High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (18 page)

The opening credits appear over a bamboo shade, which slowly rises to reveal the array of apartments in the building opposite Jeff’s—the largest specially built indoor set in movie history, for which Hitch furnished and lighted no fewer than thirty-eight individual apartments. He also had studio researchers do their homework: according to the script, Thorwald’s apartment is said to be at “125 West Ninth Street.” But
West Ninth Street ends farther east, at Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue); thereafter, West Ninth is called Christopher Street. For legal reasons, moviemakers do not use authentic addresses—hence Paramount used 125 Christopher Street as a geographic basis but had to rename it 125 West Ninth, which does not exist as a postal address.

In fact, 125 Christopher Street, on the northeast corner of Hudson Street, was the model for the design of the movie’s apartment complex. A courtyard separates it from Jeff’s residence, on West Tenth. This explains why, when the police are summoned in the movie, they arrive after just a few seconds: Manhattan’s Sixth Precinct is just across from Jeff’s flat, also on West Tenth. It also explains the plot point about the short distance to the Hotel Albert, then at Tenth Street and University Place.

The first third of the picture explores Jeff’s dissatisfaction with his girlfriend Lisa—a woman whose life he sees as completely incompatible with his own. He travels to dangerous locations around the world for his work as a freelance photographer; she is a glamorous Manhattanite, her world that of high fashion, top-end stores, the theatre and all the trappings of urban sophistication. If Jeff may be regarded as a surrogate for Hitchcock, Lisa is certainly a kind of stand-in for Grace herself. Indeed, the script specifies that Lisa resides on East 63rd Street—the site of the Barbizon Plaza Hotel for Women.

Far from establishing the murder as its central concern,
Rear Window
focuses on other issues—specifically, whether Jeff will take Lisa more seriously than as an occasional girlfriend, and whether he will trust her desire, as she says, “to be part of your life.” The focus of this movie is on the romantic efforts of Lisa, who tries and tries again to get through to a man she loves. Jeff remains a cool, independent, detached observer of life, while Lisa is involved in it and places herself at risk to help in trapping
Thorwald. Throughout the picture, what the audience
feels
depends entirely on the performance of a
secondary character:
Lisa. When
Rear Window
was released, Grace was still not given before-the-title credit, but there was no doubt where the emotional focus was—and no doubt about Grace’s extraordinarily poignant, funny, stylish yet deeply human portrait.

C
HAIR-BOUND
J
EFF
gazes at a series of rectangles (the neighbors’ windows) and sees people, turns them into characters, gives them names (“Miss Lonelyhearts” and “Miss Torso,” for example), and makes up stories about them. Finally he sends a blonde into danger. He is, in other words, just like the director, Alfred Hitchcock—who, as usual, worked closely with his screenwriter.

At the same time, each of the neighbors offers a possibility for Jeff’s future. In the opening sequence, Jeff speaks with his editor on the telephone: “Can’t you just see me, coming home from work to a nagging wife?” As he says this, he gazes across at Thorwald, arriving home from work to a nagging blond wife (who, in long shot, bears a disturbing resemblance to Grace). Each of the female neighbors he subsequently sees becomes a variation on what Lisa could become. She might turn into the blond wife of a befuddled, balding husband who lavishes all her affection on their small dog. She could become a shapely blond dancer entertaining a small platoon of men but faithfully awaiting the return of her true love from the army. She might mature into a middle-aged sculptress with obviously dyed hair, working on an abstraction called
Hunger.
Alternatively, perhaps more tantalizingly, she could be the sexually insatiable young bride who has just moved in nearby. But most clearly linked to Lisa is the pathetic “Miss Lonelyhearts.”

The role of this desperately lonely spinster was assumed by
Judith Evelyn, among the most intense actresses of her day and a specialist in neurotics and destructive characters. She had first met Grace in 1947, through George Kelly, when Evelyn played the title role in the Broadway revival of
Craig’s Wife.
Their reunion now was a reason to celebrate, which they did by sharing a split of champagne in Grace’s dressing room one afternoon.

There seems to be no hope for Jeff in his relationship with Lisa precisely because he prefers to watch her: he likes her to model clothes for him, but he is patently afraid of going further (as Stewart is similarly afraid to do in
Vertigo).
In this regard, the movie’s signature tune has enormous significance. Bing Crosby croons “To See You Is to Love You” (from the Paramount picture
The Road to Bali).
These words are literally true for Jeff, who is satisfied with merely gazing at an image—“To see you is to love you, and you’re never out of sight, and I love you and I’ll see you in the same old dream tonight.” Indeed, there seems to be no hope for Jeff, who uses his physical disability as an excuse to avoid any kind of intimacy unless initiated by Lisa—and then he talks his way out of it. Early on, he complains to Stella that Lisa is the kind of girl who loves things like a new dress or a lobster dinner—and moments later she arrives with a new dress and a lobster dinner. However, even the realization of this little bit of imagination is too much for him, and at the end of the evening he rejects her cruelly and precipitates her abrupt departure from his apartment.

When Lisa gamely climbs the fire ladder into Thorwald’s apartment, she finds the wife’s wedding ring and slips it on her finger, proudly displaying it to Jeff as he watches across the courtyard. But this gesture gives her away to Thorwald, who glances from her finger to Jeff watching him (and to us). At this moment Hitchcock closes the circle of his intention: Lisa has used the adventure as a way of showing Jeff how brave and resourceful
she could be as his wife—thus she points to the wedding ring on her finger.

“R
EAR
W
INDOW
,”
Hitchcock said years later, “was structurally satisfactory because it is the epitome of the subjective treatment. A man looks, he sees, he reacts—thus you construct a mental process.
Rear Window
is entirely about a mental process, done by use of the visual.” Regarding Grace, Hitchcock added, “Everybody wants a new leading lady, but there aren’t many of them around. There are a lot of leading
women
, but not enough leading
ladies.
An actress like Grace, who’s also a lady, gives a director certain advantages. He can afford to be more colorful with a love scene played by a lady than with one played by a ‘hussy.’ With a hussy, such a scene can be vulgar, but if you put a lady in the same circumstances, she’s exciting and glamorous.”

Everyone working on
Rear Window
could see Hitch’s fascination for Grace. “Of course he fell in love with her,” assistant director Herbert Coleman said in 1981. “But who didn’t? Nothing happened, nothing came of this fantasy romance—he often had to fall in love with his leading ladies.” The fantasy romance was a pattern that had begun with Madeleine Carroll in 1935, was repeated with Ingrid Bergman from 1944 through 1948, and would recur later, with disastrous consequences. Hitch had a preference for blondes: they photographed better against dark backgrounds, and he viewed their apparent icy remoteness to be like snow on top of a volcano. Hence, Hitchcock regarded Grace’s sophisticated beauty as hiding an inner passion, blended with her obvious wit. She became his latest obsession—his last had been with Ingrid Bergman, who had left America five years earlier. Now, with Grace, he imagined that he would never need any other actress in his future films; this was one of the most futile prospects he ever entertained.

Grace’s first appearance in
Rear Window
has the distinctive look and feeling of a dream. With the camera holding to the face of the sleeping James Stewart, we hear the sound of someone entering Jeff’s apartment. Then we see Grace, approaching the camera slowly, as if to embrace the lens (and thus the viewer). Cut to the profiles of the two heads, as Grace bends over to kiss Stewart. Hitchcock said he shook the camera for the final shimmering effect of this shot, but the fact is that he double-printed several frames of film, to give a more dreamlike, romantic feeling to the scene.

Holding to the two profiles, Hitch told Grace to whisper her first words to Stewart:

LISA. How’s your leg?

JEFF. Hurts a little.

LISA. And your stomach?

JEFF. Empty as a football.

LISA. And your love life?

JEFF. Not too active.

LISA. Anything else bothering you?

JEFF. Yes—who are you?

She moves away with a smile and turns on three lamps as she answers, “Reading from top to bottom: Lisa—Carol—Fremont.”

Hitch worked with John Michael Hayes on a later scene that perhaps no other director could then create, remarkable in its erotic frankness and yet completely inoffensive. Kisses had time limits in Hollywood films, but Hitchcock finessed that requirement here, just as he had with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in
Notorious:
he interrupted the kissing—but not the embrace—with whispers and small talk, turning up the heat while moving his plot forward. Lisa returns to Jeff
after a clash of wills over their future together. The scene, loaded with innuendo and sexy double entendres, opens with a close-up of them in a tight clinch in his wheelchair, as she sprawls over his lap:

L
ISA
. How far does a girl have to go before you notice her?

J
EFF
. Well, if she’s pretty enough, she doesn’t have to go anywhere. She just has to be.

L
ISA
. Well, I am—pay attention to me.

(More kisses.)

J
EFF
. I’m not exactly on the other side of the room.

L
ISA
. Your mind is. When I want a man, I want all of you.

J
EFF
. Don’t you ever have any problems?

L
ISA
. I have one now.

J
EFF
. So do I.

(More nibbling on lips and ears.)

L
ISA
. Tell me about it.

J
EFF
. Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?

L
ISA
. He likes the way his wife welcomes him home.

(More kisses by the passionate L
ISA
.)

J
EFF
. No, not this salesman’s wife. Why didn’t he go to work today?

L
ISA
. Homework—it’s more interesting.

J
EFF
. What’s interesting about a butcher knife and a small saw wrapped in newspaper?

L
ISA
. Nothing, thank heaven.

(Closer embracing, more kisses.)

J
EFF
. Why hasn’t he been in his wife’s bedroom all day?

L
ISA
. I wouldn’t dare answer that.

J
EFF
. Well, listen—I’ll answer it. L
ISA
, there’s something terribly wrong.

L
ISA
(as she rises from his embrace).
And with me, I’m afraid.

J
EFF
. What do you think?

L
ISA
. Something too frightful to utter.

Speaking in whispered, passionate murmurs, Grace created an authentic portrait of a woman aroused by the mere proximity of her lover, frustrated by his physical incapacity and anxious about his preoccupation with the possibility of a local murder. As Hitchcock intended, this was a side of Grace Kelly that had never before been seen. “I didn’t discover Grace,” he said, “but I saved her from a fate worse than death. I prevented her from being eternally cast as a cold woman.”

The stated consensus about her slowly improved, although audiences were far more enthusiastic than media critics. She was “fascinating,” according to the
New York Times
, whose reviewer gauged the picture as “insignificant, superficial and glib, [and] the purpose of it is sensation.” But a year later, both the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle honored Grace as best actress of the year 1954 for her performances in a trio of pictures released that year
—Dial “M” for Murder, Rear Window
and
The Country Girl.
BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, climbed aboard the Kelly bandwagon, too, nominating her as best actress for
Dial “M”
and
The Country Girl.

When
Rear Window
wrapped on January 13, 1954,
^9*
Hitchcock told Grace she would soon be working for him again; he did not inquire about her plans, or Metro’s. He had decided that she would soon be back in the Hitchcock fold, and that was that.