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

Notes

C H A P T E R O N E 1. Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure (Literary Guild of America, 1939), 54. 2. It was produced in 1921, retitled No Woman Knows. 3. Ferber, Peculiar Treasure, 262. 4. Ibid., 260. 5. Ibid., 262–263. 6. White to Ferber, 17 September 1920, box 1, folder 1, Edna Ferber Papers, U.S. MSS 98AN, State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin (hereafter cited as Ferber Papers). 7. Howard Teichmann, George S. Kaufman (Angus and Robertson, 1972), 89–90. 8. Variety, 25 October 1932, lists Kaufman first in its review of Dinner at Eight, as did reviews by Brooks Atkinson, “Sinister New York,” New York Times, 6 November 1932; Walter Winchell, New York Daily Mirror, 24 October 1932; and Robert Garland, New York World-Telegram, 24 October 1932; box 21, folder 9, Ferber Papers. 9. The Land Is Bright, playbill, 20 October 1941, George S. Kaufman papers, box 1, folder 10, U.S. MSS 12AN, State Historical Society, Madison. 10. Review of The Royal Family of Broadway, directed by George Cukor and Cyril Gardner , Film Daily, 28 December 1930; Variety, 24 December 1930; Stage Door one-sheet posters, press book, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California (hereafter AMPAS Core Collection). 11. Ferber, Peculiar Treasure, 387. 12. Kaufman cowrote A Night at the Opera (MGM, 1935) with Morrie Ryskind. 13. White to Ferber, 17 January 1944, box 1, folder 4, Ferber Papers. 14. “Giant Renews Ferber Influence,” Los Angeles Times, 2 August 1953, Ferber Clipping File, AMPAS Core Collection. 15. Weekly Variety, 24 April 1968, Ferber Clipping File, AMPAS Core Collection. Notes N O T E S T O P A G E S 7 – 1 0 268 16. Ferber “outfilms” even the likes of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. 17. See J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from “Cimarron” to “Citizen Kane” (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006), 6–10, 28–29. 18. Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Univ. of California Press, 1996), 1, 179–211. 19. “Trouble in Paradise,” New Republic, 24 February 1947, 41; Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Univ. of California Press, 1997). 20. Saratoga Trunk (1945) earned $4.25 million domestically, making it the thirteenth most-seen film of 1946, when Variety first began recording domestic box-office returns; Show Boat (1951) took in $5.2 million, making it the second most-seen film of 1951. Giant (1956) was the third-highest domestic grosser in its year ($12 million). 21. Mary Rose Shaughnessy, Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber (Gordon Press, 1977). Christopher Wilson, White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885–1925 (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1992), looks only at the author’s early short stories and nonhistorical work. 22. Julie Goldsmith Gilbert, Edna Ferber and Her Circle (Applause, 1978); Marion Meade, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties (Doubleday, 2004). 23. Miles Kreuger, “Show Boat”: The Story of a Classic American Musical (Oxford Univ. Press, 1977); Lauren Berlant, “Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat,” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deirdre Lynch and William B. Warner, 399–422 (Duke Univ. Press, 1996); Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001). 24. For more in-depth studies, see Donna Campbell, “‘Written with a Hard and Ruthless Purpose,’” in Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s, ed. Lisa Botschon and Meredith Goldsmith, 25–44 (Northeastern Univ. Press, 2003); Heidi Kenaga, “Edna Ferber’s Cimarron, Cultural Authority, and 1920s Western Historical Narratives,” in Middlebrow Moderns, 167–201; Smyth, American Historical Cinema. Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), provides a more general film summary. 25. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1992). 26. Fitzgerald to Perkins, 1 June 1925, in A Life in Letters: F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Scribner’s, 1994), 118–119. 27. Ferber to McCormick, 28 January 1951, box 1, folder 5, Ferber Papers. 28. Stanley Vestal, “Oklahoma Is Setting of Edna Ferber’s New Book,” Dallas Morning News, 30 March 1930. 29. Lon Tinkle, “Ferber Goes Both Native and Berserk: Parody, Not Portrait, of Texas,” Dallas Morning News, 1952; box 12, folder 7, Ferber Papers. 30. Stowe’s Uncle Tom...