by Donald Spoto
As Judith Quine recalled, Dore Schary and his colleagues were “rocked to the core. So was the rest of Hollywood as the story spread.” At that time, Grace’s challenge to a powerful studio was shocking: a young actress with only a few films to her name (and nothing released since Mogambo, the previous October) was now brazenly confronting—even threatening—a major company and, it seemed, jeopardizing her future. Indeed, careers were forever destroyed by what the moguls considered rank insubordination. If the studio suspended her, she would be out of work, and her period of inactivity would be tacked onto the term of her contract. But Grace could be neither intimidated nor bribed, and money made no impression on her. She had never been a starlet, had never worked in “B” pictures, had never posed in a bathing suit, had never liked any sort of publicity; she cherished her privacy and refused to go around Los Angeles dressed as if she were always on her way to a cocktail party. She wanted only good roles in good pictures, and in her mind Rear Window and Hitchcock had more than demonstrated her competency.
It’s easy to imagine corporate chairs being knocked over and multiple midday martinis being downed for false courage as Metro’s executives rushed to interoffice meetings and to their telephones, in order to prevent a major industry embarrassment. “This is blackmail!” bellowed one studio operative to Jay Kanter’s boss at MCA, Lew Wasserman. Well, of course it was—after all, this was Hollywood. Prudent heads prevailed in Culver City, and soon the studio was unwilling to play the villain in a case against a beautiful actress who had two Hitchcock pictures soon to be released. And so, just as Grace was about to go through with her plan, to call Metro’s bluff and book an airline ticket to New York, things happened with a speed she may have anticipated. On January 29, a press release from Culver City announced that Metro had agreed to loan Grace Kelly to Paramount for their forthcoming production of The Country Girl—in exchange for a fee of $50,000 and the guarantee that Grace would appear in Green Fire immediately after the Perlberg-Seaton movie wrapped. Signatures were affixed to contracts on February 8.
“The men at MGM couldn’t have cared less about me until these other offers came in, first from Hitchcock and then from Perlberg and Seaton,” Grace recalled. “I always thought that if a studio had someone under contract—an actor who was wanted elsewhere for good roles—that the home studio would try to do something for that actor. I just never understood them. I remember that they called me, Clark and Ava into their offices when we returned from Africa after Mogambo, to show us some magazine layouts. Oh, they were raving about all the publicity they planned for the picture. I remember one gentleman saying, ‘It’s glamour in Africa!’ Clark had a few choice words about that statement. But then there was no work for me until Hitch got hold of my agent. Then MGM kept picking up my option every six months because they could make money by loaning me out—not because they had big plans for me, as they said season after season.”
When it came to The Country Girl, she was quite specific. “I felt I just had to do this picture, because it had a really strong part—it was my chance to be more than a supporting character for the leading man. I had always worn beautiful clothes, or beautiful gowns or lingerie, or there were dramatic and colorful backgrounds. This was something completely different, and I worked very hard on it.”
Grace’s first love was always the theatre, and Dial “M” and The Country Girl had been successful Broadway plays, with very little changed in the transfer to the screen. The last two roles before her departure from Hollywood would also be in films based on plays—The Swan, by Ferenc Molnár; and High Society, a musical version of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story.
TWO WEEKS of rehearsal preceded the filming of The Country Girl, and when the cast gathered for the first reading, there was considerable tension. “The first week, we all didn’t pay much attention to one another,” Grace remembered. “In fact, we didn’t get along very well.” William Holden’s presence in the cast may have contributed to the atmosphere, but there was an even more delicate factor.
Bing Crosby, a hugely popular singer and actor during the 1940s, was then fifty, a perilous age in Hollywood for a crooner never associated with serious drama—not to say a role that ran against his public image. Perhaps because he longed for a change of pace, he had agreed to play Frank Elgin, a once-successful singer and stage actor who was now a pathetic drunkard, steeped in guilt, completely lacking self-confidence and entirely dependent on his wife after the accidental death of their son.
During the ten-hour rehearsal days, the three principals worked on dialogue, characterization, reactions and bits of business—where and how to include a glance, a vocal nuance or an expression that would convey a lot with a little. “Bing was so nervous about playing Frank Elgin,” Grace said. “All his previous roles had been variations on Bing himself—the affable pop singer, the good guy, dear Father O’Malley in Going My Way [for which he had won an Oscar a decade earlier]. But now he was playing a boozer who has lost faith in himself. Some of us knew—but the public didn’t—that this was very close to Bing’s own life in the 1950s. He had once been at the top of the list, and he had a drinking problem that became worse after the death of his wife in 1952.
“I knew at the time—and it was no secret in Hollywood—that Bing had wanted Jennifer Jones as his leading lady, and he almost withdrew from the picture when he heard that I was going to play the part. ‘She’s too pretty,’ he told the producers about me. ‘She has no experience … she’s too glamorous for the part of Georgie … she won’t take direction.’ Endless objections! Those first days of rehearsal were pretty rough, but Mr. Perlberg and Mr. Seaton were my champions.” They did not have to defend Grace for long. Prep was concluded, the first scenes were filmed quickly and economically, and Crosby—to his credit—changed his tune. “I’ll never open my big mouth about a casting problem again,” he told the producers and the press. “I’m sorry I had any reservations about this girl—she’s great!”
Crosby’s praise for Grace became more personal over the next two months, when he tried to court her—but Grace politely discouraged his intentions. (Contrary to the later grindings of the rumor mill, nothing like a romance ever occurred, much to Bing’s disappointment.) “Grace called me up one night,” recalled Lizanne, “and she said, ‘Bing has asked me to marry him’—but she wasn’t in love with him at all. She admired and respected him, but she was not in love.” The gossips, however, fueled the chatter after Crosby invited Grace, her sister Peggy and a few of his friends to his birthday celebration at a nightclub after the picture was completed. Photographers caught the group at a table and then neatly excised everyone from the picture except Bing and Grace. As Hitchcock famously said, the camera can make you believe anything.
During rehearsals, Edith Head and her staff rushed to finish Grace’s wardrobe for The Country Girl. “I was happy until I read the script,” Edith remembered. “She was to play a woman who has been married for ten years and has lost interest in clothes, herself—everything. The character had absolutely no resemblance to Grace.” But Edith did what was required, putting Grace in drab housedresses, an old cardigan sweater, and skirts and blouses that would look suitably dreary in a black-and-white movie. The final touch—Grace’s suggestion—was that she wear her glasses. This being Hollywood, however, Paramount insisted that George Seaton add two scenes not found in the play: a flashback in which Grace is dressed like a sophisticated fashion plate, and the finale, at a fancy Manhattan party, for which she appears in elegant finery. (She thought these two sequences were regrettable, and they were, although she acknowledged that the first sequence revealed how happy a person the younger Georgie was, once upon a time.)
Regarding her plain and dull outfits, director Seaton recalled, “A lot of actresses would say, ‘Well, why don’t we just put a few rhinestones here and some jewelry there. I want to look dowdy, but this woman has taste, after all,’ and before you know it, the actress would look like a million dollars. But not Grace. Grace want
ed to be authentic.”
Crosby, on the other hand, had to be coaxed into authenticity.
On the first day of shooting, he was two hours late. Finally the head of the makeup department summoned Seaton, who arrived in Crosby’s dressing room to find him wearing a wavy, twenty-year-old hairpiece. “I’ve just decided that this is what I’m going to wear in the picture,” Crosby said defiantly. Seaton calmly replied that this was entirely inappropriate for the role, but Crosby was adamant: “I’ve got my audience to think of—I don’t want to look like an old man on the screen!”
Seaton reminded him that he had to look the age and the character of dissipated Frank Elgin. “Bing, let’s be honest—you’re frightened,” the director said—“and Bing almost started to cry, saying, ‘I can’t do it!’”
“Please have faith in me,” continued Seaton. “I’m frightened, too—we’re all frightened—so let’s be frightened together.” Director and actor then walked onto the set, and soon there were no further problems. Bing Crosby gave an astonishing, deeply felt performance that had the critics ransacking their vocabularies for superlatives. (The Academy nominated him as best actor of the year, but Marlon Brando took the honor, for On the Waterfront.)
Fourteen Hours, High Noon and The Country Girl were Grace’s only three monochrome pictures; the other eight were filmed in color. In fact, she was one of the few stars of her era to be associated with the alluring gloss and polish of Technicolor. Years after the fact, she told me, “I wish I had been given the chance to do fewer pictures in color and more serious productions in black and white.” But she had no control over this aspect of moviemaking, and her rise to stardom was itself concurrent with the increasing use of color. There is no doubt, however, that the gravity of The Country Girl absolutely required the stark contrasts of black and white.
In ways that were perhaps surprising for her, Grace sometimes found Bill and Bing unsure of themselves. “It took [director] George Seaton’s considerable diplomatic skills to get us through those five weeks,” Grace recalled. “I really didn’t have time to be afraid or to ask myself if I was up to the task—I was too busy trying to understand each and every scene and to deliver it perfectly.”
She need not have been anxious, for her performance must be included among the finest of the 1950s. She brought a quiet, bereaved intensity to her portrait of a listless wife who fights with her last atom of energy on behalf of her weak husband. In some inchoate, unconscious way, Grace tapped in to the repressed but ever-present streak of melancholy in her own character—the sense of loneliness and longing in her since childhood that had always been sensed by her friends at quiet times, in privacy. To this, she added her art: a kind of benumbed sadness in Georgie, who comes to see that her loyalty has exacted a high price, and that she has missed very much of life.
Grace seemed not merely to speak her lines of dialogue, but to imply that beneath them were, as Wordsworth wrote, thoughts too deep for tears. Nothing seemed calculated, nothing cerebral or artificial—and there was nothing for her to rely on but her substantial talent: no color, no fine wardrobe, no flattering cosmetics and no witty, crowd-pleasing dialogue. Her understanding of Georgie Elgin is a study in the most mature kind of screen acting—a remarkable achievement for a twenty-four-year-old. She could have relied on a few histrionic tricks to win the audience’s sympathy; instead she created a character rich in complexity and almost unbearable in empathetic intensity.
One scene may be taken to stand for many in this compelling picture, in which Grace had an unusual number of speeches and long, uninterrupted scenes of dialogue with the two leading men. Confronting Holden (who played her husband’s director), she begins calmly and builds the emotion:
GEORGIE. Can you stand him up on his feet, Mr. Dodd? Because that’s where all my prayers have gone—to see that one holy hour when he can stand alone! And I might forgive even you, Mr. Dodd, if you can keep him up long enough for me to get out from under! All I want is my own name and a modest job to buy sugar for my coffee! You can’t believe it, can you—you can’t believe that a woman has to be crazy-out-of-her-mind to live alone—in one room—by herself!
(He grips her arm, but she resists him.)
GEORGIE. Why are you holding me? I said—you are holding me!
Her eyes are suddenly wild with rage and desire. He kisses her “fully on the mouth,” according to the stage directions, before they step apart.
GEORGIE. How could you be so cruel to me a moment ago … to be so mad at someone you didn’t even know … [She turns away from him.] No one has looked at me as a woman for years.
He turns to leave, and just before he reaches the door, she speaks:
GEORGIE. You kissed me—don’t let it give you any ideas, Mr. Dodd.
This was a performance made credible not by lighting, costumes or music. Its force derives from the complete lack of calculation in Grace’s impressive art—a paradox that virtually defines every memorable acting achievement. Decades later, we do not watch her as a movie star playing at or around a role, nor are we conscious of her gestures, her slight raising of the eyebrows, the sudden drop of her voice. We do not observe an “artiste” struggling to impress. Grace Kelly, the beautiful actress, disappears when we watch Georgie Elgin in The Country Girl; we see only the real weariness of a woman almost out of strength, almost empty of feeling—except that her feeling, and ours, is indeed too deep for tears.
ON THE LAST day of production, in late March, the film crew presented Grace with an inscribed plaque: “For our Country Girl—may this hold you over until next year’s Academy Awards.” The critics also responded warmly, noting that Crosby and Kelly were completely successful in playing offbeat roles that were very different from the public’s perception of the actors: “Miss Kelly will get her share of praise for the quality of strain and desperation she puts into the battered, patient wife,” ran a typical review. Asked for his reaction to all these signal achievements, her father responded with his usual dispassionate detachment: yes, he was “pleased for her,” and that was that.
“I was very young when I played in The Country Girl,” Grace said years later. “I was twenty-four, and I hadn’t yet been married. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Oh, if only I were five years older, I could do this so much better!’ And then, after I’d been married five years, I thought, ‘Well, I could certainly do The Country Girl better!’ And now, years later, perhaps it would be even better.”
THE DAY after her final scene in The Country Girl, Grace rushed to Metro for costume and makeup tests, and then to the company physician for necessary injections. Soon she was off for ten days of location shooting in the Colombian jungle, to fulfill her obligation. “I was exhausted when Green Fire began,” said Grace, “because The Country Girl had required long days of rehearsal and long hours of filming, with a great deal of concentration. So although it was a grueling schedule that spring, going right away onto Green Fire was in some ways a relief. There were no politics [with her leading men] to consider—just that awful story that MGM pushed me into. They probably didn’t allow themselves to recognize the disappointing truth that the studio was no longer the great machine it had once been. I think they were trying to repeat the success of Mogambo, with the South American jungle substituting for Africa, and they gave me Stewart Granger, the resident studio swashbuckler,” who had been in Metro’s King Solomon’s Mines.
This time, the mines contained emeralds (thus the title), sought by prospector Rian Mitchell (Granger). He copes with a band of Colombian bandits, who claim the treasure belongs to them, and he is further blocked by a growing romance with Catherine Knowland (Grace). She and her brother Donald (John Ericson) own and manage a successful coffee plantation near the land where the emeralds are buried. Mitchell digs and digs; Catherine sighs and sighs. No one gets anywhere until shortly before the end of the movie, when (1) a flood hits the plantation, (2) the bandits attack the emerald mine, (3) a box of dynamite blows the thugs to guacamole, (4) a rockslid
e deflects the course of the river, (5) a tropical storm breaks, and (6) a rainbow shines through, arching over (7) the final embrace of Granger and Grace.
“Green Fire was not the kind of picture I became an actress to do,” Grace said. “I had to accept it for the chance to make The Country Girl, and it taught me a lesson—never agree to a role before reading the script. They told me my pages [of the screenplay, by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts] weren’t ready, but that I had to do it, and that it would be an easy and exciting picture to make. Silly me—I believed them and agreed to do it.” Later, Dore Schary admitted, “It was a dog, and we never should have made it—it was just terrible, but we thought it would do well, that it would bring some money in. It didn’t.”
But there were other knots in the tangle of her life and career.
First, it was precisely the intense, creative satisfaction of performing in The Country Girl that evoked in Grace a growing impatience with Hollywood and a desire to return to the stage, the source of her best roles. “I kept confiding in my uncle George,” she said. “He was the only one who understood that my heart was not in Hollywood, but in the theatre. By [May] 1954, I just wanted to get away.”
In addition, since she had left New York in November 1953, she had been bombarded with letters, calls and even a surprise visit from the zealous Oleg Cassini, and she wanted to see if this relationship was going anywhere. He had a thriving and demanding business in New York, where he was successfully climbing the social and commercial ladder—but he insisted that Grace was important in his life.
Finally she had an opportunity to “get away” and to test Cassini’s earnestness—but she would have to rush through Green Fire, to the point of asking the director to bring forward the shooting of her final scenes in order to accommodate her as a courtesy to another director. “Hitchcock wanted her for To Catch a Thief,” as Granger recalled, “and if the dates fitted, she would go straight from our film to her next leading man, Cary Grant. Poor Grace was worried that she wouldn’t finish [Green Fire] in time, because Hitchcock waits for no man or woman.”