High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (7 page)

Grace hurried to New York to read for the role of Bertha. With no Broadway experience and only her recent summer roles to her credit, she knew that it would be difficult to land a significant part in an important classic, with no less a director and costar than the respected Massey. But Grace had read and reread the play, and she went to the audition with a calm intensity and intelligence that won over Massey and the producers, who chose her over twenty-three other candidates. Rehearsals began in mid-October for a November 16 opening at the Cort Theatre on West 48th Street.

Brooks Atkinson, the senior drama critic of the
New York Times
, felt that the production was fine as far as it went, but that it had too much gentility, that Massey’s acting and direction lacked the implacable ferocity necessary for a successful presentation of Strindberg’s “thunderbolt of wrath and hatred.” On the other hand, Atkinson singled out the twenty-year-old making her Broadway debut: “Grace Kelly gives a charming, pliable performance of the bewildered and broken-hearted daughter.” Another
critic wrote that Grace had “a naturalness that owes nothing to artifice—no airs, simply a charming fresh ness.” But
The Father
is a difficult and demanding play, and the production failed to attract audiences for longer than two months; it closed on January 14, 1950, after sixty-nine performances.

Later, Grace was typically modest about her debut: “For two years before this, I had been told so often that I was too tall for this part or that part—even at the Academy. Fortunately, Raymond Massey and Mady Christians [who played her parents] were tall actors. If they had been just a few inches shorter, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been in the cast.” Massey completely discounted her assessment: “She got the part because she showed the most promise. All through the rehearsal period, we were impressed with her earnestness, her professionalism and her good manners. She was organized and dedicated. Between rehearsals, she would ask Mady if she could sit in her dressing room and talk about the theatre. She was a delight to have in the company—a rare kind of young person who had a hunger to learn and to improve herself.”

It’s interesting to ask why Grace so desperately wanted to play Bertha in this gloomy, haunted play. The obvious answer is that it was a serious classic with two experienced major players in the cast. But she may also have been attracted to the play’s theme, which she knew from her own life: a daughter’s struggle for independence from a severe and possessive family.

T
HE
F
ATHER
. I believe that it is for your future good that you should leave home, go to town and learn something useful. Will you?

T
HE
D
AUGHTER
. Oh yes—I should love to go to town, away from here, anywhere. If I can only see you sometimes …

T
HE
F
ATHER
. But if Mother doesn’t want you to go?

T
HE
D
AUGHTER
. But she must let me.

T
HE
F
ATHER
. But if she won’t?

T
HE
D
AUGHTER
. Well, then, I don’t know what will happen. But she must—she must! You must ask her very nicely—she wouldn’t pay any attention to my asking.

The play insists that true parenthood does not consist in shaping a child according to one’s will, but in providing the freedom to learn and grow according to her own lights. “I want to be myself!” cries Bertha—a line to which Grace could relate, and which she apparently spoke with great poignancy. In the case of the Kellys, the parents’ opinions were the reverse of the characters in the play: Jack had not wanted his daughter “to go to town,” and Grace had been able to do so only because Margaret predicted that, after a trial run, their daughter would soon be home. Like Bertha, Grace needed from her parents the freedom to be herself and to determine her own path in life—an autonomy that Grace later struggled to give her own children. In other words, Strindberg’s central motif struck close to her heart, and she was far too sensitive and perceptive not to have noticed that the play’s family was a virtual mirror image of her own. As Judith Quine recalled, “Grace’s father wanted her to be re-created in his image.”

This parallel may explain her reticence to discuss the play, her role in it, and the auspicious New York theatrical debut that effectively jump-started her career. With a dismissive smile, she referred only to the matter of her height: if the leading players had not been so tall, “I wouldn’t have been in the cast.”

H
ER GOOD
reviews earned Grace the attention of New York’s increasing number of television producers. Like advertising and modeling agencies, they were being asked to provide more “product” for live TV and its startling increase in the number of
comedy and quiz shows, news commentaries, children’s programs and live dramas.

In early 1950, many highly successful (and eventually long-running) shows in various genres were already in place.
The Howdy Doody Show
and
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
were both ostensibly for children, but much of the humor was spontaneous, unrehearsed and appreciated only by their parents. Milton Berle’s variety show reflected his vaudeville background. Arthur Godfrey was a ukulele-strumming humorist who successfully cultivated an image of bumptious friendliness—until he began to fire his cast on live TV. Baseball games dominated the sports season.

Perhaps most memorable, however, were the many live TV dramas, all of them sponsored by companies that majestically exploited their names—among them
Westinghouse Studio One, The Kraft Television Theatre, The Lux Video Theatre, The Armstrong Circle Theatre, The Goodyear Television Playhouse
and
The Philco Television Playhouse.
Every night, viewers had a choice of several half-hour and hour-long live programs for grownups, many of them written and directed by people with theatrical and radio experience, and many who later went on to successful careers in Hollywood. As for the actors, there were old hands (Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan) and new (James Dean, Eva Marie Saint, Paul Newman, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, Steve McQueen). Theatrical producers and talent agents regularly attended Broadway plays, hoping to sign up good new talent before a movie offer came in, as the major studios—already engaged in a bitter struggle with TV for audience dominance—would not allow contract players to appear on the home screen.

A theatrical agent named Edith Van Cleve, who had been Marlon Brando’s agent, was on the lookout for new talent to represent. (After his long run in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, Brando went to Hollywood in late 1949 and never again
worked in the theatre.) Grace, who did not have an agent, was performing in
The Father
when Edith saw her onstage and offered to represent her.
^3*
Grace was receiving offers for future employment almost daily in early 1950, and she realized she needed a good representative; Edith, a well-born former actress, suited her needs and personality.

“I had just done a screen test,” Grace recalled, “and then I had a call to go to a barnlike studio somewhere on the far West Side of Manhattan, where I did another test, with Robert Alda, for a picture called
Taxi.
I was eager to do it because it was going to be filmed in New York, not Hollywood, and it was a one-picture deal. At that point in my career, I tried to avoid signing a long-term contract with a studio. Also, it was an interesting part—that of an Irish girl who has come to New York with her baby and goes around in a cab trying to find her husband. I wanted to try an Irish accent, and I found the character very sympathetic. I didn’t get the job, but the test survived for a few years and helped me later on.”

Taxi’s
director, Gregory Ratoff, heartily endorsed Grace for the role of Mary Turner, but after seeing the test, the executives at Twentieth Century-Fox in Hollywood decided she was too elegant and sophisticated for the role of a simple country lass; the job went to Constance Smith, an experienced Irish actress who had already appeared in a dozen pictures. “I was in the ‘too’ category for a very long time,” Grace recalled. “I was too tall, too leggy, too chinny. I remember that Mr. Ratoff kept yelling, ‘She’s perfect! What I love about this girl is that
she’s not pretty
!’”

Edith was soon on the phone, however, and she arranged for Grace to audition for a supporting role in director Joshua
Logan’s production
of The Wisteria Trees
, starring Helen Hayes. Rehearsals were scheduled for February and the opening night for late March. But Grace lost the role because Hayes, who had cast approval, judged that she could not project her voice and was therefore unsuited to stage acting. There had been no vocal problems at the 1,102-seat Cort Theatre during the run of
The Father
, but when she was asked to reach the 1,437 seats of the Martin Beck Theatre from its empty stage at the audition for
The Wisteria Trees
, she may indeed have sounded strained—or merely inaudible. “She quickly brushed aside such setbacks,” according to her longtime friend Gant Gaither, “and refused to waste any time wallowing in self-pity.” Instead, Grace considered what her next opportunity might be.

She did not have to wait long—indeed, from 1950 to 1954, she acted in three dozen live TV dramas, which made her one of the busiest actresses working in the medium who was not cast in a weekly series.
^4*

She began the busy year of TV work during the run of
The Father
, when she rehearsed for a week during the mornings and then appeared live on the evening of Sunday, January 8, on the
Philco Television Playhouse
, in the title role of “Bethel Merriday,” based on the 1940 novel by Sinclair Lewis. The teleplay by William Kendall Clarke moved the story quickly from fifteen-year-old Bethel as a student in 1931, through her college
years, in which she discovers her love for the stage. She then embarks on a tour as a professional actress, and we follow her transformation from a star-struck girl into a seasoned trouper. The role seemed made for Grace.

“Despite the quickness of the preparation and the broadcast, she really studied and applied herself to understanding the character,” recalled the episode’s director, Delbert Mann. “In fact, she did brilliantly, and immediately joined the kind of unofficial TV stock company we had in those days, made up of the actors we cast over and over again because they were reliable professionals.”

Fred Coe, who produced many of Grace’s TV projects, added that Grace “had talent and attractiveness, but so do a lot of other young people in the theatre who never become stars. The thing that made her stand out was something we call ‘style.’ She wasn’t just another beautiful girl, she was the essence of freshness—the kind of girl every man dreams of marrying. All of us who worked with her just loved her. You couldn’t work with Grace Kelly without falling a little in love with her.” That sentiment was often repeated. “Everyone in the production company of
Rear Window
and
To Catch a Thief
fell for her,” recalled Alfred Hitchcock’s associate producer, Herbert Coleman, a few years later. “Not only Hitch, most of all. Just about everyone wanted to bring her a cup of tea or run an errand for her or do
something.
She never asked, much less did she demand anything, but everyone wanted to show how much they loved and admired her. I think sometimes it made her uncomfortable.”

“Off-camera, she reminded me of a small-town high school teacher,” recalled Rita Gam. “Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her face was scrubbed clean except for a little dash of lipstick, and she wore glasses. She seemed very likable to me—and very shy. But as we became friends, I saw that along with
her determination to succeed as an actress, she had a certain inner calm. She accepted the world as it really was, not what she wanted it to be. I remember thinking that this was something unique in someone so young.”

During the last week of
The Father
, Grace rehearsed with director Franklin Schaffner on the production of “The Rockingham Tea Set,” based on a story by Virginia Douglas Dawson; it was broadcast live (as were all her performances) on Monday evening, January 23, and it is the earliest extant example we have of a performance by Grace Kelly.

In this hour-long drama (“introducing Grace Kelly as Miss Mappin”), Grace plays the nurse-companion to an elderly lady. Miss Mappin is suspected of killing her previous patient—a bitter woman who faked paralysis in order to keep her husband housebound (in which of course she failed). Grace has a long introductory speech leading to the story as a flashback, and to see it almost sixty years later is to be deeply impressed by her unmannered delivery and unaffected diction. She subsequently appeared in ten more TV dramas during 1950.
^5*

Things were happening quickly. On May 22, she was one of a dozen actors named by
Theatre World
magazine as a “most promising personality of the Broadway stage for 1950.” Others honored that evening during ceremonies at the Algonquin Hotel included Charlton Heston and his wife, Lydia Clarke.

That spring of 1950, Grace’s busy TV schedule effectively (and to her enormous relief) ended her modeling career. Edith Van Cleve continued to send her out to theatrical auditions, but in June a momentous development suspended those appointments, too.

Sol C. Siegel, a powerhouse producer at Twentieth Century-Fox, had seen Grace in
The Father
and contacted director Henry Hathaway, who was in New York that spring, preparing a picture called
Fourteen Hours.
After a brief reading and wardrobe and makeup tests, Grace was offered a very small role. She accepted, simply for the chance to see a movie made in a Hollywood studio. “I had my heart set on a career in the theatre, but I accepted because it meant only two days of work—I would be back in New York before the end of the summer. I really thought this would be a one-shot experience.” She agreed to the offer of a $500 fee, and on June 15 the
New York Times
noted that Grace had joined the cast
of Fourteen Hours.