The title of Julie Gilbert’s new book about her great-aunt, the prolific American writer Edna Ferber, comes with a double meaning. Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film refers, of course, to Giant, Ferber’s groundbreaking work about the state of Texas that is the basis for the 1956 hit movie starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Meanwhile, the “love” portion of the title reflects a rather deeply held personal side for Gilbert.
“I used to call myself the Ferber poster girl because I felt so strongly as the years went on after her death,” says Gilbert, who teaches creative writing at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Gilbert has also written a biography of Ferber, Edna Ferber and Her Circle, originally published by Doubleday and now available in paperback by Applause Books.
Reintroducing Edna Ferber
As Ferber’s popularity has waned over the years, Gilbert hopes to reintroduce the first Jewish Pulitzer Prize winner and “put her at the center of 20th-century women writers.”
“There never was a time that I don’t remember Edna Ferber,” recalls Gilbert, whose first lullaby her mother sang to her was “Can’t Help Loving That Man” from the 1927 Kern-Hammerstein musical Show Boat, which was based on Ferber’s memorable novel.
Gilbert remembers wonderful childhood outings with Ferber in 1950s Manhattan, enjoying lunch together and perhaps a visit to a toy store – all part of “the wonderful things about childhood, which are treats and adventures...”
Ferber spent part of her childhood in Ottumwa, Iowa – which marked her first encounter with antisemitism. When walking to school through cornfields, the young Ferber would encounter a little girl seated on a fence, shouting “Sheeny, sheeny, sheeny!”
“This happened every school day for what seemed like years,” Gilbert writes. “Adult males, as well, rained verbal abuse upon her and her family, even spitting on them and yelling taunts in a mock-Yiddish accent.”
Gilbert, who is also the trustee and executor of Ferber’s estate, suggests that these early encounters with antisemitism “became a battleground within her” to fight “the scourge of racism.”
“I think when you’re called a name and you’re Jewish, even if you don’t understand the name, you understand the threat,” Gilbert notes. “And so that marked her.”
But it was with the rise of Hitler that it “all came to roost,” Gilbert adds, noting that Ferber became “very vocal and had to write about the... threat of being a Jewish girl and then a woman and an American citizen...”
Gilbert’s father, who was from a prominent Berlin family, managed to get out of Germany in time with his family. When he enlisted in the US Army, he was sent to Camp Ritchie in Maryland, where he became one of the famed “Ritchie Boys” – American GIs originally from Germany and Austria whose foreign language skills were used in counterintelligence and interrogation of German prisoners.
THE CHOICE of Texas as the subject of Ferber’s book, Gilbert explains, “was initially less about the cattle versus oil and the themes of the evolution of Texas, and more about the injustice that she saw in terms of the Mexican-Americans.”
It was all typically Ferberesque, Gilbert suggests, “always looking out for the underdog, depicting it by writing about it and in that way understanding it to the bone.”
Ferber’s treatment of injustice against Mexican-Americans was not taken lightly by some in Texas – even yielding death threats.
“Not only were they death threats,” says Gilbert, “but they were gory, they were horrible… they were like… ‘Gauge your eyes out’… ‘Hang her high.’ They were horrible, really, really vivid. I don’t think they frightened her, but I don’t think she was rushing… to get down there [to Texas] at that time.”
Ironically, Ferber’s decision to write Giant did not come easily; it was “one of the few times that she kind of was not the feminist that we all knew.”
According to Gilbert, Ferber thought the right author would be “maybe a burly man like a Hemingway or a Michener.”
“So she really felt it might be just too masculine for her, too large; something, you know, that was violent in its nature that she did not want to confront.”
She “circled the idea for almost a decade prior to actually committing to writing it,” says Gilbert. But her early training as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal eventually kicked in, and she realized there was a story worth exploring.
Ferber spent years on the novel and visited Texas, which she called “a separate kingdom,” many times.
“She cut her teeth as a journalist,” says Gilbert. “She would go to where the story was.”
GILBERT’S BOOK also touches on fascinating details about the film version of Giant, including the relationships between cast and crew.
A tragic detail, of course, was the death of James Dean in a car accident on a California highway, an event that devastated everyone.
“He was so young,” says Gilbert, “and they saw it coming. He loved fast cars, he loved racing his motorcycle. Certainly, some of them had a premonition, and Ferber did, very much so.”
Despite what Gilbert calls their “monumental” age difference – Dean 24, Ferber 71 – they were close.
“It’s peculiar,” Gilbert says. “Sometimes the older person and the younger person come from equidistant points and meet right in the middle, and I think that’s what happened to them.
“I think age was discarded, and they just found something, a connection that was quite strong.”
Ironically, Ferber had wanted Robert Mitchum to play the role of Jett Rink, not Dean.
“She strongly put that to director George Stevens,” says Gilbert, “and Stevens said, ‘Well, I just want you to meet James Dean for lunch. He’s coming to New York… just meet him.’
Ferber agreed, and once they met, “the deal was sealed – they liked each other very much.”
FERBER’S INTEREST in the concept of statehood went beyond Texas, extending to modern Israel.
She took some trips to the Jewish state during its early years and was “very, very taken with Golda Meir and met [David] Ben-Gurion.”
“She found that the geographic alchemy of changing desert into fertile land was just extraordinary,” says Gilbert.
“While she was never a practicing Jew in terms of going to a synagogue, she was a very big spiritual Jewish person, and I think that’s important to know.”
- Giant Love: EDNA FERBER, HER BEST-SELLING NOVEL OF TEXAS, AND THE MAKING OF A CLASSIC AMERICAN FILM
- By Julie Gilbert
- Pantheon
- 400 pages; $28