Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (23 page)

“Haven’t you heard of the shoe fetish?” replied Hitchcock gnomically. The shot was never used. Alfred Hitchcock’s biographer Donald Spoto makes a persuasive case that the director had fallen deeply, if unconsciously, in love with Grace. Spying on the world through his lens to uncover secret nastiness and desiring his blonde goddess with a passion that he could not consummate, the wheelchair-bound James Stewart looked suspiciously like a slim and handsome surrogate for Hitchcock—particularly when the director insisted on supervising twenty-seven takes of Grace planting a kiss on Stewart’s forehead.

Edith Head, the costume designer, was struck by the way in which Hitchcock personally selected what Grace would wear in every scene. “There was a reason for every color, every style,” she remembered, “and he was absolutely certain about everything he settled on. For one scene, he saw her in pale green, for another in white chiffon, for another in gold. He was really putting a dream together in the studio.”

In later years the director’s obsession with an actress would take an overt and ugly turn, when he made direct physical advances to Tippi Hedren. But with Grace, Hitchcock’s feelings only revealed themselves in curiously repetitive remarks about her sexuality: “I exploited the fact that she had sex, but not obvious sex”; “the perfect ‘woman of mystery’ is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic”; “I’ve never been very keen on women who hang their sex round their necks like baubles.” Hitchcock also resurrected around Grace the fantasy he had once constructed around Ingrid Bergman: that he had discovered the perfect actress, with whom he could work in every single future film that he might ever make.

Grace, for her part, took the doting Englishman’s professional care for her at no more than its face value. “Mr. Hitchcock,” “Miss Kelly”—the actress and the director worked together with all the formality of participants in an English tea party, playing to Grace’s comfort with protocol, while tickling Hitchcock’s pleasure in the contrast between what can be seen and what remains hidden.

“Are you shocked, Miss Kelly?” the director inquired on one occasion when she had overheard him talking dirty to an actor—a trick that Hitchcock regularly employed just as the cameras were about to start rolling in order to inject a sense of surprise into a scene. “No,” replied Grace demurely. “I went to a girls’ convent school, Mr. Hitchcock. I heard all those things when I was thirteen.”

Hitchcock’s scabrous relish of his own sexual imaginings, which were blended with a crude line in toilet humor, stemmed from a sheltered youth. Directing a beach scene in one of his early films, he could not understand why one of his actresses was refusing to go into the water. When an aide explained the female menstrual period to him, the director was astonished. “I was twenty-five years old, and I had never heard of it,” he later confessed with defiant pride. “I had had a Jesuit education, and such matters weren’t included.”

By the end of 1953, when he was directing Grace Kelly in
Rear Window,
Hitchcock’s education had progressed:

At the rehearsal for the scene in
Rear Window
in which I wore a sheer nightgown [Grace later recalled], Hitchcock called for Edith Head. He came over to her and said, “Look, the bosom is not right.

We’re going to have to put something in there.” He was very sweet about it; he didn’t want to upset me, so he spoke quietly to Edith. . . . We went into my dressing room, and Edith said, “Mr. Hitchcock is worried because there’s a false pleat here. He wants me to put in falsies.”

“Well,” I said, “you can’t put falsies in this, it’s going to show— and I’m not going to wear them.” And she said, “What are we going to do?” So we quickly took it up here, made some adjustments there, and I just did what I could and stood as straight as possible— without falsies.

When I walked out onto the set, Hitchcock looked at me and at Edith, and said, “See what a difference they make?”

Learning how to manipulate an authoritarian male, if only occasionally, increased Grace’s self-confidence, and she blossomed as an actress under the warmth of Hitchcock’s obsessive devotion. She had found a Svengali who wanted nothing from her beyond what she could give on the screen, and her leading man was equally professional. James Stewart later scoffed at the notion that Grace was a cold dish of tea—”If you ever played a love scene with her, you’d know she’s not cold.” But Stewart was happily married, and his off-screen relationship with Grace never prompted the slightest whiff of scandal.

The great challenge facing Hitchcock in
Rear Window
was to iron the stiffness out of Grace’s acting performance. It had not mattered much in
Dial M for Murder.
Stiffness had been part of the role—as it had been an integral part of the inhibited women that Grace depicted in
Mogambo
and
High Noon.
But Lisa Fremont was nothing if she was not carefree, a will-o’-the-wisp who could enliven a sick boyfriend’s evening by contriving to spirit dinner and a bottle of Montrachet away from the “21” Club—along with a red-jacketed waiter.

Grace had the looks for the part. Statuesque and regal, she was a natural model for all the clothes that Hitchcock chose for her, draping them off her finely contoured shoulders with rare elegance and style. Now Hitchcock had to animate the mannequin with some of the lust and vigor that he had so much enjoyed witnessing off-camera during
Dial M for Murder.

“Sometimes he merely wears [his actors] down,” wrote Grace twenty years later, trying to explain what it felt like to be directed by the great man. Hitchcock told her jokes, did extra takes, shocked her, cajoled her, challenged her, flattered her as the very center of his creative life—and finally got the performance that he wanted. As Lisa Fremont, Grace Kelly was frisky, lighthearted, and enchanting. “A preview of coming attractions,” she twinkled to her incapacitated boyfriend as she drew a negligee out of her handbag, encapsulating all the innocence-with-sexual-promise which fascinated Hitchcock and which he correctly identified as the essence of the Kelly appeal.

Rear Window
was the first of the classic and inimitable Grace Kelly movies, stirring up the special magic that was hers and hers alone. Grace had been right to turn down
On the Waterfront.
Her gift did not lie in impersonating other people. Her talent was to impersonate her fantasy of herself. She had sensed how Lisa Fremont was her own dream, the very model of that sort of girl who would glitter at the April in Paris Ball. It was the direction in which Grace was pushing her own life, mustering the bouncy self-assurance she needed to buoy her very needy inner child, and Hitchcock helped her to accelerate the process.
Rear Window was
Grace Kelly’s in the sense that a movie starring Katharine Hepburn was a Katharine Hepburn movie, a creation whose essential excitement sprang from the personality of its leading lady—which meant that Grace Kelly, like Katharine Hepburn, had now to be considered as nothing less than a star.

Rear Window
opened to near unanimous critical acclaim in the summer of 1954. With its lively jazz music, its kaleidoscopic set, its puckish sense of humor and its love scenes that were considered daring in their day, the movie was a box-office sensation. In view of all the fuss, Don Richardson thought that he should take a look. Richardson’s enduring memory of his ex-girlfriend was of Grace scrambling for her emerald bracelet in the fish tank two-and-a-half years earlier. Now he was presented with a new image—and it was one that gave him a great deal of pleasure. “She was luminous on the screen,” he remembers. “When she was bending over Jimmy Stewart and kissing him, this was the girl in the illusion. This was not the timid girl I knew. Hitchcock had turned the dream into a reality, and I was sitting there overwhelmed.”

Grace Kelly as showcased by Alfred Hitchcock was a captivating and wondrous creation—light, breezy, clean, and wholesome. But the irony of the laughing Snow Princess was that words like light, clean, and wholesome were the very last to describe the imagination of the stout maestro who had first seen the vision and had given it life.

11

THE COUNTRY GIRL

T
he Church of the Good Shepherd, Beverly Hills, is known to the irreverent as “Our Lady of the Cadillacs.” The only members of the congregation below the super-tax bracket are the maids. Whenever Grace Kelly was in Hollywood, she liked to start off her Sunday at the altar rail of the Good Shepherd—which was how Dominick Dunne happened to bump into her early one Sunday after mass.

It was the autumn of 1953 and Grace was approaching her twenty-fourth birthday. Dunne had just arrived from New York, having given up his job as a television stage manager. He was feeling a little lost, and Grace immediately invited him to accompany her to a premiere later that week.

“Grace looked absolutely ravishing,” says Dunne, recalling the excitement of their evening together under the lights. “She had done her movies with Cooper and Gable. She was just finishing
Dial M,
and she knew that Hitchcock wanted to use her again. It was a very busy and promising time, but the extraordinary thing was that the photographers paid virtually no attention to her. We went to the opening of
The Band Wagon
with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and nobody in the crowd had any idea who she was. There was none of that buzz—no flashbulbs or autograph hunters. We just walked in like anyone else going to the movies. Many years later I reminded her of that evening. ‘I think that was just about the last time,’ she said.”

Dunne had caught Grace Kelly in that rare and delicious moment of presuccess that is almost more exciting than success itself. As 1953 drew to a close, she could cherish and savor the anticipation of great things about to happen. But Hollywood soon got in on the secret. Word spread quickly among those who saw the rough cuts of
Rear Window,
and industry insiders picked up the scent of dollars and distinction. “It won’t be long,” predicted Billy Wilkerson, owner and editor of the
Hollywood Reporter
in a signed column, “before this attractive kid will be the Number-One Box Office attraction in the world.” Toward the end of 1953,
Life
magazine had started preparing a special feature on Hitchcock’s young blonde discovery, and when it appeared the following spring, Grace’s photograph was on the cover, with the article inside predicting that 1954 would be “the year of Grace.”

It was gratifying for Grace, and it was energizing for those around her. When Judy Kanter, the wife of Grace’s agent, Jay, accompanied Grace to Philadelphia for a special screening of
Dial M for Murder,
she was bubbling over with what would come next. But the agent’s wife encountered a strange reaction when she tried to share her enthusiasm at 3901 Henry Avenue. The three pretty Kelly sisters were sitting side by side on the sofa, talking and joking together, when Peggy said something that made Grace whoop aloud with laughter.

“Baba’s a sketch!” said Jack Kelly to Judy Kanter, looking toward his eldest daughter with obvious pride.

“Isn’t it exciting what’s happening with Gracie’s career?” responded the agent’s wife, knowing that her husband had been talking to Grace’s father about the tempting film offers that were starting to flood in. The smile faded from Jack Kelly’s face. “I don’t understand why she’d want to be an actress,” he shrugged. “Never did. . . . I told her she could go to New York when she asked because I couldn’t think of anything else she could do. Not even getting into college. . . . Oh, well,” he sighed dismissively, “I’m glad she’s making a living.”