Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (29 page)

Cassini found a priest in Virginia who was willing to accept him into the Roman faith. This would wipe out the impediment of his divorces in the same fashion that Grace had proposed to Bill Holden. The couple could then get married in church. It would be a small, secret wedding—an elopement, to all intents and purposes—and Grace and Oleg started working out the details. But as they confronted together the hard realities of what added up to a sensational scandal—the virginal Grace Kelly running away to marry a twice-divorced fashion designer—their courage failed them. “We both hesitated,” Cassini remembers, “and the moment was lost.”

Looking back today, Cassini is inclined to lay the blame for the indecision at his own door. Elopement had not brought happiness to either of his previous marriages, rather the opposite. His stealing away of Gene Tierney had led to a bitter and draining ordeal as the couple fought off the hostility of parents, press, and studio, and he could see the same thing happening again.

Grace had hoped for so much of the sprightly knight errant who had opened his courtship with red roses. It was her postcard that had lured Cassini to the south of France. She was the one who maneuvered him into marriage over their fish dinner on the dock in Cannes harbor. Back in America, she got him telling home truths to her mother, going head-to-head with her father, and planning the stolen, Romeo and Juliet marriage which, his resume suggested, he was ideally qualified to arrange.

But it was Cassini’s own painful experience of runaway romance that shut off the escape route Grace was looking for. Her lover had tried the fantasy twice himself, and he had discovered that it was not all that it promised. If Grace really wanted her freedom, she would have to learn how to free herself.

13

OSCAR!

T
here were those who disapproved of Grace Kelly kissing Cary Grant so firmly on the lips.
To Catch a Thief,
they felt, featured a lady who had become altogether too saucy and adventurous. “There has been a growing tendency,” complained Carson Kerr in the
Toronto Star,
“to overplay the sexy side of her portrayals.” “I wonder,” queried Sidney Skolsky in
Photoplay,
“if Grace Kelly knew she had so much S.A.”—an abbreviation which, in itself, demonstrated the era’s unhappiness with overt displays of sexuality. S.A. stood for sex appeal.

But sexiness, sauce, and adventure were integral components of Grace Kelly’s appeal. Without them she was June Allyson or Jennifer Jones. It was Grace’s knack to incorporate the primness of these models of propriety with the naughtiness of Jane Russell and the sweater girls. Lisa Fremont and Frances Stevens were characters who were simultaneously innocent and experienced, and the dynamic of Grace’s screen persona came from the tension that these contradictions generated.

The conformist, country-club side of Grace played perfectly to the female role model of the 1950s, the smiling and competent middle-class spouse in the suburbs, her life made a joy by the endless array of labor-saving appliances that were the fruit of postwar affluence. Television portrayed this paragon serenely pushing the vacuum cleaner in her pearls. Though she lived on the outskirts of a big city, her values were essentially those of small-town America; and when she went shopping, it was to small-town stores grown large—her local Hudson’s, Bullock’s, or Sakowitz.

But to this suburban prototype, Grace Kelly added a touch of the cosmopolitan. She came from Philadelphia, a city that was still thought of as a major and trend-setting metropolis. She did her shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue, and there was something about her taste and demeanor that hinted at more. The archetypal fifties housewife was still regulated by the confining values that had produced victory in the previous decade—discipline, structure, discretion, self-control—and these remained at a premium in the age of the Cold War and the hydrogen bomb. But the sexual revolution was at hand. Alongside
Betty Crocker’s Cookbook,
one of the bestsellers of 1954 was Alfred Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior of the Human Female,
an academic study that detailed clinically, but all the more shockingly, the wide extent of premarital and extramarital sexual experimentation among American women—a disproportionate number of them middle-class and college-educated. The mind and body of the suburban female, according to Kinsey’s painstaking interviews, were preoccupied by a great deal more than Little League and station wagons.

Grace, of course, mirrored this ambivalence precisely in her own life. Attracted to sexually experienced older men, she was forever trying to fit her freewheeling impulses into the old-fashioned parameters of parental approval and the wedding ring. As her friend Judy Kanter later remarked, it was unthinkable for a nice girl to admit in the early fifties that she might do “it” for purely casual or pleasure-loving reasons. Good girls waited until their wedding night—or lied about it. When Judy Kanter surveyed the virtue of her closest friends, she reckoned she would be hard-pressed to raise a quorum for a Board of Virgins, but she was only guessing. Sex was something that other people did, and that nobody talked about.

Still subject to the heavy hand of the Motion Picture Production Code by which Hollywood censored itself, the movies reflected this reticence. Sexual relations could only be depicted in the context of marriage, and that in the most indirect form. Marlon Brando and James Dean were two male stars who embodied the rebellious sexuality that was to shatter the conformity of the Eisenhower years, but they had no female equivalent. Stars with big boobs had no brains. The sex bombs stuck to the old-fashioned stereotypes. In the absence of a philosophy for the independent and intelligent woman, female aspirations had to focus on comparatively tentative modifications to the familiar role models— and this was where Grace Kelly came in. She was the forces’ sweetheart of a generation that was only just starting to discard its mental uniform. The spouse in the suburbs did not yet imagine that she might be dissatisfied or unfulfilled by her lot, but she did rather like the idea of being a Park Avenue girl. Katharine Hepburn had represented several firm steps in this direction, but, independent and quirky, she was always ultimately Katharine Hepburn—someone who was difficult to imitate. Grace Kelly was a woman whom a lot of other women imagined they really could become.

“She was a new thing,” remembered her friend and television agent, John Foreman, “and there was no one to compare her to before or since. She set a style that was right for its time.” Though Grace’s vibrance, polish, and self-assurance were in a well-established movie tradition, her implied sexuality was something new. She was clearly experienced in some way that was only hinted at, but this had not been at the cost of her freshness or respectability. She was no virgin, but she was no slut either, and in squaring this particularly difficult circle, she spoke to the shy and mysterious questings in the hearts of women across the land. Grace Kelly was hardly a role model for the bra burners of a later generation, but she represented as much liberation as the decade of Pollyanna could take. Even the swinging sixties had its problems with Jane Fonda.

The trouble was that Grace’s employers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not demonstrate the slightest awareness of all this. Grace Kelly for them was the latest blonde starlet to make it big, and they offered her the same range of roles they had been offering their female leads for thirty years—Westerns (
Jeremy Rodock
with Spencer Tracy), costume dramas (
Quentin Durward
with Robert Taylor) and, after some grumbling and cogitation, the ultimate concession to the star who took her acting rather too seriously, a worthy bio-pic (the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street).

Grace could not get excited about any of these roles. It was not that she could articulate exactly who or what she was. Alfred Hitchcock, after all, had been the principal visionary in the shaping of the heroines of
Rear Window
and
To Catch a Thief.
But Grace knew she was onto something different. “Hollywood has overworked the word ‘sexy,’” she remarked to the British journalist Donald Zee in March 1955. “It really takes them by surprise when they see it displayed in a new way.”

The details of this new way were more a matter of instinct than calculation on Grace’s part. But she certainly knew who she was not—and that included the watery heroine of
Quentin Durward.
“All I’d do would be to wear thirty-five different costumes, and look pretty and frightened,” she explained to one reporter, setting out her reasons for her rejection of that part. “There are eight people chasing me, from an old man to the head gypsy. The stage directions on every page of the script read, ‘She clutches her jewel box and flees.’”

Grace was entitled to a break. The filming of the interiors of
To Catch a Thief had
come to a riotous and unforgettable conclusion in Hollywood on August 13, 1954. This was Hitchcock’s birthday, an occasion on which, by time-honored tradition, his cast and crew were expected to produce champagne and a massive birthday cake. The director would invariably greet this demonstration of affection with expressions of modest surprise, but in 1954 the surprise contained an extra ingredient. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced his precisely spoken English secretary with all-too-perfect enunciation. “Would you all come into the other room, please, and have a piece of Mr. Hitchcake’s cock?”

Grace spent the autumn in New York seeing a great deal of Oleg Cassini, then going down to Philadelphia on her own to play the role of dutiful—if deceitful—daughter. There was a sense, remarked Judy Kanter, in which the well-bred fifties girl never left home. These were the months in which Grace took up, then abandoned, the options of elopement or pregnancy. She could express her independence and maturity very clearly when it came to her dealings with MGM, but her parents, as ever, were a harder nut to crack.

She settled for moving out of the beautiless slabs of Manhattan House to acquire her own, elegant, high-ceilinged apartment just across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her mother offered to help her decorate her new home, but Grace politely declined. She hired George Stacey, a fashionable Manhattan decorator who specialized in the French antique style that Claude Philippe and Oleg Cassini had taught her to appreciate. Faded silk rugs, polished Louis Quinze pieces, instantly old-looking curtain treatments that infused a room with a feeling of haze and duskiness—the George Stacey package delivered class and subtlety conveniently ready-mixed. When you walked into the place you got the feeling that Grace Kelly must have been living on Fifth Avenue forever. Grace’s new home was Kelly-like in its excellence, but, as with her career, its style and sensitivity reflected her own contribution to the equation.

Just before Christmas 1954, the world outside Hollywood got a chance to see Grace’s performance in
The Country Girl.
Ten months after shooting finished, the movie was released in New York on December 16, to a near-unanimous chorus of critical approval—”as close to theatrical perfection,” declared
Cue
magazine, “as we are likely to see on-screen in our time.”

Bing Crosby won particular praise for his depiction of the self-pitying Frank Elgin, but the unexpected power and poignancy that Grace displayed in the title role was equally acclaimed. “Kelly extends her range down to the bottoms of un-glamor, dead-faced discouragement,” wrote Archer Winsten in the
New York Post.
“She gives it everything a great actress could.” In the
New York Times,
Bosley Crowther described Grace’s acting as “intense” and “perceptive.” She had made a major contribution, the critic wrote, to a “trenchant, intense, and moving film . . . one of the fine and forceful pictures of the year.” The movie was released just in time to be eligible for the following spring’s Oscar awards, and in January 1955, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle provided a most promising omen. They presented Grace with their award for Best Actress of 1954.

By now there was scarcely a magazine that had not done its cover story on Grace Kelly, though the writers often found fresh material difficult to gather. Grace would not allow MGM’s publicity department to give out her vital statistics, and she declined to answer questions that she considered too personal—”What do you wear in bed?” being at the top of the proscribed list. (Marilyn Monroe’s memorable answer—”Chanel No. 5.”) Extracting a personal anecdote from Grace Kelly, complained one reporter, was “like trying to chip granite with a toothpick.” “A Grace Kelly anecdote?” cheerfully agreed an unnamed friend. “I don’t think Grace would let an anecdote happen to her.”