High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (8 page)

D
URING THE MORNING
of July 26, 1938, a young man named John William Warde opened a window on the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Gotham in New York City and climbed onto the ledge, threatening suicide. His sister, a few friends, two doctors and the police tried to persuade him to come back into the room. Firemen stretched a cargo net across a lower wall to break his fall, but the ropes became hopelessly tangled during their effort. Late that evening, as thousands watched in horror
and news cameras rolled, Warde leaped to his death after an eleven-hour ordeal.

Hollywood knew a good story when it happened in real life, however morbid and however much of it would have to be changed to preserve the family’s privacy. A 1949
New Yorker
account of the incident was called “The Man on the Ledge,” but Fox changed that and expanded the time to
Fourteen Hours.
In addition, no studio at that time could release a picture concluding with a suicide—hence in John Paxton’s screenplay, the young man is finally saved by a net and brought to safety (and the ministrations of a psychiatrist). With edgy sensitivity, Richard Basehart played the leading role as someone unhappy in all his personal relations and without hope for any success in life; his costar is Paul Douglas, as a patrolman trying to save the man’s life.

When Fox sent Grace her work schedule for August, she was at the family home in Philadelphia. Her mother (in Lizanne’s words) “foresaw God knows what dangers in that city full of movie people, and suggested, ‘The presence of your sister would be very well received by the family.’” The Queen of England could not have adopted more formal diction than that, and at once the sisters obeyed the maternal fiat. Peggy was negotiating the shoals of a difficult marriage and motherhood, and so seventeen-year-old Lizanne went to Hollywood as Grace’s unlikely chaperone.

Thanks to Edith Van Cleve and her colleagues, the Kelly sisters were installed in an expensive suite (courtesy of the studio) at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Next day, they arrived at the gates of Twentieth Century-Fox on Pico Boulevard. Grace was whisked off to a makeup caravan and then to wardrobe, where she put on her costume: an expensive dress, gloves, a white hat with veil and a capacious fur coat.
Her character was obviously a woman of means, and Grace was meant to be noticed in a crowd scene.

She was then escorted by an assistant director to the “New York street” on the Fox back lot, where Hathaway was ready to direct her first appearance—in a taxicab caught in a traffic jam caused by the drama of the man on the ledge. The cameras rolled, and Grace lowered the taxi’s windows to tell the policeman (Douglas) that she was on her way “to an important appointment—and I’m late now.” He advises her to leave the cab and walk, which she does. Hathaway called, “Cut it!” as the several angles were completed. Grace Kelly’s first scene in a Hollywood movie lasted precisely thirty-one seconds in the final version. A studio driver then returned her and Lizanne to the hotel, where they called home to report on the day’s excitement. Their father was unimpressed: “Those movie people can be pretty shallow,” he muttered, as if he knew this from experience.

Grace’s second and final scene was filmed the following day, on the set of a lawyer’s office. Listening to attorneys read the complicated terms of her divorce and the formalities regarding custody of her children, she speaks only one word: “Yes.” Then the actor cast as her husband (played by James Warren) was brought to the set, and we learn her character’s full name—Louise Anne Fuller. She has been watching the drama of the man on the ledge from the attorney’s window, and now she seems to have second thoughts about a divorce. “If you’d been on time here today,” Louise says to her husband, “it would have been all right. I wanted to do it [i.e., go through with the divorce], but I got tired of waiting—and thinking.” It’s clear that the couple will attempt a reconciliation; the scene closes with Louise in her husband’s embrace as she gazes out once more at the young man on the ledge. The point of the scene was meant to be ambiguous: Does she feel as confused and hopeless as
he—or does she suddenly realize how important her own life and relationships are—or both?

The sequence required only three takes—each time because Hathaway asked Grace to bring her voice down to a lower register. The office sequence was timed at one minute and forty-three seconds, and with that, Grace’s two days of work were complete. Given tenth billing in the released film, she appears in her movie debut for a total of two minutes and fourteen seconds.

Siegel, Hathaway and Fox had no further roles for Grace, and when the picture was released in March 1951, producers and agents did not race to their telephones to call her agent with offers. Decades later, it’s clear that this small role could have been as well performed by any one of a score of available young actresses. Nevertheless, this is a polished and complete little performance, precisely because of her understanding of the role and the allusive structure of her lines.

Fourteen Hours
was mostly ignored for a half-century, until Fox decided to rerelease it as a so-called film noir. Although most of the action occurs at night, it’s certainly not in that vague genre. There are no crimes or violence, and no bad girls, but it is an effective ninety-two-minute suspense drama, marred only by the facile psychology then in common currency. Grace, who tried to learn everything she could during those two days, was an adaptable, willing and pliant collaborator as well as extraordinarily photogenic. As Cary Grant memorably said, “In two senses, she didn’t have a bad side—you could film her from any angle, and she was one of the most untemperamental, cooperative people in the business.”

There was one unforeseen consequence of Grace’s movie debut. An Oregon teenager named Gene Gilbert saw
Fourteen Hours
and founded a Grace Kelly Fan Club that within a year had spread like the proverbial wildfire across the country. Gene
kept Grace informed of new local chapters and members, and Grace responded politely. Privately, she thought this was terrifically amusing, as if she had entered a political race. After she had opened the letters from Oregon, she would announce to friends, “We’ve got a new girl in Washington [or wherever]. I think she’s ours!”

Back in New York, Grace moved into the newly completed Manhattan House, a nineteen-story luxury rental apartment building with 581 units, at 200 East 66th Street, which occupied the entire block between Second and Third Avenues and 65th and 66th Streets—a former site for storing hansom carriages and the electric streetcars of the Third Avenue Railway System. The opening of Manhattan House to tenants in 1950 and 1951 marked the start of a new architectural style in postwar New York, its light-gray brick façade a severe contrast to the prevailing art deco designs of earlier decades.

The Third Avenue elevated train still rumbled by, but Grace’s apartment did not overlook it. Her apartment had a large living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, an entry hall and a small balcony. Although she could easily have afforded the modest rent for Apartment 9A (less than $100 a month), Grace was essentially frugal—and she liked company. Hence she invited Sally Parrish, a friend from the Barbizon, to share the apartment; like Rita Gam and Judith Quine, Sally became a lifelong friend and was a bridesmaid at Grace’s wedding in 1956. “The living room [at Manhattan House] was without charm, character or gender,” according to Judith. “It wasn’t ugly; it was utterly bland. Furniture, fabrics and colors alike were all resolutely practical. Everything seemed brown. Only the bedroom and bath revealed that its tenants were female.” She may not have known that Margaret Majer Kelly had decorated the apartment, mostly with unused family pieces taken from storage and shipped to New York.

1*
When I began a year of Saturday acting classes for teenagers at the Academy in the fall of 1956, it occupied space above the Alvin (later rechristened the Neil Simon) Theatre, at 250 West 52nd Street. I remember a wall of alumni photos, among which Grace’s portrait was prominently displayed. By that time she had won an Oscar and was Princess of Monaco.

2*
In 1946, a good automobile cost $1,400; gasoline was twenty-one cents a gallon; a fine new home could be purchased for $12,500; bread cost ten cents a loaf; a first-class postage stamp was three cents; the minimum wage was forty cents an hour; a respectable annual salary was $3,150; and the stock market was booming at 177.

3*
Grace, who had a keen eye and good business sense, apparently negotiated the terms of her own quite straightforward, two-page contract for
The Father
, which had none of the complications of a typical Hollywood agreement.

4*
Grace’s TV debut, of which no copy has survived, was on November 3, 1948, in a
Kraft Television Playhouse
production of Albert G. Miller’s “Old Lady Robbins,” costarring Ethel Owen. It seems to have been unremarkable, for she scarcely recalled it thirty years later. She made no TV appearances in 1949, eleven in 1950, five in 1951, fifteen in 1952, three in 1953 and one in 1954. For years, most sources have erroneously stated that Grace appeared in more than sixty TV programs; the actual number appears to have been thirty-six, most of which have not survived in the kinescope recordings made at the time of live broadcast, which were the precursor to videotape and filming for TV.

5*
On February 2, she was the eponymous “Ann Rutledge,” allegedly Abraham Lincoln’s great love until her death at twenty-two—a performance of enormous tenderness balanced by youthful high spirits. On March 3, the ABC network presented her in “The Apple Tree” (no connection to the 1966 Broadway musical); and on April 25, she appeared in a half-hour episode of a series called
Cads, Scoundrels and Charming Ladies.
On May 26, she was seen in “The Token,” and the July 17 episode of the suspense series
Lights Out
presented her in an installment called “The Devil to Pay.” On September 6, she appeared in an abbreviated version of Ferenc Molnár’s play
The Swan.
On October 5, Grace appeared in “The Pay-Off,” an episode of the series
Big Town.
Viewers who tuned in on November 1 could have seen her on the “Mirror of Delusion” episode of the series
The Web;
and two weeks later she appeared on
The Somerset Maugham Television Theatre
in “Episode,” in which she portrayed the daughter of social-climbing parents who falls in love with a working-class boy. Her New Year’s Eve was spent acting in “Leaf Out of a Book.”

PART II

Action

1951 — 1956

Moments after receiving her Academy Award as best actress, for
The Country Girl
(March 30, 1955).

THREE

Less Is more, or not

There’s got to be some better way for people to live.

      —GRACE (AS AMY FOWLER KANE) IN
HIGH NOON

D
URING
C
HRISTMAS WEEK 1950
, G
RACE HAD A TELEPHONE
call from Edith Van Cleve, who told her to ring their mutual friend Gant Gaither. He had first met Grace in February 1947 at the Broadway revival of Uncle George’s play
Craig’s Wife
, which Gaither had produced. Now he was producing a comedy called
Alexander
, by actor-director Lexford Richards, and the rehearsals and pre-Broadway tryouts were about to begin at the Albany Playhouse, a modest but highly respected theatre owned by actor Malcolm Atterbury, a wealthy Philadelphian who knew the Kellys.