Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (16 page)

It does not seem likely that Grace Kelly would have had an affair with one of her father’s best friends, and even less likely that Sacks, a solid and widely trusted character, would have succumbed to it. But Waterman had caught a revealing glimpse of the calculating side of Grace in action. Her sex drive and her sense of ambition were curiously similar. Grace Kelly was never casting-couch material. She did not exploit sex crudely to get herself a job. She was at some pains, indeed, to choreograph her love affairs as grand romances.

But unlike many who daydream, Grace Kelly actually got the job done, and she accomplished this thanks to the steely, almost obsessive determination that betrayed itself to Richard Waterman. “It was always there underneath,” says Don Richardson. “When I first met her I had thought she was helpless, but I came to realize that she was about as helpless as a Patton tank.”

It was Richardson’s full realization of this that finally put an end to the romance in his relationship with Grace. “She had invited me over to her apartment for dinner,” remembers Richardson, “and afterward, when we were both in bed together, she said, ‘Do you want to see some lovely things?’ Well, for me, the sight of her naked was the most lovely thing that I could think of. But she started to do a fashion show for me, coming out in all these expensive clothes. Gown after gown—
I could not imagine where she got them from. And then she came out, stark naked again, wearing nothing but a gold bracelet that had several emeralds around it, and she waved the bracelet at me. Well, I knew where
that
bracelet came from.”

Richardson had known a couple of girls who went out with Aly Khan, the playboy who was famed for his sexual technique. “When he first had a date, he would give them a cigarette case with one emerald in it,” says Richardson. “When he fucked them, he’d give them the bracelet. Well, that was it. I was heartbroken. I put my clothes on, and said that I was leaving. I just didn’t want to see her anymore. She asked me if the bracelet had anything to do with it, and I said it had everything to do with it.”

Richardson had long been aware that his love affair with Grace was dying. He himself had enjoyed a number of romantic adventures, so he could hardly complain at the evidence that Grace had been playing the field. But suddenly he realized that there must be many more men in her life—and that his girlfriend’s strange fashion parade, culminating in the revelation of the bracelet, was her oblique way of telling him that.

“She had become a career carnivore,” he says. “She was rapacious about getting famous and being important. She’d already talked to me about some of the men she’d been dating, how they helped her to make social contacts, and were teaching her things she needed to know. I decided I had had enough of it.”

As Richardson said goodbye to Grace, he dropped the emerald bracelet contemptuously into her fish tank. He put on his clothes, and when he reached the door of the apartment, he turned for a farewell glance. He had evidently made the correct decision, for his girlfriend was not crying. There were no hands outstretched, no pleadings for him to come back. Grace was still naked and beautiful, but she was not thinking of her lover. “Her hand was in the water,” Don Richardson recalls.
“I shall never forget the sight of her. She was fishing for the bracelet in the goddamn tank.”

7

FIRE AND ICE

G
race made her Broadway debut on November 16,1949, four days after her twentieth birthday. Raymond Massey had plucked her straight from the American Academy for his production of Strindberg’s harrowing tragedy
The Father,
and the young actress justified his confidence. “Grace Kelly gives a charming, pliable performance as the bewildered, brokenhearted daughter,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times.

But the production as a whole was not so well received. “Only the novice Grace Kelly,” wrote George Jean Nathan, “convincing as the daughter, relieves the stage from the air of a minor hinterland stock company on one of its off-days.” Massey’s gentlemanly rendering of Strindberg struck the highbrows as thin-blooded, while the play’s gloomy theme—the tale of a malevolent wife who deliberately drives her husband to insanity—was not what the mass audience fancied at Christmas time.
The Father
closed in the early weeks of 1950, after only sixty-nine performances. Grace Kelly was out of work, and it was two years—and the best part of forty unsuccessful auditions—before she made it back to Broadway again.

“I read for so many plays, I lost count of them,” Grace told an interviewer in later years. “People were confused about my type, but they agreed on one thing: I was in the ‘too’ category—‘too tall,’ ‘too leggy,’ ‘too chinny.’”

That was the kindest thing that some people said. When John Foreman became an agent at MCA, and took Grace to lunch to see what he could do to help the beautiful young protégée of Edie Van Cleve, Grace turned up in gloves, a hat, and a little veil. “This is a strange, dead-assed girl,” thought Foreman, disconcerted by her shyness and by her odd formality.

Don Richardson’s gloomy assessment of his girlfriend’s dramatic potential was borne out by the tough and unforgiving standards of the Broadway marketplace. Grace did not have the voice or the more general character projection to make it on stage. She was personally endowed with ample quantities of grit. She was willing to prepare for part after part, to trudge the round of the rehearsal rooms, and to submit unflinchingly to the pain of scrutiny and rejection. But she did not yet know how to expose her inner steel in a dramatic fashion. Her stage personality lacked the timbre—the sheer guts and swagger—to reach out and grab the hearts of several hundred people in a live theater. As the director Sidney Lumet put it, “She has no stove in her belly.”

Fortunately for Grace, however, live theater was not her only option. John Foreman, the MCA agent who had been so unimpressed with her hat, veil, and gloves, specialized in the rapidly developing field of television drama, and Grace’s delicacy took on a different dimension when it was projected on the miniature screen. Even before
The Father
closed, she had played the lead in NBC’s Philco Playhouse production of
Bethel Merriday
by Sinclair Lewis. That was broadcast on January 8, 1950. Less than three weeks later, on January 23, she was on CBS in a Studio One production of
Rockingham House.
Then it was back to NBC for
Ann Rutledge,
in which she played the lead again—as Abraham Lincoln’s legendary sweetheart.

Television had only just started its invasion of the American home. It was still a heavy, rather lumbering device, and the plays that the networks started putting out regularly in 1948 had a similar character—worthy and stilted productions, with an emphasis on costume drama and an excess of false mustaches. But there were innovative directors and writers who were experimenting with the new medium, and Grace found herself in the midst of a heady and creative hurly-burly of young acting talent. Rod Steiger, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Eva Marie Saint, Anthony Perkins, Lee Marvin, James Dean, Jason Robards, Steve McQueen, Jack Palance, and Charles Bronson all got their start in television in New York in the years around 1950.

It was an electronic version of the summer-stock company— with more money at stake, less time to rehearse, and everything riding on the success of a single, live performance. Videotape was not yet an option. Rita Gam, a young actress who met Grace through television and became a close friend of hers, compared it with shooting the rapids: “You only had one chance.”

Grace herself said it was like working on the edge of a precipice. “Ten minutes before you go on,” she later remembered, “they change the script. They say ‘Don’t sit down. Play it all standing up by the fireplace.’”

Television was where Grace Kelly learned the basics of her craft as a working actress. From 1950 to 1953 she appeared in over sixty television shows—an average of more than one a month.
Lux Video Theatre, Kraft Television Theatre, Hallmark Hall of Fame, The Prudential Family Playhouse, Philco TV Playhouse, Goodyear TV Playhouse, Robert Montgomery Presents
—Grace played them all. Some of them were productions of real quality. Many were no better than melodrama. Her appearances for
Lux
were some of the original tearjerkers for which the term soap opera had recently been coined.

Grace accepted parts at short notice, absorbed her lines in a matter of days, and learned how to look good on camera after only minimal rehearsal. She did not stand on her dignity. For Ed Sullivan she donned fishnet stockings and did a spirited job as a chorus girl. When Cary Grant found himself playing opposite the young and still comparatively inexperienced actress in 1954 in
To Catch a Thief,
he was amazed at her mastery of dialogue and asked her the secret. “Dozens of soaps,” she cheerfully replied.

Dominick Dunne, the writer, was working as a television stage manager in those days. It was his job to arrive at rehearsals before everyone else and to mark out the floor with gray tape to show where the furniture and scenery would be positioned “on the night.” The rehearsals often took place in rented West Side dance halls. These were drab and seedy establishments in the cold light of day, and Dunne can remember the glamour that Grace would bring to a thin winter’s morning, sweeping in off the street in an elegant mink coat: “She was one of the most ravishing creatures you ever set eyes on. Always friendly and always very professional. She just lifted the spirits.”

“She was no Eleonora Duse,” said Ted Post who directed her in two episodes of
Danger,
a popular mystery series. “But Grace was very determined. . . . She listened to you, and she applied what you said.”

Much early television drama was lifted straight from the live stage, so Grace got a chance between soaps to play some of the roles to which she aspired, but which she could not capture for herself on Broadway. One of these was
The Swan,
Ferenc Molnar’s hit drama about a young princess torn between the passion of her dashing young fencing instructor and the courtship of the moody prince whom her family expects her to marry. Grace Kelly topped the bill in
The Swan
on CBS on June 9, 1950.

Grace became so busy with her TV work that she decided to give up her modeling. She also became something of a resource center for other young actors who hoped that her commercial success might rub off on them. One day Elia Kazan asked if she could spare time to help a young man who was rehearsing for a particularly important audition. He was only free on weekends because he had to work for his father during the week and had a young family to support.

“I tried to find a kind way of letting him know that he wasn’t going to make it,” Grace remembered more than twenty years later. “I explained how difficult it was to get work, and reminded him that most actors in New York were hungry most of the time. I advised him to keep his job so he could support his wife and child—and maybe act as a hobby, in amateur productions.”

This became a favorite story of Grace’s, and her punch line was the identity of the inexperienced young man whom she, the seasoned TV professional, had considerately consigned to amateur dramatics. The actor’s name was Paul Newman.

Every summer in the years of 1951, 1952, and 1953, Grace went back to the Bucks County Playhouse, and she accepted work in any summer stock that Edie Van Cleve could book for her. Making it in live theater remained her most immediate ambition, and she turned down television engagements for any stage work that she could get. Grace enjoyed the texture of a live appearance, the hush from the audience as the curtain went up—and, as ever, she was also seeking the approval of her father.

“Mr. Kelly loved the theater much more than he did films or television,” remembers producer Jean Dalrymple. “He didn’t want her to do films at all.”

Dalrymple was the impresario and general inspiration of City Center, a municipally subsidized theater which staged low-budget productions of classic revivals in the Mecca Temple on Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. She had gone backstage to congratulate Grace after her first, brief Broadway appearance in
The Father.
Dalrymple saw Grace as the ideal Roxanne in a
Cyrano de Bergerac
that she dreamed of staging, and Jack Kelly encouraged her. If his daughter had to be an actress, he much favored her appearing in serious and respectable classics.