Julie Gilbert
Being the great niece of Edna Ferber came with obligations. I was to read as much of her work as I was able, as early as possible. At the age of eleven, I was packed off to summer camp with the novels So Big, Show Boat, and Cimarron. While my other bunkmates read Nancy Drew mysteries, I became immersed in and enamored by what was to be my legacy.
I gobbled up Cimarron and found it incredibly stirring. The image of the heroine, Sabra, cradling the head of her husband, the wounded Yancey Cravat, plunged into my callow preteen heart. Ferber painted words that translated into images I could see and feel. I was more than pleasantly surprised that my estimable relative had become my favorite novelist. Soon, these books were being devoured by my whole bunk and then by the neighboring one. Sabra Cravat, Selina Peake DeJong (So Big), and Magnolia Ravenal (Show Boat) had replaced The Message in the Hollow Oak.
The story of Cimarron and the settling of the Oklahoma Territory, from the land rush to the oil gush, brings history alive. Written in 1929 and published in 1930, Ferber felt the thrust of the book had been misunderstood. “I was bitterly disappointed,” she said.
“Cimarron had been written with a hard and ruthless purpose. It was and is a malevolent picture of what is known as American womanhood and American sentimentality. It contains paragraphs and even chapters of satire, and, I’m afraid, bitterness, but I doubt that more than a dozen people ever knew this. All the critics and hundreds of thousands of readers took Cimarron as a colorful, romantic Western American novel.”
Rudyard Kipling, a big Ferber fan, was not disappointed, however. “That’s a big bit of work, and dam’ good atmosphere. Seems to me she’s going on from strength to strength,” he wrote to Ferber’s publisher, Nelson Doubleday.
The stimulus for the novel came from Ferber’s colleague, William Allen White, renowned editor of the Emporia Gazette, and whom she thought of as being the birth father of the project. The previous autumn, he had motored through Oklahoma and had brought home tales of the opening of the Territory, the discovery of oil, and of the Indians “so basely treated by the white man and so ludicrously revenged when the vast oil strike was made on the arid Indian reservation to which they had been herded.” Ferber was incredulous at the dichotomy: “Osage Indians in blankets and braids riding around in Pierce Arrow cars! Millionaire Indians living in wigwams!” But when White suggested that she write a novel about it, she hesitated, feeling that rendering the story of Oklahoma was a man’s job. She decided, however, that she wouldn’t mind just having a “tourist’s look at the state.”
She went with the Whites, and after a week, they left her there, “slogging through oil fields, living in sky-scraper luxury hotels, talking to old-timers who had made the Run in the 1880’s, sitting in a rocking chair on a hundred front porches while I listened to tales tall but true, dining at the improbable palaces of white oil millionaires. It was hot, it was exasperating, it was fascinating, it was seemingly endless, it was Cimarron.”
Much later, long after the novel was published and praised, Ferber attributed some of her best writing to it, as did Clark Gable, who wrote to her: “It is with sincere appreciation that I want to thank you for Cimarron. If we had more people in our country today who had Cimarron in their hearts and minds this would be a happier country to live in.”
Cimarron was made into two motion pictures—the first by RKO in 1931, starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, the second by MGM in 1960, starring Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. Ferber was less than enchanted with both of the films. However, Variety, the show business bible, championed both of them, calling the 1931 version, “An elegant example of super film making and a big money picture. This is a spectacular western away from all others. It holds action, sentiment, sympathy, thrills and comedy—and 100% clean.” In 1959, the same newspaper reevaluated glowingly: “Edna Ferber’s novel of the first Oklahoma land rush (1889) shapes up in its second film translation.… The pic pulls no punches in pointing up the greed that discovery of black gold brought out in the rags-to-riches pioneers.… This is grand scale action in spades.” Ferber did favor the first version, giving it a small salute as she made her way to the bank after having received a telegram about the novel’s film sale: “MAY IT BUY YOU MANY FREESIAS” (her favorite flower).
During her lifetime Ferber’s properties were recycled, resold, repackaged, but rarely reevaluated. She never gave up on them financially or emotionally and always hoped they’d be reborn to new public applause and new market rewards. In 1967, the Ashley Famous Agency was working on selling the 1960 MGM version of Cimarron to television. On September 3, 1967, Ferber picked up the New York Times and saw on the television page a large photo of a man in a Stetson with a caption reading: “Cimarron Strip—U.S. Marshall Stuart Whitman tries to keep law and order in the rough-and-tumble days of Kansas, circa 1880.… On CBS Thursdays at 7:30.”
Ferber, sensing danger, clipped the picture, drew dagger-like arrows at actor Whitman’s head and to the title, “Cimarron Strip,” and sent it off to the Ashley Famous Agency, who took pains to reassure her that the program in no way would influence the sale of the motion picture based on her novel.
Edna Ferber was always acutely clear about the intentions of each of her novels. She also had prescience about what might not be seen or understood, that
“the great American public will never see in those stories the thing that I fondly hope they contain. Maybe they’ll never see the woods for the trees. I’m used to that. In Cimarron I wrote a story whose purpose was to show the triumph of materialism over the spirit in America, and I did show it, but perhaps I was too reticent about it. It emerged in the minds of most people, as a romantic western, and it broke my heart, though the thing sold by the tens of thousands.” And then, as if hoping for the eternal flame, she adds: “Oh, well, maybe when I’m dead.”
In 1968, a year after Ferber’s death, a woman named Eta Kitzmiller evaluated all of Ferber’s properties for potential television sales. She felt that the story and characters had a definite appeal. “There is more than enough material here,” she said, “to keep a long-lived series going and a lot of it—the Indian sections, and the sudden oil riches—haven’t been over-told on TV.… I think the book has possibilities.”
With the arrival of a new eBook and print publication forty-three years later, Cimarron certainly continues to have possibilities.
Julie Gilbert is a professional novelist, biographer, playwright, and teacher. She is a Random House author.