Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (25 page)

Clifford Odets’s play, a massive Broadway hit in November 1950, was one of the countless productions for which Grace Kelly had auditioned and been rejected in her years as a struggling actress. [Grace had not auditioned for the title role in the original Broadway production of
The Country Girl.
In 1950 she was trying for an ingenue role that was written out of the movie.] It was a drama, wrote Brooks Atkinson, “that practically burns a hole right through the theater.” A once great actor touches bottom, brought down by drink and depression, but is put back together by his equally depressed but tougher wife, “the country girl,” who battles against her husband’s weaker side in order to redeem his career.

Uta Hagen had won rave reviews and numerous awards for her searing performance in the tide role, and when the great ladies of Hollywood heard that George Seaton was at work on the screenplay, their agents and publicity men went into action. The part offered dramatic fireworks of a sort that seldom came a film actress’s way. Jennifer Jones got ahead of the field with some behind-the-scenes help from her husband, the mogul David Selznick. But then, early in 1954, Selznick phoned Perlberg and Seaton with the news that his wife was pregnant. The two men were well into the making of
Toko-Ri,
and were only weeks away from starting on
The Country Girl.

“George and I don’t tear our hair out,” Perlberg later remembered, talking in the historic present favored by his friend Damon Runyon. “We just look at each other. We’re both thinking the same thing at the same time—
Grace Kelly.”

The trouble was that Perlberg and Seaton were working for Paramount, and in her fifteen months under contract to MGM, Grace had so far made only one MGM movie. After
Mogambo,
her career had been built through films made for other studios. MGM had turned tidy profits through the loan-out arrangements they had made with Warner Brothers
(Dial M for Murder)
and Paramount
(Rear Window).
For
Toko-Ri,
they had charged Paramount $25,000, and only paid Grace $10,000 in salary. But the time had come for the studio that had originally found and signed Grace Kelly to capitalize properly on her growing appeal. MGM had seen the rough cut of
Rear Window,
and they had heard the jungle drums. Dore Schary, MGM’s head of production, said no to their young contract actress’s leaving the studio yet again. “We have big plans for Grace,” he told Perlberg and Seaton.

That should have been the end of the matter, for it was a breach of studio etiquette for producers to solicit the services of artists at rival studios, particularly once a loan-out request had been made and had been rejected. But Perlberg and Seaton wanted Grace badly for
The Country Girl,
and somehow they made sure that she saw a copy of the script. “No court on earth can make us tell how she got it,” Perlberg later said coyly. “Just say that I suspect Seaton, and he suspects me.”

Grace was regularly reading the scripts submitted to her by MGM, and regularly turning them down—
The Cobweb,
a love triangle with Robert Taylor and Lana Turner;
The Long Day,
a romance of the early West; and
Green Fire,
a thriller about emeralds set in South America. Seaton’s screen treatment of Odets’s play was in a totally different class, in Grace’s opinion. “I just
had
to be in
The Country Girl,
“she later said. “There was a real acting part in it for me.” It infuriated Grace that Dore Schary’s “big plans” should be such low-level potboilers by comparison, and, according to Hollywood legend, she stormed into the production chiefs office and told him so: “If I can’t do this picture, I’ll get on the train and never come back!”

But such an upfront attack was not Grace’s style. Occasionally frosty, more usually effusive and charming, Grace was almost never direct in her aggressiveness. She had been trained to hide her anger, not to flaunt it. Her toughness had to be implied from her actions, deceptively hidden below her creamy exterior. “I never said any such thing to anybody,” Grace later commented on her alleged showdown with Dore Schary. “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. My agent handled the whole matter.”

In the end, it was nothing that money could not fix. Paramount agreed that they would pay MGM $50,000—double their previous loan-out price for Grace—while Grace agreed that she would go to work on one of MGM’s potboilers the moment that
The Country Girl
was finished.
Green Fire,
the emerald adventure, seemed the least undesirable, since it promised some location shooting in the jungles of Colombia, where her old school friend Maree Frisby had recently moved following her marriage.

The one remaining negotiation involved Grace’s scheduled co-star in
The Country Girl,
Bing Crosby. Crosby’s movie contracts gave him leading-lady approval, and he remained to be convinced that Grace Kelly was the serious actress that the part called for. “He had heard tales,” reported Louella Parsons in May 1954, “that she was flirtatious and set out to capture the heart of every man with whom she worked.”

Arthur Jacobson, assistant producer on both
Toko-Ri
and
The Country Girl,
was at the Palm Springs house party that William Perlberg arranged so that Bing and Grace would meet: “Bing had been playing golf, and he came in, and Perlberg said, ‘Hey Bing, I want you to meet Grace—Grace Kelly.’ And Bing, with the pipe in his mouth, which he never took out, just said ‘Oh, hi!’ and walked on out of the room.”

Grace knew what a significant meeting this was—she had brought Prudy Wise along for moral support—and she was knocked backwards by Crosby’s reaction. “She was crushed,” remembers Jacobson, “because she knew this was important in her life. Meeting a man who could say no. She didn’t know what to think. I saw a few little tears starting to glisten in her eyes.”

When Jacobson cornered Crosby later that evening and asked him for his verdict, the star responded as if there had never been a problem. “Fine!” he said. “Good for Bill? Good for George? Good for you? Who the hell am I to judge?”

The strange behavior of the singer stemmed to no small extent from Crosby’s personal anxieties about the challenge with which
The Country Girl
confronted him as an actor. Playing Frank Elgin, the depressed and deceitful drunk who was married to the country girl, demanded a bleak and unglamorous performance that was light-years away from
White Christmas.
Seaton and Perlberg had boldly decided to cast both their hero and heroine against type. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the witch queens of Hollywood gossip, had been perfectly correct about Grace’s tendency to mix romance with serious work on the set, and it was difficult to see how such a stunning young beauty could be dressed down and generally flattened to play Elgin’s dreary and cheerless wife with any conviction.

Arthur Jacobson was present at the first costume tryout to see if the dressing-down of Grace could possibly work. Edith Head, the costume designer, was brought in to execute the opposite of her normal job of glamorizing young starlets. “We looked at twenty-four sweaters,” remembers Jacobson, “before we settled on the one that looked dowdy enough. Edith found this drab dress, and we gave Grace some heavy spectacles and we pushed them back on her forehead. By the time the hairdresser had finished with her and we had her standing by an ironing board with a basket of washing, she looked like a different woman.”

“Grace, I didn’t think we could do it,” exclaimed Edith Head with delight, “but you look truly depressed! I congratulate you.”

Flat, dull, and listless, Grace’s performance as Georgie Elgin demanded a 180-degree change of direction from the breeziness of Lisa Fremont,
Rear Window’s
girl-about-town, and Grace accomplished the change with remarkable skill. As the downtrodden wife, she had to pull out emotions she had never displayed before—sarcasm, bitterness, and a rather frightening despair, which she portrayed with convincing bleakness. There was a dead soul somewhere deep inside Grace, the little girl who bowed her head submissively whenever her father disapproved, and Grace located her in the way that Sanford Meisner had taught her, by listening hard to the lines and by reacting instantly from her gut. “Never let me open my big mouth again,” said Bing Crosby after a few days working with Grace. “This girl can really act!”

Grace’s surprising dramatic backbone helped the singer in his own struggles with his part. Locked for many years in a marriage that all Hollywood knew to be unhappy, Crosby had been a heavy drinker himself, and the story of
The Country Girl
eerily shadowed his own life. Frank Elgin is an apparently affable singer-dancer who blames his drunken lapses on his demanding wife, just as Bing Crosby, the happy-go-lucky crooner with the pipe, liked to present himself in Hollywood society as a cheery innocent whose wife, Dixie Lee Crosby, was a drunken shrew. In reality, it was Crosby who started the heavy drinking in his marriage, and when his wife was stricken with ovarian cancer in 1952, he left her to face the ordeal alone. For most of her final months, Dixie Lee Crosby had to do without her husband, who was away in Europe on a leisurely schedule of filming and exhibition golf which got him home just a few days before her death.

Knocked sideways by grief and guilt, Crosby was shocked into a sort of moral stock-taking, and by the time he was filming
The Country Girl
sixteen months later, he felt able to discuss the parallels between himself and Frank Elgin. “It was so like his own life,” Grace later recalled, “he would remark about it when he did a scene.”

Fifty-years-old, remorseful, and seeking to make a new start, Bing Crosby found himself drawn to Grace’s combination of strength and tenderness. He had already started looking for a new young wife, and it seemed to him that Grace would fit the bill nicely. He made tentative and respectable advances, which were all the more respectable for his being a widower and a Catholic. “He would take us to church on Sunday,” remembered sister Lizanne. “Then we’d go to Alan Ladd’s for brunch and swimming.”

Grace responded to the courtship. When she liked a man and trusted him, she could act with a warmth that could sometimes be misleading. At the wrap party for
The Country Girl
she suddenly threw herself into Arthur Jacobson’s lap and gave him a hug. “There’s the man who was so nice to me,” she giggled kittenishly. Mrs. Jacobson was not amused. When Grace abandoned the reserve that she was cultivating against the hazards of her increasing celebrity, she reverted to the loose and comfortable Gracie who would stage a fake séance to get rid of an unwanted suitor. Bing Crosby’s attentions were not unwelcome, and the couple started dating in a decorous fashion.

The only complication was that the second male lead on
The Country Girl
—the actor playing the stage director whose production is threatened by Frank Elgin’s alcoholic moodiness—was none other than Grace’s most recent beau, William Holden. As one of the foremost actors on the Paramount roster, Holden normally worked for nothing less than top billing, but, like Grace and Bing, he knew a good acting role when he saw one. With one of the magnanimous gestures for which he was famous, Holden proposed himself for third billing in
The Country Girl,
below the still comparatively unknown Grace—and when it came to romance, he also yielded the field. Crosby broached the subject, according to Holden’s biographer Bob Thomas, one evening after filming.

“This Kelly girl,” he said. “She’s a knockout, isn’t she?”

“She sure is,” Holden agreed. “I’ve never known a young actress with so much know-how.”

“I’m talking about her as a person,” said Crosby, somewhat embarrassed. “I don’t mind telling you, Bill, I’m smitten with Grace. Daffy about her. And I was wondering if. . .”

“If I felt the same way?” Holden responded. “What man wouldn’t be overwhelmed by her? But look, Bing, I won’t interfere.”

Holden was already looking for the way to walk out of his relationship with Grace, and he elegantly bowed to the ardor that Crosby made so little attempt to conceal.

“Bing was mad for her,” remembers Lizanne. “Absolutely mad for her.”

The couple started being seen together more and more about town—Scandia, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, not far from Sweetzer Avenue, was a rendezvous that Crosby particularly favored—and since both Grace and the singer were single, the columnists did not hesitate to report on the relationship and speculate on its prospects. The headlines proclaimed it “Hollywood’s Newest Romance.”

Ma Kelly’s reaction was remarkable for being so positive. “Crosby was unquestionably eligible,” she later remarked in the horse-breeder style that marked her approach to the mating of Grace. “He was widowed, and he was going out with any number of girls.” Ma Kelly flew to Hollywood to meet the singer, and decided that she liked him. Working hard at his eligibility, Bing took Mrs. Kelly and Grace to lunch and a film preview in the company of William Holden and his wife. “He was very nice,” said Mrs. Kelly of Bing, “and we had a lovely time.”