Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (30 page)

But Grace’s inscrutability became the story itself, and this served to enhance her image of intelligent refinement. “A person has to keep something to herself,” she said, “or your life is just a layout in a magazine.” She was not cultivating mystery for the narcissistic reasons of a Dietrich or Garbo. Her rationale smacked of modernity and thorough good sense, and if a writer worked hard enough, Grace would come up with the goods. When she spoke to Hedda Hopper, she was positively loquacious:

I have a phobia about telephones, and will avoid them if it’s possible. As a little girl, I used to run so I wouldn’t have to answer the phone. . . .

Do you have any eccentricities?

I hate to drive a car. . . . I am not a good driver. That’s probably why I don’t like to drive. . . .

Why don’t you drink when you ‘re working?

I have a tendency to put on weight quickly, so I don’t take anything during the week. . . .

Do you think an actor would make a good husband?

No. But also I don’t think someone outside of the business would make a good husband either.

Would you be willing to give up your career for marriage?

I don’t know. I’d like to keep my career. I’ll have to wait, and make that choice when the time comes.

The cover of
Time
magazine provided the ultimate accolade. “Grace Kelly—Gentlemen Prefer Ladies,” ran the cover line on January 31, 1955, below a handsome photograph of Grace. The magazine had some shrewd things to say about the nature of Grace’s appeal—”she inspires licit passion”—and it corrected the common misconception about her wealthy Philadelphia background: “She is neither Main Line nor a debutante.” The piece was almost totally admiring, and it was only the Kelly family who could not think of a nice thing to say. “We’d hoped she would give it up,” said her mother of her acting. “Those movie people,” added her father, “lead pretty shallow lives.” “I don’t generally approve of these oddballs she goes out with,” remarked Kell with reference to Oleg Cassini. “I wish she would go out with the more athletic type. But she doesn’t listen to me anymore.”

Kell spoke truer than he knew. Grace was not paying the slavish heed she once had done to being on the Kelly team. Spending more and more time creating a life for herself, she could stand a little sniping from Henry Avenue, for she had bigger battles to fight. “Last week,” reported
Time,
“MGM’s Production Boss Dore Schary summoned Grace to Hollywood to propose a new picture. . . . After two days of talk, Grace was still noncommittal: she would wait, she said coolly, until she could see the completed script.”

It was nearly six months since Grace Kelly had made her last movie, and her employers’ patience was beginning to wear thin. Dore Schary was only recently installed as MGM’s head of production in succession to the great Louis B. Mayer. His producers were constantly bringing him projects that they considered right for Grace, and it was embarrassing that he could not deliver the services of the studio’s hottest property.

The question of yet another loan-out to a rival studio brought matters to a head. Early in 1955, Hollywood’s most talked about project was the Warner Bros, production of
Giant,
due to be directed by George Stevens and featuring James Dean. MGM had already agreed to loan out Elizabeth Taylor for the female lead. But she was recovering from the Caesarean birth of her second son, and it was uncertain that she would be well enough to begin filming in April. Grace was George Stevens’s favored substitute, and Grace herself liked the part. “Could it be,” speculated Sidney Skolsky in his column of February 23, 1955, “that Grace Kelly is holding out with MGM because she wants to be loaned to George Stevens for
Giant?”

Louella Parsons put the question directly to Dore Schary, and she got a very sharp response. “We are not going to loan out Miss Kelly for
Giant
or any other picture,” declared the production chief firmly. “She’s coming back to MGM very shortly. We’ve already agreed to loan out Elizabeth Taylor, and that’s that. We feel Miss Kelly has certain obligations to us. After all, we were the first to give her a chance. All of her offers came after
Mogambo.
She has a contract, and she has only made two movies for us.”

The MGM scripts which were currently in front of Grace were
Jeremy Rodock,
the Western starring Spencer Tracy, and
Something of Value,
a screenplay based on a forthcoming novel about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Neither was by any means a demeaning vehicle, but Grace wanted her next project to be more than just good enough. Kellys went for the best. Grace was not willing to be pushed along somebody else’s production line, and if she was still wrestling with how to cope with this problem in her private life, she now knew how to deal with it in her career. “I don’t want to dress up a picture with just my face,” she declared with a definite fieriness. “If anybody starts using me as scenery, I’ll do something about it.” Grace was willing to admit that
both Jeremy Rodock
and
Something of Value
contained their strong points. But she had quite definitely decided, she announced in an interview in February 1955, that neither of them was “right for me personally.”

It might have been different if Grace had been living in Hollywood and had made her decision public after a long and earnest meeting with Dore Schary. But she remained adamantly in New York, supervising the decorating of her new flat, and passing out her none-too-flattering opinions of MGM’s taste in the interviews she was giving to promote her Hitchcock and Perlberg/Seaton movies for Paramount. Grace had developed a definite edge since her travails with her parents over Cassini. Nor was her respect for MGM increased by the bosomy, green-draped lady that was currently looming over Broadway advertising
Green Fire.
“The dress isn’t even in the picture,” she remarked with scorn.

MGM responded in kind. On February 26, 1955, Loew’s Inc. (MGM’s parent company) informed Grace by telegram that she was “instructed” to report to the office of Sam Zimbalist, Jr., the producer of
Jeremy Rodock,
at MGM’s headquarters in Culver City—and when the star failed to appear, another telegram followed. At the beginning of March 1955, Loew’s notified Grace that her contract with the studio was suspended. She would no longer be paid, nor could she make a motion picture anywhere in the world, at the risk of legal action.

Grace went through the motions of distress. She was “bewildered and disappointed,” she confessed. But she did not sound too brokenhearted. “I’m afraid,” she said, “I’ll have to stop decorating my new apartment for the present.”

Ten years earlier Grace’s suspension could have constituted something close to catastrophe. Ten years later suspension did not exist, for her disagreements with MGM were played out in what proved to be the twilight of the old studio system. Built around different packages of independent acting and production creativity—Hitchcock for one project, Perlberg and Seaton for the next—Grace Kelly’s career foreshadowed the free-for-all of modern Hollywood in which the studios serve as bankers for competing syndicates of talent. In these syndicates, agents are the brokers and stars are the kings—and in March 1955, Grace Kelly was a star. MGM needed her more than she needed them.

A sudden flurry of front-office meetings and memos in Culver City showed that the studio had belatedly woken up to this. A valid disagreement that was really quite resolvable had somehow got out of hand. It was not unusual for studios to discipline their stars for unprofessionalism—fits of temperament, laziness, arriving late on set. But no one could accuse Grace Kelly of that. She was a byword for her reliability and her capacity for hard work. The dispute arose, in fact, because Grace took her profession more seriously than MGM did.

The studio’s biggest mistake was its timing. In February Grace had been nominated for an Oscar for her role in
The Country Girl,
and the awards ceremony was due to be held in a few weeks’ time. The word around the Academy was that Grace had a very good chance in her category. So there was every possibility that, before March was over, MGM would turn out to have suspended the Best Actress of 1954.

Bernie Thau, the studio’s head of talent, moved quickly. Grace still had not given a final “no” to
The Barretts of Wimpole Street,
he reported to a meeting of MGM executives on March 18, 1955. He proposed that they accept her refusal of
Jeremy Rodock,
while naming
The Barretts
as her provisional new project. This would save face for both studio and star, and they could discuss
The Barretts
and other projects with Grace in due course. On March 21, 1955, Dore Schary formally announced the lifting of the suspension. “We respect Grace,” he told the press, “and we want to do everything possible for her during this important time in her life when she is up for an Academy Award.”

It was an unqualified victory for the actress and a tribute to the stature that she had won in a very short time on her own. Now the question arose, could she win the Oscar as well? Carrying off an Academy Award is a complex equation of studio politics, popular sentiment, and the intangible chemistry of what the Hollywood herd instinct defines, that year, as being deserving. All the nominated performances are usually meritorious, so pure acting ability tends to be the least important factor.

In 1954 Grace’s rivals for Best Actress were Judy Garland
(A Star Is Born),
Dorothy Dandridge
(Carmen Jones),
Audrey Hepburn
(Sabrina),
and Jane Wyman
(Magnificent Obsession).
Wyman generated the least excitement. Dorothy Dandridge was nonwhite, and was considered fortunate to be included among the nominees—it was another decade before Sidney Poitier became the first black to win an Oscar in the Best Actor category. Audrey Hepburn had won Best Actress the previous year for
Roman Holiday.

That left Grace and Judy Garland as the main contenders.

“Many are backing Judy,” reported Sidney Skolsky on March 30, 1955, “because she never won an Oscar and they say it’s about time.” Difficult and unreliable though she was, little Dorothy from Kansas was one of Hollywood’s own. Grace’s competing claim to sentiment was that, as a hardworking newcomer who had only just established the outlines of her glamorous persona, she had been brave enough to go against type and debeautify herself as the drab and downtrodden Georgie Elgin.

Bob Hope’s opening monologue on the stage of the RKO Pantages Theater on the night of March 30,1955, showed how Grace was already regarded by her peers as something of a trouper. “I just wanna say,” he cracked, “they should give a special award for bravery to the producer who produced a movie
without
Grace Kelly.”

When Grace had emerged from her limousine outside the Pantages in her ice-blue satin evening gown, she had drawn the biggest fusillade of flashbulbs of the night. It was a far cry from her premiere evening with Dominick Dunne only eighteen months earlier. Grace had not judged it politic to bring Oleg Cassini along, so her entourage comprised Edith Head, who had designed her dress, and Don Hartman, the chief of production at Paramount. Judy Garland was not at the theater. Two days before the show, she had gone into labor, giving birth to a son, Joey Luft. But NBC had their cameras waiting outside her hospital room in case she turned out to be the winner.

As a dramatic occasion, the Academy Awards for 1954 fell somewhat flat.
To save time, NBC decided to tidy away the lists of nominees by rolling them as a sort of title sequence at the beginning of the program, and in their absence it became clear that the recitation of the names in each category was an essential ingredient of the suspense. But when William Holden stepped up with the envelope containing the name of the Best Actress, the tension was palpable. A gutsy but frequently charmless old stager was pitted against an equally gutsy new girl who had worked very hard at being charm personified. Holden himself made no secret of his delight as he read out Grace’s name. He had a broad smile across his face, and there were cheers and spontaneous cries of ‘‘Bravo!’’ from Grace’s supporters in the crowd. Grace herself was quite lost for words. “The thrill of this moment,” she said, “prevents me from saying exactly what I feel.” Then, in front of the whole theater and a television audience of millions, the ice maiden burst into tears.

Up on the third floor of the hospital, Sid Luft, Judy Garland’s husband, was frank in his disgust. “Fuck the Academy Awards,” he said, putting his arms around his wife as the TV cameramen unplugged their equipment and started to go home. “You’ve got yours in the incubator.” Judy Garland herself never bothered to hide her opinion that she had been gypped, sniffing at the thought of Grace Kelly “taking off her fucking makeup and grabbing MY Oscar.” Judy Garland received over a thousand telegrams of condolence following the ceremony—her most treasured coming from Groucho Marx. “Dear Judy,” he wired, “this is the biggest robbery since Brink’s.”