High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (9 page)

Alexander
would be like a family gathering, said Gant. Would Grace come up right after New Year’s Day and prepare for the role of a well-bred society girl who becomes a torch singer in a Manhattan nightclub? She would and she did, feeling (as Gant revealed) “that it would develop her ability to play
another type of personality,” different from those she had already played.
^1*

Grace arrived in New York’s capital amid a ferocious snowstorm on January 2 and began rehearsals even as the play, troubled from day one, was being rewritten every night. “Grace learned a lot,” according to Gant. “She knew instinctively how to train for the job.” She also befriended her costar, Leatrice Joy, who had appeared in films since 1915 and was once married to the actor John Gilbert. But any chance of bringing
Alexander
to Broadway was doomed by the weather and the failure of the play to attract audiences, critics or interested New York theatre owners.

After two weeks of rehearsals and two weeks of performances, the play closed. Gant hosted a farewell party, at which Grace all but frightened the horses. Aware that some of her Albany colleagues regarded her as too cool to be successful, she leaped onto a table and danced to the music of an electric guitar, throwing off her shoes and letting her hair fall from its moorings. “If she had been raven-haired instead of platinum,” said Gant, “she could have been a gypsy.” And with that, the party guests realized that she was “cool” only in another sense of the word.

Grace returned to New York and set about arranging her calendar for 1951, which, as it turned out, would have to be revised several times. Her first job was in a TV play called “A Kiss for Mr. Lincoln,” for which she wore magnificent (and hurriedly fitted) Civil War–era costumes. David Pressman directed this comedy of manners, and Grace played the role of Mrs. Delight Kennitt, a lively young bride determined to turn her husband’s attention from the boardroom to the bedroom. This idea, of course, was conveyed with the utmost delicacy required
of television at the time. During the evening of the action, Delight and her husband, Henry, host a dinner party for a business associate and his wife on their way to Washington, to meet President Lincoln.

When Delight appears wearing a shiny modern lip gloss, her husband calls her “indecorous” in front of the guests, and later she further shocks him by kissing the business associate. When they are alone, Delight tells Henry the reason for her makeup: “I love being kissed the way a man
should
kiss a woman—not the way a bank president kisses one of his liquid assets. I love being kissed by a man, not stroked by a beard!” In one speech, Grace’s voice rises dramatically: initially she sounds like a wounded doe, then she cries and shouts like an outraged wife; finally she defends her farewell gesture: “It was a kiss for Mr. Lincoln.”

Henry says that he worships and reveres her, but is afraid to take her in his arms. “I don’t want reverence from you, Henry,” she says more calmly. “I want love. I don’t mind being a liquid asset, but you’re freezing me out.” In a final shot, remarkable for live TV in 1951, the couple climbs the stairs to share the same bedroom at last.

Even at this early stage of her career, Grace’s elegance was exploited by the director to suggest that men want to worship rather than love her precisely because she seems to have the cool beauty of a marble statue or the distant bearing of a goddess. But that judgment is revealed to be a fault in perception: her good posture, marmoreal beauty and refined diction should not be equated with remoteness and inaccessibility. This idea—that Grace was one to be revered rather than loved—became a recurring motif in all her films, straight through to
High Society:
“I want to place you on a pedestal and adore you,” says her fiancé, played by John Lund. “I don’t want to be adored—I want to be loved,” she replies plaintively. “That
goes without saying,” is his response. But of course it does not, and her expression reveals her disappointment.

A variation on the same theme occurred in her next TV assignment. Another Philadelphia native, the playwright and screenwriter John L. Balderston, had agreed to adapt his successful 1929 romantic fantasy play
Berkeley Square
, which was broadcast on February 13.
^2*

Based on Henry James’s unfinished tale “The Sense of the Past,” the story tells of a modern man named Peter Standish (played on TV by Richard Greene), who is the descendant of a man with the same name. Standish comes to London to marry his fiancée, Kate Pettigrew (Mary Scott), but he has read his ancestor’s diaries and correspondence and believes he could exchange places with him and go backward in time—which, miraculously, he promptly does. But things do not go so well in the eighteenth century, where he falls in love with Kate’s ancestor Helen, played by Grace.

Her performance was ethereal without being unrealistic, her line readings poignant without sounding arch. In period costume, she again seems to glide across the rooms of the set—all the more remarkable because she had to take meticulously prearranged steps as the moving camera followed. In
Berkeley Square
, Grace portrayed Helen as a kind of chaste Diana, the Roman goddess—ever desired yet ever remote, revered and unloved.

E
ARLY THAT SPRING
, Grace demonstrated that in real life she was not at all ethereal or detached from everyday reality. The African-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker had returned
to the United States after years of European triumph, and she promptly became involved in the struggle for desegregation and the fight against racism in America, which was typified by the refusal of Washington’s National Theatre to sell tickets to nonwhites until that year. During her American tour, Baker refused to play to segregated audiences or to register at segregated hotels. She successfully made a citizen’s arrest of a racist in Los Angeles, and her nationwide fight against prejudice earned her a citation as Outstanding Woman of the Year by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Josephine Baker then came to New York and took some friends to dine at the famous Stork Club, where they were denied a table. Grace was at the club that same evening, and she was so outraged by this rank display of racism that she rushed over to Baker—whom she had never met—took her by the arm and stormed out with her own entire group of friends, telling the press she would never return to the Stork Club; she never did. Grace Kelly and Josephine Baker became friends on the spot.

From her earliest days, Grace had never understood prejudice. She and her siblings had grown up with and remained grateful for the devotion of Fordie, and during her entire life, Grace always remained color-blind. She was also completely indifferent to the sexual orientation of friends and colleagues, many of whom (like Uncle George) were gay and, at that time, constantly risked ridicule and ostracism.

Years later, an American television crew came to document scenes of palace life in Monaco. While filming a sequence of the staff’s children in the royal playground, the director noticed three nonwhite children in the group, and he approached Princess Grace. “The film is to be shown in the American South,” he said, “and it won’t do to see black children playing
with white children. At least while we’re filming, we don’t want them here.”

“Oh, but we do,” Grace replied with a smile.

The incident at the Stork Club earned her some unpleasant epithets then widely used in America for those who befriended nonwhite people. But Grace proudly accompanied Josephine Baker on her return to Europe that season, stopping in London on the way home to see the opening-night performance of N. C. Hunter’s comedy
Waters of the Moon
at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on April 19. She kept the printed playbill and never forgot the legendary performances by two great ladies of the English stage, Edith Evans and Wendy Hiller, whose talents confirmed Grace’s desire for a serious career in the theatre.

B
ACK HOME
, there was a letter waiting from Edith Van Cleve, reporting that Grace was being considered for the role of a scheming playgirl in a Joan Crawford film,
Sudden Fear
, scheduled to begin production in San Francisco and Hollywood early in 1952. Grace rang Edith to say that she would leap at the chance to undertake something so utterly different, but Edith had disappointing news. Gloria Grahame, already cornering the market as Hollywood’s conniving bad girl, had won the part. Anyone familiar with
Sudden Fear—
a crisp thriller that won Crawford her third Oscar nomination—may be tempted to imagine Grace in the role of the murderous Irene Neves. At this stage of her career, she would perhaps have been either memorably terrific or embarrassingly terrible. A deeply evil character, which she never played, may have been beyond her capacity.

But Grace was kept busy with other good projects on offer that spring and summer of 1951. In late May she went to Michigan, where she played Isabelle in the Ann Arbor Drama
Festival’s production of Jean Anouilh’s
Ring Around the Moon.
Following that, for the week beginning Sunday, June 24, she appeared at the Elitch Theatre, Denver, in a comedy by F. Hugh Herbert and in several other plays in repertory until the end of August.

The Elitch family, who founded what became the oldest summer stock theatre company in America, mounted its first production in 1897, starring James (father of Eugene) O’Neill. Sarah Bernhardt was on the Elitch stage as Camille in 1906, and among its many other stars over the next seven decades were Douglas Fairbanks, José Ferrer, Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Fredric March, Antoinette Perry (for whom the Tony Awards were named), Walter Pidgeon, Vincent Price, Robert Redford, Ginger Rogers, Gloria Swanson and Shelley Winters.

Grace consistently deflected questions about her summer in Denver. This may have been because her time offstage was spent almost exclusively with another actor in the company, Gene Lyons. Eight years her senior, he had appeared on Broadway and television and seemed poised for further success. With his angular features, seductive voice and intelligent approach to the craft of acting, he at once impressed Grace, and they began an eighteen-month romance. Alas, like Don Richardson, Lyons was married, although his annulment was being processed; he had also recently ended his affair with the actress Lee Grant. More to the inauspicious point, Lyons could not control his drinking; eventually, alcoholism destroyed his career and caused his death at the age of fifty-three.

But that summer, Lyons captivated Grace as much as did the variety of plays and the genial atmosphere of the Elitch repertory company. Like many women in her amorous circumstances, Grace seems to have told herself that Lyons needed only true love in order to put down the bottle. In this she was very much misguided, but enlightenment took time. In
addition, perhaps because she was only an occasional drinker and always a temperate one, she did not understand Gene’s problem.

In addition, there was a general ignorance about heavy drinking. “In the 1950s, we would not have recognized an alcoholic unless we tripped over him for ten nights running in a Bowery doorway,” Judith Quine recalled accurately. “Alcoholics came from places we didn’t even know existed. The boys we dated or fell in love with had, at worst, ‘a little drinking problem.’ They ‘drank like a fish’ or ‘couldn’t hold their liquor.’”

In the United States there had been a national ban against the manufacture, sale or consumption of all alcoholic beverages by the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which went into effect in January 1920 and lasted until the enactment of the Twenty-first Amendment, in December 1933. From Christmas of that year, drinking excessive amounts of alcohol crashed into vogue in American culture: it was a sign of wealth, and it was stylish and adult to drink (and to smoke); it was a mark of naïveté and inelegance not to. Drunkards of both sexes were considered hilariously funny in movies (and later on TV), and very few people seemed to know that alcoholism was a serious, potentially fatal condition. In this regard, Grace was a daughter of her time, and she apparently thought that Gene’s little problem could eventually be solved. There was, however, an interlude in this quixotic affair.

I
N
J
UNE
, Edith Van Cleve had sent photos of Grace to the MCA talent agency, where Jay Kanter now represented Edith’s former client, Marlon Brando. Based on those prints alone, MCA offered Grace a contract whereby they would represent her exclusively for movies and TV employment. At first, Grace
would not sign it: she did not want to sabotage her hopes for a career on the stage, nor did she wish to be “owned” by any agency.

Kanter, meanwhile, forwarded the photos of Grace to Stanley Kramer, a producer who had recently enjoyed enormous success with
Champion
(1949),
Home of the Brave
(1949) and
The Men
(1950; Brando’s first film). “I was producing half a dozen or more movies every year,” Kramer said years later. “Because of that schedule, I needed actors—lots of them—and I needed them cheaply, too. I was just starting out, and the whole enterprise could have collapsed for lack of cash or a foolish use of cash.” Thrifty to the point of frugality, Kramer signed up gifted directors who would soon be unavailable at the bargain prices he paid for them in the late 1940s and early 1950s—among them Richard Fleischer, Mark Robson and Fred Zinnemann (who had directed
The Men).
Carl Foreman was Kramer’s business partner and primary screenwriter.

Kramer and Foreman were already at work on an untitled western, to be directed by Zinnemann. They had their title:
High Noon
, which had been temporarily used for
Home of the Brave.
The inspiration for the western was an eight-page short story by John W. Cunningham—“The Tin Star,” published in
Collier’s
magazine on December 6, 1947. Foreman bought the rights to it because, as Kramer said, “if I had negotiated the deal as a Hollywood producer, we would have had to pay a whole lot more. So Carl purchased it for something ridiculous.”