High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (29 page)

Deprived of familial affection or even transient attention, young Rainier engaged in a series of wild love affairs and dangerous sports—until the spring of 1955, when a thirty-minute rendezvous with an American actress touched something in him. For the first time in his life (so he told the palace chaplain, an American Catholic priest named Francis Tucker), he felt he had really met the right woman. Whatever inchoate feelings Grace harbored were not confided to anyone—not to her sisters or her mother, not even to close friends. In the absence of any expressed sentiments about the prince of Monaco between
May and December, it is impossible to know or to presume what Grace’s feelings may have been.

Rainier’s sister Antoinette did not take her disenfranchisement graciously. After divorcing her first husband and taking up with a jewel thief, she concocted a scheme to depose her brother and declare herself regent, on the basis that she had a son to inherit the throne, whereas her brother Rainier was unmarried. Apparently mad for power, she simultaneously circulated the rumor that Giselle Pascal was sterile, and this perfidy effectively forced Rainier to end his relationship with the French actress, to whom he was about to propose marriage. Pascal then married in 1955 and bore a healthy daughter. Antoinette, for whom eccentricity is too mild a description, was later banished from Monaco.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
, Grace returned from New York to Hollywood, where she began work on
The Swan.
On the fifteenth and sixteenth of that month, she had hair and makeup tests, and then there was a week of long hours at the studio, for her wardrobe fittings with Helen Rose, head of the costume department. “I’ve always been interested in fashion and textile design,” Grace said, “and Helen was a diplomat. She knew how to steer actresses away from a favorite color or line if it did not suit them or the role. I also observed her tactfully get a producer or director, who was fixed on a certain idea, to change his mind if that particular thing was unflattering for the star. I knew very little of the period [of
The Swan]
, so I did some research in New York before going out to California for my fittings. The Empire look had come back into fashion for just a few years leading up to the 1914 war, and it was an enchanting look. I was thrilled when I saw Helen’s sketches and some of the exquisite fabrics she had selected.”

“There were costumes in every conceivable situation,” Helen Rose recalled about the film, set in 1910 in a mythical European kingdom. “There was a riding habit, and a fencing costume, negligees, afternoon frocks and ball gowns. I used beautiful fabrics on all the costumes, the finest I could find. I never saw a star as thrilled as Grace the day we fitted the white chiffon ball gown. She stood before the mirror, gently touching the embroidered camellias and saying, ‘How simply marvelous, Helen—what talented people you have here at MGM!’ For weeks, several skilled women had sat at embroidery frames, carefully working by hand each petal of every flower. The ball gown was indeed fit for a princess.”

After preparations in Culver City, the production, under the Hungarian-born director Charles Vidor, moved to the Biltmore House, near Asheville, North Carolina, for three weeks of exterior filming at the largest private home ever built in the United States. Begun in 1889 and completed seven years later, George Vanderbilt’s residential extravaganza had been designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt in imitation of three Loire Valley châteaux. When finished, Biltmore House featured four acres of floor space and 250 rooms, including thirty-four bedrooms, forty-three bathrooms and sixty-five fireplaces. The swimming pool, gymnasium, bowling alley, servants’ quarters and kitchens were located below ground level, while Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of New York’s Central Park, designed 125,000 acres of gardens and parklands. No one could have chosen a lovelier setting for the European palace of
The Swan.

John Dighton’s screenplay follows very closely the text of Molnár’s play. Princess Alexandra (Grace), her mother, Princess Beatrice (Jessie Royce Landis), her great-aunt Symphorosa (Estelle Winwood) and her younger brothers (Van Dyke Parks and Christopher Cook) live in the castle of a country that lost its status as a kingdom at the time of Napoleon. Beatrice is eager to
make a match between Alexandra and a distant cousin, Prince Albert (Alec Guinness), who will one day inherit a throne as king of a neighboring country. The marriage of Albert and Alexandra will effect the fulfillment of Beatrice’s long-cherished dream—the family will at last have “a throne of their own” again, and her beloved daughter will be a queen. Nor is Alexandra apathetic to this idea: she, too, likes the idea of becoming the wife of a future king, although she has not yet met Albert and fears that her shyness will be unappealing to him.

When the prince arrives for a four-day visit with Beatrice and her family, he prefers sports and shooting activities to time with Alexandra. Albert is a wise, kind and unpretentious royal bachelor, refined and aware of his royal destiny but without any desire to manipulate or exploit others. His apparent indifference to Alexandra seems to augur poorly for an engagement, and so Beatrice takes a desperate measure, hatching a scheme to make Albert jealous. She forces Alexandra to ask the family’s tutor, handsome young Nicholas Agi (Louis Jourdan), to come to the ball in Albert’s honor. Alexandra will feign romantic interest in the teacher, thus arousing Albert’s interest. Albert will then see Alexandra’s beauty and charm, Nicholas will be duly returned to his servant status and Beatrice’s hope will be fulfilled as Alexandra becomes engaged to a future king.

But there are complications. From the time of his arrival at the castle some time earlier, Nicholas has been secretly in love with Alexandra, and after expressing his devotion to her, he is deeply hurt and offended to learn that he has been used as a device to propel her into another’s arms. Alexandra, who regrets her complicity, is moved to discover that intelligent, attractive Nicholas has harbored an ardent passion. This is her first experience of love, and she is ecstatic—and far too naïve in her belief that she can abandon her quest for a throne by yielding to this romance with an employee. At the bittersweet, completely
realistic conclusion, Nicholas leaves the castle and Alexandra accepts that it is only with Albert that her own aspirations and her family’s future destiny can be realized.

The film of
The Swan
, like the Molnár play, is far more emotionally complex and more mature in its stance toward love than can be conveyed in a summary. Ostensibly a romantic fable, it is actually high comedy, puncturing social pretenses and exaggerated expectations of life gently and without bombast or cruelty.
The Swan
is also a remarkably earnest depiction of the shallow, fading monarchical pretensions of minor European royalty. Written in 1914, as the fires of the Great War were being stoked in Molnár’s native Hungary and were soon to engulf all of Europe, the play presents Beatrice as hopelessly self-absorbed, but not wicked. Her treatment of Nicholas is inexcusable, as Albert and his comical but endearing mother the queen (Agnes Moorehead) make clear. But in his departure, Nicholas is clearly moving on to brighter fields.

There are three constellations of characters in
The Swan—
a celestial metaphor reinforced by frequent references to telescopes, stars, astronomy lessons and the vastness of the universe. Beatrice and her household represent an old and now inadequate way of life. Albert and his mother stand for a kind of royalty that can still be relevant in a modern world—a working family mindful of the need for a new social order. And Nicholas and Alexandra (a noteworthy choice of names in light of the couple then still reigning in Russia) represent the unlikely lovers.

Like the play, the film sparkles with delicate humor that leavens the gravity with which it explores the nature of romantic love in a rapidly changing world dominated by class struggles. In this regard, Alexandra is not simply a foolish, inexperienced young woman. She is a sympathetic soul who, in the course of the story, moves through the stages of a moral education, comporting herself
at first with charming awkwardness, then relying on her idea of what it is to be a love-struck maiden, and finally accepting that her ambitions and her vocation require sacrifices she has not yet considered.

In 1923 the great Eva Le Gallienne created the role for the American premiere, and then the play was indifferently adapted to the screen in 1925 and 1930. It lay all but forgotten until—at the instigation of a judicious uncle and his shrewd niece—Metro transformed it into a lush Technicolor film that remains an acutely touching and alluring adult romance. The Hungarian director Charles Vidor, admirably familiar with the literary sensibility of his compatriot Molnár, also understood the tangle of characters, and he never lost sight of the complexities in his deceptively simple, uncluttered management of the actors in their vast and lavish settings.

The performances are uniformly first-rate. In his American movie debut, Alec Guinness portrays the prince with the proper combination of wry bemusement, astuteness and comic gentility. Jessie Royce Landis (also Grace’s mother in
To Catch a Thief)
had no equal in her ability to convey hollow pomposity as only an amusingly venial fault. Louis Jourdan, as the lovesick, mistreated academic, knew how to play a young man at the mercy of his emotions. His love scenes with Grace in the carriage by moonlight and on the terrace are lessons in the fine art of making such moments both credible and affecting. Estelle Winwood, in a role that could easily have been relegated to mere comic relief, gave Symphorosa a daffy wisdom as she insists, “I don’t like the twentieth century.” And Brian Aherne, improbably cast as Beatrice’s brother, a worldly-wise Franciscan monk who has abandoned the world but not his wisdom, turns the character of Father Hyacinth into a new Friar Laurence from
Romeo and Juliet.
He reminds everyone that compassion is the best axis for any romantic constellation.

For much of her time onscreen, Grace remains silent, or speaks but a few words. But we see her listening, we watch her subtle reactions and confusions, and her muted passion is the cyclorama against which everyone must play. The performance is like a pantomime in a silent movie: she communicates every emotion with only the slightest changes in facial expression. Some of this subtlety she learned from her trio of Hitchcock films, but much of it came from a deep understanding of Alexandra—“a woman I thought I really had under my skin,” as she told me. Certainly she was never more lovingly photographed than in
The Swan.

It was perhaps no wonder that the industry’s trade journal
The Hollywood Reporter
proclaimed that with this achievement she was “on the threshold of becoming the next Garbo,” for this was a performance of deep repose and admirable tranquillity. Grace’s features were neither immobile nor masklike, and perhaps it is no exaggeration to assert that she acted with markedly more warmth than Garbo. It was precisely this tenderness that raised her portrait of Alexandra above the level of a thesis-character. She made it impossible, for example, to discount her declaration of love to Nicholas: “I’ve never seen a man in love—and he happens to be in love with me. Oh, Nicholas, if I am afraid of you, I want always to be afraid. I want to be so good to you. I want to tell you everything that’s in my heart. I want to look after you and spoil you and—oh,
here—
eat something!” Rarely has a standard love scene been so gently and movingly lifted above stereotypes. In
The Swan
, Grace is at last, as Hitchcock had hoped she would one day become, “the character around whom the whole film is built.”

B
EFORE THE FIRST
scenes were filmed, Dore Schary summoned assistant director Ridgeway Callow and told him, “I
want Grace Kelly treated like a star.” Callow hadn’t the remotest idea what that meant, and so he decided to treat Miss Kelly the way he would treat a good friend who had a difficult assignment—using practical jokes to relax her, and refusing to behave as if she were … well, a princess. “We gave her a dog’s life on the picture,” Callow recalled, “and she loved every minute of it. We short-sheeted her repeatedly in her hotel room when we were on location in North Carolina. We played many tricks on her, she played many tricks on us, and after the picture was over, she wrote a note to Dore Schary, saying that she enjoyed the picture tremendously. We played more tricks on her than anybody we ever worked with. She certainly was not temperamental. She wasn’t regal at all—she kidded around all the time.”

Howell Conant, who documented the making of the film in a brilliant set of color photographs for Metro and for Grace, also recalled her sense of fun. Aware that Guinness had received a rather bold letter from a fan named Alice, Grace had “Alice” page him repeatedly in the hotel lobby.

Guinness decided on suitable retribution. Jessie Royce Landis had given him a tomahawk from a local souvenir shop, and when he departed for a brief holiday, he tipped the concierge to slip the weapon into Grace’s bed. “It became a sort of running gag between Grace and myself,” according to Guinness, “although neither of us ever mentioned it. A few years after she had married Prince Rainier, I returned home from an evening performance in London and, getting into bed, found the identical tomahawk between the sheets. My wife knew nothing about it. I waited two or three years and then, hearing by chance that Grace was going to do a tour of poetry readings in the U.S. with the English actor John Westbrook, whom I had never met, I telephoned him to ask if he would be prepared to help me with a little scheme. Sportingly he agreed, so I got the
tomahawk to him through a third party [and] the thing was placed in Grace’s bed. I had almost forgotten about it until I went to Hollywood in 1979. Grace was in Monaco, but after the ceremony, I found the tomahawk in my bed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.”

And so it went until Grace’s death. “She had this extraordinary sense of humor,” according to Louis Jourdan, “first of all, about herself, never taking herself seriously.” But Conant also recalled another side of Grace that autumn: she was often “remote, quiet, pensive.” Her colleagues, and visiting friends like Judy Kanter and Gant Gaither, believed that her moments of reserve, and even her sudden brief periods of withdrawal into an atypical solitude, had to do with concern over her next picture. On November 27, Metro announced that Grace was joining Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the cast
of High Society
, a musical remake of
The Philadelphia Story.
The production of
High Society
was scheduled for early 1956, and that seemed to be the source of Grace’s apprehension. Metro’s executives were finally coming to their senses in the matter of Grace Kelly, but time had run out for them: unknown to everyone, her epistolary romance with Rainier was moving her in another direction—away from Metro and out of Hollywood forever.