High Society Page 14

  7* Work on the two movies overlapped. Rear Window was in production from November 29, 1953, to January 14, 1954, and Sabrina from September 29 to December 5, 1953.

  8* Grace also refused to smoke cigarettes in any of her pictures. When Hitchcock instructed her to light up in Rear Window, the camera cuts away—from the cigarette, unlighted, between her lips, then to Stewart, and finally to the lighted cigarette held for a few seconds and then stubbed out. As the saying goes, she never inhaled.

  9* Several sources state that Grace made her final appearance in a live TV play on the Kraft Television Playhouse episode “The Thankful Heart,” broadcast live from New York on January 6, 1954. I have been unable to reconcile this assertion with the Paramount production files, which indicate that she worked on that date on Rear Window, which occupied her on nine of the first twelve days of that year.

  SIX

  Friends and Lovers

  Nothing is quite so mysterious and silent as a dark theater.

  —GRACE (AS GEORGIE ELGIN) IN THE COUNTRY GIRL

  OVER THE COURSE OF FOURTEEN MONTHS—FROM July 1953 through August 1954—Grace Kelly completed six of the eleven films that constitute the sum of her movie career: Dial “M” for Murder, Rear Window, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Country Girl, Green Fire and To Catch a Thief. That was a remarkable achievement by any standard. She was energetic, ambitious and admired by her colleagues, but moving immediately from one production to the next often left her exhausted. “I realized much, much later that I had no time for myself—no time to reflect, to think about what I was doing and where I was going. I thought I had the best intentions, but of course, one always does. The pictures were made in Hollywood, South America and the South of France, but except for Sundays, I didn’t have much time off in the first eight months of 1954. Looking back, I’m not sure how I survived.”

  When the columnist Hedda Hopper asked, in May of that year, how old Grace was, she replied truthfully, “Twenty-four—and aging much too quickly.” Did Grace think an actor would make a good husband? “No, but I don’t think someone outside the business would make a good husband, either.” Would Grace be willing to give up her career for marriage? “I don’t know. I’d like to keep my career. I’ll have to wait and make that choice when the time comes. Of course I think about marriage, but my career is still the most important thing for me. If I interrupt it now to get married—because I don’t believe in a part-time family life—I would risk passing the rest of my existence wondering whether or not I would have been able to become a great actress.”

  For the public, 1954 was “a year of Grace,” as journalists repeatedly asserted, and audiences agreed. She was invariably counted among the most fashionable women in America, and before the year’s end, she was on several best-dressed lists. But the public had no idea of the wide streak of melancholic dissatisfaction within her, caused by her desire for a husband and children. “I suddenly noticed that I was an aunt several times, and a godmother many times, and that I was receiving invitations to one wedding after another. For a while I was the only unmarried woman I could name! I was going to be twenty-five that year, and as each month passed and each film was finished, I was more and more confused. I had no time for myself, and when a magazine asked me, ‘Who is the real Grace Kelly?’ I replied, ‘There isn’t any real Grace Kelly yet! Come back in ten years and I’ll tell you—I’m still trying to find out.’”

  BEFORE REAR WINDOW was completed in January, Grace gained a new and valuable friend. She had known Rita Gam in New York when they were both working as models and acting in TV dramas, and Rita, too, had come to Hollywood. While Grace was working on Rear Window, Rita was at Universal, filming the historical epic Sign of the Pagan. They both knew the producer and former agent John Foreman, who suggested that the two young women might become friends.

  “Grace had taken an apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood,” Rita recalled, “and she had shared it with her friend and secretary, Prudy Wise. When Prudy left Los Angeles, Grace rang me and invited me to come over for a cup of coffee. We clicked immediately—the friendship was virtually instantaneous—and Grace, who didn’t like living alone, invited me to share her apartment. I was lonely living at a hotel, and I accepted at once.” Like Judith Balaban Kanter, Rita was a bridesmaid at Grace’s wedding and a lifelong friend.

  Grace’s rented West Hollywood apartment was a simple place in a nondescript building, but Rita remembered that Grace had made it her own. “It was feminine and sentimental, filled with snapshots, sketches and souvenirs from her films, and everywhere there were pictures of her family. As she poured the coffee at our first meeting, we compared notes about our separate African adventures—she having filmed Mogambo in central Africa, and I just back from North Africa, where I appeared in Saadia for MGM.

  “She was generous, open, tolerant, fun and completely down to earth—and she was always working. She had huge ambitions to become one of the fine stage actresses in America—that’s what she wanted more than anything else. Her film work became just a detour. I think that’s why she never owned a home in Los Angeles—New York was always her home, and she was never in Hollywood with all her heart. She just saw it as a temporary opportunity, and she had other plans for her future—on the stage.”

  That year, as Rita remembered, Grace “was often very tired, but she enjoyed the work. Occasionally on Sunday, she went to lunch and spent the day with her uncle George, and she always spoke about him with great warmth and affection. He was extremely important in her career, and he seemed to understand everything she resented about Hollywood—especially the whole publicity machine. There she was, the envy of every woman in Hollywood—but she disliked being turned into this great romantic image. Only her sense of humor got her through all this—her humor and the conviction that once she got too tired of it all, she would settle down and have a family.”

  Grace was protective of her siblings and loyal to her parents, Rita added. “She admired her father, although she thought he was too tough on her and she knew that he didn’t approve of her acting. It was always ‘Peggy this’ and ‘Peggy that’ for her father. And her mother wasn’t a warm person at all. But Grace wouldn’t hear a word against them. She was a good-hearted gal. She had an understanding about people, and compassion—she didn’t talk about it, but you heard how she spoke and saw how she behaved.”

  Grace’s agent, Jay Kanter, and his wife, Judy, recalled an afternoon with Grace and her parents that year, after Grace received her Academy Award nomination for Mogambo. Jay told John and Margaret Kelly about their daughter’s impressive accomplishments and the offers MCA was receiving for her every day. “She was a weak little thing,” interrupted Grace’s father, changing the subject to Grace’s childhood. “I don’t understand why she wanted to be an actress—never did—but I told her she could go to New York when she asked because I couldn’t think of anything else she could do. Oh, well, I’m glad she’s making a living.” In the eyes of her father, as Judy recalled, “Grace was a write-off.”

  As for the men in Grace’s life, Rita “made it a rule never to ask about her boyfriends, and she was the same with me. That served us both well and kept our friendship. Her beaux came and went, but they weren’t the focus of her life, and in Hollywood there was never that one special person who could fulfill her idea of the perfect mate for her. Her focus was on her career. Although we never pried into one another’s life, Grace was very kind and especially caring when I broke up with Sidney [Lumet, her first husband]. No one could have been a more attentive friend.”

  AT THE COMPLETION of Rear Window, Grace was full of anecdotes about Hitchcock. “She told me he was a great director,” Rita recalled, “and they had a great working relationship laced with jokes and good humor. But he never went out of his way for anybody. Hitchcock, Zinnemann and Ford were all like benevolent tyrants. None of them really liked women. They were male chauvinists, and they treated Grace like a cutout. But she made sure she had a good time, and she did
what she was told on the set. Grace was tough and strong—mentally, emotionally and physically—and she cut through a lot of the nonsense. Hollywood was like a game for her. She was also a good businesswoman, and this allowed her to win in her struggles with MGM. She knew how to play the corporate game, and she played it so that it worked for her.”

  Between Rita and Grace there was no competition—only a mutual understanding and a certain touching protectiveness. “Over the years, I found that people didn’t think of Grace as very bright, but she was—all her acting talent and her success came through her intelligence.”

  As attractive, unattached young movie stars, Rita and Grace were frequently invited to Hollywood parties and suppers, and producers and studio executives said they would send a car to collect them. “I often said OK to that,” Rita recalled. “But then Grace interrupted me: ‘Don’t you dare let them send a car! We may want to get out of there. I’ll drive us.’ She knew the ways of the world and didn’t want to be trapped in an uncomfortable situation. So although she never liked to drive, she did if we went to a party.”

  The day after Grace concluded work on Rear Window, she moved over to another sound stage at Paramount, to begin filming her scenes in The Bridges at Toko-Ri. The role of Nancy Brubaker was a brief but affecting one, mostly in support of William Holden, who played her husband, Harry, a navy hero during the Korean War.

  Born in 1918 into a prosperous Illinois family, William Beedle had been noticed by a Paramount scout when he was a college student in Pasadena. Rechristened William Holden by the studio, he had made two minor pictures until 1939, when the leading role in Golden Boy raised him to instant stardom.

  In 1941, Holden married actress Brenda Marshall, but nothing about that union seemed authentic, despite its thirty-year length—for the most part, it veered between pathetic soap opera and low comedy. They both engaged in a dizzying array of extramarital romances, usually with each other’s full awareness, and these intrigues ended with tearful acts of contrition—just before the next paramour came into view. To prevent the complication of illegitimate paternity, Holden decided—with his wife’s encouragement—to undergo a vasectomy in 1947, after the births of his two sons by Brenda. This decreased neither his libido nor the number of his conquests, who, for obvious reasons, were delighted with the medical news.

  By the 1950s, the Holdens lived mostly separate lives—but unofficially, as Paramount executives and publicists demanded. Bill’s good looks and charm were the main features of his seduction technique; for much of his life he had a reputation that made Casanova seem like a Trappist monk. But as he approached forty, he was also an alcoholic.

  That January, when Bill met Grace, he had just come out of a brief but torrid affair with Audrey Hepburn, with whom he had costarred in Sabrina. Now he turned his charms full throttle on his new costar, and his efforts were immediately rewarded—not only because of his humor and courtesy toward her, but also perhaps because (like Gene Lyons) his problematic drinking aroused Grace’s sympathy. “She had an ability to turn men on,” said her sister Lizanne, “and most men who dated her fell in love with her.” So it was with William Holden.

  Their liaison lasted only about three weeks. Years after her death, Grace’s children acknowledged the affair by including photos of her and Bill in the 2007 tribute to Grace, and by official approval of a book with a brief account of the matter: “She succumbed to the charms of the actor, who was twelve years her senior and married. The friendship rapidly turned into a fiery passion.”* In any case, Grace’s prior experience with Lyons had taught her the perils of life with a heavy drinker. A sudden attack of reality cooled her feelings and enabled her, with the utmost delicacy, to end the intrigue when she left the picture. Within days, Holden was finding consolation in the arms of another.

  GRACE HAD neither sought nor fought for the small role of Nancy Brubaker in The Bridges at Toko-Ri; she was forced into it by MGM, which continued to realize a healthy profit on another loan-out. Again, the deal was made with Paramount, where producer William Perlberg and director George Seaton had a better sense of her worth.

  The screenplay for Bridges, based on a long story by James Michener that had appeared in Life magazine, was written by Valentine Davies and directed by Mark Robson. Set in 1952 during the Korean War, the story concerns navy pilot Harry Brubaker, assigned to bomb a string of strategic bridges. His wife, Nancy, brings their two children to see him during a short leave in Japan, where she must accept the possibility that her husband’s dangerous assignment may leave her a widow. In an ending unusual for war movies of the time, that is precisely what happens.

  Grace, who had second billing after Holden, appears for no more than fifteen minutes, and she is last seen waving farewell as he leaves for his fateful mission. The half-hour sequences opening the picture, showing navy heroics, and the forced humor of the dialogue combined with ultrapatriotic observations, make for an unsatisfactory movie. The audience is invited to care about the wife and children of a doomed pilot, but we leave them at the dock and never see how they are affected by his death or begin to cope with it. In the Michener story, a straightforward but affecting prose style makes for a more emotionally satisfying experience than the movie, which focuses far too long on the battles at sea and on land. Together with another 1954 movie, Green Fire, Bridges was a film Grace did not rate highly.

  At the time, Perlberg and Seaton were not so indifferent, and they saw Bridges as a kind of trial run for her possible appearance in their next Paramount picture—for which, by a kind of bitter irony, William Holden had already signed up. “Grace doesn’t throw everything at you in the first five seconds,” Seaton said later of her role in Bridges. “Some [actors] give you everything they’ve got at once, and there it is—there is no more. But Grace is like a kaleidoscope: one twist, and you get a whole new facet.” There were not many twists to the character of lovely, normal Nancy Brubaker, but at least (in the chaste bedroom scene) she had an opportunity to show that she could portray both love for her husband and fear for herself. As in the Michener story, the role of Nancy Brubaker exists for the sake of exposition—she’s there only to ask why the war is necessary and to be brave at her husband’s departure. Still smarting from the ravages of World War II and Korea, American audiences loved the role and the actress.

  FOR OVER two months, Grace had been inundated with long, loving letters and cards from Oleg, who also telephoned almost every evening when she returned home from the studio. When The Bridges at Toko-Ri was completed at the end of January, she planned a return to New York, in order to determine precisely what was happening in this odd relationship with Cassini—odd because it had all the characteristics of a love affair except the obvious one. Grace needed to know more about him, to determine her feelings for him; at the same time she was wary because of his widely known amorous activities.

  But, for a good reason, her trip to New York had to be postponed. William Perlberg and George Seaton had obtained film rights to the Clifford Odets play The Country Girl, an enormous success of the 1950–51 Broadway season. Perlberg was to produce and Seaton to adapt the play and direct it for Paramount. For her achievement as Georgie Elgin, the prematurely aged wife of an alcoholic actor, Uta Hagen had earned the Tony Award as best actress of the year; now, however, Paramount wanted a movie star to help sell an intense drama that was not automatically expected to be a crowd-pleaser. Georgie is a challenging part—a once vibrant and attractive woman who has become weary and cheerless in support of her irresponsible, alcoholic husband. Many women in Hollywood coveted the role, and Perlberg, Seaton and Paramount had first settled on Jennifer Jones—perhaps because of her recent superb performance in the title role of the film Carrie (also for Paramount), based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie. But that idea for casting was scotched when Jennifer’s husband, the producer David O. Selznick, announced that she was pregnant.

  Georgie could not have been more different from the roles Grace had played so far. The
innocent, idealistic Amy Kane of High Noon; the genteel Linda Nordley of Mogambo; the wealthy, discreet Margot Wendice in Dial “M” for Murder; the sophisticated, stylish Lisa Fremont of Rear Window; and the anxious navy wife of The Bridges at Toko-Ri: these women did not bear the remotest resemblance to the wan, tired and impoverished Georgie. But this difference was precisely what attracted Grace to the role, and when Perlberg surreptitiously handed her the script (which by all rights he should have submitted to her through MCA), she knew this was the part that would both challenge and establish her as a serious dramatic actress.

  The primary obstacle in her way was her Metro contract. Dore Schary had decided it was time to bring her back to Culver City, this time for another jungle adventure, to be filmed partly in South America. The project was Green Fire, and they had a script, a director, a leading man and a stalwart supporting player ready to go; Grace would be the glamorous complement, glamorizing a story of uncommon languor. The screenplay, riddled with clichés, had been doomed from the start. Metro’s contract star Eleanor Parker had simply walked out on it, and Robert Taylor said he would rather retire than act in such nonsense. Eager to get the film in production and to bring Grace back to the studio, Metro flatly turned down Perlberg-Seaton’s request to loan her to Paramount for The Country Girl.

  But Schary and company had not foreseen that at this stage of her career she was not prepared to behave like a compliant tool in corporate hands. “I asked my agents to give my New York address to all the MGM executives, so they would know where they could send their Christmas cards. It took a moment for them to realize what I meant, and I did mean it—I was prepared to leave Hollywood forever if they denied me the chance to play in The Country Girl. And I was more than willing to tell the press why I was retiring.”