High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (22 page)

One scene may be taken to stand for many in this compelling picture, in which Grace had an unusual number of speeches and long, uninterrupted scenes of dialogue with the two leading men. Confronting Holden (who played her husband’s director), she begins calmly and builds the emotion:

G
EORGIE
. Can you stand him up on his feet, Mr. Dodd? Because that’s where all my prayers have gone—to see that one holy hour when he can stand alone! And I might forgive even
you
, Mr. Dodd, if you can keep him up long enough for me to get out from under! All I want is my
own name and a modest job to buy sugar for my coffee! You can’t believe it, can you—you can’t believe that a woman has to be crazy-out-of-her-mind to live alone—in one room—by herself!

(He grips her arm, but she resists him.)

G
EORGIE
. Why are you holding me? I said—you are holding me!

Her eyes are suddenly wild with rage and desire. He kisses her “fully on the mouth,” according to the stage directions, before they step apart.

G
EORGIE
. How could you be so cruel to me a moment ago … to be so mad at someone you didn’t even know … [She turns away from him.] No one has looked at me as a woman for years.

He turns to leave, and just before he reaches the door, she speaks:

G
EORGIE
. You kissed me—don’t let it give you any ideas, Mr. Dodd.

This was a performance made credible not by lighting, costumes or music. Its force derives from the complete lack of calculation in Grace’s impressive art—a paradox that virtually defines every memorable acting achievement. Decades later, we do not watch her as a movie star playing at or around a role, nor are we conscious of her gestures, her slight raising of the eyebrows, the sudden drop of her voice. We do not observe an “artiste” struggling to impress. Grace Kelly, the beautiful actress, disappears when we watch Georgie Elgin in
The Country Girl;
we see only the real weariness of a woman almost out of
strength, almost empty of feeling—except that her feeling, and ours, is indeed too deep for tears.

O
N THE LAST
day of production, in late March, the film crew presented Grace with an inscribed plaque: “For our Country Girl—may this hold you over until next year’s Academy Awards.” The critics also responded warmly, noting that Crosby and Kelly were completely successful in playing offbeat roles that were very different from the public’s perception of the actors: “Miss Kelly will get her share of praise for the quality of strain and desperation she puts into the battered, patient wife,” ran a typical review. Asked for his reaction to all these signal achievements, her father responded with his usual dispassionate detachment: yes, he was “pleased for her,” and that was that.

“I was very young when I played in
The Country Girl,”
Grace said years later. “I was twenty-four, and I hadn’t yet been married. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Oh, if only I were five years older, I could do this so much better!’ And then, after I’d been married five years, I thought, ‘Well, I could certainly do
The Country Girl
better!’ And now, years later, perhaps it would be even better.”

T
HE DAY
after her final scene in
The Country Girl
, Grace rushed to Metro for costume and makeup tests, and then to the company physician for necessary injections. Soon she was off for ten days of location shooting in the Colombian jungle, to fulfill her obligation. “I was exhausted when
Green Fire
began,” said Grace, “because
The Country Girl
had required long days of rehearsal and long hours of filming, with a great deal of concentration. So although it was a grueling schedule that spring, going right away onto
Green Fire
was in some ways a relief.
There were no politics [with her leading men] to consider—just that
awful
story that MGM pushed me into. They probably didn’t allow themselves to recognize the disappointing truth that the studio was no longer the great machine it had once been. I think they were trying to repeat the success of
Mogambo
, with the South American jungle substituting for Africa, and they gave me Stewart Granger, the resident studio swashbuckler,” who had been in Metro’s
King Solomon’s Mines.

This time, the mines contained emeralds (thus the title), sought by prospector Rian Mitchell (Granger). He copes with a band of Colombian bandits, who claim the treasure belongs to them, and he is further blocked by a growing romance with Catherine Knowland (Grace). She and her brother Donald (John Ericson) own and manage a successful coffee plantation near the land where the emeralds are buried. Mitchell digs and digs; Catherine sighs and sighs. No one gets anywhere until shortly before the end of the movie, when (1) a flood hits the plantation, (2) the bandits attack the emerald mine, (3) a box of dynamite blows the thugs to guacamole, (4) a rockslide deflects the course of the river, (5) a tropical storm breaks, and (6) a rainbow shines through, arching over (7) the final embrace of Granger and Grace.

“Green Fire
was not the kind of picture I became an actress to do,” Grace said. “I had to accept it for the chance to make
The Country Girl
, and it taught me a lesson—never agree to a role before reading the script. They told me my pages [of the screenplay, by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts] weren’t ready, but that I had to do it, and that it would be an easy and exciting picture to make. Silly me—I believed them and agreed to do it.” Later, Dore Schary admitted, “It was a dog, and we never should have made it—it was just terrible, but we thought it would do well, that it would bring some money in. It didn’t.”

But there were other knots in the tangle of her life and career.

First, it was precisely the intense, creative satisfaction of performing in
The Country Girl
that evoked in Grace a growing impatience with Hollywood and a desire to return to the stage, the source of her best roles. “I kept confiding in my uncle George,” she said. “He was the only one who understood that my heart was not in Hollywood, but in the theatre. By [May] 1954, I just wanted to get away.”

In addition, since she had left New York in November 1953, she had been bombarded with letters, calls and even a surprise visit from the zealous Oleg Cassini, and she wanted to see if this relationship was going anywhere. He had a thriving and demanding business in New York, where he was successfully climbing the social and commercial ladder—but he insisted that Grace was important in his life.

Finally she had an opportunity to “get away” and to test Cassini’s earnestness—but she would have to rush through
Green Fire
, to the point of asking the director to bring forward the shooting of her final scenes in order to accommodate her as a courtesy to another director. “Hitchcock wanted her for
To Catch a Thief,”
as Granger recalled, “and if the dates fitted, she would go straight from our film to her next leading man, Cary Grant. Poor Grace was worried that she wouldn’t finish
[Green Fire]
in time, because Hitchcock waits for no man or woman.”

To complicate the issue further—and simultaneously to make it all the more attractive—the production schedule of
To Catch a Thief
called for location shooting on the French Riviera from May to July. Even before she completed
Green Fire—
and before Metro had signed off on yet another loan-out to Hitchcock and Paramount—Grace was making late-night calls to Edith Head about the costumes for Hitchcock’s picture. “Just go ahead,” she told the designer. “I’ll get the picture.” Her confidence was doubtless rooted in Alfred Hitchcock’s insistence (which he told her on the sly) that he would
not seriously consider a replacement for her. “I’m not sure what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to get Grace,” Hitch said many years later. “I saw her in this role ever since I bought the rights to the novel.”

J
OHN
E
RICSON
, who played Grace’s brother in
Green Fire
, had been a student with her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and was also under contract to Metro that year. Just when he and Grace began work, his previous picture was released
—Rhapsody
, in which he appeared to very good effect with Elizabeth Taylor. A strong but not brutish actor on the studio roster, John was a strikingly handsome young man, already believable in a wide variety of roles. He, too, should have been more wisely managed by Metro, as Grace recognized. “They’re doing the same thing with John Ericson as they have with me,” she wrote to columnist Hedda Hopper that season. “To the press, they’re full of enthusiasm and generous with their promises. But then nothing comes of it, and now they are ignoring a fine actor in John, and I think it’s shameful.”

“Grace had always been surrounded by a group of admiring young men in our student days,” Ericson recalled more than fifty years later. “And on
Green Fire
, she was as serious as she was popular, and completely professional—even though she didn’t want to be in the picture. But everyone in the cast and crew grew very fond of her.”

John’s scenes did not require him to travel to South America with Grace and Granger, who went for ten days in April and worked in fiercely uncomfortable conditions in Barranquilla, along the Magdalena River and in the mountains surrounding Bogotá. “It wasn’t too pleasant there,” Grace wrote in another message to Hopper. “We worked at a pathetic village, with miserable huts and poverty-stricken people who were forced to
live in awful conditions. Part of our crew got shipwrecked—it was terrible.” Years later she added, “Really, it was a wretched time. Everybody at MGM knew we had a very, very bad picture on our hands, but the production just dragged on in all the heat and all the rainstorms because no one knew how to end it—and for lots of reasons, I wanted to end it!”

The remaining exteriors were shot on the slopes of Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, and on Metro’s back lot. “We were lucky to have Andrew Marton as our director,” said John Ericson. “He was not temperamental, but very helpful to everyone, especially in the action sequences. I remember that Grace insisted on doing her own [horseback] riding scenes, which surprised everybody and caused us some anxiety. But she did it like a champion rider, and without any fuss or fanfare. She was the least prima-donna-like actress I ever knew.”

“I had the misfortune to be in the only really bad movie Grace ever made,” recalled Granger. “She was stunningly beautiful, but I thought she was lonely and agitated. One treated Grace differently. You didn’t chum up with her or smack her on the bottom”—which was precisely what he did, while embracing her in the movie’s concluding rainstorm. She was not pleased.

“The whole experience was unhappy for me,” Grace said. “I took the role for the sake
of The Country Girl—
and because my old friend Marie Frisbee was in Colombia at the time. She and her husband had to live there for a while because of his job, and she felt lonely. I hoped to surprise Marie—but when I tried to contact her after my arrival in South America, I was told that she had gone to Washington for a vacation. That was the first disappointment, and more followed.”

In the movie, Grace smiled amiably for the camera, but of course she could not rewrite the astonishingly bad dialogue. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love before,” she had to say in one
scene—“not really in love—not like this.” Years later she laughed when reminded of a peculiarly apposite line in another scene: “I’ve had a few proposals of marriage,” she says in one romantic sequence, “and I turned them down. But I’m not panicking yet. There’s always the chance that Prince Charming will come down out of the mountains on his charger one day.” The ordeal of
Green Fire
finally reached its term in late May, after the interior scenes were completed in Culver City.

On May 2, Metro and Paramount issued press statements that Grace Kelly was going directly from
Green Fire
to Alfred Hitchcock’s next picture,
To Catch a Thief. Dial “M” for Murder
and
Rear Window
were still unreleased, but the advance word was more than encouraging. At the same time, Grace was behaving with poise and refined resolve—not to say remarkable audacity—in her dealings with Metro.

The studio announced that, after the Hitchcock picture, she would at once star in
The Cobweb
, but she refused to play its rather gloomy role of a psychiatrist. The press was then informed that Grace had the leading role in a western called
The Long Day
, but she turned that down, too. The public then read the news that she would be the leading lady in a historical romance called
Quentin Durward
, but she also turned aside that offer. “All the men could duel and fight,” she said. “But I would just wear thirty-five different costumes, look pretty and act frightened. It seemed to me that eight people were to be chasing me [in
Durward]
—an old man, robbers, gypsies—and the stage directions on every page of the script said, ‘She clutches her jewel box and flees.’ It read like a satire, and I knew I would be bored to tears by all that nonsense.”

And so it went, as Grace refused to yield to studio pressure to perform in roles that she considered unsuitable or that would in no way deepen her talents or advance her career. She also rejected the scripts for the movies
Diane, Something of
Value, Bannon
and
Tribute to a Bad Man.
A period of the movie industry was dying, and Grace was dancing at the funeral. This was more than a simple case of individual pride, willfulness or prudent self-management of her career. Grace was quite consciously putting one of the final nails in the coffin of a moribund studio system.

T
HE TRADITION
of the seven-year contract gave movie studios the legal right to drop a player who was not drawing crowds to the box office—but the rights of the players were limited to a guaranteed minimum wage for six months, after which they could be dismissed. Actors had no control over their own careers, and almost no share in the decision of what roles they would play and how their public image would be created, sustained, managed and altered. The seven-year system, in other words, created a kind of indentured servitude, and many competent players were blithely pushed onto the unemployment lines because studio executives disliked them.