High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (21 page)

Georgie could not have been more different from the roles Grace had played so far. The innocent, idealistic Amy Kane of
High Noon;
the genteel Linda Nordley
of Mogambo;
the wealthy, discreet Margot Wendice in
Dial “M” for Murder;
the sophisticated, stylish Lisa Fremont of
Rear Window;
and the anxious navy wife of
The Bridges at Toko-Ri:
these women did not bear the remotest resemblance to the wan, tired and impoverished Georgie. But this difference was precisely what attracted Grace to the role, and when Perlberg surreptitiously handed her the script (which by all rights he should have submitted to her through MCA), she knew this was the part that would both challenge and establish her as a serious dramatic actress.

The primary obstacle in her way was her Metro contract. Dore Schary had decided it was time to bring her back to Culver City, this time for another jungle adventure, to be filmed partly in South America. The project was
Green Fire
, and they had a script, a director, a leading man and a stalwart supporting player ready to go; Grace would be the glamorous complement, glamorizing a story of uncommon languor. The screenplay, riddled with clichés, had been doomed from the start. Metro’s contract star Eleanor Parker had simply walked out on it, and Robert Taylor said he would rather retire than act in such nonsense. Eager to get the film in production and to bring Grace back to the studio, Metro flatly turned down Perlberg-Seaton’s request to loan her to Paramount for
The Country Girl.

But Schary and company had not foreseen that at this stage of her career she was not prepared to behave like a compliant tool in corporate hands. “I asked my agents to give my New
York address to all the MGM executives, so they would know where they could send their Christmas cards. It took a moment for them to realize what I meant, and I
did
mean it—I was prepared to leave Hollywood forever if they denied me the chance to play in
The Country Girl.
And I was more than willing to tell the press
why
I was retiring.”

As Judith Quine recalled, Dore Schary and his colleagues were “rocked to the core. So was the rest of Hollywood as the story spread.” At that time, Grace’s challenge to a powerful studio was shocking: a young actress with only a few films to her name (and nothing released since
Mogambo
, the previous October) was now brazenly confronting—even threatening—a major company and, it seemed, jeopardizing her future. Indeed, careers were forever destroyed by what the moguls considered rank insubordination. If the studio suspended her, she would be out of work, and her period of inactivity would be tacked onto the term of her contract. But Grace could be neither intimidated nor bribed, and money made no impression on her. She had never been a starlet, had never worked in “B” pictures, had never posed in a bathing suit, had never liked any sort of publicity; she cherished her privacy and refused to go around Los Angeles dressed as if she were always on her way to a cocktail party. She wanted only good roles in good pictures, and in her mind
Rear Window
and Hitchcock had more than demonstrated her competency.

It’s easy to imagine corporate chairs being knocked over and multiple midday martinis being downed for false courage as Metro’s executives rushed to interoffice meetings and to their telephones, in order to prevent a major industry embarrassment. “This is blackmail!” bellowed one studio operative to Jay Kanter’s boss at MCA, Lew Wasserman. Well, of course it was—after all, this was Hollywood. Prudent heads prevailed in Culver City, and soon the studio was unwilling to play the
villain in a case against a beautiful actress who had two Hitchcock pictures soon to be released. And so, just as Grace was about to go through with her plan, to call Metro’s bluff and book an airline ticket to New York, things happened with a speed she may have anticipated. On January 29, a press release from Culver City announced that Metro had agreed to loan Grace Kelly to Paramount for their forthcoming production of
The Country Girl—
in exchange for a fee of $50,000 and the guarantee that Grace would appear in
Green Fire
immediately after the Perlberg-Seaton movie wrapped. Signatures were affixed to contracts on February 8.

“The men at MGM couldn’t have cared less about me until these other offers came in, first from Hitchcock and then from Perlberg and Seaton,” Grace recalled. “I always thought that if a studio had someone under contract—an actor who was wanted elsewhere for good roles—that the home studio would try to do something for that actor. I just never understood them. I remember that they called me, Clark and Ava into their offices when we returned from Africa after
Mogambo
, to show us some magazine layouts. Oh, they were raving about all the publicity they planned for the picture. I remember one gentleman saying, ‘It’s glamour in Africa!’ Clark had a few choice words about
that
statement. But then there was no work for me until Hitch got hold of my agent. Then MGM kept picking up my option every six months because they could make money by loaning me out—not because they had big plans for me, as they said season after season.”

When it came to
The Country Girl
, she was quite specific. “I felt I just
had
to do this picture, because it had a really strong part—it was my chance to be more than a supporting character for the leading man. I had always worn beautiful clothes, or beautiful gowns or lingerie, or there were dramatic and colorful
backgrounds. This was something completely different, and I worked very hard on it.”

Grace’s first love was always the theatre, and
Dial “M”
and
The Country Girl
had been successful Broadway plays, with very little changed in the transfer to the screen. The last two roles before her departure from Hollywood would also be in films based on plays
—The Swan
, by Ferenc Molnár; and
High Society
, a musical version of Philip Barry’s
The Philadelphia Story.

T
WO WEEKS
of rehearsal preceded the filming
of The Country Girl
, and when the cast gathered for the first reading, there was considerable tension. “The first week, we all didn’t pay much attention to one another,” Grace remembered. “In fact, we didn’t get along very well.” William Holden’s presence in the cast may have contributed to the atmosphere, but there was an even more delicate factor.

Bing Crosby, a hugely popular singer and actor during the 1940s, was then fifty, a perilous age in Hollywood for a crooner never associated with serious drama—not to say a role that ran against his public image. Perhaps because he longed for a change of pace, he had agreed to play Frank Elgin, a once-successful singer and stage actor who was now a pathetic drunkard, steeped in guilt, completely lacking self-confidence and entirely dependent on his wife after the accidental death of their son.

During the ten-hour rehearsal days, the three principals worked on dialogue, characterization, reactions and bits of business—where and how to include a glance, a vocal nuance or an expression that would convey a lot with a little. “Bing was so nervous about playing Frank Elgin,” Grace said. “All his previous roles had been variations on Bing himself—the affable pop
singer, the good guy, dear Father O’Malley in
Going My Way
[for which he had won an Oscar a decade earlier]. But now he was playing a boozer who has lost faith in himself. Some of us knew—but the public didn’t—that this was very close to Bing’s own life in the 1950s. He had once been at the top of the list, and he had a drinking problem that became worse after the death of his wife in 1952.

“I knew at the time—and it was no secret in Hollywood—that Bing had wanted Jennifer Jones as his leading lady, and he almost withdrew from the picture when he heard that I was going to play the part. ‘She’s too pretty,’ he told the producers about me. ‘She has no experience … she’s too glamorous for the part of Georgie … she won’t take direction.’ Endless objections! Those first days of rehearsal were pretty rough, but Mr. Perlberg and Mr. Seaton were my champions.” They did not have to defend Grace for long. Prep was concluded, the first scenes were filmed quickly and economically, and Crosby—to his credit—changed his tune. “I’ll never open my big mouth about a casting problem again,” he told the producers and the press. “I’m sorry I had any reservations about this girl—she’s great!”

Crosby’s praise for Grace became more personal over the next two months, when he tried to court her—but Grace politely discouraged his intentions. (Contrary to the later grindings of the rumor mill, nothing like a romance ever occurred, much to Bing’s disappointment.) “Grace called me up one night,” recalled Lizanne, “and she said, ‘Bing has asked me to marry him’—but she wasn’t in love with him at all. She admired and respected him, but she was not in love.” The gossips, however, fueled the chatter after Crosby invited Grace, her sister Peggy and a few of his friends to his birthday celebration at a nightclub after the picture was completed. Photographers caught the group at a table and then neatly excised everyone
from the picture except Bing and Grace. As Hitchcock famously said, the camera can make you believe anything.

During rehearsals, Edith Head and her staff rushed to finish Grace’s wardrobe for
The Country Girl.
“I was happy until I read the script,” Edith remembered. “She was to play a woman who has been married for ten years and has lost interest in clothes, herself—everything. The character had absolutely no resemblance to Grace.” But Edith did what was required, putting Grace in drab housedresses, an old cardigan sweater, and skirts and blouses that would look suitably dreary in a black-and-white movie. The final touch—Grace’s suggestion—was that she wear her glasses. This being Hollywood, however, Paramount insisted that George Seaton add two scenes not found in the play: a flashback in which Grace is dressed like a sophisticated fashion plate, and the finale, at a fancy Manhattan party, for which she appears in elegant finery. (She thought these two sequences were regrettable, and they were, although she acknowledged that the first sequence revealed how happy a person the younger Georgie was, once upon a time.)

Regarding her plain and dull outfits, director Seaton recalled, “A lot of actresses would say, ‘Well, why don’t we just put a few rhinestones here and some jewelry there. I want to look dowdy, but this woman has taste, after all,’ and before you know it, the actress would look like a million dollars. But not Grace. Grace wanted to be authentic.”

Crosby, on the other hand, had to be coaxed into authenticity.

On the first day of shooting, he was two hours late. Finally the head of the makeup department summoned Seaton, who arrived in Crosby’s dressing room to find him wearing a wavy, twenty-year-old hairpiece. “I’ve just decided that this is what I’m going to wear in the picture,” Crosby said defiantly. Seaton calmly replied that this was entirely inappropriate for the role,
but Crosby was adamant: “I’ve got my audience to think of—I don’t want to look like an old man on the screen!”

Seaton reminded him that he had to look the age and the character of dissipated Frank Elgin. “Bing, let’s be honest—you’re frightened,” the director said—“and Bing almost started to cry, saying, ‘I can’t do it!’”

“Please have faith in me,” continued Seaton. “I’m frightened, too—we’re all frightened—so let’s be frightened together.” Director and actor then walked onto the set, and soon there were no further problems. Bing Crosby gave an astonishing, deeply felt performance that had the critics ransacking their vocabularies for superlatives. (The Academy nominated him as best actor of the year, but Marlon Brando took the honor, for
On the Waterfront.)

Fourteen Hours, High Noon
and
The Country Girl
were Grace’s only three monochrome pictures; the other eight were filmed in color. In fact, she was one of the few stars of her era to be associated with the alluring gloss and polish of Technicolor. Years after the fact, she told me, “I wish I had been given the chance to do fewer pictures in color and more serious productions in black and white.” But she had no control over this aspect of moviemaking, and her rise to stardom was itself concurrent with the increasing use of color. There is no doubt, however, that the gravity of
The Country Girl
absolutely required the stark contrasts of black and white.

In ways that were perhaps surprising for her, Grace sometimes found Bill and Bing unsure of themselves. “It took [director] George Seaton’s considerable diplomatic skills to get us through those five weeks,” Grace recalled. “I really didn’t have time to be afraid or to ask myself if I was up to the task—I was too busy trying to understand each and every scene and to deliver it perfectly.”

She need not have been anxious, for her performance must be
included among the finest of the 1950s. She brought a quiet, bereaved intensity to her portrait of a listless wife who fights with her last atom of energy on behalf of her weak husband. In some inchoate, unconscious way, Grace tapped in to the repressed but ever-present streak of melancholy in her own character—the sense of loneliness and longing in her since childhood that had always been sensed by her friends at quiet times, in privacy. To this, she added her art: a kind of benumbed sadness in Georgie, who comes to see that her loyalty has exacted a high price, and that she has missed very much of life.

Grace seemed not merely to speak her lines of dialogue, but to imply that beneath them were, as Wordsworth wrote, thoughts too deep for tears. Nothing seemed calculated, nothing cerebral or artificial—and there was nothing for her to rely on but her substantial talent: no color, no fine wardrobe, no flattering cosmetics and no witty, crowd-pleasing dialogue. Her understanding of Georgie Elgin is a study in the most mature kind of screen acting—a remarkable achievement for a twenty-four-year-old. She could have relied on a few histrionic tricks to win the audience’s sympathy; instead she created a character rich in complexity and almost unbearable in empathetic intensity.