Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (21 page)

The director’s first glimpse of Grace came in
High Noon,
in which he pronounced her performance “mousy.” This, in fact, was a compliment when it came from the master of the unexpected—”mousy” was an arousing concept for Hitchcock—and when he was shown Grace’s disheveled screen test for Gregory Ratoff, his imaginings were still more powerfully stimulated. Hitchcock had a mystery movie planned for production in the fall of 1953.
Dial M for Murder
was a detective thriller which the British writer Frederick Knott had adapted from his successful stage play. The action was set in a claustrophobic London apartment, and Hitchcock saw Grace as the wayward but ultimately naive English heroine—
Mogambo’
s
Linda Nordley as she might carry on back in North Kensington.

“An actress like her gives the director certain advantages,” Hitchcock later explained. “He can afford to be more colorful with a love scene when it is played by a lady than when it is played by a hussy. Using one actress, the scene can be vulgar. But if you put a lady in the same circumstances she can be exciting and glamorous.”

Hitchcock asked to meet and inspect Grace personally when she got back from filming
Mogambo
in the spring of 1953. She was so nervous at the prospect of meeting the great man that she could scarcely speak. “In a horrible way it was funny to have my brain turn to stone,” she later said. Fred Zinnemann and John Ford had been great directors, but Hitchcock was something approaching a legend—the only Hollywood filmmaker, with Cecil B. DeMille, whose name on a movie usually occupied a billing above that of its stars.
Psycho
and
The Birds
still lay ahead, but Hitchcock had already trademarked his macabre blend of humor and suspense in such groundbreaking successes as
The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes,
and
Saboteur.

Hitchcock took an instant liking to Grace. Her shyness and deference appealed to an artist who gloried in manipulating every component of his creation, and he offered her the female lead in
Dial M for Murder,
playing the faithless wife of Ray Milland. Grace was the only female in the cast. Since Hitchcock was making the film for Warner Brothers, he had to negotiate a “loan-out” of the actress’s services from MGM, who charged him $20,000 for her six weeks filming, thus netting themselves a tidy profit. This was standard procedure in the days of the studio system—and it carried dividends for Grace. Along with second billing to Milland, she got a raise in salary to $1,250 a week.

It was good going for a twenty-three-year-old actress with only two half-significant movie roles to her credit. But before Grace started work on
Dial Murder,
she had one remaining television commitment to fulfill—playing the wife of the pioneering naturalist and bird painter John James Audubon, opposite the debonair French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont.

Jean-Pierre Aumont was a natural candidate for Grace Kelly’s affections. Forty-two years old, a widower and a war hero, the handsome Frenchman delivered his lines in an elegantly fractured accent. Aumont was a younger, leaner, and more predatory version of Maurice Chevalier—a definite ladykiller. He had already played opposite such stars as Ginger Rogers and Eva Gabor, and when NBC hired him early in 1953 to play Audubon in the Goodyear Playhouse production of
Way of an Eagle,
he asked about the actress who had been cast to play his wife. “‘She’s a very young and beautiful girl,’ they told me, ‘and she’s just finishing a film in Africa with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.’”

Aumont was not expecting white gloves and horn-rimmed spectacles when he reported for his first meeting with Grace Kelly in the off-Broadway ballroom that NBC had hired for rehearsals. But Grace was operating in her frosty, arm’s-length mode. She had just arrived back from London, and she was still suffering from the abrupt let-down in her relationship with Clark Gable. She did not intend to get picked up and dropped again. “She was giving out a feeling of great austerity,” Aumont remembers. “She was certainly good-looking, but she was also very, very strict.” This lady, Grace made clear to her handsome French costar, was not for killing.

The leading man assumed that he could at least address his leading lady by her Christian name: “In Hollywood, in our profession, everybody calls each other by their first name from the very first minute.” But Miss Kelly was not even willing to be that casual.

“It was
‘Mr.
Aumont’ all the time. She kept on calling me that for two or three days.” The Frenchman took note of Grace’s chilling ability to turn her blue eyes to steel at a moment’s notice.

Aumont deployed every ounce of charm at his disposal to no avail—until he noticed on the wall a sign that had been posted to foster good fellowship when the ballroom reverted in the evenings to its designated function. “It said, ‘Ladies, be kind with your gentlemen. After all, men are human beings too.’ So I said, ‘Miss Kelly, will you read this, please?’ And she looked and she laughed, and the ice was broken. We became the best of friends.”

They also became lovers. “Neither of us were virgins,’’ says Jean-Pierre Aumont, who, as a 200 percent Frenchman, is amazed at the notion that a relationship between two attractive, single adults should not include a healthy ration of sex. Through the summer of 1953, Grace and her costar enjoyed a warm and happy New York romance, playing Mr. and Mrs. Audubon offscreen as on. Arch ornithological exclamations—”Look, my dear, a crested flycatcher!”—became a running joke in their conversations.

When autumn came, they went their separate ways, Grace to take up her filming engagement with Hitchcock in Hollywood, Aumont returning to pursue his career in France. “I loved her,” says the Frenchman today, “because she was so lovely.” So why does he think that Grace Kelly first presented herself to him with such severity—only to succumb to him totally thereafter? “The day that I can explain how women work,” replies the actor with a shrug of Gallic insouciance, “is the day that I’ll be sanctified.”

Jean-Pierre Aumont was a man of action when it came to the opposite sex. Alfred Hitchcock was very definitely a man of theory. Imprisoned inside his gross and pendulous body, the Englishman’s hyperactive mind was that of a voyeur, flickering with the fantasies of lust and violence that inspired his art. “Hitchcock filmed scenes of murder as if they were love scenes,” observed the French director Francois Truffaut, “and love scenes as if they were murder.”

Dial M for Murder
was a melodrama of those two elements, with Grace playing the lady who was the inspiration for both. Caught out by her unlikeable husband (Ray Milland) in a love affair with a visiting American writer (Robert Cummings), Grace’s character, Margot Wendice, becomes the victim of an elaborate murder plot. In staving off the assassin hired by her husband, Margot kills her attacker with a pair of sewing scissors, whereupon her husband manipulates the evidence to get her convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

Hitchcock decided he would film the play virtually as it had been performed on stage, using the single set to create an enclosed and psychopathic feeling. When Grace arrived in Hollywood in August 1953, she found that her director had been at work for weeks. “Hitchcock planned out everything ahead of time,” remembers Mel Dellar, who was the assistant director on the movie. “I have never worked with anyone who was so meticulous.”

Hitchcock put particular effort into the choreographing of the murder struggle, which was the one piece of action in an otherwise static and somewhat wordy drama. Grace was to writhe and moan in a nightgown, arching her hands beseechingly into the audience, her bare white legs thrashing in the yellowy-green darkness of “Warner Color.” It was a scene that needed a real lady to moderate its evident sexuality, and Hitchcock could not wait to shape the performance of the young actress who, he felt sure, would prove to be a “snow-covered volcano.”

Even the master of the unexpected, however, was not prepared for the sort of volcano that Grace turned out to be. A cool professional on the set, she conducted herself as a completely different character when the camera stopped rolling, fulfilling Hitchcock’s fantasies to a degree he could scarcely have imagined. “That Gryce!” he reminisced in his cockney accent to the screenwriter Bryan Mawr a few years later, recalling the havoc that his not-so-virginal young star wrought among the attractive males on the set of
Dial M for Murder.
“That Gryce! She fucked everyone! Why”— and he said this with a certain amazement—”she even fucked little Freddie, the writer!”

Bryan Mawr, himself a writer of only moderate physical stature, could not help taking the great man’s surprise a trifle personally. “The snow princess!” Hitchcock chortled, relishing the irony of it, and looking more devilishly cherubic than ever. “Gryce Kelly, the snow princess!”

Himself a Catholic who struggled vainly with carnal desires— sheer gluttony, most of all—the director was fascinated by the ambiguous behavior of his leading lady. Arriving in Hollywood for her first leading role, Grace had totally abandoned the distant demeanor in which she had tried to set her professional relationship with Jean-Pierre Aumont. She could scarcely have surprised Hitchcock more if she had played out his back-of-the-taxicab scenario. “All the men fell in love with Grace on
Dial M,”
remembered her sister Lizanne. “They were around her in scores—Tony Dawson [who played the murderer] and Frederick Knott [the author of both the play and screenplay] really fell for her.”

Lizanne was sharing a room with Grace in the Chateau Marmont, the shabby lodging-house hotel that loomed over Sunset Boulevard like a decaying Gothic castle. The younger sister was playing chaperone as she had done two years earlier during the filming of
High Noon,
but this time she found herself overwhelmed. “The whole cast seem to fall in love with her,” she remembered. “Everyone was sending flowers. At one point I said, ‘This place looks like a funeral home.’ I ran out of vases. . . . Every day another bouquet would come.”

Chief among the bouquet senders was the star of the movie, Ray Milland, toupee’d, smooth, and glib, and twice as old as Grace. He was known to his intimates as “Jack.” Born Reginald Truscott-Jones in Neath, South Wales, in 1905, Milland had switched from light comedy to serious drama in 1945 when he played an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s film,
The Lost Weekend,
a harrowing performance which Grace had seen back in Germantown. It had won Milland an Oscar.

Grace was greatly flattered that one of her schoolgirl heroes should be dropping in on her at the Chateau Marmont. “After the shooting,” Lizanne remembered, “we’d all sit around there, and he would come over. He wasn’t living with his wife, and one thing led to another. . . . It was pretty serious.”

“They made no attempt to conceal it,” remembers Mel Dellar.

“You would see them together after work having a meal or whatever.”

When Joe Hyams went to interview Ray Milland for the
New York Herald Tribune
that autumn, the star answered the door dressed in nothing but a towel, and the journalist got the clear impression that Milland was not alone. “Grace appeared after a time,” remembers Hyams. “She was dressed, but she had had time to dress. She was cool as a cucumber. She was very patrician.”

Lizanne had to abandon the pretense that she could do very much to safeguard her sister’s virtue. She knitted a pair of argyle socks for Milland, as if he were already her brother-in-law, and she offered him her ear as his confidante. “We had a long talk,” she recalled of one plane trip that she shared with Milland. “He really was, seriously, very much in love with her.”

Grace returned Milland’s feelings. Put on her guard by the outcome of her relationship with Clark Gable, she had played wary with Jean-Pierre Aumont. But the Frenchman had relaxed her, and she positively blossomed in the adulation she received as the only woman on the
Dial M for Murder
set. Suddenly she was a star— and she was in love with a star. She did not care who knew it.

Conducting a love affair in Hollywood, however, was rather different from romantic indiscretion in the African bush. Grace had not reckoned with the power of gossip in a closed and jealous community—nor with the fact that Milland’s wife, Mai (short for Murial), had many friends and was generally well liked.

“Grace Kelly was a conniving woman,” says Skip Hathaway, who was particularly close to Mai Milland. “She almost ruined my best friend Mai’s marriage. Grace Kelly fucked everything in sight. She was worse than any woman I’d ever known. She knew how to lead a man on.”

It was not long before the papers started hinting at the story. In the early 1950s the established gossip columnists still disseminated their scandal in the oblique and codelike staccato perfected by Walter Winchell, rushing from nudge to wink and back again so rapidly that their mischief was softened in a miasma of slightly confusing innuendo. Only one magazine went for the jugular in the style of the modern muckraking tabloid.
Confidential
was a scandal sheet that employed private detectives to trail stars who checked into hotels with companions to whom they were not married. The magazine was not scared to broach such taboo subjects as the homosexuality of Liberace, and when it got wind of Milland’s romance with Grace it did not hesitate: