Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (22 page)

After one look at Gracie, he went into a tailspin that reverberated from Perino’s to Ciro’s. The whole town soon hee-hawed over the news that suave Milland, who had a wife and family at home, was ga-ga over Grace. Ray pursued her ardently and Hollywood cackled.

In the 1990s such a story could expect to get picked up and republished throughout the tabloid media, swallowed down into the electronic databank to reappear in talk shows, magazines, and even in newspapers of record. In the 1950s
Confidential
stood alone, and was regarded as a pariah. Even popular newspapers did not quote from it. There was shame attached to the repeating of gossip, an old-fashioned feeling that if you peddled scandal you were not much better than those who committed it. America still operated on the presumption that there was a moral national consensus which it was a journalist’s job to support. This was an attitude that fostered hypocrisy, but it also generated tolerance and even kindness of a sort.

Hollywood could forgive almost anything in those whom it loved. The long-standing affair of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the male lovers of Rock Hudson, the sexual adventuring of Marlene Dietrich—such private areas were considered out of bounds even by the journalists who made their living from gossip and from personality profiles. When Rupert Allan wrote a sun-filled story for
Look
magazine about Ava Gardner’s flawless marriage to Frank Sinatra, Allan told only his closest friends that he had interviewed the actress while sitting at her bedside in a London abortion clinic. [In her old age—and in the climate of a different era—Ava Gardner wrote openly about her abortions in
Ava: My Story
(1990).]

Such discretion depended upon the stars themselves making a certain amount of effort to be discreet. There were rules to the game. You had to keep up appearances if you wanted appearances kept up, and the penalties were savage for those who thought they were above the system. Charles Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman had both, in their different ways, chosen to flout the proprieties of the industry which made them great, and each had had to pay for their carelessness: “Do not fool yourself,” the producer Walter Wanger had cabled Bergman as she paraded her extramarital pregnancy in Italy in 1949, “that what you are doing is of such courageous proportions or so artistic to excuse what ordinary people believe.”

Grace was courting the same danger in her relationship with Ray Milland. An off-camera romance was one thing. An unconcealed affair leading to the destruction of a long-standing marriage that had been sanctified by years of studio press releases was quite another. Grace was sailing close to the wind. Her affairs with the young Shah and with Clark Gable had been hinted at by conventional newsstand publications. Her most recent loveblitz had attracted the attention of more than Alfred Hitchcock. “Grace Kelly, who stars in it, and Frederick Knott, who wrote it, are hand-holding after
Dial Murder
hours,” reported Sidney Skolsky in the
New York Post
on September 8, 1953. Now
Confidential
’s story about Grace and Ray Milland could not help but hasten the possibility of full disclosure.

For a girl who was so concerned with looking respectable, Grace Kelly conducted her private life with extraordinary recklessness. When it came to sex, she had the same buccaneering streak as her father, pursuing physical and emotional impulses that were in total contradiction to the moral and religious principles to which she subscribed. Surrendering her virginity to the husband of a friend, meeting a man in an elevator and going to bed with him that night—a number of episodes in Grace’s life suggested a curiously hollow moral core. The moment that she dared to untether herself from the firm constraints of her Catholic ethic, she had a terrible tendency to run amok. It was as if she were actually inviting the heavy-handed rescue missions that her parents had to organize so frequently.

For her father’s part, Grace’s affair with Ray Milland justified Jack Kelly’s worst fears about Hollywood—and it also showed that he knew a thing or two about the psychology of his impetuous middle daughter. Anticipating some sort of problem, Jack Kelly had already spoken to “Scoop” Conlan, an old friend who was a professional PR man, asking him if he would “keep an eye on Grace.” When news of the
Confidential
revelation reached Philadelphia, Mrs. Kelly embarked on yet another of her emergency flights to her daughter’s side and took the publicist along. “She and Scoop sat down and talked things over with Grace,” Jack Kelly related later. “They found her willing to listen.”

Submissive as ever when confronted by the formidable will of her parents, Grace agreed to stop seeing Ray Milland. “Divorce was just something you didn’t do in our family,” remembers Lizanne. “Going out with a married man or a divorced man was a no-no.” According to sister Peggy, their father ordered Grace to leave Hollywood the moment she had finished filming with Hitchcock. Jack Kelly wanted his daughter back on his side of the continent, and he suggested she look hard for some work in New York.

According to Skip Hathaway, Mai Milland decided to get tough with her husband: “She finally got the courage. She finally said, ‘Out! I have all her letters, and I can sue you both.’. . . Well, he got down on bended knee. I wouldn’t have taken him back, but she did.”

Mai Milland told her friends that the few weeks of her husband’s affair with Grace Kelly were the most bitter and wrenching of her entire life. But Grace emerged from the trauma feeling equally battered. “It was a bad mistake,” she later admitted to Judy Kanter, the wife of her agent.

“I really thought that the marriage was over,” Grace related to Gwen Robyns many years later. “That is what he told me. I did not know that he had many affairs, and that I was just one of them.”

So Grace Kelly, at the age of nearly twenty-four, had allowed herself to be the plaything of an inconstant character who was under the thumb of his wife. She had come within an ace of wrecking her reputation—and she had had to be rescued from the whole mess by her parents. Grace fled from Los Angeles the moment that the filming of
Dial M for Murder
was completed. “At times I think I actually hate Hollywood,” she said.

Back in New York, Grace set about following her father’s advice— just at the moment that Jean Dalrymple was finally realizing her dream of getting
Cyrano de Bergerac
staged at the City Center theater. José Ferrer had agreed to repeat his successful Broadway portrayal of Cyrano for her.

It seemed the ideal opportunity, a chance for Grace to play the female lead in a New York production of a classic. But Ferrer did not share Jean Dalrymple’s confidence that Grace Kelly would make the perfect Roxanne—”She’s an amateur,” he said dismissively—and it was only with some difficulty that Dalrymple prevailed on the actor to let Grace at least read for the part. Dalrymple then persuaded Mel Ferrer (no relation) to coach Grace for the audition. Mel Ferrer had directed the original Broadway
Cyrano
in which José Ferrer had starred, and Grace worked with him every day for a week.

“She was up and fine and marvelous,” remembers Jean Dalrymple. “Then, on the day of the audition, José and I were sitting out in the theater, and Mel came out and said, ‘I’m awfully sorry to tell you that Miss Kelly is not in good voice today. She has a bad cold.’ José sort of snorted. ‘An amateur!’ And I said, ‘Please, now, you promised.’ So Grace came out, and we were in the first row in the orchestra and we just couldn’t hear her. José said, ‘Maybe we’re too close.’ He actually wanted to give her a chance. So we moved back, and she was worse. The poor thing! Between fried nerves and a bad cold, she really couldn’t speak. It was embarrassing and terribly sad—and also a little funny.”

By the time Grace’s voice was back in speaking order, José Ferrer had found himself another heroine. Grace used to laugh over the episode in later years, but her untimely attack of laryngitis proved to be a turning point. She had done her best to mold her career according to her father’s wishes, but her audition for
Cyrano de Bergerac
was the last chance she had to make it on the stage.

As filming had drawn to an end on
Dial Murder,
Alfred Hitchcock had started telling Grace about his plans for his next movie. Paramount had already started building the film’s massive and unique set—a rabbit warren of no less than thirty-one apartments as seen from the rear window of another apartment in Greenwich Village. Temporarily confined to a wheelchair by an accident, a normally active young photographer scans the details of his neighbors’ lives through the telephoto lens of his camera, and he happens upon a sequence of comings and goings in one particular apartment that arouses his suspicions. His Park Avenue girlfriend, a stylish young fashion publicist, shares his suspicions, and together they identify and solve a murder mystery.

Early in October 1953, Jay Kanter phoned Grace to tell her that Hitchcock definitely wanted her for
Rear Window.
She would play female lead to yet another of the great stars of Hollywood, James Stewart. But the agent had received a rival offer that was equally interesting. Sam Spiegel was putting together
On the Waterfront,
a raw and angry drama about longshoremen that would be filmed in New York with Elia Kazan as the director. Grace was being considered for the female lead opposite Marlon Brando.

Grace read the two scripts and liked them both. Twenty-two years later she told author Donald Spoto of her indecision: “So I was sitting with these two scripts. My agent said, ‘I have to know by four o’clock this afternoon.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I love them both. I’d rather stay in New York, but I love working with Mr. Hitchcock. I just don’t know what to do.’ He said, ‘I’ll call you back in an hour, and I have to know.’ So I said, ‘Well, okay . . .’”

Spoto did not press Grace to explore the personal reasons that led her to choose
Rear Window
rather than
On the Waterfront,
but her decision spoke for itself. Passing up the chance to play an underprivileged child of the tenements (the role eventually portrayed by Eva Marie Saint), Grace plumped for the part of a self-assured and moneyed girl-about-town. She went for Technicolor over black-and-white, she picked the comfortably aging James Stewart over the prickly young talent of Marlon Brando, and when it came to directors, she also opted for the father figure.

For all her frequently expressed ambitions to be a serious actress, Grace seldom took any risks. She knew her limitations. She never strayed away from the safely middlebrow, in the way that even a traditional star like Elizabeth Taylor went out on a limb to play Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare. Grace felt most at ease when portraying her own vision of herself. In
High Noon, Mogambo,
and
Dial M for Murder,
she had played women who contained striking elements of her own character, and now, in
Rear Window,
Hitchcock was inviting her to play a glossy and tomboyish Barbizon girl. The character was called Lisa Fremont, but she was no one else but Grace Kelly.

Back in Hollywood again by the beginning of November 1953, Grace lent herself once more to Hitchcock’s cheerfully warped showcasing of what he was later to call her “sexual elegance.” On the opening day of filming the director devoted half an hour to the filming of a close-up of her shoes. “Where does that fit in?” asked Herbert Coleman, the assistant director, who had not seen the shot mentioned in the shooting script.