by Donald Spoto
To complicate the issue further—and simultaneously to make it all the more attractive—the production schedule of To Catch a Thief called for location shooting on the French Riviera from May to July. Even before she completed Green Fire—and before Metro had signed off on yet another loan-out to Hitchcock and Paramount—Grace was making late-night calls to Edith Head about the costumes for Hitchcock’s picture. “Just go ahead,” she told the designer. “I’ll get the picture.” Her confidence was doubtless rooted in Alfred Hitchcock’s insistence (which he told her on the sly) that he would not seriously consider a replacement for her. “I’m not sure what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to get Grace,” Hitch said many years later. “I saw her in this role ever since I bought the rights to the novel.”
JOHN ERICSON, who played Grace’s brother in Green Fire, had been a student with her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and was also under contract to Metro that year. Just when he and Grace began work, his previous picture was released—Rhapsody, in which he appeared to very good effect with Elizabeth Taylor. A strong but not brutish actor on the studio roster, John was a strikingly handsome young man, already believable in a wide variety of roles. He, too, should have been more wisely managed by Metro, as Grace recognized. “They’re doing the same thing with John Ericson as they have with me,” she wrote to columnist Hedda Hopper that season. “To the press, they’re full of enthusiasm and generous with their promises. But then nothing comes of it, and now they are ignoring a fine actor in John, and I think it’s shameful.”
“Grace had always been surrounded by a group of admiring young men in our student days,” Ericson recalled more than fifty years later. “And on Green Fire, she was as serious as she was popular, and completely professional—even though she didn’t want to be in the picture. But everyone in the cast and crew grew very fond of her.”
John’s scenes did not require him to travel to South America with Grace and Granger, who went for ten days in April and worked in fiercely uncomfortable conditions in Barranquilla, along the Magdalena River and in the mountains surrounding Bogotá. “It wasn’t too pleasant there,” Grace wrote in another message to Hopper. “We worked at a pathetic village, with miserable huts and poverty-stricken people who were forced to live in awful conditions. Part of our crew got shipwrecked—it was terrible.” Years later she added, “Really, it was a wretched time. Everybody at MGM knew we had a very, very bad picture on our hands, but the production just dragged on in all the heat and all the rainstorms because no one knew how to end it—and for lots of reasons, I wanted to end it!”
The remaining exteriors were shot on the slopes of Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, and on Metro’s back lot. “We were lucky to have Andrew Marton as our director,” said John Ericson. “He was not temperamental, but very helpful to everyone, especially in the action sequences. I remember that Grace insisted on doing her own [horseback] riding scenes, which surprised everybody and caused us some anxiety. But she did it like a champion rider, and without any fuss or fanfare. She was the least prima-donna-like actress I ever knew.”
“I had the misfortune to be in the only really bad movie Grace ever made,” recalled Granger. “She was stunningly beautiful, but I thought she was lonely and agitated. One treated Grace differently. You didn’t chum up with her or smack her on the bottom”—which was precisely what he did, while embracing her in the movie’s concluding rainstorm. She was not pleased.
“The whole experience was unhappy for me,” Grace said. “I took the role for the sake of The Country Girl—and because my old friend Marie Frisbee was in Colombia at the time. She and her husband had to live there for a while because of his job, and she felt lonely. I hoped to surprise Marie—but when I tried to contact her after my arrival in South America, I was told that she had gone to Washington for a vacation. That was the first disappointment, and more followed.”
In the movie, Grace smiled amiably for the camera, but of course she could not rewrite the astonishingly bad dialogue. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love before,” she had to say in one scene—“not really in love—not like this.” Years later she laughed when reminded of a peculiarly apposite line in another scene: “I’ve had a few proposals of marriage,” she says in one romantic sequence, “and I turned them down. But I’m not panicking yet. There’s always the chance that Prince Charming will come down out of the mountains on his charger one day.” The ordeal of Green Fire finally reached its term in late May, after the interior scenes were completed in Culver City.
On May 2, Metro and Paramount issued press statements that Grace Kelly was going directly from Green Fire to Alfred Hitchcock’s next picture, To Catch a Thief. Dial “M” for Murder and Rear Window were still unreleased, but the advance word was more than encouraging. At the same time, Grace was behaving with poise and refined resolve—not to say remarkable audacity—in her dealings with Metro.
The studio announced that, after the Hitchcock picture, she would at once star in The Cobweb, but she refused to play its rather gloomy role of a psychiatrist. The press was then informed that Grace had the leading role in a western called The Long Day, but she turned that down, too. The public then read the news that she would be the leading lady in a historical romance called Quentin Durward, but she also turned aside that offer. “All the men could duel and fight,” she said. “But I would just wear thirty-five different costumes, look pretty and act frightened. It seemed to me that eight people were to be chasing me [in Durward]—an old man, robbers, gypsies—and the stage directions on every page of the script said, ‘She clutches her jewel box and flees.’ It read like a satire, and I knew I would be bored to tears by all that nonsense.”
And so it went, as Grace refused to yield to studio pressure to perform in roles that she considered unsuitable or that would in no way deepen her talents or advance her career. She also rejected the scripts for the movies Diane, Something of Value, Bannon and Tribute to a Bad Man. A period of the movie industry was dying, and Grace was dancing at the funeral. This was more than a simple case of individual pride, willfulness or prudent self-management of her career. Grace was quite consciously putting one of the final nails in the coffin of a moribund studio system.
THE TRADITION of the seven-year contract gave movie studios the legal right to drop a player who was not drawing crowds to the box office—but the rights of the players were limited to a guaranteed minimum wage for six months, after which they could be dismissed. Actors had no control over their own careers, and almost no share in the decision of what roles they would play and how their public image would be created, sustained, managed and altered. The seven-year system, in other words, created a kind of indentured servitude, and many competent players were blithely pushed onto the unemployment lines because studio executives disliked them.
Almost twenty years earlier, Bette Davis had challenged the control of Jack L. Warner. Convinced that her career was being irreparably damaged by a series of mediocre roles into which she was forced, Davis simply ignored her contract and accepted an offer to work in England. There, she brought her case against Warner Bros. to the English courts, confident that they would decide in her favor. Her counsel listed her complaints: that she could be suspended without pay for refusing any role; that the period of suspension could be added to the term date of her contract; that she could be required to play any part regardless of her opinions; that she could be required to support publicly any political party even against her private beliefs; and that her image could be displayed anywhere and in any context the studio thought helpful for business.
When Jack Warner was called to testify, he was asked, “Whatever part you choose to call upon her to play—even if it is distasteful and cheap—she has to play it?” Warner replied immediately and cheerfully: “Oh, yes, of course she must play it!” Bette Davis lost the case and returned to Hollywood in 1937, burdened with debts and without any prospect of income. Jack Warner, however, never doubted her star power, and she returned fo
r several years to his studio—under the terms of the standard seven-year contract.
Later, Davis’s friend Olivia de Havilland picked up the battle standard against Warner Bros. and fought her case all the way to the California Supreme Court. According to the state labor laws, personal service contracts were limited to a maximum of seven years. De Havilland had signed a standard contract with Warners in 1936, and during the ensuing years she frequently refused various roles and was put on suspension for as long as it took another actor to complete the role she had rejected. When her contract expired on August 31, 1943, she thought she was finally free of Warner’s control, but de Havilland was informed that she had to continue working to compensate the studio for the times she had been suspended.
She thought this was preposterous: she had been obligated to the studio for seven years, and that, she believed, should have been the end of it. She filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros., and in 1945 the State Supreme Court decided in her favor. Seven years indeed meant seven years, with no time added for bad behavior.
But Grace Kelly carried the issue further. She flatly refused to do what the studio expected, relying on her own talents and her own perceptions of what was good for her and what was not. If she did well, she reasoned, her success would support her—hence she would force the studio to comply by sheer force of will and achievement. “I never believed in the studio system,” she told me. “I signed the contract with Metro in order to do Mogambo, and I agreed to do Mogambo in order to see Africa and work with Clark Gable and John Ford. The idea of being owned by a studio was offensive to me, and the more I saw the consequences of that seven-year deal, the more determined I became to make my own way and find my own direction. For a wonderfully long time I was left to do that, but then the chickens came home to roost.” In fact, they were vultures.
To Metro’s annoyance, the more assertive she became, the more the public seemed to love her. Grace was in demand for newspaper interviews and magazine feature stories, and her picture was popping up all over America: the April 26 cover of Life magazine, for example, proclaimed, “Grace Kelly—America’s Brightest and Busiest New Star.” Her agents took advantage of her growing status and were able to renegotiate the deal with Paramount, whereby Metro was paid $80,000 to loan her out for ten weeks of work on the Hitchcock picture—but $50,000 of that sum was paid to her. Five thousand a week was a respectable sum for Grace in 1954; on the other hand, Cary Grant, her costar in the forthcoming Hitchcock picture, was paid $18,750 a week (in 2009, the equivalent of $150,279 a week).
“I finished Green Fire at eleven o’clock on the morning of May 24,” Grace recalled. “I went into the dubbing room [to rerecord lines that were unclear in a few outdoor scenes] at one in the afternoon—and at six o’clock that evening I was on my way to France.”
* Indeed, the 2006 book by Dherbier and Verlhac (see bibliography) contains a complimentary foreword by Prince Albert of Monaco, Grace’s son.
SEVEN
Climbing Over Rooftops
Palaces are for royalty. We’re just common people with a bank account.
—GRACE (AS FRANCIE STEVENS) IN TO CATCH A THIEF
UNTIL AGE AND POOR HEALTH IMPEDED HIM, ALFRED Hitchcock loved to travel to the smartest and most luxurious venues in the world for his holidays: to the best Swiss resorts, the finest Caribbean hotels—and to lesser-known but equally expensive places. In London, New York, Paris and Rome (to mention but a few major cities he visited regularly), he and his wife were royally welcomed at five-star accommodations. Whenever possible, Hitchcock synchronized his holiday with a movie project—a concurrence ensuring that his considerable personal expenses would be borne by the production’s budget.
Such was the case in May 1954, when he and his crew arrived on the French Riviera. They remained for six weeks, filming in and around Cannes, in the hills above the Mediterranean, along picturesque roads, in the flower market at Nice and on the sun-drenched tourist beaches. Hitchcock also arranged for the entire company to have plenty of time for sightseeing and sampling the best French restaurants along the Riviera.
To Catch a Thief was Hitchcock’s forty-first feature. Cary Grant, appearing in his third picture for the director, was fifty years old, but Hitchcock was right when he told Paramount’s executives that audiences would accept Grant as a romantic leading man opposite twenty-four-year-old Grace Kelly, also appearing in her third Hitchcock feature. Fit and tanned, Grant had an ageless, urbane charm, and his acting was on the mark for a director who preferred understatement. In a career that ultimately spanned thirty-five years, he had already performed with Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe, among others. As the Hollywood cliché put it, Cary Grant was bankable.
John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplay for To Catch a Thief, based on David Dodge’s novel. Hayes had written the script for Rear Window and later wrote two more for Hitchcock (The Trouble with Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much); his work is noteworthy for a warmth of characterization often lacking even in some of Hitchcock’s masterworks.
The director called To Catch a Thief “a lightweight story,” and so it is—a rambling, relaxed comic caper, the work of a man on holiday, telling a story without the atmosphere familiar to his fans. Some critics feel that the picture’s sheer visual appeal and sexy charm overwhelm the suspense, that we really don’t care about the villain at all, and that the thriller aspect—the hero’s need to unmask a crook in order to exonerate himself—is lost in a glamorous travelogue. The film is, to be sure, far more interesting for its ravishing shots of the French Riviera (which earned Robert Burks the Oscar for color cinematography) than for its ho-hum narrative, which is exceedingly short on Hitchcockian tension.
The plot concerns John Robie (Grant), a former jewel thief and once a collaborator with the Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. The police now believe that he has returned to his old larcenous habits and is responsible for a series of burglaries along the Riviera. To prove his innocence, Robie embarks on his own investigation to catch the thief. He enlists an insurance agent (John Williams) and soon meets a rich young American named Frances “Francie” Stevens (Grace) and her mother (Jessie Royce Landis). Francie is fascinated—even excited—by Robie’s reputation as a thief. She falls in love with him, and although at first she thinks him guilty, she finally helps him trap the real cat burglar. The culprit, Danielle Foussard (Brigitte Auber), turns out to be a woman Robie thought was a friend, the daughter of a former Resistance colleague who is involved in a ring of thieves.
“For me, this was the perfect part after the intensity of The Country Girl and the discomforts of Green Fire,” Grace recalled in 1976, “and how could I turn down the chance for another Hitchcock picture? I was flattered he wanted me. It was a comedy, but it was also romantic—and rather daring for its time, too, but always with the sophisticated Hitchcock touch. Francie is eager to be a thief—she’s out for kicks and thrills, and she thinks it’s exciting to join up with a man she believes to be an outlaw. She was all set to climb out over the rooftops with him.”
Grace had clear memories of filming several especially clever sequences. In the first, Danielle and Francie meet in the waters of the beach club, as rivals over Robie:
DANIELLE (Brigitte Auber). What has she got more than me—except money, and you are getting plenty of that.
ROBIE (Grant). Danielle, you are just a girl—she is a woman.
DANIELLE. Why do you want to buy an old car if you can get a new one cheaper? It will run better and last longer.
ROBIE (scanning the horizon). Well, it looks as if my old car just drove off.
FRANCIE (Grace—suddenly bobbing out of the water). No, it hasn’t—it’s just turned amphibious. I thought I’d come out and see what the big attraction was—and possibly even rate an introduction.
ROBIE. Miss Foussard—Miss Stevens.
They are all treading water.
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FRANCIE. How do you do, Miss Foussard—Mr. Burns [Robie’s temporarily assumed name] has told me so little about you.
ROBIE. Well, we met only a few minutes ago.
FRANCIE. Only a few minutes ago, and you talk like old friends. Ah, well, that’s warm, friendly France for you.
ROBIE. Would you like me to teach you how to water ski?
FRANCIE. Thank you—but I was women’s champion at Sarasota, Florida, last season. Are you sure you were talking about water skis? From where I sat, it looked as though you were conjugating some irregular verbs.
ROBIE. Say something nice to her, Danielle.
DANIELLE. She looks a lot older up close.
ROBIE (groaning). Oh-h-h-h-h-h …
FRANCIE. To a mere child, anything over twenty might seem old.
“HITCH TOLD us to improvise some of our dialogue,” Grace recalled, “and so Cary and I did just that. We rehearsed it first with Miss Auber, whose English was not so fluent. We all had terrific fun trying to see what we could get away with, because we knew Hitch wanted us to go as far as we could. Cary and I shared the same warped and sometimes risqué sense of humor, so it was just a great deal of fun for us. Only one sequence in the picture really troubled me, and it does to this day. When I see the costume ball sequence at the end, I feel very embarrassed. It seems overdone—and I did my bit in those scenes badly. Hitch should have made me do them over.”