High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (25 page)

“Oleg drives me to the [Paramount] studio every morning,” Grace wrote during the final weeks of
To Catch a Thief
, “and he picks me up at night. Then we have dinner…. My father isn’t very happy over the prospect of Oleg as a son-in-law. But
the plan now is to be married the first part of October, so we can have some time together before he has his showings [of the fall fashion line].”

The inevitable meeting with the Kelly clan occurred in early September, immediately after the completion of
To Catch a Thief.
First, Oleg was introduced to Margaret in New York. Riding in a taxi, he and Grace encountered only a stony silence until Oleg seized on a literary reference and said cheerfully, “Well, here we are—the unholy trio!”

“You, Mr. Cassini, may be unholy,” said Grace’s mother, almost between clenched teeth. “I can assure you that Grace and I are not.” This was worthy of a character in a play by George Kelly.

“We do not consider you good marriage material,” Margaret continued coldly over lunch, counting the reasons on her gloved hand: he was divorced, he had a checkered past, he was a playboy. “I can see why Grace might have been swayed by you. You are charming and literate. But we believe Grace owes it to herself, her family and her religion to reconsider.”

Grace did not challenge her mother in 1954. She remained optimistic even after this lunchtime fiasco, and insisted that Oleg come to meet her father and the rest of the family later that month at the Kelly summer home near Atlantic City. That weekend, as Oleg recalled, was “unforgettably unpleasant.” Both Jack Kellys, senior and junior, completely ignored him, even to the point of refusing to answer his questions.

No sooner had Grace and Oleg fled back to Manhattan than the press descended on her family, who were all too willing to speak. “I don’t approve of these oddballs she goes out with,” grumbled Kell, as if Grace had brought home a sword-swallower instead of a wealthy, sophisticated and famous designer. “I wish she would go out with the more athletic type,” interposed Papa. “But she doesn’t listen to me anymore.”

It was left to her mother to spell out the details, which she gladly did for the entire country: “The situation with Cassini had us all concerned,” she told the syndicated press in early 1956. “Oleg was a charming man. His manners were continental, he had a wide acquaintance in international society, and he could tell a samba from a mambo. He was at Grace’s side everywhere. He literally pursued her across the ocean to Europe. But we in the family were not too happy about it. We knew of his previous marriages—and the mere thought of Grace considering a divorced man was distasteful to us. We all felt she might well go against our wishes and marry him. I put it to him bluntly: ‘Look here, Oleg—you’re a charming escort, but in my opinion you are a very poor risk for a marriage.’”

And then Margaret Kelly said something that might have turned Grace’s resentment into loud laughter: “Of course I never interfere, even when I do not approve.”

According to Lizanne, Grace might have acted contrary to her parents’ wishes: “If she had really wanted to marry him, I don’t think you could have talked her out of it, but she didn’t really want to.” But Grace did not fully realize that she “didn’t really want to [marry Oleg]” until almost a year later.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding the disapproval of her family, she and Oleg remained—in public as in private—very much a couple, despite occasional separations necessitated by work. They were photographed with Hitchcock, for example, at the New York and Los Angeles premieres of
Rear Window
, and they were often seen dining at this or that restaurant in both cities. More to the point, they were unofficially engaged: they had made a commitment to a wedding, and although the date was continually pushed back, their friends had no doubt about the nuptials, and the principals made no secret of their plans. Their perseverance prevailed until the autumn of 1955.

Regarding Grace’s experiences with Alfred Hitchcock,
Oleg’s judgment was sharp: “He was a complete autocrat. He believed anyone on a film (except him) could be replaced. I argued the opposite, the importance of individuals, especially the unique ‘chemistry’ generated by stars like Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. They could not be replaced. Hitchcock believed, though, that he could make anyone a star. He was wrong, and would spend the rest of his career [searching] for an actress who could replace Grace Kelly.” John Michael Hayes agreed. “Had he been able, Hitch would have used Grace in his next ten pictures,” he said in 1981. “I would say that all the actresses he subsequently cast were attempts to retrieve the image and feeling that Hitch carried around so reverentially about Grace.”

Soon after, Hitchcock tried to fashion Vera Miles into another Grace Kelly, and most notably there was Tippi Hedren, who began working with Hitchcock in 1962. Hitchcock’s colleague, the French director François Truffaut, wrote that “in casting Tippi Hedren in two of his films
[The Birds
and
Marnie]
, he entertained the notion of transforming her into another Grace Kelly.”
^2*
And there were others. He always told them a variant of something like “I will make you into the next Grace Kelly,” and to the press he said the same about this or that ingénue: “I will make her into the next Grace Kelly.” Conversely, he had no interest at all in women who could not be refashioned, or in whom he found no “chemistry,” as he said—gifted actresses like Doris Day and Julie Andrews.

Hitchcock’s attempt to re-create the image of a lost love is the premise of his most personal film
—Vertigo.
In the climactic moments of that spiritual testament to Hitch’s own soul, Scottie (James Stewart) confronts Judy (Kim Novak) about her exploitative
lover, who turned her into the replica of another woman: “He made you over, didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over—only better. Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words. Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and what to say? You were a very apt pupil!”

Such was Alfred Hitchcock’s conduct with several of his most talented leading ladies, his “pupils,” after Grace. He tried to control their lives within and outside the studio, designing their personal as well as their professional wardrobes, and attempting to dictate where they went and with whom. But the more he acted this way, the more young women fled from his pathetic need to dominate. He was a brilliant artist, but a lonely and self-destructive man.

Vertigo
was released in 1958, when Grace was a wife and mother and far removed from Hollywood. She agreed that it was among Hitch’s masterworks, and then she paused and said, “I thought it was also very sad.”

1*
See
The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock
and
Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies.

2*
Truffaut, who knew Hitchcock for twenty years, published a book-length series of interviews with the director in 1967; it was revised and expanded in 1983, three years after Hitchcock’s death and a year before his own.

EIGHT

Crisis

I want to be at peace with myself.

      —GRACE (AS PRINCESS ALEXANDRA) IN
THE SWAN

O
N O
CTOBER 10, 1954
, S
ENATOR
J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY
entered the New York Hospital for Special Surgery. Ten days later, doctors performed a risky operation called a lumbar fusion, which was necessary to prevent permanent disability. The surgery itself was life-threatening, for the patient also suffered from the debilitating effects of Addison’s disease; indeed, after the surgery, Kennedy contracted severe infections that were resistant to antibiotics. His parents and a priest were summoned, and his wife, Jacqueline, kept constant vigil at his bedside. No one expected the senator to survive.

The gravity of Kennedy’s condition was not detailed in the daily press, but the news traveled in New York society. When Kennedy’s condition improved slightly, Grace sent a note to Jackie, asking if she could visit the hospital. Mrs. Kennedy thought this was a marvelous idea, and she invited Grace to arrive wearing a nurse’s uniform, for Jack had complained that
all the nurses were homely old crones. Grace arrived to find a platoon of bustling attendants hovering over a bone-thin, frail and ashen patient; he was thirty-seven, but he looked much older—nothing like the picture of glowing energy normally presented by the media.

All in white and wearing the regulation nurse’s cap, Grace entered the room, but Kennedy was heavily medicated and could neither recognize nor respond to her. “I must be losing it,” Grace whispered to Jackie as she departed. Their little stunt had failed, but the actress and the senator’s wife became fast friends, and later, Princess Grace and Prince Rainier frequently visited President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy at the White House.
^1*

A
S HER FRIEND
Judith Balaban Quine recalled, Grace usually thrived on excitement, chaos and overcrowded scheduling. “Grace was mature, and prematurely grown-up, yet we loved in her the dizzy, dopy, melting and swooning schoolgirl who was never out of sight for long.” Sometimes Grace appeared withdrawn and indifferent in public, but with friends like Judy and Rita, she was warm, demonstrative and full of fun. Still, there remained throughout her adult life a constant, if mostly hidden, undercurrent of melancholy. She rarely seemed depressed and was fundamentally hopeful—but close friends sensed her subtle streak of wistfulness, or an occasional assault of “the blues.” The precise source of this trait in her nature is difficult to locate.
Without her conscious awareness, it may have had to do with that element in the Catholic soul that is pessimistic about the world but optimistic about God.

No one who knew her believed that Grace felt religious guilt about her premarital sexual experiences, which were strictly proscribed by her religious education. She had, as she admitted, a tendency to fall in love repeatedly, and her failure to find the right man who would be her husband and the father of her children—and who would please her family, too—haunted her more than ever by the autumn of 1954. This was a different kind of guilt, of which she could not easily free herself, for it concerned not something she had done, but what she had failed to find in life. Grace marked her twenty-fifth birthday in November 1954, and while almost all her friends and relatives were married or engaged, she remained unattached. Hence, she was as reluctant to abandon hope for a life with Oleg as she was hesitant to finalize plans for the marriage. The unofficial engagement and their public courtship continued that season and into the new year. Just as Grace remained adamant in her refusal to accept Metro’s offer of roles she considered unappealing, so she became more and more dependent on the thought of marriage to Oleg as a refuge from Hollywood and the Kellys.

On September 28, 1954, he sent his usual weekly bouquet of flowers to her Manhattan apartment. She kept the enclosed card, signed simply “O,” on which he had written,
“Io ti amo e ti voglio sposare”—
“I love you and I want to marry you.”

M
EETINGS WITH
Metro executives required Grace’s presence in Hollywood in late autumn, but the discussions with Dore Schary and his colleagues were disappointing on both sides.
“Still don’t know what the hell is going on or when I’ll work,” Grace wrote to Prudy.

From a suite at the Bel-Air hotel, she wrote to Oleg:

Darling—

I can’t wait to see you, now that I know I want to marry you. We have so much to learn about each other—there are so many things I want you to know about me. We must be patient with each other and go slowly without wanting results too quickly. But we need each other and we must be completely honest, at all times.

I feel for the first time ready to approach love and marriage in an adult way. I never thought I could be capable of thinking and feeling this way. But in this last year, six pictures have taken so much from me physically and emotionally that it will take a while to recover. Please, darling, try to understand and to help me—I love you more every day and I hope you feel that way too. One time you said to me that you couldn’t love me any more than you did then. That upset me terribly, because I so hope that we shall never stop growing and developing our minds and souls and love for God and each other, and that each day will bring us closer.

I love you and want to be your wife.

Grace

Grace was clearly in crisis—certainly more so than ever. A summary of her life, written to accompany a long photo essay and approved by her son Prince Albert for publication in 2006, notes that Grace was, at Christmas 1954,