Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (19 page)

Sanford Meisner today is eighty-seven years old, crippled by a cruel series of accidents and illnesses. He has lost his voice box, and he can only speak with the greatest difficulty, holding an amplifier to his jaw. He has very few words to spare, so when asked for his verdict on the pretty and hardworking actress whom he taught for twelve months in 1951-52, he searches carefully for the accolade, and mouths it out precisely. “Grace had good emotion,” he says.

9

ROMANCING THE KING

W
hen Grace got back to New York from the filming of
High Noon,
she picked up the strings of her summer-stock romance with the dashing Gene Lyons. “They were very much in love,” remembers David Swift, the producer-director, who was then writing for television and had dated Grace himself a few times.

Gene Lyons was now in New York working in TV and trying to improve his own acting technique. He had enrolled in the Actors Workshop on Sixth Avenue, and he spent long evenings at Manhattan House, working with Grace through their respective dialogues and exercises. Romance, work, and mutual encouragement—it was very much the pattern that Grace had shared with Herbie Miller and Don Richardson.

Early in February 1952, Grace and Gene appeared together on television, playing the leads in
The Rich Boy,
a Scott Fitzgerald story. “From the beginning,” intones the narrator, “they were in love with each other.” But the love in the story turns sour, since the rich boy of the title, played by Lyons, has a drinking problem which proves fatal to his affection for the rich girl, played by Grace. They go their separate ways in the drama—and so it proved in real life.

“He loved his Old Bushmills,” remembers actress Lee Grant, who had enjoyed a romance with Lyons shortly before he met Grace. “He was a really great, attractive Irishman, very complex and poetic. He loved saloons and to have his foot up on the bar. He was wonderful company. He had an enormous talent. But it was the whiskey that killed him. He had a very quick slide after Grace.”

Hobbled by his drinking, Gene Lyons never fulfilled his potential as an actor. In his later years, he played a supporting role in the TV series
Ironside,
and he died, comparatively young and hopelessly alcoholic, in 1975—another would-be husband whose subsequent life and misadventures lent confirmation to the doubts that Grace’s parents had come to harbor about their daughter’s impetuous heart.

Grace’s stage career was still showing no signs of getting airborne. In the spring of 1952, straight after her appearance in
The Rich Boy,
she was cast in a minor role in
To Be Continued,
an unexceptional drawing-room comedy that closed after only a few weeks on Broadway. But by April 1952,
High Noon
had won its Oscars, and Hollywood was taking a second look at the shy, blonde young actress who had played Amy Kane. Gregory Ratoff, the director, called Grace in for a screen test for
Taxi,
a movie he was due to shoot for Twentieth Century-Fox. Grace had prepared for the part, but the summons to the screen test took her unawares. She was just leaving Manhattan House for one of her classes with Sanford Meisner when she got the call, so she had no chance to dress up or to put on her white gloves. She turned up at Fox’s New York office in an old skirt and shirt, wearing no makeup, with her hair all disheveled. “Perfect!” cried Gregory Ratoff.

The outer office was full of coiffed and polished young actresses, but Ratoff was looking for someone to play the role of a simple, immigrant Irish girl, and Grace appeared to fit the bill exactly. “Can you speak with an Irish accent?” he asked.

“Of course,” Grace replied. To prepare for the test, she had had an Irish friend read her three days’ worth of newspapers.

Ratoff s wish to cast Grace as his colleen was overruled by his Hollywood superiors. The
Taxi
part went to a Fox contract actress. But Grace’s unconventional screen test was seen by John Ford, the great director of
Stagecoach,
who had been hired by MGM for a remake of
Red Dust,
the early thirties hit that had starred Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in a romance set against the backdrop of a Malaysian rubber plantation. Clark Gable wanted to play the lead again in the remake—shifted to Africa and retitled
Mogambo
—and a big budget spectacular was envisaged. There would be several months filming on location in East Africa, followed by a month or so shooting the interior scenes in MGM’s studios in England. It was an opportunity that no young actress could pass up. But the price of the part was now inescapable—signing a seven-year contract with MGM.

Lucille Ryman Carroll, the head of talent at the studio, remembers the young actress agonizing in her office in the autumn of 1952. Grace had flown out to Hollywood and had been offered the part of the second female lead. She was promised third billing after Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. But even that prospect could not break down Grace’s resistance to the prospect of seven years of indentured servitude. “I am not interested in a contract,” she told Lucille Ryman Carroll, “because once you get into a contract you don’t have any options.”

Mrs. Carroll found Grace’s spirit and intelligence a welcome change from those of most of the pretty young women who passed through her room. “So many of them,” she says, “didn’t have anything up there.” On the right-hand side of the talent director’s office was a lush couch on which many a would-be star had reclined provocatively. But Grace had ignored the couch for a small hard chair on which she sat straight in front of the desk, upright and businesslike, firmly gripping her folded white gloves. “Just what does a contract mean?” she asked after Mrs. Carroll had made it clear that there was not the slightest chance of her acting on the same bill as Clark Gable and Ava Gardner unless she signed for MGM.

The talent director explained that Grace would start out at $750 a week, for a guaranteed forty weeks work per year—an annual salary of $30,000 (the equivalent of $190,000 today). Mrs. Carroll did not tell Grace that, as MGM’s biggest star, Clark Gable was on $5,000 a week, and that most young actors and actresses started out at $1,500. “When I look back, I really insulted her by offering her only $750,” says Mrs. Carroll. “But I knew she wasn’t in great demand, and the money did not seem a problem. She had other priorities.”

Grace knew exactly what she wanted. She had worked out her conditions for signing with MGM—the right to continue living in New York, a schedule which required no more than three pictures a year, and the freedom to do stage plays from time to time if she wanted.

“None of those things were really a problem,’’ says Mrs. Carroll. “We didn’t mind where she lived between movies, and it was hardly likely that we could fit in more than three movies into a year. As for appearing on the stage, I told her that it sounded a good idea. ‘We like that,’ I said, ‘because it increases your popularity, and makes you better known.’”

So Grace became a Hollywood contract player after all. But she did get the special conditions that she asked for, and she was starting several layers up from the bottom of the heap. “Sit down, catch your breath, I have some wonderful news,” she wrote to her friend, Bill Allyn, mimicking the style of J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye,
which Allyn had recently given her. “I am going to do a picture in Africa with Old Clark Gable!”

When Donald Sinden, the young British actor who was cast as Grace’s husband in
Mogambo,
arrived in Nairobi at the end of November 1952, he found that Gable and Kelly were already fast friends. Sinden joined the couple for dinner that night in the grill room of the New Stanley Hotel. “She ordered the entire meal for the three of us in Swahili,” he remembers. “From the moment she heard she was due to be working in Kenya, she had been swotting up on the language.”

The logical off-camera pairing was between Gable and Ava Gardner, the two major and fabled American screen idols, who were each in a class of their own. But Ava Gardner was preoccupied with the complications in her recent marriage to Frank Sinatra. Soon after her arrival in Africa she discovered she was pregnant, and she interrupted her filming for a journey to London for an abortion. Ava found,
in any case, that Clark Gable’s affections were already firmly engaged.

“As far as romance went,” she later wrote in her memoirs, “Clark’s eyes were quite definitely on Gracie, and hers, for that matter, were on him. They were both single at the time, and it’s very normal for any woman to be in love with Clark.”

Clark Gable was twenty-eight years older than Grace Kelly, and he had false teeth. He was so inarticulate that, as Ava Gardner famously remarked, if you said, “Hiya, Clark, how are ya?” he was stuck for an answer. But he could still twist his mustaches into the lopsided smile that captivated Scarlett O’Hara, and he had not the slightest difficulty in winning Grace’s heart. She had come to Africa to play with the “King” of Hollywood, and she did precisely that. Solid and easygoing, Clark Gable was Jack Kelly without the intimidation. Gracie liked to snuggle up to him and call him
“Ba”—
the Swahili word for “Father.”

The couple made no pretense. “They were together,” remembers Donald Sinden, “most of the time.” In his amusing autobiography,
A Touch of the Memoirs,
Sinden recalls stumbling into Gable’s darkened room one night, to find the “King” sitting up in bed with a girl—”both of them starkers.”

So was the young lady Grace Kelly? Sinden, a friend of Grace in later life and now one of the graying elders of the British theater, grows gentlemanly and vague. “I’ve often wondered that myself,” he says.

Grace would get up early on days when she and Clark were not needed for filming and would go driving for hours with him, bumping through the bush in an uncomfortable old jeep. In a letter back to Prudy Wise, her Barbizon friend who was now working as her secretary, she described stripping down to her underwear to go “skinny-dipping” with Clark in Lake Victoria. The pair were totally relaxed together, flopping down side by side on their chairs between takes, both wearing their glasses, as unconcerned with impressing each other as any old married couple. When shooting was over, they would adjourn to Clark’s tent, where Grace would try to help him demolish the bottles of hard liquor of which both he and Ava Gardner were so fond—though Grace soon discovered that she did not have the capacity of her famous costars.

“She was never much of a drinker,” remembers her school friend, Maree Frisby Rambo. “When we used to try rum and Coke at parties, Grace could only manage one drink. Hard liquor didn’t seem to agree with her.”

Ava Gardner noticed the same. “Her little nose would get pink,” she wrote, “she’d get sick, and we’d have to rescue her. Or she’d get easily hurt and do my trick and run off into the darkness. Clark would catch on after a few seconds and say to me, ‘Sugar, where’s she gone? This is Africa. She can’t just run off in Africa.’ So I’d go off and find her and bring her back before the lions ate her.”

One evening Donald Sinden was sitting outside his tent, writing a letter home by the light of a hurricane lamp, when he thought he saw something white flash past him in the darkness. A minute or so later there was another flash of white, which came, and went, and scurried around, and finally turned into Ava Gardner in her nightdress. “Don,” she asked, “did you see Grace? We can’t find her.”

Seizing his flashlight, Sinden strode out into the bush, to locate his overwrought costar, also in a nightdress, huddled behind a bush and weeping. “Go away,” hissed Grace. “I want to be alone.” So Donald Sinden stayed with the young actress, putting his arms around her until she had calmed down, and he could lead her back to the safety of her own tent.

On location near the Indian Ocean, Gable returned from a day’s shooting without Grace, and was told that she had gone down to the beach. He went looking for her himself and found her sitting on some rocks, with a book open on her lap, sobbing her eyes out. “Why are you crying?” he asked.

“It’s the most beautiful thing in the world,” replied Grace. “I’m reading Hemingway’s
Snows of Kilimanjaro
about the leopard in the snow, and I looked up and I saw a lion walking along the seashore.”

Finally beyond reach of the most tenacious Kelly chaperone, Grace was free at last to indulge her immense capacity for sentimentality. Swooning over Hemingway, hitting the liquor, romancing the great white hunter—it was as if she were making her own private movie: “What I did in Africa!” Cut off from the world in the most definitive fashion, she did not have to hide her wilder instincts in the sort of secret life that she had created in New York. She could take a few risks and enjoy the sensation of being marginally out of control.

Yet, ever the striving Kelly, Grace was also living out, in classic drama-school style, the character that she would have to play in her first major movie role. Consciously or not, she was giving an off-camera rendition of her screen role as Linda Nordley, a refined and straitlaced young Englishwoman who loses her bearings under the romance of the Dark Continent. On safari with her earnest anthropologist husband (Donald Sinden), she falls for the rough and roguish Clark Gable, who has been hired as their guide, but who is already half-involved with Ava Gardner, a good-time girl who has come to Africa looking for a maharajah.