45. Edna Ferber — So Big with Dr. Caroline Frick

AMY: Welcome, everyone, to Lost Ladies of the Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. So the Lost Lady we’re discussing today wrote about the beauty of cabbages.

AMY: Okay, I hate to break it to you, Kim, but you’re not really selling it.

KIM: You’re right. Okay, I could see that wouldn’t really be selling it. But what if we were to tell you that this book, which extols the virtues of (literally) your garden-variety produce, was the top-selling novel of 1924, selling hundreds of thousands of copies the year it was published? How do you like them apples?… or should I say… cabbages?

AMY: And what if we were to tell you that it also won the Pulitzer Prize the following year? Pretty good deal, right? But we are a little embarrassed to say we hadn’t read this book until quite recently, and we’re guessing many people today haven’t. This episode, we hope, will rectify that, at least for those of you who are listening. Because how good is Edna Ferber’s book? SOOO GOOOOD!

KIM: That’s right. (And Amy’s baby talk will eventually make sense in this episode, I promise. There’s a reason to this.) Actually, Ferber’s novel, “So Big,” which she herself categorized as being a story about the “the triumph of failure” was so wildly popular in its day that it was adapted three times for film, the second of which (in 1932) starred Barbara Stanwyck and featured a young Bette Davis in one of her earliest roles.

AMY: And I’m so excited that our guest today, who is an expert in films from this era, is going to be able to offer us an interesting perspective on Edna Ferber (and this book) through that Hollywood lens.

KIM: I can’t wait to introduce her, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

KIM: Okay, I’m SO EXCITED to introduce our guest, Dr. Caroline Frick. She’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at University of Texas, Austin and the founder and Executive Director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. She’s worked in film preservation at Warner Bros., the Library of Congress, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and she also programmed films for the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel! (How cool is that?) Caroline’s book, "Saving Cinema," was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. Those things are all impressive, but the real reason I’m excited is because she used to be my roommate once upon a time, many moons ago, in San Francisco when we were practically babies! She taught me a lot about movies, especially “pre-code” movies, which we’ll be discussing later on in the show. I think one of my first trips to Los Angeles was to visit her after she moved here, and do you remember, Caroline? You took me to The Ivy for dinner--I think  you might have been working at Warner Bros. at the time and probably on a tight budget, but  I immediately felt like I was in L.A. Story… That’s just the kind of classy person she is. We’d lost touch over the last few years, but I’m loving that we are reconnected! Caroline, welcome to the show! 

DR. CAROLINE FRICK: Thanks so much for having me, and thanks for such a nice introduction. This is a great opportunity to talk and actually learn a little bit more about a topic that I kind of have been peripherally around but didn't know that much about which is Edna Ferber. I thought this was such a great opportunity to dig down a little bit to learn a little bit more about her. I know the movies, but I didn't know that much about her, so I really appreciate this invitation.

AMY: Yeah, sure! And so actually, Kim and I were really new to Edna Ferber heading into this episode; we’d never read anything by her. But it does seem like she was one of those writers that Hollywood really took a liking to straightaway — for decades, in fact. So can you tell us anything about that?

CAROLINE: Well, sure. I mean, what's interesting, and I thought a lot about this, is there's lots of reasons why Edna Ferber would have been a really solid choice for the Hollywood studios at this particular time, right? If you look at when they started adapting her work, it was in the 1920s, 1930s. She's a really big deal. She's publishing. She's very popular. She is the author of really sprawling (I kept coming to the word “sprawling,”) like sprawling dramas, right, that take place over decades. And so there are many reasons why the industry at this point in time would have logically gone to her. The fact that she wins a Pulitzer for this particular novel is going to be a real attraction. What's fascinating also, though, to me was how many times these films were remade (well, the adaptations were remade) over and over again, whether it's Showboat, whether it's Cimarron, whether it is So Big with three adaptations, right? So she was a really popular author for them, and I think there are reasons why — we can get into this later — why I think So Big came out at this particular moment for this particular studio and with these particular stars. I think there's a lot that kind of comes together here. 

KIM: Wow, okay, I’m excited. So, Amy, what else do we know about Edna Ferber’s life?

AMY: Okay, so basically, by the time of her death in 1968, she was considered one of the most successful women writers of her time. She had a proverbial seat at the Algonquin Round Table. She’d won the Pulitzer, as Caroline said. But let’s go back in time. She was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1885. She was from a Jewish family. Her dad was a Hungarian-born shopkeeper and her mom was of German descent. Her father lost his eyesight and experienced a lot of business failures, prompting the family to move a lot. So they lived for a time in the Chicago area, where So Big is set, and then they eventually settled in Wisconsin. But Edna and her family experienced a lot of Anti-Semitic bigotry. People mocked her Yiddish accent. It really helped her to understand the immigrant experience and what it felt like to be persecuted, which is a theme that she returns to a lot in her writing. But she also features strong female characters in a lot of her work.

KIM: Right, which we love, of course! So initially, Edna wanted to study acting, but she ended up switching gears and dropping out of college so that she could help her struggling family. Based on the strength of articles she’d written for her high school paper, she landed a reporting gig at the local paper The Appleton Daily Crescent and worked her way up to reporting gigs for The Milwaukee Journal and the United Press Association. By the time she was 35, she covered the 1920 Democratic and Republic national conventions. But it was as early as 1911 and 1912 that she started publishing some of her fiction… mostly short stories (including a collection of stories called Buttered Side Down) and then a few novels, the first of which was called Dawn O’Hara, The Girl Who Laughed (this was about a young woman newspaper reporter, so she’s drawing from life here). 

AMY: Yeah, and like other writers who started off as journalists, her writing style at this time was fairly pithy and to-the-point; you know, fairly journalistic. And it’s safe to say she didn’t know the extent of her talent. So when she wrote So Big (which came out in 1924 and which we mentioned, received a Pulitzer) she initially had told her publisher Doubleday, “You probably aren’t going to want to publish this.”

KIM: Yeah, she later claimed, “Not only did I not plan to write a Bestseller when I wrote So Big, but I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world’s worst seller. I thought I had written a complete Non-Seller. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it.” She figured nobody would be interested in a middle-aged woman who sells cabbages, but it was one of those stories she had been carrying around in her head and she just needed to get it out, I guess.

AMY: And since we’re on the topic of So Big, maybe we should familiarize our listeners with the basic plot.

KIM: Sure. The heroine of the novel is Selina Peake, a young Midwestern woman who (thanks to her father’s reputation as a gambler) is both accustomed to the finer things in life and also can easily make do with very little depending on which way the wind blows. At the start of the book she bemoans the fact that she has to eat mutton and cabbage for dinner one night. 

AMY: (Oh, girl, just you wait — you’re going to be overloaded with vegetables soon!) So early on in the book, Selina’s father shares a bit of wisdom with her about life, and it’s something she carries with her and reflects back on throughout the course of the book. He says, “I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.” … “The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember, no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much…. Just so much velvet.”

KIM: I love that quote. “Just so much velvet.”

CAROLINE: I thought this line was really interesting, and it gets used in the film as well, right? They use it. What do you think it means, “so much velvet?”

KIM: I took it as luxurious … rich … royal, almost.

AMY: You think of nobility being shrouded in velvet. The character, over the course of time, she has this nobility (an unexpected nobility) and by the end of the book, it's gonna make a lot more sense.

KIM: Yeah, because there are a lot of people with varying degrees of money and, who is really a noble person by the end of the book? He follows that up with another nugget of wisdom when he tells her, “There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind’s wheat and the other kind’s emeralds.” That becomes prophetic for Selina. When her father dies unexpectedly, the newly orphaned Selina must leave Chicago and try to eke out a living working as a rural school teacher in the Dutch-immigrant farming community of High Prairie (which was loosely based on the present-day suburb of South Holland, Illinois). On the wagon ride that brings her to this rural area, Selina (who is trying to make the best of the situation), optimistically describes the endless rows of cabbages as “beautiful,” a comment that sets her host family, the Pools, roaring with laughter. It’s a big joke for them after she says that.

AMY: Yeah, and actually … so, Caroline, what I’m going to do is, I have snippets of the film recorded, so let me cue up the cabbages quote.

[plays clip]

CAROLINE: The actor that plays Mr. Pool is Alan Hale, and a lot of the listeners might know his son because he was the Skipper on “Gilligan's Island.” And so when you hear him laugh, he's very familiar and he looks very familiar to those who were fans of “Gilligan's Island.” You might not know his father. His father was a very famous actor at this particular moment in time, but when he popped up in this film, I burst out laughing because I thought, “Oh, here we go. It's gonna be a classic Alan Hale laugh.”

AMY: Okay, so basically, as we can tell by his laughter, these pragmatic Dutch country folk think that Selina’s crazy to take such a romanticized view of their back-breaking lives in the fields. But Ferber writes that for a woman like Selina, who can find beauty in cabbages, “life has no weapons against a woman like that.” I love that quote. So the eldest son in the family, Roelf, he’s the only one who doesn’t laugh at Selina’s romanticism. He’s kind of a sensitive, artistic soul, and although he’s quite a bit younger than Selina (he’s 12 and she’s 19) they form a very special bond. And am I the only one who was maybe a little initially weirded-out at this part of the book? Because I thought they were going to find romance, and he was so young.

KIM: Caroline, what did you think?

CAROLINE: It was real weird. And then I was like, you know that the movie is gonna just mimic it. And then it was even weirder in the film! At first, I was like, “This is odd.” And then I thought, “No, they're finding each other's souls. This is like a beautiful friendship.”

AMY: I'm so used to reading books, especially books from this era. And you're like, “I know exactly where they're going with this. She's gonna fall in love with Roelf.” And what's great about Ferber’s book is you can't predict it. You don't know where stuff is going in this book at all. So needless to say, false alarm. There is no inappropriate romance with a 12-year old, so no worries about that.

KIM: Right. And Selina is obviously a very idealistic woman with big dreams, but life in High Prairie is definitely a harsh reckoning for her. When she discovers the farmers use actual dried blood to fertilize the fields, it couldn’t be more symbolic. Life on the farm is tough.

AMY: Yeah, and the hardships of farm life, combined with the immigrant characters (their command of the English language is very halting)… it reminded me a bit of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. 

KIM: Yeah, and in the same way, I think you could say that Ferber’s novel is a real tribute to immigrants. She emphasizes the fact that it’s these simple, hard-working people who are literally feeding the nation and keeping all the fancy-pants privileged people in the cities alive. 

AMY: Caroline, did you have any favorite passages that would sort of help give our listeners a taste of Ferber’s writing style?

CAROLINE: You know, when we were talking about kind of this, celebrating the immigrants and celebrating the rural people at this point in time, I think one of the things that strikes me in some ways — she's really mourning the 19th century's past into the 20th. It's very much, I think, an indictment about modernity and kind of the 20th century’s rapid pace and kind of modernism. And one of the things I loved reading about, which is evocative, and it's interesting that it relates very much to the fact that she, ironically, was adapted so many times in cinema, but she talks a lot how as a young girl her father took her to the theater and this is an ongoing thing. She obviously, once she's in the middle of nowhere, she's not going to see theater, she's not going to see burlesque, she's not going to see any of these kinds of shows. And so it says strangely enough, “considering the lack of what the world calls romance and adventure in her life, she did not like the motion pictures. “All the difference in the world,” she would say, “between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theatre. My, yes! Like fooling with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.” And I thought I am so going to use this in my classes, because the idea that she's like, “movies are like paper dolls when you could have a real live baby.” And I think there's some of this kind of, again, mourning of a more agrarian past, when it kind of collides with the urban modernity of the 20th century.

KIM: So speaking of film, the three of us actually watched the 1932 film So Big in preparation for this, and Caroline, you’re an expert in pre-code Hollywood, so let’s weigh in on what we thought of the film up to this point in the story with Selina ending up living with the Pools in High Prairie.

CAROLINE: Well, I just want to say how brilliant it is that you're like, we actually watched this movie, which I think sums up perhaps the sacrifice that the three of us had in watching this movie, I think? I'll defer to Amy here. But I was cracking up the way you just said that because it was, like, it was a struggle. It was a struggle. I’m not going to lie.

AMY: I would liken it to when you have to go see a cousin’s son’s high school play. You’re like, “Oh, I would love to go!” And then you sit there and you’re like, “Okayyy… Yeah.”

KIM: Yeah. But then you have to say something nice.

AMY: But first of all, Caroline, I’m not even really familiar with the term “pre-code Hollywood” by the way. So can you film me in on exactly what that even means?

CAROLINE: Sure, sure. Pre-code is a designation that gets used for films that were produced before the adoption of the do's and don'ts, what you can do and what you cannot do (or portray) on film. In essence, think of it as the adoption of the MPAA rating systems, right? Think of it as like the “wild west” of cinema production. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but in essence, it's essentially looking at a period of time where things got a little bit more charged in terms of the coverage of sex of violence, etc, etc, right. In the early ’30s, a little bit after this film was released, that changes. Now there's a little bit more of a cynical take that I would use in terms of So Big being listed somewhere as a pre-code is that it's also an attempt by more contemporary marketing people to get you to be interested in older films, right? So in the case of Barbara Stanwyck’s career, probably the most famous pre-code film (and one that holds up very, very well, and one that really makes your eyebrows go up and go, “Really?”) is a film called Baby Face, which she did very closely to this one ... a little bit later. In this particular case, though, it's interesting to me that they're labeling this a pre-code. Yes, in terms of dates, it makes sense that it's a pre-code. But for the most part, this is a pretty tame film and a pretty darn tame adaptation of the book. So pre-code, I would say, (and I guess we're all ladies here — I'll go ahead and say it.) I think what's interesting is when you look at the history of pre-code, it's actually far more than a film being sexy. It's actually that the first generation of film historians that looked at this issue were largely men, and they were largely looking at the films that were a little bit more pervy ... because remember, this is not the government censor. This is studios self censoring. And they were very shrewd. They knew (especially if you look at the date, the year 1932), they had to be careful, because this is the height of the Depression, and Hollywood product was losing money. And so they did not want to offend any of those Catholic mothers, and they were largely Catholic mothers who were up in arms over the movie.

AMY: Can I just say, though, I'm pretty glad they kept this one tame, because I don't think I could have stomached racy scenes between Selina and Pervis in this movie. 

KIM: Absolutely. yeah. 

AMY: So we'll get to Pervis in a minute. But first of all, what do we think of Barbara Stanwyck as Selina? I know, Caroline, I think you have strong opinions, maybe.

CAROLINE: I have such strong opinions. That’s why you should start.

KIM: Oh my gosh.

AMY: I liked her. I thought she kept my interest. Your eyes are drawn to her. She's beautiful. They have to age her over time, which is a little weird, but I thought she did a good job relative to the other actors, you know?

KIM: Yeah, definitely. I thought she was much better than ... I thought she was a star. And, you know, she had that glowing look that they have where they look like they're in a different movie. But it was like she was acting in a different movie. And there was a big juxtaposition there for me. Anyway, I want to hear what Carolyn has to say, though.

CAROLINE: Well, you know, it's funny. I'm going to tell one of my colleagues here in Austin about this podcast, because he and I fight all the time over Barbara Stanwyck. This is the curator of the Austin Film Society, and he loves Barbara Stanwyck, and I just roll my eyes and go, “Uggh.” Yeah. So here's what I would say. I thought she was interesting in this role, but even the audio that you just used, I couldn't get over her voice. Now remember, this is an early talkie. So one of the reasons the film looks the way it does is that you're in the first couple years of sound. So even original reviews of this film, we're going to talk about it being a “talking picture, a talking picture,” and you have to hear her Brooklyn sounding voice. So she's like, “Look! Cabbages! Beautiful!” and I was like, take it down a notch Brooklyn-born!

AMY: [laughing] She does have a very deep voice. Yeah.

KIM: She’s not who I pictured, at all, as Selina when I was reading the book.

AM: Yeah, but like we said, she’s head and shoulders above some of the rest of this cast. So yeah, getting back into the book, in time, Selina sheds her sophisticated city ways (she's coming from Chicago), and she now is permanently entrenched in the toil and struggle of life as a farmer's wife after marrying a struggling bachelor named Pervis DeJong, which I thought it was De-JONG until I saw the movie and apparently it's De-YONG. What did we think of Pervis, and Selina’s choice of marrying him? …. Caroline's laughing. I mean, she can't even get to the microphone, 

KIM: Right. Yeah, she's just laughing.

CAROLINE: Kim, you are a more elegant woman I admire and what ON EARTH was going on in the film? So you have to take the lead.

KIM: In the film, there's no attraction. I mean, no. No. No. It doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile, in the book, there is this great sexual tension between the two of them, and he's so handsome that she can't even, you know, realize the fact that intellectually, they're completely incompatible. But in the film, there's no way she wouldn't know they're incompatible and there is no sexual tension and he is, you know…

AMY: He’s a doofus. 

KIM: Yeah, it's messed up.

CAROLINE: He is definitely an intriguing character in the book, even though as you say, they're not intellectual … they don't meet intellectually. She's only, what, 19 I think when she meets him? And she had lived such a kind of cloistered existence, and so you kind of appreciate it. But then the movie, I literally was like, “Him?!” Like, “What? That guy?!” And he's about as interesting as a toad. (Actually a toad would be more interesting.) A rock that's just sitting there. It was sad. It was sad. The good news is he's not around very long.

KIM: Yeah, that is good news.

AMY: Yeah, they move him along fast.

KIM: Yes. So after getting married, Selina DeJong, our heroine, has a baby named Dirk. Here’s where the book’s title comes in… his nickname becomes “SoBig” because his mother always asks, “How big is baby?”

AMY: And we actually have a little film audio of this moment. They are in the cabbage patch. He’s a Cabbage Patch kid.

CAROLINE: Literally!

[plays film clip]

CAROLINE: It’s like she’s assaulting him! “HOW BIG ARE YOU? HOW BIG ARE YOU?” It’s like, “Relax, sister!” He is a precious child, and she’s like, “HOW BIG?!!!!”

KIM: Oh my gosh. So back to Selina’s young artist friend that Amy had been mentioning, Roelf, by this point in time, he has gone off to see what the great wide world has to offer. And her husband, Pervus, is a kind of failure as a farmer and sort of as a husband. Selina has all sorts of ideas and suggestions for how they might make improvements, but he has no interest in humoring her in that.

AMY: And then, due to unforeseen circumstances, she finds herself all alone having to raise her little boy and eke out a living on this poor excuse for a farm. And it’s really terrifying for her (especially the first time she has to drive her produce into Chicago on her own and try to sell it. It’s scary.) But before long we discover that Selina is a total entrepreneur when it comes to figuring out how to run this farm, you know, drain the fields so the harvest will improve, grow new types of crops. She’s got all these ideas and she’s got some serious hustle. 

KIM: Yes, she’s completely into it. It actually reminded me a little bit of The Home-Maker episode that we did last year. And I loved the scene where she’s driving her first crops to Haymarket Street by herself, and she takes special care to make her vegetables stand out. 

AMY: Yeah, she’s positioning herself to have the pricey “Whole Foods” version of produce.

CAROLINE: I think it’s totally the Whole Foods! She was like, “I’m going to make this beautiful,” and they’re like, “Rubbish! Who cares?” But I do blame both of you for when I was at the grocery store this weekend and I started strolling amongst the asparagus and I was like, “Look at that asparagus in beautiful bunches!”

AMY: Look at how it’s bundled!

KIM: So Ferber writes: “They had picked and bunched only the best of the late crop — the firmest, reddest radishes, the roundest, juiciest beets; the carrots that tapered, a good seven inches from base to tip; kraut cabbages of the drumhead variety that were flawless green balls; firm juicy spears of cucumber; cauliflower (of her own planting; Pervus had opposed it) that looked like a bride’s bouquet. Selina stepped back now and regarded this riot of crimson and green, of white and gold and purple. “Aren’t they beautiful! Dirk, aren’t they beautiful!”

AMY: And Dirk’s like, “Whatyoutalkinabout, Woman?” Just like the Pool family at the beginning of the book, Dirk can’t see his mother’s vision. He doesn’t understand where there’s any beauty in a wagon full of produce. And this is what sets up the conflict that continues in the rest of the book as Dirk grows up. So Caroline, what are your thoughts on what Ferber’s trying to impart here, with Selena’s dedication to her life on the farm?

CAROLINE: Well, you know, probably what you all have seen is important there, right, which is even in this kind of dull environment, she still tries to find beauty. And I think Ferber is very romantic about this, like, it's setting up this kind of romantic notion about how you can find beauty in, you know, vegetables. And I think it's interesting. It's cabbage of all things, because it's very evocative of the immigrant experience, right? What is the vegetable that the poorest people eat? That's cabbage. She's doubling down on this. She was a laughing stock for saying this earlier in the book, and then with Dirk, she's trying to impart this, she's trying to say, “You're not just your father's son, you're my son as well. And you need to see the beauty.” And he's not having it. 

KIM: But she was glorifying the people in this country that aren’t often celebrated. Laborers, farmers, people who are eking out a living ... I can see them reading this novel (if they had time. I don’t think they did…)

AMY: I think they probably were, because of how many copies it sold. I mean, it was a huge bestseller. So were they more like the Pool family and rolling their eyes at the “cabbages is beautiful,” or were they feeling validated?

CAROLINE: That's a great question. My family's originally from Kansas, so those flat fields feel very familiar to me. And, you know, I'm not sure this book would have appealed. I think they would have rolled their eyes at a lot of that. But who knows? Who knows? The majority of people in the United States at this point in time were rural. It's so different from what we experience now ... you have a huge, again, kind of nostalgia here, where they're saying “the agrarian past,” because in the 20th century is when we become as a nation, predominantly urban.

AMY: Along the same lines here, in researching Edna Ferber I kept coming across the term “middlebrow” author, which annoyed me a little bit. It was sort of like the fact that her book was popular with everyday folk made it somehow “lesser.” Apparently some of her later writing was definitely less literary and more mainstream, but Caroline, what do you think the film industry saw in her works (beyond just the fact that she sold a lot of books) which would have appealed to them?

CAROLINE: For So Big, there's a large kind of backstory to Warner Brothers’ history at this moment, but they would have said, “Okay, we're in the height of the Depression. This is really bankable. We're going to do this. And we're going to put some of the key talent into this.” Whether or not it was as successful as they hoped … (it was certainly not as successful as Cimarron) … but certainly over time when they were remaking it this proved to be a good investment.

AMY: We should mention, also, that Cimarron, that won an Academy Award, right? Best Picture.

CAROLINE: Yes. And in fact, it was one of the most successful films from this period of time.

KIM: You’re making me want to watch Cimarron.

AMY: Or read it.

KIM: So back to the novel, Selina DeJong goes from being this beautiful young woman to a woman who is physically diminished: she’s old before her years, weathered, beaten-down. And getting back to the movie, we see that transformation take hold of Barbara Stanwyck… sort of, anyway.

CAROLINE: I actually liked her more at the latter part of the film when she was somehow a little bit softer. And part of that was just makeup. She was somehow elegantly more beautiful to me at the latter part of the film, but I think that was pretty effective. I was like, “Let's see who did makeup and costumes.” Like, I’ll do a slow clap for them. I'm not sure I’d do it so much for the screenplay and or casting department. But you know, makeup ...?

Bang on. 

AMY: Watching this movie made you understand why it’s important for film-makers to take some license independent of the book. But Caroline, what do you think this film version did well, and where do you think it fell completely flat other than the casting? Because you mentioned Edna Ferber’s books are so sprawling, and I felt like if we were to see this movie made today, we would get the “sprawling,” right? We’d get the wide shots of the fields; we’d get the panoramic of the farm. And you’re not really getting this … a lot of it felt like it was on a soundstage. There were some outside moments, but it didn’t have the epic cinematography that I wanted. 

CAROLINE: No, and I would say here (this is where the film nerd comes in) so this was the second adaptation of this book, which is really interesting. In the silent era (... and this film does not exist, right? It, sadly, is completely lost at this point in time) they would have had the capacity to shoot those exteriors, because this is a book that takes place basically outside. And this particular adaptation feels claustrophobic in a way, because they had to be inside because of sound technology. I started to go back and count how many exterior scenes, and there's basically none, because of the sound technology. Just like in the podcast, you have to be really close to your microphone, and there was no way they would have been able to do it, particularly with the way and the technology employed by Warner Brothers. By the time you get to the third adaptation in the ’50s, it's a much more expansive as you say, the ability to tell that story outside. And I think that definitely contributes to the challenges that this adaptation faced.

KIM: So as we said, when “Sobig,” a.k.a Dirk DeJong grows up, there’s a real philosophical disconnect between the way he lives his life and the way his mother lives. He makes a success of himself in a white-collar, stock-broking job (even though he’s not passionate about it), and clearly our girl Edna Ferber has ZERO respect for this.

AMY: She writes: “He sat looking down at his hands — his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably, he thought of another pair of hands — his mother’s — with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken — expressive — her life written on them. Scars. She had them.”

KIM: Yeah, I loved the way the Dirk character was, you know, even though he was making some bad choices, it's like he really was aware of his bad choices and the conflict that he had. And you know, his feelings about his mom and he did really respect her. But his soft hands prove problematic when he falls for a beautiful young artist named Dallas O’Mara — she has opinions of her own about Dirk’s choices in life, right?

AMY: She is not turned on by men with soft hands. No.

KIM: No, she’s not! And she’s played by Miss Bette Davis, who pops up in the last third of the 1932 movie. Do we have a clip of Bette Davis, Amy?

AMY: I do! Let me play it for us.

[plays film clip]

KIM: Okay, you guys can disagree with me, but to me, that performance and her coming in like that, and her cool, edgy, city vibe and independent woman … and she looked incredible. I was like, “Yeah, give me a movie about Dallas O’Mara. That's the movie I want to see. That's the passion I want to see right there. What do you guys think? 

CAROLINE: That was when the movie started for me. At the end. I'm just saying ... I was ready to not only watch that movie, I wanted to hang out with her. This is why Bette Davis was a star, because she is cute as a button.

KIM: Yes! It changed my perception. I want to go back and watch Bette Davis movies now in a way that I never did before. I have a whole new appreciation for her. She was just the best. 

AMY: That’s why she’s a star.

CAROLINE: She’s a star. Yeah. She wrote about this film and how honored she was and excited she was to be in a Stanwyck vehicle. And she also said for all of the roles in her entire career, this was the one that was most like her as a person. You almost get a sense of that. She's so kind of, I don't know, has such an authority about her. It doesn't feel like a performance. And I thought it was really interesting looking at that quote, which was: “She, of all the roles I've played, is the closest to me as a person,” and I thought, “You kind of ... you kind of get that!”

AMY: And when she tells Dirk what her worth is. When he said, “I'm not paying you $1500 for a painting,” and she's like, “Well, that's what I'm worth.” That was such a great moment.

KIM: It’s so feminist, right there.

CAROLINE: That character, it popped off the page for me in Ferber’s book, because I thought, “My gosh, this book was written 100 years ago. And yet, this argument is still fresh.” And it's still almost shocking that she was so comfortable in saying, “That's what I'm worth.” I just thought, “This is wild!” There's another aspect to maybe why Ferber was useful for the film industry, and it is that strong feminist voice. I think there's something about Ferber’s work that is useful for an industry that is going to be catering to a lot of women.

KIM: Yeah. And then thematically with the book, Selina is sort of a certain type of person. And Dallas is like the new version of that person. She's how you can go into the world with what Selina brings, in a way where you can own it and be a success at it and live your life.

AMY: The modern successor, yes, of Selina. Yeah, I like that. So, without giving away the ending of this book, I’m wondering what you guys actually thought of the way it ended. It’s kind of abrupt.

CAROLINE: Kind of? I literally, I was reading on a Kindle and I kept kind of swiping because I was like, “Wait, what? Huh?” So um, yeah. What do you think, Kim?

KIM: Oh, you know, it's so funny. I'm like thinking back. I mean, I guess it kind of sews it up. 

AMY: I mean, in the case of the movie, we needed it to be over by then. 

KIM: Yeah. It doesn't lessen the book for me at all, the ending. I'll just put it that way. It's not like one of those endings, I think, where you're like, “Oh. My. God.” It's more like, “Okay, the book finished.” But the book is just wonderful throughout.

CAROLINE: 

AMY: And if we're talking about going back to the idea of like, missing in the movie, this sort of sweeping depiction of farm life … for me, there's actually a really different movie that I was thinking of the whole time I was reading So Big. It's a documentary by David Sutherland that came out in 1998 called The Farmer’s Wife. It aired on PBS on Frontline and I remember that movie really got under my skin. I think it's a three-part movie. So like six hours. It was amazing. It follows this woman named Juanita Bushkoetter. (I always remember her name.) She lives with her farmer husband and their daughters in rural Nebraska. Her story is so anguishing as the farmer's wife and all the struggles, the financial struggles, she has all the backbreaking labor that she has to do on the farm. And at the same time, it's so beautiful ...  you see her on the farm, and the sun's rising up, you know, behind her. So I kept thinking of her when I was reading about Selina DeJong, not Barbara Stanwyck. And you can find that documentary on Amazon Prime, and I think it really would be a good companion movie, also, to reading So Big.

CAROLINE: You know, it’s funny, I think, in some ways, that documentary … (and I don’t know — I haven’t seen it) … is it also equally romanticizing the beauty there? Because on one hand, I think that the farming and this kind of this notion of American settlers, right, even Cimarron and Giant, these are all similar stories that she's telling, which is these sweeping, very European-focused stories about the settling of the West. And I think there is such a romanticization of that in her work that doesn't hold up today, when we're poking holes in that narrative a little bit. I do think it would be interesting to see if that documentary shares a little bit of that romanticizing of it. In some ways, it goes back to the ending for me: what I liked about the ending of the book was that it seemed to go so well with the difficulties of being a farmer. It was just like, there's an abruptness of life, you know? An abruptness of life and death. And, you know, I worked with a guy in Los Angeles, who has passed away, sadly, now, but he worked in the film laboratories, worked with all the major studios, and he worked so hard. And I said to him, “How do you do it? You work so hard.” He said, “Oh, please, I grew up on a farm.” He said, “That's the people that work hard.” You have to get up and milk the cow. You have to get up and do it. Because if you don't, it'll be a disaster. And I thought that was really interesting in terms of a modern perspective on that, for sure.

KIM: That's true. Yeah, this is going to digress a little bit, to earlier in the book, but I actually was surprised at the direction the book took when she ended up inheriting the farm basically, and trying to turn it over. The actual joy that she took in the hard work. She actually really chose to keep that life. There's a choice all throughout the middle of the book where she could have chosen differently, she had friends, (and that part of the story isn't in the movie so much) but she had other opportunities later and she really became in love with that life of the farm. 

AMY: That's true. 

KIM: I also think, like in a Thomas Hardy movie or something like that, the choices that she made would have ended disastrously. But you know, what we talked about with her, you know, sort of making this choice of marrying the wrong guy? Obviously, it doesn't end up killing her, you know? I mean, she sort of makes a triumph of a failed choice in marriage. And in a lot of books that we've read in movies that we've seen, you know, that doesn't happen.

AMY: Yeah, she has that nobility at the end, which we talked about when we were discussing the velvet. I know Kim and I both were commenting to each other when we read this, that it was really a pleasurable experience to read the book. And I’m really glad that we selected it. I think I might not have been intrigued enough to pick it up just based on the plot summary (which goes back to what Ferber told her publisher, you know -- this probably won’t sell). But reading it was really enjoyable. And I think I would be interested to read more of her work after this.

CAROLINE: I was just dumbfounded, having seen so many adaptations of her work, but, I mean, feeling kind of guilty that I hadn't read her. Here's this kind of a feminist icon from this era. And here, I just kind of blindly looked over this. I was sort of thinking of this as like my work; I need to do my work. And then I was like, “This isn't work. I'm enjoying this book — everybody in my house, be quiet. I'm focusing on this really enjoyable book right now.” And I think in some ways, maybe that's why the film (this adaptation from the ’30s) struck me so hard, because I thought, “How did they suck the joy out of this book?”

KIM: This book won a Pulitzer Prize. It was adapted three times, as Caroline was saying. We found it incredible. We all three loved reading it, yet none of us had read it before. I don't know if Amy and I even had heard of it. It goes back to the whole question of this podcast, which is like, why did we not know about this book? Why hadn't we read it? It just got lost in time. And it's really interesting. And we would tell everyone out there to read this book. It's fabulous. it deserved a Pulitzer, as far as I'm concerned.

CAROLINE: And again, this notion of what's lost ... I think if my grandmother were here she'd be like, “Oh, yeah, of course, I've read all that.” Is it generational, that gets lost in this way? And one person's “lost” is another person's “passion,” right? I was thinking about how struck I was with the adaptation of Ferber and I hadn't put all this together. But you know, the star of the 1920s version of So Big would be the person that I would recommend in terms of a “lost movie star.” The star of that is, I think, one of the most gifted actresses or Hollywood stars from the Silent Era Colleen Moore — and that it is so tragic to me that not only is this film lost, but it was in particular, it was Colleen Moore in this title role, who would have brought, I think, exactly what you were saying, Kim, about what you in your head would have pictured as this particular performance, right? She would have had a very different look and would have had a very different sort of manner. And it was interesting, because I thought, well, maybe the listeners wouldn't know who Colleen Moore is, that this is a lost person to them. But I've been following her career for 30 years. It's such an interesting kind of question of loss or misremembered or rediscovered, and the politics of rediscovery … what have you.

KIM: Good point? Yeah. Who does it belong to?

AMY: It was so nice meeting a blast from Kim’s past, Caroline, and we’re so glad you could take time out of your schedule to read some Edna Ferber with us.

KIM: Yes, we are so happy to have had you. This was really, really fun.

CAROLINE: No, thank you! I am so honored to be included. And I just want to say thank you and agree with everything that we've said, that if anybody listening has not read this book or seen an adaptation it was such a pleasure and great opportunity to have this excuse. So thank you both.

AMY: Kim, I feel like I need to go hit up a farmers market or something after this episode.

KIM: Yeah, or throw together a big salad… with cabbages in it.

AMY: So anyway, that’s all for today’s episode. We hope you’re loving the authors and book suggestions we’ve been offering up each week -- if you do, head over to wherever you listen to this podcast and click that five-star review!

KIM: Yes, it’s a HUGE help! And let us know what you think by sending us an email or connecting with us on Instagram. And don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter for more fun stuff!

AMY: We’ll be back next week! Bye, everybody!