High Society

by Donald Spoto

  During the first week of production, which began on November 17, scenes were shot at an animal preserve. Jungle sequences were then filmed in Tanganyika, where Metro built a village with elaborate tents for the cast and crew, as well as kitchens and offices.

  Every contingency was foreseen. The production company comprised hundreds—the usual array of technicians along with pilots, translators, native guides and guards, cooks, servants, a physician and nurses. But life was not luxurious. Water had to be boiled; foods were limited to what could be shipped from London or inspected by company monitors; and baths were limited, even in torrid and humid weather. Constant vigilance had to be maintained, for danger lurked everywhere: one location—on the banks of the Kagera River—was very near the habitat of scores of crocodiles not well inclined to a human invasion. Despite all the precautions, several crew members died in auto accidents or from tropical diseases, and scores contracted intestinal parasites or pathogens difficult to treat. Wherever the company of Mogambo went, an infirmary was established, and it was always occupied by employees ill with infections from insects, reptiles, tainted water and a variety of jungle maladies. By monitoring what she ate and drank, and where she went, Grace sailed through the production with nothing more serious than a heavy cold.

  On his side, John Ford was a gifted director but an infuriating bully. Donald Sinden recalled the “appalling treatment” Ford meted out to various crew members—something often seen by such as Henry Fonda, who appeared in no fewer than nine Ford pictures. “He had by instinct a beautiful eye for the camera,” Fonda said of the director. “But he was also an egomaniac. He never rehearsed and didn’t want to talk about a part. If an actor asked questions about dialogue, he responded with insults or tore the pages out of the script”—thus reducing the actor’s role. Ava Gardner described Ford as “the meanest man on earth—thoroughly evil.” But she respected him.

  Gable was silent about his dealings with Ford, but their relationship was no more than civil. At the time, the actor suffered from a tremor—a benign condition that caused his left hand to tremble occasionally, but this was not a symptom of either nervous tension or anything serious. Ford, who hated retakes of a shot and always felt that what was real could be captured the first time, lost his patience over the necessity to reshoot several of Gable’s scenes. But he gave in to the star’s male vanity. As Donald Sinden recalled, “Clark, whose chest was completely devoid of hair, insisted that no other actor should appear on film [in Mogambo] exposing a hirsute breast.” And so, once a week, a makeup man came to Sinden with electric clippers.

  As for Grace, she, too, felt the director’s wrath. “I was awfully anxious about this part,” she said. “I knew how much was on the line after High Noon, and I desperately wanted to do well—especially since Jack Ford had liked my test and apparently saw something in me that no one else had before him. Well, one day during filming, he shouted at me, ‘Kelly—what the hell are you doing over there?’

  “I replied, ‘In the script, it says that Linda walks over here—then turns around and—’

  “And he shouted back, ‘Well, Kelly, we are shooting a movie—not a script!’

  “You see, he shot a picture in such a way that the editor had very little—almost nothing—to work with. He very rarely shot close-ups, and then he did so only when something was very dramatic and important. Many directors filmed long shots, medium shots, close-ups and so forth. John Ford preferred to do one long shot; he moved in for a medium shot, did the rest of the scene in two or three takes maximum, and that was all. No one ever did more than four takes with John Ford! In my case, he knew how he wanted to photograph me, and to hell with the script.

  “But no one ever told me about this in advance—I had to hear it from the assistant director. If Ford had said something at the outset, I would not have had to figure out where I was going to stand and why, and all the rest. But he really gave me no direction, no hint.”

  BASING MOGAMBO on his original screenplay for Red Dust, writer John Lee Mahin changed the names of all the earlier characters and transposed the action from Southeast Asia to Africa. Victor Marswell (Gable) is a safari guide in Africa. Into his wild but uncomplicated world come two women—the uninhibited, worldly-wise, single but experienced Eloise “Honey-bear” Kelly (Ava Gardner), who immediately has a passionate week with Victor; soon after, anthropologist Donald Nordley (Donald Sinden) and his very prim wife Linda (Grace) arrive. Mogambo then becomes the story of a romantic triangle. In true Hollywood fashion, the jungle is the setting for the release of wild passions, and Linda finds Victor seductive in ways her scholarly husband is not. But the blond Grace and the brunette Ava are not the two Isoldes. Because the film was made in 1953, the conclusion is achingly proper: the Nordleys rediscover true love, and Victor realizes that “Honeybear”—always called “Kelly” in the film—is the right gal for him.

  Grace’s experience of working with John Ford repeated the situation that had prevailed with Zinnemann, who had neither the time nor the desire to provide Grace with any direction, much less to discuss her character in the story. Ford was not interested in conversation or in entertaining any questions except with his technicians—and he was far less courteous than Zinnemann. At their first meeting, Grace mentioned to Ford that she was the second Kelly to be working for him—that her uncle Walter had appeared in Ford’s film Seas Beneath, made in 1930. “Yeah?” Ford grunted, and chomped his cigar.

  Sinden remembered an incident that perfectly represents Ford’s directorial method that winter. Sinden and Grace were to make their entrance into the story from a river steamer. Without rehearsal or instructions, the actors were sent aboard and the boat moved toward shore. Suddenly they heard Ford’s voice over a loudspeaker: “Grace—Donald—get below deck. OK. Donald—come on deck. Look around at the scenery. Call Grace. Put your arm around her. Point out a giraffe over on your right. Get your camera out—quickly. Photograph it—the giraffe. Smile at him, Grace. Grace—look at that hippopotamus on your left. Get Donald to photograph it. A crocodile slides into the water. You’re scared, Grace—you’re scared! OK. You’re coming onto the pier. Look around. What’s in store for you? Natives run down to meet you. OK! OK! Cut! Print it!”

  And that, Sinden said, was their first day of being directed by John Ford—exactly as if he were still directing silent films.

  Gable conveyed real poignancy in the role of the aging macho hero, a character frightened not of wild animals but of loneliness, a man who has to reconsider his lifetime of bachelorhood when he falls in love with two very different women. Ava Gardner contributed an exquisitely calibrated performance in the picture, in the smartly written role originally played by Jean Harlow. With Gardner’s smoky baritone voice, her balance of sarcasm with tenderness, her flawless timing and subtle expressions, she created a memorable character who transcended every cliché normally associated with a woman of easy virtue whose generous spirit finally earns her true love—in this case, Clark Gable.

  During her acting career, Gardner was usually regarded as a sexy dame and not much more; indeed, she represented precisely the opposite of what Grace, all too briefly, epitomized on the screen. Sadly, Gardner believed the conventional, shallow assessment of her talent and never thought much of her achievements. But she was a fine actress, and toward the end of her career, even the critics had to take note of her exquisite performance in John Huston’s 1964 film of Tennessee Williams’s play The Night of the Iguana.

  As screenwriter Mahin admitted, Grace’s role was disappointingly two-dimensional, and Mogambo offers the audience no reason to empathize with Linda Nordley. As the wealthy, beautiful wife of a wealthy, handsome husband with the time and money to indulge his academic interests, Grace portrays a woman who allows herself the luxury of a reckless dalliance, oblivious to and careless of her husband’s feelings. She did her best to temper Linda’s cardboard primness with a fear of the jungle and anxiety over an illicit passion, but she could not supply sufficient dialo
gue (nor could she demand close-ups) to win the audience’s sympathy. The critical consensus was that “Grace Kelly’s blond beauty remains intact, despite the remarkably silly lines she is made to say,” such as (Grace to Gable, in the jungle): “I didn’t know monkeys could climb trees!”

  “I really wasn’t very good in Mogambo,” she said years later, “because I was so new in the business and I needed to learn so much.” But she was perhaps judging the character, not her performance; she did what was required, and she could not exploit what was not provided. Depending on which sources are consulted, mogambo is the Swahili word for passion or for danger. Linda Nordley demonstrates little of the former, and the latter is provided in only one scene, involving a giant python that turns out to be implausibly friendly.

  In fact, Mogambo is as tedious as the dreadfully polite Nordleys; it has none of the rapid, wisecracking humor and tight narrative line of Red Dust. An incessantly talky yarn set in an exotic wilderness, with a few animal roars thrown in, Mogambo is the sort of movie that could only have been saved by cutting about forty minutes and re-editing the rest. John Ford, ill and losing his sight, was a “tyrant” from day one (as producer Zimbalist said), interested only in the lush tropical scenery and the wild beasts, and the cast had to cope with a legion of logistical problems.

  But audiences loved it, and the picture grossed a healthy $5 million on its first release. The Academy justly nominated Ava Gardner as best actress of 1953, and, for reasons that defy comprehension, Grace Kelly as best supporting actress; in that category she won a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. But when they mentioned her at all, the critics were not passionate: “Grace Kelly is all right,” sniffed the New York Times. Clark Gable perhaps fared best of all: Mogambo revived his career, and he remained in demand until his death at the age of fifty-nine, in 1961.

  Grace and her colleagues were glad when the African sojourn was ending, for they were exhausted. “Ava and I are now great friends,” Grace wrote from Africa to Prudy. “The times we have been through! Frank [Sinatra] left Friday, so maybe things will be easier. It’s been a strain on all of us. The old man [Grace’s nickname for John Ford] is very anxious to leave Africa, and everyone is terribly nervy and on edge. I think the picture is going to be awfully good, but right now not many people give a damn.”

  IN FEBRUARY 1953, the production company moved from Africa to England, where interior scenes were photographed at Metro’s Borehamwood Studios, Hertfordshire. Immediately, Clark Gable turned a chilly shoulder to Grace, refusing to date or dine with her, or even to speak more than a few words except about work—a sudden, severe shift in behavior that left her baffled and hurt. At the time, rumors of a romance were trumpeted in the press—stories perhaps planted by Metro, for publicity purposes. Some biographers, therefore, have jumped to the conclusion that Gable rejected Grace’s proposal of marriage or her insistence on continuing the affair in London (and later, in Hollywood). But the truth was more prosaic: he did not want to jeopardize the decree absolute of his divorce (scheduled for April in an English court) by providing grounds for a charge of improper conduct. For all that, Grace was disheartened at the way he ignored her, and she was, for once, glad for a visit from her mother, who was eager to meet the King of Hollywood.

  The leading players were lodged at the Savoy Hotel, London. One day, in the foyer, Grace was greeted by Morgan Hudgins, the studio’s unit publicist on the picture, who had been with the production from the start. Hudgins was having a drink with a tall, courtly gentleman, forty-year-old Rupert Allan. Born in St. Louis and educated at Oxford, Rupert was at the time working for Look magazine and had been assigned to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June. He later worked with the publicist Arthur P. Jacobs and compiled an impressive client list of his own. Very quickly, Grace and Rupert became friends, and he was often her escort in London, Hollywood and New York. He also became her personal publicist and, as princess, she asked him to be Monaco’s consul general in Los Angeles.

  That Rupert was gay was a matter of profound indifference to Grace, who loved him like a brother, and for the rest of her life he was her close confidant. In Beverly Hills, Grace often visited Rupert at his home on Seabright Place, where he lived with the love of his life, Frank McCarthy. A World War II hero and a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army, McCarthy eventually produced the Oscar-winning Patton. Whenever anyone uttered a word against gay men or women, Grace was outspoken. “You shouldn’t criticize people who are homosexual,” she told her friend Prudy Wise. “It can be very destructive, and it is so easy to become mean without realizing it.”

  MOGAMBO FINALLY wrapped production in March 1953 and was listed for release in October. Back in America, Grace visited her family in Philadelphia before returning to Manhattan. “You know, the girl must have had a lot of fascinating experiences,” her father told a reporter, “but she just won’t talk!”

  But there was neither theatrical nor movie work on offer. “She was pretty much in the same place she had been after the unsuccessful test for Taxi,” recalled Dore Schary, “and although she was available for other roles, none appeared.”

  The fact is that Metro, Schary and company simply did not know what to do with her at the studio. They were producing costume dramas such as The Prisoner of Zenda, Plymouth Adventure, Young Bess and Beau Brummell—and none of these had roles they considered right for her. After several conferences that spring, her bosses quietly let it be known around town that Grace was available for loan-out to other studios, as her contract permitted. This would raise money for Metro, which would charge a hefty fee for Grace’s services elsewhere and, in turn, pay her only the fee her contract stipulated. The loan-out, an old Hollywood tradition, was an easy moneymaking proposition for studios. Still, nothing happened until very late that spring of 1953.

  But Grace kept busy. Jay Kanter invited her to his wedding on April 15, in New York. His bride was Judith Balaban (later Quine), daughter of the president of Paramount Pictures. Grace and the Kanters became close friends, and three years later, Judy was one of her bridesmaids. A few days after the Kanters’ wedding, Grace had a less pleasant appointment: the funeral of her first love, Harper Davis, who had succumbed to multiple sclerosis at the age of twenty-six.

  In May and June, Grace appeared in three live TV dramas: “The Betrayer,” with Robert Preston; “Boy of Mine,” with Henry Jones; and “The Way of the Eagle,” in which she and Jean-Pierre Aumont costarred as Mr. and Mrs. John James Audubon. Then forty-two, Aumont had been widowed since the death of his wife, the actress Maria Montez, in 1951. As a popular, handsome actor much in demand both in his native France and in America, he was also a prime target of aspiring brides on both continents. Aumont found twenty-three-year-old Grace far more interesting and mature than many women he met, and he asked her to be his guest for lunch on the day after the broadcast of “The Way of the Eagle,” scheduled for June 7.

  Although she found Jean-Pierre enormously attractive and sophisticated and very much liked his Gallic charm and wit, Grace declined the invitation. Some of the gossips believed that an affair between Grace and Jean-Pierre began at once—a canard that, alas, has taken on the authority of fact. Others claimed that, no, Grace turned him down because she was awaiting a resumption of l’affaire Gable. Once again they were all wide of the mark. The fact is that Grace could not accept Aumont’s offer of a lunch date because Jay Kanter had telephoned her during TV rehearsals for “The Way of the Eagle.” She was to leave for Los Angeles on June 8. An appointment had been made for her to meet Alfred Hitchcock, who was looking for a new leading lady.

  * Among the memorable MGM musicals: Annie Get Your Gun, The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, Easter Parade, The Harvey Girls, Love Me or Leave Me, Meet Me in St. Louis, On the Town, Royal Wedding, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Show Boat, Singin’ in the Rain and The Wizard of Oz.

  † Victor Fleming’s Oscar for directing Gone With the Wind (1939) was awarded for a David O. Selznick pro
duction released by MGM, and William Wyler was an independent director when he won for MGM’s Mrs. Miniver (1942).

  FIVE

  Over the Moon

  The best way to do it is with scissors.

  —ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  THE TEST I MADE FOR THE ROLE OF THE IRISH GIRL IN Taxi—a part I didn’t get—turned out to be very important in my career,” Grace recalled. “John Ford saw that test and cast me in Mogambo, and then Hitchcock saw the same test and wanted to see if I would be right for his next picture. I was very nervous and self-conscious at my first meeting with him [in June 1953], but he was very dear and put me at my ease. We talked about travel, food and wine, music, fashions—everything, it seemed, except the character of Margot Wendice in the movie.”1*

  Grace’s initial anxiety was reasonable. Alfred Hitchcock, who marked his fifty-fourth birthday that summer, was unquestionably one of the world’s most popular and successful filmmakers; later he would justly be hailed as one of the cinema’s artists, a man whose movies were frequently profound as well as enormously entertaining. From his earliest days in England, he was also his own best publicist, and he made certain that his name and presence were known and remembered—hence the cameo appearances in his movies, among other publicity stunts over a half-century. “Actors come and go,” Hitchcock said repeatedly in the 1920s, “but the name of the director should stay clearly in the mind of the audiences.” Until the 1960s, the average moviegoer in England and America could name only three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock.