by Thilo Wydra
According to Grace, Green Fire was the only dark mark on the map of her filmography. She described working on the film as “a depressing experience.”196 Stewart Granger later commented that she was often unhappy during filming and was delighted after the final take was finished.
In the middle of filming Green Fire, Grace hired a private tutor to help her learn French. She already knew that within a few weeks she would be in the Riviera, standing before Robert Burks’s camera. Although there was no contract yet and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had not yet granted permission for another loan of its actress to another studio, Grace had no doubt that she would be involved with the next Hitchcock movie. Hitch had secretly informed Grace that he could conceive of no one in the role but her. Some years later, he confirmed that from the very beginning, he had intended Grace for this part, ever since he had purchased the rights to David Dodge’s novel. Grace was certain that now she would again, for a fourth time, act in a film for Paramount: “I finished Green Fire one morning at eleven, I went into the dubbing room at one—and at six o’clock I left for France.”197
To Catch a Thief
(1955)
She never distanced herself from others. Even so, as soon as she came on the set, everyone fell silent.
—Cary Grant198
He would have used Grace in the next ten pictures he made. I would say that all the actresses he cast subsequently were attempts to retrieve the image and feeling that Hitchcock carried around so reverentially about Grace.
—John Michael Hayes199
In the summer of 1954, filming for To Catch a Thief took place on the Côte d’Azur, followed by Paramount Studios in Hollywood for all interior scenes. Filming lasted three months, from May 31 through September 4. The first stage of filming incorporated various locations around the Riviera: the elegant Carlton Hotel and the Villa Goldman in Cannes, sites in Tourrettes and La Turbie, in Eze and Gourdon, in Nice, in Cagnes-sur-Mer and Monte Carlo. Of course, some scenes were shot in the colorful Marché des Fleurs, the historic flower market in the center of Nice. It was a cinematic sightseeing tour par excellence.
On August 13, after departing from France and resuming filming in Hollywood, the team celebrated Hitchcock’s fiftieth birthday on the set of the final costume ball. There was champagne and a large cake, as was the tradition for the master’s birthday. As always, Hitchcock greeted and reacted to this event with exaggerated surprise and humility. Oleg Cassini was present for this event, and he provided the following description. When Hitch’s thoroughly British secretary—most likely his long-term, personal assistant Peggy Robertson (1916–1998)200 whom Cassini for whatever reason did not name—clapped her hands to gather everyone for the cutting of the cake, she experienced a Freudian slip in her very carefully clipped English:
“Ladies and gentlemen, could I have your attention for a moment? Would you all come into the other room, please, and have a piece of Mr. Hitchcake’s cock?”201 According to Oleg Cassini, this was a hilariously comic moment—at least for the majority of those present . . .
On a black-and-white photograph from that day, Hitch can be seen blowing out the candles on his cake, while Grace stands immediately to his left and watches with interest. He is holding her with his left hand. It is a very lovely moment. A moment that reveals something very familiar and platonic despite the rumored characterization of Hitchcock’s film set. It resonates with something that has nothing to do with the banal cliché of a romantic connection between the director and his main actress. This photograph exemplifies the exceptionally good relationship between Grace’s favorite director and his favorite actress. As Grace Kelly once explained about Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, “I feel there is so much affection between him and his wife, that he can do no wrong.”202
With great excitement, Grace flew to Paris on May 24, 1954. There she went shopping at Hermés and then took the night train (the Blue Train) to Cannes. Alfred Hitchcock picked her up at the train station. However, before leaving for Paris, Grace had sent Oleg Cassini a meaningful postcard from Hollywood after the disastrous filming of Green Fire had come to an end. It contained only one sentence: “Those who love me shall follow me.”203 And indeed, Oleg Cassini did follow Grace Kelly. Along with Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, Cary Grant and his wife Betsy Drake, and Grace, Cassini too stayed in the elegant Carlton Hotel.
After the long days on set and even on their days off, the six of them often went out to eat together. Alfred Hitchcock may have been a knowledgeable art collector, but above all he considered himself a pleasure-loving gourmet and wine connoisseur. He always carefully selected the restaurants, as well as the menus. As Oleg Cassini recalled, most of the time, he picked three star restaurants, if not higher.204 Cassini had never before met someone who took so much joy from eating. At this time Hitchcock was again on a diet—at his heaviest, during the filming of Rebecca, he weighed 330 pounds—and he drank only water during the hours of filming. In the evening, he ate lavishly.
“What didn’t he eat?” quipped the actress Brigitte Auber rakishly, remembering with amusement the various meals had while filming on the Riviera.205 The evening meals ran like small ceremonies under Hitchcock’s attentively strict leadership. At the table, he resided like a self-satisfied master of ceremonies, which paralleled the way he would sit like Buddha in the director’s chair on the set, holding all the threads in his hand. He loved to surprise others, but he himself wanted to avoid being surprised at all costs, even by a dish that he had not previously seen or tasted. Unforeseen developments on set were a horror of nightmarish proportions. These dinners for six, whether in the hotel restaurant in the Côte d’Azur or in small, out-of-the-way restaurants in the foothills of the maritime Alps, were unforgettable to everyone involved. Grace would greatly miss these in the coming years.
Five years later, in a very personal letter from April 14, 1959—the first surviving letter from Hitchcock to Grace, preserved in the Palace Archives in Monaco—Alfred Hitchcock recalled their time together on the French Riviera and their various lavish dinners: “I miss the Foie Gras in Cannes. We have all the original recipes, but it is just not the same. How is your weight?”206
Besides Hitchcock’s nostalgic look into the past, this letter is particularly notable because it speaks to both the professional and the private aspects of his life, what moves him and occupies him. It is a further indication of the close connection between the two artists. The letter goes on to tell about the birth of his third granddaughter, Kathleen, on February 27, 1959, and about Alma’s battle with advanced cancer. And finally, Hitchcock wrote about the canceling of the long-anticipated No Bail for the Judge, which was to be filmed in London. Audrey Hepburn was Hitchcock’s intended actress for this film, and in June, her movie The Nun’s Story (1959; Director: Fred Zinnemann) had its world premiere in New York. After reading the screenplay, she was very concerned about the lasting, negative impact that a rape scene set in Hyde Park could have on her image as an innocent doe, a classically stylish woman in Givenchy. Ultimately, Hepburn backed out of the project, and the London Hitchcock-Hepburn film was never produced.
For Grace Kelly, the time spent with Oleg Cassini was the best time during this very relaxed, third and last film made with Hitchcock. She enjoyed Oleg’s affection and attention, and she enjoyed the work with her favorite director. The work took place on one of the most beautiful coasts in Europe. She could be herself within the privacy of close friends. It was a small, familiar circle. This summer was singular in Grace’s life. There would be no other like it again.
Oleg Cassini died on March 17, 2006, on Long Island, New York, at the age of ninety-two. Until his death, he endlessly praised Grace. Whenever he was interviewed—a prime example being his sit-down with publicist Gero von Boehm—and asked about other things in his life, such as his time as the personal couturier for First Lady Jackie Kennedy, he often changed the subject and returned again and again to her—to Grace, whom he described as his great love.
Here are some of Gero von Boehm’s unpublished notes regarding his interview with Oleg:
September 5, 2001. Mid-morning in Cassini’s townhouse, which is like a great stage set. A mixture of Venetian Palazzo (with fake windows!), English country house, and Russian royal palace. I believe that his father was an ambassador of the czar to America. Everywhere there are little tables with silver-framed pictures, mostly of himself, however it is immediately noticeable how often Grace Kelly appears. All sorts of altars. Cassini is amazingly lively, but he does not want to divulge much about Jackie [Kennedy]. He keeps talking about Grace, who was the love of his life. He has never recovered from the shock of her completely surprising him by ending their relationship. The ideal woman in every way. Her beauty, her perfect body, her intelligence—she had inspired him as no other woman had. She had driven him to his greatest achievements. He complains about Grace’s mother, who had always stood between the two of them. At least he told the story of Jackie and [her sister] Lee, and how Onassis booted Lee off the boat [the Christina] and gave her a small bracelet in farewell. Not particularly meaty, so to speak, was and neither was the conversation about Jackie. He would be better in a film about Grace. However, a wonderful meeting with an incredible man from a long vanished epoch. As a farewell, a book and a somewhat oppressive men’s cologne which has long been retired from the markets.207
Cassini once significantly said that Grace, his great love, “was two people”—a woman with two sides, with two faces.208 One of them was reserved, distant, and unapproachable. So it seemed. A woman who entered the public arena, elegant and stoic. However, in private she was incredibly warm, giving everyone the feeling that she cared exclusively for them and them alone. This was a talent that later, as the Princess of Monaco, she used to overcome the initial difficulties with the Monegasque population, ultimately becoming quite beloved in her small country.
On one balmy June evening, Grace and Cassini had an intimate dinner with each other on a pier in the Cannes harbor. During the course of this meal, the conversation concretely turned to the topic of marriage. According to Cassini, Grace told him: “I want to be your wife.”209 And immediately, in the midst of this conversation, she began to sketch out and plan everything: Cassini’s introduction to her parents in Philadelphia, the wedding dress, the wedding, their children. The conversation went so far that they considered a wedding for fall of that very year; one possible date was in the first half of October 1954. The actual date would be kept a secret, and the wedding in America would include only a close circle of a few friends. This plan was the polar opposite of the actual, expensive, ostentatious, media extravaganza that occurred in Grace’s life only a year and a half later, not far from Cannes, on the Riviera.
However, in this romantic summer, Grace and Cassini failed to reckon with Grace’s strict parents. Grace promised Cassini that her mother Margaret would side with her, and her mother would somehow convince father Jack. When both of them returned to the United States and filming began at Paramount Studios (Cassini often accompanied Grace to the set, driving her there in the morning and picking her up afterward for dinner), Grace wanted to immediately introduce Cassini to her parents, but it would be no walk in the park. The location was to be the Kellys’ summer house, a large, white, turn-of-the-century wooden beach house on the New Jersey coast between the quaint towns of Ocean City and Margate City, not far from Atlantic City and thus easily reachable from both Philadelphia and New York. Before this fateful visit, Grace and Cassini met her mother Margaret for lunch in New York in early September.
Cassini called the first meeting with Grace’s mother “an absolute disaster.” Until the end of his life, Cassini would complain about Grace’s mother, claiming, “She would always stand between us.”210 He joined the mother and daughter in Grace’s apartment in Manhattan to pick them up for lunch. Already during the joint taxi ride from the apartment to the restaurant, a highly unpleasant, extremely frosty conversation ensued. At first, Cassini tried to humorously lighten the tense, strained situation. “Well, here we are—the unholy trio,” he said, to which Margaret Kelly responded, “You, Mr. Cassini, may be unholy. I can assure you that Grace and I are not.”211 During the subsequent, no-less-icy luncheon, Margaret Kelly gave Cassini a “long talk about his unworthiness,” saying he was “a playboy, a divorced man . . . not good marriage material.” Mrs. Kelly said, “I can understand why Grace may have been charmed by you, Mr. Cassini. You are charming and educated. You have a lot of experience with women. But we believe that Grace owes it to herself, her family, and her community to rethink this.”212
The eventual introduction of Cassini to Jack Kelly and Grace’s brother Kell sometime later was its own fiasco. The two Kelly men would not even look at Cassini during this torturously long weekend—Cassini himself spoke of spending seven days in the Kelly house213—and they refused to answer him even if he posed a direct question to them, acting as if he was not even in the same room with them. They looked right through him. A deeply humiliating situation. A completely ridiculous attitude. At one point, Grace’s brother Kell gave the following statement to Time magazine: “Generally I dislike the strange men she goes out with. I would like to see her date more athletic men. But she doesn’t listen to me.”214 In the same Time article, Oleg Cassini described Kell as a “professional skirt chaser.”
Fifteen years before, Cassini had had a similar experience with the actress Gene Tierney, but the two of them had still married. Tierney had even sided with him against her parents to defend him. Now, at this point, Cassini, who had been twice divorced—an abomination in the eyes of the Catholic Kellys—and was known for his romantic affairs, was a persona non grata for the Kellys. He was yet another man in their daughter’s life whom they found unworthy. None of her lovers so far had any standing in their eyes. And there had already been several of them. But Grace did not protest their judgments. She did not resist her parents’ dictates. She remained silent. With this, the wheel of fate turned. In terms of marriage, Cassini began to hesitate. As did Grace. “We missed our moment,” Oleg Cassini commented vaguely many years later.215 Who knows what might have become of Grace Kelly, or of the actress, if she had married the fashion designer Oleg Cassini in the fall of 1954?
Grace Kelly and Oleg Cassini saw each other one last time, after she had married Prince Rainier and was living in Monaco on the Riviera. Their meeting was pure accident, a brief, yet lingering moment. Together with a few friends—including young Philippe Junot, a playboy whom Grace’s older daughter Princess Caroline would marry in June 1978—Cassini was crossing the Mediterranean in a yacht. They were docked in Monaco. As Cassini walked along the beach, he suddenly saw Grace sitting on a bench with the New York fashion designer Vera Maxwell. He immediately stopped still, a little shocked, and looked across at her. Grace saw him, nodded at him and said: “Hello, Oleg.” And he responded: “Hello, Grace.” They looked at one another for a long moment. Then Cassini turned around and went back to the yacht. They never saw each other again.
In looking back over his close relationship with Grace Kelly, which lasted about one and a half years before it finally ended, Oleg Cassini once had this to say: “We loved each other. We were engaged to be married. That is the truth. No more, no less.”216
In terms of film history, To Catch a Thief may be one of the most underrated of Hitchcock’s films. This is totally unjustified. Even through to the minor roles, the film was excellently cast. Furthermore, the foreground of this seemingly lighthearted mélange of thriller, comedy, drama, and romance, which pulses throughout with undertones of melancholy, conceals a background tension that is anything but light in nature.
Due to a series of jewel thefts in the grand hotels of the Côte d’Azur, the French police come to the conclusion that John Robie (Cary Grant), known as “the Cat,” is active again. Before World War II, during which he was involved in the French Resistance, Robie had been a well-known jewel thief. Now he lives alone, having withdrawn to his country home not
far from Saint-Paul-de-Vence. He has not practiced his “profession” in fifteen years. However, it is not only the assiduous yet bumbling Kommissar Lepic (René Blancard), of the French Sûreté, who thinks that Robie is again moonlighting as “the Cat.” His old Resistance cohorts, with whom he seeks shelter from the French police, blame him for putting them in danger, complaining that he seeks to make a profit while they toil in the shadows. These ex-Resistance friends now run a harbor restaurant in Monaco under the leadership of Bertani (Charles Vanel). Among the servers are old fighter Foussard (Jean Martinelli), who hobbles around on a wooden leg, and his young, awkward daughter Danielle (Brigitte Auber). In order to prove his innocence, Robie the ex-thief hunts for the actual offender. With the help of a very British insurance agent, H. H. Hughson (John Williams, who previously acted in Dial M for Murder as the no-less-British Chief Inspector Hubbard), who provides him with both a list of potential insured victims, and a false identity as a lumber businessman named Conrad Burns from Oregon, Robie soon meets the Stevenses. Mrs. Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis) is “the American woman with the diamonds and the daughter,”217 as Robie smugly labels her in a conversation with Hughson. The aforementioned daughter is Frances Stevens, known as Francie (Grace Kelly). A cool, young blonde, she is statuesque and untouchable in an ice blue gown. Mrs. Stevens knowingly asks Robie: “Mr Burns, you said lumber? How come you haven’t made a pass at my daughter?” To this, he responds: “Very pretty; quietly attractive.”218
In this layered cat and mouse game, Alfred Hitchcock chose to emphasize visual storytelling as opposed to verbal. What is verbalized is usually complex and ambiguous in nature. This begins with the very title of the film, To Catch a Thief, which could relate to several different individuals and threads of plot. There is an old saying that goes, “You catch thieves with thieves.” And certainly, the title pertains to catching and identifying “the Cat.” But really, which other characters couldn’t be considered a “Cat” in some way? John Robie was once that, and perhaps he is again. Francie is also a “Cat” who is hunting the supposed jewel thief on a totally different plane—an emotional-erotic one.
