The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (12 page)

As early as July 2, 1954, Stevens was trying to sign Audrey Hepburn as Leslie Benedict, but at the time she was appearing on stage in New York in
Ondine
. Referring to a Monday visit, Stevens wrote her at the 46th Street Theater that he was “hopeful” their talks would eventuate in a mutually agreeable “visualization of
Giant
as a film.”
¹
On July 9, after
Ondine
closed, he wrote Hepburn again, this time addressing her at 35 East Sixty-seventh Street. The letter clearly indicates that the director and the actress were at loggerheads over their interpretation of the Edna Ferber story. Though their visit was “very pleasant,” Stevens wrote, they were “not always” of one mind about the character of Leslie. “I respect your views on our story,” Stevens added.

With Hepburn no longer in the running, the director turned to Eva Marie Saint, but a Warner interoffice memo dated January 25, 1955, advised Stevens and Henry Ginsberg, Stevens’s coproducer, that Saint was pregnant, and the baby was due in late April. On January 28, Ginsberg was informed in a letter he received at the Bel Air Hotel that Grace Kelly was “very anxious” to be cast as Leslie, but MGM had earmarked her for a Spencer Tracy film, though she definitely did not want to do it. Meanwhile, Stevens had also been attempting to cast the lead male role of Jordan “Bick” Benedict, Leslie’s husband. The current box-office kings of Hollywood, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and William Holden, were all vying for the part since
Giant
promised to be the most distinguished film of the year. Then Ross Hunter, producer of Universal’s
Magnificent Obsession
, insisted that Warner screen the film to see the performance of the up-and-coming Rock Hudson.

On viewing the movie, Stevens immediately realized that Rock’s scenes with Jane Wyman were going to make him the biggest romantic lead since Gable.
²
He screened an earlier Hudson film,
The Lawless Breed
, in which the actor played a gunslinger who ages several decades, just as Bick ages from youth to midlife in
Giant
. Stevens alerted Warner to start negotiations for borrowing Hudson from his home studio, Universal. A copy of the script was sent to Universal’s Edward Muhl on October 23, 1954. The studio was reluctant to lose the services of its hottest new star, even for a short period, and decided to rush Hudson into another Jane Wyman tearjerker,
All That Heaven Allows
. Eager for the plum
Giant
lead, Hudson was convinced his studio would never loan him out. However, on November 4, Louella O. Parsons wrote in the
L.A. Examiner
, “Rock begged so hard he finally won over.”
³
On the same day, Hudson cabled Stevens from Evanston, Illinois, that he’d been apprised of the “wonderful news” and was “walking in clouds.”
⁴
He was returning to L.A. immediately, hoping to call on Stevens. The director replied on November 6, agreeing to Hudson’s request for a meeting. Universal notified Warner that Hudson was available beginning May 17, 1955, and a deal was made with his agent Henry Willson.

At their first conference, Stevens asked Hudson whom he’d like for his leading lady, “Grace Kelly or Elizabeth Taylor?”
⁵
Having met Elizabeth through Monty and knowing she was simpatico with gays, he replied, “Elizabeth Taylor,” and Stevens said, “Fine. We’ll get Elizabeth.” Hudson later recalled, “If I had said Grace Kelly, he would have found a way to make me think that Elizabeth would be better. That was the wonderful way of his direction, of making me think that it was my idea.” At first Metro refused to lend Elizabeth to Warner. “I had to go almost on a sitdown strike,” she recalled. “MGM wanted me for some other film—like a sequel to Lassie’s mother.”
⁶
Fortunately, on May 4, 1955, Metro finally consented to release her until August 21, 1955. “Those bastards at MGM make me do five pictures a year for my hundred thousand,” she complained, “and on this
Giant
loan-out alone they are collecting two hundred and fifty thousand from Warner Brothers.”
⁷

She was now at a key turning point in her career as an actress rather than a Hollywood personality. Warner Bros. planned the film as an ambitious three-hour-and-eighteen-minute epic, not only a portrait of modern Texans grappling with social and economic change, but of an independent woman surviving in a male-dominated society. A Warner interoffice memo about the character of Leslie Benedict demonstrated that a new wind was blowing through the studios, wiping out old stereotypes and hinting at the advent of women’s lib in the following decade. “There was in her the elements of romantic rebellion against the Virginia social world,” wrote the Warner profiler. “Leslie romanticized truth, without necessarily understanding it . . . A ride on a clear morning, a mountain view, a child in need, a calf being branded—these made her blood quicken and demanded her intense participation . . . She rejoiced in a kind of noble dilettantism.” Elizabeth would bring Leslie alive in all her dimensions, inhabiting the role with an authority that would make it impossible to imagine any other actress in the part.

In another casting anomaly, Stevens at first envisaged Richard Burton in the role of Jett Rink, the oil wildcatter who secretly loves Leslie Benedict. To avoid stereotypes, he was determined to cast actors who’d never appeared in a Western before. That he contemplated casting Burton, a British subject whose voice had the music of Wales in it, shows the extent to which he was willing to go to make
Giant
a film free from clichés. Stevens reconsidered and offered the role to Alan Ladd, but Ladd turned it down and the part went to James Dean, who’d achieved overnight stardom in his first film,
East of Eden
.
⁸

With the cast in place, a press conference was held in the Warner commissary to announce the start of principal photography, and Elizabeth sat on the dais with Stevens, Dean, Hudson, Mercedes McCambridge, and Chill Wills. At first, she wasn’t sure what to make of the peculiar, introverted Dean. To everyone’s astonishment, he appeared in blue jeans, a threadbare red flannel shirt, a sweat-stained Western hat, tattered boots, and an aged cowboy belt with a silver buckle, a cigarette drooping from his lips. Photographers asked him to remove his sunglasses for a group photo but he refused. Though his costars stood up as they were introduced, he remained in his chair, staring at his boots. Hudson rolled his eyes. To all appearances, he was as straitlaced as Dean was quirky, and of the two men, Elizabeth at first preferred Hudson.

Though her box-office power was well known, Elizabeth was not, prior to
Giant
, regarded as a heavyweight actress or megastar. The billing file in Stevens’s private papers indicates that the original pecking order was Hudson, Dean, Elizabeth, Jane Withers, and Wills, in that order. Not until the following year, 1956, as Stevens laboriously edited thousands of feet of footage, did Metro, Elizabeth’s home studio, nail down the exact billing in negotiations with Warner. A memo from Marvin H. Schenck, vice president of Loew’s Inc., specified that Elizabeth was to be “first of the names of the members of the cast.”
⁹
Hudson followed Elizabeth on the bill, and Dean received third billing.

On April 28, 1955, a few days before Elizabeth’s loan-out agreement went into effect, she reported to Warner’s Burbank lot for fittings for her six costumes. Having heard from their friends at Metro that she was a problem but such a moneymaker that she was worth it, Warner executives nervously quizzed wardrobe about her behavior. In an interoffice memo to Stevens, Russ Llewellyn wrote that while the star was “very cooperative,” it would be advisable—“less tiring” for Elizabeth—if they brought her in for one hour a day three days a week. Almost immediately she quarreled with Stevens over costumes. He put her in brogue shoes, a long skirt, and a man’s slouch hat, appropriate attire for the wilds of West Texas, but she complained that she felt like “a lesbian in drag.”
¹⁰
The director ridiculed her in front of the entire company as just another pretty face who’d never make it as a serious actress. Though she eventually got rid of the slouch hat, she appeared in the rest of the outfit in one of the Reata ranch scenes, and Stevens’s judgment was borne out. The costume contributed to her credibility as a working ranch woman and enhanced her overall performance. Though she resisted Stevens, he was, apart from Monty, the best thing that had ever happened to her, tapping emotions and deep, rich vocal tones that no one else could elicit from her. Apart from Angela Vickers, Elizabeth’s Leslie Benedict is perhaps her most appealing role—warm, lovable, and intelligent—and one of the first of the screen’s new breed of liberated women.

Giant
brought her two of her most important loving, a-sexual relationships. Rock Hudson and James Dean both became influential in her life and career in that watershed year of 1955. For decades thereafter, she scrupulously guarded the secret of Hollywood’s foremost masculine role model, Hudson, a closet queen for whom the love that dare not speak its name was anathema. Even after his death from AIDS in 1985 she declined to discuss his sexuality. Finally, in 1997, she told interviewer Kevin Sessums, “I knew he was gay.” She also revealed to Sessums that Dean was homoerotically inclined, something that had been rumored for years but never confirmed by a primary source. “The men that I knew—Monty and Jimmy and Rock—if anything, I helped them get out of the closet,” she said.

Had she not been such an earnest and resourceful actress, Hudson’s and Dean’s homoeroticism would have made her work quite difficult in
Giant
as the lovely Leslie Benedict, supposedly desired by both men. Instead, it was Hudson and Dean who experienced difficulty, not because they were gay, but because her appearance was somewhat daunting to all males. Both actors were petrified at the prospect of making love to the world’s reigning glamour girl, and it showed in their work as they began filming in Burbank in early 1955.

The Wildings invited the twenty-nine-year-old Hudson to their home one night, and Hudson brought along a woman named Phyllis Gates. According to actor Ray Stricklyn, Phyllis was a farm girl from Minnesota who’d been an airline stewardess.
¹¹
Later Phyllis moved to the West Coast and met Rock when she went to work for his gay agent Henry Willson, who’d changed Rock’s name from Roy Fitzgerald to Rock Hudson and launched him on a movie career. When Ray Stricklyn moved to Hollywood and looked up his old friend Phyllis Gates, he met Henry Willson, who had a reputation for trying to seduce young actors.
¹²
Willson attempted to have sex with Stricklyn, and one night hosted a gang bang at his house, inviting Rock and other young studs. One of the boys squealed to
Confidential
magazine, which threatened to expose Rock as a homosexual. According to Stricklyn, Willson managed to “dissuade” the magazine with the help of hired gangsters, and then advised Rock to get married for at least two years to squelch the rumors. Rock ended his affair with a blond, blue-eyed, twenty-two-year-old man and started living with Phyllis Gates. When it appeared that
Confidential
was going to expose Rock as gay after all, studio executives gave the scandal sheet a big story on the prison record of another, lesser star, Rory Calhoun. Calhoun’s career was sacrificed, and Rock was off the hook.

At the Wildings, that night, Rock asked Elizabeth, “How can you stand being so beautiful?” She replied, “Beautiful? Beautiful! I’m Minnie Mouse.” Going into another room, she changed into a red skirt and black pumps, pinned her hair back, and then came back looking exactly like Minnie Mouse. The campy, relaxed nature of their relationship was firmly established. They partied until four in the morning and then went to the studio at six to shoot one of
Giant
’s most important scenes, the wedding of Leslie Benedict’s sister in Virginia, during which Bick Benedict comes from Texas to retrieve the independent, self-willed Leslie.

Hung over, Elizabeth sat in her dressing room wondering when she’d be called to the set. After an hour, she walked out and found Stevens and the entire company waiting for her. “What’s going on? What happened?” she asked. The director bawled her out for being late. She tried to explain that no one had paged her, as was customary. Stevens tongue-lashed her until he’d reduced her to tears. When they started filming, she continued to weep throughout the scene. As played by Elizabeth and Rock, it was one of the most moving sequences in the film, despite the fact that between takes, both stars ran off the set to vomit. “We were both so hung over we couldn’t speak,” Rock said. “That’s what made the scene.”
¹³
Elizabeth suspected that Stevens had attacked her for being late to prepare her emotionally for this pivotal turn in the love story. Years later, in the early 1960s, when Stevens asked her to play Mary Magdalene in
The Greatest Story Ever Told
, she reminded him of their fight and expressed surprise that he would want her. Astounded, Stevens said, “I always thought we got along very well together.”
¹⁴

As Elizabeth’s marriage to Wilding deteriorated during the shoot, Rock offered a convenient shoulder on which to cry. She was frantic over how she’d raise two children alone if the marriage ended. “I felt sorry for her and the kids,” Hudson said. “She loves them, but she never seems to know what she wants or where to go.”