Ramon Novarro, the Mexican-American actor once promoted by MGM as the greatest Latin Lover of the Silent Screen, attempted to come out of retirement to play a minor role in Giant, that of an itinerant rancher, “Old Polo.” He had thrilled audiences in the 1920s, reaching the peak of his fame in Ben Hur (released in 1925).
At a luncheon in the Warners commissary, director George Stevens introduced Novarro to Jimmy. The long-faded matinee idol “wanted desperately to meet this Jimmy boy.”
After a quick drink, Stevens departed, leaving the two actors, one from yesterday, one of them contemporary, to talk privately.
Mexican-American silent film star Ramon Novarro. “I was a bathing suit beauty,” he said.
Judging from his references, Novarro had heard that Jimmy was gay, and he wanted to share some advice about how a studio was likely to handle, if necessary, the possibility of a gay actor’s exposure.
During Novarro’s heyday, Louis B. Mayer, the MGM mogul, had wanted him to enter into what was known as a “lavender marriage” as a vehicle that might squash rumors that he was gay. “He tried to force me into a loveless marriage, but I refused, even when he told me he’d line me up with a lesbian star at MGM. He did not name her. I think it might have been Nazimova.”
“I stubbornly refused. I’ve heard that such a marriage is now being forced upon Rock Hudson.”
The lunch went quickly, but Jimmy was not turned on by Novarro’s adoration, especially when he told him, “I like to enjoy young men, such as yourself, who reward me with their honey.” Then he invited Jimmy to visit him at his residence that evening at eight o’clock.
Jimmy agreed, writing down Novarro’s contact information.
Ramon Novarro as Ben-Hur in 1925. Both he and James Dean had only one thing in common: Each of them would meet violent deaths.
Escorting the aging actor to his car, Jimmy gave him a passionate kiss on the lips, telling him, “I can’t wait. I won’t wear underwear.”
Apparently, Novarro was waiting at his home at eight o’clock and beyond. Surely by midnight, he’d realized that Jimmy had been putting him on, with no intention of ever showing up.
Jimmy later told Stevens about Novarro’s come-on.
“You shouldn’t play games with an old queen,” Stevens chastised him. “He was a big star worthy of respect. Didn’t you see Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd.? One day you, too, may be a fading star being humiliated by young men. However, in your case, maybe not. You might not live that long.”
To add insult to his injury, Stevens had to call Novarro later that afternoon to inform him that he’d decided to give the role of Old Polo to character actor Alexander Scourby.
[On October 30, 1968, Novarro picked up two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, thinking they were hustlers with whom he could have sex for pay. However, they had another motive in mind. Someone had told them that the fading star kept a huge stash of money at his home.
As the evening progressed, Novarro wanted them to come into his bedroom one by one to extract their “honey.” Paul had another plan: He and his brother tortured Novarro for several hours, trying to get him to reveal where the loot was hidden, but there was no stash of money in the house. The brothers had been misinformed.
After the two perpetrators left the building, Novarro died of asphyxiation, choking on a mixture of his own vomit and blood.
The Ferguson brothers were later caught and sentenced to long prison terms, but released on probation in the mid-1970s. They were later sent back to prison on unrelated crimes.
After his final release, Tom committed suicide in 2005 by cutting his throat in a Motel 6.]
Susan Strasberg and Ramon Novarro were not the only actors rejected for lesser roles in Giant. Two of the most talented actresses in the entertainment industry were also turned down.
Stevens had long been fascinated by the acting skills of British star Angela Lansbury, who had fled the London Blitz to come to America in 1940. He first saw her in Gaslight (1944), in which, at the age of eighteen, she had played a cockney maid, adding spunk to this film with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. She won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in her American debut. Amazingly, she was also nominated the following year for Best Supporting Actress. She was cast as Sibyl Vane, the music hall singer in the adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).
For a while, Stevens thought she might play Rock Hudson’s butch sister, Luz Benedict. He finally decided, however, that in spite of her talent, she would not be convincing “as a Texas broad.” Instead, he opted for Mercedes McCambridge, figuring that she was more “dyke-like,” citing her performance opposite Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1954).
After that, still intrigued with her potential, he considered her for the lesser role of Vashti Snythe, a plump, uncouth heiress, but eventually assigned it to Jane Withers instead.
After her second rejection, with a touch of bitterness, Lansbury was quoted as saying, “I thought in America it was three strikes and you’re out, not two strikes.”
For a brief time, Stevens considered casting one of the most talented Puerto Ricans, Rita Moreno, in the role of Juana, a Mexican girl who marries Dennis Hopper, son of Bick and Leslie Benedict. But at the last minute, he opted for the beautiful Mexican actress, Elsa Cárdenas, instead.
Angela Lansbury...Not butch enough.
[Actually, the role was too small for a performer of Moreno’s talent. She would go on to win all four major American entertainment awards, including an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, and an Emmy.]
Joan Collins, the sultry British brunette, was also under consideration by Stevens for a role in Giant, mainly as a backup possibility in the event something happened to Elizabeth Taylor that prevented her from performing her duties.
When Elizabeth came through, the offer was never pitched to Collins. Ironically, she later became the bewigged, bejeweled, bitch goddess of the hit TV series, Dynasty (1981-89), which—along with its competitor, Dallas (1978-91)—were said to have been inspired by Giant.
Joan Collins was considered as an alternative choice to star in two of Elizabeth Taylor’s most famous movies: Giant and Cleopatra.
Collins met Jimmy at a small dinner party in the San Fernando Valley. He later said, “I was with Ursula Andress that night, but I found Joan a hot little number. I staked her out for a big seduction in my immediate future.”
He never revealed if he fulfilled his sexual fantasy with Collins.
Collins remembered him in one of her memoirs: “He was intense, moody, and had incredible charisma. He was short, myopic, not good looking in life, really. You know who he was like? A young, better-looking Woody Allen. He had the same qualities of shyness, uncertainty, and insecurity.”
“I was particularly energized by his eyes, which were a deep, piercing blue and could change instantly from a look of sullen brooding to an expression of extreme mischievousness. He was quite short for a film actor and had longish, blonde, wavy hair.”
***
At long last, Stevens rounded up what he called his “Texas posse,” with supporting roles going to Mercedes McCambridge, Carroll Baker, Jane Withers, Chill Wills, Nick Adams, Dennis Hopper, Rodney Taylor, Earl Holliman, and Sal Mineo. Mineo told his gay friends, “With Hudson and Dean in the cast, I expect to get my ass pounded a lot.”
Warner Brothers summoned a press conference to introduce the stars of its upcoming Texas saga to reporters.
Jimmy was the last to arrive, appearing in a threadbare red flannel shirt, tattered boots, dirty blue jeans, a Stetson, and a large silver buckle on a cowhide belt that he claimed had once belonged to Roy Rogers. A cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth, and he wore very dark sunglasses which he refused to take off for reporters. He claimed, “I had a hell of a fucking night, and I’ve got bags under my eyes.”
When Jimmy was introduced to Elizabeth Taylor, he was rude to her. He had a good reason to dislike her. She was still demanding that Stevens replace him with Montgomery Clift in the role of Jett Rink.
Leonard Rosenman, the composer of the musical scores for both East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, and who had been Jimmy’s sometimes lover back in New York, had not been able to get him on the phone in Hollywood. He decided to show up at the press conference, hoping to get a chance for a conversation. He wanted Jimmy to recommend him to George Stevens as a composer for Giant.
“I was shocked,” he later said. “Jimmy practically didn’t even acknowledge me. We’d never had an argument. But it was like he didn’t even know me, and I had been one of his best friends.”
“He told me he could not recommend me as a candidate for the composition of music for Giant. Dimitri Tijomkin got the job. I sensed that Jimmy had really changed, not gone Hollywood exactly. But he had become a big star—at least he was acting like one.”
“He claimed he hated Hollywood and detested the press conference, but the fucker actually got off on all the attention.”
“It’s like this,” Rosenman said. “In the land of the blind, even a one-eyed king stands out. In Hollywood, Dean could stand out as a New York intellectual, a regular Arthur Miller. After all, what was his competition? Bimbo starlets and directors and producers who used to be gas jockeys filling up your tank, or else attendants in wash rooms handing out towels.”
During the last month of his life, Jimmy was the most sought-after actor in Hollywood. Virtually every major studio wanted to cast him in some film, but in almost every case, Jack Warner was unwilling to lend out his most prestigious star. Some examples of the many offers swirling around him are elucidated below:
***
Both Marlon Brando and Jimmy were seen together one night at the Villa Capri, sharing a table and talking about the 1954 release of The Egyptian. Brando had turned down the role before it was sent to Jimmy, who also rejected it. The role was that of Sinuhe, a physician in the ancient Egyptian court, who sustains an affair with one of the Pharoah’s mistresses.
In this intimate scene from Giant, Jett Rink (Dean) is secretly in love with Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), who is married to his boss, Bick Benedict. He conveys his longing for her with his eyes.
Director Michael Curtiz cast Edmund Purdom instead. In the final version, he appeared opposite Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Gene Tierney, and Peter Ustinov.
***
Producer Lew Kerner wanted Jimmy to play the title role of Studs Lonigan. Its script would be based on the trilogy of Studs Lonigan novels by James T. Farrell, which today are ranked by Modern Library as one of the one hundred best English language novels of the 20th Century.
At the time of the Great Depression, Farrell set out to expose the evils of capitalism. Studs deteriorates from a tough, adventurous teenager to an embittered, physically shattered alcoholic.
During Jimmy’s short lifetime, the project never got off the ground, but in 1960, it was adapted into a minor movie featuring a young Jack Nicholson in one of his first film roles. In 1979, it was adapted once again into a TV series starring Harry Hamlin.
***
Billy Wilder wanted Jimmy to play the aviator Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis, set for release in 1957. The script was to depict the thirty-three hour transatlantic flight of the young aviator in his monoplane crossing the Atlantic. Setting a world’s record, he landed at Le Bourget in Paris on May 21, 1927, when it seemed that most of Paris turned out to give him a tumultuous welcome.
Even though he was the right age to play Lindbergh, and vaguely resembled him, Jimmy rejected the role.
At the time, although he was forty-seven years old, and Lindbergh at the time of his crossing was twenty-five, James Stewart was also vigorously campaigning for the role. He went on a diet, dyed his hair, and worked out every day, trying to beef up his beanpole physique.
In this still from The Spirit of St. Louis, a “too old for the part” James Stewart impersonates the twenty-something Charles Lindbergh in a role originally rejected by James Dean.
Jimmy had objected to the script because he wanted more spice in it. He wished to insert a scene showing Lindbergh picking up a waitress in a diner to seduce her before taking off from New Jersey. “It might have been his last chance for a good fuck,” Jimmy told Wilder.
He also wanted some scenes of a younger Lindbergh in flashbacks, before any footage depicting his transatlantic success, as well as an overview of his reaction to the kidnapping of his child in 1932.
“The audience has to understand the character,” Jimmy lectured Wilder, “or else I’ll be reduced to looking out at the clouds until I get to Paris.”
He later said, “I just couldn’t see myself sitting up there for thirty-three hours in that airplane, pissing in a jar.”
[If circumstances had been different, Stewart and Jimmy might have worked together on the same film, East of Eden. For a while, Elia Kazan considered casting the veteran actor in the role of Jimmy’s stern, puritanical father. But the role went to the more suitably cast Raymond Massey. Jimmy told Kazan, “Stewart is too lovable a character to play the mean father role.]
Wilder briefly considered casting Jimmy’s rival, John Kerr, in the role before finally giving in to Stewart. Upon its release, The Spirit of St. Louis—made for $6 million—was massively promoted as the saga of a hero who became the first person in history who was in New Jersey one day and in Paris the next. In spite of the hype, the movie failed at the box office, although some critics cited Stewart’s “boyishness.”
***
Jimmy was shopping around for a heroic sports hero to show his versatility. He had agreed to star as Rocky Graziano in the boxing film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, but died before the picture was made. In the aftermath, the role went to Paul Newman.
***
Jimmy also gave serious consideration to starring in Fear Strikes Out, the story of the mentally disturbed baseball player, Jim Piersall, who cracked under the pressure of a domineering father. Piersall was the baseball center fielder who played seventeen seasons in the Major League from 1950 to 1967.
Tony Perkins, as an emotionally unbalanced baseball player, a role rejected by James Dean, in Fear Strikes Out.
The movie would deal with the baseball great’s bipolar disorder, not a subject guaranteed to lure 1950s audiences to their local movie houses. In 1957, the role went to Tony Perkins, Jimmy’s rival and sometimes lover, still being billed as “The New James Dean.”
***
After Giant, Jimmy didn’t want to be cast in another Western, although he was vastly intrigued at the thought of playing Billy the Kid, which had been brought to the screen many times, even by Robert Taylor. Instead of some idolized figure from the Old West, Jimmy wanted to play him as a baby-faced, cold-blooded killer.
At the Château Marmont, Gore Vidal told him that he was working on a very different script. All of his reading about Billy the Kid had convinced him that the bandit was a homosexual.
Paul Newman in a role offered to but rejected by James Dean, The Left Handed Gun.
Once again, Jimmy’s death would prevent him from taking a role he truly wanted to play. And once again, the role went to Paul Newman. Word buzzed around Hollywood that Newman was going to “play Gore Vidal’s fag cowboy.”
Newman seemingly went through very few struggles about playing a subtly gay role. He once said, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve never been able to understand attacks on the gay community.”
Even Vidal’s title, The Left Handed Gun, was a code for being gay. [The historical figure of Billy the Kid, born Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney (1859 – 1881), was actually right-handed.]
Jack Warner objected to Vidal’s script. “When movie-goers hear that Newman is going gay, they’ll stay away from the theaters in droves.”
Leslie A Stevens III was called in to revise Vidal’s script, turning Billy the Kid from a repressed homosexual into more of a surrogate father-son drama with a Freudian subtext.
Newman later referred to the revised version, released in 1958, as “The Left Handed Jockstrap.”
Arthur Penn, a young Turk from TV land, directed the picture. He later claimed that “Paul Method-acted his way through the entire film. At one point, he curls up in a ball on the floor, a scene and acting style that was pure James Dean.”
Newman confided to Fred Coe, the producer, “I feel Dean could have done a better job than me. That thought is driving me crazy, leading to an extra three beers every night.”
Born in 1885 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist and playwright, author of such celebrated works as So Big (1924); Show Boat (1926), Cimarron (1929), and Giant (1952). The daughter of a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, she was a lesbian who never married.
Edna Ferber with James Dean, unconvincingly made up to resemble an aging Jett Rink. Note his new hairline.
Ivan Moffat and Fred Guiol were assigned the difficult task of reducing her 447-page novel into a 178-page script, which they completed in April of 1955.
Before tackling it, they read various comments from critics about her novel. John Barkham in The New York Times noted, “Miss Ferber makes it very clear she doesn’t like the Texas she writes about, and it’s a cinch that when Texans read about what she has written about them, they won’t like her either.”
Marghanita Laski in the Spectator claimed that “Edna Ferber can always be relied on for a good story interwoven with fascinating information and sound moral judgments on the shortcomings as well as the virtues of her country and its history.”
Moffat was a British screenwriter and the grandson of the famous Edwardian actor and theatrical producer, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917). [A brilliant actor long associated with London’s Haymarket Theatre, and an influential visionary in the entertainment industry of his day, he arranged some of the first filmed versions of segments of Shakespearean plays.]
As such, Moffat was an odd choice as author of a screenplay about Texas. He’d met George Stevens in World War II during his filming of the activities of the U.S. Army in Europe. After the war, Moffat followed Stevens to Hollywood, assisting him at Paramount.
There, he became known for his high-profile affairs, notably with Elizabeth Taylor and later with Lady Caroline Blackwood. His gay friend, author Christopher Isherwood, said, “He’s so pretty and bright-eyed, it’s no wonder he’s in bed with some woman every night.”
Another odd choice to adapt Ferber to the screen was Guiol, who had worked at the Hal Roach Studios for several years and was known for directing many of the Laurel and Hardy movies. Although a sort of “odd couple” writing team, Moffat and Guiol would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay of 1955.
Although many films had already been adapted from novels by Edna Ferber, the first time she actually visited a movie set was in Marfa, Texas.
She arrived there in time to see Elizabeth emoting in front of the camera. She later interpreted that day’s depiction of Leslie as “simpering.” When the completed film was finally released, she did not approve of her, but kept quiet, because her contract called for her to share in the profits.
During Ferber’s second day on the set, she met Jimmy. In a memoir, A Kind of Magic, she wrote: “He was an original. Impish, compelling, magnetic, utterly winning one moment, obnoxious the next. Definitely gifted, frequently maddening.”
She sized him up, telling him, “Your profile is startlingly like that of John Barrymore, but then, I know your motorcycle racing or one thing or another will fix that.”
Before she flew out of Texas, Jimmy took a picture of her. Days before he died, he was working on a sculpture of her back at his studio in Hollywood.
***
Just an hour after completing his post-recording of Rebel Without a Cause, Jimmy, in early June of 1955, was aboard a train headed to Marfa in the high desert of the Trans-Pecos of West Texas. Founded in the early 1880s as a waterstop, the bleak little outpost was located between the Davis mountain range and Big Bend National Park.
The Benedict Mansion, a studio prop, under construction on the Evans Ranch in Marfa.
What he found when he got there was a drought-stricken town where daytime temperatures sometimes rose to 120° F. It was a three-hour drive from El Paso, and some sixty miles north of the Mexican border.
The cast and crew of Giant had swelled the population of Marfa to 3,000. Many locals rented their homes to them and camped out in tents during the filming.
On Main Street stood one hotel and two movie houses, each showing Mexican films. Technicians had produced the façade of a three-story Victorian mansion, the abode of the Benedicts. It had been built in Burbank and shipped east to Texas. Since Marfa lies in a part of West Texas without oil wells, Warners had to erect derricks that gushed ersatz crude.
George Stevens set about creating harmony in the town by employing some 200 locals, thereby easing tensions between the town and its invaders. The local newspaper, The Big Sentinel, had denounced Ferber’s novel, defining it as “superficial and derogatory to Texans.”
For the big barbecue scene, Stevens invited a lot of Texas millionaires to participate, winning their support, since they wanted to see themselves in the film, not realizing that it was mocking and satirizing them.
One of the cast members, crusty Chill Wills, knew Marfa well, having made a film there in 1950 called High Lonesome, in which he co-starred with John Drew Barrymore.
During the course of Giant’s 198 minutes, it moves through the rise and failing fortunes of Texans, with side detours into moral dissipation, racism, miscegenation, the oppression of women, oil well conflicts, and the changing social scenario of Texas itself. The movie’s subplot involves the war between the longtime Texas aristocracy and the nouveau riche wildcatters whose oil wells have “come in big.”
For Elizabeth, after suffering through all those “rubbish” movies at MGM, Giant became a milestone in her life. Other than being saddled with a husband she didn’t want, her biggest problem involved having to postpone her flourishing romance with Kevin McClory, a production assistant to Mike Todd, who would become her next husband.
—Director George Stevens, in reference to James Dean
Ever since he’d seen A Place in the Sun (1951), with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy had nothing but praise for Stevens, its director. Before heading for Texas, he told the press: “George Stevens is the greatest director of them all, even better than Elia Kazan. He was born to make movies. Hollywood can, on occasion, make a great movie. I have a feeling that Giant will be up there with the best of them.”
[Alas, after the first week of working with Stevens, he would have a radically different opinion.]
“Stevens is so real, so unassuming,” Jimmy went on. “You’ll be talking to him, thinking he missed your point and then—bang!—he has it.”
For the first two weeks of shooting, the location was in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Bick (Rock Hudson) meets and falls in love with his future bride, Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). Jimmy stayed behind in Texas, working with Bob Hinkle, his dialogue coach. Hinkle was also teaching him rope tricks.
In just two weeks, Jimmy seemed to have mastered the Texas drawl and its “lock-hipped swagger of a wrangler.” On weekends, he and Hinkle headed for the enveloping desert to shoot jack rabbits and coyotes.
Pat Hinkle taught Jimmy how to walk and talk, Texan style.
Nicknamed “Texas Bob,” Hinkle had grown up in Brownsville, Texas, at the state’s southernmost tip. “We were so poor, we could afford only a tumbleweed for a pet,” Hinkle claimed. Early stints in show business had included gigs as a rodeo rider and a diction coach. During the course of the shooting, he trained not only Jimmy, but Rock Hudson in the subtleties of portraying a “Texan.”
For some fifty years, Hinkle remained active in show business as a diction coach, a director, a friend of movie stars, and occasionally, a film producer. In 1963, Paul Newman asked him “to do for me what you did for Dean in Giant.” At the time, Newman was preparing for his award-winning role in Hud, co-starring with Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas.
After his return from filming the Maryland (as shot in Virginia) segments of Giant, Stevens learned that Jimmy had slipped away and had competed in a racecar rally in Bakersfield, California. In that race, Jack Drummond, a thirty-year-old ace driver, had been killed.
Horrified at the implications of that, Stevens demanded that Jimmy “Give up car racing until this picture is wrapped. Then you can kill your fool self.”
“I don’t have a death wish,” Jimmy protested. “I’m not risking my life, since I have too much to live for. There are too many things I want to do in this one life.”
Before Giant, Stevens had worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year (1942); with Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Talk of the Town (also 1942); and Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in Shane (1953).
Stevens was well acquainted with Elizabeth, having directed her in 1951’s A Place in the Sun, but he’d never helmed Hudson or Jimmy. He found Hudson relatively compliant, “always on the mark, always knowing his dialogue, and carrying out my instructions perfectly.”
In contrast, he found his working relationship with Jimmy much more difficult, defining it as a “rapport of challenge.”
Stevens was a perfectionist, demanding that a small scene be reshot sometimes as many as fifty times. Several times, Jimmy shouted back at him, “I got the god damn thing right on the first take.”
[Weeks later, when Stevens was editing the final version, he realized that he’d shot 25,000 feet of film, and used only 7,500 feet of it, ultimately producing a movie with a running time of 198 minutes.
In a memo to Jack Warner, Stevens complained about Jimmy, citing his “tardiness, his unmanageableness, his soaring resistance to reasonable demands, differing from what I have in mind, and his depleting the morale of the entire company. My impression is that is a George Stevens Production, not a James Dean Production.”
In protest, Jimmy said, “I can’t get my ideas of Jett Rink over to Stevens. I know Jett better than Stevens does. He just won’t listen to me. He’s trying to keep me from making a truly great picture instead of a mediocre Western.”
“The cocky little bastard accuses me of interfering with his work,” Stevens claimed. “I accuse him of jeopardizing my movie. I’m the son of a bitch running this show, not some snot-nosed cocksucker from Indiana who takes it up the ass.”
Eartha Kitt remembered desperate phone calls from Marfa during the wee hours of the morning. “Jamie sounded like he was going out of his mind. He felt that Stevens was sacrificing his character and devoting all his attention to Rock Hudson or to Elizabeth Taylor, who had star billing over him.”
“He told me that Giant was too big in an artificial way,” Stevens said. “He wanted his interpretation as an old man to be quite different from what it was turning out to be.”
It would have been interesting to view an aging Jett Rink the way Jimmy wanted to play him. As it turned out, his interpretation of Jett Rink as a drunken senior citizen was his weakest characterization, eliciting the harshest criticism.
During another call, Jimmy complained to Eartha about Hudson. “How can I create a character working with someone so plastic? I feel nothing from him. I also have no support from Elizabeth in her later incarnation as she’s maturing. They are not maturing with me. They are the same from beginning to end; only their hair has been grayed. You can’t be an old person by aging your face with makeup and by putting some gray stripes in your hair. You have to imagine old. You have to become old.”
***
After the first two weeks of filming, Stevens said, “Dean never understands that Jett Rink is only part of the film, not the central figure. In his first two movies, he was the primary focus. But I have two other stars: Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.”
When Stevens attacked Jimmy’s performance in front of cast and crew, the actor became very sullen, addressing the director as “Fatso.” He also began to show up late, once going an entire day without making an appearance and holding up production which, of course, ran up costs for Warners.
Reflecting later on the turmoil he suffered from Jimmy, Stevens said, “All in all, it was a headache to work with him. He was always pulling and hauling, and he had developed this cultivated, designed irresponsibility. It’s tough on you, he seemed to imply, but I’ve got to do it my way. From the director’s point of view, this is not the most delightful sort of fellow to work with. Anyway, he delivered his performance, and he cracked himself up, and I can’t say I’m happy about all that’s happening about that. There are some people involved in it who don’t show up well.”
[When Stevens saw the final cut of Giant, he said, “I made the right decision in casting Dean, the little bastard, as Jett Rink. But he’ll never appear in another picture that I’ll direct.]
—James Dean
Because of the severe housing shortage in Marfa, only a few members of the cast were granted the privilege of living alone, privately and without roommates, in a house of their own. The best of the rented homes went to Elizabeth Taylor. Her husband, Michael Wilding, remained, for the most part, in California with their children.
Jimmy was assigned lodgings in a rented house that he shared with Rock Hudson and Chill Wills. Wills had his own bedroom, and Hudson and Jimmy would sleep in a small room with twin beds. The building’s only bathroom was shared by all three of them.
When Jimmy arrived there, he introduced himself to Wills, who invited him for a beer in the kitchen. He wasn’t familiar with the career of this actor and set out to learn what he could.
The folksy, shaggy-haired actor had gotten his start singing in medicine and minstrel shows before abandoning them and heading to Hollywood.
Soon, he was appearing as a sidekick cowboy in Westerns or else as a backwoods rustic equivalent to the role he’d been assigned in The Yearling (1946) with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. That same year, he appeared as a roughshod but good-natured “diamond in the rough” with Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls.
Chill Wills in 1953. He was the roommate of Rock Hudson and James Dean in shared quarters in Marfa, Texas. “I heard a lot...a hell of a lot.” Later, he took Jimmy and Dennis Hopper “on a jaybird naked cruise off the coast of Catalina.”
[He would go on to become the voice of Francis, the Talking Mule, in that series of pictures starring Donald O’Connor. Our favorite? Francis Joins the WACs (1954).]
In his raspy, homespun voice, Wills enthralled Jimmy with tales of growing up in Texas, the effect of which deepened his understanding of the character he was playing.
As they talked, Jimmy felt he was getting close to understanding the mentality of a dyed-in-the-wool Texan. Wills had been born in Seagoville (now a suburb of Dallas) in the hot summer of 1903. His views had never changed from those learned growing up. As Jimmy later said, “I liked him for some strange reason, but he was to the right of Joseph Goebbels, hating what he called ‘niggers, Mexicans, Hollywood Jews, and Indians.’”
[In spite of their deeply divided views of the world, some sort of bond was formed. “He is about the most amusing old redneck I’ve ever met,” Jimmy later said.
In fact, back in Hollywood, Wills invited Jimmy and Dennis Hopper for a weekend of charter fishing off the coast of Catalina Island. “During our sail, those two boys, out at sea, walked around jaybird naked. By the time it came for them to retreat to their bunks at night, I was too drunk to care what they were up to. I retreated to my own cabin to sleep it off.]
Wills would later describe to Forrest Tucker and John Wayne, among others, what it was like living in small quarters with James Dean and Rock Hudson. “The walls were paper thin. For the first week or so, those two pretty boys were as happy as a pig in shit. Those creaky bedsprings got a lot of workout.”
[In 1987, Elizabeth Taylor told Star magazine that, “In the beginning, I thought Rock and Jimmy were two lovebirds. When I was with the both of them, I felt like an uncomfortable third party. But that was to change very soon.]
“Jimmy and Rock were two such very different kind of men and polar opposites as actors,” she said.” It seemed inevitable that their fucking would soon turn to feuding. It was a short honeymoon before war was declared. Jimmy moved out.”
On the day he left, he told Wills, “Hudson is trying to queer me and make me his bitch. My ass is sore. He’s too big.”
Jimmy may have resented the enormous buildup that Warners was giving Hudson. One press release trumpeted, “The prize acting plum of the year, one which has often been reported in the grasp of a number of Hollywood’s top male stars, goes to a dark horse who has never once been mentioned in the spirited competition. Hudson will be co-starring with the beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, with newcomer James Dean in a small supporting role.”
Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson as man and wife in Texas. For a brief time, they were also off-screen lovers. Later in life, a drunken Elizabeth once said, “Occasionally, Rock delivered a mercy fuck to a woman.”
Jimmy almost detested Stevens on sight, but Hudson seemed to adore him. Or, as Jimmy said, “He follows Stevens around like a lovesick puppy.”
During their filming of Giant, Rock appeared on the cover of Life magazine, headlined as “Hollywood’s Most Handsome Bachelor.”
Life speculated about why the twenty-nine-year-old had never gotten married, telling its readers that it was about time he explained to his fans why.
The very urbane, very handsome, very charming Rock Hudson
At times, Jimmy found Rock very troubled. Somehow, a blackmailer had obtained sexually explicit photographs of him and was demanding a lot of money, more than Hudson had.
Jimmy and Hudson had completely different approaches to acting. Jimmy was from the Marlon Brando/ Monty Clift/ Rod Steiger/ Eli Wallach school of (Method) acting, and Hudson was from the “erotic hunk of beefcake academy” whose members also included Tab Hunter, John Derek, and Guy Madison.
When Jimmy was forced to act out a scene with Hudson, he referred to his colleague as “a lump of dead wood.” In retaliation, Hudson called Jimmy “that little scruff.”
When Hudson got to know Elizabeth more intimately, he confessed to her, “I want sex, real man-on-man sex, but I don’t go in for this kinky stuff. Dean wants to get into that claw-footed, old timey bathtub we have, and then he begs me to piss on him. He also likes me to burn his ass with my cigarette butt—shit like that. I’m not into all this sicko crap.”
Hudson would later tell Elizabeth, “Dean is the kind of guy who could make mad, passionate love with you one minute. Then, after he shoots off, he starts complaining about your acting. It’s amazing.”
The former child star, Jane Withers, was cast as a nouveau riche oil heiress, Vashti Snythe, in Giant, a role that several other aging actresses also wanted. On screen, Jimmy eyes her skeptically, but off-screen, she became his “mother confessor.”
***
Instead of spending time with Hudson, Jimmy bonded with Jane Withers. She had beat out more established stars to get the role in Giant of Vashti Snythe. Withers had worked as a child actress since the age of three. Less than a decade later, at the age of eleven and twelve, she emerged as one of Hollywood’s top box office stars of 1937 and 1938.
At the time that Jimmy met her, she was divorcing a rich Texas oilman, William P. Moss, Jr., with whom she had produced three children.
[Oddly enough, her greatest fame would come in the 1960s and early 70s, based on her TV commercials for Comet as “Josephine the Plumber.”]
During the Marfa shoot, Withers turned her rented lodgings into a kind of USO-inspired social center. Inviting cast and crew to hang out there at night. She played records, organized games, and served refreshments, but didn’t allow liquor or poker.
She recalled that Jimmy would sit in his parked car across the street from her house. “He’d wait until my eleven o’clock curfew, when I kicked everybody out. Then he’d come in alone and talk to me until two or three o’clock in the morning. That certainly interfered with my sleep when I had a 4AM call on the set.”
“I think that in some way, I helped Jimmy get over his negative attitude toward life,” she said. “He became my Number Three son. We sometimes read the Bible together.”
[Long after Jimmy died, Withers appeared in a DVD documentary about his life, revealing that she owned this favorite pink shirt he wore off screen nearly all the time. He didn’t want it washed, fearing that it would lose its vibrancy. “It was pretty rank, so he let me wash it for him. I did this often. In fact, before he left for Salinas on that fateful day of September 30, 1955, he came by house and dropped off the pink shirt for me to wash. He told me he’d drop by and pick it up when he returned from Salinas. That pink shirt is still hanging in my closet.”]
Jimmy had campaigned for Stevens to cast his sometimes lover, Sal Mineo, in the small role of Angel Obregon II, the son of poor Mexican immigrants. Jimmy said, “Sal has the look of the angels.” The director agreed and gave Mineo the small but key role. [Mineo had no scenes with Jimmy onscreen.] They’d been lovers on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, and the Italian-American actor retained powerful emotions. He had bought a rebuilt Mercury like the car his idol had driven in Rebel. He had also taken to wearing a red jacket similar to the one Jimmy had worn in it.
“My father made coffins, hand-finishing them for the Bronx Casket Company, where he was a hand-finisher and later, a foreman,” Mineo said years later, in Manhattan, to Darwin Porter. “Near the end of Giant, I join the Army and leave Texas, only to be sent back in a coffin. Since my dad made coffins, I tried to get Stevens to use one of his since it was my coffin in the film, but he turned down my offer.”
Sal Mineo was cast as a U.S. soldier in Giant. returning from war in a coffin. Like James Dean, in real life, he would meet a violent end. At 9:30PM February 12, 1976, a paramedic noted in his report that Sal Mineo’s murder had been committed in an alley at the rear of his Manhattan apartment. He had died from a single stab wound to the middle of his chest, apparently part of a garden-variety mugging unrelated to his status as a movie celebrity.
“I did not have to go to Texas because my scenes were shot at Warners in Burbank. But I went there anyway, to see what was happening and with the intention of shacking up with either Jimmy or Rock—or maybe both, if I got lucky.”
“When I got there, I found out that Jimmy had moved out of the house with Rock, and that big, muscular son of a bitch was looking for another boy ass. I volunteered and he got mine.”
“I didn’t think I had a chance, because the rumor was that he preferred tall, blonde-haired and muscular guys who looked liked Steve Reeves. Here I was, a 5’8”, raven-haired 120-pound, olive-skinned WOP from the Bronx.”
“But he really came on to me and invited me to spend the night with him in a bed recently vacated by Jimmy. What a pounding I got that night! He nearly split me open, and I loved it. I got to spend two of the most glorious weeks of my life in bed with Rock until he discovered this cowboy in Marfa. Into that little bedroom went the cowboy. Out went Sal Mineo.”
“Jimmy broke off his friendship with me when he heard I’d slept with Rock. We later made up. I’d planned to get involved with him again, since we’d been cast together in the boxing movie, Somebody Up There Likes Me. Of course, that was not to happen. Into my life walked Paul Newman instead.”
“The last time I saw Jimmy, I almost didn’t recognize him,” Mineo said. “It was on the Warners lot. I was coming out of the commissary as he was going in. This old man with gray hair, a mustache, and hunched shoulders passed me by. Well, almost passed me by. He stopped and groped my salami. I was about to punch him out when I saw through the makeup. It was Jimmy. He grabbed me and embraced me. He promised to call me real soon.”
“It was a day in late September. That phone call never came in. The next thing I heard, he was dead.”
After Hudson, Jimmy was soon shacking up with a tall, blonde-haired, handsome cowboy he’d presumably met through Pat Hinkle.
Biff Beaufort had drifted down from Wyoming, where he’d gotten into some trouble with the law. Jimmy was immediately attracted to the 6’4” rodeo rider.
It was reported that he borrowed some of Beaufort’s characteristics for his portrayal of Jett Rink.
Hollywood Dreams
May They Rest in Peace:
Whatever Happened to Biff Beaufort, aka
SAGE DURANGO?
Whenever they could get away, they drove off to a battered-looking shack about ten miles from Marfa. Otherwise, they lived together in the town’s only hotel.
Jimmy spoke little about his relationship with Beaufort, except to tell about one of the most romantic nights he’d ever spent in his life.
It was a clear night when two horses took Jimmy and the cowboy to a scenic outlook on the outskirts of town. Perhaps that was the night Beaufort shared his dream with Jimmy, and that involved becoming a Hollywood star. “I’m bigger and better looking than Rock Hudson,” he bragged.
Actually, he wanted Jimmy to promise to take him back to Hollywood after the filming of Giant. Jimmy didn’t really want to do that, as he had other plans.
He had an idea. One night, he asked Beaufort to put on a pair of tight-fitting briefs. He told him to get them wet in the bathtub, thereby making them semi-transparent. Then Jimmy photographed him, “bulging out” of those briefs.
He sent the photograph to Henry Willson in Hollywood. At the time, Willson was “dating,” (of all people) Margaret Truman, the daughter of the former U.S. president Harry S Truman.
Five days later, Willson responded, sending Beaufort a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles and a money order for five hundred dollars. Willson wrote, “I’ve already changed his name: Instead of Biff Beaufort, why not Sage Durango?”
The re-christened cowboy spent his last night in Texas in Jimmy’s arms before riding a train to Los Angeles.
With only weeks to live, Jimmy never heard of him after that.
“I’ve flown to this hellhole of Marfa just to size you up,” said the big, burly Texan who stood before Jimmy, looking him up and down. “That asshole, George Stevens, must have been on something when he cast a little runt like you to play me on the screen. Hell, I’m bigger than the State of Texas itself. You look like the kind of pretty boy a whore might ask, ‘Are you in yet?’”
“Thanks for the buildup. I’m James Dean. Just who in hell are you?
“I’m Glenn McCarthy, the King of Texas. In case you didn’t know, that pussy-eater, Edna Ferber, based Jett Rink on me.”
Jimmy did some sizing up too. Indiana didn’t produce men like McCarthy. His eyes were hidden behind the darkest sunglasses Jimmy had ever seen. He wore a gleaming leather jacket with a leopard-patterned ascot. On his pinkie rested a diamond ring which Jimmy thought might have been the Hope Diamond.
[McCarthy’s nickname was “Diamond Glenn.]
“Listen, Buddy, you don’t have to be big in person to look big on the screen,” Jimmy answered.
“Guess you’re right, kid,” McCarthy said. “After all, everything’s blown up thirty feet or so, isn’t it?”
In the late 1940s, much of America knew who McCarthy was, as he ranked up there with that coven of billionaire Texas oilmen such as H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Hugh Roy Cullen.
As a wildcatter, McCarthy drilled himself a fortune of “black gold,” built the massive and legendary Shamrock Hotel in Houston, and then, in time, faded into obscurity, a relatively forgotten figure.
He was called “Texas Crude, a stereotype of the raw, hard-living, bourbon-swilling, damn-thetorpedoes, Texas oil millionaire,” as one reporter defined him.
Oil baron Glenn McCarthy on his 15,000-acre ranch near Uvalde, Texas, about 80 miles west of San Antonio.
Author Bryon Burrough wrote that McCarthy rubbed shoulders with the likes of Howard Hughes, another Texan billionaire, and such movie stars as Errol Flynn and John Wayne, “drinking and brawling his way from Buffalo Bayou to Sunset Boulevard.” At the peak of his fame in the late 1940s, he was depicted on the cover of Time magazine.
Jimmy was almost stunned by the larger-than-life creature who stood before him, now, in Marfa. Then, welcoming the chance to study the character he was depicting on film, he accepted McCarthy’s invitation to fly with him to Houston for a weekend at the Shamrock Hotel. [Ironically, although McCarthy had built and widely publicized it, at this stage in his fortunes, he was no longer in full control of its management.]
Before the end of their time together, Jimmy had learned plenty about McCarthy, perhaps more than he needed to know. McCarthy enthralled him with stories of his wildcat days, when he was known as the hottest oil finder, and biggest risk taker, in Texas.
James Dean in a detail from a scene in Giant.
“I owned 15,000 acres of West Texas prairie outside Uvalde,” McCarthy boasted. “Hell, Rock Hudson as Bick Benedict could also be playing me, but he’s not wild enough like you are, kid. I’ve heard stories about you. I hope it’s just a rumor that you suck cock.”
“But if you are,” he continued, “you’ve come to the state where the men have the biggest dicks in America. At a urinal, I stood next to Lyndon Johnson. He called his ‘Jumbo.’ We sized each other up. I had him beat, but not by much.”
Arriving at the Shamrock, Jimmy was ushered into the gray-granite, eighteen-story hotel. He stood in awe at the sight of the cavernous lobby covered with Honduran mahogany. “It’s called the Lone Star State’s answer to the Taj Mahal,” McCarthy said.
“I felt like a king riding the elevator up to the top floor of this colossus where I was installed in the guest bedroom of McCarthy’s suite.”
Two hours later, the two men descended together to the lavish bar, where McCarthy treated him to what he called “Kentucky bourbon a century old.”
“No one makes bourbon like Kentuckians,” he said. “It’s got that special flavor. I hear they piss into the mash for that zippy tang.”
Over drinks, McCarthy amused Jimmy with stories of the spectacular opening of the Shamrock in March of 1949, when dignitaries flew in from all over Europe and North America. He said he rented the entire fourteen cars of the Santa Fe Railway, renaming it “The Shamrock Special” as it hauled movie stars to Houston from Los Angeles for the hotel’s lavishly publicized gala opening.
It was disastrous. “I invited two-thousand people and about another five-thousand showed up, storming all over the place and disrupting everything. It became a raging stampede, Texas-style.”
The press described it as “a gaudy, diamond-strewn, chaotic metaphor for the New Texas of the vulgar nouveau riche.”
“I personally checked in my first guest, Frank Sinatra,” McCarthy said. “Later that night, I arranged for him to fuck Miss Texas.”
To beef up the entertainment, he also staged the premiere of a movie. Because nothing recent was available at the time, he decided to finance his own, arranging for a scriptwriter to turn out a sad story of a young girl who wants to raise two baby lambs. “I cast Natalie Wood in the part when she was still a child star, long before you got to mess with her in Rebel Without a Cause. Walter Brennan was her co-star.”
[It was a low-budget affair for RKO, one that extolled the virtues of Heartland values and 4-H clubs. The love interest was provided by Robert Paige and Marguerite Chapman, a glamorous brunette. It wasn’t shot in Texas, but near the Feather River outside Sacramento.]
“Natalie had a special plate at her dining table every night for her pet Chihuahua. Her left wrist got broken when we shot this dramatic scene of her crossing a collapsing bridge in a thunderstorm, a stunt that went wrong. Her mother didn’t get a doctor for her. I hear that even today, her left wrist is misshapen. But you’d know more about that than I do. If you go for young poontang like I do, I’m sure you’ve banged her. Which reminds me—I’ve invited two sixteen-year-olds to join us. I married a sixteen-year-old, and I’ve been addicted to sixteen-year-old pussy ever since.”
McCarthy also claimed that he started the tradition of Texas oilmen marrying movie stars. “I invited Joan Crawford to christen my Flying Shamrock with a bottle of the world’s most expensive champagne. I bought a P38 fighter plane and spent another $50,000 upgrading it. Later that day, I fucked Crawford high in the clouds. My Errol Flynn mustache tickled her twat when I went down on her.”
“She wanted to marry me,” he said. “But I turned her down. We got a lot of publicity in the papers.”
[He went on to cite a long list of other oil tycoons from Texas who had “married Hollywood.” Oil magnate Bill Moss had married Jane Withers. After their divorce, Moss wed Ann Miller. Howard Lee married Hedy Lamarr. After Lee dumped her, he married Gene Tierney. Dallas oilman Buddy Ferguson married Greer Garson.]
Later, back in Marfa, Jimmy omitted details about what happened that night in Houston with the underaged prostitutes whose services McCarthy had arranged. He did, however, tell Stevens, “Glenn McCarthy sure knows how to show a guy a good time. I’ll never be the same again. Finally, I had to tell him to quit sending up any more putas. Enough is enough.”
Jimmy bonded with yet another member of the cast, Mercedes McCambridge. Nicholas Ray had shown Jimmy a film he’d directed, the campy Johnny Guitar (1954) with Mercedes and Joan Crawford.
In reference to her autobiography, Mercedes McCambridge wrote, “I wanted to call the book Life Is a Bitch, but my publisher wouldn’t let me. Jimmy, however, liked what I wanted to entitle my memories.”
McCambridge, cast as Bick’s butchy sister, harboring a deep-seated hatred for Bick’s wife (Taylor), had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her debut performance in All the King’s Men (1949) opposite Broderick Crawford.
“My character in Giant liked Jett Rink,” she said. “We bonded both on and off the screen. It’s true, he was a little bastard, but an amusing one. My role was small, but I was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting actress once again. I didn’t last long in the picture, as I was mangled to death by a mean horse.”
There were two bars in Marfa, and she and Jimmy often hung out in both of them every night for a while. She told him stories about growing up in Joliet, Illinois and her work in radio before arriving on Broadway for a role in A Place of Her Own. A critic said, “She attracted attention with her tight-lipped performance with her cold, demanding eyes.”
She discussed working with Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men. “Believe it or not, that tough, burly, macho bastard was gay as a goose. He would really have gone for you.”
Pretending to be Texans, and although most of the crew didn’t like them, Mercedes McCambridge and James Dean became friends on the set of Giant. Midway through the filming, she fell off a horse and suffered lacerations to her face.
She also told him that Joan Crawford was “a mean, tipsy, powerful rotten egg lady. She put the make on me. When I didn’t want to lick her pussy, she turned on me.”
Night after night, Mercedes drank too much, and Jimmy would have to drag her back to the hotel. “Mercedes would down bourbon after bourbon until she passed out. Quite a gal. I liked her. She told it like it was, and spared no one.”
She said, “Jimmy wanted to be patted like a little dog. He was the runt of a litter of thoroughbreds, and you could feel the loneliness beating its way out of him.”
In her memoir, The Quality of Mercy, she wrote: “While he was playing Jett Rink, he was inseparable from Jett Rink. He did not become Jett Rink, but Jett Rink was his constant companion.”
[September 30, 1955, occurred near the end of Mercedes’s stay at a remote resort in the California desert. Its accommodations had plumbing, but no access to radios or newspapers. As she was driving back to Los Angeles, she stopped at a gas station in the little town of Cholame, where she spotted what used to be a shiny silver Porsche, now a mass of wreckage.
She inquired about it from the gas station attendant.
“Oh, didn’t you know?”he asked. “James Dean was driving it. He was killed. It’s been all over the news!”
She gasped. “I didn’t know.”]
Elizabeth recalled, “In Texas, Rock and I hit it off right away. The heat, humidity, and dust in Marfa were so thoroughly oppressive we had to bolster our spirits any way we could. So we stayed out drinking all night and luckily were young enough and resilient enough to go straight to the set in the morning with fresh complexions and with no bags under our eyes. During our toots, we concocted the best drink I’ve ever tasted—a chocolate martini made with vodka, Hershey’s syrup, and Kahlua. How we survived, I’ll never know.”
“Rock and Elizabeth were like kids again,” claimed Stevens. “They indulged in a kind of baby talk, and they liked to play pranks on each other, tossing water at each other from our rapidly dwindling supply.”
She told her assistant, Dick Hanley, “Rock has become my second best friend—no one will replace Monty as Number One.”
In Texas, Hudson and Elizabeth discovered nachos, devouring them along with a massive consumption of alcohol. “Then they staged belch-and-fart contests,” Dennis Hooper said.
During the filming of Giant, Rock Hudson provided emotional support for Elizabeth Taylor. She was distraught, as her marriage to Michael Wilding was crumbling. According to Hudson, “She is very extreme in her likes and dislikes. If she likes, she loves. If she doesn’t like, she loathes. She liked me.”
On the set of Giant, Elizabeth had to battle her weight problem. All those chocolate martinis she consumed with Hudson were obviously fattening. But Stevens complained that she compounded the problem with her midnight snacks, which consisted of homemade vanilla ice cream drenched in fudge and peanut butter, preceded by a series of mayonnaise sandwiches, “which I just adore.”
For about ten nights, Hudson seduced Elizabeth. Actually, she was the aggressor. She’d later tell Roddy McDowall something he already knew: “Rock is really endowed, and I mean really. As a lover, he’s very efficient and eager to get on with it. For me, it’s over before it begins. We’ve decided to be great friends, not lovers. No woman will ever succeed in igniting his enthusiasm in bed, and of that, I’m certain.”
***
In the beginning, Jimmy was leary of Elizabeth, mainly because she’d lobbied to have Monty Clift designated as Jett Rink. Yet he was attracted to her. One hot afternoon between set-ups, he confided to Chill Wills one of his sexual fantasies. “In World War II, I heard women wore a shade of lipstick called Victory Red. My greatest turn-on would be to have three women, their mouths painted with that lipstick, each give me a blow-job—Elizabeth Taylor, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edith Piaf.”
Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie Benedict calls on Jett Rink (Jimmy) for tea. The sexual tension between them inflamed the hot Texas afternoon.
[Wills agreed on Elizabeth, but didn’t know who Bankhead and Piaf were.]
James Dean had difficulty filming this “crucifixion” scene with Elizabeth. To ease his tension, “I took the most famous piss in the history of cinema, with all of Marfa looking on.”
Elizabeth confided to Hanley, “Jimmy and I, in Texas, were at first rather suspicious of each other. We circled each other like two animals of prey. I was just another Hollywood star to him, all bosom and no brains. To me, he was a would-be intellectual New York Method actor. We were not prepared to dig each other at all.”
Stevens later referred to the June 3rd filming of Jimmy’s first scenes with Elizabeth as “a day that will live in infamy in the annals of cinema history.” They were filmed on an open set at the Worth Evans Ranch, which Stevens had temporarily rented. It was the site of the famous scene where Jimmy was depicted with a rifle hoisted over his shoulders—he called it “my crucifixion pose.”
Time and time again, he flubbed his lines. Watching the proceedings, Dennis Hopper said, “That was one nervous queen. He was fucking up big time with another Queen (i.e., Elizabeth) of Hollywood.”
In front of at least 250 onlookers, Jimmy ruined take after take by freezing up. A total of sixteen shots failed. Suddenly, he broke from the set and walked over to a wire fence in front of the assembled population of Marfa, some of whom included children who had skipped school to attend this first ceremonial film shoot. As everyone looked on, he unzipped his jeans and hauled out his penis. Hopper claimed it looked about four inches soft. Shock waves were heard from the crowd as he took what he called “a horse piss.”
He later told Hedda Hopper, “I knew that if I could piss in front of some two thousand (sic) people, I could do anything. I’m a Method actor.” Then he returned to the set and did the scene perfectly in one take. When it was over, he turned to Elizabeth: “I’m cool, man. It’s cool.”
When Jimmy saw this picture of himself as a Texan cowboy, he proclaimed, “This is the sexiest photo I’ve ever posed for. I could go for me myself.”
Eventually, they developed a friendship. “One night, he arrived at my house. He seemed engulfed in loneliness. We talked for hours. He loved our Siamese cats, and I gave him one of them. I knew he wanted something that belonged to him, something of his own, so I gave him a kitten. He cried when he accepted my gift.”
Jimmy seemed to dote on Marcus, the Siamese cat, but later gave the animal away. When asked why, he said, “I lead such a strange and unpredictable life that some night, I might never come home again. Then what would happen to Marcus?”
“After a while, we found we were just two human beings, and we became intimate friends,” Elizabeth said. “There was sex in the beginning, but none of that kinky shit that Rock talked about.”
“But, as in the case with Rock, Jimmy and I decided that we could hold each other to protect each other from the cold winds, but as friends, not as lovers.”
Perhaps as an emulation of Rock’s relationship with Elizabeth, Jimmy engaged in playful games with her. “Two kids on the playground,” Stevens called their intimacy.
However, during their moments of manic giddiness, he had a tendency to go too far. One day, he grabbed Elizabeth, picked her up off her feet, and turned her upside down so that her skirt fell over her head, exposing her “unmentionable” regions to photographers.
As she later told Stevens, “Fortunately, unlike Marilyn Monroe on most occasions, I wore my panties that day, or else my twat would be hanging on every bathroom wall in every man’s toilet in America.”
To Elizabeth, Jimmy always remained a mystery, but she came to love him. “Sometimes, Jimmy and I would sit up until three in the morning, talking, and he would tell me about his past life, his conflicts, and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day it was almost as if he didn’t want to recognize me, or to remember that he had revealed so much of himself the night before. And so he would pass me and ignore me, or just give me a cursory nod of the head. And then it took him a day or two to become my friend again. I found all that hard to understand.”
As regards his military record, or lack thereof, he told Elizabeth, “I would have been shot down by some yellow boy in Korea, but I escaped the draft.”
Shortly before his death, he was said to have confided his most painful secrets to Elizabeth, sordid details of his life he shared with no other. One of these was revealed after Elizabeth’s death in 2011 by writer Kevin Sessums in The Daily Beast. Elizabeth had granted Sessums an interview in 1997.
“I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die,” she told Sessums. “When Jimmy was eleven, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did.”
[His biographers have long suspected there was a sexual relationship with the Rev. James DeWeerd, a Wesleyan pastor in Fairmount, Indiana, who had a penchant for young boys. For more on this, refer to Chapter Four of this biography.]
When Hudson learned that Elizabeth was having an affair with Jimmy, he jokingly asked her, “Did he piss on you, or did you piss on him?”
“Let’s just call it a tinkle-winkle,” she said, perhaps jokingly.
***
Stevens had a closeup view of the shifting alliances and shifting romances of his major stars throughout the production of his film. Some of them later revealed some enticing details:
“George always had to have a patsy to pick on throughout every one of his films,” Elizabeth claimed. “On Giant, it was both Jimmy and me. Actually, Rock and I speculated that George secretly had the hots for Jimmy. Whenever he thought Jimmy wasn’t looking, he was always eying him like a lovesick schoolgirl. One scalding hot afternoon, when Jimmy didn’t show up for work, George told Rock and me, ‘I should punish the little bastard and make him suck my dick.’”
“George and I staged some epic battles under that hot sun,” Elizabeth said. “Our biggest fight was when he wanted me to wear those thick brogue shoes and a long ‘grandma-in-the-wilderness’ skirt, plus a man’s battered old cowboy hat. I attacked him for trying to force this ludicrous getup on me. I told him, ‘What are you trying to do? Make me look like a lesbian in drag? I’m Elizabeth Taylor, in case you forgot it.’”
At first, Jimmy and Carroll Baker sat together whispering conspiratorially. “Our main diversion was making fun of Rock and Elizabeth,” Baker later said. “We were cruel and cutting.”
Carroll Baker, cast as Luz Benedict, daughter of the characters played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in the multi-generational saga, Giant.
Baker was popular both as a sex symbol and also as a dramatic actress. She and Jimmy were the same age. She had beautiful features, striking blonde hair (not dyed), and a slight Southern drawl, despite her birth in Pennsylvania. A year later, Baby Doll (1956) earned her some screen notoriety, thanks to Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan.
Unaware of Jimmy’s past, Baker, at first, didn’t believe that he was a homosexual. She thought that the rumors about him being gay had begun on the set of Giant when he began to hang out with a “posse” of Texas cowboys. Unknown to the cast, these cowboys were gay, as were many men in the Old West. They rode together, slept together in bunks, bathed together, gave each other massages, including paying special attention to their buttocks, which were sore from riding too long in the saddle. And they made love at night.
An aging, lecherous Jett Rink (Jimmy) courts Luz Benedict (Carroll Baker), the daughter of his bitter rival.
Author Randall Riese wrote; “During the shoot of the bar scene in which Jett Rink proposes marriage to Luz, Jimmy slid one of his hands under the table and allegedly assaulted Carroll between her legs in a schoolboy fit of one-upmanship.”
After the release of her 1956 picture, Baby Doll, Carroll was absurdly billed as “The Female James Dean.”
“Jimmy desperately wanted to be a part of that camaraderie,” McCambridge said. “He talked openly about it to me. He’d heard that I was a lesbian, so I guess he felt his secrets would be safe with me.”
Baker admitted that Jimmy worked hard to pick up the speech patterns of Jett Rink. “He listened to the cowboys’ speech patterns and watched their mannerisms. He not only learned to ride and wore those slant-heeled cowboy boots,” she said, ‘but he walked with the bowlegged gait of a man born in the saddle.”
***
During their first two weeks in Marfa, whereas Elizabeth and Hudson spent nearly every evening together, Jimmy was frequently seen bonding with Baker, whom he’d known from the Actors Studio in New York.
In one scene in Giant, Dennis Hopper, depicted above, has a push-shove altercation with Jett Rink (Jimmy). Gossip columnists later reported that Hopper was sent to a local hospital for treatment of injuries sustained during that onscreen fight with Jimmy.
Hudson constantly complained to Elizabeth about Stevens. “He gives Dean all the close-ups, and I’m left out in the cold.”
Elizabeth and Hudson feared that Jimmy was stealing the picture. Both actors set out to woo Baker into their cabal. In that, they succeeded, and subsequently, Jimmy stopped speaking to her, feeling betrayed.
“Dean got the ultimate revenge,” Baker said. “He succeeded in stealing Elizabeth from Rock and me. The dirty rat wanted Elizabeth for himself, and I went into a state of mourning. Elizabeth went off every evening with Jimmy, ignoring Rock and me. The tables had turned.”
During the final three weeks of the shoot, Elizabeth temporarily deserted both Hudson and Baker. [Her friendship with Hudson would be recharged after Jimmy’s untimely death.]
The film’s cast and crew were shown the daily rushes in a battered old movie theater that had closed down with the coming of television. Most of the participants preferred to sit on the theater’s ground floor, but Elizabeth and Jimmy usually retreated to the balcony where they were alone. She brought popcorn from her house to share with him.
“They were like two lovebirds,” Chill Wills said. “I never could figure out these switch-hitters. One night, Jimmy is taking it up the ass, and on another night, he’s pounding pussy. You figure.”
Throughout the filming of Giant, Elizabeth was plagued with various illnesses, some of which required hospitalization. The first of her health emergencies began in July of 1955, when she developed a severe sore throat and could not deliver her lines. That was almost immediately followed by a bladder infection and thrombophlebitis, a blood clot in a vein of her left leg. She blamed its flare-up on Stevens for “making me wear those tight breeches.”
Dr. John Davis examined her and asserted that she suffered from “a congenital anomaly of the spine.” To alleviate the pain in her lower back caused by a dysfunctional sciatic nerve, she took heavy doses of Novocaine.
One scene in Giant called for Elizabeth “to do a lot of jumping and twisting on a bed.” Her always-sensitive back exploded in pain again, as she suffered a ruptured intervertebral disc. She was shot with Novocaine and Hydrocortisone and also given Demerol and Meticorten. “I was a god damn walking pharmacy,” she claimed.
Stevens didn’t believe in any of her illnesses, calling them “psychosomatic.” On August 12, she returned to the set on crutches.
—James Dean to Michael Wilding
On the set of Giant in Texas, a studio underling rushed Elizabeth the latest edition of Confidential magazine, which ran the headline: WHEN LIZ TAYLOR’S AWAY, MIKE WILL PLAY. It detailed the night Michael Wilding picked up two female strippers at a club in Hollywood and brought them back to the home he shared with Elizabeth in Beverly Hills. In the scandal’s aftermath, Elizabeth told Stevens, “Whether it’s true or not, a woman can’t let an indiscretion break up a marriage.”
Of course, considering the dramas of her own affairs, she was in no position to chastise Wilding.
Flying to Texas with their two sons to check up on Elizabeth, Wilding was greeted with a blaring headline—MICHAEL WORRIED ABOUT LIZ AND ROCK.
When Wilding with their children arrived in Marfa, he went to find Elizabeth, perhaps to remind her she was a wife and mother. Not finding her, he was told that she was last seen driving off with a young man.
“Where in hell do you drive to in this one-horse town?” he asked.
Instead of Elizabeth and Hudson, Wilding encountered Jimmy. “I have to be very frank with you,” Jimmy told Wilding. “I’ve fallen in love with your wife. She’s going to divorce you—and marry me. But, remember, you had your chance. Now it’s my turn.”
Wilding was so amazed by and skeptical of this that he told Stewart Granger back in Hollywood, “I could only conclude that Jimmy was poking me in the ribs. He could not have been serious. Elizabeth will no more marry James Dean than I’ll marry the Queen Mother!”
On his first night in Marfa, Wilding was allowed to stay at Elizabeth’s rented home, but she didn’t return that night.
Nick Adams, Jimmy’s longtime lover, had arrived in Marfa, and Stevens spread the rumor that Jimmy had fixed Elizabeth up with Adams. “He’s living proof that big things come in small packages,” Jimmy told Elizabeth.
Knowing that Wilding would be alone that evening for dinner, Jimmy brought over some West Texas chili and cold beer.
Over the chili, Wilding pointedly asked Jimmy, “Your plans to marry Elizabeth shocked me. I was told you were strictly homo.”
“Depending on how much rain falls on any given night, I can go either way—male or female,” he answered. “What does it really matter, come to think of it? Sometimes I reward people who do favors for me with sex. I recently flew to Key West to fuck Tennessee Williams. I virtually made him sign a blood oath that he would lobby to get me to play the male lead in all the future adaptations of his plays.”
“Smart career move, dear boy,” Wilding told him.
At the end of their chili supper, Jimmy said, “Elizabeth is likely to be engaged for the rest of the evening. In that case, would you like to go back to my place and fuck me instead?”
“A tempting offer, but I’m the babysitter tonight,” Wilding said. “Give me a rain check.”
Wilding claimed that he was still in love with Elizabeth, “but I found the daily tremors of living with such a volcanic creature more and more difficult. After my failure to make it as a star in Hollywood, I felt like James Mason in that role of a has-been in A Star Is Born.”
Elizabeth and Wilding quarreled throughout his stay in Marfa, and he soon flew from El Paso back to Los Angeles, taking their two sons with him.
“By then, I knew the marriage was all but over,” he said. “All that remained was bringing down the final curtain.”
***
After he returned from Marfa to Los Angeles, The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Rock Hudson, who said: “I didn’t like James particularly. Chill Wills and I lived together in a rented house for a while. Dean was hard to be around. He hated George Stevens, didn’t think he was a good director, and he was always angry and full of contempt. He never smiled. He was sulky, and he had no manners. He was rough to do a scene with for reasons that only an actor can appreciate. While doing a scene, in the giving and taking, he was just a taker. He would suck everything out and never give back.”
Back in Hollywood, Elizabeth continued her friendship with Jimmy, and also “recharged the batteries in my love for Rock, who was going through a troubling time and needed me.”
As influenced by his agent, Henry Willson, Hudson agreed to marry Phyllis Gates, his lesbian secretary. Willson had helped to arrange the marriage based on the fear of exposure of Hudson’s homosexuality in Confidential magazine.
“Michael and I visited Jimmy at least three times at his little house in San Fernando Valley, and he came to see us,” Elizabeth said. “He seemed engulfed in loneliness The first time he invited us for dinner, he heated up two cans of beans—and that was that. We sat and talked and listened to his music.”
On another night, Jimmy invited Elizabeth for a ride in the pride of his life, a new Porsche Spyder nicknamed “Little Bastard.”
He took her for a spin through Beverly Hills and rode up and down Sunset Boulevard. He turned left onto Hollywood Boulevard, passing Grauman’s Chinese Theater. When they passed the theater with its cement casts of the hands and feet of the stars, he told her he was considering having a cast of his erect cock made in the cement instead.
The next day, he dropped in at her home to tell her goodbye, claiming that he was driving his Porsche, accompanied with a friend, to the road race at Salinas. The date was September 30, 1955.
“Whatever you do, Jimmy, be safe—just be safe,” she cautioned him.
***
The night before his farewell to Elizabeth, he’d received a similar warning from another big star. Quite by chance, he encountered the British actor, Alec Guinness, whose work he admired, at the Villa Capri. He had seen Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), in which he’d played eight different roles, and also in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), for which he’d received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
Before inviting Guinness to dinner, Jimmy was eager to show off his new Porsche.
Guinness remembered that night in his memoirs: “The sports car looked sinister to me, although it had a large bunch of red carnations resting on its bonnet. I heard myself in a voice I could hardly recognize as my own, ‘Please, never get in it! It looks like a death trap.”
***
At Warner Brothers in Burbank, Stevens invited some of his stars, including Elizabeth, Hudson, and Baker, to watch the rushes for Giant. At one point, there was an urgent ringing of the telephone. Stevens got up to answer it. Then the cast heard him say, “No! My god! When? Are you sure?”
As Baker remembered it, “The picture froze. The lights shot up. We turned and looked at George. The phone dangled in his hand. He was white and motionless. Death was present in that room. ‘There’s been a car crash,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Dean has been killed.’”
Within the hour, Elizabeth heard all the painful details.
After Jimmy’s death, she went into hysterics and had to be hospitalized for five days.
In Los Angeles, Elizabeth, along with Rock Hudson and George Stevens, pressed their hands and footprints into the freshly poured cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
The premiere of Giant was announced for this same theater on October 7. Before arriving, Mike Todd and Elizabeth had drinks with Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.
[At this time, Elizabeth was divorcing Michael Wilding and had fallen in love with producer Todd, whom she would marry in February of 1957. Todd was the best friend of Fisher. The two couples often spent evenings together.]
Todd escorted Elizabeth to the Los Angeles premiere. Rock Hudson arrived with his new wife, Phyllis Gates. They were followed by Clark Gable escorting Joan Crawford, and Tab Hunter with Natalie Wood on his arm.
Late in October, a few weeks later, Todd and Elizabeth flew to Manhattan for the respective New York premieres of both Giant and Around the World in 80 Days.
By then, a weird cult had formed around the image of the late James Dean. Thousands of his fanatical fans believed that he had not died, but that he was going to make an appearance at the New York premiere of a movie that had helped to make him famous.
Shortly before the screening, Stevens hosted a reception for the film’s cast. The director warned everyone that there might be a problem associated with security at the premiere. The New York Police Department had assigned extra men to the premises, and wooden barriers had been erected to restrain the throngs. Fears involved the possibility of a riot because of the hysteria engulfing the fans, mostly those who had come to worship the deceased actor.
Hudson was among the first to arrive. The identity of his date for the evening—Tallulah Bankhead—came as a surprise. She had gone to bed with him the night before. Hudson called such seductions of older female stars “mercy fucks.”
Before the beginning of filming, it was clearly understood that James Dean had third billing in Giant, the leads defined as Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. But by the time Giant opened across the nation, Jimmy’s posthumous fame had grown to such an extent that marquees, such as this one in Chicago, gave him star billing.
She told a reporter from NBC, “I’m here tonight, darling, because of this divine young man, Rock Hudson, who is a giant in every conceivable way.”
In advance of the premiere at New York City’s Roxy Theater, Todd had presented Elizabeth with a pair of ten-thousand-dollar diamond earrings. The crowd outside the theater grew and grew until it stretched for several blocks. As Elizabeth and Todd emerged from their long black limousine, a roar went up as fans pushed against the police barricades.
Carroll Baker and her husband, director Jack Garfein—a Holocaust survivor for whom she had converted to Judaism—walked directly behind Elizabeth and Todd. As Baker remembered it, “The fanatic Dean cult were nearest the red-carpet aisle leading into the entrance. Those closest to us were thrashing against the barriers, letting out menacing, eerie cries; they had red, distorted, lunatic-like faces. The sight of them filled me with revulsion a moment before the premonition of danger gripped me.”
In front of them, Todd, too, was aware of the danger, and he was shoving photographers and reporters aside to make a pathway to safety for Elizabeth. It was as if he was trying to create a tunnel for her to escape.
Baker then described the pandemonium that followed. “There was an explosion of human bodies across the barricades and a stampede of howling maniacs trampling each other and rushing the actors.”
Photographers were knocked down along with their cameras. Some of the fans even knocked over police officers, whose caps often went flying through the air. Jane Withers was nearly trampled to death.
The fans tore at Elizabeth, grabbing her hair and trying to rip off pieces of her gown. Todd yelled at them, “Stand back.”
A screech went up. “My earring!” shouted Elizabeth. “I’ve lost one of my earrings!”
“Forget the god damn earrings.” Todd shouted at her. “I’ll buy you another pair.”
The manager of the Roxy appeared, and ushered Elizabeth and Todd into his office, where he offered them a brandy to steady their nerves. Bankhead had retreated to the women’s room, and Hudson joined Elizabeth. His shirt was in shreds, and his jacket had disappeared, along with his wallet.
Giant became the highest grossing film in the history of Warners until the 1978 release of Superman.
Most of the reviews generated after the premieres were raves. Posthumously, Jimmy was singled out for special praise. And, as with all movies, there were occasional attacks.
Isabel Quigly in the Spectator claimed, “James Dean more than fulfills his early promise. Small and cocky, writhing, with self-consciousness, with guile, with the pangs of poverty, ignorance, social ineptitude, the quintessence of everything youthful, impossible, impressionable, frustrated, and gauche—and yet a ‘personality,’ someone that matters beyond his pathetic presence—his performance in the first half (later, he is asked to grow old, and cannot manage it), would make Giant worth seeing, even if it were five hours long.”
Lindsay Anderson in New Statesman and Nation delivered this: “The acting is moderately adequate by Rock Hudson, good by Elizabeth Taylor, and virtuoso by James Dean, whose Jett Rink is a willful and brilliant variation on the character he made his own, and died for—the baffled, violent adolescent, rejected by the world he rejects. The middle-aged Jett Rink he could not manage: a matured, hopelessly corrupt character was beyond him.”
Fred Majdalany in the London Daily Mail wrote: “He was one of the very few genuine personalities to come up since the war.”
Time magazine stated: “He created the finest piece of atmospheric acting seen on the screen since Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger did their ‘brother’ scene in On the Waterfront.”
Walter O’Hearn in the Montreal Star said: “James Dean may well have been the most promising young actor of this generation.”
Edwin Schallert, in the Los Angeles Times, found Jimmy “in the championship class.”
In The Houston Post, George Christian claimed: “James Dean’s talent glows like an oilfield flare.”
Variety believed: “The film only proves what a promising talent has been lost. Dean delivers an outstanding portrayal. It’s a sock performance.”
Hollis Alpert in the Saturday Review wrote: “It’s Dean, Dean, Dean. This young man has caused a mass hysteria at least equal to that caused by Valentino.”
“James Dean’s depiction of the amoral, reckless, animal-like young ranch had will not only excite his admirers into frenzy, it will make the most sedate onlooker understand why a James Dean cult ever came into existence.” So wrote Herbert Kupferberg of The New York Herald Tribune.
Perhaps to honor Jimmy in his death, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times actually penned a favorable review: “The late James Dean makes the malignant role of the surly ranch hand who become an oil baron the most tangy and corrosive in the film. He plays the curious villain with a stylized spookiness—a sly sort of offbeat languor and slur of language—that concentrates spite.”
Paula Rotha, in Films and Filming, cast a dour note: “I found Dean so mannered and exhibitionistic as to be repellent in a way not, perhaps, intended by the role. It is a calculated, erratic, and unsubtle performance lacking the depth of his promising work in East of Eden under Kazan.”
In the Sunday Express, Milton Shulman came down hard on Jimmy: “As a middle-aged, power-crazed megalomaniac, his limitations are seriously revealed. Looking like a small-time watch salesman, inarticulateness maddeningly reduces the character to an unintelligible throttle of grunts that arouses neither sympathy nor repugnance. It is a pity that he died before he had learned to correct the mistakes he made in Giant.”
Paul Dehn in the News Chronicle said: “Mr. Dean, with his realistic gulps, hesitations, and strangled tardiloquence, is ill-suited to the sort of ‘literary’ dialogue which calls for articulate declamation rather than a manneristic mumble.”
Courtland Phipps in Films in Review, attacked “the loutish and malicious petulance which present-day teenagers profess to admire. Dean made the young Jett Rink such a boor not even a wife more neurotic than one Miss Taylor was portraying could have thought him attractive.”
— Giant, as described in Warners’ promotional material
Almost no critic attacked the camera work of William C. Mellor, one of the leading cinematographers of his era, who took the great open spaces of Texas, its skyline, its panoramic vistas and cactus-studded deserts, with oil derricks “masturbating” what’s under the earth, bringing them to eruption.
Mellor had previously won an Oscar for his camerawork on Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951). Future awards would include an Oscar for his work on The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), and an Oscar nomination for his work on Mark Robson’s Peyton Place in 1957.
He died suddenly in 1963 while filming Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
At the time of the Academy Awards in the spring of 1956, Giant was a strong contender for an impressive string of other awards as well. It was nominated for Best Picture; Stevens for Best Director; both Jimmy and Hudson for Best Actor; and Mercedes McCambridge for Best Supporting Actress. Only the director, George Stevens, won.
Ironically, the award for Best Picture that year went to Michael Todd for Around the World in 80 Days. He would become Elizabeth’s third husband.
Many critics claimed that Dean would have won if he’d been nominated as Best Supporting Actor, which he really was. He and Hudson split each other’s votes.
As it turned out, Anthony Quinn won that year as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Lust for Life, and the Best Actor Oscar went to Yul Brynner for The King and I. Also nominated for Best Actor, along with Jimmy and Hudson, were Kirk Douglas for Lust for Life and Sir Laurence Olivier for Richard III.
Pictured above is the last major scene James Dean ever filmed. Portraying the oil millionaire, Jett Rink, at a banquet in his honor attended by the elite of Texas, he gets drunk and hostile, embarassing himself, and emptying the room.
He finally collapses onto the banquet’s head table, an inglorious end to Jett Rink and perhaps, symbolically, to James Dean, too.