How Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean Grew Old
elizabeth taylor giant rock hudson
Amy Davidson Sorkin Clare Malone Charles Bethea E. Tammy Kim Evan Osnos Condé Nast
Since hearing about Elizabeth Taylor’s death, I’ve been thinking about “Giant.” She made that film in 1956; when I saw it, about thirty-five years …
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The New Yorker
Since hearing about Elizabeth Taylor’s death, I’ve been thinking about “Giant.” She made that film in 1956; when I saw it, about thirty-five years later, I was fascinated by the film’s fantasies of aging, and why they never became real. The movie follows a few decades in the lives of Bick Benedict, a Texas rancher, played by Rock Hudson; his wife, Leslie, played by Taylor; and Jett Rink, played by James Dean. Taylor was twenty-three when she made the film; Dean was twenty-four. In “Giant” ’s more than three hours, they are transformed from a young, horseback-riding bride and brooding ranch-hand into a gray-haired grandmother and dissolute oil man. Around the time I watched it, Elizabeth Taylor was marrying Larry Fortensky, whom she’d met in rehab, at Michael Jackson’s Neverland. She was about the same age as she was meant to be in the movie, but in the pictures in the tabloids she looked jarringly different from the gracefully aged woman in “Giant.” (Though somehow both versions were beautiful, even if one was more depressing; her beauty may have spoken particularly well to the style of a certain era, one I didn’t especially fetishize, but it was undeniable.) It wasn’t that the movie’s makeup artists and costume designers had gotten it wrong, or didn’t know their craft, or didn’t really make her look old—they did; she might have become that woman, but didn’t.

Dean, meanwhile, never grew old at all, in real life; he died in a car crash on September 30, 1955, before the film even finished shooting and more than a year before it came out, and so the aged version of him is not so much an admonition about how one lives as it was simply very sad.

I was also watching “Giant” a few years after the death, in 1985, of Rock Hudson, from AIDS. He was fifty-nine; until not too long before his death he hadn’t looked so different from the older Bick Benedict. (At the end, he did.) Seeing him on the Texas ranch, entirely beautiful, or in a fist-fight in an diner (see the video above), I understood, as I don’t think I quite had, what with his appearances on “Dynasty,” what it meant to many people it became clear that he had been living as a closeted gay man. He was so visible, and yet, until his body was stricken, so hidden.