But perhaps this departure from the usual pattern of parental disapproval made Bing Crosby rather too bland and easy a conquest for Grace. “He really wanted to marry her,” remembers Lizanne. “She called me up one night, and said ‘Bing has asked me to marry him.’ But I don’t think she was in love with him at all.” Romance without adversity was romance without spice. “Grace loved him,” explained Lizanne, “but she was not
in love. . . .
There is a difference.”
In later years Grace was discreetly forthcoming with close friends about some of her Hollywood romances—”What else is there to do,” she would ask, “if you’re alone in a tent in Africa with Clark Gable?” But the idea that she had gone to bed with Bing Crosby, or had even considered him as a serious suitor, used to irritate her intensely. “Perhaps he was the one who spread the word,” says the author Gwen Robyns. “He would probably have liked to think that it was true.”
“Whatever quality she had, she should have bottled it and made a fortune,” commented sister Lizanne. “There was something about her that men just went ape over. It was amazing to see these big names just falling all over themselves.”
When Grace moved straight on from
The Country Girl
to the filming of
Green Fire
in fulfillment of her promise to MGM, her leading man was as handsome as any that she had worked with before. Stewart Granger, forty-one years old, six-foot-three, and British, was MGM’s slightly flat-footed answer to Errol Flynn. He was best known for swashbuckling his way around costume epics like
Scaramouche
and
King Solomon’s Mines.
But he did not impress Grace one bit. “I don’t think,” she later confided to a friend, “that I have ever met anyone who was quite so conceited.”
Grace could not hide her scorn at the banality of the material that she was being called upon to act, and it did not help that her chum Maree Frisby was not in Colombia, as she had expected. For three weeks the
Green Fire
company rattled around a succession of depressing and poverty-stricken jungle locations—”a wretched experience,” Grace later said. “It dragged on in all the heat and dust because nobody had any idea of how to save it.”
Stewart Granger’s memories of his weeks with Grace suggest why the actress might have been less than impressed with her co-star. “She was very nice to kiss,” the heartthrob confided in his memoirs, also confessing that he was “tempted a bit” by her coolness and beauty—and that he took a particular fancy to her bottom. “Our last scene was played in a torrential downpour,” he wrote, “and when the final kiss came we were both soaking wet, which accentuated that fabulous behind. To save her embarrassment I covered it with both hands. She was so delighted at finishing the film that she didn’t even object, but if you look closely at that kiss, you’ll see Grace give a start as those two eager hands take hold.”
When
Green Fire
was eventually released, MGM chose to advertise the movie on Broadway with the gigantic billboard of a green-garbed model with Grace Kelly’s face grafted on top of the unsubtly busty body. For Grace the montage symbolized the crassness and commercialization of the entire enterprise. Long before she returned from South America, she resolved that she would never again lend herself to such a run-of-the-mill venture, and the moment she got back for the filming of
Green Fire’s
nonlocation sequences in Hollywood, she went into battle to ensure that her next movie reflected her own judgment and not that of some studio mogul. Alfred Hitchcock wanted Grace for his next project.
He had invited her to play the lead opposite Cary Grant in
To Catch a Thief,
a romantic thriller set in the south of France, and she was determined to accept, even though it meant yet another fight with MGM.
Grace was asking for her fifth loan-out in only eight months. It was unheard-of for a hot actress to secure so many releases. It would be the fourth time that Paramount had to ask MGM to release Grace, but Grace herself was unperturbed. “No matter what anyone says, dear,” she told Edith Head, who was in charge of the costumes for
To Catch a Thief,
“keep right on making my clothes.” She hired herself a French tutor, and took language lessons in the intervals between filming on the set of
Green Fire.
The twenty-four-year-old actress could handle her professional life with a decisiveness she had yet to demonstrate in the transactions of the heart. Grace knew that MGM was nursing a production for which they wanted William Holden as badly as Paramount wanted her, and in the end the two studios came to terms. Little more than six months previously, in the autumn of 1953, Paramount had paid $25,000 for Grace Kelly’s services in
Rear Window.
Now they were prepared to give MGM $50,000
and
William Holden as well.
It was a triumphant conclusion to an autumn, winter, and spring that had been packed with the most intense work and negotiation—not to mention some equally tangled love life—and Grace’s schedule was hectic to the final minute. “I finished
Green Fire
one morning at eleven,” she later recalled. “I went into the dubbing room at one—and at six o’clock I left for France.”
12
TO CATCH A THIEF
W
hen Grace Kelly arrived in Paris in the spring of 1954 she was exhausted. She had made five movies in just eight months, and Alfred Hitchcock was waiting for her down in Cannes, ready to start another. Grace had only a few hours in the French capital between her morning arrival by plane and her evening departure on the famous Blue Train for the Riviera, and by rights she should have caught up on her sleep. But she could think of better things to do in Paris on a bright spring day. Grace went shopping.
“Let’s go and buy some gloves,” she said to Edith Head, who was traveling with her. “The nicest gloves in the world are at a place called Hermes.”
“And so we went in there,” Edith Head later remembered, “like two little girls who must go and have an ice cream soda, and, of course, she fell in love with the gloves, and the people in the shop fell in love with her, and at the end they presented her with a package and a bill that was astronomical. Grace said, T haven’t got that much money.’ So we put both our money together, and we still didn’t have enough. In the end we had to get some cash from the hotel.”
Edith Head had been a ringside spectator and semi-participant in Grace’s most recent struggles with MGM, and she was full of admiration for the young actress’s willpower and sense of purpose. “There is a lot of solid jaw under that quiet face,” the designer used to say. “I have never worked with anyone who had a more intelligent grasp of what she was doing. But she still has this rather charming childish quality—the exuberance of a child in a candy shop.”
Grace had gone through some tough times in her long hard winter of filmmaking, and now she was set to have some fun. She had stumbled upon her previous romances more or less haphazardly as she went along, and she wanted something special for the south of France. At the same time that she had been involved with Ray Milland, William Holden, and Bing Crosby, she had had another love interest dancing attendant in the background. This suitor had been courting her—and she had been teasing him—all through the winter, and now the time had come to advance the drama. Enter front stage center the most baroque, inventive, and amusing of all Grace Kelly’s gentlemen, Oleg Loiewski-Cassini.
Cassini had first met Grace in 1953 toward the end of her bird-watching romance with Jean-Pierre Aumont. The couple were having a quiet dinner, tête-à-tête, in the Veau d’Or restaurant on East Sixty-sixth Street, when Cassini strolled up to their table. The Russian-Italian designer was not yet the household name he became in the early 1960s with the pillbox hats and the simple, geometric dresses that he created for Jackie Kennedy, but he was already a successful couturier with quite a high profile in Manhattan society. Cassini knew Jean-Pierre Aumont, and by one of the strange coincidences to which Cassini attached great significance, he had just come from the movies, where he had seen
Mogambo
and had been knocked sideways by the beauty and elegance of the still comparatively unknown Grace Kelly.
“I’m going to meet that girl,” he had proclaimed to his companion as he left the theater.
“You’re out of your mind,’’ responded his friend. “What makes you think she’d be interested in you? What makes you think she’s not already in love?”
“Such prosaic questions,” Cassini later recorded in his autobiography. “I don’t care,” he told his friend. “That girl is going to be
mine!’“
Less than half an hour later Cassini found himself talking to Grace, and he went straight into action: “I didn’t tell her that we had just seen her in
Mogambo,
or acknowledge her profession in any way. . . . I sensed the direct, frontal approach would not work. I wanted only to establish a beachhead, to create an agreeable presence in her mind.”
“Every woman has a sweetness somewhere inside her,” says Giancarlo Giannini in the film
Seven Beauties.
“She may seem bitter on the outside, like a cup of coffee when the sugar has settled to the bottom. She needs stirring to bring the sugar to your lips.” Oleg Cassini knew how to stir the coffee. He delighted in it, and from the night that he first shook hands with Grace in the Veau d’Or, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to her pursuit and conquest.
“This was not the sort of girl you simply called for a date,” he realized.
“A program of action was needed, a plan—something outrageous, romantic, even silly—to pierce her reserve.” Next morning he had a dozen red roses delivered to Manhattan House, followed by a dozen the day after, and the day after that, for ten successive days, each vase bearing the same enigmatic card: “the Friendly Florist.” It was not until Grace’s apartment was awash with roses that Cassini picked up the telephone. “This,” he said, “is the Friendly Florist calling.”
“There was a pause, and then that charming little laugh of hers, and I knew I had won. As Napoleon said, ‘A woman who laughs is a woman conquered.’”
The conquest only extended to Grace’s agreeing cautiously to lunch. For their second date she brought along her sister Peggy, a ploy to which Cassini responded by paying slightly more attention to the older sister. Cassini considered himself a five-star general on the battlefields of love, but he found himself up against an equally wily strategist. He was just congratulating himself, on their third date, on having such a soft and beautiful woman in his arms on the dance floor of El Morocco, when Grace smiled demurely. “I have two little surprises for you, Oleg,” she said. “One,
I happen to be in love. Two, I’m leaving for California tomorrow.”
Grace at first refused to tell Cassini the object of her affections, then relented and gave him some clues: an actor who was an Englishman and who was very handsome; his initials, she said, were “R. M.” The next day Grace left for California.
R.M.—Ray Milland (technically, not an Englishman but a Welshman). Cassini was not greatly worried about him. If Grace were really in love with the man, the designer reasoned, she would not have agreed to go out with him once, let alone three times. But courtship at three thousand miles’ distance did pose some difficulties, and the challenge induced Cassini to intensify his campaign, sending Grace notes to Sweetzer Avenue every day and calling her regularly on the phone—briefly, lightly, and, above all, amusingly. It was an axiom of Oleg’s always to keep his ladies laughing.
Oleg Cassini was the son of exiled Russian nobility who settled in Italy, and his first and very happy memory was of his red-haired nanny Nina, who would stroke his penis when he was a baby to lull him to sleep. The product of another age and culture might consider this formative, childhood experience something to be bemoaned on confessional television. For Cassini, quite to the contrary, it provided a delightful starting point to a lifelong fixation on the fairer sex. Women yielded him both pleasure and his livelihood as a designer, and their wooing became, in many ways, his entire identity. “I loved women,” he wrote in his memoirs of his earliest years, “the way they looked and moved. . . . I would always be interested in women, how to make them look good, how to please them.”
In the spring of 1954, Cassini flew out to California. He had business there, and he took advantage of it to pursue his courtship at firsthand. Grace was in the midst of filming
The Country Girl,
and Cassini today recalls seeing absolutely no sign that she was romantically involved with either of her costars, Bing Crosby or William Holden. Grace was keeping her
cavaliere servente
at arm’s length. She was as offhand as ever. Cassini found that he had many an evening to himself, and he seized the opportunity to escort such beauties as Anita Ekberg and Pier Angeli to Ciro’s, where he made sure that his presence was noted in the social pages. Even an evening away from his intended could be harnessed to the long-term purposes of his campaign.
“I don’t understand you,” said Grace to him after she had read the mentions in the gossip columns.