“He had heard terrible things,” remembers Dalrymple, “about how the girls had to sleep around in Hollywood in order to get good parts. And he hadn’t heard anything like that about the theater—well, only for chorus girls, perhaps.”
By 1951, when Grace went back for another summer at Bucks County, she was a television drama star by any measure. But taking her cue from her father, she did not count this as any particular distinction. In her eyes, the veterans of the summer-stock company were the real actors. “You probably don’t remember me,” she said shyly to Sara Seegar, one of the senior Bucks County players, who remembered Grace very well and had watched her quite frequently when she appeared on television. “I’m Grace Kelly and I played in
The Torch-Bearers.”
The 1951 Bucks County production of
Accent on Youth
cast Grace opposite Jerome Cowan, a minor movie actor who had enjoyed his heyday in the 1930s, and who made no secret of his envy of Grace’s television success. “She’s twenty-something, and she doesn’t know anything,” he complained to anyone within earshot—Grace included.
“He treated her abominably,” remembers Natalie Core O’Hare, who was playing in the same production. “He scared her to death, and she just had a terrible time learning her lines. So I would take her off in the corner, and I would cue her. ‘Don’t let him frighten you,’ I would tell her. ‘He’s slipping in his industry, and he’s jealous of everybody. Hang in there. This is a good test of what you can do.’ Well, of course, on opening night she came on stage looking ravishing, and the audience went, ‘Ahhhh!’ She remembered her lines and she got all the reviews. He could have killed her.”
It was the beginning of a fast friendship between Grace and Natalie, who joined the group of regular visitors to the Kelly apartment, a merry circle of girls who brought the Barbizon atmosphere to the Stalinist severities of Manhattan House. There was Prudence Wise (“Prudy”), the friend Grace had made at the hotel; Grace’s former Barbizon roommate, Bettina Thompson; Carolyn Scott, who had helped Grace get started in modeling; and Sally Parrish, a Southern girl who, like Grace, had wanted to go to Bennington, and had ended up at the Academy.
Sally Parrish was actually living in Manhattan House, sharing the apartment’s single bedroom with Grace. This had been at Mrs. Kelly’s request. Grace had reached the age of twenty-one in November 1950, but, according to Sally Parrish, Ma Kelly still “wanted her to have some French companion, or someone to give this aura of respectability.”
Mrs. Kelly was horrified when she saw the disarray of the girls’ shared sleeping quarters. “Oh, Grace,” she exclaimed, “I hope when you get married you have someone to pick up after you!”
“I hope so, Mother,” Grace replied.
Pride of place among the Grand Rapids furniture went to a large, round table of black Formica, which doubled for dinner and drinks. The table operated on a spiral. It was swiveled up for food, then spun down again eighteen inches for the coffee and tea afterward. Natalie Core O’Hare remembers a meat and potatoes dinner prepared by Grace, who cooked hearty and ate hearty: roast leg of lamb, vegetables, and Grace’s own, home-baked lemon pie for dessert—with games and charades to round the evening off.
Grace and her friends would sit up late into the night, sharing jokes and confidences. Men were a constant source of entertainment. Grace got rid of one unwanted admirer by borrowing Sally’s mother’s engagement ring, and doing a love scene with an actor friend who was in on the joke. To dampen the ardor of another suitor who seemed incapable of taking no for an answer, the girls draped themselves in sheets and cooked up a fake séance.
“The lights were out, and everything was pitch black,” recalled Sally Parrish. “The furniture had been pushed on one side. . . . A candle was burning, and this man walked in, and she pretended that this was all very serious and all very much part of her life. Well, that got rid of
him.”
The séance was rather more than joke, for during her Manhattan House years Grace developed quite an interest in table-moving, Ouija boards, and the occult. She was a Scorpio herself, and throughout her life she could discourse learnedly on the Scorpio characteristics as she saw them—efficiency, creativity, stubbornness, sensuality, and passion. “She got terribly astrologically minded,” remembers June Sherman, who socialized with Grace in the early 1950s. “She was such a romantic. Having her palm read or studying her chart was like buying jazz records or going to French movies. It was all part of the excitement of being young and untethered in New York.”
“Most of us didn’t have very nice places to live,” John Foreman remembered twenty years later, talking to Gwen Robyns, “and Grace had a wonderful place. So a great many people used to congregate at her apartment. Everyone was young and we were sure we were going to take over the entertainment business. There was a party atmosphere. Late in the night there would be improvisational dancing by everyone. I remember Grace doing a flamenco once to rival Ava Gardner in
The Barefoot Contessa.
She was heavy into ballet lessons. She had no genuine talent, but she still went every day because that was the way she was. She was a disciplined girl.”
Her other friends remember the same dedicated, purposeful Grace behind the giggling. “When she had something to do, she didn’t make a big fuss,” recalls Bettina Thompson Gray. “She just did it. This was a very determined woman.”
Grace Kelly was not pushy, but she was forever pushing forward, and as her friends got to know her more intimately and became familiar with her extraordinary family, they came to a fairly unanimous view as to the sources of her drive and ambition. “It was her father,” says Natalie Core O’Hare. “She was forever striving to get that recognition—the good, kind words at home.”
“She had this drive to win his attention,” agrees William Allyn, an actor who played
Ring Round the Moon
with Grace in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May 1951, and who became another firm friend. “She once said to me, ‘I am going to be the greatest film star that Hollywood ever saw,’ and I do not think that she said that out of ego. ‘My father and my brother were Olympic oarsmen,’ she said, ‘and my uncle was a Pulitzer Prize playwright. Whatever the Kellys do, they have to do well.’” As Don Richardson put it, “Grace had to make a bigger splash than a pair of oars.”
It weighed heavy on Grace sometimes, the duty of being a Kelly. Working in Albany in the snowy January of 1951, she seemed particularly stiff and serious to some of the cast who were trying out in Lexford Richard’s new play
Alexander.
Then, at the end of the two-week run, someone brought an electric guitar to the closing-night party. Music always had a way of loosening Grace. It unlocked the sensuality inside her. As the electric guitar began to play, the stuffed shirt clicked dramatically into life, throwing off her high-heeled shoes and dancing barefoot, her full skirt whirling as she turned. “She ran her fingers through her hair,” remembered Gant Gaither, “and as it fell to her shoulders, the pins flew in all directions.”
“There it is!” exclaimed Ernestine Perry, the stage manager. “I’ve said all along there was fire beneath that surface of ice!”
To her friends, Grace was a fundamentally warm and natural girl who also happened to be blessed with a very cool head. To strangers she was the opposite—an aloof and rather forbidding young woman who only occasionally betrayed the passions that were waiting to be released.
It was love that kindled the passions, and love was never difficult for Grace to find—with her mother and father doggedly shadowing her every move. The drama coach, the banqueting manager, the Shah of Iran—who would she fall for next? In the summer of 1951, Ma Kelly went out to Denver, Colorado, where Grace had secured a summer engagement with the prestigious Elitch Gardens stock company, and it did not take her long to work out that her daughter’s affections were committed once again.
It was an emotional time for Grace. Her earliest teenage sweetheart, Harper Davis, was dying of multiple sclerosis. He displayed the symptoms of the disease in 1946 soon after he returned from the wartime naval service that had provoked their separation, and by 1951 he was almost totally paralyzed. He was living in the Veterans Hospital in Wilmington, and whenever Grace came home to Philadelphia, she would get Charlie Fish to drive her down to see him. She would sit by Harper’s bedside for a full hour, though he could no longer move or speak, and when she got back to Henry Avenue she was always in tears.
When Grace Kelly, film star, was giving interviews in later years, she would invariably be asked if she had ever been in love, and her standard reply was the story of Harper Davis: “We were childhood sweethearts,” she would relate, “and he died of multiple sclerosis.” The clippings repeat the story half a dozen times or more, an affecting tale that supplied the apparently intimate “love life” paragraphs that the reporter needed, while politely cutting off inquiry about any current and more embarrassing romance. The tactic was pure Grace—elegant, dignified, and very convenient. But her mourning was genuine for all that. Harper Davis was the first in a long line of men whose love Grace had renounced in obedience to her father’s wishes.
In Colorado, her new boyfriend was Gene Lyons, a strutting and poetic young actor with reddish-blond hair. Like Grace, he came from Pennsylvania and was of Irish descent. But while Grace had grown up in the comfort of Henry Avenue, Gene Lyons came from poverty in Pittsburgh, and was proud to label himself “shanty Irish.” Lyons was handsome, complicated, unexpected, and very charming. “Mother,” confided Grace, “I think I’m in love.”
Gene Lyons appealed to the bohemian side of Grace. He was a step back from the gilded salons of the Waldorf, toward the carpet dealers of Thirty-third Street, and he shared her passion to make it on the stage. “He not only knew how she felt, but he felt the same way,” remembered Mrs. Kelly. “He kept telling her that they could be stars in the theater together, that they would stimulate each other to success and fame.”
Mrs. Kelly had heard this sort of thing before, and when Gene Lyons’s ex-wife was thrown in, the handsome young actor added up to a package which was not that different from Don Richardson. Mrs. Kelly felt about him in much the same way. “He was not the stable sort of young man I’d hope Gracie would marry. . . .” she said. “I had real reservations toward her marrying someone in her profession. . . . ‘Gracie,’ I said, ‘Please be absolutely sure before you do anything as final as marriage.’”
In the event, Grace’s work priorities dealt with the dilemma, as they had done before. Although Edie Van Cleve had booked Grace into Elitch Gardens for a succession of performances through the summer of 1951, the agent had also been working on another, very different project for her young client—and on August 10 it finally came through. Grace received a telegram in Colorado from the movie producer Stanley Kramer in Hollywood: “Can you report August 28, lead opposite Gary Cooper. Tentative title
High Noon.”
8
HIGH NOON
G
race Kelly had been to Hollywood once before. Twentieth Century-Fox had flown her out for a few days in the summer of 1950 to film one of the vignettes that made up
Fourteen Hours,
a worthy and vaguely experimental production based on the true story of a young man who had spent fourteen hours threatening to jump from a New York hotel ledge in 1938.
Grace’s appearance had been so brief that her character was not given a name. She was listed as “lady in lawyer’s office,” her role being that of an elegant young society woman who catches sight of the would-be suicide across the street as she confers with her attorney about her forthcoming divorce. It was a small part in the original script, and it was even smaller by the time the editing room had finished with it.
Fourteen Hours
was not a commercial or a critical success. But Grace’s few days of work earned her enough for her to treat herself to her first mink stole, and she was offered several long-term studio contracts—all of which she refused.
It was standard practice in the early 1950s for Hollywood studios to offer seven-year contracts to promising young actresses, guaranteeing them a thousand dollars or so a week in return for taking charge of their destiny—the right to change a girl’s name or hairstyle, to get her teeth capped, and even to supervise her choice of boyfriend or husband. This paternalism was exercised in the name of career development, but in practice the studios’ care of their charges amounted to what the film critic Richard Schickel has described as the “cafeteria” system—placing all sorts of tasty morsels in front of the audience, “then sitting back to see which of them the public hungers for most deeply.”
Grace Kelly did not see her future in the ranks of the studio starlets. “I wasn’t interested,” she later said. “I could earn more modeling.” Grace knew what her father thought of Hollywood, and her Uncle George had imbued his niece with a horror of the gilded slavery of the studio contract. George Kelly had experienced it himself in the 1930s, when he went out to Los Angeles to work as a studio script doctor, and he felt it was the death of artistic independence. Grace took his lectures to heart. One of the keynotes of her Hollywood career was her ability to be intelligently choosy. She proved to have an instinct for landing work in the very best company—the best scripts, the finest direction, and the most glamorous costars—and she hit upon all of these in the autumn of 1951, when she left Colorado summer stock to join the cast
of High Noon.