The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (6 page)

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, Ceau
escu, 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.)

The film sets up Jett Rink as Jordy’s polar opposite. At the beginning of the movie, Stevens tempts us to root for Rink. He grew up broke, and his struggles toward self-betterment—memorizing vocabulary and learning to make tea—are poignant. But when he strikes oil and becomes a billionaire, he builds an absurdly lavish hotel and orders its staff to refuse service to nonwhite people. He props himself up by tearing down others—whole races of them.

Rink and Jordy clash at the black-tie opening of Rink’s hotel—which the Benedicts (also newly oil-rich) have been pressured to attend. Jordy expects the event to annoy him—and regrets agreeing to attend—but when the hotel beauty salon bars his wife, Juana, he hits the roof. The beautician is baffled by his anger: “She should have gone to Sanchez’ place, where they do her people.”

Too furious to notice the thunderstorm through which he has slogged, Jordy, dripping, confronts Rink at the dinner in Rink’s honor. Portrayed with passion by Dennis Hopper, Jordy is a small, clenched bundle of indignation in a ballroom full of rangy, tuxedo-clad cowboys—the state’s petroleum elite. Rink sneers; he loathes Jordy’s education, idealism, and last name. He taunts Jordy about “marrying a squaw.” Then he orders his goons to hold Jordy back, so that he can avenge years of class resentment, throwing a punch to flatten the rich boy. Leslie winces when Jordy is struck; but she is proud that her son stood up to injustice. Bick, however, shamed, leaps to defend the Benedict family honor—not to demand respect for Jordy’s wife.

Bick prides himself on being open-minded. But later, when he counsels Jordy to expect confrontation—that it comes with “marrying in that direction”—he exposes his prejudice. Bick is just a less-crude version of Rink. On the edge of tears, Jordy begs his father to hear what he has said—and to fight against the bigotry in his heart.

At Sarge’s Diner, a roadside dump on the drive back to Reata, Jordy’s message sinks in. Sarge, the loutish white owner, grudgingly serves Leslie, Juana, Bick, and Bick’s biracial grandson. But when a Mexican couple sits down, Sarge evicts them. And Bick raises his fists—not for family honor or personal pride, but for something larger—racial justice—in which before this moment he had only superficially believed.

Bick does not prevail. Sarge decks him; he crashes into a stack of dishes and topples to the floor. But in Leslie’s eyes, he is victorious. He has experienced a flicker of empathy. She has also triumphed. Her values don’t just reside in the Benedict children; they have taken root in her husband as well: “After a hundred years, the Benedict family is really a success.”

Giant
“depicts the erosion of sexual stereotyping,” critic Peter Biskind writes in
Seeing Is Believing
:
How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties
. “Leslie is more assertive, more a man than her mother back in Maryland, and she feminizes Bick, sees to it that he becomes more a woman than his father.” In 1956—the same year that
Rebel Without a Cause
blamed teenage delinquency on fathers who wear aprons—this itself was an achievement.

But Stevens doesn’t just break down gender polarities. He implies that the innate values of women are nobler than those of men. He takes Leslie’s world—the world of women—and connects it to the “aggregate of pluralist values,” the “highest aspirations” toward which a civilization can strive: “tolerance, compromise, flexibility, and civility,” Biskind writes. He does this through Leslie’s commitment to social justice. In
Giant
, Biskind asserts, “woman’s world comes to be equated with nothing less than culture itself.”

7

1956–1959

AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, Warner Brothers did not sell
Giant
as a feminist call to arms. It sold the film as a steamy love triangle—misrepresenting, often comically, the content of scenes. The ad campaign used “subliminal seduction,” a then-trendy technique for selling products by stealthily linking them to sex. The studio ran a half-page ad with three big pictures. In the first, Hudson, valiantly heterosexual, gazes longingly at Taylor. The caption: “Bick Benedict, owning so much except the one part of Leslie’s life that is no part of his.”

The ad then shows Dean, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, oozing intensity, and Taylor
on her knees
before him. Although they are technically chaste, their positions hint at an act that would violate the Production Code. The caption: “Jett Rink, the outsider—and Leslie, wealthy and beautiful.”