Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (24 page)

When Jack Kelly’s son won a sculling race in England, the achievement was celebrated with a parade through the streets of Philadelphia. When his daughter made the cover of
Life
magazine, she was rewarded with a shrug that was not much better than a sneer. Jack Kelly later said that he did it out of concern and care for Grace—trying to prevent her head from getting swollen by the fickle nature of show-business fame. But his remarks to Judy Kanter had an edge that suggested more—that he was actually jealous of his daughter, and that, somewhere not too deep below the surface, he resented her for daring to prove that she could do very well in life without him.

It would not have mattered very much if that had actually been the case—if Grace had been able to acknowledge and act upon her impulse to blaze her own trail. She was entranced by the insolence and rebellion articulated by Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye,
but that, for her, was just a book. It did not represent an attitude that she could imagine applying to her own life. Grace came of the generation that first made it fashionable to blame parents for the woes of children, but she did not dream of rebelling against her background, or even of turning her back and walking away. She wanted to stay on the Kelly team.

So at the very moment Grace found herself in a position to begin to enjoy herself and her achievements, she was torn in two directions. The adult half of her knew how to cherish and savor her years as a star—the love and adulation, the sheer power and the fun of it all. “She enjoyed her stardom, as far as I could see,” said John Foreman, describing this side of Grace. “She wasn’t embarrassed by it. She had earned it and she enjoyed it.” But Grace’s other half remained the uncertain and anxious daughter, her eyes perked up perpetually for approval, oscillating among all the different strategies that could provide the comfort she craved—the little girl lost, the ingenue, the woman who was desperate in her search for the love and reassurance of elder men.

The one constant which had seen Grace through to this point was her drive to succeed, and this remained her talisman. Grace Kelly, film star, was still the Patton tank, steaming steadily forward. Her career eye was fixed firmly on the main goal, even if her personal vision remained clouded and immature. Grace’s instinct for working with Hollywood’s best was a reflection of this tough and perverse form of adulthood, and when she finished filming with Hitchcock on
Rear Window,
she moved on to collaborate with a filmmaking partnership who, in the early 1950s, commanded equal respect.

William Perlberg and George Seaton were an Oscar-winning director-producer team whose movies included such classics as
Miracle on 34th Street
and
The Song of Bernadette.
At the end of 1953 the two men were at work on
The Bridges at Toko-Ri,
a film based on James Michener’s documentary novel of the Korean War, and Grace was cast as the enterprising Navy wife who evades regulations to see her husband on the eve of what proves to be his final mission. William Holden played her husband.

At thirty-five, William Holden was the youngest leading man with whom Grace ever acted in Hollywood, and he was also the most openly flirtatious. Nicknamed “Golden Boy” after the tide of the 1939 movie that made him an overnight star, he had the dash of a man who had seldom encountered rejection. He seemed to get more handsome as he grew older, and his acting was similarly blessed. When Holden’s career as a heartthrob seemed on the slide in the early fifties, Billy Wilder had cast him in
Sunset Boulevard
and
Stalag 17,
which won him an Oscar, and he went on giving sterling performances to the end—most notably in
The Wild Bunch
and
Network.

William Holden was to die a broken and embarrassing alcoholic, literally too drunk to save his own life when he fell and cut his head open at the age of sixty-three. But his drinking was not an obvious problem when he started work with Grace Kelly on
The Bridges at Toko-Ri.
As an actor, he generated fire and excitement in the style of Gene Lyons. The intensity of his performance was, in some way, his own exorcism of his demons within, and with Grace he turned a cliché—a married couple saying their farewells on the eve of battle—into a puzzled and rather moving reality.
Toko-Ri
was the first Grace Kelly movie in which she was featured wearing a bathing suit, and the only one that ever showed her in bed with a man. The couple were chastely clothed in pajamas, and, thanks to the rules of Hollywood’s still powerful Motion Picture Production Code, they did not touch. The sequence was all talk from opposite sides of the bed. But by the standards of early 1950s movies the scene was definitely intimate, and even a little shocking.

The couple’s off-screen love affair carried straight on from what they developed on set. As sister Lizanne put it: “If a lovely girl and a handsome fellow have to ‘play’ at being husband and wife all day, they’re bound to have problems switching off when the show is over.”

Holden was married to the actress Ardis Ankerson Gaines (known as Brenda Marshall during her brief screen career), but he had betrayed Ardis quite openly during an affair he conducted with Audrey Hepburn in the early months of 1953, and he was no more discreet with Grace. “It was a heavy romance,” remembers Mel Dellar, the assistant director, who was an old friend of Holden’s from his Air Corps days. According to Holden’s psychiatrist, Michael Jay Klassman, Grace was so serious about her new boyfriend that she took him home to Philadelphia. “We fell head over heels in love with each other,” Holden told Klassman. “We couldn’t help our feelings.”

Michael Klassman was Holden’s therapist for an intensive four months shortly before the actor’s death, and it was a breach of ethics for him to reveal the details of his client’s sessions. But the therapist asserted that this was Holden’s wish—the actor had wanted the world to know the details of his alcoholism, Klassman said—and his rendering of Holden’s memories of Philadelphia had an authentic ring. “Cold and hostile,” were the words Holden chose to describe the welcome he found waiting for him at 3901 Henry Avenue.

Holden’s recollection of Grace’s father was particularly unpleasant. Jack Kelly had been quizzing Grace about the nature of her relationship with her latest costar. He suspected his daughter of having another affair with a married man, and Grace had kept denying it. So Jack repeated the accusation to Holden’s face, “shaking his fist,” as Holden remembered it, in his anger. Equally angry to be treated as an errant teenager, the star abandoned politeness, telling Jack Kelly to go to hell and stalking out of the room in fury. “I thought he might take a swing at me,” Holden remembered. Outside in the hall he found Grace, “tears streaming down her face.”

“We kept falling in love with all the wrong men,” remembers Rita Gam, “—the married ones.” An old colleague from the TV merry-go-round in New York, Rita Gam was sharing a small, two-bedroom apartment with Grace in those early months of 1954. It was on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood, an eccentric and rundown neighborhood of cottages and low-rent apartments, some of them occupied by hookers who would be returning from work around the time that Rita and Grace were leaving for their six o’clock makeup calls. The British photographer Cecil Beaton could not believe that two glamorous young actresses could be living in such seedy surroundings—”a modern apartment project,” he recorded in his diary, “where, rather like a reformatory, the inmates lived in cubicle apartments built around the courtyard.” The only gesture to Hollywood was a cracked and overchlorinated, kidney-shaped pool.

Sweetzer Avenue provided a thrifty and unpretentious background to Grace’s affair with William Holden. The star would pick her up there for dates, but it was no setting for romance. Grace and Rita had a bedroom each, and the sofa in the small living room was occupied by Prudy Wise, who was now established as Grace’s full-time assistant. In these cramped surroundings, Grace lived as frugally as ever, her one extravagance being the splits of champagne that she kept in the fridge to drink, as Rita Gam remembered it, with just about everything.

Grace never drank champagne, however—or any other form of alcohol—on a night before she had to work. During her modeling days a photographer had once told her that he could pick out the models who had had a drink for lunch. He would not work with them for the rest of the afternoon, he had said, and his warning had impressed her greatly. “He said that it tells in your eyes,” she used to explain with solemnity.

Grace loved her champagne, but she loved her looks still more, and she came to develop something of an obsession with her alcohol intake. She was regularly going on and off the wagon, observing Lent like a good Catholic, and also abstaining, in her later years, during the months that led up to her birthday in November. It was a running theme in her letters—”only one week to go,” she wrote to Prudy Wise in 1956, “and I will be swizzling away”—and when extracts from her correspondence with Prudy were published in the spring of 1994, this provoked headlines that Grace was an alcoholic.

Her close friends are unanimous that this was not the case. “In more than forty years,” says Maree Frisby Rambo, “from our rum-and-Coke days onward, I never once saw Grace have too much to drink. Giggly—yes. Drunk or out of control—never.”

Grace was a drinker, but she was not a boozer. The alcoholic in the Kelly family was sister Peggy, whose drinking sprees were already a problem, and Peggy’s excesses may have been another reason for Grace’s preoccupation with keeping her own drinking under control. Jack Kelly would regularly lecture his daughters on how unbecoming drunkenness was in a woman—and Grace’s ultimate worry was the havoc that drinking could play with her weight, since staying slim went with keeping her looks.

Slimming was a major concern in Sweetzer Avenue in the early months of 1954. Grace, Prudy, and Rita were forever on a diet. Gayelord Hauser, prunes, and exercise provided the cornerstones of their weight-loss program and it stimulated a sisterly closeness. In their eagerness to cut calories, the young women had worked out a ritual that involved the three of them bumping energetically round the room together on their bottoms.

Grace was now twenty-four, and it was a measure of her growing independence that she had finally shaken off her family chaperones. Rita Gam had already been married and divorced and had lived openly for a time, as the saying went, “in sin.” A catlike young woman with dark almond eyes, the brunette actress was an unconventional spirit, a hippie before her time, and the way she lived and talked about her own experiences helped Grace toward some deciphering of her own emotional life. “I have been falling in love since I was fourteen,” Grace admitted candidly to her friend, Judy Kanter, “and my parents have never approved of anyone I was in love with.”

Grace went on seeing William Holden in secret. It was uncanny the degree to which she was repeating the pattern of her romances with Don Richardson and Claude Philippe—and in the end it was Holden who called it all off. “I walked out of her life,” he told Michael Klassman, “although I loved her very, very much.” The actor had come to realize that there was no point. In the battle with Jack Kelly for his daughter’s ultimate allegiance, even the Golden Boy had to concede defeat.

In later years Holden confided to friends that he had loved Grace to a degree that surprised him. She was a warm, vivacious, and satisfyingly solid woman in many ways—but he came to feel she had an innermost emotional core which he could only diagnose as immature. Wrestling one day with the question of how they might overcome the problem of Grace’s Catholicism and Holden’s existing marriage in order to get married themselves, Grace came up with an answer which, she thought, solved it all. Her priest had told her, she said brightly, that if Holden became a Catholic, his previous marriage would be considered invalid—so she and Holden could get married in church. It would all be quite respectable!

In the days when she had been hoping to marry Don Richardson, Grace had come up with a similar proposal as a route around her parents’ objections to Richardson’s divorce, and Richardson had laughed in her face. Holden’s reaction was similar. “I’d be damned,” he told Broderick Crawford, “if I’d let any church dictate what I could do with my life.”

Grace’s eager reliance on the literalism of Catholic doctrine demonstrated the difficulty that she had in making grown-up moral decisions. The priest was another father figure whose blessing offered the validation that she could not give herself—and who also absolved her of the need to think through her problems as a mature and responsible adult. Either it was wrong to break up William Holden’s marriage or it wasn’t. Only Grace could know— and she had to decide for herself—whether she really wanted him sufficiently to face all the consequences. The idea that Holden’s becoming a Catholic would wipe away all the difficulties created by their mutual attraction was fairy thought—trying to wave a magic wand over real problems and real people. Grace’s “falling in love” was still an adolescent and ultimately selfish process in which she took refuge from the responsibilities of real life.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri
ranked marginally above
Fourteen Hours
in the canon of Grace’s movies. Her brief, fifteen-minute appearance was just an interlude in a drama whose primary focus was on men doing the nasty business of war. It scarcely advanced her career with the critics, who could find little to discuss beyond the pleasure of studying her for the first time in a bathing suit. But linking up with William Perlberg and George Seaton did prove to be a shrewd career move. The two men had recently secured a property which they, and most of Hollywood, knew would make a marvelous movie, and just as Hitchcock had spent the filming of
Dial M for Murder
discussing his plans for
Rear Window,
so Perlberg and Seaton’s energies during the making of
Toko-Ri
were largely centered on their hopes and plans for
The Country Girl.