Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History

7. The New Nationalism: Ice Palace, 1954–1960

seven seven E ven as her unofficial tenure ended as Giant’s script vetter and production assistant, Edna Ferber was in the midst of two more frontier dramas. Cimarron was nearly thirty years old, and MGM was remaking RKO’s masterpiece. Ferber had nothing but contempt for MGM, but realizing that she could do nothing to stop the latest remake of her work, she simply ignored the studio’s letters asking for her endorsement of the script. Her health was failing, and Ferber needed all her resources to finish her final novel, Ice Palace. Ice Palace grew out of Ferber’s research for Giant and reflected the author’s predilection for historical critique and examinations of race and gender on the twentieth-century frontier. 1 But Giant had been a somewhat unpleasant experience for Ferber; she was determined to enjoy the process of creating Ice Palace. During the production of Giant, Ferber planned several trips to Alaska, using them as a means of evading Hollywood and Giant Productions’ publicity events. 2 After her first visit, in November 1954, she returned to New York exhilarated, and some of her excitement was transferred to her editor at The New Nationalism: ICE PALACE, 1954–1960 E D N A F E R B E R ’ S H O L L Y W O O D 230 Doubleday. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that you are on fire again about a book,” Ken McCormick wrote to her. “Something happens to your voice and your whole manner when you begin to become interested in writing .” 3 But Ferber wasn’t just on a pleasure trip; her new novel about Alaska mixed the legacy of nineteenth-century frontier history with current controversial political issues about economic exploitation, race relations, and statehood . For years, wealthy Alaskans, along with corporate executives based in Seattle and Washington, D.C., successfully fought working- and middle-class Alaskans’ demands for a territorial legislature, regulation of the fisheries, and, later, statehood. But since the end of the Second World War, the statehood movement and proponents of racial equality (the other major long-term controversy in Alaska) had gained power. 4 Ferber always loved a battle—particularly a historical fight for political and personal freedom. From the beginning of her research, she consulted the foremost pro-statehood, antisegregation political advocate in the state, Governor (later Senator) Ernest Gruening. Gruening also doubled as the territory’s most popular historian (The State of Alaska, 1954), and Ferber’s relationship with him would anchor the political discourse of her own narrative. 5 Ice Palace represented a return to many of Ferber’s old historical themes: generational conflict, environmental and racial exploitation, the problematic masculine frontier ideology, and the new generation of mixed-race American women. But many literary critics would attack the book for its apparent enthusiasm for some of those old-style frontier values while ignoring the racial arguments driving her story of mixed-blood Christine Storm. However, Ferber ’s instinct to publish the book shortly before Congress voted on Alaska’s admission as the forty-ninth state not only guaranteed her best-seller status, but also made her a major American social and political figure. It also helped her negotiate another fantastic contract with Warner Bros. Narratives about Alaska had been a niche market of the western genre since the 1920s. Between Charlie Chaplin (The Gold Rush, 1925) and Rex Beach (The Spoilers, 1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), American filmmakers projected a successful image of gold rushes, dance-hall girls, Eskimos, whiskey brawls, and ice. Possibly Jack Warner thought this was what he was getting when he bought Ice Palace’s screen rights without reading the book. Some hearts sank when they read the female-centered political and racial drama. But initially, scriptwriters were less interested in the current political drama than in Ice Palace ’s potential as a racial drama. If it was not another Spoilers, it could be the 231 Ice Palace, 1954–1960 next Giant. But after one of the most labored and expensive script developments in Hollywood history, Warner Bros. obscured many of the interracial and feminist issues and instead exploited the book as a two-fisted, masculine frontier melodrama. Although it lacked the historical clichés of the gold rush made familiar to audiences through countless remakes of The Spoilers, the modern battles of statehood and race were less important than...