High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (15 page)

The leading players were lodged at the Savoy Hotel, London. One day, in the foyer, Grace was greeted by Morgan Hudgins, the studio’s unit publicist on the picture, who had been with the production from the start. Hudgins was having a drink with a tall, courtly gentleman, forty-year-old Rupert Allan. Born in St. Louis and educated at Oxford, Rupert was at the time working for
Look
magazine and had been assigned to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June. He later worked with the publicist Arthur P. Jacobs and compiled an impressive client list of his own. Very quickly, Grace and Rupert became friends, and he was often her escort in London, Hollywood and New York. He also became her personal publicist and, as princess, she asked him to be Monaco’s consul general in Los Angeles.

That Rupert was gay was a matter of profound indifference to Grace, who loved him like a brother, and for the rest of her life he was her close confidant. In Beverly Hills, Grace often visited Rupert at his home on Seabright Place, where he lived with the love of his life, Frank McCarthy. A World War II hero and a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army, McCarthy eventually produced the Oscar-winning
Patton.
Whenever anyone uttered a word against gay men or women, Grace was outspoken. “You shouldn’t criticize people who are homosexual,” she told her friend Prudy Wise. “It can be very destructive, and it is so easy to become mean without realizing it.”

M
OGAMBO FINALLY
wrapped production in March 1953 and was listed for release in October. Back in America, Grace visited her family in Philadelphia before returning to Manhattan. “You know, the girl must have had a lot of fascinating experiences,” her father told a reporter, “but she just won’t talk!”

But there was neither theatrical nor movie work on offer. “She was pretty much in the same place she had been after the unsuccessful test for
Taxi
,” recalled Dore Schary, “and although she was available for other roles, none appeared.”

The fact is that Metro, Schary and company simply did not know what to do with her at the studio. They were producing costume dramas such as
The Prisoner of Zenda, Plymouth Adventure, Young Bess
and
Beau Brummell—
and none of these had roles they considered right for her. After several conferences that spring, her bosses quietly let it be known around town that Grace was available for loan-out to other studios, as her contract permitted. This would raise money for Metro, which would charge a hefty fee for Grace’s services elsewhere and, in turn, pay her only the fee her contract stipulated. The
loan-out, an old Hollywood tradition, was an easy moneymaking proposition for studios. Still, nothing happened until very late that spring of 1953.

But Grace kept busy. Jay Kanter invited her to his wedding on April 15, in New York. His bride was Judith Balaban (later Quine), daughter of the president of Paramount Pictures. Grace and the Kanters became close friends, and three years later, Judy was one of her bridesmaids. A few days after the Kanters’ wedding, Grace had a less pleasant appointment: the funeral of her first love, Harper Davis, who had succumbed to multiple sclerosis at the age of twenty-six.

In May and June, Grace appeared in three live TV dramas: “The Betrayer,” with Robert Preston; “Boy of Mine,” with Henry Jones; and “The Way of the Eagle,” in which she and Jean-Pierre Aumont costarred as Mr. and Mrs. John James Audubon. Then forty-two, Aumont had been widowed since the death of his wife, the actress Maria Montez, in 1951. As a popular, handsome actor much in demand both in his native France and in America, he was also a prime target of aspiring brides on both continents. Aumont found twenty-three-year-old Grace far more interesting and mature than many women he met, and he asked her to be his guest for lunch on the day after the broadcast of “The Way of the Eagle,” scheduled for June 7.

Although she found Jean-Pierre enormously attractive and sophisticated and very much liked his Gallic charm and wit, Grace declined the invitation. Some of the gossips believed that an affair between Grace and Jean-Pierre began at once—a canard that, alas, has taken on the authority of fact. Others claimed that, no, Grace turned him down because she was awaiting a resumption of
l’affaire Gable.
Once again they were all wide of the mark. The fact is that Grace could not accept
Aumont’s offer of a lunch date because Jay Kanter had telephoned her during TV rehearsals for “The Way of the Eagle.” She was to leave for Los Angeles on June 8. An appointment had been made for her to meet Alfred Hitchcock, who was looking for a new leading lady.

^*
Among the memorable MGM musicals:
Annie Get Your Gun, The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, Easter Parade, The Harvey Girls, Love Me or Leave Me, Meet Me in St. Louis, On the Town, Royal Wedding, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Show Boat, Singin’ in the Rain
and
The Wizard of Oz.

†
Victor Fleming’s Oscar for directing
Gone With the Wind
(1939) was awarded for a David O. Selznick production released by MGM, and William Wyler was an independent director when he won for MGM’s
Mrs. Miniver
(1942).

FIVE

Over the
M
oon

The best way to do it is with scissors.

      —ALFRED HITCHCOCK

T
HE TEST
I
MADE FOR THE ROLE OF THE
I
RISH GIRL IN
Taxi
—a part I didn’t get—turned out to be very important in my career,” Grace recalled. “John Ford saw that test and cast me in
Mogambo
, and then Hitchcock saw the same test and wanted to see if I would be right for his next picture. I was very nervous and self-conscious at my first meeting with him [in June 1953], but he was very dear and put me at my ease. We talked about travel, food and wine, music, fashions—everything, it seemed, except the character of Margot Wendice in the movie.”
^1*

Grace’s initial anxiety was reasonable. Alfred Hitchcock, who marked his fifty-fourth birthday that summer, was unquestionably one of the world’s most popular and successful
filmmakers; later he would justly be hailed as one of the cinema’s artists, a man whose movies were frequently profound as well as enormously entertaining. From his earliest days in England, he was also his own best publicist, and he made certain that his name and presence were known and remembered—hence the cameo appearances in his movies, among other publicity stunts over a half-century. “Actors come and go,” Hitchcock said repeatedly in the 1920s, “but the name of the director should stay clearly in the mind of the audiences.” Until the 1960s, the average moviegoer in England and America could name only three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock.

As a great visual storyteller, Hitchcock had a vivid fantasy life, as his writers, designers, crew and actors attested. He frequently shared fabulous ideas for movies he made and never made, and told the bawdiest jokes about sex and the most horrific tales about murder—simply to monitor his listeners’ reactions. As a mastermind of the movies, Hitchcock deserved all the respect he commanded and which was invariably rendered; but he was also a lonely, complex man, “frightened of everything,” as he said. Gregory Peck, who starred in two of the director’s movies, said that “something was ailing Hitchcock—throughout his entire life, I think.” That “something” had at least partially to do with deeply repressed desires and emotions and a feeling that he was doomed to isolation and romantic abnegation.
^2*
Those elements are the common currency of his most deeply felt films.

Hitchcock was born in the East End of London and felt himself to be a marginal person from the beginning. As a Catholic and a Cockney, he did not hail from polite, acceptable society; and although his father was a prosperous greengrocer and fishmonger, that occupation meant Joseph Hitchcock was “in trade” and therefore not a gentleman. In addition, young Alfred was creative, clever, and gifted with a prodigious memory; he was also restricted by a lifelong tendency to morbid obesity. “Hitch” (as he called himself) had mastered the art of film as a storyteller, designer and assistant director before he was permitted to direct his first silent picture, in 1925; from then to 1953, he directed more than three dozen movies that made him both celebrated and wealthy.

After leaving England in 1939, he directed, during his first dozen years in America, some of the finest movies ever to come from the old Hollywood studio system—among them
Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious
and
Strangers on a Train.
He then continued to produce and direct movie masterworks until a few years before his death in 1980. That June morning in Burbank, Hitchcock told Grace that he had a multi-picture deal with Warners, and after rummaging for a year in search of the right subject or property for his next movie, at last he had found one he could make in fulfillment of his contractual obligation.

Dial “M” for Murder
, by the English writer Frederick Knott, had originated as a BBC television thriller early in 1952. On June 19 that year, it was staged as a full-length play in London, and on October 29 it opened on Broadway, where it was still selling tickets for every seat, every night. Even before the West End premiere, the Hungarian-British filmmaker Alexander Korda had snapped up worldwide film rights to the play for a modest £1,000. Hitchcock saw
Dial “M”
and believed that, in the absence of any obvious alternative, he could make a film of
it for the brothers Warner, who then had to come up with Korda’s asking price of £30,000. With its single set and few characters, it seemed an easy task to transfer the play to celluloid: Hitch was, as he later said, “running for cover.”

There was, however, a major condition in the sale of movie rights: any motion picture
of Dial “M”
could not be released as long as the play was running. (Indeed, it had 552 Broadway performances, from October 29, 1952, to February 27, 1954. The movie was finally released three months later.) In addition, for Hitchcock, there was another, more troublesome condition: Warners required him to make the movie in the three-dimensional format.

By 1953 there were 25 million TV sets in America. To entice audiences out of their living rooms and into theatres, Hollywood came up with a variety of gimmicks that television could not offer: the wide screens of Cinerama and Cinemascope, huge historic epics, flimsy costumes and sexual innuendo, stereophonic sound, and even a mercifully short-lived contraption called Smell-O-Vision. Flashiest of all were 3-D movies:
Bwana Devil
and
House of Wax
had already roped in audiences, and Warners wanted to continue the technique with
Dial “M”—
even though Hitchcock accurately predicted that 3-D was an unwieldy fad that would quickly die. The process did not interest him at all: “It was essentially anti-cinematic,” he told me during one of our many conversations. “3-D constantly reminded the audience that they were ‘out there’ and not drawn visually and emotionally into the story. Until I met Grace, I just wanted to get through with this thing as quickly and unceremoniously as I could. Then I realized that here was a girl I could really do something with, despite the problems of the 3-D camera.”

O
N
J
ULY
22, 1953, the Hollywood trade papers announced that Grace Kelly had been borrowed from MGM for the role of Margot Wendice in Alfred Hitchcock’s 3-D movie version of
Dial “M” for Murder
, scheduled to begin filming on July 30. Frederick Knott had written the scenario after making one or two minor cuts in his play, and Hitch was ready to go. “I was determined not to do the usual pranks with 3-D,” he said, “because I felt that it was a trick that was already on the wane. Therefore, I told Bob Burks [the cinematographer] that we would not have knives or fists flying out at the audience, and no one would fall from a great height into their laps. In other words, I made it as if it were a normal movie.”