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.
“Elizabeth Plans to Divorce You and Marry Me”
—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.
Communal Grieving and Mass Hysteria: The Cinematic Premiere of Giant
SCENES TORN FROM THE PAGES OF THE DAY OF THE LOCUST
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 Octob
er 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.
BOUQUETS AND BRICKBATS FOR THE SURLY RANCH HAND WHO BECOMES A CORRUPT OIL
Giant
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
“A CENTURY OF STORMY PASSIONS, DEEP HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, AND LOVE, ALWAYS LOVE, POWERFUL, UNQUESTIONING, CONSTANT.”
— 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.
James Dean Page 94