High Society

by Donald Spoto

In the final moments of the movie, when Amy takes up a gun and shoots the man who is about to kill her husband, High Noon is not making a statement about Amy’s abandonment of her pacifist principles; on the contrary, it is asserting that sometimes violence occurs as a tragic, unwilled necessity. Amy shoots the man not to kill him, but to save her husband; it’s a classic example of the double-effect principle: she wants to save a life, not to destroy one. Unlike the gang and the townsfolk, but very much like her husband, she does not take up arms to seek revenge. All this may be read on Grace’s features in the last moments of the picture.

  In High Noon, she did precisely what the role called for: she expressed youth’s callow first blush and its first encounter with the wickedness that is always present and ready to annihilate. She conveys the sense that Amy is enduring a kind of moral education, just like the people of Hadleyville.

  Zinnemann and Foreman were nominated by the Academy as best director and screenwriter of 1952 (the year of High Noon’s release), and several Oscar statuettes were distributed—for best performance by an actor (Cooper); for film editing (Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad); for best song (Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington); and for best score (Tiomkin). In later years, awards worldwide were added to the list. These honors were unusual for a movie in the western genre.

  As Zinnemann said years later, High Noon “seems to mean different things to different people. Kramer, who had worked closely with Foreman on the script, said it was ’about a town that died because no one there had the guts to defend it’ … [and] Foreman saw it as an allegory about his own experience of political persecution in the McCarthy era. With due respect, I felt this to be a narrow point of view. First of all, I saw it simply as a great movie yarn, full of enormously interesting people. I vaguely sensed deeper meanings in it; but only later did it dawn on me that this was not a regular Western myth. To me, it was the story of a man who must make a decision according to his conscience. His town—symbol of a democracy gone soft—faces a horrendous threat to its people’s way of life. It is a story that still happens everywhere, every day.”5* Grace was mostly ignored by reviewers; when her name appeared, it was mentioned with other cast members who were “the best of many in key roles,” as the New York Times noted.

  GRACE HAD no reason to remain in Hollywood after the completion of High Noon: the picture was not released until the summer of 1952, and no offers of further movie work were forthcoming—and so, as she later said, she hurried to New York, where she resumed private studies.

  Sanford Meisner, then forty-six, was one of the most influential acting teachers of the twentieth century. Since 1940 he had taught in the acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in Manhattan and then, as director of it, he continued to develop a technique until his retirement in 1990. Whereas Lee Strasberg emphasized “emotion memory” exercises, Meisner encouraged actors to imagine the character’s history, thoughts and feelings in the text (rather than one’s own history, thoughts and feelings, à la Strasberg). When Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis founded the Actors Studio in 1947, Meisner (not, at first, Strasberg) was invited to teach there. When Strasberg became director of the Actors Studio in 1951, Meisner returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse.

  “Less is more” was one of Meisner’s mantras. “Silence has myriad meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.” Most of all, Meisner urged his students to think of acting a role as “living truthfully under given imaginary circumstances.”

  For a year beginning in the autumn of 1951, Grace studied several times weekly with Meisner. Training in voice and body movement had been part of the curriculum at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but now Grace was exposed to a different technique, aimed (as Meisner insisted) on “seeing into, understanding and breathing life into a stage character. The thing about acting that moves audiences is the emphatic sense of the reality of the human being who is portrayed, greatly enhanced but not dependent on the excellent diction with which the lines are spoken. Students need a body as flexible as a gymnast’s, a voice as malleable and responsive as a singer’s, and a director who understands and can communicate the way of life which gave birth to the play in the first place.”

  Meisner’s technique also asked an actor to sit quietly, waiting until a flash of imagination impelled a fresh understanding before reciting dialogue. This was no bogus mysticism, much less was it merely subjective comprehension without guidelines. There were specific exercises developed for each student, no matter the text assigned. Over time, the Meisner Technique influenced three generations of successful actors, writers and directors—among them Bob Fosse, Diane Keaton, Sidney Lumet, David Mamet, Steve McQueen, Arthur Miller, Gregory Peck, Sydney Pollack, Marian Seldes and Joanne Woodward.

  But Grace’s life was not all work. Gene Lyons had followed her to New York at the end of the Elitch season, and there the romance continued. When her friend Prudy Wise wrote to ask, “Are you still in love with old Gene?” Grace replied emphatically that autumn, “YES! We had our first fight last night, but all is alright again.”

  Nor was her life all work plus the vicissitudes of passion. Grace’s television career resumed at full speed in New York that autumn. On November 21, she appeared in a teleplay called “Brand for the Burning,” and on December 10, in “Smith Serves.” Somerset Maugham introduced the latter on the television series that bore his name.

  In “Smith Serves,” Grace was listed third in a cast featuring Eddie Albert and Joan Chandler. Set in New York in 1895, the story tells of a man who wants to marry an old flame—but when she learns that he has become a South Dakota farmer instead of a glamorous entrepreneur, she declines the offer. He then meets the woman’s housemaid, who was once a farm girl. They are mutually attracted, but she does not want to go back to a rural life: she is studying to be a secretary in New York. Enter Grace, as a sophisticated city girl who says that she loves her family’s farm north of New York City, and that she loves to ride horses there—thus implying that she might be the answer to the man’s search. But she is actually the farmer’s longtime platonic friend, about to be married; she had gladly agreed to be a ploy to arouse the housemaid’s jealousy. The ruse works, and the maid will marry the gentleman farmer.

  “Smith Serves” is a slight but effective play, convincingly performed by Eddie Albert with a wry combination of the “goshdarn” country boy and the savvy, successful businessman. Joan Chandler as the housemaid—dark-haired, poised and quick with a mordant observation—is the perfect foil for Grace, who enters the cluttered, claustrophobic house like a fresh breeze. She gave an agreeably amusing performance that indicated an inchoate gift for high comedy.

  THE NEW year 1952 was a rush of activity. Classes with Meisner continued four days a week during that year, and Grace rehearsed and performed in no fewer than fifteen live television programs, eleven of them before the summer.6* In “The Big Build Up,” she portrayed Claire Conroy, a classy New York star who has come to Hollywood to be promoted, or “built up,” so we are led to believe, by an old boyfriend, now a powerful press agent (played by Richard Derr). But in fact he is her estranged husband. The story then flashes back to happier days, when they encouraged each other’s professional aspirations. Back in the present, the story concludes with touching ambiguity.

  Most remarkable about Grace’s performance here, as so often in her dozens of TV roles, is her complete artlessness, the lack of pretension and the naturalness of her gestures and her diction. These qualities, critics have complained in recent years, were sometimes absent during key moments of High Noon and her subsequent movies. If this was occasionally the case in her first three pictures, there is an easy explanation: “To tell the truth, I was intimidated at first, working with directors like Zinnemann, Ford and Hitchcock—they were among the big guns of the movies in those days, and they were my first directors [after her brief appearance in Fourteen Hours].”

  In addition, Zinnemann, Ford and Hitchcoc
k frequently asked their casts for multiple takes of a shot, and Grace—convinced that these were her fault and not, for example, owing to problems with lighting or sound recording—became, for a while, ever more self-conscious, which in turn sometimes made her performance less spontaneous and credible. Zinnemann’s admitted inability to help a newcomer, Ford’s grumpy machismo and Hitchcock’s lifelong failure to compliment an actor on a job well done—even when he liked what he saw—were qualities that worried the inexperienced Grace. As it happened, it was precisely her trio of roles for Hitchcock that erased every bit of artifice, but that took time.

  After a week of rehearsals, television plays were presented live, and there was no time to correct accidents. “It was like living on the edge of a volcano or in the midst of a hurricane,” Grace recalled. “We didn’t even think about mistakes, we just muddled along with them. Most of the time it was quite funny, and our biggest problem was not to burst out laughing. Once I had a scene in bed. I had to wear all my clothes beneath the covers, so I could leap out and run to the next scene on a nearby set. But the TV camera didn’t cut away—so there I was, leaping out of bed with all my clothes on and dashing off-camera to the next room. The viewers at home must have wondered what the hell was going on.

  “The same year I did ‘The Big Build Up,’ I was in ‘The Cricket on the Hearth.’ In one scene, a wonderful old English character actor and I were coming to bring a steaming hot pie to an orphan on Christmas Day. We were told to wave at the boy through a window, but the pie was too hot to hold in one hand, so I set it down for a moment—and the old actor stepped right into it. He came limping into the door of the ‘cottage’ with his left shoe stuck in a pie—and simply said to the other actors, as if everything was perfectly natural, ‘Here’s a lovely hot pie for all of you—Merry Christmas!’”

  THREE WEEKS after “The Big Build Up,” on February 10, Grace appeared in Walter Bernstein’s hour-long TV version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Rich Boy.” She had much anticipated this job: she would again be directed by Delbert Mann (of “Bethel Merriday”); the role of Paula Legendre was both challenging and appealing; and, perhaps most of all, her leading man was none other than Gene Lyons, in the role of Anson Hunter.

  Set in New York during the Roaring Twenties, “The Rich Boy” opens in the autumn, at one of Anson’s chic Manhattan parties, where he meets Paula and her mother, who are visiting New York “for the season” from their home in California. Paula quickly falls in love with Anson, but soon she has to hurry back to the West Coast. Before her departure, Grace speaks with great warmth and understanding:

  PAULA (GRACE). You drink a lot, don’t you?

  ANSON (LYONS). I suppose so.

  The dialogue could have been spoken between them in real life.

  ANSON. We’re both rich.

  PAULA. It’s nice, isn’t it?

  There are very long kisses between them in “The Rich Boy”—unusual for TV in 1952—and home viewers may have wondered why those moments seemed so convincing.

  In subsequent scenes with Paula, Anson is always polite and courtly, but he is gross, indecent, and drunk with others—a pathetically louche character ruined by privilege, an absence of value and a failure of purpose. Each time Paula and Anson are together, she sees more drunken sprees, and she is warned by her disapproving mother (as Margaret Kelly would have sternly advised Grace).

  PAULA. You have one idea about life and I have another. Maybe we’re too far apart. Why do you have to drink so much?

  ANSON. Because I want to!

  Time passes, and they have been engaged for eight months, but he is in no hurry to set a wedding date. Soon Paula fully sees the danger, and she breaks their engagement. Later he learns that she is engaged to marry in Florida. Anson finds her there, and the old spark is reignited in him. But Paula has been “worn away inside” after the long wait for Anson to reform himself, and she won’t accept him. He returns to New York and begins an affair with another young woman, but he breaks this off: “I don’t love you one bit,” he tells her cruelly. “You better wait for someone who does.”

  Anson then learns that Paula has married. He becomes richer than ever, but he cannot control his drinking. In time, Paula divorces her husband and happily remarries, while Anson has not been able to have one enduring relationship. By chance, he meets Paula, her new husband and her three children in New York. In a moment of privacy, she gently reminds Anson that their romance was nothing more than an infatuation—that it wasn’t good for either of them and never could be. Then the stock market collapses in 1929, signaling more disaster for Anson Hunter. Thus the story ends.

  Considering the lives of the real-life leading duo, the teleplay of “The Rich Boy” is astonishingly autobiographical—as much about Grace and Gene as it was about Fitzgerald himself—and it is tempting to imagine their conversations when they rehearsed privately. Indeed, the script is a virtual template for the doomed romance of these two actors.

  ON MARCH 22, the New York press carried a small item, announcing that Grace was joining rehearsals for a new Broadway play by William Marchant, starring Neil Hamilton, John Drew Devereaux and Dorothy Stickney. This rather wan comedy, To Be Continued, opened at the Booth Theatre on April 23 and closed, after thirteen performances, on May 2. Grace knew the play was troubled when she accepted the role of Janet (“a very dignified, attractive young lady,” according to the text), the daughter of a philanderer. But every theatre credit was important toward her goal—even a part that kept her onstage for less than three minutes. Her only function in the play was to dissuade her father’s mistress of twenty-five years from accepting her mother’s invitation to meet:

  JANET (GRACE). My mother wants to prove to herself that her husband has never cared one iota for her. She wants to hear it from your lips. She wants to see it in your eyes.

  DOLLY (DOROTHY STICKNEY). I didn’t know that.

  JANET. I’m afraid it will turn her into one of those lonely, unloved women you see everywhere nowadays. Her foundations are terribly shaky—really shaky. I’m afraid she might go to pieces. Before you see my mother, will you please think of the consequences?

  Thinking of the consequences might have prevented the playwright from trying to make a drawing-room comedy out of a painful marital situation. The New York critics (who did not mention Grace in their reviews) noted that there were too many solemn moments for a fey treatment of infidelity, and an excess of virtuous looks instead of mocking glances.

  That summer, after working in several more TV dramas, Grace hastened to the Playhouse in the Park, Philadelphia, where she appeared in two comedies. In mid-August she returned to the Bucks County Playhouse, playing the plucky young secretary in love with a depressed, middle-aged playwright in Samson Raphaelson’s 1934 comedy, Accent on Youth. There seem to have been no reviews of or news items about these productions.

  She then returned to New York, where she received a call from her agent. An English movie executive named Sidney Bernstein, then in partnership with Alfred Hitchcock, wanted to meet her, for they could not find the right leading lady for a picture called I Confess, soon to begin filming in Quebec. “I met Mr. Bernstein for lunch at his hotel,” Grace recalled, “but I guess I didn’t make a very good impression.” A fine Swedish actress named Anita Björk was soon engaged for the leading role in I Confess, but she arrived with an illegitimate child in her arms and a lover at her side, and was forthwith turned away by Jack Warner. Instead, the part went to Anne Baxter.

  Grace then began rehearsals for one of her most successful TV appearances, again demonstrating her superb gift for a special kind of romantic comedy of mistaken identities. Convoluted and improbable but engaging and lively, the show was called “Recapture,” and in it Grace received top billing on TV for the first time—perhaps because of the recent release of High Noon.

  As director Ted Post recalled, “I thought Grace’s voice was not yet blended with her stately posture—it was still high, a little girlish a
nd breathless. But I said nothing, certain that things would improve during rehearsals. Then one day her mother came to the studio and took her aside: ‘Darling, your speech sounds a little affected.’ And Grace replied, ‘I know, Mother—I’m working on it.’ And work on it she did. By the time of the broadcast, everything was much more natural.” For the moment, the problem, one might say, was Grace’s immersion in a variety of forms. She needed to find a palette of modulated expressions for films and an unforced projection for stage plays. But on live TV she had to lower her register while maintaining complete clarity. At first, therefore, her efforts produced what her mother heard as a certain fastidious affectation.

  The tendency to exaggeratedly polite speech was soon erased, thanks mostly to Sandy Meisner’s exercises. By the time of “The Kill,” a western broadcast on September 22, Grace’s performance was entirely credible, and the character was nothing like Amy Fowler Kane. The director, Franklin Schaffner, was swiftly extending the effects possible with a moving camera on live TV, for which he directed more than two hundred shows before going on to Hollywood, where he directed Planet of the Apes (1968) and Patton (1970).

  In “The Kill,” Grace plays a woman married to a man with a frightful temper. They go to a local saloon, where he meets an old flame, now married, and then he starts a fight with men who are stealing from his irrigation system. A young man is killed in the mêlée, and the husband flees. When the men approach the wife in search of him, she scares them off with a rifle—a strong scene by Grace, who liked playing such a different woman. “She seemed much more at home with a firearm than Amy Fowler did!” Grace recalled. “I had fun with ‘The Kill.’” In her role as a frontier heroine, Grace became a kind of Minnie (in Belasco’s play and Puccini’s opera The Girl of the Golden West), and her portrait of an anxious wife, attempting to keep men at bay with a heavy rifle, is both moving and suspenseful.