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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello, and welcome to the Drama Book Show, where we bring you conversations with writers, artists, and theater professionals whose work helps shape the world of live performance.

[0:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: My name is Mark Eugene Garcia. In this episode, we explore the remarkable life and legacy of one of America's most influential writers, Edna Ferber, and the story behind one of her most enduring works, Giant. We're joined by author Julie Gilbert for a conversation about her book, Giant Love, an exploration of trailblazing novelist Edna Ferber's most popular work. From Ferber's rise as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and celebrated Broadway playwright to the controversy surrounding her best-selling novel about Texas and the making of George Stevens Academy Award-winning film adaptation, this discussion takes us behind the scenes of a defining moment in American literary and cinematic history.

[1:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Together, Julie Gilbert explores Ferber's groundbreaking career, her collaborations with some of the greatest artists of her time, and the fascinating journey that brought Giant from the page to the screen, including the casting of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, and the challenges of creating a Hollywood classic. Here's Julie Gilbert, live at the Drama Book Shop.

[1:35] Julie Gilbert: On the heels of this final plea to Henry Ginsberg, the leading members of the cast gathered in New York. Rock Hudson came with his fiancée, Phyllis Gates, Elizabeth Taylor with her husband, Michael Wilding, James Dean was there, and Mercedes McCambridge, Luz the elder. There was to be a press conference, some luncheons, and a dinner given by Ferber. Stevens, Henry Ginsberg, Ivan Moffat, and Fred Gill were also present. My parents were invited to the dinner party.

[2:10] Julie Gilbert: Bring Julie along, Ferber had said. She might enjoy it. The day before it was to be, the fever came, and then the spots. I was put to bed, too sick to go, and too feverish to understand that I really couldn't. I lay in the darkened room with all sorts of empty and full juice glasses around me, and cried. The maid came in and turned on the desk lamp. She said that I had a visitor, Mr. Dean. He must have been right behind her, for he was suddenly in the room, mumbling, hi, how are you? He dragged over the blue desk chair and sat by my bed. He studied my pox. Bad case, he said. I asked him if he'd ever had them. He shrugged and said that he didn't remember. I told him not to get too close, or he might catch them.

He shrugged again and said that everybody should have chicken pox at least once in their lives. Then he gave a funny little squawk. He asked how many chicken pox I had. I said I didn't know. You mean you haven't counted them? So he counted the ones on my face. He asked me if I'd read Giant. I said no, I was only nine. Then he asked me if I liked Ferber. I told him I loved her. He nodded as if in approval, and then said if you do, you better read her stuff. Then he drank some of my juice and was gone.

[3:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Your fleeting contact with James Dean, opening night of Giant at the Roxy Theater in New York? No, couldn't have been, because he was gone by then.

[3:55] Julie Gilbert: They weren't, it was no opening. It was some kind of press stuff that they were doing. Then she just thought I would have fun meeting the stars.

[4:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Of course, but you were only nine.

[4:08] Julie Gilbert: I was only nine.

[4:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But you have a vivid memory.

[4:13] Julie Gilbert: No, actually it was kind of dreamlike. My parents certified that it had happened, because it was almost too much that there was this young guy in my room, and I knew who it was, and I dined out for a whole school year on that story.

[4:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Of course, and you're dining out on it now.

[4:29] Julie Gilbert: I never have grown up. But anyway, Julie's book is terrific. We've done a few interviews.

[4:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We have.

[4:38] Julie Gilbert: This is another interview. She asked me to do it tonight, and I thought that's a good idea, because that gives me a chance to reread the book, which I did, and it really is beautifully written. But what I want to discuss tonight and for our podcast listeners is that the book is about the film Giant, but to sell it just as that is incorrect, because it's a two-parter, and the first part is about Ferber and the creation of Giant, and she becomes the central focus of your entire book.

[5:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She actually steals the show from Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Carol Baker, George Stevens, pretty hefty competition. Is that good?

[5:24] Julie Gilbert: But she is your protagonist. She's there at the beginning, and then she's there at the end during the production and release of the film, and she is your great aunt.

[5:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She was my great aunt. She was your great aunt. As a reader, I found her a fascinating, complex character, but not totally lovable. I think I would have had mixed feelings about her.

[5:55] Julie Gilbert: Not if you were her nephew.

[6:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Not if you were her own. I can understand if you were just someone meeting her.

[6:08] Julie Gilbert: Is that formidable and prickly?

[6:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, yeah. She could wither anyone.

[6:26] Julie Gilbert: I got that. That comes across, but I compliment you because you present a complex portrait of this complex woman. You don't present a fawning portrait of a doting niece, which wouldn't be so interesting, and I don't think it would be the truth.

[6:38] Julie Gilbert: I was pretty doting. I really was in real life, but she taught me. She gave me my writer's backbone, and you get your story, and you tell it the way it is. I wanted to convey love, but it was her story. It really wasn't mine, and maybe I'm even a little too much in it.

[7:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, that's helpful to us, that you're there. You are a relative, so you're not a detached biographer. You are a relative and a niece that she was very kind to and generous to, but she was a difficult lady.

[7:17] Julie Gilbert: She was, but never to me. Also, that was such a pivotal time for me because I was there during the whole Giant ride, from the writing of it and her trips to Texas and the gifts from Neiman Marcus. I was part of that giving birth to this book.

[7:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You have firsthand memories of her talking about writing and doing enormous research for Giant. What the book does present vividly is how a novelist or a novelist like Ferber creates. She does an extensive firsthand research on Texas. She didn't know anything about Texas before she began to write Giant. She really didn't. It was clear she did all her research for the book. She wasn't writing as a Texan, certainly, and that did create some problems down the line for her. She was an outside researcher with a vivid imagination and a woman who had a command of a lot of facts.

[8:33] Julie Gilbert: You do detail her research and writing process, and then you end the book by saying, Ferber's readers are not there anymore. Is it accurate to say she was a fabulously successful, best-selling author in her lifetime, but her literary stature has not endured? Is that accurate?

[8:54] Julie Gilbert: I think she's gone into an eclipse. I keep waiting for the sun to come out again. I don't understand it, and I've devoted a lot of time to trying to understand it and to correcting it. I think writers do go through phases. I think she needs Martin Scorsese to make maybe some kind of film about her life or a remake of Giant or a film about one of her other novels, just like Edith Wharton had Scorsese because he was her guardian angel in Maid Age of Innocence, and there was a huge resurrection of Edith Wharton, and now she's back.

[9:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Edna hasn't had that.

[9:42] Julie Gilbert: She hasn't had that. She's had Broadway revivals, but the glory kind of went to Kaufman somehow, and his name usually came first anyway in the plays. I'm waiting, but it hasn't quite had the limelight.

[9:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Is there something in the work itself that prevents her reputation from being at the highest level?

[10:12] Julie Gilbert: What do you think?

[10:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: She's a wonderful writer. Her sentences, you all know Edna Ferber. She's a wonderful writer. Her sentences flow. Her style is not dated. She doesn't sound old-fashioned. Her sentences have a wonderful rhythm and cadence, beautifully descriptive, but in the end, is there a certain lack of depth?

[10:41] Julie Gilbert: I'm the wrong person to ask that because I think that the characters really just embed themselves in one. In Giant, the fascinating thing is the casting was so off for Jet Rink than what she meant because in the novel, if you remember, he was dark and swarthy and gruff and more Rod Steiger-esque than Dean, and in fact, she wanted Robert Mitchell to

[11:45] Julie Gilbert: Act 1 is the writing of the novel. Act 2 is the making of the film. He makes a late appearance, but once he comes on, the star charisma and authority are irresistible. Did he not, in fact, charm and seduce Edna Ferber? He did, indeed. He did? Yes. Tell us about it. I think sometimes the old, the really quite old, and the quite young can come together from equidistant points and meet right in the middle. And I think that's what happened to them. And his psychological makeup and hers had nothing to do with each other, except she never had a family. She never had a son or a daughter. She never had kids. And I think it was all sort of, he'd lost his mother quite early when he was 14 and had a terrible relationship with his father.

Terrible, but really intense with his mother, who was quite feisty, and so was Ferber. And I just think they found each other in this kind of no-man's land. And you couldn't put a name on it or a description on it, but it was very much there. And she absolutely, I do remember that when he was killed in a car crash, which I think is just everybody knows that, I think. September 30th, 1955. Yeah. The date has gone down in history. In infamy, yeah. And he was only 24 years old. And I was not allowed to call Aunt Edna for at least, I think, 10 days. She went into seclusion. She was so distraught? Yeah, very much. Did he fulfill something that had been missing in her life, do you feel? And she, the same for him?

Probably, probably. Just a kind of, well, first of all, he wooed her at a lunch so that Stevens did not cast Robert Mitchum. And I wasn't there at the lunch, but he must have said something that turned her around. She had cast approval? She had cast approval, yeah. But she also, she respected Stevens very much. They were compadres. And so when he said, no, Edna, she listened. And he never said no to her. He just said, have lunch with Dean. And so she did. And she changed her opinion? Absolutely. And never did that. And she was right to do so. He's terrific in the film. There's some criticism that in the later parts when he has to age, and he's not playing James Dean, that he's not convincing.

I don't agree with that at all. I think he does a terrific job when he's playing a hopeless alcoholic at the end. That scene with Carol Baker is just knockout. In the restaurant, in the empty restaurant, there's a scene. Have you all seen Giant, the movie? Of course, they wouldn't be here otherwise. Who hasn't seen Giant? So that scene is just absolutely terrific. Fabulous. The two of them. An acting- Actor's studio. Actor's studio, an acting contest, but it goes beyond that. Real psychological revelation. Just terrific. He's great in the film. But I think everybody that he touched remained touched. I think Ann Ferber was not invulnerable to that. She was just part of the throng. But speaking of that, going off from that, there are two sentences in your book that I remembered from the first reading and that I remember from the second reading.

And part of the power of your writing is you will suggest something and then you'll follow up on it, but you won't go where you're not sure you have all the evidence. So for instance, there's a, for me, the most powerful scene in the book is Julia's death, her mother's death. And in that scene, Julia takes her daughter's hand, Edna's hand, and she says, Edna, dear Edna, I ruined your life, didn't I? That's so powerful. I'm choked up even talking about it. And then- But you don't completely follow through on it. It's a fabulous, powerful scene. But what are the implications of that statement? This goes really away from Giant and into Ferber. Who's part of this book. But she wrote a short story called Mother Knows Best.

And it was about a stage mama, a really almost dragon mama, and a girl who becomes a star. And they are a team, she and the mother. And the girl falls in love. And the boy that she falls in love with follows through everywhere through the career. He's always a stage door Johnny kind of thing. And finally, the mother says she does something in the short story and sends him away. And the girl then becomes sick. And she's a Broadway star and all but she becomes sick and dies. And the mother says to her, upon her deathbed, I ruined your life, didn't I? I ruined your life. So she just lifted that short story. And the fellow who I think I know who it was in Ferber's life. And the story is really about Julia Ferber and Edna.

And so there it is. But did her mother feel she had prevented Edna from having the fulfilling romantic relationship? If she did, she would, she would just toss her head and look at the other way. I don't, I wish I knew. I don't know. But I do think that she was Ferber's escort for every important opening, for every trip abroad that they made. It was always Edna and Julia. And people used to say Edna and Julia. It sounds like Sebastian and Violet and suddenly last summer. But connected to that another powerful statement. Fanny was your grandmother? Yes. Your mother's mother. Fanny was Edna's sister. Yes. Fanny once said to you, I'm someday going to tell you everything. And that day didn't happen.

No. And I never said tell me now. Do you regret that? No, because she wasn't well. And I would have put her under pressure. And I don't know what she meant. I really don't. But there are mysteries. Yes. In your knowledge of your beloved aunt. Yes. You don't know everything about it. I do not. And our beloved editor pushed me almost to the point where I just, I, you know how that happens where you think, oh, I can't make anything up, but boy, I would like to, because I just, I don't know. But I do think that there was a privacy that doesn't exist today about personal life. And I think Edna had a definite personal life that we know nothing about. And she did not want you to know. No. Did you feel as even as a young woman that there was that slight wall or guarded quality?

I was a little more audacious than I would be today, I think. And I once said to her, are you lonely? And she said, she froze. And I thought, oh, am I in trouble? And then she said, oh, no, the characters in my books are my friends. But another resounding sentence in your book is from a worker at Main Chance. Yeah. Judy Shorey. Who said, who dealt with Edna, who went there for recuperation or spa treatment. And Judy said, she was a lovely woman and terribly lonely. Yeah. Yeah. I think she had everything. And yet, to my knowledge, she never had a companion. She had lots of friends and, oh, no, coward is coming here. And the Luntz were great friends. That's different. But she never had a just a walk arm in arm with a companion.

So something, there was something, but it will remain a mystery. It has to. You're the only one who can plumb it and you don't have all the evidence. Unless I have a friend who's a psychic and she keeps saying, I could do this. I don't want it. I don't want to know. You don't want to know. Not really. No. That's where I become the great niece and not the biographer. I just let it rest. And speaking of that, because you have dual roles here. You are a writer, but you're a relative. Yeah. Did you ever feel protective of your subject? Yes. In a way that an outsider would not have felt. Absolutely. So that is part of the equation here. It is. I tried. Vicki, our editor, we share an editor, wanted me to really plumb all kinds of things.

And I tried, but all I could do was innuendo. I couldn't make any statements about her personal life, except for the letters, the wonderful letters between Mary Martin and the Luntz and this one and that one, but nothing of an into really.

[22:31] Julie Gilbert: I'm assuming you went to her penthouse at 730 Park Avenue?

[22:39] Julie Gilbert: It was a little sort of old-timey for me. It wasn't Bauhaus, but she had beautiful things.

[22:49] Julie Gilbert: But you were always terrified, terrified that you'd spill something. Just like, oh my God, because it was like an eggplant-covered satin couch, I remember. And she would say, would you like a little hors d'oeuvre? I couldn't eat on that couch.

[23:06] Julie Gilbert: What I did get from the book, and I thought that was terrific, Edna enjoyed her wealth. She was a wealthy woman. She made lots of money from her writing.

[23:15] Julie Gilbert: Pots and pots.

[23:16] Julie Gilbert: Pots and pots of money. She enjoyed it.

[23:20] Julie Gilbert: She really enjoyed it. I did shop with her on occasion at Bergdorf Goodman.

[23:29] Julie Gilbert: And that was, you know...

[23:30] Julie Gilbert: She traveled? She had that fabulous house that she built in Connecticut?

[23:34] Julie Gilbert: She did. She was always worried that she would go back to being the sort of lower-middle class little girl in Ottumwa, Iowa, or in Wisconsin, where she grew up. She was always kind of worried about that, that she'd make a bad deal or lose it all. But she had all of these advisors, and they were pretty good advisors.

[23:56] Julie Gilbert: She was very careful about contracts and what was owed her.

[24:00] Julie Gilbert: Oh, yeah.

[24:00] Julie Gilbert: And she did have a sense of what was owed her.

[24:03] Julie Gilbert: She did, but my father said that she really did not understand trust and money and banks, and that if she'd had her own way, it would all be in a mattress.

[24:16] Julie Gilbert: There was plenty of that, but it would be a very thick mattress, right?

[24:21] Julie Gilbert: Feather bed.

[24:24] Julie Gilbert: Is Giant her greatest literary achievement?

[24:27] Julie Gilbert: I think it's her most popular one. Today, Show Boat. None of these were masterpieces.

[24:35] Julie Gilbert: I think that they were wonderful, huge, readable, readable novels. Now, Kipling thought she was a genius, so there were some people who thought that she really was of a loftier way, but she was such a popular writer all over the world in her time that she was satisfied by that, although I think she was always slightly afraid she couldn't do it again.

[25:06] Julie Gilbert: Was she satisfied with her literary position? I think you mentioned that she wasn't crazy about Faulkner or Hemingway. She detested Lillian Hellman.

[25:15] Julie Gilbert: Detested.

[25:16] Julie Gilbert: And you saw them avoid each other on the upper east side.

[25:19] Julie Gilbert: I did, because I was walking with my great aunt, and she had this beautiful mink coat, and then we saw another mink coat, short, stocky woman with another mink coat, long, and she said, quick, Julie, hide.

[25:39] Julie Gilbert: And it was Lillian.

[25:40] Julie Gilbert: And it was Lillian, and I said, don't you like her? Oh, she's a witch.

[25:47] Julie Gilbert: She wasn't very generous about other women writers, particularly.

[25:51] Julie Gilbert: She wasn't.

[25:52] Julie Gilbert: She wasn't, and she thought they were inferior. I think Fanny Hearst and people like that were inferior.

[25:58] Julie Gilbert: Fanny Hearst's writing doesn't stand up to... Edna Ferber has aged much better than Fanny Hearst. Fanny seems old-fashioned. They were both enormously popular in their day, but Hearst seems old-fashioned now. I don't think Edna seems old-fashioned. She's a very skillful, popular storyteller.

[26:20] Julie Gilbert: You do get lost in the story.

[26:22] Julie Gilbert: You do, and she always had, and I don't want to neglect this, she had a terrific social conscience. She was very aware of things that we're so aware of today, racism and inequality. She was all for inclusiveness and fairness to workers. She had a social conscience.

[26:40] Julie Gilbert: Huge liberal social conscience. Huge and totally unafraid of writing manifestos and was...

[26:51] Julie Gilbert: She spoke out in her political belief. She didn't keep anything a secret.

[26:55] Julie Gilbert: No, she really didn't, and there was this one thing that... Oh, one of her sort of frenemies was Dorothy Parker. Remember Bruno Hauptmann and Lindbergh's little baby son was kidnapped, and they found this worker and pinned it on him. Sound familiar?

[27:19] Julie Gilbert: They pinned it on this guy, and they railroaded him into a horrible trial. Ferber was testified at the trial, and she said, this is not America. This is not justice. This man, he does not speak very good English. This is just absolutely intolerable. It was very widely publicized, and Dorothy Parker said, and now I salute you.

[27:54] Julie Gilbert: The reticence that she may have felt and lived about her personal life didn't apply when it came to social issues at all.

[28:00] Julie Gilbert: Not at all.

[28:03] Julie Gilbert: Very forthcoming. Really formidable. Yeah, people listened.

[28:08] Julie Gilbert: They might not have liked it, but they listened. They listened, and she wrote some beautiful pamphlets, political pamphlets.

[28:12] Julie Gilbert: Oh, she did.

[28:14] Julie Gilbert: Which you include. Now, your book is extraordinary in the sense that I think one critic said, is there any scrap of evidence that Julie Gilbert didn't touch? It's thoroughly researched.

[28:27] Julie Gilbert: You have firsthand research from your own memories, but what resources did you have? You have lots of quotations of letters and papers, everything.

[28:33] Julie Gilbert: I had archival stuff, and I had stuff from my mother that had been stored away that I knew about, but I hadn't gone in there, and I had a wonderful researcher who really helped me because when I got the contract, we got the pandemic, so everything shut, and Warner's library shut, but the George Stevens library was still open, so she was able to get me a lot out of there, and then I went to Wisconsin to the archive and just dug and dug, and I had a lot of helpers who came up with gems and photos and that.

[29:15] Julie Gilbert: And it's all in the book. I don't feel you hold anything back. Every bit of research is there, and it all supports the ongoing narrative. You don't get sidetracked by the research. The research helps you to tell the story. It doesn't prevent you from telling the story.

[29:32] Julie Gilbert: No, and you know this from your own career that when it's like shopping and you find something that you didn't think you could afford, you find these gems suddenly, and they're never where you think they'll be or what you think you might have needed, and that's what happened with this, that I guess luck found me during this period of time, and I just would lay my hand on things and go, oh, my God, look at this.

[30:04] Julie Gilbert: And you share it all with us.

[30:06] Julie Gilbert: Maybe too much.

[30:07] Julie Gilbert: No, I don't think so, because your voice never gets lost. You're the commanding officer, and you take us through it. You're in control, but you share your research without losing your voice. You're a writer who has her own voice, so your voice remains prominent throughout.

[30:25] Julie Gilbert: What do you think of Giant, the film? How does it hold up? Not everybody loves it, believe it or not. I get some negative feedback. They don't like the way the characters age.

[30:37] Julie Gilbert: They don't like the treatment of the Mexican characters. George Stevens is an outsider. It's not truly Texas. It's not universally beloved.

[30:46] Julie Gilbert: In spite of words, you know that.

[30:48] Julie Gilbert: Yeah, it's not universally beloved. I think it's a great movie.

[30:52] Julie Gilbert: It is long. It's very long. I'm so protective of the whole Giant oeuvre that I wouldn't say a bad word about the movie.

[31:02] Julie Gilbert: You love the film yourself.

[31:05] Julie Gilbert: I do, but when I interviewed Rock Hudson many years ago, and he really didn't like Dean.

[31:16] Julie Gilbert: Maybe he liked him too much, and then Dean spurned him or what have you, but they had antipathy, and in that scene, in that final scene where he takes him down in the hotel in the kitchen in the wine cellar, and at one point he says, Jet, you're through, and that was the last thing he ever said to James Dean, Rock Hudson ever said as the character Bic or as real Rock Hudson, and he was talking about, I asked him, did he think that Dean's performance was good, and he said, I don't really know because Bic was supposed to loathe Jet and think very little of him, and so he said, and he laughed and said, I don't know if it's a method thing, but I felt the same way.

[32:18] Julie Gilbert: It probably did. They were antithetical in many ways, but they were both gay men.

[32:25] Julie Gilbert: Yes, they were, and so who knows what happened at that hotel. Now I'm blanking. The famous hotel in Marfa.

[32:33] Julie Gilbert: In Marfa.

[32:35] Julie Gilbert: Yeah.

[32:36] Julie Gilbert: Paisano.

[32:37] Julie Gilbert: Paisano.

[32:38] Julie Gilbert: Paisano, yes.

[32:39] Julie Gilbert: Oh, I came up with that.

[32:40] Julie Gilbert: You did.

[32:41] Julie Gilbert: What do you know?

[32:42] Julie Gilbert: Yay.

[32:43] Julie Gilbert: And they both were crazy about Elizabeth Taylor.

[32:45] Julie Gilbert: Crazy about her, and she liked that.

[32:48] Julie Gilbert: And she liked that, and she liked both of them a great deal.

[32:50] Julie Gilbert: Oh, a great deal.

[32:51] Julie Gilbert: She was Rock Hudson's most loyal friend at the start and did all her great work for AIDS because of her friendship with Rock Hudson.

[32:59] Julie Gilbert: Yeah, yeah.

[33:00] Julie Gilbert: Does the film stand the test of time, in your opinion, as a great work of Hollywood artistry?

[33:06] Julie Gilbert: Yes, I think it does. I think Stevens was a great filmmaker, and he won the Academy.

[33:14] Julie Gilbert: That was the only Academy Award for that picture that was won was by Stevens as the director, and around the world in 80 days won for best picture.

[33:21] Julie Gilbert: Look what wins best picture these days. We won't go there.

[33:25] Julie Gilbert: If any of you like Donora, I'm leaving right now.

[33:33] Julie Gilbert: So I think that it's a picture, for me, it's hard for me to extricate my life.

[33:46] David Rigano: And I'm not a cineast. You are, but I'm not. I don't really study film. I just emote or don't emote. It gets me going. But when I was reading all through Ferber's reaction to the movie, she, and I still think of it as a movie, not a film, but she, at first she adored it. And then she pulled back and thought about it. And she hated that last frame with the Mexican child. I didn't like that either. She said, the lambs, she said, the lambs made me vomit, is what she said. When she, the children, she thought, okay, but then when the lambs, they have a black lamb and a white lamb. Corny. I think I thought the last shot was corny, but I thought he was trying to honor Edna Ferber's liberalism about race relations. See, in the novel, it doesn't pull any punches, but he softened the film, she felt. Did she like the film in the end overall?

[34:59] Julie Gilbert: Yeah, she loved Dean, obviously. And she loved Taylor and Hudson. And yes, she thought it was a very powerful film. But that last bit she could have done without. And also, I still think she wanted to correct some of Leslie's lines that he had, that the writers had changed. In the book, she's, of course, much more liberal and activist, but that's still in the film. That character is still as independent and as forthright and as intelligent and as feisty as Ferber wrote. And I thought Taylor was just wonderful, wonderful in that role. Just terrific. Nobody could have done it better. And nobody could have written a better book than this. This is a terrific book. If you haven't bought it yet, now's your chance to do. Julie is here. It's a pleasure to reread it. So ask me to do another interview, and then I can reread it a third time. It's that good. It really is. It really holds you. So any questions from the house? Cathy?

[36:03] Cathy: You touched on this briefly, but the reaction from Taylor Simmons to the book.

[36:10] Julie Gilbert: Ah, yes. Yes. What was it that she discovered about that part of the country that she exposed?

[36:21] David Rigano: That they were a divided lot, that there were the haves and have-nots, and the have-nots were Mexican-Americans. And she had discovered, for those that haven't read the book, and I discovered as well, a testimony that went through all of the atrocities of the living conditions and the school conditions of the Mexican-Americans in their own country. She really felt compelled to tell the truth in this novel. And Texas felt compelled to want to hang her. Hi. But Texans have come around, because I go to the USA Film Festival in Dallas every year, and they now think of Giant as almost sacred text. They love the novel, and they love the film. And you're going to Austin this summer.

[37:27] Julie Gilbert: I am. Yeehaw. And there are going to be thousands of people, probably, let's hope. Thousands, I don't know, maybe hundreds. Let's hope they all buy a copy of the book. But there's a great deal of interest in Giant in Texas. I'm a good friend of Carol Baker's, who's the last surviving star of the film. And the USA Film Festival in Dallas offered her all kinds of inducements. Come down, we'll have a screening at the Majestic Theater, where the film opened in Dallas in 1956, and we'll sell out. And she doesn't want to talk about it anymore. She doesn't want to. She said all she's going to say. And she said, I couldn't possibly sit through that film again. It's too long. She said, I made a very firm resolution with myself.

I think Giant's great, but I can't sit through it again. But you quote from her own memoir in the book, and her quotes are very vivid, actually. She did say all she was going to say. I met Carol a couple of times, and she said, I'm not talking because I'm talked out. And so she said, use anything you want in the book, use it all, and just be sure you thank me. And you did.

[38:35] David Rigano: And I did. You certainly did. Of course. There's another question here. Yes, sir.

[38:41] Audience Member: The movie comes out right in the middle of what we think of as the civil rights movement. I don't know exactly what year the Montgomery bus strike is.

[38:51] David Rigano: That's later. That's later. This is the 50s.

[38:56] Julie Gilbert: I think 59. And this is 56 was the movie. 52 is the novel.

[39:02] David Rigano: 20 years ago.

[39:03] Julie Gilbert: Yeah.

[39:04] David Rigano: It really is striking how head on they take that.

[39:08] Julie Gilbert: And they played, in the movie, they play it down with angels. They make nice about it. She did not in the novel. It remains in the film, not as vivid and as specific as prolonged in detail, but it's there.

[39:25] David Rigano: It is. It is.

[39:26] Julie Gilbert: It's there.

[39:27] David Rigano: It is. Yeah. Because Stevens, his social conscience was huge. So in that sense, he was the perfect director for her.

[39:37] Julie Gilbert: Just talk about his social conscience. He was the first director in Hollywood to have the courage to deal with the Holocaust because that was a forbidden subject. And he made the Diary of Anne Frank, a Gentile director dealing with a Jewish subject. He was the first Hollywood director. And I think he should be in Yad Vashem with the other righteous Gentiles because it was.

[40:01] David Rigano: Try getting him there.

[40:03] Julie Gilbert: It could happen.

[40:04] David Rigano: Maybe.

[40:05] Julie Gilbert: It could happen.

[40:05] David Rigano: Maybe.

[40:07] Julie Gilbert: But that social consciousness.

[40:09] David Rigano: Yeah.

[40:09] Julie Gilbert: Connected with his next film, which was Diary of Anne Frank.

[40:12] David Rigano: Very much.

[40:12] Julie Gilbert: Absolutely.

[40:13] David Rigano: It's true. Has the movie or the book, have you ever seen it put into that narrative of the wider civil rights?

[40:22] Julie Gilbert: No, not really.

[40:24] David Rigano: No, it's a Hollywood movie.

[40:26] Julie Gilbert: And it remained as one of the longest movies ever made in Hollywood. And the star wattage sort of almost takes away from the bitter underbelly, I think, in a sense.

[40:45] David Rigano: And of course, I always wonder, my big question is, would the movie, I'll ask you what you think, and then do you think that the movie would have had the lasting power, the big boom that it made, and then the lasting power if Dean had lived?

[41:04] Julie Gilbert: Probably not.

[41:07] David Rigano: Dean's myth is so great that it carries with it the three films he made. They're all good films. But their position in film history is enhanced by his premature and tragic death.

[41:25] Julie Gilbert: Yes.

[41:35] David Rigano: And that she did a huge amount of research and spent a lot of energy and time doing that. So I wonder, what took her to that story?

[41:49] Julie Gilbert: She had a friend named William Allen White, who was the editor of the Emporia Gazette. We're talking in the 40s. They were friends all along. And he said, Edna, I think there's a story there. A lot of the time of her novels, because she wrote so many, people would point her toward things, say, I think this is for you. So he said, I think you should conquer Texas. I think it's time. And then she went and she tried to get the feeling in her, and it wasn't. But it haunted her. And it was the first time I've ever heard her, she thought she could pretty much, and she could say anything, do anything, go anywhere. She was a free woman, so liberated at that time. But she did say at one point that she thought after her second trip there, that it was more, she said something like it was more for the big boys like Michener or Hemingway. So she was, I think it finally won her. But she fought it. She fought it. She did say this is a subject that should be written by a man.

[43:05] David Rigano: Anyway, please get this book. It is terrific. Thanks so much for being here.

[44:28] David Rigano: Follow us on Instagram at Dramabookshowpodcast. Follow our eventbrite at Dramabookshop. And all the books we talk about can be found here at the bookshop. And so can we. And we will see you at the bookshop.

[44:58] David Rigano: Bye.