“It’s very simple,” Cassini replied. “You are busy. It seems I’m not very important to you. I like to dance, I enjoy pleasant company . . . and also I have a reputation to maintain.”
Romance as practiced by Oleg Cassini had more in common with chess or poker than with courtship in the conventional sense, and after six months of dueling, Grace found that she was rather enjoying the contest. She turned down Cassini’s suggestion that he should accompany her to the jungles of Colombia. But she did keep responding to his overtures—his almost daily letters and phone calls—and on the very eve of her departure for Paris, she sent him a postcard bearing just seven words: “Those who love me shall follow me.” The lady had decided to join in the game.
Cassini’s first attempt to join Grace in France was foiled by his own incompetence. He arrived at the airport to discover that his passport had expired. So it was nearly a week before he found himself sitting opposite his quarry in the dining room of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, sipping Kir Royals, and embarking on a multicourse dinner that opened with
mousse de trois poissons.
Two bottles of Dom Perignon later, the couple were happy and laughing, but Grace was not giving Cassini the opening that he had been looking for. As he later described it, “Our relationship was still distressingly platonic.”
Cassini went to his own room, resolving that he would give it just one more try. He had started his campaign in the autumn, and it was now beyond spring. He had traveled halfway round the world by plane and train. He had reached the moment of decision. Grace had another free day before filming started, so lunchtime found her with Oleg, a picnic of cold duck, and a bottle of Montrachet ‘49 in a romantic cove beside the Mediterranean. Out on the clear blue water floated a swimming raft, and it was on the deck of this raft, beneath the warm June sun, that Cassini made his final pitch. He spoke to Grace of his long pursuit and of the minuet that they had danced together. He told her that he cared for her deeply, that his months of persistence and devotion should surely be the proof of that. His fate, he told her, now rested in her hands. “There is no need,” he concluded, “for artifice any longer.”
“She said nothing,” remembered Cassini, “but she was looking at me in such a way that I knew I had won.”
The couple went back to the hotel and put the looks into action. “We seemed to float there,” Cassini later wrote, “glowing, mesmerized by the intensity of our feelings. She smelled of gardenias, at once exotic and very pure. There was a translucent, pearl-like quality to her; everything about her was clear and fresh and fine— her skin, her scent, her hair. I was enraptured, aware only of the transcendence of the moment.”
In the roll call of Grace’s lovers, Oleg Cassini must be rated at or near the very top. This is not a verdict upon his beddability. For a charmingly boastful man, he was charmingly modest about the physical consummations of his elaborately hatched campaigns of bewitchment. “The actual mechanics of love,” he wrote, “were never as interesting to me as the events that led up to it. The art of seduction was always far more fascinating than the ultimate result.” But this was part of the reason why Cassini’s tireless courtship of Grace finally captured her heart. He was different from any other man she had met. Everything he did had a twist of artifice and thought. He was prepared to be tested by time, and, as a result, a flirtation which seems to have started as something of a game on both sides turned into the longest, most soundly rooted and, for a time, the most publicly acknowledged romance Grace had ever enjoyed.
Oleg Cassini was not a conventionally handsome man. With his large nose and pencil mustache he was curiously reminiscent of Philippe of the Waldorf, a resemblance made stronger by his busy, European accent, and by his readiness to kiss ladies’ hands. Cassini had the bohemian dash of Don Richardson, the fire and pugnacity of Gene Lyons. He did not have the sheer, naked fame of Grace’s film-star lovers, but he did have a subtle celebrity that was all his own. People who mattered knew who he was. Oleg was fun. It was one of his working principles, when in female company, always to talk more about his companion’s concerns than about his own, while the nature of his work, designing elegant clothes for elegant women, gave him access, as he put it, to “a form of knowledge that most men don’t even know exists. I had the power to envision women as they wanted to be seen—to help them create fantasies about themselves.”
Cassini had already designed some outfits for Grace—subdued, patrician dresses that enhanced her inherent classiness. They gave her the look of a pale and delicate English rose. But Oleg had more than fashion to offer. He gave Grace confidence, a feeling of comfort inside her own skin. The pressures of being her parents’ daughter were lifted. Cassini’s twinkle-toed provocations brought out the playfulness in her. She was once more the giggly girl in the candy shop whom her friends knew so well, but whom she tended to hide from her more intense lovers.
This was a tonic that would have been welcome at any time, but Grace needed it particularly in June 1954, as she got ready to play the part that Hitchcock had designed for her in
To Catch a Thief.
After the black-and-white solemnities of her two movies for Perlberg and Seaton, she was back in glorious Technicolor, all froth and bubbles, playing Lisa Fremont again.
Rear Window’s
feisty and independent girl-about-town was renamed Frances Stevens. The character was transplanted to the south of France. She was on holiday there with her lavishly bejeweled and mildly dotty mother, and she was given all the naughtiness and sense of adventure that a healthy trust fund can encourage. The wealthy and wilful Miss Stevens was just the sort of girl who would send a man a postcard reading, “Those who love me shall follow me.”
For Alfred Hitchcock, Frances Stevens represented another stage in the defrosting of his beloved Snow Princess.
To Catch a Thief did
not have much plot. It was a succession of improbable capers in picturesque south of France settings. The dramatic electricity was generated by Frances Stevens’s remarkably aggressive pursuit of John Robie (Cary Grant), a debonair Riviera jewel thief who has paid his debt to society by joining the Resistance and performing heroic feats during the war. As the movie opens, Robie is suspected of going back to his old tricks as a cat burglar, and this fascinates Frances Stevens. Half of her is drawn to play detective and catch the thief single-handed, using her mother’s jewels as bait. But her other half desperately hopes that her suspicions are wrong, that Robie has been maligned, and that she can win the heart of this dashing and mysterious man.
Hitchcock was toying once again with the tension generated by the two faces of his favorite actress, the contradictions that he liked to call Grace’s “incongruity.” Ten minutes after her first appearance in the movie, at the end of an evening spent rather formally with John Robie, Frances Stevens unexpectedly interrupts the jewel thief s gentlemanly goodnight by stepping forward and kissing him long and passionately on the lips. The thief stands astonished, his composure quite gone. “It was as though,” Hitchcock later said with relish, “she’d unzipped Cary’s fly.”
The director saved his subtlety for his filmmaking, spicing Grace’s sexuality with some dialogues of extraordinary double entendre:
KELLY: [Offering
cold chicken at a picnic lunch]
Do you want a leg or a breast?
GRANT: You make the choice.
KELLY: . . . Tell me, how long has it been?
GRANT: How long has what been?
KELLY: Since you were in America last.
The action moves to Frances Stevens’s hotel suite, where she has invited Robie for a view of the fireworks in Cannes harbor:
KELLY: If you really want to see the fireworks, it’s better with the lights off. I have a feeling that tonight you’re going to see one of the Riviera’s most fascinating sights.
[She is wearing a strapless, low evening gown.]
I was talking about the fireworks. . . .
GRANT: May I have a brandy? . . . Would you care for one?
KELLY: Some nights a person doesn’t need to drink. . . . Give up, John. Admit who you are. Even in this light I can tell where your eyes are looking. [
Close-up on her chest and necklace and generous décolletage.]
Look! Hold them! Diamonds—the only thing in the world you can’t resist . . .
[The fireworks shoot upwards in the background as she kisses his fingers one by one, and places his hand beneath the necklace. Cut to close-up of the fireworks.]
Ever had a better offer in your whole life? One with everything! . . . Just as long as you’re satisfied.
[Fireworks again.]
GRANT: You know as well as I do this necklace is imitation.
KELLY: Well, Are not.
[They kiss. Cut to the shooting fireworks that mount to a climax. End of scene.]
The verbal sparring of
To Catch a Thief was
deliberately tightened and edited by Hitchcock to enhance its suggestiveness, and it illustrated what the director had said about his first use of Grace in
Dial M for Murder
—that a lady could help him get away with things he would not dare attempt with a hussy. It was as if people were so mesmerized by Grace Kelly’s wholesome aura, they could not believe that a nice girl would really have said those things—or perhaps they were swayed by the sheer exuberant joy with which she said it. You knew exactly what she meant, but she smiled so sweetly. How could you possibly take offense?
Grace enjoyed herself making
To Catch a Thief.
For the first time in her filmmaking career she had an escort whom she could acknowledge openly, without complications. Cary Grant had brought his wife Betsy Drake on location, so with Alfred and Alma Hitchcock, Oleg and Grace completed a natural and merry six-some, dining out in hill villages and in the great restaurants of the Riviera. Hitchcock would never eat in a restaurant rated less than three stars. He would send for the menu ahead of time, and would then proceed to direct every detail of the repast, from soup to cheese. Grace enjoyed the
Mogambo
-like
camaraderie of being away from home in an exotic location, and she was no longer the greenhorn of the party. With eight movies to her credit, she reckoned herself a pro, and her colleagues accepted her as such.
Grace fell in love with the south of France—the dusty roads, the dark-green cypress trees, the villas on distant hillsides. Several of the movie’s sequences were set in and around the little Principality of Monaco, and people later remembered how Grace happened to glance down from the hills onto what seemed to be a secret garden, small and mysterious, surrounded by ancient fortifications.
“Whose gardens are those?” she asked.
“Prince Grimaldi’s,” replied John Michael Hayes, who had written the movie’s script. “I hear he’s a stuffy fellow.”
People were also to remember how appallingly Grace handled the sports car that she had to drive in some of the film’s most scenic passages. The plot called on her to pilot Cary Grant around the notorious bends and precipices of the Corniches, and she steered the car so close to the edge at one point that, as she recalled in 1982, she caused her costar “to turn dead white under his tan.” It seemed a great joke at the time.
Grace did not have an affair with Cary Grant. It was not in the cards. Though Grant was the epitome of the suave and mature Grace Kelly man, he was in his wife Betsy’s company, as Grace was paired with Oleg Cassini. But that did not stop Alfred Hitchcock from dwelling on the sexual interplay between his stars with his customary obsessiveness. The director had his publicist compute how many hours the couple spent kissing each other under his supervision. When the endless takes and retakes were added up, the total came to two-and-a-half working days—twenty hours of solid kissing—and Hitchcock released the figures proudly to the press.
Cary Grant was impressed by the solidity and self-assurance of his young costar. “Grace acted the way Johnny Weissmuller swam, or Fred Astaire danced,” he later said. “She made it look so easy. Some people said that Grace was just being herself. Well, that’s the toughest thing to do if you’re an actor.”
Grant was amazed that such a beautiful and spectacular young actress should not display the slightest hint of the prima donna. “We had a scene where I had to grab her arms hard while she was fighting me,” he remembered. “We went through that scene eight or nine times, but Hitchcock still wanted it again. Grace went back alone behind the door where the scene started, and just by chance I happened to catch a glimpse of her massaging her wrists and grimacing in pain. But a moment later she came out and did the scene again—she never complained.”
Oleg Cassini suffered from his girlfriend’s unflinching professionalism. Even at the height of her romance with him, she would refuse to go out if she was working next day, or had a scene to prepare. But there were enough free days when Grace was not working, and one evening toward the end of the location filming, she and Cassini slipped away for a little dinner on their own, in a simple fish restaurant on a pier by Cannes harbor. The company was due to trek back to Hollywood a few days later for six weeks of studio shooting, and Grace grew serious at the approach of reality.