High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (26 page)

physically exhausted and emotionally weary … sadder than ever. The pitiless California world that she never liked now seemed to her like hell. The “gentle Miss Kelly” became capricious, irritable and volatile. Fits of tears, a loss of appetite—this crisis was the worst anyone who knew her had seen. In California, she was isolated and everything around her seemed strange. Her life, her friends, her family and the film world disgusted her. She was even thinking of giving up her career, a crushing machine where only the box office mattered. Hollywood was the source of all she detested. She didn’t want to live there any more or be subjected to the affronts of the headlines and the harassment of photographers. Nostalgic for New York, she left Los Angeles suddenly.

As Judith Quine said years later, “At that time, she wanted to build a happy married life—but she knew she couldn’t do it hopping around the world, starring in films.”

When Rita’s work and imminent second marriage took her to New York, she and Grace gave up the West Hollywood apartment. With that, Grace signaled her desire to put California behind her by moving to a larger Manhattan residence. This she regarded as a major step in her life, for it involved the total redecoration of a grand New York apartment, which spanned the entire seventh floor of 988 Fifth Avenue. Grace may well have been anticipating her married life here, for it was a generously proportioned home.

With four exposures, ten-foot ceilings and crown moldings from the original 1925 décor, the apartment had a private elevator landing that opened onto a foyer. From there the apartment spread to four thousand square feet and eleven rooms, with four bedrooms, four and a half baths, a kitchen and laundry, living and dining rooms (both with wood-burning fireplaces), a library, two maids’ rooms and no fewer than twelve spacious closets. There were extraordinary views of Central Park and the West Side, and vistas all the way north to the
George Washington Bridge. The rent for this apartment was among the highest charged in New York that year—$633.69 a month.
^2*
She moved in on February 1, 1955.

Grace invited decorator George Stacey to help locate new and old furniture, and together they found French antiques appropriate to the pale blue and off-white walls. She ordered fresh flowers to be delivered twice weekly, and she began to host small cocktail parties and dinners. To help with her busy life, she engaged a full-time secretary who moved into one of the suites. “I love this apartment,” Grace told a friend one day. “But am I going to be living in it alone for the next twenty years, going back and forth from Los Angeles and movie locations?” Her single status was more bothersome that season: “I have been falling in love since I was fourteen—and my parents have never approved of anyone I was in love with.”

S
HE WAS
awakened on the morning of February 12 with very good news: she had been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best actress of 1954, for her performance in
The Country Girl.
The other nominees were Dorothy Dandridge (for
Carmen Jones)
, Judy Garland (for
A Star Is Born)
, Audrey Hepburn (for
Sabrina)
and Jane Wyman (for
Magnificent Obsession).
Grace was, as the saying goes, cautiously optimistic: she very much admired the competition and she knew she could not depend on the backing of her home studio for encouraging publicity. In January she had again traveled to Culver City—at her own expense—for two days of meetings with Schary, but their discussions ended at an impasse.

Meanwhile, Henry Hathaway, her director on
Fourteen Hours
, wanted her back at Fox for a drama called
The Bottom of the Bottle.
Metro said no. George Stevens, at Warner Bros., was assembling his cast for an epic called
Giant
, based on the sprawling Edna Ferber novel. “I am reliably told,” Ferber wrote from New York to the producer Henry Ginsberg at Warners, “that Grace K. is very anxious to play Leslie [in
Giant]
, but Metro wants her for a Spencer Tracy picture, which she definitely does not want to do. As she now does pretty much as she pleases, I think she might do
Giant
if properly approached. This comes from someone here whom
[sic]
you know is very close to Tracy [i.e., Katharine Hepburn].” Metro said no again.

“Then they wanted to put me in a movie about Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Grace recalled years later. “I was twenty-five, and the story occurred when she was over forty and ill. I read the script and told them I was too young, and they said, ‘No problem—we’ll make her younger and prettier!’ But I insisted that the whole beauty of the story was that this wonderful romance happened to an older woman who was fragile. ‘No problem,’ they said again. ‘She’ll be just as happy at twenty, and healthy!’ You just couldn’t reason with these men!” When Grace left Los Angeles for New York, she was told by an executive that she was persona non grata in Culver City. This pronouncement evoked no tears.

She was not at all surprised, therefore, when, on March 3, Metro sent Grace a notice that she had been put on suspension. Her refusal of multiple offers had pushed Schary and company to the breaking point, and she was told that her salary would be withheld until she came back to work on assignment; if she went to another studio, she would be “in danger of grave consequences”—a phrase governments ordinarily reserve for the threat of nuclear attack.

Then, without consulting her agents or attorneys, Grace took a very clever public relations step. Aware of her positive public image, and with her Oscar nomination still fresh in the news, she immediately informed the press about Metro’s action against her—in advance of any public statement by the studio. When Schary was asked to comment, he could only rather sheepishly confirm her assertion.
^3*

With that, Grace took her sister Peggy (whose marriage was foundering on the shoals of incompatibility and in a storm of alcoholic brawls), and together they left for a quiet Jamaican holiday. There they welcomed the photographer Howell Conant, who had already taken photos of Grace for the April issue of
Photoplay
magazine. In the pellucid waters of the Caribbean, on a private beach and in the sisters’ bright, uncluttered rented villa, she and Conant together broke the mold of the standard-issue celebrity image. The results, published in
Collier’s
magazine on June 24, were a landmark.

Up to this point in Hollywood history, the studios had employed their own photographers and had meticulously controlled the dissemination of actors’ images, which were close to pure fantasy. The public could not get enough of the glamour photos taken, retouched and brilliantly corrected by such geniuses as Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Eugene Richee, Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, John Engstead, Laszlo Willinger and a platoon of others who fed the dream machine. But Grace Kelly and Howell Conant had new ideas: they wanted to present her as a living human being—not a
museum artifact—and the candid shots he took of her were just that: unposed, spontaneous, printed without cosmetic touch-ups or artificially flattering lights.

No star before Grace had ever posed with her hair wet as she rose from the water (an idea that Grace took from the pool scene in
The Bridges at Toko-Ri).
No star had ever been seen wearing her glasses. No star had been photographed without makeup, wearing an oversized shirt that did nothing to show off her figure. No star would have been shown munching an orange or lounging with a pillow. “You trusted Grace’s beauty,” Conant wrote in an extraordinary book of photos published in 1992. “You knew it wasn’t built from clothes and makeup. In New York, Grace came over to my studio dressed in a sweater, a skirt and loafers. In Jamaica, she was no different: her hair [was] pulled back, [and she] dressed in a simple boy’s shirt. This was Grace: natural, unpretentious.” A close friendship developed, and Howell Conant became Grace’s favorite photographer in the United States and Monaco up to the time of her death.

I
N
M
ARCH
, Grace prepared for her appearance at the Academy Awards. As custom required, she went to Metro’s wardrobe department for a consultation—after all, she was still under contract, even if she had been suspended from working. On the spot, Grace was told that she was unwelcome, an outlaw on the studio premises—a wholly unexpected, discourteous and shortsighted corporate gesture. Executives might have reasoned that
The Country Girl
was a Paramount picture, and that they need not concern themselves with promoting her in any way. With her usual unruffled poise, Grace smiled, adjusted her white gloves and asked if she could make a telephone call.

In her Paramount workroom, Edith Head answered her
private line and then put aside several obligations to work from Grace’s own choice of fabric and design to come up with the clothes for Oscar night: a slim, floor-length aquamarine gown of French duchesse satin with a matching cloak and pastel blue slippers. White opera-length gloves completed the outfit.

At the Academy’s rite of spring on March 30, William Holden stepped up to the podium to announce the award for best actress of 1954. Opening the envelope, he smiled broadly—“Grace Kelly, for
The Country Girl
!” This was the ultimate professional accolade, preceded by similar honors already tendered by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the Golden Globe), the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle; she was also nominated by BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. (Among seven nominations for the picture, George Seaton also won an Oscar, for best screenplay.)

When her name was read, Grace leaned over to Paramount executive Don Hartman: “Are you sure? Are you
sure?”
She went up to accept the statuette from Holden, stepped up to the microphone and quietly spoke her brief acknowledgment: “The thrill of this moment keeps me from saying what I really feel. I can only say thank you with all my heart to all who made this possible for me. Thank you.” Backstage, clutching her Oscar and adjusting the yellow rosebuds she had inserted at the last minute into her blond chignon, Grace Kelly wept. At the victory dinner later, she was the winner everyone wanted to meet and congratulate. That night,
Life
magazine settled a deal to put her on the cover of the April 11 issue, wearing the same outfit. She returned to her suite at the Bel-Air hours later—“just the two of us, Oscar and I. It was the loneliest moment of my life.” Three thousand miles away, Jack Kelly watched the Academy Awards on television and shook his head: “I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe Grace won!”

In the years to come, she was often asked if that spring evening was the most gratifying, most exciting moment of her life. She never wavered: “No, not at all—it was the day when [her first child] Caroline, for the first time, began to walk. She took seven small steps by herself before reaching me and throwing herself into my arms.” When another question was put to her, as it was hundreds of times, “How did
it feel
to win the Oscar?”—she smiled and said something polite. But to friends she confided the truth: “I was unhappy. I had fame, but you find that fame is awfully empty if you don’t have someone to share it with.” When Grace left America in 1956, the coveted statuette went with her, remaining on a small table in her room at the palace until her death; her son Albert then placed it in his living room.

W
HERE WAS
Oleg Cassini that March? As he later admitted, he was temporarily separated from Grace—“because of my terrible and often silly temper [and] some awful fights, most of which were my fault.” The catalyst for the diminishment of their romance was in fact his unreasonable jealousy. There had been rumors he knew to be false—that Grace had had a brief romance with Bing Crosby—and he was furious that she still occasionally dined with Crosby in Los Angeles. “I behaved badly,” Oleg said—and Grace agreed, as she wrote in a letter:

You have upset me so that I could die.

It is incredible to me that having dinner with Lizanne and the Crosbys can make you behave like a schoolboy—If I went out with Bing alone you would be absolutely right—and I would never do that to begin with, because I have no interest in anyone but you—but this I shouldn’t have to explain.

Bing is a wonderful person and a very dear friend. I have
great respect for him and hope he will be our friend for many years.

I told you he said that he was in love with me—but there are many people he feels that way about, and after the emotional strain of playing Country Girl, this was only natural. But Bing would never try to do anything about it. Unless he thought I wanted it that way.

I have very few friends out here. Please don’t ask me to give up their friendships!

But that was not the only incident that caused Grace to reevaluate the affair with Oleg. On another occasion that spring, she wanted to dine with Jay Kanter and Frank Sinatra, to discuss a potential movie project. She told Oleg before the evening was confirmed. But Oleg was furious, calling the dinner a pretext for Sinatra to initiate a romance. “I must explain something to you right now, with no interruptions,” Grace said calmly while Cassini raged. “The extravagance of your jealousy did not displease me at first. But isn’t it about time that you stopped this silly behavior? It shows nothing but a lack of confidence. I love you, but your anger isn’t very endearing. Indeed, it is slowly destroying the warmth I’ve felt for you. If it is so important to you, I won’t go out with Sinatra. But please, stop this behavior right now!”

Cassini was judging Grace by his own conduct, believing that she was as frivolous (indeed, as promiscuous) as he—and this mistaken presumption led him to jealous rages over matters he knew and later admitted had no foundation in reality. That spring of 1955, he was, with his own hand, finishing off an intense and important relationship that had been central to their lives for a year—and that might otherwise have led to marriage.