All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  Never Say Goodbye is a remake of the 1945 Merle Oberon vehicle This Love of Ours, which in turn was inspired by a play by Luigi Pirandello. With each incarnation, the story seemed to become more grossly sentimental. Brimming over with tragic accidents, chance encounters, and tearful reconciliations, Never Say Goodbye seems intent on achieving maximum bathos. Taking the tearjerker to an entirely new level, every frame of the film seems to ooze with a kind of treacly goo.

  Hudson is Dr. Michael Parker, a widowed surgeon so dedicated to furthering orthopedic research that he maintains a state of the art diagnostic laboratory in the basement of his own home—complete with a young Clint Eastwood as his attentive lab assistant.

  Parker’s young daughter, Suzy (Shelley Fabares), is so single-mindedly devoted to her father, she’s diagnosed as having “an advanced Electra complex.” Although her heart belongs to daddy, Suzy also finds time to create a needlepoint shrine to her long-departed mother. Dr. Parker’s chauffeur and housekeeper talk about his German-born wife—who went missing in the Russian zone just after the war—in only the most hushed, reverent tones. While attending a medical conference in Chicago, Parker joins some colleagues at Timmy’s Tavern, where Lisa (Cornell Borchers), the wife he long assumed was dead, is not only very much alive but providing piano accompaniment for the house caricaturist, Victor (George Sanders, at his most languid).

  Within moments of this unexpected reunion of husband and wife, an overwhelmed Lisa dashes into the street and is struck by a car. She may have survived years of deprivation behind the Iron Curtain, but with a punctured lung the chances of her pulling through surgery are slim to none. Paging Doctor Parker. With weepy violins underscoring every lachrymose flashback, it’s all Hudson can do to keep a straight face while delivering lines like, “You could have at least closed one door when you married me . . . the door to your lover!” or “I like to dream my dreams when I’m wide awake.”

  With Rock’s popularity surging, Never Say Goodbye became one of the top-grossers of 1956. The film proved to be critic-proof, which is a good thing as the reviews were hardly raves. Variety noted that the picture was overloaded with “the ingredients of misunderstanding and mother love which appeal to those gals who go for soap opera and magazine romance.”

  Chapter 8

  Giant

  Rock and his bride-to-be, Phyllis Gates, on the set of Giant in the summer of 1955.

  (Courtesy of Wally Cech)

  I think Rock Hudson worked best with a big background,” says film historian Steve Hayes. “A big melodrama against a big landscape. He was such a big presence and the camera caught how strapping and stalwart and dependable he was. You don’t lose him in the Pacific Ocean when he’s on a schooner. You don’t lose him in the vineyards when they’re on fire. He’s the ultimate hero and you feel like he’s big enough to take all of that on.”

  Hudson’s next production would be big in every way. It took more than three years to make. And even then, it ran forty-four days overschedule. It cost far more than its initial budget of $3 million and at 210 minutes, it was longer than its projected running time of two and a half hours. As Hollywood epics go, Giant was a film of mammoth proportions—as grandiose and immense as the Texas it depicted. It would even be advertised as “a story of big things and big feelings.”

  After director George Stevens read Edna Ferber’s novel, which spanned almost thirty years in the life of a wealthy ranching family, he knew that the Pulitzer Prize–winning saga would form the basis for his next film.

  In 1955, Stevens was a fifty-year-old army veteran and his career in motion pictures had been going strong for over thirty years. As one of the most prolific and dependable craftsmen in the business, Stevens had directed classics in virtually every genre, including A Place in The Sun, Gunga Din, Alice Adams, Swing Time, and Shane. While the projects he was attracted to were typically panoramic in scope, Stevens was also intent on making movies that explored the human condition in intimate detail.

  During World War II, Stevens was recruited by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The director supervised a film unit which documented D-Day as well as Nazi atrocities at the Dachau concentration camp. Upon his return to Hollywood, the kind of riotous battle of the sexes comedies Stevens had made before the war (The More the Merrier, Woman of the Year) suddenly didn’t seem as appealing to him. “I guess I wasn’t in a very hilarious mood,” the director told his colleagues. Recognizing that the cultural climate in postwar America had shifted, Stevens wanted to make more serious-minded, socially conscious pictures.

  With its sweeping scale and themes of racial intolerance, capitalistic excess, and feminism, Giant seemed tailor-made for George Stevens and the perfect property with which to launch his own independent production company. The sensitive social issues that Ferber had focused on in her novel may have scared off some of his contemporaries, but not Stevens. The director seemed to like the fact that Ferber’s searing indictment of Texas’s arrogance and racism had generated plenty of controversy when Giant was published by Doubleday in 1952.

  Many irate citizens from the Lone Star State felt that “a little old lady from Kalamazoo” had humiliated and betrayed them. One El Paso newspaper went so far as to suggest that Ferber be hung in effigy in bookstore windows. “The reaction was quite violent in some quarters,” Ferber recalled at a press conference a year after Giant was published. “They called me names that were unprintable—but they printed them.”

  When a syndicated columnist asked readers if they’d like to see Ferber’s much discussed novel turned into a movie, a Dallas newspaper responded that if Hollywood filmed the book, bullet holes would fill the screen wherever Giant was shown in Texas; and given the intense reaction to Ferber’s latest effort throughout the state, this was no idle threat.

  None of this ruffled Stevens, who understood that all of the outrage was good for business: “To my mind, all of this bombast meant controversy, a healthy and provocative thing. And as such, it seemed to add to my enthusiasm for putting the subject on to the screen in the best and most forceful possible form.”

  In November of 1953, Stevens’s appropriately named Giant Productions acquired the screen rights to Ferber’s novel, which thanks to all of the ballyhoo, had become a runaway bestseller. A month later, Stevens signed a contract with Warner Brothers for the financing and distribution of what the trades were already touting as “the biggest and most important picture since Gone With the Wind.”

  When Stevens announced that he was about to begin casting Giant, his office was deluged with letters and telegrams from readers all over the country who had very definite ideas about which actors should fill Giant’s leading roles: headstrong cattleman Jordan “Bick” Benedict, his socially conscious wife, Leslie, and their surly ranch hand, Jett Rink, who becomes a well-to-do oil baron in the latter half of the film. In Ferber’s novel, Bick Benedict is described as a mass of contradictions: “There was nothing regal, certainly, in the outer aspect of this broad-shouldered figure in the everyday clothes of a Texas cowman. Yet here was the ruler of an empire . . . His was a deceptive gentleness; soft spoken, almost mild. The eyes were completely baffling; guileless, visionary; calculating, shrewd.”

  The actor playing Bick would have to portray him at three different stages of his life—as an ambitious young rancher, then as a middle-aged husband and father, and, finally, as a graying grandfather in the film’s final hour. Bick undergoes a transformation from entitled bigot—who treats the minorities working for him disdainfully—to proud defender of his half-Mexican grandson.

  Ferber saw Burt Lancaster, the robust veteran of dozens of Westerns, as Bick. Others felt that Alan Ladd’s career-defining performance in Stevens’s Shane, made him the most logical choice. Meanwhile, Clark Gable let Stevens know that he was interested in the role—provided that he would get a percentage of the grosses. Gable would have come with the kind of “marquee insurance” that movie studios prize, but at fifty-four he was a bit long in the tooth to play Bick
as a younger man.

  The fact that most of Hollywood’s established stars were over forty prompted Stevens to move in a different direction. Instead of resorting to gauzy lenses and strategic lighting to make over-the-hill actors appear thirty years younger in the opening scenes, Stevens decided to cast actors in their twenties and age them for the second half. With this new approach in mind, Stevens continued to search for his leads.

  “We thought about Bill Holden very seriously, at one time,” Stevens recalled. Warner Brothers liked the idea of reteaming Holden and Audrey Hepburn in Giant, as they had been paired very successfully in Sabrina a few years earlier. This dream casting quickly fell apart, however. After Hepburn met with Stevens in July of 1954, it was decided that the star of Roman Holiday was “too sophisticated” for Leslie. As for Holden, he was intent on starring in the forthcoming United Artists production of Elmer Gantry. In the kind of ironic twist that Hollywood seems to specialize in, Burt Lancaster ended up playing Elmer Gantry, making Holden once again available for Giant; only now Stevens had moved on.

  One morning, the director got a call from Joan McTavish, a casting agent at Universal and the woman who would later become Stevens’s second wife. “Have you thought about Rock Hudson?” McTavish asked him. She had recently seen Hudson in The Lawless Breed and remembered being pleasantly surprised by his performance. At McTavish’s urging, Stevens screened the biopic, in which Rock portrayed John Wesley Hardin from youth to old age. When the picture ended and the lights went up in his screening room, Stevens knew that he had found his Bick Benedict.

  “He’s the best young star in pictures,” Stevens would say of Hudson. “He’s big and strong and fits the physical qualifications 100 percent.” The only problem was, Rock Hudson was not at liberty to star in a George Stevens production. Universal-International essentially owned Hudson under the terms of an ironclad seven-year contract. The studio wasn’t about to let their most important asset walk out the door.

  “When I first went to the [Universal] front office with the idea of Giant,” Hudson recalled in an interview in 1981, “they said, ‘Well, we can’t have you go to Warner Brothers, Rock. That’ll be six months and we can make two pictures with you here in that time. It’s out of the question.’” Hudson rarely used his star power to get his own way, but he wanted to appear in Giant so badly that he insisted on another meeting with top brass.

  Rock was granted an audience, but once inside Universal’s executive board room he found himself being subjected to the ultimate game of Hollywood hardball. The studio would release Hudson to appear in Giant, but they would demand a then-impressive $100,000 for his services. What’s more, Rock had to agree to renew his contract with Universal for four more years. “They were really bastards!” Hudson recalled years later. “But it was worth it . . . If it wasn’t me, it was going to be Holden. And every actor in town wanted the role.”

  Stevens announced Hudson’s casting in November of 1954. “Wonderful, wonderful news. Am walking in clouds,” Hudson cabled Stevens. Long before the cameras rolled, director and star got down to work. “I was very grateful because he did all of the directing with me before the picture began,” Hudson said. “First of all, he got me thinking I was the richest son of a bitch in the world. And he got me all puffed up and full of myself by making me believe my opinion was important to every aspect of the picture. And he got me so bigoted, talking about the squalor and filth of the Mexicans . . . that I hated them. From then on, he hardly said a word.”

  Stevens also took Rock on an educational field trip—to, of all places, the Wiltern Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Perched in the balcony, Stevens and Hudson watched movies starring Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper. Hudson remembered that Stevens offered minimal commentary. Once, while an early Cooper feature was being shown, the director remarked, “Look at the way Cooper reacts—he doesn’t move a muscle but you can see what he feels.”

  Through a kind of cinematic osmosis, Rock Hudson would achieve an unaffected naturalness, quiet authority, and newfound subtleness in Giant that had only been hinted at in some of his previous performances. All of those qualities had been lying dormant from the beginning of his career, but, with the exception of Douglas Sirk, few of Hudson’s directors had encouraged the actor to tap into them.

  With his Bick Benedict finally in place, Stevens turned his attention to finding a bankable and popular—though not too sophisticated—actress to play Leslie Lynnton Benedict. Moviegoers had lined up for Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Why not reunite them for Giant? Stevens kept the Oscar-winning Wyman in mind while pursuing an even bigger star. “Frankly, I would rather have had Grace Kelly for the part at that time,” the director recalled years later. “She sort of suited it better and she was the most important female star at that time.” But when Stevens approached MGM about borrowing the future “Serene Highness of Monaco” for his latest production, the answer from studio chief Dore Schary was swift and emphatic: “We are not going to loan Miss Kelly for Giant or any other picture. End of discussion.”

  Then, as Stevens would later diplomatically phrase it, “Liz Taylor cast herself in Giant.” Rock Hudson, for one, was delighted. Although they had never had an opportunity to work together, Hudson and Taylor had socialized a bit and found that they enjoyed each other’s company.

  May 19, 1955, marked the first day of principal photography and the pivotal third role of Jett Rink had been cast only a few days earlier. For months, Stevens was bombarded with casting suggestions for Jett Rink. They ran the gamut from the inspired (Robert Mitchum) to the absurd (Frank Sinatra). As it turned out, the ideal actor had been visiting Stevens’s office on the Warner Brothers lot on a regular basis. He was a displaced New Yorker. A bongo-playing, motorcycle-riding disciple of Marlon Brando. In his cruddy blue jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, he already seemed dressed for the part of Bick Benedict’s adversary. The uniquely talented oddball with the slouching stance was named James Dean.

  Although he had already starred in Elia Kazan’s production of East of Eden for Warners, the film had not yet been released. Word around the studio was that Dean had delivered—and then some—with a riveting, star-making performance. Stevens told screenwriter Fred Guiol, “We should think about this boy for Jett. He’s very different from anybody that we have thought about.”

  Very different was right. If eager-to-please Rock Hudson had been buffed and polished into a kind of gleaming but impenetrable form of matinee idol perfection, Jimmy Dean was the anti-star—an ill-mannered, mercurial, intensely neurotic loner who almost single-handedly personified the edgy intensity of the Actors Studio.

  Alongside Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, Dean was a poster boy for the Method, a supposedly more “authentic” approach to acting, in which the performer accessed their own emotional memory to bring a character to life. Director Lee Strasberg and other practitioners of the Method believed this technique resulted in a more realistic, multilayered portrayal. In other words, it was as far from Hollywood’s cardboard theatrics and glycerin tears as one could get. And the same could be said for Marfa, Texas, where cast and crew of Giant converged in early June.

  Vast and remote, this West Texas town of 3,500 had been founded as a railroad water stop in 1883. As one scenic designer put it, “Marfa was 3,856 square miles of blank page.” Desolate and drought-stricken as it may have been, Marfa and its people would supply Giant with its atmospheric heart and soul. Although some exteriors had already been shot in Keswick, Virginia, it was in Marfa where virtually the entire company and all of George Stevens’s meticulous preplanning finally came together. Along with reporters from Look, Life, and Marfa’s own Big Bend Sentinel, as many as 700 curious onlookers would observe shooting on any given day.

  In Stevens, Hudson found a supportive and inspired director. In Elizabeth Taylor, he found a soul mate. Almost immediately, the two stars became inseparable. So much so that rumors started flying. “At the time it was suspected there was a romance between Elizabeth Taylor an
d Rock Hudson,” says Joe Duncan, owner of the El Paisano Hotel, where the stars were temporarily housed. “Taylor’s husband, actor Michael Wilding, showed up from Hollywood with their two dogs to investigate the rumor. He and Elizabeth had a blow-out fight in the main room that could be heard for miles.”

  Although Elizabeth confided in Rock about some of the problems in her marriage, the legendary Hudson-Taylor camaraderie seems to have been more about cutting loose than getting reflective. “Rock made me laugh,” Taylor would say after his death. “We spent most of the time chatting and laughing and being silly. Just before he died . . . I remember making him laugh by recalling a night in Marfa, Texas, when it was hailing. The hail was like golf balls. We were running out, getting conked on the head . . . making chocolate martinis. So you can imagine the state we were in.”

  In addition to bonding with Taylor, Rock went out of his way to ingratiate himself with the rest of the cast, which included Carroll Baker (debuting as Bick’s daughter), Dennis Hopper (playing son Jordan), Earl Holliman (as son-in-law Bob Dace), and Sal Mineo (as fallen war hero Angel Obregon). The same kind of sociability didn’t seem at all possible with James Dean. Even though Rock, Jimmy, and character actor Chill Wills were sharing a house on location, Dean couldn’t have been more remote. “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but he was a prick. Pardon my French,” Hudson would tell an interviewer in 1974. “He was selfish and petulant, and believed his own press releases. On the set, he’d upstage an actor and step on his lines. Arrogant. But let him alone and he was brilliant.”