By Sarah Sluis
FJI writer
Maria Garcia reports while on holiday in Marfa, Texas, onetime home to the Oscar-winning 1950s drama Giant.
I'm at Hotel Paisano in Marfa, Texas, in a suite that overlooks the courtyard's fountain, an oddity in the dry high desert of West Texas. The hotel's claim to fame, which may be apocryphal, is that Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean were guests here in 1954, during the filming of
Giant, the sprawling (and glacial) drama of class warfare on a Texas cattle ranch. Director George Stevens had his office at the hotel, and some members of the cast and crew ate their morning meal here before driving to locations outside Marfa for the day's shoot. Dailies, which were sent to Warner Bros. in Burbank, were screened at the now-shuttered movie theatre next-door. A nearby cattle ranch was the setting for Reata, the homestead of Hudson's Bick Benedict. His outsized Victorian mansion, actually a faade built at Warner Bros., arrived by rail from California.
Giant, which is based on Edna Ferber's 1952 novel of the same name, was not popular with Texans who were
put off by its racist and class-conscious characters, as well as its broad generalizations of Texas life. After the release of the film, Texas lore went into high gear, and Bick and Jett were compared to legendary Texans. Giant did introduce Americans to the chauvinism that continues to characterize the denizens of the Lone Star State, whether they're rich cattle ranchers like Bick, oil barons (and baronesses) like Jett (James Dean), or naturalized Texans like Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), Bick's Virginia-born wife. All Texans share a genuine love of the land�the brash beauty of Big Bend National Park, the arid plains of the Panhandle, and the verdant slopes of the Hill Country. One-third of Texans are Latino, although Texas' divisions of class are similar to the rest of the United States. There's new money, like Jett Rink's�he hits oil on land inherited from Bick's sister�and old money, like the Benedict family's, steeped in land and cattle.
The town of Marfa is another matter entirely, its recent, Texas-style gentrification having its roots in artist and naturalized Texan Donald Judd's 1971 purchase of the abandoned Army base near town. If Judd were alive today, he might leave his sculptures behind and move to a Wilder West than Marfa has become. At five in the afternoon, the tiled courtyard that adjoins Hotel Paisano's restaurant, obviously a local watering hole, comes alive despite the triple-digit June temperature. The scene reflects the hotel's snooty ambiance�more Santa Fe, New Mexico than Anywhere, West Texas. With its neatly restored windowed storefronts, and the railroad tracks at the edge of town�it was a "water stop" for 19th-century steam engine trains�Marfa looks like the work of a Hollywood production designer.
Jett's oil find on Reata notwithstanding, there are no oil rigs for 40 miles in any direction, but there's undoubtedly plenty of new money in Marfa. While cattle ranches dot the landscape outside of town, Marfa is the epicenter for well-heeled travelers on the Tourist Trail that begins or ends for most at the McDonald Observatory, one of the few places where ordinary folks can look through a large telescope. Visitors can choose accommodations in sleepy Fort Davis, or the more populous Alpine, but Hotel Paisano offers the relative cachet of a $280 suite with chipped paint and a lumpy couch. For that price, you can carry your own luggage, too, since no bellboy is on duty to greet you when you park outside that fountained courtyard around which the hotel is built. One can't imagine Liz or a famous Hollywood director putting up with this apparent lack of Texas hospitality.
Giant, which won director George Stevens an Oscar for best direction, is now best remembered for James Dean's remarkable performance as the parvenu in a class struggle in which the Benedicts prevail. Old money and genes�Leslie's and Bick's�trump the black gold of Jett's
nouveau riche fortune.
Giant is undoubtedly an archetypal story, but it is not the tale of Texas�then or now. For that, watch John Ford's
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Set in an unnamed state, and shot entirely on a soundstage, the black-and-white film eloquently depicts the forces that shaped Texas and that are still shaping her. One is the desire for economic development that Marfa represents, and the other is the wish to preserve ranching and agriculture in towns like Shafter and Valentine�the latter the set for Jett's "Little Reata" in the film�and all the "wide spots in the road" where we stopped along Route 90 and Texas 17. The two-lane roads wind through Presidio and Jeff Davis Counties like notches in the timeline of Texas history.
Arriving from the wilderness of Big Bend National Park, Marfa may at first appear to be an oasis in the Chihuahuan Desert. Here, a Native New Yorker can get a real cup of coffee, rather than the swill that passes for coffee in Big Bend Country, but I found the town pretentious. It wants to leave Texas behind, to become that generic tourist attraction, fitting for the sort of people who seek not the nuances of a place but the sweeping vision of it offered by a Hollywood epic. Among the trim shrubbery of Marfa, it was hard to spot the "cactus rose" that, in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is the bloom of a prickly pear. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) gives the squat, flowering cactus to Hallie (Vera Miles), the woman he loves. This June, the yellow and pink blossoms are popping out all over Big Bend Country. The cactus is Ford's leitmotif, its flowering an illustration of many themes in
Liberty Valance, but mostly how the history of the land itself tells the story of the West.
While there is no doubt that cattle and oil shaped Texas, the cattlemen and sodbusters first seized the land from Mexico (and earlier from Native Americans) to form the Republic of Texas in 1836. Oil followed half a century later. The struggle between old money and new that is portrayed in
Giant was actually rooted in the land and how it would be used. Ford, rather than Stevens, gets this right. In
Liberty Valance, Tom's love of the land, and Hallie's, propels the story. The progress represented by Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), Hallie's husband, and a U.S. senator, is based on a lie, that "Rance" is the man who shot the outlaw Liberty Valance. It was Tom, the horse trader of Shinbone, who did that, and who, like Hallie, acted only to preserve some part of the West he treasured.
My husband Pete, a native of the Lone Star State, smiles when I tell him that I want to get out of Hotel Paisano and Marfa, and go back to Texas, the land of contrasts that for me defines the Old West and the new one. Here in West Texas, the struggle continues over how to preserve the land, both the spare beauty of the Chihuahuan Desert and the ranching life that
Giant exaggerates, but which all Texans are either born to or yearn for. As I write this from the rambling Hotel Limpia in Fort Davis, 22 miles up the road from Marfa, I think of the women in
Giant and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Today, Leslie Benedict would be protesting the treatment of Mexicans at our Rio Grande border. As for Hallie,
Liberty Valance may be named for the outlaw, but it's about the woman who understood that some of the desert in Shinbone had to be made into a garden, and some of it had to remain a wilderness. While men broke laws and made laws, and were the law, in the real West and the West of the movies, women remained connected to the needs of ordinary people, and the fundamental forces of nature. It's their spirit that I hope is alive in the heart of
every Texan, because the so-called "Marfa Lights" pale in comparison to the spectacular view of the Milky Way at Big Bend National Park.
