The team of Stanley Kramer, producer, Carl Foreman, writer, and Fred Zinnemann, director, had already produced
The Men,
a powerful drama about wheelchair-bound war veterans. Shot in the stark, black-and-white, “semirealistic” style that was Fred Zinnemann’s trademark, the film had not proved good box office. But undeterred, Kramer and Foreman moved on to a Western, the story of a sheriff who tries to rally the inhabitants of his small town against a bunch of desperadoes. Every able-bodied citizen, from the judge to the pastor and his upstanding congregation, finds their own good reason for turning their back on the sheriff in his hour of need—which is scheduled for noon, when the train is due, bearing the villains.
Carl Foreman wrote the script while under subpoena to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Years previously he had been a member of the Communist Party, and he knew how many friends he could count on once he admitted that allegiance in a town and an industry that was running scared. “
High Noon,
”
he later said, “was about Hollywood and no other place but Hollywood.”
Grace was picked to play Amy Kane, the marshal’s young Quaker wife whose pacifist principles prompt her to join the town’s general disavowal of her husband. Under the stress of events, Amy changes her mind and returns to his side, firing the crucial shot that saves him. It was the pivotal role in the plot, but Grace could take no particular credit for landing it. “I wanted somebody unknown opposite Gary Cooper,” remembers Stanley Kramer. “I couldn’t afford anybody else. So I signed her.”
Kramer was an independent producer, raising his money wherever he could find it. One of his investors was a lettuce grower from Salinas. Kramer put together his own combination of stars, director, supporting cast, and production crew, then sold the finished movie to a studio. This system of “packaging” is the way in which virtually all Hollywood movies are produced today, but in the days of the studio production line it was revolutionary—and it offered a particular advantage to Grace. “As an independent, Stanley didn’t require any studio contract,” explains Jay Kanter, the young colleague of Edie Van Cleve at MCA who got Grace the job with Kramer. “She didn’t want to sign the long terms.”
When Grace arrived in Hollywood at the end of August 1951, she went to the set to meet her new director. All that Fred Zinnemann knew about the young actress was that she had been playing summer stock, and that she came at the right price. “She was wearing white gloves,” remembers Zinnemann, “which seemed rather out of place in the small studio where we were working, which was rather a dump. She was beautiful in a prim sort of way. But she was very tense. She seemed definitely inhibited.”
Zinnemann’s eloquence lay in his filmmaking rather than in his powers of conversation. “I am very bad at small talk,” he says, “and she wasn’t very good either. So she answered most of my questions with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ It was a very, very quick discussion.” The director felt a certain relief as he shook the actress’s white-gloved hand and sent her on to the office of Carl Foreman. She did not seem promising material, but as he reflected on the work that he had to do with Grace, he realized that she was exactly how he imagined the marshal’s young wife should be. , “Sort of boring, and thin-blooded,” says Zinnemann today, “the image of virginity in a colorless sort of way. She was a Quaker girl from the East who suddenly found herself among all these wild people in this crude Western town. She was
supposed
to be inhibited and tense. She was typecast. She just had to play herself. The fact that she was really not quite ready as an actress made her that much more believable.”
Just playing himself was what made Gary Cooper’s performance as Marshal Kane so memorable. The fifty-year-old actor was unhappily separated from his wife, Rocky, and did not seem to be deriving much joy from an affair with the actress Patricia Neal. He was suffering from arthritis, back pain, and a stomach ulcer—and he discovered after the filming ended that he was also in need of a hernia operation. The word around town was that Coop was on the way out. His last two pictures had been flops, and he had dropped his fee considerably to work for Stanley Kramer.
“I told him, ‘Just look tired,’” remembers Fred Zinnemann, “and he did it wonderfully well.”
Grace could scarcely believe she was working with one of the stars over whom she had swooned on Saturday nights with Maree and her other girlfriends at the Orpheum in Germantown. “Did you kiss him?” Peggy asked her sister the moment that Grace got back to Henry Avenue.
“Yes, I did,” replied Grace giggling.
“How many times?” Peggy wanted to know.
“Oh,” said Grace, frowning, “about fifty, I guess.”
The gentle and charming Gary Cooper was a prime candidate for one of Grace’s romances. He was a handsome and polished older man who found her entrancing and who was anxious to help her career. He was the classic father figure. But he had more than enough woman problems in September 1951, and it does not seem likely that he was ever more than a friend. The shooting of
High Noon
was compressed into a busy twenty-eight days, and throughout that time Grace was chaperoned by her younger sister, Lizanne.
“The presence of your sister Lizzie would be very well received by the family,” Ma Kelly had declared severely when Grace first announced her intention of going out to Hollywood, so the youngest of the Ocean City watchdogs was deployed to the Hollywood Hills. Eighteen-year-old Lizanne roomed with her sister throughout the time Grace was working on
High Noon,
driving her to work in the morning, hearing her lines at night, and sometimes spending the days on the set with her as well. When Coop took his pretty young female lead for a drive in his beloved silver Jaguar in search of a good steakhouse, the not-so-photogenic younger sister would squeeze herself firmly into the back.
Neither Kramer nor Zinnemann saw any obvious clues of a romance. “Grace was odd,” remembers Kramer. “She was separate from everybody.”
“She kept her own counsel pretty much,” agrees Zinnemann. “In twenty-eight days there wasn’t a lot of time to get into anything personal.”
Zinnemann was struck, in fact, by what an unhappy person Grace seemed. Anything but the careless romantic, she appeared tense and introspective as she stood on the threshold of opportunity. “She was insecure,” remembers the director, “very busy sorting herself out. I now feel that I was knowing her before she had really developed as a human being.”
Zinnemann also worked in these years with the young Audrey Hepburn—
he is the only filmmaker to have directed both women—and he found that Grace was by far the more fragile of the two. “Audrey had enormous self-confidence,” he says today, “while Grace, so far as I could see, was not self-confident at all. Certainly not at this stage. She was her own problem, so to speak. Instead of looking out at the world, she was looking inward, into herself, a great deal.”
Zinnemann wished he could have given Grace more help with her acting. He had come to movies by way of his superb camerawork, not as someone who specialized in working with actors and actresses on the stage. But even in the tough and compressed shooting schedule for
High Noon,
the director could sense what lay ahead for the young actress who played Amy Kane: “In some shots, she could look surprisingly average. But then in certain angles, and with a certain lighting, she looked just magical. She
looked like
a star.”
Gary Cooper won an Oscar for his role in
High Noon.
His performance was both human and heroic, and it helped elevate the movie to the status of a classic. The grainy, newsreel-like camerawork, the tension generated by the remorselessly ticking clock faces, Dimitri Tiomkin’s forlorn and dramatic theme song, which also won an Oscar—every ingredient clicked. Only Grace Kelly was a failure—by her own estimation, at least. She delivered the uptight and stilted role that her producer and director had wanted, but it left her profoundly dissatisfied. “You look into his face and see everything he is thinking,” Grace said of Gary Cooper’s performance. “I looked into my own face and saw nothing. I knew what I was thinking, but it didn’t show.”
More than twenty years later Grace remained mortified by the woodenness of her first significant screen performance. “When we graduated from the Academy, we would sit and practice how we were going to sign our autographs,” she told the author Donald Spoto in 1975. “It was only a question of time—we were right there. There was nothing between me and stardom except a few city blocks. After I saw
High Noon
I thought, ‘God! This poor girl may not make it unless she does something very quickly!’ I was horrified. I was miserable.”
The American Academy had given Grace a foundation of dramatic technique and her very particular accent. Television had improved the fluidity of her dialogue. But she knew that she still needed more. Somehow she had to locate and unlock the extra resource that would put real heart and soul into her acting. Her life was a bubble with emotions. The question was how to release those emotions dramatically, and Grace turned for help to Sanford Meisner, one of the great gurus of American drama who was then teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse on Fifty-fourth Street in New York. The moment she got back from Hollywood, Grace enrolled in his professional class.
Sanford Meisner had been one of the original developers of the “Method” school of acting in the 1930s, but he had broken with Lee Strasberg over the concept of “emotion memory,” the idea that the actor should look back into his own past to discover the feelings that he needed on the stage. There were many possible sources of authentic feeling in Meisner’s view—pure imagination and fantasy not least among them. “What you are looking for is not necessarily confined to the reality of your life,” he argued, inviting his male students, by way of example, to imagine what might happen in an encounter between themselves and Sophia Loren. “Your imagination is, in all likelihood, deeper and more persuasive than the real experience.”
The way to find yourself, according to Meisner, was not to look inside but to look out. Acting, as he saw it, was a process of getting connected to the other actor, thus bringing life to the dramatic exchange of feelings that constitute stage dialogue, and ultimately bringing life to yourself. Meisner trained his pupils to generate this life through dialogue drills that they practised in pairs, two actors working together—talking, listening, and reacting to each other intensely:
“I’m staring at you.”
“You’re staring at me.”
“You admit it?”
“I admit it.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I don’t care.”
Meisner suggested the starting point. It was for the actors to develop the exchange of words and feeling that followed, guided by their sensitivity to their partners and to their own inner selves. “One moment will lead to the next,” Meisner would explain. “You have to learn how to trust. Eventually the line will come right out of the heart of you.” Only when this final stage, the ultimate goal of the course, had been achieved did Meisner move his students on to scenes and dialogues from actual plays.
Starting in the late autumn of 1951 and working solidly, between her stage auditions and TV work, for more than a year, Grace Kelly practiced her way through Meisner’s tough and sometimes obscure-sounding dialogues, fiercely alert for her own feelings, sensing her reaction, and then shooting it straight back to her partner, trying not to pause for reflection. It was the very opposite of the watch-your-manners, think-before-you-speak gospel of Henry Avenue. “Repetition leads to impulse,” Meisner taught. “You have to learn how not to think any more, and how to act before you think.”
“Her attitude was so impressive,” says Meisner’s assistant, James Carville. “She had played leading roles on television. She had had success in Hollywood and had been offered a contract. But she put it all on hold. She said she was not going back until she had studied and learned to act properly—and that was after she had already spent two years at drama school.”
Meisner, a lean, ascetic, and bespectacled man, did not tolerate fools gladly. His favorite quotation, framed and hung on the wall of his office, was from Goethe: “I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tightrope dancer, so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.” There was a significant dropout rate from his classes, and he had been known to dismiss pupils in mid-exercise, telling them never to return because he felt there was nothing they could learn from him. “Thinking has no part in this process,” he would explain. “Work from your
instincts.
Good acting comes from the heart.”
Grace followed his cue. Progressing through the intense tit-for-tat of her teacher’s dialogues, she pushed her acting through the inhibiting barriers of convention and thoughtfulness toward the stage that Meisner described as “self-betrayal”—”the pure, unselfconscious revelation of the gifted actor’s most inner and private being.” Love and sex had already taken Grace through those barriers. Now she began to learn how acting could yield up the same joy. “Grace was astonishing,” commented Cary Grant in later years, marveling at the Meisner-taught intensity that Grace was able to bring to a dramatic sequence. “When you played a scene with her, she really listened. She was right there with you. She was Buddha-like.”