Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (20 page)

Like the best Hollywood plots,
Mogambo
made less sense on paper than when projected in Vistavision with swelling background music, and it was filmed in the grandest Hollywood tradition. An army of cooks and servants catered to the stars in their luxuriously appointed canvas pavilions. An electrical generator the size of a locomotive provided power for the 300-tent encampment whose entertainment marquees featured table tennis, darts, and twin sixteen-millimeter film projectors that showed a different movie every night. When Christmas came around, a chartered DC-3 flew in bearing turkeys, champagne, and Frank Sinatra, who provided company for Ava Gardner and sang for everyone else at the New Year’s Eve party.

As the principal actor from England, Donald Sinden frequently caught the rough side of his director’s tongue. John Ford was a gruff Irish-American, who cultivated an immense contempt for both the English and for Italian-Americans, and he took the opportunity to indulge both prejudices when he introduced Ava and Frank Sinatra to the British Governor of Uganda at a reception. “Ava,” he said, “why don’t you tell the Governor what you see in this one hundred and twenty-pound runt?”

“Well,” replied Ava, who was seldom at a loss for words, “there’s only ten pounds of Frank, but there’s a hundred and ten pounds of cock!”

Far from being shocked, Grace reveled in the company of such spectacularly uninhibited grown-up children. It took her back to the teenage Gracie who flung her falsies around in the car, and she became a close friend to Ava Gardner, particularly in the painful weeks surrounding Ava’s abortion. Gore Vidal recounts an anecdote told him by Sam Zimbalist, the producer of the movie: “The location was full of these tall Watusis, beautiful warriors who had been hired as extras, wearing their breechclouts. The girls were walking along, and Ava said to Grace, ‘I wonder if their cocks are as big as people say? Have you ever seen a black cock?’ . . .

“With that, she reached over and pulled up the breechclout of one of the Watusis, who gave a big grin as this huge cock flopped out. By then Grace had turned absolutely blue. Ava let go of the breechclout, turned to Grace, and said, ‘Frank’s bigger than that.’”

Inspired by the collegial saltiness, Grace was moved to treat her fellow actors to a little bawdiness of her own. Her very best story, it was decided, was her tale of how she was going to a Broadway rehearsal one day in all her finery, when she saw an old wino picking a piece of chicken skin out of a trash can and slipping it between two moldy bits of bread. He caught her eye. “Wanna a bite?”

Grace sniffed disdainfully, and walked on by. “No chance of a fuck, then?” the wino flung at her retreating back.

The frolics came to an abrupt halt in the new year when the cast got back to civilization. Rumors of romance had preceded them, and reporters looked eagerly for clues as the company arrived in England for a final month of shooting at MGM’s studios at Borehamwood. Grace and Gable were billeted in two of the grand River Suites overlooking the Thames at the Savoy Hotel. “On their trek back to London,” Sidney Skolsky reported in the
New York Post,
“the ‘Mogambo’ troupe dispersed three ways: Ava Gardner took one plane; director John Ford and his brother-in-law took a second plane; Gable and Grace Kelly a third!”

Hedda Hopper got on the line, transatlantic. “Tell me about Grace Kelly?” she asked Clark Gable.

“I can’t hear you,” replied Gable, who had been able to hear every question of the interview with perfect clarity till that point.

The Queen of Hollywood gossip could not be shaken off that easily. “I hear you two made Africa hotter than it is,” she persisted.

“Oh, good God, no!” said the King.

“I’m old enough to be her father,” was Gable’s response to one British inquiry about his relationship with his younger costar, and that report joined the others reaching the American newspapers. Grace’s friends in New York were abuzz at the stories. The young men in the Manhattan House set all carried not-so-secret torches for Grace, and here she was, hooked up with the ultimate man.

“I remember being vitally pissed off,” recalled John Foreman, talking to Gwen Robyns in 1975. “We were always jealous of men that Grace saw, all the rest of us guys, and it took me some years to decide—if indeed it did happen—that she had every justification. Who wouldn’t have gone to bed with Clark Gable, I had to ask myself? And the answer is,
everybody
would go to bed with Clark Gable.”

The reaction at Henry Avenue was not so philosophical. Ma Kelly could sniff the smoke at 3,000 miles, and she was on the next plane to London. “I was only too well aware,” she later wrote, “of the emotions that our Gracie could arouse in men.”

Ma Kelly’s firsthand diagnosis once she reached London was that Grace’s feelings for the star added up to nothing more serious than “a schoolgirl crush”—but she decided to stick around just to make sure. The concerned mother remained three long, cold, February weeks in London to keep her twenty-three-year-old daughter company. Admitting a weakness of her own for Clark Gable, Ma Kelly took great pleasure in chaperoning Grace and Gable on at least one of their dates. “It was very interesting,” she reported of their dinner
a trois,
“to hear the various experiences they’d had in Africa.”

Grace was quite accustomed to the mechanics of weaving a love affair in and around her mother’s intrusive curiosity. That was how the Kellys operated. They were a family without frontiers. But it was not Clark Gable’s cup of tea, and the arrival of Mrs. Kelly in London was his cue to beat a courteous retreat. Henry Hathaway, Grace’s director in
Fourteen Hours,
happened to be staying at the Savoy with his wife, Skip, and they witnessed the end of the affair.

“He had a guard put at the top of the stairs to keep her out,” remembers Skip Hathaway. “The guard was there the whole time we were there. She was very persistent.”

The Hathaways were old friends of Gable. “He just told her, ‘Out, out,’” says Mrs. Hathaway.

The Hathaways’ impression was that Gable was trying to phase romance into friendship. After four marriages and more than thirty years of travel and location liaisons, the older man knew a fling when he had had one. But Grace could not accomplish the switch so easily, and her letters home to Prudy grew flat and miserable. “I’m not speaking to Clark these days,” she wrote. “. . . Am terribly depressed and anxious to get home.”

“She was just devastated,” recalls Maree Frisby Rambo. “I remember her telling me how he would not answer the phone and would not return her messages. ‘When we got back to London, he was suddenly on display,’ she said. ‘He was Clark Gable, and I was just nobody.’”

Clark Gable was several cuts above the average heartbreaker. He was genuinely fond of Grace. His public professions of fatherly affection were more than just camouflage for what had happened in Africa, and in later years he was to accompany Grace quite regularly to Hollywood galas and public functions as a loyal supporter and friend. It took Grace some time, however, to see Clark Gable that way. When the young actress’s London filming assignments were over, Gable escorted her to the airport to bid her a smiling goodbye. It was a public relations “opportunity” designed to put the rumors to rest, but Grace could not pretend. In front of the assembled reporters and cameramen, she burst uncontrollably into tears.

Grace’s screen performance in
Mogambo
displayed the dividends of her year of training with Sanford Meisner. Her acting still could not match the casual expertise of Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, but, as in
High Noon,
the part was in the prissiness. Grace’s representation of painfully corseted passion had the quality of real life, and on the strength of her performances as Amy Kane and Linda Nordley, she was hailed by
Look
magazine as the Best Actress of 1953.

This somewhat extravagant nomination was the work of Rupert Allan, a young film publicist who represented
Look
in Europe. Allan had met Grace in London, where he was preparing a story for
Look
on the forthcoming coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and he had become an instant friend. Discreet and homosexual, Rupert Allan was to become one of Grace’s most intimate confidants, and he was to spend much of his life deploying his charm and contacts for the benefit of her career and public image.

Only slightly less of a fix was the 1953 Academy Award nomination that Grace received as Best Supporting Actress for her role in
Mogambo.
Her nomination in this subordinate category was traditional Academy showcasing of a pretty and promising newcomer with a powerful studio behind her. Her role was to ornament the early part of the awards evening, and no one was surprised when her name was not the one drawn out of the envelope.

But Hollywood had clearly taken note of Grace Kelly. She was a pretty face—an incredibly pretty face when she was photographed well—and she filled a particular niche that had been vacant since the departure of Ingrid Bergman. Throughout the 1940s, Bergman had reigned as Hollywood’s cool and enigmatic blonde, most notably in
Casablanca.
But in 1950 the sexual vulnerability that the Swedish actress projected on the screen had overwhelmed her real life disastrously, when she fell in love with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Pregnant by Rossellini, Bergman eloped with him to Europe, leaving her daughter and apparently blameless physician husband behind.

The scandal rocked the entire motion picture industry. The actress was denounced as “a free-love cultist,” and “Hollywood’s apostle of degradation” on the floor of the U. S. Senate, and Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado actually called for legislation to license the movie business and to have its morality supervised by the Department of Commerce. The early fifties star billings given to sex bombs like Lana Turner, Jane Russell, and Marilyn Monroe only seemed to prove the Senator’s point.

Virginia McKenna and Deborah Kerr were possible Bergman substitutes, but they were too cut-glass and schoolmistressy. It was Grace who had the correct and intriguing mixture of fire and ice. She embodied the ambiguity which had provided the tension in Ingrid Bergman’s creamy presence on the screen. Grace was blonde and, thanks to her Teutonic genes, she even had Bergman’s Nordic cheekbones. The physical resemblance was quite striking—and with her white gloves and Philadelphia origins, Grace Kelly also came with a social veneer. “It has been quite a few years,” remarked the gallant Gary Cooper, “since we had a girl in pictures that looked like she was born on the right side of Park Avenue.”

Grace Kelly struck a timely chord. After only three slight roles, she could offer Hollywood the casting equivalent of the Biblical and classical epics that the studios were churning out to prove their respectability in the early 1950s. She was the very opposite of the sweater girls. “We are sick of flamboyant, bouncy, flashy sex,” wrote Edward Linn in
Saga
magazine. “Grace Kelly is all the more exciting for her quality of restraint.”

With her cool good looks and restrained public style, Grace appeared to be virginity personified—the very essence of pedigree and purity. But this, of course, was not quite all the story.

10

SNOW PRINCESS

A
lfred Hitchcock enjoyed toying with a recurring fantasy—that he was alone in the backseat of a taxi with a beautifully
formed but chilly blonde, whose inhibitions suddenly melted in a flailing of arms and legs and the slithering of silk underwear. “Anything could happen to you with a woman like that,” the director declared, mentally licking his lips on one of the several occasions that he divulged his imagined encounter with what he liked to describe as a “Snow Princess.” “The English woman or the North German or the Swedish can look like a schoolmarm, but, boy! When they get going, these women are quite astonishing. . . . It is more interesting to discover the sex in a woman than to have it thrown at you.”

The basis of Hitchcock’s disturbing and extraordinarily successful films was that things are never quite what they seem. Wickedness a la Hitchcock could pop up in the most unexpected circumstances, and the portly impresario selected his heroines to embody this element of surprise. From Virginia Valli, the female lead of his first silent movie in 1925, to Ingrid Bergman, who played in three of his 1940s thrillers, Hitchcock’s heroines acted out the intriguing ambiguities of beauty and seduction—the alchemy which transforms apparently chaste purity into flaming passion. Grace Kelly fitted the profile precisely.