-An excerpt from Donald Spoto's book, A Passion for Life:
The Biography of Elizabeth Taylor. Here is another observation
of Liz Taylor's relationship with Dean:
"...Hudson was otherwise an easygoing soul, accustomed (like Elizabeth) to being considered merely an attractive presence, with no fair assessment of his desire to be a good actor. Dean, on the other hand, was a tangle of conflicts, ornery, difficult and enormously vain. He was, to be sure, committed to the art of acting, but at twenty-four he was caught in a vise of personal anxiety. To both men [Hudson and Dean], Elizabeth was a warm friend, encouraging and completely accepting of their sexual orientation, which she regarded as unremarkable..."
"Hudson made no secret of
his dislike for Dean, who reciprocated. "Jimmy was always late, really
very unprofessional," Hudson complained later. "You know the type:
the Broadway actor who comes to California and deigns to make a motion
picture-that attitude." But again to her credit, Elizabeth befriended
Dean despite Hudson.
After four bit parts, James
Dean had landed three leading roles in succession (in East of Eden
and Rebel Without a Cause, just before Giant) and had very
quickly achieved stardom as the prototype of the disaffected, sensitive
postwar American youth. Disconnected from his feelings and full of
neurotic self-loathing, he found a sympathetic listener in Elizabeth, who
was (as with Montgomery Clift) both nurturing and respectful.
Sometimes
Jimmy and I would sit up until three in the morning talking, and he would
tell me about his past life, his
conflicts and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day it
was almost as if he didn't want to recognize me,
or to remember me, or to remember that he had revealed so much of himself
the night before. And so he would
pass me and ignore me, or just give me a cursory nod of the head.
And then it took him a day or two to become
my friend again. I found all that hard to understand..."
"...Early in the evening
of September 30, she was sitting in a Warner screening room with Stevens,
nursing her sniffles and reviewing rough cuts of her last day's work.
A telephone rang, and the director answered. A moment later he announced
to the group that James Dean, who had been driving his new Porsche at almost
a hundred miles per hour while heading north to an auto race, had been
killed in a head-on collision near Paso Robles. He had completed
his work in Giant on September 22, had just signed a contract for
nine films in the next six years and had celebrated by buying a new roadster
he raced to his death.
Elizabeth was devastated,
and although Stevens had to continue with filming the next day, she could
not work. She arrived three hours late to the set and, almost catatonic
with grief, had to be sent home. By October 4, she had been admitted
to UCLA General Hospital (as the Medical Center was then called), "but
they have been unable to reach a diagnosis of her condition," as the production
manager wrote to Jack Warner. She then ran a fever and lost her voice.
Finally, Elizabeth returned on October 11 and 12 to complete her final
shots..."