High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (11 page)

Even before filming began, Kramer made no secret of his un-happiness with Grace. “She was too young, too inexperienced, too nervous.” She was certainly young and inexperienced. But as Zinnemann insisted, her anxiety was entirely appropriate for
the role, especially in the opening wedding scene. The virginal, innocent Quaker Amy is a girl who would indeed be nervous at her wedding to any man, especially to a respected marshal very much her senior. In Will’s crowded office moments after the brief ceremony, she smiles, laughs girlishly and creates the only moment of light amid the gathering gloom.

The problem was actually not in Grace’s performance, but in the fact that her character was underwritten. It’s true that many actresses could have portrayed Amy Fowler equally well—but many would have been less satisfactory. Perhaps what remains most in the memory is the alarming and exquisitely appropriate contrast between the giggling bride of the opening sequence and the fearful, worried, perplexed woman she soon becomes. Grace understood this contrast not intellectually, but by imagining “how I would feel if my brand-new husband seemed to abandon me for his duty. Amy had to learn that, because he did his duty—because he did not shrink from it, as she first begged him to do—he could be a wonderful husband. So she learns something. I thought that was very interesting.”

Blond Amy, all in white, exists only as a counterpoint to dark Helen, all in black. Grace’s most dramatic scene is her exchange with Katy Jurado, which Grace performed with complete conviction and a sense that innocence does not mean inanity.

H
ELEN
. How can you leave [Will] like this? Does the sound of guns frighten you that much?

A
MY
. I’ve heard guns. My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side, but that didn’t help them when the shooting started. My brother was nineteen. I watched him die. That’s when I became a Quaker. I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live. Will knows how I feel about it.

Grace spoke the words with the terrible memories in her voice: there is a slight quiver of emotion, and an almost imperceptible tremor in her chin, as if she might weep at any moment.

“This movie was her first big break,” said Katy Jurado, who was appearing in her second American film after acting in her native Mexico. “Grace and I were very different and couldn’t be very close, but I saw a girl with a lot of dignity and character who wanted to be somebody. She looked weak and tiny, but she was a very strong person—one of the strongest I worked with. She knew what she wanted, and she worked hard for it.” As Stanley Kramer had to admit years later, “Grace
was
determined, and she wasn’t overwhelmed in her scenes with the dynamic Katy Jurado, who really chewed up the scenery.”

“When I watched the film with her at home,” recalled Grace’s son, Prince Albert of Monaco, in 2007, “I could see how uncomfortable she was sitting there and seeing it again. She wasn’t at all satisfied with her performance.” But perhaps no serious, conscientious actor is ever satisfied with a performance—and a “neophyte,” as she knew she was, would have been extremely sensitive about what she gave the picture.

In this regard, Grace Kelly was never content with her achievements. “My time in Hollywood was so brief,” she said, “and everything happened so quickly, that I don’t think I accomplished anything to be proud of. I needed good teachers and directors; I needed understanding actors to work with me. I was grateful for my theatre experience, and for the work I did in television—but none of that really prepares you for movie acting. Scenes are filmed out of context and continuity—the first day’s work can be the last sequence of the picture, and what you’re acting, in which scene and with which actor, is all determined by a set of complicated scheduling mechanisms. This means that a film actor has to have an understanding director who doesn’t mind being a teacher. And it means that the
actor has to come prepared for all kinds of variables. You wait for hours, then a shot is filmed, then something goes wrong and you wait again and it’s filmed again. Then you wait some more, and another scene is shot—which may actually occur a half-hour later in the finished picture, or a half-hour earlier, at a completely different stage of the character’s development. Movie acting is more challenging than most people think, and you have to be extremely clever or a seasoned veteran to carry off a credible performance. I wasn’t a seasoned veteran, and I don’t think I was extremely clever.” (According to Zinnemann, “Grace was not self-confident at all—certainly not at this stage.”)

In the final moments of the movie, when Amy takes up a gun and shoots the man who is about to kill her husband,
High Noon
is not making a statement about Amy’s abandonment of her pacifist principles; on the contrary, it is asserting that sometimes violence occurs as a tragic, unwilled necessity. Amy shoots the man not to kill him, but to save her husband; it’s a classic example of the double-effect principle: she wants to save a life, not to destroy one. Unlike the gang and the townsfolk, but very much like her husband, she does not take up arms to seek revenge. All this may be read on Grace’s features in the last moments of the picture.

In
High Noon
, she did precisely what the role called for: she expressed youth’s callow first blush and its first encounter with the wickedness that is always present and ready to annihilate. She conveys the sense that Amy is enduring a kind of moral education, just like the people of Hadleyville.

Zinnemann and Foreman were nominated by the Academy as best director and screenwriter of 1952 (the year of
High Noon’s
release), and several Oscar statuettes were distributed—for best performance by an actor (Cooper); for film editing (Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad); for best song (Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington); and for best score (Tiomkin).
In later years, awards worldwide were added to the list. These honors were unusual for a movie in the western genre.

As Zinnemann said years later,
High Noon
“seems to mean different things to different people. Kramer, who had worked closely with Foreman on the script, said it was ’about a town that died because no one there had the guts to defend it’ … [and] Foreman saw it as an allegory about his own experience of political persecution in the McCarthy era. With due respect, I felt this to be a narrow point of view. First of all, I saw it simply as a great movie yarn, full of enormously interesting people. I vaguely sensed deeper meanings in it; but only later did it dawn on me that this was not a regular Western myth. To me, it was the story of a man who must make a decision according to his conscience. His town—symbol of a democracy gone soft—faces a horrendous threat to its people’s way of life. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day.”
^5*
Grace was mostly ignored by reviewers; when her name appeared, it was mentioned with other cast members who were “the best of many in key roles,” as the
New York Times
noted.

G
RACE HAD
no reason to remain in Hollywood after the completion of
High Noon:
the picture was not released until the summer of 1952, and no offers of further movie work were forthcoming—and so, as she later said, she hurried to New York, where she resumed private studies.

Sanford Meisner, then forty-six, was one of the most influential acting teachers of the twentieth century. Since 1940 he had taught in the acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse
School of the Theatre in Manhattan and then, as director of it, he continued to develop a technique until his retirement in 1990. Whereas Lee Strasberg emphasized “emotion memory” exercises, Meisner encouraged actors to imagine
the character’s
history, thoughts and feelings in the text (rather than
one’s own
history, thoughts and feelings, à la Strasberg). When Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis founded the Actors Studio in 1947, Meisner (not, at first, Strasberg) was invited to teach there. When Strasberg became director of the Actors Studio in 1951, Meisner returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse.

“Less is more” was one of Meisner’s mantras. “Silence has myriad meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.” Most of all, Meisner urged his students to think of acting a role as “living truthfully under given imaginary circumstances.”

For a year beginning in the autumn of 1951, Grace studied several times weekly with Meisner. Training in voice and body movement had been part of the curriculum at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but now Grace was exposed to a different technique, aimed (as Meisner insisted) on “seeing into, understanding and breathing life into a stage character. The thing about acting that moves audiences is the emphatic sense of the reality of the human being who is portrayed, greatly enhanced but not dependent on the excellent diction with which the lines are spoken. Students need a body as flexible as a gymnast’s, a voice as malleable and responsive as a singer’s, and a director who understands and can communicate the way of life which gave birth to the play in the first place.”

Meisner’s technique also asked an actor to sit quietly, waiting until a flash of imagination impelled a fresh understanding before reciting dialogue. This was no bogus mysticism, much less was it merely subjective comprehension without guidelines. There were specific exercises developed for each student, no
matter the text assigned. Over time, the Meisner Technique influenced three generations of successful actors, writers and directors—among them Bob Fosse, Diane Keaton, Sidney Lumet, David Mamet, Steve McQueen, Arthur Miller, Gregory Peck, Sydney Pollack, Marian Seldes and Joanne Woodward.

But Grace’s life was not all work. Gene Lyons had followed her to New York at the end of the Elitch season, and there the romance continued. When her friend Prudy Wise wrote to ask, “Are you still in love with old Gene?” Grace replied emphatically that autumn, “YES! We had our first fight last night, but all is alright again.”

Nor was her life all work plus the vicissitudes of passion. Grace’s television career resumed at full speed in New York that autumn. On November 21, she appeared in a teleplay called “Brand for the Burning,” and on December 10, in “Smith Serves.” Somerset Maugham introduced the latter on the television series that bore his name.

In “Smith Serves,” Grace was listed third in a cast featuring Eddie Albert and Joan Chandler. Set in New York in 1895, the story tells of a man who wants to marry an old flame—but when she learns that he has become a South Dakota farmer instead of a glamorous entrepreneur, she declines the offer. He then meets the woman’s housemaid, who was once a farm girl. They are mutually attracted, but she does not want to go back to a rural life: she is studying to be a secretary in New York. Enter Grace, as a sophisticated city girl who says that she loves her family’s farm north of New York City, and that she loves to ride horses there—thus implying that she might be the answer to the man’s search. But she is actually the farmer’s longtime platonic friend, about to be married; she had gladly agreed to be a ploy to arouse the housemaid’s jealousy. The ruse works, and the maid will marry the gentleman farmer.

“Smith Serves” is a slight but effective play, convincingly
performed by Eddie Albert with a wry combination of the “goshdarn” country boy and the savvy, successful businessman. Joan Chandler as the housemaid—dark-haired, poised and quick with a mordant observation—is the perfect foil for Grace, who enters the cluttered, claustrophobic house like a fresh breeze. She gave an agreeably amusing performance that indicated an inchoate gift for high comedy.

T
HE NEW
year 1952 was a rush of activity. Classes with Meisner continued four days a week during that year, and Grace rehearsed and performed in no fewer than fifteen live television programs, eleven of them before the summer.
^6*
In “The Big Build Up,” she portrayed Claire Conroy, a classy New York star who has come to Hollywood to be promoted, or “built up,” so we are led to believe, by an old boyfriend, now a powerful press agent (played by Richard Derr). But in fact he is her estranged husband. The story then flashes back to happier days, when they encouraged each other’s professional aspirations. Back in the present, the story concludes with touching ambiguity.

Most remarkable about Grace’s performance here, as so often in her dozens of TV roles, is her complete artlessness, the lack of pretension and the naturalness of her gestures and her
diction. These qualities, critics have complained in recent years, were sometimes absent during key moments of
High Noon
and her subsequent movies. If this was occasionally the case in her first three pictures, there is an easy explanation: “To tell the truth, I was intimidated at first, working with directors like Zinnemann, Ford and Hitchcock—they were among the big guns of the movies in those days, and they were my first directors [after her brief appearance in
Fourteen Hours].”

In addition, Zinnemann, Ford and Hitchcock frequently asked their casts for multiple takes of a shot, and Grace—convinced that these were her fault and not, for example, owing to problems with lighting or sound recording—became, for a while, ever more self-conscious, which in turn sometimes made her performance less spontaneous and credible. Zinnemann’s admitted inability to help a newcomer, Ford’s grumpy machismo and Hitchcock’s lifelong failure to compliment an actor on a job well done—even when he liked what he saw—were qualities that worried the inexperienced Grace. As it happened, it was precisely her trio of roles for Hitchcock that erased every bit of artifice, but that took time.

After a week of rehearsals, television plays were presented live, and there was no time to correct accidents. “It was like living on the edge of a volcano or in the midst of a hurricane,” Grace recalled. “We didn’t even think about mistakes, we just muddled along with them. Most of the time it was quite funny, and our biggest problem was not to burst out laughing. Once I had a scene in bed. I had to wear all my clothes beneath the covers, so I could leap out and run to the next scene on a nearby set. But the TV camera didn’t cut away—so there I was, leaping out of bed with all my clothes on and dashing off-camera to the next room. The viewers at home must have wondered what the hell was going on.