High Society

by Donald Spoto

  Regarding Grace’s experiences with Alfred Hitchcock, Oleg’s judgment was sharp: “He was a complete autocrat. He believed anyone on a film (except him) could be replaced. I argued the opposite, the importance of individuals, especially the unique ‘chemistry’ generated by stars like Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. They could not be replaced. Hitchcock believed, though, that he could make anyone a star. He was wrong, and would spend the rest of his career [searching] for an actress who could replace Grace Kelly.” John Michael Hayes agreed. “Had he been able, Hitch would have used Grace in his next ten pictures,” he said in 1981. “I would say that all the actresses he subsequently cast were attempts to retrieve the image and feeling that Hitch carried around so reverentially about Grace.”

  Soon after, Hitchcock tried to fashion Vera Miles into another Grace Kelly, and most notably there was Tippi Hedren, who began working with Hitchcock in 1962. Hitchcock’s colleague, the French director François Truffaut, wrote that “in casting Tippi Hedren in two of his films [The Birds and Marnie], he entertained the notion of transforming her into another Grace Kelly.”2* And there were others. He always told them a variant of something like “I will make you into the next Grace Kelly,” and to the press he said the same about this or that ingénue: “I will make her into the next Grace Kelly.” Conversely, he had no interest at all in women who could not be refashioned, or in whom he found no “chemistry,” as he said—gifted actresses like Doris Day and Julie Andrews.

  Hitchcock’s attempt to re-create the image of a lost love is the premise of his most personal film—Vertigo. In the climactic moments of that spiritual testament to Hitch’s own soul, Scottie (James Stewart) confronts Judy (Kim Novak) about her exploitative lover, who turned her into the replica of another woman: “He made you over, didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over—only better. Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words. Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and what to say? You were a very apt pupil!”

  Such was Alfred Hitchcock’s conduct with several of his most talented leading ladies, his “pupils,” after Grace. He tried to control their lives within and outside the studio, designing their personal as well as their professional wardrobes, and attempting to dictate where they went and with whom. But the more he acted this way, the more young women fled from his pathetic need to dominate. He was a brilliant artist, but a lonely and self-destructive man.

  Vertigo was released in 1958, when Grace was a wife and mother and far removed from Hollywood. She agreed that it was among Hitch’s masterworks, and then she paused and said, “I thought it was also very sad.”

  1* See The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock and Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies.

  2* Truffaut, who knew Hitchcock for twenty years, published a book-length series of interviews with the director in 1967; it was revised and expanded in 1983, three years after Hitchcock’s death and a year before his own.

  EIGHT

  Crisis

  I want to be at peace with myself.

  —GRACE (AS PRINCESS ALEXANDRA) IN THE SWAN

  ON OCTOBER 10, 1954, SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY entered the New York Hospital for Special Surgery. Ten days later, doctors performed a risky operation called a lumbar fusion, which was necessary to prevent permanent disability. The surgery itself was life-threatening, for the patient also suffered from the debilitating effects of Addison’s disease; indeed, after the surgery, Kennedy contracted severe infections that were resistant to antibiotics. His parents and a priest were summoned, and his wife, Jacqueline, kept constant vigil at his bedside. No one expected the senator to survive.

  The gravity of Kennedy’s condition was not detailed in the daily press, but the news traveled in New York society. When Kennedy’s condition improved slightly, Grace sent a note to Jackie, asking if she could visit the hospital. Mrs. Kennedy thought this was a marvelous idea, and she invited Grace to arrive wearing a nurse’s uniform, for Jack had complained that all the nurses were homely old crones. Grace arrived to find a platoon of bustling attendants hovering over a bone-thin, frail and ashen patient; he was thirty-seven, but he looked much older—nothing like the picture of glowing energy normally presented by the media.

  All in white and wearing the regulation nurse’s cap, Grace entered the room, but Kennedy was heavily medicated and could neither recognize nor respond to her. “I must be losing it,” Grace whispered to Jackie as she departed. Their little stunt had failed, but the actress and the senator’s wife became fast friends, and later, Princess Grace and Prince Rainier frequently visited President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy at the White House.1*

  AS HER FRIEND Judith Balaban Quine recalled, Grace usually thrived on excitement, chaos and overcrowded scheduling. “Grace was mature, and prematurely grown-up, yet we loved in her the dizzy, dopy, melting and swooning schoolgirl who was never out of sight for long.” Sometimes Grace appeared withdrawn and indifferent in public, but with friends like Judy and Rita, she was warm, demonstrative and full of fun. Still, there remained throughout her adult life a constant, if mostly hidden, undercurrent of melancholy. She rarely seemed depressed and was fundamentally hopeful—but close friends sensed her subtle streak of wistfulness, or an occasional assault of “the blues.” The precise source of this trait in her nature is difficult to locate. Without her conscious awareness, it may have had to do with that element in the Catholic soul that is pessimistic about the world but optimistic about God.

  No one who knew her believed that Grace felt religious guilt about her premarital sexual experiences, which were strictly proscribed by her religious education. She had, as she admitted, a tendency to fall in love repeatedly, and her failure to find the right man who would be her husband and the father of her children—and who would please her family, too—haunted her more than ever by the autumn of 1954. This was a different kind of guilt, of which she could not easily free herself, for it concerned not something she had done, but what she had failed to find in life. Grace marked her twenty-fifth birthday in November 1954, and while almost all her friends and relatives were married or engaged, she remained unattached. Hence, she was as reluctant to abandon hope for a life with Oleg as she was hesitant to finalize plans for the marriage. The unofficial engagement and their public courtship continued that season and into the new year. Just as Grace remained adamant in her refusal to accept Metro’s offer of roles she considered unappealing, so she became more and more dependent on the thought of marriage to Oleg as a refuge from Hollywood and the Kellys.

  On September 28, 1954, he sent his usual weekly bouquet of flowers to her Manhattan apartment. She kept the enclosed card, signed simply “O,” on which he had written, “Io ti amo e ti voglio sposare”—“I love you and I want to marry you.”

  MEETINGS WITH Metro executives required Grace’s presence in Hollywood in late autumn, but the discussions with Dore Schary and his colleagues were disappointing on both sides. “Still don’t know what the hell is going on or when I’ll work,” Grace wrote to Prudy.

  From a suite at the Bel-Air hotel, she wrote to Oleg:

  Darling—

  I can’t wait to see you, now that I know I want to marry you. We have so much to learn about each other—there are so many things I want you to know about me. We must be patient with each other and go slowly without wanting results too quickly. But we need each other and we must be completely honest, at all times.

  I feel for the first time ready to approach love and marriage in an adult way. I never thought I could be capable of thinking and feeling this way. But in this last year, six pictures have taken so much from me physically and emotionally that it will take a while to recover. Please, darling, try to understand and to help me—I love you more every day and I hope you feel that way too. One time you said to me that you couldn’t love me any more than you did then. That upset me terribly, because I so hope that we shall never stop growing and developing our min
ds and souls and love for God and each other, and that each day will bring us closer.

  I love you and want to be your wife.

  Grace

  Grace was clearly in crisis—certainly more so than ever. A summary of her life, written to accompany a long photo essay and approved by her son Prince Albert for publication in 2006, notes that Grace was, at Christmas 1954,

  physically exhausted and emotionally weary … sadder than ever. The pitiless California world that she never liked now seemed to her like hell. The “gentle Miss Kelly” became capricious, irritable and volatile. Fits of tears, a loss of appetite—this crisis was the worst anyone who knew her had seen. In California, she was isolated and everything around her seemed strange. Her life, her friends, her family and the film world disgusted her. She was even thinking of giving up her career, a crushing machine where only the box office mattered. Hollywood was the source of all she detested. She didn’t want to live there any more or be subjected to the affronts of the headlines and the harassment of photographers. Nostalgic for New York, she left Los Angeles suddenly.

  As Judith Quine said years later, “At that time, she wanted to build a happy married life—but she knew she couldn’t do it hopping around the world, starring in films.”

  When Rita’s work and imminent second marriage took her to New York, she and Grace gave up the West Hollywood apartment. With that, Grace signaled her desire to put California behind her by moving to a larger Manhattan residence. This she regarded as a major step in her life, for it involved the total redecoration of a grand New York apartment, which spanned the entire seventh floor of 988 Fifth Avenue. Grace may well have been anticipating her married life here, for it was a generously proportioned home.

  With four exposures, ten-foot ceilings and crown moldings from the original 1925 décor, the apartment had a private elevator landing that opened onto a foyer. From there the apartment spread to four thousand square feet and eleven rooms, with four bedrooms, four and a half baths, a kitchen and laundry, living and dining rooms (both with wood-burning fireplaces), a library, two maids’ rooms and no fewer than twelve spacious closets. There were extraordinary views of Central Park and the West Side, and vistas all the way north to the George Washington Bridge. The rent for this apartment was among the highest charged in New York that year—$633.69 a month.2* She moved in on February 1, 1955.

  Grace invited decorator George Stacey to help locate new and old furniture, and together they found French antiques appropriate to the pale blue and off-white walls. She ordered fresh flowers to be delivered twice weekly, and she began to host small cocktail parties and dinners. To help with her busy life, she engaged a full-time secretary who moved into one of the suites. “I love this apartment,” Grace told a friend one day. “But am I going to be living in it alone for the next twenty years, going back and forth from Los Angeles and movie locations?” Her single status was more bothersome that season: “I have been falling in love since I was fourteen—and my parents have never approved of anyone I was in love with.”

  SHE WAS awakened on the morning of February 12 with very good news: she had been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best actress of 1954, for her performance in The Country Girl. The other nominees were Dorothy Dandridge (for Carmen Jones), Judy Garland (for A Star Is Born), Audrey Hepburn (for Sabrina) and Jane Wyman (for Magnificent Obsession). Grace was, as the saying goes, cautiously optimistic: she very much admired the competition and she knew she could not depend on the backing of her home studio for encouraging publicity. In January she had again traveled to Culver City—at her own expense—for two days of meetings with Schary, but their discussions ended at an impasse.

  Meanwhile, Henry Hathaway, her director on Fourteen Hours, wanted her back at Fox for a drama called The Bottom of the Bottle. Metro said no. George Stevens, at Warner Bros., was assembling his cast for an epic called Giant, based on the sprawling Edna Ferber novel. “I am reliably told,” Ferber wrote from New York to the producer Henry Ginsberg at Warners, “that Grace K. is very anxious to play Leslie [in Giant], but Metro wants her for a Spencer Tracy picture, which she definitely does not want to do. As she now does pretty much as she pleases, I think she might do Giant if properly approached. This comes from someone here whom [sic] you know is very close to Tracy [i.e., Katharine Hepburn].” Metro said no again.

  “Then they wanted to put me in a movie about Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Grace recalled years later. “I was twenty-five, and the story occurred when she was over forty and ill. I read the script and told them I was too young, and they said, ‘No problem—we’ll make her younger and prettier!’ But I insisted that the whole beauty of the story was that this wonderful romance happened to an older woman who was fragile. ‘No problem,’ they said again. ‘She’ll be just as happy at twenty, and healthy!’ You just couldn’t reason with these men!” When Grace left Los Angeles for New York, she was told by an executive that she was persona non grata in Culver City. This pronouncement evoked no tears.

  She was not at all surprised, therefore, when, on March 3, Metro sent Grace a notice that she had been put on suspension. Her refusal of multiple offers had pushed Schary and company to the breaking point, and she was told that her salary would be withheld until she came back to work on assignment; if she went to another studio, she would be “in danger of grave consequences”—a phrase governments ordinarily reserve for the threat of nuclear attack.

  Then, without consulting her agents or attorneys, Grace took a very clever public relations step. Aware of her positive public image, and with her Oscar nomination still fresh in the news, she immediately informed the press about Metro’s action against her—in advance of any public statement by the studio. When Schary was asked to comment, he could only rather sheepishly confirm her assertion.3*

  With that, Grace took her sister Peggy (whose marriage was foundering on the shoals of incompatibility and in a storm of alcoholic brawls), and together they left for a quiet Jamaican holiday. There they welcomed the photographer Howell Conant, who had already taken photos of Grace for the April issue of Photoplay magazine. In the pellucid waters of the Caribbean, on a private beach and in the sisters’ bright, uncluttered rented villa, she and Conant together broke the mold of the standard-issue celebrity image. The results, published in Collier’s magazine on June 24, were a landmark.

  Up to this point in Hollywood history, the studios had employed their own photographers and had meticulously controlled the dissemination of actors’ images, which were close to pure fantasy. The public could not get enough of the glamour photos taken, retouched and brilliantly corrected by such geniuses as Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Eugene Richee, Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, John Engstead, Laszlo Willinger and a platoon of others who fed the dream machine. But Grace Kelly and Howell Conant had new ideas: they wanted to present her as a living human being—not a museum artifact—and the candid shots he took of her were just that: unposed, spontaneous, printed without cosmetic touch-ups or artificially flattering lights.

  No star before Grace had ever posed with her hair wet as she rose from the water (an idea that Grace took from the pool scene in The Bridges at Toko-Ri). No star had ever been seen wearing her glasses. No star had been photographed without makeup, wearing an oversized shirt that did nothing to show off her figure. No star would have been shown munching an orange or lounging with a pillow. “You trusted Grace’s beauty,” Conant wrote in an extraordinary book of photos published in 1992. “You knew it wasn’t built from clothes and makeup. In New York, Grace came over to my studio dressed in a sweater, a skirt and loafers. In Jamaica, she was no different: her hair [was] pulled back, [and she] dressed in a simple boy’s shirt. This was Grace: natural, unpretentious.” A close friendship developed, and Howell Conant became Grace’s favorite photographer in the United States and Monaco up to the time of her death.

  IN MARCH, Grace prepared for her appearance at the Academy Awards. As custom required, she went to
Metro’s wardrobe department for a consultation—after all, she was still under contract, even if she had been suspended from working. On the spot, Grace was told that she was unwelcome, an outlaw on the studio premises—a wholly unexpected, discourteous and shortsighted corporate gesture. Executives might have reasoned that The Country Girl was a Paramount picture, and that they need not concern themselves with promoting her in any way. With her usual unruffled poise, Grace smiled, adjusted her white gloves and asked if she could make a telephone call.

  In her Paramount workroom, Edith Head answered her private line and then put aside several obligations to work from Grace’s own choice of fabric and design to come up with the clothes for Oscar night: a slim, floor-length aquamarine gown of French duchesse satin with a matching cloak and pastel blue slippers. White opera-length gloves completed the outfit.

  At the Academy’s rite of spring on March 30, William Holden stepped up to the podium to announce the award for best actress of 1954. Opening the envelope, he smiled broadly—“Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl!” This was the ultimate professional accolade, preceded by similar honors already tendered by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the Golden Globe), the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle; she was also nominated by BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. (Among seven nominations for the picture, George Seaton also won an Oscar, for best screenplay.)

  When her name was read, Grace leaned over to Paramount executive Don Hartman: “Are you sure? Are you sure?” She went up to accept the statuette from Holden, stepped up to the microphone and quietly spoke her brief acknowledgment: “The thrill of this moment keeps me from saying what I really feel. I can only say thank you with all my heart to all who made this possible for me. Thank you.” Backstage, clutching her Oscar and adjusting the yellow rosebuds she had inserted at the last minute into her blond chignon, Grace Kelly wept. At the victory dinner later, she was the winner everyone wanted to meet and congratulate. That night, Life magazine settled a deal to put her on the cover of the April 11 issue, wearing the same outfit. She returned to her suite at the Bel-Air hours later—“just the two of us, Oscar and I. It was the loneliest moment of my life.” Three thousand miles away, Jack Kelly watched the Academy Awards on television and shook his head: “I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe Grace won!”