Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (31 page)

Forty years later, one can see what he meant.
A Star Is Born
—and
Carmen Jones,
for that matter—live on today as infinitely fresher and more original creations than
The Country Girl,
which seems ponderous and dated by comparison. Grace’s thoroughly worthy performance lacks the spark of her classic Grace Kelly roles. Dare one say it?—Georgie Elgin is actually dull. When the New York drama critics voted Grace best actress of 1954 it was for her work on all three of her releases that year—
Dial M
and
Rear Window
as well as
The Country Girl
—and there was a sense in which the voters of the Academy were saying the same.
The Country Girl
was by no means Grace Kelly’s finest movie, but it was her Oscar movie.

It was a wonderful night. Marlon Brando won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in
On the Waterfront,
and success made him positively jovial. He happily posed with his arm around Grace, kissing her twenty times or more until the photographers had got all the pictures they needed, and Grace seemed to enjoy the experience as well. “I can’t believe they were saying my name,” she sobbed, breaking into tears again.

Don Richardson had just finished watching the show on television with a group of friends in New York, when the telephone rang. It was Grace calling long distance from Hollywood. “Thank you, darling,” she said. It was an evening for celebration and good feeling, and even Jack Kelly’s predictable comment wired to newspapers across the country could not spoil the euphoria. “I can’t believe it,” declared her father. “I simply can’t believe Grace won. Of the four children, she’s the last one I’d expected to support me in my old age.”

“This is the one night I wished I smoked and drank,” exclaimed Grace, happily looking around the revellers who had joined her at Paramount’s after-the-show celebration at Romanoff’s. Brando’s success had meant disappointment for Bing Crosby, the other fancied contender in the Best Actor category, but, debonair in white-tie and tails, the crooner raised his glass with Humphrey Bogart, another failed nominee, at what Bogart cheerfully described as “the bad losers’ table.”

It was the small hours of the morning by the time that Grace got back to her bungalow in the Bel Air Hotel. She was all alone, with only her Oscar for company, and she set the little metal manikin on the top of her dressing table. She lay down on the bed, she later remembered, and looked across the room at the statuette that represented so much effort and hope and sacrifice, the culmination of her life and work to that point.

“There we were,” she recalled, “just the two of us. It was terrible. It was the loneliest moment of my life.”

14

PHOTO OPPORTUNITY

H
owell Constant was a rising young New York fashion photographer when
Photoplay
commissioned him to shoot a cover of Grace Kelly in the spring of 1955. It was just a few weeks before she won her Academy Award.

Photoplay
was
the leading American movie magazine. Its editors favored photos in an idealized style—limelit star portraits of the sort that are framed in gilt in cinema lobbies—and Conant gave them exactly what they wanted. His
Photoplay
cover displayed Grace as an untouchable icon. Shot against a background of bright rose pink, her complexion seemed air-brushed in its perfection. She was like alabaster, an image of fantasy beyond reach.

But Howell Conant felt sure there was more. He found Grace an intriguing and rather challenging person to meet. Beneath the crispness of the professional model, he could detect daring, intelligence, and a certain vulnerability—the whole complex of contradictory impulses that made up her screen persona, and he felt certain there must be a way of capturing this personality in an image that moved beyond the traditional glossy star portrayal.

Conant soon got his chance to find out.
Collier’s
magazine had commissioned him to shoot a behind-the-scenes look at the new young sensation from Philadelphia, and the photographer suggested he might follow his subject around New York, taking impromptu photos for a day.

“No,” said Grace, “I don’t like that sort of thing.”

A few weeks later, Conant discovered what she did like. The star was in Jamaica, taking a vacation with her sister Peggy, and she suggested that
Collier’s
might send their man down to the Caribbean to photograph her there, snorkeling and collecting shells along the beach.

Conant had been experimenting with underwater photography, and he had an idea for a different sort of pose—Grace rising from the water wearing a diver’s face mask. They tried it a few times, standing on tiptoes in the ocean to dodge the sea urchins on the bottom. Grace was wearing just a trace of eye shadow, a smear of waterproof makeup that she had borrowed from the wife of the hotel manager, and Conant suddenly realized that the rubber mask was a mistake. Her face looked better without it. So Grace ducked down and surfaced seven times just as she was—and the eighth time, bingo! Howell Conant had got the photo he was looking for.

Conant’s picture of Grace Kelly’s sculptured head rising damp and fresh from the waters of the Caribbean captured all the allure of the actress’s ambiguous beauty. It was timeless. It could stand today on a Lancôme or Clinique counter: the swanlike neck, the drop of seawater for an earring, the staring eyes with their level look of appraisal—or is it invitation? Chastely but intriguingly enveiled by the ocean, Grace stares up at the camera, exuding wholesomeness and freshness—and a sexuality of extraordinary power.

Out of the water, Conant took another sequence of pictures, using a device that he had never tried before, the mechanical motorwind. Sports and action photographers were just starting to use this recently invented accessory, but Conant reckoned that it might have potential for portrait work. He noticed how Grace reacted each time she heard the shutter. She was a performer to the marrow. “She’d start to smile,” he remembers, “and click, click, click, she would smile more and more and more. The more the camera hummed, the more she reacted.”

Howell Conant got his pictures back to New York, and he never had to look for work again. When his images of Grace Kelly appeared in
Collier’s
that summer, they caused a sensation. They had a vigor and freshness that lifted them above conventional glamour photography. Statuesque in a canoe, making a speech to a peeled orange, wearing a man’s dress shirt with her hair scraped back simply from her forehead, Grace came vibrantly alive—young and uninhibited, on the very crest of her own personal wave. Conant had accomplished the still-life equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock. His shots glowed with the serenity and wildness of this woman. Janet Leigh, Doris Day, Natalie Wood—the up-and-coming stars of the era—queued to have Conant work the same alchemy for them, and he became the hottest property on Madison Avenue. Advertisers from Pond’s cold cream to Eastman Kodak beat a path to the Conant studio on East Thirty-fifth Street, anxious to bottle and sell the elegance, class, or whatever it was that the photographer had captured in his few days with Grace Kelly on a Jamaica beach.

“Almost everything happened,” remembers Conant, “after I became famous with Grace.” It was the making of Conant’s career, and it was also the beginning of an extraordinary collaboration between subject and photographer. Whenever Grace had any say in who was to take her picture—and she developed a great deal of say as time went by—she insisted that Howell should be the one. Conant, for his part, would plan out the photo sessions ahead of time with Grace, then go through the contact prints with her afterward, editing the images according to her wishes, and destroying any of which she did not approve. He was happy that she should have the final say, while Grace had found the man she wanted to shoot the movie of her life.

Howell Conant came from a family of portrait photographers. His father was a professional photographer, as were two uncles and his grandfather before that, operating small clapboard portrait studios on the main streets of Wisconsin. The Conants memorialized the rituals of Midwest immigrant life—christenings, weddings, high school graduations—and from this background Conant learned the tricks of the portrait trade: throw a shadow on a bald head so it does not look shiny, shoot from above to make a square chin look round.

“Grace’s jawline was the only slight problem,” Conant says today, recalling the technicalities of shooting his favorite subject.

“You didn’t have to flatter Grace. She always looked good. You just had to be a little selective about the angles. Six inches this way, that way, up or down—that’s all I needed to move to get the jaw right.”

Blending soft-focus glamour with hard-edged reportage, Conant’s pictures made fantasy credible and graspable—the most attainable thing in the world, it seemed. His deceptively simple-sounding definition of a good photograph was a photograph that made his subject look good, which was why Senator John F. Kennedy came to the Conant studio for a session in the mid-1950s to learn about the good and bad angles of his face. The ambitious young senator spent the best part of a day being photographed in different poses, then studying the contact prints, thus helping himself to develop the dashing, sideways glance into the middle distance which came to symbolize his style—and which also hid the fact that, when seen head on, JFK’s eyes were oddly close-set.

Conant did the same for Grace. To be a success, to sell yourself—to count for just about anything in the age of celebrity—you needed the right image, and though Grace herself was naturally blessed with the right ingredients and worked hard to achieve the correct blend, it was through the lens of Howell Conant that they all came so graphically together. When people spoke of Grace Kelly as one of the classic faces of her era, it was usually a Conant photograph that they were thinking of.

Since Conant personally was a well-built, tough, and very attractive man, the question inevitably arose as to the nature of his relationship with Grace. Some of her friends suspected a holiday fling. A handsome young couple thrown together on a Caribbean island? How could attraction not bloom? But the photographer himself denies it flatly. “I should be so lucky,” is his gentlemanly, if not quite total dismissal of the idea today. The intimacy that mattered to Howell Conant was the private moment of union through the viewfinder that he was to enjoy with Grace as actress and princess literally thousands of times from 1955 until her death in 1982—that momentary yet eternal coupling of photographer and subject which holds magic for both of them, and which, in the case Grace and Howell Conant, generated magic sufficient for millions of others to share.

From Jamaica, Grace returned briefly to New York, before setting off again almost immediately for the south of France. Being an Oscar-winning film star was really quite fun. She had been invited to head the American delegation to the Cannes Film Festival, a high-profile position with only the gentlest of duties attached. So May 1955 found Grace Kelly on the Riviera for the second time. It was exactly eleven months since the filming of
To Catch a Thief.

By 1955 the Cannes Film Festival was already the most glamorous trade show in the world. Originally founded to compete with Mussolini’s Venice Film Festival, Cannes was just in the process of eclipsing its Italian rival—thanks, in no small part, to an incident that had occurred the previous year. Arriving with his wife at the opening luncheon of the 1954 festival, Robert Mitchum had been confronted by a shapely French starlet, Simone Sylva, who walked up to him and boldly let drop her bikini top. Photographers rushed forward to record the spectacle, prompting the chivalrous Mr. Mitchum to extend his hands in an attempt to shield the modesty of the anything-but-modest Ms. Sylva. The resulting image— for which, some felt, Mr. Mitchum kept his hands in place just a moment or two longer than duty alone could strictly justify—was flashed to newspapers around the world, and it defined the enticing perfume of sun-oil and reckless abandon which has wreathed the Cannes Festival ever since.

In 1954, however, the festival’s organizers considered the incident a serious embarrassment. Most of them belonged to that school of Frenchman which regard
le cinema
with a reverence beyond anything that normal Americans would dream of mustering for the movies, and they huffily requested Simone Sylva to leave Cannes forthwith. For 1955 they made a conscious decision to head their image for the high ground and they invited Grace Kelly to serve as the head of the Hollywood delegation. “They thought she had class and she was regal,” remembered Grace’s old friend, Rupert Allan, “and they needed that kind of thing after what they had been through.”