High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (13 page)

FOUR

L
’
Affaire Gable

When I was younger, I was always falling in love.

      —GRACE KELLY GRIMALDI

D
URING THE EARLY DAYS OF THE MOVIE INDUSTRY—FOR
about twenty years, beginning in the early 1890s—very few actors were identified in the films that unspooled in penny arcades, nickelodeons and music halls. People worked anonymously in these “flicker” movies, which were considered a form of entertainment for the lower classes, on a par with carnival sideshows. Performers with stage experience feared they would lose future theatrical employment if it became known that they were in these mere fake pantomimes. In addition, the first film theatre owners were hesitant to promote the names of their employees, worried that they would demand higher salaries.

But things changed. The first name credited in a movie was that of Florence Lawrence, a stage actress since childhood who worked for Thomas Edison’s company from 1907 and later appeared in films under the direction of D. W. Griffith. Sarah Bernhardt and Geraldine Farrar were among many renowned actors and singers who were immortalized in silent films, and
by the time of the World War, movies became more respectable fare. Audiences gradually recognized their favorite performers from picture to picture and wanted to know more about them; soon producers began to see financial advantages in creating and promoting certain players, called “stars”—perhaps because they illuminated the darkness of movie theatres.

The era of the great studios coincided with the fame, fortune and power of these movie actors, who became essential in promoting the products. Directors, on the other hand, were mostly ignored, and for a long time, few of them had any real clout and all were regarded as secondary to a movie’s success. The conventional wisdom was that only the stars and producers turned films into hits, and so studio executives selected young hopefuls they liked and essentially created identities for them, even to the point of changing their names and insisting on certain patterns of conduct even in their private lives. Archibald Leach, an acrobat from England, became Cary Grant. A flapper-era dancer named Lucille Le Sueur became Joan Crawford. Spangler Brough was renamed Robert Taylor, and Roy Scherer was rechristened Rock Hudson. Thousands received new identities, and backgrounds were created for them that sounded more interesting, more exotic or more acceptable than the truth.

Thanks to powerful studio publicists and “talent handlers,” the public never knew that so-and-so might be socially objectionable according to the standards of the day. Under threat of dismissal or permanent demotion to minor, stereotyped roles, for example, lesbian and gay actors were usually forced to marry for the sake of their careers. Non-Caucasian actors were rarely cast as anything but servants, criminals or people of doubtful morality. Even on their own time, women could not appear in public without makeup and a fashionable outfit. Men had to be seen as unimpeachable gentlemen, and any studio player could be dismissed for failing to adhere to certain moral standards, often defined in
their contracts and even sometimes invented in a moment of whimsy by a movie mogul. Public appearances and provocative romantic rendezvous were arranged for the sake of image, and the press was duly alerted in advance; in this regard, the situation remains largely unchanged in the twenty-first century.

If a movie star was alcoholic, a drug abuser, unfaithful to a spouse or even found guilty of a crime—well, the studios could take care of that. They routinely paid for media silence, bribed the police and negotiated with newspapers and gossip columnists. In the so-called glory days of Hollywood, the studios thus essentially directed the lives of countless thousands. All this control was taken for granted as a part of American big business.

The year 1924 was perhaps a watershed in which merely profitable entertainment became a huge corporate industry. New York theatre owner Marcus Loew, who had already bought Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures, added Mayer Pictures to his list—with the aim of placing Louis B. Mayer as head of Los Angeles studio operations and Irving Thalberg as production chief. For decades afterward, the legal name of the holding company was Loews, Inc., while corporate power, as with all the Hollywood studios, was wielded by New York executives, with their proximity to Wall Street financiers. In the fullness of time, Mayer added his name to the studio’s—and so was born Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Thanks to Mayer’s creation of what his publicists called “more stars than there are in the heavens,” the studio boasted an impressive roster of popular players—among them Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Jeanette MacDonald, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Greta Garbo. Later, Metro placed under contract Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Ann Miller, Esther Williams, June Allyson and Elizabeth
Taylor. More than any other Hollywood studio, Metro was deeply involved in the personal lives of its contract players; for Mayer and his colleagues, that was simply a matter of protecting their investments.

From the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, Metro was the most successful studio in Hollywood: it never lost money during the Depression and released a feature film every week—along with animated cartoons and short subjects. Then the United States Supreme Court, ruling against corporate monopolies, ordered the studios to divest themselves of theatre chains, and Loews, Inc., had to yield control of Metro; thus began the studio’s decline, for they could not survive without guaranteed showcases.

In the early 1950s, with Dore Schary as Louis B. Mayer’s replacement, the studio continued to dominate the musical genre. This brought a new generation of talent, many of them young singers and dancers like Howard Keel, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse and Leslie Caron. From 1939 to 1955 the studio released six or seven musicals a year,
^*
and in 1951, the Oscar for best picture went to the musical
An American in Paris.
But by then Metro could not depend on its musicals alone to woo the shrinking audience away from television. Despite the need to remedy the situation, Schary (like Mayer) had no great regard for strong directors, and only once did a Metro contract director receive an Oscar for directing a Metro picture (Vincente Minnelli, for
Gigi
, in 1958).
†

B
Y THE AUTUMN
of 1952, when Grace was invited to test for a movie the studio hoped would be a blockbuster, the Culver City complex had grown from 40 to 187 acres. On them were six back lots, more than fifteen huge stages, a lake with a harbor, a jungle, a railway station and parks, squares and streets from different eras and in a variety of styles. However, this turned out to be intemperate expansion, because Metro’s glory days, as the most successful studio of the 1930s, were numbered. They had a shortage of great directors, and their glossy star vehicles were becoming old-fashioned and predictable—in 1953, for example,
Knights of the Round Table
followed
Ivanhoe.
“It was a lush and gaudy period,” as Dore Schary said. The studio was reluctant to use color for anything but musicals, costume dramas or period spectacles, and the number of productions was dropping each year: Metro was making less than a sixth of Hollywood’s output. “We had trouble finding roles for all of our contract players,” added Schary. In light of all this, but reluctantly joining the effort to do anything to attract audiences, Metro decided that, after the success of
King Solomon’s Mines
, they should produce another epic—the remake of
Red Dust
, updated to be called
Mogambo.

J
OHN
F
ORD
directed Grace’s color test, which pleased him, Schary and the executive board. A seven-year contract was drawn up for her and sent to Jay Kanter at MCA, where he and his superior, the formidable Lew Wasserman, tinkered with a few clauses. By late October it was ready for Grace’s signature. But when she read it, she hesitated and asked for some important alterations, which astonished everyone, for this was considered willful and autonomous behavior. Metro’s offer gave them the right to her services on three pictures a year for seven years,
during which time they could dismiss her after every six months and loan her out to other studios at their pleasure. Her salary was to begin at $750 a week, with escalation clauses to be negotiated in good faith depending on her success, and a $20,000 bonus if she completed three pictures in any year. She may have smiled at the salary, for she had made far more money as a model.

Grace wanted every other year off from movie work, so that she could return to the theatre, and she insisted on the right to retain her primary residence in New York. These concessions Metro granted—again, to Hollywood’s astonishment. It was immediately clear that Grace Kelly was not to be controlled easily.

“I signed with MGM,” she recalled in 1975, “because
Mogambo
offered the opportunity to work with John Ford and Clark Gable, and to make the picture in Africa. If the production had been scheduled in Arizona, I wouldn’t have signed the contract. But I did—at the departure desk of the airport, on my way out of the country.”

Filming took from autumn 1952 through late winter 1953, first in Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya, and then in London. On November 2, Grace arrived at the New Stanley Hotel, Nairobi. That evening at dinner, she met Gable and the British actor Donald Sinden, who was cast as her husband. “Grace proceeded to astonish Clark and me by ordering the entire meal for the three of us—in Swahili,” Sinden recalled. From the moment in Hollywood when she had learned the precise African location, Grace had taught herself the rudiments of the local dialect.
“Lete ndizi, tafadhali,”
she told an astounded native waiter at the end of the meal—“Please bring me a banana.”

In his fifties, Clark Gable—the self-styled “King of Hollywood”—had lost little of his renowned virile charm tempered by a kind of protective, paternal warmth. Far from the familiar comforts of home and friends, Grace formed an intense affection for Gable that lasted throughout their time in
Africa. But it is impossible to say unequivocally if theirs was a fully realized affair. A strong attraction is not invariably expressed sexually, no matter how randy the principals. At various times Gable and Grace were asked directly about rumors. Perhaps it was not surprising that each of them smiled and dismissed the topic, but nobody connected to the production ever asserted that there was a clandestine romance, and no one claimed to have held the lamp.

There was definitely a passionate friendship, however. Grace undertook to knit Clark a pair of socks for Christmas (which she never finished), and they spent much of their free time together. “Clark’s eyes were quite definitely on Gracie,” said Ava Gardner, “and hers, for that matter, were on him. They were both single at the time, and it’s very normal for any woman to be in love with Clark.” There was Grace, Ava added, “in Africa, with exotic flora and fauna all over the place—and Clark, strong and smiling and completely at home, made her love him more.”

Both Grace and Gable were long deceased when Ava made this statement, which is highly ambiguous: “in love” may (but does not necessarily) mean “in bed.” Ava was always bluntly straightforward about herself and others, and if there had indeed been an affair, one would have expected her to say so plainly.

“When I was younger, I was always falling in love with someone who gave more to me than I gave back,” Grace said years later. “I knew I was immature and incomplete as a person, that I was really taking and absorbing more than I was giving. I think that’s true of all young people. In the selfishness of youth, we need to feed our psyches and our souls by taking from others.”

But her relationship with Gable was not only about taking, for she had a great deal to offer him. In his way, Gable was as
lonely as Grace, and more than a little fretful. His career had been stymied in recent years by various ailments and the inevitable shifts in movie styles and movie-star popularity. He found the physical demands of
Mogambo
extremely challenging, and he was in the process of a divorce from his fourth wife (Lady Sylvia Ashley, the English model and socialite who had once been Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks). Romantic though Grace was, and smitten with her legendary costar, she was also sympathetic to his anxieties, and she made every effort to bolster his spirits during this difficult time in his life. As she wrote to her friend Prudy Wise, Grace and Clark dined together every night while working in Africa, which was not unusual for two single costars. In addition, Clark was of course enormously flattered to have the attention of a beautiful, playful and proficient young woman who clearly adored him.