High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (12 page)

“The same year I did ‘The Big Build Up,’ I was in ‘The
Cricket on the Hearth.’ In one scene, a wonderful old English character actor and I were coming to bring a steaming hot pie to an orphan on Christmas Day. We were told to wave at the boy through a window, but the pie was too hot to hold in one hand, so I set it down for a moment—and the old actor stepped right into it. He came limping into the door of the ‘cottage’ with his left shoe stuck in a pie—and simply said to the other actors, as if everything was perfectly natural, ‘Here’s a lovely hot pie for all of you—Merry Christmas!’”

T
HREE WEEKS
after “The Big Build Up,” on February 10, Grace appeared in Walter Bernstein’s hour-long TV version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Rich Boy.” She had much anticipated this job: she would again be directed by Delbert Mann (of “Bethel Merriday”); the role of Paula Legendre was both challenging and appealing; and, perhaps most of all, her leading man was none other than Gene Lyons, in the role of Anson Hunter.

Set in New York during the Roaring Twenties, “The Rich Boy” opens in the autumn, at one of Anson’s chic Manhattan parties, where he meets Paula and her mother, who are visiting New York “for the season” from their home in California. Paula quickly falls in love with Anson, but soon she has to hurry back to the West Coast. Before her departure, Grace speaks with great warmth and understanding:

PAULA (GRACE). You drink a lot, don’t you?

ANSON (LYONS). I suppose so.

The dialogue could have been spoken between them in real life.

ANSON. We’re both rich.

PAULA. It’s nice, isn’t it?

There are very long kisses between them in “The Rich Boy”—unusual for TV in 1952—and home viewers may have wondered why those moments seemed so convincing.

In subsequent scenes with Paula, Anson is always polite and courtly, but he is gross, indecent, and drunk with others—a pathetically louche character ruined by privilege, an absence of value and a failure of purpose. Each time Paula and Anson are together, she sees more drunken sprees, and she is warned by her disapproving mother (as Margaret Kelly would have sternly advised Grace).

P
AULA
. You have one idea about life and I have another. Maybe we’re too far apart. Why do you have to drink so much?

A
NSON
. Because I want to!

Time passes, and they have been engaged for eight months, but he is in no hurry to set a wedding date. Soon Paula fully sees the danger, and she breaks their engagement. Later he learns that she is engaged to marry in Florida. Anson finds her there, and the old spark is reignited in him. But Paula has been “worn away inside” after the long wait for Anson to reform himself, and she won’t accept him. He returns to New York and begins an affair with another young woman, but he breaks this off: “I don’t love you one bit,” he tells her cruelly. “You better wait for someone who does.”

Anson then learns that Paula has married. He becomes richer than ever, but he cannot control his drinking. In time, Paula divorces her husband and happily remarries, while Anson
has not been able to have one enduring relationship. By chance, he meets Paula, her new husband and her three children in New York. In a moment of privacy, she gently reminds Anson that their romance was nothing more than an infatuation—that it wasn’t good for either of them and never could be. Then the stock market collapses in 1929, signaling more disaster for Anson Hunter. Thus the story ends.

Considering the lives of the real-life leading duo, the teleplay of “The Rich Boy” is astonishingly autobiographical—as much about Grace and Gene as it was about Fitzgerald himself—and it is tempting to imagine their conversations when they rehearsed privately. Indeed, the script is a virtual template for the doomed romance of these two actors.

O
N MARCH
22, the New York press carried a small item, announcing that Grace was joining rehearsals for a new Broadway play by William Marchant, starring Neil Hamilton, John Drew Devereaux and Dorothy Stickney. This rather wan comedy,
To Be Continued
, opened at the Booth Theatre on April 23 and closed, after thirteen performances, on May 2. Grace knew the play was troubled when she accepted the role of Janet (“a very dignified, attractive young lady,” according to the text), the daughter of a philanderer. But every theatre credit was important toward her goal—even a part that kept her onstage for less than three minutes. Her only function in the play was to dissuade her father’s mistress of twenty-five years from accepting her mother’s invitation to meet:

J
ANET
(G
RACE
). My mother wants to prove to herself that her husband has never cared one iota for her. She wants to hear it from your lips. She wants to see it in your eyes.

D
OLLY
(D
OROTHY
S
TICKNEY
). I didn’t know that.

J
ANET
. I’m afraid it will turn her into one of those lonely, unloved women you see everywhere nowadays. Her foundations are terribly shaky—really shaky. I’m afraid she might go to pieces. Before you see my mother, will you please think of the consequences?

Thinking of the consequences might have prevented the playwright from trying to make a drawing-room comedy out of a painful marital situation. The New York critics (who did not mention Grace in their reviews) noted that there were too many solemn moments for a fey treatment of infidelity, and an excess of virtuous looks instead of mocking glances.

That summer, after working in several more TV dramas, Grace hastened to the Playhouse in the Park, Philadelphia, where she appeared in two comedies. In mid-August she returned to the Bucks County Playhouse, playing the plucky young secretary in love with a depressed, middle-aged playwright in Samson Raphaelson’s 1934 comedy,
Accent on Youth.
There seem to have been no reviews of or news items about these productions.

She then returned to New York, where she received a call from her agent. An English movie executive named Sidney Bernstein, then in partnership with Alfred Hitchcock, wanted to meet her, for they could not find the right leading lady for a picture called
I Confess
, soon to begin filming in Quebec. “I met Mr. Bernstein for lunch at his hotel,” Grace recalled, “but I guess I didn’t make a very good impression.” A fine Swedish actress named Anita Björk was soon engaged for the leading role in
I Confess
, but she arrived with an illegitimate child in her arms and a lover at her side, and was forthwith turned away by Jack Warner. Instead, the part went to Anne Baxter.

Grace then began rehearsals for one of her most successful TV appearances, again demonstrating her superb gift for a
special kind of romantic comedy of mistaken identities. Convoluted and improbable but engaging and lively, the show was called “Recapture,” and in it Grace received top billing on TV for the first time—perhaps because of the recent release of
High Noon.

As director Ted Post recalled, “I thought Grace’s voice was not yet blended with her stately posture—it was still high, a little girlish and breathless. But I said nothing, certain that things would improve during rehearsals. Then one day her mother came to the studio and took her aside: ‘Darling, your speech sounds a little affected.’ And Grace replied, ‘I know, Mother—I’m working on it.’ And work on it she did. By the time of the broadcast, everything was much more natural.” For the moment, the problem, one might say, was Grace’s immersion in a variety of forms. She needed to find a palette of modulated expressions for films and an unforced projection for stage plays. But on live TV she had to lower her register while maintaining complete clarity. At first, therefore, her efforts produced what her mother heard as a certain fastidious affectation.

The tendency to exaggeratedly polite speech was soon erased, thanks mostly to Sandy Meisner’s exercises. By the time of “The Kill,” a western broadcast on September 22, Grace’s performance was entirely credible, and the character was nothing like Amy Fowler Kane. The director, Franklin Schaffner, was swiftly extending the effects possible with a moving camera on live TV, for which he directed more than two hundred shows before going on to Hollywood, where he directed
Planet of the Apes
(1968) and
Patton
(1970).

In “The Kill,” Grace plays a woman married to a man with a frightful temper. They go to a local saloon, where he meets an old flame, now married, and then he starts a fight with men who are stealing from his irrigation system. A young man is killed in the mêlée, and the husband flees. When the men approach
the wife in search of him, she scares them off with a rifle—a strong scene by Grace, who liked playing such a different woman. “She seemed much more at home with a firearm than Amy Fowler did!” Grace recalled. “I had fun with ‘The Kill.’” In her role as a frontier heroine, Grace became a kind of Minnie (in Belasco’s play and Puccini’s opera
The Girl of the Golden West)
, and her portrait of an anxious wife, attempting to keep men at bay with a heavy rifle, is both moving and suspenseful.

M
EANWHILE, EXECUTIVES
at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were arguing over the casting of a film they wanted to rush before the cameras that autumn—in Africa.
King Solomon’s Mines
(1950), produced by Sam Zimbalist, had been successful for Metro, as
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
(1952) had been for Fox; both pictures were among the kinds of colorful adventure stories that were being created to lure people away from their television sets.

Zimbalist had approached Dore Schary, who had recently replaced Louis B. Mayer as head of Metro, with the idea of remaking a film the studio had made in 1932 called
Red Dust
, which had starred Clark Gable. Although set in Southeast Asia, it had been made entirely at the studio in Culver City. At first Schary waved off Zimbalist’s suggestion. But fifty-one-year-old Gable, after a number of indifferent movies indifferently received, was nevertheless still vigorous, still popular—and available. So was Ava Gardner, one of Metro’s bankable leading ladies who (apart from her dark sultriness) had the kind of image once projected by Jean Harlow, the blond star of
Red Dust.
Zimbalist pushed his case: for a remake of the original, the studio needed only a third actress—one with evident elegance and covert passion, like Mary Astor in the original. To clinch his argument, the producer told Schary that the director
John Ford was interested: he already had three Oscars and was soon to win a fourth.

They sought among their contract players for the right actress to play opposite Gable. Deborah Kerr had been appealing in
King Solomon’s Mines
, but Ford growled his displeasure at that idea. Zimbalist judged that Metro’s Greer Garson was too affected—and so the ideas rose and sank. Ben Thau, a vice president at Metro, then suggested that they look for someone new. They sat for days looking at tests made by aspiring actresses and at reels submitted by agents’ models. No one impressed them.

In 1952 it was common for studios to exchange screen tests made by actors they subsequently rejected. At Metro they sifted through tests sent over by Columbia, RKO and Warner Bros. Then, one day in October, they saw a test made for a Fox film called
Taxi
, with an unknown girl who had an ordinary appearance and an unconvincing Irish accent. Sighs of disappointment came from the Metro executives as they prepared to order up the next test from the archives—until John Ford interrupted. “This dame has breeding, quality and class,” he said. “I want to make a color test of her—I’ll bet she’ll knock us on our ass!”

Next day, Jay Kanter rang Grace in New York with the news that Metro wanted to test her for a major role. She was lukewarm to the idea until she heard two words: “Africa” and “Gable.” Departing early the following morning, she was, by nightfall, enjoying a moonlight swim in the pool at the Bel-Air Hotel, Los Angeles.

1*
Further details about
Alexander
seem to have vanished into oblivion.

2*
On June 5, 1951, Grace also appeared in “Lover’s Leap,” a half-hour drama broadcast on
Armstrong Circle Theatre.

3*
Kramer always maintained that he alone interviewed Grace in Manhattan, “backstage, after her appearance in an Off-Broadway show, where I signed her up on the spot.” But she never appeared in an Off-Broadway show; furthermore, his account is contradicted by the written production history and by my interviews with Grace and Zinnemann. Kramer’s memory of production histories was always interesting, but his facts could be wildly inaccurate.

4*
In a rehearsal for the scene following the marriage of Amy and Will, Zinnemann asked Grace to sit on Cooper’s lap; both were out of costume and wearing their own casual clothes. They all agreed that this gesture was inappropriate for the shot, and the scene was filmed otherwise. But a stills photographer captured the moment, and soon some news editors decided that the two stars were more than colleagues.

5*
Issues of conscience often dictated Zinnemann’s choice of subject matter, perhaps most memorably in his films of
The Nun’s Story, A Man for All Seasons
and
Julia.

6*
In addition to the four programs for which commentary is provided here, Grace was seen on TV during 1952 as Dulcinea to Boris Karloff’s Don Quixote. She was also in “Prelude to Death,” with Carmen Mathews; in “Life, Liberty and Orrin Dudley,” with Jackie Cooper; in “The Borgia Lamp,” with Hugh Griffith and Robert Sterling; in “Candles for Theresa,” “The Small House,” and “The Cricket on the Hearth.” She assumed the role of a dance-hall girl threatened by a serial killer in “Fifty Beautiful Girls,” and was seen with Shepperd Strudwick in “City Editor.” Grace was also in a new production of “Leaf Out of a Book,” originally presented on the
Goodyear Television Playhouse
in 1950, and she appeared in “A Message for Janice,” again with Jackie Cooper.