Adventure classics -- So rich, brash and Texan

Giant

by Edna Ferber

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Does anybody but me read the text that serves as filler between advertisements and social register photos in the Dallas Morning News’ FD Luxe Sunday magazine? I flipped through the glossy this week, looking more at the pictures than the words, but went into a fit of giggling at the final essay, proposing initiation rituals for would-be Texans newly arrived from other states. Number 1 on the initiation list -- “Read Edna Ferber’s Giant.”

The novel is the story of Eastern intellectual Leslie Lynnton and her marriage to Jordan “Bick” Benedict, owner of the multimillion acre Reata Ranch. Mutually swept off their feet, Leslie and Bick return to Texas in the 1920’s. Leslie applies her brand of civilization to her husband while he applies twentieth century technology to his family’s nineteenth century brand of ranching. The resulting cultural and social clashes will tear their marriage and family apart.

Hey, I’ve lived in this state most of my life and I still can’t figure out whether Texans regard Ferber’s 1952 muckraking story about our super-rich as satire, gospel truth, or simply one helluva page turner. Whatever we think of it, it’s now as much part of our lore as the Alamo, cattle drives, and oilfields.

But it wasn’t always so.

The subject of Texas, “improbable; brash, overwhelming, hospitable, larger than life,” had fascinated Ferber for at least a decade before she wrote her bestselling novel’s depictions of the fantastically rich alongside descriptions of grotesque poverty, oppression and racism.

“Whenever Ferber was repelled by something, she was also fascinated,” was the verdict of 
of a Ferber biography written by her great-niece, Julie Goldsmith Gilbert.

Texans, on the other hand, were at first more repelled than fascinated by Ferber. “To say that in 1952 the impact of Giant created a tumult not only in the book world but in the real world of the United States would not be an exaggeration,” Gilbert wrote. “The entire state of Texas felt impugned by it, and it created in displaced Texans a surge of nationalistic nastiness.”

By the time the movie version of Giant appeared in 1956, the state’s attitude had begun to change. Admittedly, the movie was less intent on muckracking than Ferber’s novel. And it starred incredibly handsome (and not yet out of the closet) Rock Hudson as Bick Benedict; incredibly beautiful young Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie; and incredibly young, beautiful and sexy James Dean in his swan song performance as Jett Rink, the villainous oilman everybody loved to hate.

Is it any wonder that when the new Texas legend of TV’s Dallas appeared a few decades later, the villain who romped away with the show boasted the initials “J.R.”? Forget earnest Leslie and Bick. Greed, power and J.R. Ewing were in.

A few more decades (and a revivial of Dallas) later, Texas politicians recycle the brash Texas image, forgetting it was ever reviled. And a glossy Sunday magazine whose front cover celebrates the lipsticks of cosmetic queen Mary Kay Ash can end with a 
tongue in cheek recommendation for Ferber’s long-ago Giant.

You don’t even need to ask, do you, whether Giant is available on Amazon, in both book and movie versions?

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a June of books about Texas and the Southwest with Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn.)

Adventure classics -- Girl, horse, steeplechase!

National Velvet

by Enid Bagnold

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Some little girls play with paper dolls. But Enid Bagnold’s secret passion was a stable of paper horses, “cut from sporting magazines,” biographer Anne Sebba writes, “shut up in a box when not in use and shared by no one except, thirty-five years later, her fictional creation Velvet Brown.”

Bagnold grew up to become a writer, to marry Reuters’ media magnate Roderick Jones, and have horse-crazy children, most notably daughter Laurian. By the early 1930’s, the Jones children were eager participants in the horseback competitions known in England as gymkhanas. After Laurian won a cup on her first pony, the Joneses bought a string of horses, including a black and white spotted piebald jumper called The Pie.

Fascinated by her daughter’s enthusiasm, Bagnold began to write a book about the collaboration between a girl and her horse that would grow into her most famous novel, 1935’s National Velvet.

In it, butcher’s daughter Velvet Brown wins a piebald rogue of a jumping horse -- The Pie -- in a raffle. With the help of a retired jockey , Velvet trains the horse as a racer and masquerades as a boy to enter -- and win -- England’s Grand National steeplechase. Although an accident reveals Velvet’s charade and her win is disqualified (women would not be allowed to compete in the Grand National for another forty years), it’s hard to imagine a more perfect fantasy for a horse-loving young girl.

Appropriately, Bagnold dedicated the book to Laurian, who provided line drawings for the original edition, “much to the anguish of some future publishers,” Sebbe reports in Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Polo magazine illustrator Paul Brown would undertake drawings for the 1949 U.S. edition.

I have qualms about any biography titled “authorized,” much less one that includes the subject’s genealogy, as this does. But Sebbe’s is too much fun to miss. Among other eccentricities, Bagnold was an inveterate social climber and early proponent of Hitler. Late in life, she would give up wearing shoes, appearing barefoot for a shopping spree at posh jewelers’ Bailey, Banks & Biddle.)

Bagnold’s National Velvet was selected as a Book of the Month in England in April of the year of publication. In May, it got the same designation in the U.S.

Of course, there was a movie, and the search for a suitable actress to play Velvet was the English equivalent of the search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in the U.S. 1930’s blockbuster, Gone With the Wind. In coincidences stranger than fiction, English actress Vivien Leigh nabbed Scarlett’s part; a girl living in America -- then almost-unknown Elizabeth Taylor -- was cast as Velvet.

Although Sebbe writes that Bagnold was a stickler for authenticity, most race horses are thoroughbreds, and spotted thoroughbreds are only slightly more common than hen’s teeth. Taylor’s movie co-star was a chestnut whose nom de cine, The Pie, was explained as a nickname for “Pirate.” The 1960’s U.S. TV spin-off would change the horse’s name to “King” to get around the whole piebald issue.

Of course, I wondered -- are there actually spotted racehorses? I found, to my surprise and delight, that there are, and have been, spotted thoroughbreds for centuries. For more, info, check out “Coloured Thoroughbred Breeders Association,”
www.facebook.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics’ February of animal adventures does back to back horse stories with Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse.)