High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (23 page)

Almost twenty years earlier, Bette Davis had challenged the control of Jack L. Warner. Convinced that her career was being irreparably damaged by a series of mediocre roles into which she was forced, Davis simply ignored her contract and accepted an offer to work in England. There, she brought her case against Warner Bros. to the English courts, confident that they would decide in her favor. Her counsel listed her complaints: that she could be suspended without pay for refusing any role; that the period of suspension could be added to the term date of her contract; that she could be required to play any part regardless of her opinions; that she could be required to support publicly any political party even against her private beliefs; and that her image could be displayed anywhere and in any context the studio thought helpful for business.

When Jack Warner was called to testify, he was asked, “Whatever part you choose to call upon her to play—even if it is distasteful and cheap—she has to play it?” Warner replied immediately and cheerfully: “Oh, yes, of course she must play it!” Bette Davis lost the case and returned to Hollywood in 1937, burdened with debts and without any prospect of income. Jack Warner, however, never doubted her star power, and she returned for several years to his studio—under the terms of the standard seven-year contract.

Later, Davis’s friend Olivia de Havilland picked up the battle standard against Warner Bros. and fought her case all the way to the California Supreme Court. According to the state labor laws, personal service contracts were limited to a maximum of seven years. De Havilland had signed a standard contract with Warners in 1936, and during the ensuing years she frequently refused various roles and was put on suspension for as long as it took another actor to complete the role she had rejected. When her contract expired on August 31, 1943, she thought she was finally free of Warner’s control, but de Havilland was informed that she had to continue working to compensate the studio for the times she had been suspended.

She thought this was preposterous: she had been obligated to the studio for seven years, and that, she believed, should have been the end of it. She filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros., and in 1945 the State Supreme Court decided in her favor. Seven years indeed meant seven years, with no time added for bad behavior.

But Grace Kelly carried the issue further. She flatly refused to do what the studio expected, relying on her own talents and her own perceptions of what was good for her and what was not. If she did well, she reasoned, her success would support her—hence she would force the studio to comply by sheer force of will and achievement. “I never believed in the studio system,”
she told me. “I signed the contract with Metro in order to do
Mogambo
, and I agreed to do
Mogambo
in order to see Africa and work with Clark Gable and John Ford. The idea of being owned by a studio was offensive to me, and the more I saw the consequences of that seven-year deal, the more determined I became to make my own way and find my own direction. For a wonderfully long time I was left to do that, but then the chickens came home to roost.” In fact, they were vultures.

To Metro’s annoyance, the more assertive she became, the more the public seemed to love her. Grace was in demand for newspaper interviews and magazine feature stories, and her picture was popping up all over America: the April 26 cover
of Life
magazine, for example, proclaimed, “Grace Kelly—America’s Brightest and Busiest New Star.” Her agents took advantage of her growing status and were able to renegotiate the deal with Paramount, whereby Metro was paid $80,000 to loan her out for ten weeks of work on the Hitchcock picture—but $50,000 of that sum was paid to her. Five thousand a week was a respectable sum for Grace in 1954; on the other hand, Cary Grant, her costar in the forthcoming Hitchcock picture, was paid $18,750 a week (in 2009, the equivalent of $150,279 a week).

“I finished
Green Fire
at eleven o’clock on the morning of May 24,” Grace recalled. “I went into the dubbing room [to rerecord lines that were unclear in a few outdoor scenes] at one in the afternoon—and at six o’clock that evening I was on my way to France.”

*
Indeed, the 2006 book by Dherbier and Verlhac (see bibliography) contains a complimentary foreword by Prince Albert of Monaco, Grace’s son.

SEVEN

Climbing Over Rooftops

Palaces are for royalty. We’re just common people with a bank account.

      —GRACE (AS FRANCIE STEVENS) IN
TO CATCH A THIEF

U
NTIL AGE AND POOR HEALTH IMPEDED HIM
, A
LFRED
Hitchcock loved to travel to the smartest and most luxurious venues in the world for his holidays: to the best Swiss resorts, the finest Caribbean hotels—and to lesser-known but equally expensive places. In London, New York, Paris and Rome (to mention but a few major cities he visited regularly), he and his wife were royally welcomed at five-star accommodations. Whenever possible, Hitchcock synchronized his holiday with a movie project—a concurrence ensuring that his considerable personal expenses would be borne by the production’s budget.

Such was the case in May 1954, when he and his crew arrived on the French Riviera. They remained for six weeks, filming in and around Cannes, in the hills above the Mediterranean, along picturesque roads, in the flower market at Nice and on the
sun-drenched tourist beaches. Hitchcock also arranged for the entire company to have plenty of time for sightseeing and sampling the best French restaurants along the Riviera.

To Catch a Thief
was Hitchcock’s forty-first feature. Cary Grant, appearing in his third picture for the director, was fifty years old, but Hitchcock was right when he told Paramount’s executives that audiences would accept Grant as a romantic leading man opposite twenty-four-year-old Grace Kelly, also appearing in her third Hitchcock feature. Fit and tanned, Grant had an ageless, urbane charm, and his acting was on the mark for a director who preferred understatement. In a career that ultimately spanned thirty-five years, he had already performed with Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe, among others. As the Hollywood cliché put it, Cary Grant was bankable.

John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplay for
To Catch a Thief
, based on David Dodge’s novel. Hayes had written the script for
Rear Window
and later wrote two more for Hitchcock
(The Trouble with Harry
and
The Man Who Knew Too Much);
his work is noteworthy for a warmth of characterization often lacking even in some of Hitchcock’s masterworks.

The director called
To Catch a Thief
“a lightweight story,” and so it is—a rambling, relaxed comic caper, the work of a man on holiday, telling a story without the atmosphere familiar to his fans. Some critics feel that the picture’s sheer visual appeal and sexy charm overwhelm the suspense, that we really don’t care about the villain at all, and that the thriller aspect—the hero’s need to unmask a crook in order to exonerate himself—is lost in a glamorous travelogue. The film is, to be sure, far more interesting for its ravishing shots of the French Riviera (which earned Robert Burks the Oscar for color cinematography)
than for its ho-hum narrative, which is exceedingly short on Hitchcockian tension.

The plot concerns John Robie (Grant), a former jewel thief and once a collaborator with the Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. The police now believe that he has returned to his old larcenous habits and is responsible for a series of burglaries along the Riviera. To prove his innocence, Robie embarks on his own investigation to catch the thief. He enlists an insurance agent (John Williams) and soon meets a rich young American named Frances “Francie” Stevens (Grace) and her mother (Jessie Royce Landis). Francie is fascinated—even excited—by Robie’s reputation as a thief. She falls in love with him, and although at first she thinks him guilty, she finally helps him trap the real cat burglar. The culprit, Danielle Foussard (Brigitte Auber), turns out to be a woman Robie thought was a friend, the daughter of a former Resistance colleague who is involved in a ring of thieves.

“For me, this was the perfect part after the intensity of
The Country Girl
and the discomforts of
Green Fire,”
Grace recalled in 1976, “and how could I turn down the chance for another Hitchcock picture? I was flattered he wanted me. It was a comedy, but it was also romantic—and rather daring for its time, too, but always with the sophisticated Hitchcock touch. Francie is eager to be a thief—she’s out for kicks and thrills, and she thinks it’s exciting to join up with a man she believes to be an outlaw. She was all set to climb out over the rooftops with him.”

Grace had clear memories of filming several especially clever sequences. In the first, Danielle and Francie meet in the waters of the beach club, as rivals over Robie:

D
ANIELLE
(Brigitte Auber). What
has she
got more than me—except money, and you are getting plenty of that.

R
OBIE
(Grant). Danielle, you are just a girl—she is a woman.

D
ANIELLE
. Why do you want to buy an old car if you can get a new one cheaper? It will run better and last longer.

R
OBIE
(scanning the horizon). Well, it looks as if my old car just drove off.

F
RANCIE
(Grace—suddenly bobbing out of the water). No, it hasn’t—it’s just turned amphibious. I thought I’d come out and see what the big attraction was—and possibly even rate an introduction.

R
OBIE
. Miss Foussard—Miss Stevens.

They are all treading water.

F
RANCIE
. How do you do, Miss Foussard—Mr. Burns [Robie’s temporarily assumed name] has told me so little about you.

R
OBIE
. Well, we met only a few minutes ago.

F
RANCIE
. Only a few minutes ago, and you talk like old friends. Ah, well, that’s warm, friendly France for you.

R
OBIE
. Would you like me to teach you how to water ski?

F
RANCIE
. Thank you—but I was women’s champion at Sarasota, Florida, last season. Are you sure you were talking about water skis? From where I sat, it looked as though you were conjugating some irregular verbs.

R
OBIE
. Say something nice to her, Danielle.

D
ANIELLE
. She looks a lot older up close.

R
OBIE
(groaning). Oh-h-h-h-h-h …

F
RANCIE
. To a mere child, anything over twenty might seem old.

“H
ITCH TOLD
us to improvise some of our dialogue,” Grace recalled, “and so Cary and I did just that. We rehearsed it first
with Miss Auber, whose English was not so fluent. We all had terrific fun trying to see what we could get away with, because we knew Hitch wanted us to go as far as we could. Cary and I shared the same warped and sometimes risqué sense of humor, so it was just a great deal of fun for us. Only one sequence in the picture really troubled me, and it does to this day. When I see the costume ball sequence at the end, I feel very embarrassed. It seems overdone—and I did my bit in those scenes badly. Hitch should have made me do them over.”

Earlier in the movie, Robie accompanies Francie to the door of her hotel suite. They have been introduced only moments before, and are not yet on a first-name basis—and so Hitchcock surprised his audience by having Francie, all in cool blue chiffon, enter her room, turn and, without a word, boldly plant a kiss square on the lips of the astonished but quite pleased Robie. This is a hint of what is to come later—some of it, too, improvised by the actors:

R
OBIEM
. What do you expect to get out of being so nice to me?

F
RANCIE
. Probably a lot more than you’re willing to offer.

R
OBIEM
. Jewelry—you never wear any.

F
RANCIE
. I don’t like cold things touching my skin.

R
OBIEM
. Why don’t you invent some
hot
diamonds?

F
RANCIE
. I’d rather spend my money on more tangible excitement.

R
OBIEM
. Tell me—what do you get a thrill out of the most?

F
RANCIE
. I’m still looking for that one.

R
OBIEM
. What you need is something I have neither the time nor the inclination to give you—two weeks with a good man at Niagara Falls.