Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (28 page)

“Well, here we are, Mr. Cassini,” she said, looking out at the boats bobbing on the water. “You’ve been following me all over the world. What do you have to say for yourself? Isn’t there anything you want to say?”

It was the equivalent of the raft scene six weeks earlier, but now it was Grace who had got Oleg in a corner.

“I think I would be happy to continue as we are right now,” Cassini responded, frankly expressing his first preference, “or to take this in any direction you want”—he could sense that more was wanted—”including marriage. What do you wish?”

He had uttered, with a little prompting, the line that Grace wanted to hear. “I want to make my life with you,” she responded quietly and movingly. “I want to be your wife.”

“You’ve got it,” said Oleg Cassini.

The couple ordered champagne. They went off to the casino to dance and gamble, and Grace even won a little at the tables. “It was an altogether magical evening,” remembers Cassini. “I was filled with pride and love, and was entirely enraptured by her.” But as the celebration progressed, the designer was alarmed to see Frances Stevens, the self-assured and sophisticated girl-about-the-Riviera, transform herself into Grace Kelly from East Falls, talking excitedly about the preparations for their marriage—the dress, the church, all the mundane details of the wedding reception. The globe-hopping polish of Oleg Cassini’s film-star girlfriend was quite overwhelmed by “the flushed enthusiasm of a typical American Junior Leaguer.”

Cassini was confronted by what he had not seen, or had not wanted to see, before—the square and conventional side of Jack and Ma Kelly’s daughter. Part of Grace was a very free spirit indeed—the girl who had imagined her life with such out-of-the-mainstream characters as Don Richardson or Philippe of the Waldorf. This was the Grace who had coaxed Cassini to the south of France and had lain with him on swimming rafts. But now Grace had to return to the world of rules, and her mind flipped straight to the rule-makers.

“I want to write home immediately and let them know,” she said. “Mother will be on my side in this, I’m sure of it. . . .” But here was another troubling note. “There may be some difficulties with Father. You’re not exactly his type. . . .”

Thinking about it later, Oleg Cassini realized that his relationship with Grace was never quite the same after those words had been uttered. The happy couple shared their joy with the Grants and the Hitchcocks, and more champagne was consumed. But when the time came to arrange their journey home, Grace said she thought that they should travel separately. Oleg should fly straight to New York, she said, while she took the boat with the rest of the company. It was important to preserve the appearance of propriety if her parents were to be won over.

Cassini kissed Grace goodbye at the boat, consigning her to the care of the Grants and the Hitchcocks, then flew alone to New York—where he discovered, as he later put it, that “the world had turned.” The success of
Rear Window
at theaters across America had made Grace Kelly the most talked-about star in the country, and the rumors of her romance with Cassini had reached all the gossip columns. Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper were both predicting marriage—though with a significant twist. No longer was Grace the mysterious and unknown predator who represented a danger to happily married stars. Her spectacular new fame had made her the innocent heroine, while the comparatively obscure Cassini was now the figure from the shadows—a marauding playboy whose claims on Grace’s affections aroused the suspicions of both her studio and the press. Why, of all the attractive men that were available, wondered Hedda Hopper, had “the ethereal Miss Kelly” picked on the “devilish” Cassini?

The couple’s reunion in Grace’s cabin in New York harbor proved stilted and awkward. The careless rapture of the Riviera had quite disappeared. Grace’s two sisters were there, along with a reception committee that seemed to include every press agent and film executive in Manhattan, and reality intruded still more harshly when Cassini took Grace and her mother out for a meal to get acquainted.

“Well, here we are,” smiled the designer nervously, as he sat with the two ladies in the back of a taxi—”the unholy trio.”

“You, Mr. Cassini, may be unholy,” responded Ma Kelly, not missing a beat. “I can assure you that Grace and I are not.”

Mrs. Kelly’s jibe was not unwarranted. Age forty-one in the summer of 1954, Oleg Cassini was, by religion, a less-than-practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and had been twice divorced. His first marriage to Merry Fahrney, a cough syrup heiress from Chicago, had lasted only a matter of months. He survived longer with Gene Tierney, a promising Hollywood actress who had burned out in the 1940s, but the marriage had not ended much more happily. Refined and well-bred, of wealthy Irish-American parentage, Gene Tierney had some eerie similarities to Grace, and the failure of her union to Cassini did not provide a happy precedent. Ma Kelly was quite frank.

“We do not consider you good marriage material, Mr. Cassini,” she said bluntly over lunch. “. . . We believe Grace owes it to herself, to her family, and to her parish to reconsider.”

Oleg Cassini never took an insult lying down. He had fought duels in his youth in Italy, and he gave Ma Kelly as good as he got. Yes, he conceded, he had been divorced, but he remained on good terms with Gene Tierney and his children. He was wealthy enough, through his own efforts, not to be suspected of fortune-hunting, and he was not ashamed to be known as a man who was attractive to women. “There is no attractive man—including your husband—who has not been popular with the opposite sex,” he retorted. “Why do you penalize me for success?”

Oleg Cassini was the first of Grace’s lovers ever to stand up and try to slug it out with her parents. But it did little to advance his case with Mrs. Kelly. “We propose a six-month moratorium,” she said. “We don’t think you should see each other for that time. . . . Grace will be able to see if it was just Europe, or your charm, or this pursuit you put on her. . . .”

Twenty-four years old—only weeks away from being twenty-five—Grace sat limp and cowed through this exchange, silent as her lover did all the fighting in their battle against the enmity of her parents. Cassini had not seen this childlike, spiritless side of Grace before, and he could not believe it. If she truly loved him as she said she did, it was surely her job to explain to her parents why she wanted to marry him.

But later in the week Grace phoned from Ocean City. She had been doing some thinking. She was guest of honor at the Miss America Pageant that was due to be held that weekend in Atlantic City, just up the coast, and she wanted Oleg to be her official escort. It would serve as her own, local, hometown endorsement of their relationship. She had also been talking to her mother, and had managed to get Ma Kelly to soften just a little. Her father remained hostile, but working together, mother and daughter had secured Jack Kelly’s grudging consent to Cassini’s coming to stay for the weekend.

The designer discovered how grudging that consent was as soon as he arrived at the Kelly’s Ocean City beach house. The bedroom to which he was shown was a cubicle-like enclosure a few yards down the hall and within obvious earshot of the bedroom of the senior Kellys. “I was trapped there at night,” he recalls. “My movements were easily monitored.”

But the more extraordinary thing was the way in which both the male Kellys, Jack Senior and Kell, absolutely declined to speak to their guest or even acknowledge his presence in their home. They might allow the man through the door, but that was only to demonstrate the extent of their scorn and dislike of him. “They actually refused to say a word to me,” Cassini remembers, “even in response to questions. At one point Grace and I were swimming, and she said, ‘Try and talk with my father.’ But whenever I attempted a conversation with him, he looked right past me. He would not say a word.”

Jack Kelly’s cold shoulder was comparatively benign. When his wife had first broached the subject of Oleg Cassini coming down for the weekend, he had exploded. The dress designer, he sneered, was a “wop,” a “dago,” and a “worm.” He would kill the man if he dared to walk through the door.

Grace and Ma Kelly had modified that threat, but this was slight consolation for Oleg Cassini, who felt utterly humiliated by his treatment at the hands of Grace’s family. He sat through whole meals disbelievingly trying to make conversation, and receiving not one male word in response.

The designer could not help remembering a similar occasion at the Tierney home a dozen years earlier, when Gene Tierney had come to his defense. “You can’t treat him this way!” she had screamed at her parents. But Grace was saying absolutely nothing. It seemed to Cassini that she was deliberately standing back, watching the drama as an outsider, not as the person who had created it. It was sad to see a beautiful, successful, and apparently mature woman whose reactions were so totally frozen by her parents. Grace seemed very much a victim.

Seen in another light, however, Grace’s behavior to her boyfriend had been almost sadistic. What had she expected to happen? Don Richardson, Claude Philippe, Ray Milland, William Holden, and now Oleg Cassini—she had placed all her lovers in the same arena, enlisting them to her banner in the full knowledge of the impossible challenge that they faced as men who were either married or divorced.
It was like the fairy stories of the princess whose father will only yield her hand to the suitor who can solve some insoluble riddle or perform an impossible feat of arms. In terms of Freudian theory, it was classically Oedipal behavior. Grace was toying with a variety of suitors in order to affirm her tie to the male who mattered most.

When Oleg Cassini left Ocean City he was deeply depressed. His suffering had been for nothing. The Kellys would never accept him, he felt quite sure, and Grace was too craven ever to do battle on his behalf. The situation seemed quite hopeless.

Yet as the weeks went by, Cassini discovered that his girlfriend had more spirit than he had suspected. It was true that Grace felt obliged to abide by what she described as “this silly moratorium.” When she got back to New York, she was reluctant to go out too often to restaurants or nightclubs, or to occasions where there was the risk of her being photographed on Oleg’s arm. She still felt compelled to stick by her parents’ version of the rules.

But, at the same time, she continued to consider herself as committed to Cassini. She did not date anyone else. The couple saw each other constantly, dining in Grace’s apartment together almost every night. They would take it in turns to do the cooking in a cozy and domestic fashion, and one evening Grace was stirred to a moving declaration of independence. The phone had been ringing repeatedly all night, with an insistence and regularity that suggested someone parental at the other end of the line. One could almost sense the steam rising in Philadelphia.

“Aren’t you going to answer that phone?” asked Cassini.

“No!” replied Grace. “If it’s personal, then I don’t want to hear from anyone, because I am with the one person who I care about the most. There is no one else I’d rather be speaking to. On the other hand, if this is business . . . . they will call again.”

The defiance would have been braver if issued directly to her parents instead of to a ringing phone, but it was better than nothing. When Grace went out to Hollywood to complete the studio scenes of
To Catch a Thief,
she rented herself a house, but she lived for the most part with Oleg Cassini. In New York they would spend discreet weekends at the Long Island homes of Cassini’s friends like Sherman Fairchild. Avoiding the world, the couple recreated together the cocoon of romance and fantasy they had shared in the south of France. The rejection they were living through pushed them closer together, and as they put the memory of Ocean City behind them, they began to speculate and fantasize again, thinking of the future. One day Cassini got a phone call from Grace. “I don’t care what my parents think,” she said. “I miss you. Let’s get married anyway.” A few days later, a letter arrived:

“Darling
—

I
. . .
can’t wait to see you, now that I know I want to marry you. We have so much to learn about each other
—
there are so many things I want you to know about me. We must be patient with each other and go slowly without wanting results too quickly. But we need each other and we must be completely honest, at all times. I feel for the first time ready to approach love and marriage in an adult way.

Last November
[at the end of her romance with Ray Milland], /
hit rock bottom and never thought J could be capable of thinking and feeling this way. Thank God I had my work to help me through that period, and thank God for you. But in this last year, six pictures have taken so much from me physically and emotionally that it will take a while to recover. Please, darling, try to understand and to help me
—/
love you more every day and I hope you feel that way too. One time you said to me that you couldn’t love me any more than you did then. That upset me terribly, because I so hope that we shall never stop growing and developing our minds and souls and love for God and each other, and that each day will bring us closer. I love you and want to be your wife
—

Grace.

Solemn and determined—and not afraid to invoke the name of God—Grace was taking a remarkable stand. She was ready, finally, to break the rules and to defy her parents, not quite directly, perhaps, but in the best way that she knew how. She had reached the turning point, and she was looking to the daring and impertinence of her lover to help her achieve the independence that was her right by the age of twenty-five. Both of Cassini’s previous marriages had been romantic, runaway matters, and now Grace wanted him to arrange a third.