No, James Dean Did Not Sleep with a 70-Year-Old Edna Ferber

Julie Gilbert's new book on the making of "Giant" indulges in the author's weird sexual fantasies about her great-aunt.

This past week saw the release of Giant Love, a book about the making the James Dean film Giant by Julie Gilbert, the great-niece of the woman who wrote the novel Giant is based on, Edna Feber. The second book touching on James Dean to be released in a month, following my own, Gilbert and I have seen our books discussed in some of the same outlets, and we even appeared on the same podcast on two different days this week. I have largely refrained from commenting on her very lightly sourced book while promoting my own, but now that the Daily Mail seized on the book’s weirdest claim, I can’t pass over in silence her utterly absurd assertion that Dean was having sex with the septuagenarian novelist.

Look, I spent four years investigating every scrap of paper that Dean left behind and virtually everything anyone ever said about him, and I can tell you with all of the authority I can muster that Gilbert’s claims have absolutely no support in fact. And she knows this. While asserting, bizarrely, that Feber (who had no known sex life) was likely only sexually attracted to couples (!), Gilbert writes in Giant Love:

Ferber had never been average in any way but this one; she was drawn toward the Dean magnet just like everyone else. Mercedes McCambridge was similar to Ferber in outline: strong-featured, forthright, accomplished—and also a Deanite. […] When Katharine Hepburn called herself and Ferber “unicorn women,” I assumed the term meant that they were unique. It sounded original and right on target. They both had singular heads on their shoulders.

For much of my life people have been inquiring about my great aunt’s proclivities. Now, in the time of variety-pack sexuality, I am finally grasping what a “unicorn woman” is all about. It is a woman who grazes with couples. […] When I think of Hepburn’s statement now, the curtain parts on Ferber, Dean, and McCambridge in Los Angeles during those final weeks filming Giant. They spent a good deal of time together on the set and off. Ferber and Dean became close, but McCambridge was never far. Perhaps there was a liaison. McCambridge was married, but did say “I love you” in a letter to Ferber; and Dean was so young and arbitrary, it seemed he would try anything. The curtain closes. Maybe this was part of the “everything” Ferber had promised to tell my mother someday. I will never know if there was any lover for Ferber other than fame. In her words: “Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death—fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.”

OK, so let’s take this from the top: Hepburn said that to Gilbert sometime in the early 1970s (it appears in Gilbert’s 1970s biography of Ferber), but there is no evidence that “unicorn” referred to a bisexual woman brought in for polyamorous sex at that time. While some speculate the term originated in the 1970s, it was not widely known then and not popularized until the online era, as part of “unicorn hunting,” a term for a male-female couple seeking a bisexual female third. Hepburn, who famously needed Spencer Tracy to explain to her what a homosexual was, probably wasn’t using brand-new polyamorous swinger lingo as she herself approached seventy.

(That said, there is documentary evidence from 1970s literature that the mythical unicorn was understood to be bisexual, so it is perhaps possible that Hepburn was making a sidelong reference to bisexuality, not to specific polyamorous sex acts.)

More to the point, there is no evidence on any sexual relationship involving Dean and either of the women named. There is no documentary material, no oral testimony, and no real opportunity. While it is, of course, impossible to account for every hour of Dean’s life, we know where he was most nights in those last months in Los Angeles, and those nights were not spent with Edna Ferber.

Edna Ferber with James Dean on the set of “Giant”

There is also no real contemporary evidence that Dean had any particular love for Edna Ferber beyond the general goodwill he felt toward older women. He had himself photographed with her many times, as he did anyone he thought famous enough to be useful for publicity, but contemporary accounts show that Ferber thought him obnoxious at the time. She plays virtually no part in any Dean biography or memoir, and I could find little evidence they shared any significant friendship. Joe Hyams, who interviewed Ferber in 1955 while on the set of Giant, quoted Ferber as saying that Dean “didn’t want to see or talk with anyone” during his time filming the movie, and he implied that she found this unpleasant.

Val Holley, who reviewed all of the filming records for Giant, reported that Ferber visited the set for a few days at the end of July 1955. During that time, Dean did as he would with various gossip columnists and reporters, providing superficial charm, demonstrating rope tricks (though authors including Gilbert make much hay of it, we know of it only from a publicity photograph), and flattering her. The only other contact between the two was a photo of himself in costume as Jett Rink that Dean sent to Ferber and a letter Ferber wrote to Dean, who had won her over personally if not professionally (she insisted years later he had been “miscast”), telling him that he looked like John Barrymore and that she believed they both were significantly above average humans. It arrived the day after he died.¹

James Dean teaches Edna Ferber a rope trick.

Any suggestion of a deep friendship only emerged later, after Dean died, when Ferber wanted to associate herself with his incandescent posthumous celebrity and, like so many others, exaggerated her relationship with Dean, at least with her family. While Gilbert trusts what she heard in her mother’s stories of Ferber’s apparent love of Dean, she admits that her own father told her much of it was made up. Gilbert could not find any actual proof, and the passage she cites from Ferber’s 1963 memoir about Dean offers nothing other than a plain description of him and his career quite clearly derived from posthumous news accounts.

Given all of this, the imagined threesome involving the seemingly asexual Ferber and James Dean is not just implausible but unsupportable by any conventional historiography.

1. Val Holley saw the letter, but his summary described material not printed in the excerpt in Ferber’s memoir. It isn’t fully clear if this was the same letter, but Ferber says in her memoir that it was their only correspondence, so it seems likely to be.