Cimarron Read online

  VINTAGE MOVIE CLASSICS

  Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.

  FIRST VINTAGE MOVIE CLASSICS EDITION, MARCH 2014

  Copyright © 1930 by Edna Ferber, renewed 1957 by Edna Ferber

  Foreword copyright © 2014 by Julie Gilbert

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, in 1930.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Movie Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-345-80575-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-80576-8

  Cover design: Evan Gaffney Design

  Cover photograph by Jochem Wijnands © akg / Horizons

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  Movie Adaptations of Edna Ferber’s Cimarron

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  FOREWORD

  Julie Gilbert

  Being the great niece of Edna Ferber came with obligations. I was to read as much of her work as I was able, as early as possible. At the age of eleven, I was packed off to summer camp with the novels So Big, Show Boat, and Cimarron. While my other bunkmates read Nancy Drew mysteries, I became immersed in and enamored by what was to be my legacy.

  I gobbled up Cimarron and found it incredibly stirring. The image of the heroine, Sabra, cradling the head of her husband, the wounded Yancey Cravat, plunged into my callow preteen heart. Ferber painted words that translated into images I could see and feel. I was more than pleasantly surprised that my estimable relative had become my favorite novelist. Soon, these books were being devoured by my whole bunk and then by the neighboring one. Sabra Cravat, Selina Peake DeJong (So Big), and Magnolia Ravenal (Show Boat) had replaced The Message in the Hollow Oak.

  The story of Cimarron and the settling of the Oklahoma Territory, from the land rush to the oil gush, brings history alive. Written in 1929 and published in 1930, Ferber felt the thrust of the book had been misunderstood. “I was bitterly disappointed,” she said.

  “Cimarron had been written with a hard and ruthless purpose. It was and is a malevolent picture of what is known as American womanhood and American sentimentality. It contains paragraphs and even chapters of satire, and, I’m afraid, bitterness, but I doubt that more than a dozen people ever knew this. All the critics and hundreds of thousands of readers took Cimarron as a colorful, romantic Western American novel.”

  Rudyard Kipling, a big Ferber fan, was not disappointed, however. “That’s a big bit of work, and dam’ good atmosphere. Seems to me she’s going on from strength to strength,” he wrote to Ferber’s publisher, Nelson Doubleday.

  The stimulus for the novel came from Ferber’s colleague, William Allen White, renowned editor of the Emporia Gazette, and whom she thought of as being the birth father of the project. The previous autumn, he had motored through Oklahoma and had brought home tales of the opening of the Territory, the discovery of oil, and of the Indians “so basely treated by the white man and so ludicrously revenged when the vast oil strike was made on the arid Indian reservation to which they had been herded.” Ferber was incredulous at the dichotomy: “Osage Indians in blankets and braids riding around in Pierce Arrow cars! Millionaire Indians living in wigwams!” But when White suggested that she write a novel about it, she hesitated, feeling that rendering the story of Oklahoma was a man’s job. She decided, however, that she wouldn’t mind just having a “tourist’s look at the state.”

  She went with the Whites, and after a week, they left her there, “slogging through oil fields, living in sky-scraper luxury hotels, talking to old-timers who had made the Run in the 1880’s, sitting in a rocking chair on a hundred front porches while I listened to tales tall but true, dining at the improbable palaces of white oil millionaires. It was hot, it was exasperating, it was fascinating, it was seemingly endless, it was Cimarron.”

  Much later, long after the novel was published and praised, Ferber attributed some of her best writing to it, as did Clark Gable, who wrote to her: “It is with sincere appreciation that I want to thank you for Cimarron. If we had more people in our country today who had Cimarron in their hearts and minds this would be a happier country to live in.”

  Cimarron was made into two motion pictures—the first by RKO in 1931, starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, the second by MGM in 1960, starring Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. Ferber was less than enchanted with both of the films. However, Variety, the show business bible, championed both of them, calling the 1931 version, “An elegant example of super film making and a big money picture. This is a spectacular western away from all others. It holds action, sentiment, sympathy, thrills and comedy—and 100% clean.” In 1959, the same newspaper reevaluated glowingly: “Edna Ferber’s novel of the first Oklahoma land rush (1889) shapes up in its second film translation.… The pic pulls no punches in pointing up the greed that discovery of black gold brought out in the rags-to-riches pioneers.… This is grand scale action in spades.” Ferber did favor the first version, giving it a small salute as she made her way to the bank after having received a telegram about the novel’s film sale: “MAY IT BUY YOU MANY FREESIAS” (her favorite flower).

  During her lifetime Ferber’s properties were recycled, resold, repackaged, but rarely reevaluated. She never gave up on them financially or emotionally and always hoped they’d be reborn to new public applause and new market rewards. In 1967, the Ashley Famous Agency was working on selling the 1960 MGM version of Cimarron to television. On September 3, 1967, Ferber picked up the New York Times and saw on the television page a large photo of a man in a Stetson with a caption reading: “Cimarron Strip—U.S. Marshall Stuart Whitman tries to keep law and order in the rough-and-tumble days of Kansas, circa 1880.… On CBS Thursdays at 7:30.”

  Ferber, sensing danger, clipped the picture, drew dagger-like arrows at actor Whitman’s head and to the title, “Cimarron Strip,” and sent it off to the Ashley Famous Agency, who took pains to reassure her that the program in no way would influence the sale of the motion picture based on her novel.

  Edna Ferber was always acutely clear about the intentions of each of her novels. She also had prescience about what might not be seen or understood, that

  “the great American public will never see in those stories the thing that
I fondly hope they contain. Maybe they’ll never see the woods for the trees. I’m used to that. In Cimarron I wrote a story whose purpose was to show the triumph of materialism over the spirit in America, and I did show it, but perhaps I was too reticent about it. It emerged in the minds of most people, as a romantic western, and it broke my heart, though the thing sold by the tens of thousands.” And then, as if hoping for the eternal flame, she adds: “Oh, well, maybe when I’m dead.”

  In 1968, a year after Ferber’s death, a woman named Eta Kitzmiller evaluated all of Ferber’s properties for potential television sales. She felt that the story and characters had a definite appeal. “There is more than enough material here,” she said, “to keep a long-lived series going and a lot of it—the Indian sections, and the sudden oil riches—haven’t been over-told on TV.… I think the book has possibilities.”

  With the arrival of a new eBook and print publication forty-three years later, Cimarron certainly continues to have possibilities.

  Julie Gilbert is a professional novelist, biographer, playwright, and teacher. She is a Random House author.

  PREFACE

  Only the more fantastic and improbable events contained in this book are true. There is no attempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma. All the characters, the towns, and many of the happenings contained herein are imaginary. But through reading the scant available records, documents, and histories (including the Oklahoma State Historical Library collection) and through many talks with men and women who have lived in Oklahoma since the day of the Opening, something of the spirit, the color, the movement, the life of that incredible commonwealth has, I hope, been caught. Certainly the Run, the Sunday service in the gambling tent, the death of Isaiah and of Arita Red Feather, the catching of the can of nitroglycerin, many of the shooting affrays, most descriptive passages, all of the oil phase, and the Osage Indian material complete—these are based on actual happenings. In many cases material entirely true was discarded as unfit for use because it was so melodramatic, so absurd as to be too strange for the realm of fiction.

  There is no city of Osage, Oklahoma. It is a composite of, perhaps, five existent Oklahoma cities. The Kid is not meant to be the notorious Billy the Kid of an earlier day. There was no Yancey Cravat—he is a blending of a number of dashing Oklahoma figures of a past and present day. There is no Sabra Cravat, but she exists in a score of bright-eyed, white-haired, intensely interesting women of sixty-five or thereabouts who told me many strange things as we talked and rocked on an Oklahoma front porch (tree-shaded now).

  Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

  EDNA FERBER

  1

  All the Venables sat at Sunday dinner. All those handsome inbred Venable faces were turned, enthralled, toward Yancey Cravat, who was talking. The combined effect was almost blinding, as of incandescence; but Yancey Cravat was not bedazzled. A sun surrounded by lesser planets, he gave out a radiance so powerful as to dim the luminous circle about him.

  Yancey had a disconcerting habit of abruptly concluding a meal—for himself, at least—by throwing down his napkin at the side of his plate, rising, and striding about the room, or even leaving it. It was not deliberate rudeness. He ate little. His appetite satisfied, he instinctively ceased to eat; ceased to wish to contemplate food. But the Venables sat hours at table, leisurely shelling almonds, sipping sherry; Cousin Dabney Venable peeling an orange for Cousin Bella French Vian with the absorbed concentration of a sculptor molding his clay.

  The Venables, dining, strangely resembled one of those fertile and dramatic family groups portrayed lolling unconventionally at meat in the less spiritual of those Biblical canvases that glow richly down at one from the great gallery walls of Europe. Though their garb was sober enough, being characteristic of the time—1889—and the place—Kansas—it yet conveyed an impression as of purple and scarlet robes enveloping these gracile shoulders. You would not have been surprised to see, moving silently about this board, Nubian blacks in loincloths, bearing aloft golden vessels piled with exotic fruits or steaming with strange pasties in which nightingales’ tongues figured prominently. Blacks, as a matter of fact, did move about the Venable table, but these, too, wore the conventional garb of the servitor.

  This branch of the Venable family tree had been transplanted from Mississippi to Kansas more than two decades before, but the mid-west had failed to set her bourgeois stamp upon them. Straitened though it was, there still obtained in that household, by some genealogical miracle, many of those charming ways, remotely Oriental, that were of the South whence they had sprung. The midday meal was, more often than not, a sort of tribal feast at which sprawled hosts of impecunious kin, mysteriously sprung up at the sound of the dinner bell and the scent of baking meats. Unwilling émigrés, war ruined, Lewis Venable and his wife Felice had brought their dear customs with them into exile, as well as the superb mahogany oval at which they now sat, and the war-salvaged silver which gave elegance to the Wichita, Kansas, board. Certainly the mahogany had suffered in transit; and many of their Southern ways, transplanted to Kansas, seemed slightly silly—or would have, had they not been tinged with pathos. The hot breads of the South, heaped high at every meal, still wrought alimentary havoc. The frying pan and the deep-fat kettle (both, perhaps, as much as anything responsible for the tragedy of ’64) still spattered their deadly fusillade in this household. Indeed, the creamy pallor of the Venable women, so like that of a magnolia petal in their girlhood, and tending so surely toward the ocherous in middle age, was less a matter of pigment than of liver. Impecunious though the family now was, three or four negro servants went about the house, soft-footed, slack, charming. “Rest yo’ wrap?” they suggested, velvet voiced and hospitable, as you entered the wide hallway that was at once so bare and so cluttered. And, “Beat biscuit, Miss Adeline?” as they proffered a fragrant plate.

  Even that Kansas garden was of another latitude. Lean hounds drowsed in the sun-drenched untidiness of the doorway, and that untidiness was hidden and transformed by a miracle of color and scent and bloom. Here were passion flower and wistaria and even Bougainvillea in season. Honeysuckle gave out its swooning sweetness. In the early spring lilies of the valley thrust the phantom green of their spears up through the dead brown banking the lilac bushes. That coarse vulgarian, the Kansas sunflower, was a thing despised of the Venables. If one so much as showed its broad face among the scented élégantes of that garden it suffered instant decapitation. On one occasion Felice Venable had been known to ruin a pair of very fine-tempered embroidery scissors while impetuously acting as headsman. She had even been heard to bewail the absence of Spanish moss in this northerly climate. A neighboring midwest matron, miffed, resented this.

  “But that’s a parasite! And real creepy, almost. I was in South Carolina and saw it. Kind of floating, like ghosts. And no earthly good.”

  “Do even the flowers have to be useful in Kansas?” drawled Felice Venable. She was not very popular with the bustling wives of Wichita. They resented her ruffled and trailing white wrappers of cross-barred dimity; her pointed slippers, her arched instep, her indifference to all that went on outside the hedge that surrounded the Venable yard; they resented the hedge itself, symbol of exclusiveness in that open-faced Kansas town. Sheathed in the velvet of Felice Venable’s languor was a sharp-edged poniard of wit inherited from her French forbears, the old Marcys of St. Louis; Missouri fur traders of almost a century earlier. You saw the Marcy mark in the black of her still bountiful hair, in the curve of the brows above the dark eyes—in the dark eyes themselves, so alive in the otherwise immobile face.

  As the family now sat at its noonday meal it was plain that while two decades of living in the Middle West had done little to quicken the speech or hasten the movements of Lewis Venable and his wife Felice (they still “you-alled”; they declared to goodness; the eighteenth letter of the alphabet would forever be ah to them) it had made a noticeable difference in the younger generation. Up
and down the long table they ranged, sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law; grandchildren; remoter kin such as visiting nieces and nephews and cousins, offshoots of this far-flung family. As the more northern-bred members of the company exclaimed at the tale they now were hearing you noted that their vowels were shorter, their diction more clipped, the turn of the head, the lift of the hand less leisurely. In all those faces there was a resemblance, one to the other. Perhaps the listening look which all of them now wore served to accentuate this.

  It was late May, and unseasonably hot for the altitude. Then, too, there had been an early pest of moths and June flies this spring. High above the table, and directly over it, on a narrow board suspended by rods from the lofty ceiling sat perched Isaiah, the little black boy. With one hand he clung to the side rods of his precarious roost; with the other he wielded a shoofly of feathery asparagus ferns cut from the early garden. Its soft susurrus as he swished it back and forth was an obbligato to the music of Yancey Cravat’s golden voice. Clinging thus aloft the black boy looked a simian version of one of Raphael’s ceilinged angels. His round head, fuzzed with little tight tufts, as of woolly astrakhan through which the black of his poll gleamed richly, was cocked at an impish angle the better to catch the words that flowed from the lips of the speaker. His eyes, popping with excitement, were fixed in an entrancement on the great lounging figure of Yancey Cravat. So bewitched was the boy that frequently his hand fell limp and he forgot altogether his task of bestirring with his verdant fan the hot moist air above the food-laden table. An impatient upward glance from Felice Venable’s darting black eyes, together with a sharply admonitory “Ah-saiah!” would set him to swishing vigorously until the enchantment again stayed his arm.

  The Venables saw nothing untoward in this remnant of Mississippi feudalism. Dozens of Isaiah’s forbears had sat perched thus, bestirring the air so that generations of Mississippi Venables might the more agreeably sup and eat and talk. Wichita had first beheld this phenomenon aghast; and even now, after twenty years, it was a subject for local tongue waggings.