by M. G. Lord
Some critics preferred the simplicity of Dreiser’s novel. Capitalism is bad; the pregnant girl is good; the rich girl is whiney; and the guy is a cad—who, at the end, turns to religion for solace and repudiates his love.
In the film, George is tempted by religion. He even meets with a chaplain. But on the eve of his execution, when Angela enters his cell, all he sees is her scorching beauty. Angela is eros, not agape. She is pagan, not Christian. She mocks Breen—and the institutions that denied Alice a choice. Taylor has gotten to George as she has gotten to us: entering through our aft-brain and lodging in our soul.
5
1951–1955
A PLACE IN THE SUN wrapped in 1950, but it wasn’t released until 1951, which left Elizabeth in an odd limbo. To the world at large, she was still the glossy bauble in Father of the Bride and its sequel, Father’s Little Dividend. But under the tutelage of Clift, acclaimed for his method acting, Taylor’s craft had evolved significantly. Stevens, too, had pushed her—once literally, off a rock into Lake Tahoe. He shot the film’s summer holiday scenes there in the fall. The temperature rarely topped forty degrees. And when Taylor balked at taking an icy swim, Stevens gave her a shove.
Back in Beverly Hills, Taylor’s mother, Sara, was less concerned with her growing credibility as an actress than with her marketability as a bride. Sara loved that millionaires were buzzing around her eligible daughter. She stoked the flames of the Wedding-Industrial Complex, making sure Hedda Hopper knew just how popular Elizabeth was. Soon, however, from the swarm of suitors, a special one arose: Nicky Hilton. And in a ceremony even more over-the-top than the one in Father of the Bride, he and Elizabeth were married.
The November 1950 issue of Modern Screen reveals the vast disconnect between real-life Hollywood and its engineered fantasy. In a five-page, stream-of-consciousness ramble, Hopper described the newlyweds on their honeymoon—from their love shack in Pebble Beach (a long way from National Velvet) to their voyage on the Queen Elizabeth II. Hopper dropped every imaginable name—from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to composer Richard Rodgers to Butch, Elizabeth’s recently deceased poodle.
“Nick’s every bit as close to his dynamic dad as Elizabeth is to her doting mother,” Hopper wrote. “Sara Taylor used to sigh to me, ‘I always have to stay dressed up even when I go to bed the nights Elizabeth goes out.’ Because no matter what time she came in, Liz raced right upstairs—usually bringing her dates along with her—to tell Mama all.” The unfortunate word choice—“tell Mama all”—may have stuck with Hopper from an advance screening of A Place in the Sun. But I doubt she used it with deliberate irony. Irony seems outside her skill set. For example, during the filming of A Place in the Sun, with barely a gasp of incredulity, Hopper reported plans for a musical version of Dreiser’s novel—with Bing Crosby as the murderer.
Unfortunately, two months into the marriage, Elizabeth did have much to tell Mama—about Nicky clobbering her. And Sara faced a daunting choice—between Hilton’s millions and her daughter’s well-being. Sara chose her daughter, and Elizabeth and Hilton divorced.
Elizabeth was not single for long. Disillusioned with young rakes like Hilton, she fell for an older one, actor Michael Wilding, twenty years her senior. They married in London in 1952. Her fans were thrilled, and all had hopes for “happily ever after.” Or nearly all. Actress Marlene Dietrich, an ex-lover of Wilding, despised Taylor and was bitter about the marriage, which she attributed to cheap physical attraction. “It must be those huge breasts of hers,” Dietrich told her daughter, Maria Riva. “He likes them to dangle in his face.”
Wilding, some say, married Taylor to advance his lagging career—or at least get a toehold in the United States. But if so, the strategy failed. MGM gave him a few parts, including a painful paring with Joan Crawford in Torch Song in 1953. But by 1955, the Wildings had two sons, Michael Howard, born in 1953, and Christopher Edward, who arrived two years later. And the role Wilding mostly played was dad.
After A Place in the Sun, Elizabeth’s value skyrocketed—so high that it seemed unlikely ever to go down. But between 1952 and 1956, MGM managed to slow its climb, by casting her in a series of duds, including Elephant Walk, Love Is Better than Ever, Ivanhoe, Beau Brummell, and Rhapsody, a film that Elizabeth herself said “should never have been made by me or anybody else.”
Taylor’s worst film from this period had the best pedigree: The Last Time I Saw Paris, “inspired” by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s splendid short story “Babylon Revisited.” “Inspired” is the word Hollywood uses when it buys a work and makes it into something altogether different. This is not always bad; the film versions of National Velvet and A Place in the Sun were very strong. This was not the case with The Last Time I Saw Paris.
Fitzgerald wrote a moral tale about alcoholism. It deals with a self-pitying narcissist who goes on a protracted bender in Paris. There he mistreats his wife and, while drunk, locks her out of their house during a blizzard. As in Cynthia, where cold air, not germs, cause pneumonia, the wife gets sick and dies. In the movie, Taylor plays the wife, Helen; Van Johnson, the lush, Charles. And the blizzard in which Charles, intoxicated, gurgles while Helen pounds the front door, is unintentionally hilarious. Yet in Fitzgerald’s story, the lush is justifiably punished. His dead wife’s family takes his child away. The story has a moral core. Richard Brooks, who directed the film and also served as one of its screenwriters, throws out that core—and replaces it with hokum. Charles, newly contrite and occasionally sober, gets to keep the child whose mother he killed.
Brooks’s blithe evisceration of “Babylon Revisited” was a harbinger of worse to come. In a few years, he would get his bowdlerizing mitts on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, an important Broadway play about homosexuality. And quicker than you can say “Lord Alfred Douglas,” he would hack the homo from the sexuality. He landed a fine cast for this film, including Taylor, and they all performed well—tragically, however, in the service of an inane plot contrived to appease the Production Code Administration.
In 1955, however, Cat was far down the road. The Taylor brand was languishing—as was Taylor’s marriage. She needed a film worthy of her gifts. She needed a director who understood her, and who would put her strengths to a higher purpose. She needed George Stevens.
And thanks to Rock Hudson, she got him—as well as a break from her contract with MGM. Stevens had offered Hudson the male lead in Giant—a Warner Brothers film that was as strapping and ambitious as the six-foot-five-inch actor himself. For the female lead, Stevens had wanted Grace Kelly, who turned down the part to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco. Uncertain how to proceed, Stevens asked Hudson whom he pictured in the role of Hudson’s character’s wife. Hudson requested Taylor. So in May 1955, Taylor, Hudson, Stevens, and a sexually cryptic newcomer, James Dean, struck out for the punishing flats of Marfa, Texas—a world apart from the glitz of Hollywood—where they would create something extraordinary.
6
Giant, 1956
You gentlemen date back a hundred thousand years. You ought to be wearing leopard skins and carrying clubs. Politics? Business? What is so masculine about a conversation that a woman can’t enter into it?
—Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie Lynnton Benedict in Giant
IF GEORGE STEVENS had deliberately set out to make a feminist propaganda film, he could not have achieved a greater success than he did with Giant. The movie is based on Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel of the same name—only nominally a portrait of Texas, where the book is set, and more a celebration of its formidable heroine, Leslie Lynnton Benedict, who with cajoling words and gentle force tames a brutal frontier. Leslie also fights discrimination against Mexican immigrants, making the film as timely today as when it came out in 1956.
According to Albert Sindlinger, a market researcher whose firm analyzed film attendance in the 1950s, Giant reversed a five-year box-office downturn, “bringing back many people—especially women—who had nearly given up the movie habit all together.�
�
As the story moves from the 1930s to the 1950s, Giant exalts what feminists of the 1970s termed “essentialist” values. Smart and well schooled, Leslie demonstrates that higher education need not transform a woman into a parody of a man. Leslie owns her beauty—for that matter, she owns Taylor’s beauty—and displays it to its best advantage. But she is far from a narcissist. In an early scene that defines her character, Leslie overcomes heat, dirt, fatigue, and the racial bigotry of her husband to secure medical care for a sick Mexican child. Leslie embodies the values of the right brain: empathy, compassion, and a belief in social justice. Over time, she introduces these values to the left-brained (and occasionally no-brained) inhabitants of the Lone Star state.
Feminism and social justice have always been closely linked. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding mothers of American feminism, were both abolitionists. (Though Stanton was not exactly thrilled when freed black men got the vote before women.) In the 1950s and ’60s, a commitment to social justice often prefigured an involvement with feminism. As writer Sara Evans observes in Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, many women became feminists after fighting for racial justice in the American South: “There they found the inner-strength to explore the meaning of equality and an ideology that beckoned them to do so.”
In Giant, Leslie is at one with the natural world. As in National Velvet, Taylor portrays a horsewoman who seems to collude with her mount, rather than force it into submission. We first see her in the rolling Maryland countryside, galloping, as the natives say, “to hounds.” Meanwhile, another sort of horse—a clanging iron one—rolls into the nearby train station. It carries Bick Benedict, a Texas cattle baron, portrayed with a swagger by Hudson. He has traveled east from Reata, his two-and-a-half-million-acre ranch, to purchase the horse Leslie rides, War Winds, from Leslie’s father, Dr. Lynnton. Driving from the depot to the Lynnton home, Bick glimpses Leslie atop the midnight-colored stallion. Flushed, radiant, she fixes him with those violet eyes. “That sure is a beautiful animal,” he blurts.
Of course, Bick falls in love with Leslie—she’s Elizabeth Taylor. But she also represents what he himself lacks: tenderness, education, and feminine values. In an instant, the audience grasps what it takes Bick a three-and-a-quarter-hour movie to realize: Leslie is Bick’s other half.
Aside from his looks—and the two and a half million acres—what Leslie initially sees in Bick is less clear. When, after a whirlwind courtship, Leslie arrives at Reata, she has what my friend Lindsay calls her Rebecca moment, after Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 psychological thriller. Reata is not the lush, Edenic East Coast countryside of Leslie’s childhood. It is a flat, featureless desert: arid, harsh, pockmarked with tumbleweeds. Nor is Leslie allowed to take her rightful place at the head of Bick’s household. Another woman is in charge: one who, like the deranged Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, is set on destroying the new woman in the house.
This charmer is Bick’s sister Luz, a barrel-chested oaf who seems to have no right brain at all. Instead of challenging the fact that men rule the roost in a frontier culture, Luz tries to make herself more mannish than the men. As portrayed by Mercedes McCambridge, Luz has the grace of a buffalo at a debutante ball. She is bossy, the way Stalin, Ceauescu, and Pol Pot were bossy, but because she lacks the top job in a dictatorship, she satisfies her urge to dominate through torture by abusing animals. She won’t even soften in private; she clomps around the house in her spurs.
But Luz cannot annihilate Leslie. As determined to ease suffering as Luz is to cause it, Leslie parries Luz’s blows, emerging stronger. Frustrated, Luz hops on War Winds and attempts to do to him what she would like to do to Leslie: gouge his sides with those spurs until he submits. But War Winds has other plans. He bucks her off with sufficient force to cause a fatal accident. Carried back to the parlor in Reata, Luz dies with her boots on, spurs conspicuously shredding the leather sofa.
Meanwhile, away from the ranch, Jett Rink, Bick’s dirt-poor hired hand, drives Leslie to the squalid village where Bick’s Mexican workers live. Rink, memorably portrayed by James Dean, simmers in class resentment, which takes the form of hunching, mumbling, and skirting eye contact. He had intended to annoy Bick and shock Leslie by showing her the encampment. Instead, Leslie finds—and saves—a dying child, forcing the white ranchers’ physician to tend to him.
Jett Rink is patterned after Glenn Herbert McCarthy, a famously vulgar, up-from-nowhere wildcatter who used his oil riches to found Houston’s Shamrock Hotel. To the degree that Ferber’s novel was a satire on real people, Texans hated it. Ferber, however, could not have cared less. Brought up in a midwestern Jewish family, she worked insanely hard to gain recognition as a writer in Manhattan. And she succeeded: co-writing plays with George S. Kaufman, fraternizing with Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Hotel, and winning the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big. Unfortunately, she was better at gaining recognition than at actual writing—which is why few people know her books today.
“Reading Giant for a second time was a painful, if not outright excruciating experience,” Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote when Giant was reissued in 2006, and, as usual, Yardley is right. “Aspiring to irony, Ferber rarely rises above sarcasm. Her prose is almost entirely lacking in grace or rhythm.” Happily, however, “the movie is so much better than the book as to seem an almost entirely different piece of work.”
In the same way that Stevens took Dreiser’s anticapitalist screed and made it into a multi-Kleenex blockbuster, he took Ferber’s cartoon and made it into a masterpiece. Credit must also go to screenwriters Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat, for, among other things, placing the climax near the end of the movie instead of at its beginning. And to cinematographer William C. Mellor, for capturing the cruel splendor of the sun-bleached West.
Often, when Taylor’s character is allied with nature, nature is all-powerful. In Giant, nature is not easily tamed, and human efforts are often so ineffectual as to be comical. We see this when Leslie first glimpses Reata: a proper Victorian house plopped down in the dusty emptiness, like a spaceship on Mars. And we see it at the movie’s climax—a fierce thunderstorm, whose torrents mirror the human clash below.
Leslie doesn’t earn her feminist stripes in a single scene, but over time. Her ultimate victory is to raise a feminist son, who will impart her values to the next generation. She doesn’t defy; she subverts. Yet in a speech whose overt feminism is startling for a mid-1950s movie, she makes clear that she wants no part of a culture that demeans women. Nor is it words alone that carry the scene; it is Stevens’s direction and Taylor’s acting.
After dinner at Reata, that great white elephant of a house, the men and women segregate themselves. Until one night when Leslie—wrapped in a Greek chiton, equal parts Aphrodite and Athena—dares to invade the masculine enclave.
“You’ll be bored, honey,” Bick says, when she won’t go away. “We’re talking politics.”
“You married me in Washington, darling. I lived next door to politics. Please do go on.”
But Bick refuses: “This is men’s stuff.”
“Men’s stuff?” Leslie explodes. “Lord, have mercy! Set up my spinning wheel, girls. I’ll join the harem section in a minute.”
The men, who had been indifferent, suddenly glower. Stevens focuses on their faces, not Leslie’s. When she accuses them of behaving like cavemen, they look as if they’d like to use their clubs on her.
“Leslie, you’re tired,” Bick says, to silence her.
And she is tired: of his patronizing, his misogyny, his contempt.
With resignation—but not in defeat—she walks to the base of the massive staircase, pausing to study the men, who struggle to ignore her. She has never looked wiser, more self-possessed, or more mature—despite their little-boy efforts to infantilize her. “That’s right,” she says, speaking with care. “Send the children on up to bed so the grown-ups can talk.”
>
That night, of course, Bick and Leslie fight. But they make up. Because Leslie holds a trump: She is pregnant with their child—a son—who, as yet unbeknownst to Bick, will break open his narrow, prejudiced, masculine world.
Giant exploded gender stereotypes before this was fashionable. Bick expects their son, Jordan Benedict III, scion of the Benedict cattle empire, to adore horseback riding. But when he gives the boy a pony, “Jordy” screams—preferring quiet play with his plastic doctor kit. Leslie supports her son’s desire to study medicine. But she, too, has her preconceptions challenged—when one of their daughters, whom Leslie had planned to send to a fancy girls’ school, prefers to study ranching at Texas A&M. (The other daughter rebels in a more traditional fashion: falling for a no-good man.)
The greatest conflict hanging over Texas—and over all of America in the 1950s—was the fight for civil rights, which Giant’s roller-coaster climax tackles. In the context of the movie, the civil rights struggle is an extension of the feminist struggle. Leslie is committed to social justice. When she forced the white ranchers’ doctor to save a dying Mexican child, she made this clear. She also imbued Jordy with her core values, and he carries on Leslie’s fight. After an Ivy League medical education, he returns to the border states to provide health care to migrant workers and the poor. And he marries a Mexican woman, a bold act in the 1950s—one whose depiction on screen, before Giant, had been outlawed by the Production Code. (Interracial marriage remained illegal in many southern states, including Texas, until 1967, when the Supreme Court pronounced the proscription unconstitutional.)