High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (14 page)

On November 8 the company welcomed the fourth major player in the movie when Ava Gardner breezed in lustily with her husband, Frank Sinatra. As usual throughout their marriage, this couple argued constantly when they were not making loud intimate merriment; alternately, they drank excessively, shouted and threw things at each other whenever they had a few spare moments—until Frank left Africa to take a role in Zinnemann’s
From Here to Eternity
, which jump-started his stalled movie career.

On November 12, the cast and director drank champagne and toasted Grace’s twenty-third birthday, repeating the festivities on Ava’s birthday, Christmas Eve. “After that,” Ava recalled, “no matter where in the world I was, every year a birthday present arrived from Grace. She never forgot, and she sent a handwritten card—it wasn’t left for a secretary to do. She was a great lady, and also great fun.” But unlike others in the cast, Grace did not drink much. “Her little nose would get pink, she’d get sick, and we’d have to rescue her.” Different
though they were, the two American actresses became fast and lifelong friends. Ava attended Grace’s wedding, and she often visited the palace in Monaco. She admired Grace’s relaxed elegance, and Grace appreciated Ava’s lack of inhibitions and the candid displays of emotions that Grace usually kept in check.

During the first week of production, which began on November 17, scenes were shot at an animal preserve. Jungle sequences were then filmed in Tanganyika, where Metro built a village with elaborate tents for the cast and crew, as well as kitchens and offices.

Every contingency was foreseen. The production company comprised hundreds—the usual array of technicians along with pilots, translators, native guides and guards, cooks, servants, a physician and nurses. But life was not luxurious. Water had to be boiled; foods were limited to what could be shipped from London or inspected by company monitors; and baths were limited, even in torrid and humid weather. Constant vigilance had to be maintained, for danger lurked everywhere: one location—on the banks of the Kagera River—was very near the habitat of scores of crocodiles not well inclined to a human invasion. Despite all the precautions, several crew members died in auto accidents or from tropical diseases, and scores contracted intestinal parasites or pathogens difficult to treat. Wherever the company of
Mogambo
went, an infirmary was established, and it was always occupied by employees ill with infections from insects, reptiles, tainted water and a variety of jungle maladies. By monitoring what she ate and drank, and where she went, Grace sailed through the production with nothing more serious than a heavy cold.

On his side, John Ford was a gifted director but an infuriating bully. Donald Sinden recalled the “appalling treatment” Ford meted out to various crew members—something often seen by such as Henry Fonda, who appeared in no fewer than
nine Ford pictures. “He had by instinct a beautiful eye for the camera,” Fonda said of the director. “But he was also an egomaniac. He never rehearsed and didn’t want to talk about a part. If an actor asked questions about dialogue, he responded with insults or tore the pages out of the script”—thus reducing the actor’s role. Ava Gardner described Ford as “the meanest man on earth—thoroughly evil.” But she respected him.

Gable was silent about his dealings with Ford, but their relationship was no more than civil. At the time, the actor suffered from a tremor—a benign condition that caused his left hand to tremble occasionally, but this was not a symptom of either nervous tension or anything serious. Ford, who hated retakes of a shot and always felt that what was real could be captured the first time, lost his patience over the necessity to reshoot several of Gable’s scenes. But he gave in to the star’s male vanity. As Donald Sinden recalled, “Clark, whose chest was completely devoid of hair, insisted that no other actor should appear on film [in
Mogambo]
exposing a hirsute breast.” And so, once a week, a makeup man came to Sinden with electric clippers.

As for Grace, she, too, felt the director’s wrath. “I was awfully anxious about this part,” she said. “I knew how much was on the line after
High Noon
, and I desperately wanted to do well—especially since Jack Ford had liked my test and apparently saw something in me that no one else had before him. Well, one day during filming, he shouted at me, ‘Kelly—what the hell are you doing over there?’

“I replied, ‘In the script, it says that Linda walks over here—then turns around and—’

“And he shouted back, ‘Well, Kelly, we are shooting a
movie—
not a
script
!’

“You see, he shot a picture in such a way that the editor had very little—almost nothing—to work with. He very rarely
shot close-ups, and then he did so only when something was very dramatic and important. Many directors filmed long shots, medium shots, close-ups and so forth. John Ford preferred to do one long shot; he moved in for a medium shot, did the rest of the scene in two or three takes maximum, and that was all. No one ever did more than four takes with John Ford! In my case, he knew how he wanted to photograph me, and to hell with the script.

“But no one ever told me about this in advance—I had to hear it from the assistant director. If Ford had said something at the outset, I would not have had to figure out where I was going to stand and why, and all the rest. But he really gave me no direction, no hint.”

B
ASING
M
OGAMBO
on his original screenplay for
Red Dust
, writer John Lee Mahin changed the names of all the earlier characters and transposed the action from Southeast Asia to Africa. Victor Marswell (Gable) is a safari guide in Africa. Into his wild but uncomplicated world come two women—the uninhibited, worldly-wise, single but experienced Eloise “Honey-bear” Kelly (Ava Gardner), who immediately has a passionate week with Victor; soon after, anthropologist Donald Nordley (Donald Sinden) and his very prim wife Linda (Grace) arrive.
Mogambo
then becomes the story of a romantic triangle. In true Hollywood fashion, the jungle is the setting for the release of wild passions, and Linda finds Victor seductive in ways her scholarly husband is not. But the blond Grace and the brunette Ava are not the two Isoldes. Because the film was made in 1953, the conclusion is achingly proper: the Nordleys rediscover true love, and Victor realizes that “Honeybear”—always called “Kelly” in the film—is the right gal for him.

Grace’s experience of working with John Ford repeated the
situation that had prevailed with Zinnemann, who had neither the time nor the desire to provide Grace with any direction, much less to discuss her character in the story. Ford was not interested in conversation or in entertaining any questions except with his technicians—and he was far less courteous than Zinnemann. At their first meeting, Grace mentioned to Ford that she was the second Kelly to be working for him—that her uncle Walter had appeared in Ford’s film
Seas Beneath
, made in 1930. “Yeah?” Ford grunted, and chomped his cigar.

Sinden remembered an incident that perfectly represents Ford’s directorial method that winter. Sinden and Grace were to make their entrance into the story from a river steamer. Without rehearsal or instructions, the actors were sent aboard and the boat moved toward shore. Suddenly they heard Ford’s voice over a loudspeaker: “Grace—Donald—get below deck. OK. Donald—come on deck. Look around at the scenery. Call Grace. Put your arm around her. Point out a giraffe over on your right. Get your camera out—quickly. Photograph it—the giraffe. Smile at him, Grace. Grace—look at that hippopotamus on your left. Get Donald to photograph it. A crocodile slides into the water. You’re scared, Grace—you’re scared! OK. You’re coming onto the pier. Look around. What’s in store for you? Natives run down to meet you. OK! OK! Cut! Print it!”

And that, Sinden said, was their first day of being directed by John Ford—exactly as if he were still directing silent films.

Gable conveyed real poignancy in the role of the aging macho hero, a character frightened not of wild animals but of loneliness, a man who has to reconsider his lifetime of bachelorhood when he falls in love with two very different women. Ava Gardner contributed an exquisitely calibrated performance in the picture, in the smartly written role originally played by Jean Harlow. With Gardner’s smoky baritone voice, her balance of sarcasm with tenderness, her flawless timing and
subtle expressions, she created a memorable character who transcended every cliché normally associated with a woman of easy virtue whose generous spirit finally earns her true love—in this case, Clark Gable.

During her acting career, Gardner was usually regarded as a sexy dame and not much more; indeed, she represented precisely the opposite of what Grace, all too briefly, epitomized on the screen. Sadly, Gardner believed the conventional, shallow assessment of her talent and never thought much of her achievements. But she was a fine actress, and toward the end of her career, even the critics had to take note of her exquisite performance in John Huston’s 1964 film of Tennessee Williams’s play
The Night of the Iguana.

As screenwriter Mahin admitted, Grace’s role was disappointingly two-dimensional, and
Mogambo
offers the audience no reason to empathize with Linda Nordley. As the wealthy, beautiful wife of a wealthy, handsome husband with the time and money to indulge his academic interests, Grace portrays a woman who allows herself the luxury of a reckless dalliance, oblivious to and careless of her husband’s feelings. She did her best to temper Linda’s cardboard primness with a fear of the jungle and anxiety over an illicit passion, but she could not supply sufficient dialogue (nor could she demand close-ups) to win the audience’s sympathy. The critical consensus was that “Grace Kelly’s blond beauty remains intact, despite the remarkably silly lines she is made to say,” such as (Grace to Gable, in the jungle): “I didn’t know monkeys could climb trees!”

“I really wasn’t very good in
Mogambo
,” she said years later, “because I was so new in the business and I needed to learn so much.” But she was perhaps judging the character, not her performance; she did what was required, and she could not exploit what was not provided. Depending on which sources
are consulted,
mogambo
is the Swahili word for
passion
or for
danger.
Linda Nordley demonstrates little of the former, and the latter is provided in only one scene, involving a giant python that turns out to be implausibly friendly.

In fact,
Mogambo
is as tedious as the dreadfully polite Nordleys; it has none of the rapid, wisecracking humor and tight narrative line of
Red Dust.
An incessantly talky yarn set in an exotic wilderness, with a few animal roars thrown in,
Mogambo
is the sort of movie that could only have been saved by cutting about forty minutes and re-editing the rest. John Ford, ill and losing his sight, was a “tyrant” from day one (as producer Zimbalist said), interested only in the lush tropical scenery and the wild beasts, and the cast had to cope with a legion of logistical problems.

But audiences loved it, and the picture grossed a healthy $5 million on its first release. The Academy justly nominated Ava Gardner as best actress of 1953, and, for reasons that defy comprehension, Grace Kelly as best supporting actress; in that category she won a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. But when they mentioned her at all, the critics were not passionate: “Grace Kelly is all right,” sniffed the
New York Times.
Clark Gable perhaps fared best of all:
Mogambo
revived his career, and he remained in demand until his death at the age of fifty-nine, in 1961.

Grace and her colleagues were glad when the African sojourn was ending, for they were exhausted. “Ava and I are now great friends,” Grace wrote from Africa to Prudy. “The times we have been through! Frank [Sinatra] left Friday, so maybe things will be easier. It’s been a strain on all of us. The old man [Grace’s nickname for John Ford] is very anxious to leave Africa, and everyone is terribly nervy and on edge. I think the picture is going to be awfully good, but right now not many people give a damn.”

I
N
F
EBRUARY
1953, the production company moved from Africa to England, where interior scenes were photographed at Metro’s Borehamwood Studios, Hertfordshire. Immediately, Clark Gable turned a chilly shoulder to Grace, refusing to date or dine with her, or even to speak more than a few words except about work—a sudden, severe shift in behavior that left her baffled and hurt. At the time, rumors of a romance were trumpeted in the press—stories perhaps planted by Metro, for publicity purposes. Some biographers, therefore, have jumped to the conclusion that Gable rejected Grace’s proposal of marriage or her insistence on continuing the affair in London (and later, in Hollywood). But the truth was more prosaic: he did not want to jeopardize the decree absolute of his divorce (scheduled for April in an English court) by providing grounds for a charge of improper conduct. For all that, Grace was disheartened at the way he ignored her, and she was, for once, glad for a visit from her mother, who was eager to meet the King of Hollywood.