Grace of Monaco

by Robinson, Jeffrey

  While trying to decide where her future lay, she attended a few courses at Temple University. However, she soon made up her mind to take a serious stab at acting, moved to New York, installed herself at the Barbizon—a residential hotel for well-bred young women—and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

  Watching Grace, barely 18, go off to seek fame and fortune in the big city was not something that Jack Kelly found easy to accept.

  His own sister Grace, for whom his daughter was named, had expressed an interest in acting many years before. But her career was stopped by her parents before it ever began because proper young ladies in those days did not do such things.

  As Grace herself would later say, “Aunt Grace made the mistake of being born just one generation too soon. I had better luck.”

  She also had a pair of uncles on her father’s side who made her dream of a career in the theatre a genuine possibility. Walter Kelly, much older than her father, was an itinerant actor who had moderate stage success in his youth playing a vaudeville character known as “The Virginia Judge.” He went to Hollywood in the early days of the American cinema, but his career never got much further than vaudeville and he died in 1938 when Grace was nine.

  Still, she grew up knowing that one of her uncles had been “on the boards” and Uncle Walter stories were a common topic at the family dinner table.

  Uncle George was infinitely more successful.

  He was John’s immediate elder brother, although the two were totally different. Whereas John was physical, George was a dreamer, a delicate man of moods and intellect who started in the theatre as an actor, then evolved into writing plays. He was Grace’s godfather and perhaps one of her most important early influences.

  In 1926, George Kelly won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Craig’s Wife, the success of which eventually took him to Hollywood where he was on the writing staff at MGM. Even though his years there never came close to equaling his earlier Broadway promise, being able to say that she was George Kelly’s niece opened some early doors for Grace.

  It didn’t hurt, for instance, at the American Academy where her audition for admission included a speech from The Torch Bearers.

  Over the next two years she studied diction and posture and learned how to walk on a stage. She gradually overcame her shyness and learned how to create a character. She studied improvisation and Constantin Stanislavski’s famous “Method,” and found herself doing all sorts of things that would have horrified her parents. For instance, she trekked down to the Bowery to watch bums stumble around so she could improvise a drunk, and spent afternoons at the Bronx Zoo studying the way animals moved.

  Acting school was, she would always claim, “the only place I was ever called on to play a llama.”

  While living at the Barbizon—which more often than not was referred to by the hoards of young men who hung out in the lobby as “The Amazon” because very few of the residents were anywhere near as beautiful as Grace Kelly—a friend suggested she might be able to earn some extra money by modeling. She refused at first, knowing what her parents would think, then let herself get talked into it.

  Just before her 19th birthday she signed with a small agency, which managed to get her work at $7.50 an hour. That was a fairly good salary in those days when you consider that most of the rest of the world was struggling to make $1 an hour.

  And her parents weren’t pleased.

  But before long, her blonde, “girl-next-door” looks—as they were then described—found their way into national advertising campaigns. She sold Ipana toothpaste, Old Gold cigarettes, dandruff shampoo, overnight beauty creams, insecticide, and several different kinds of beer. Her fee was quickly upped to $25 an hour and by the time she graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1949, she was doing fashion spreads for newsreels at $400 a week.

  Whether or not she could have gone on to be one of the great New York models is another matter. The problem with modeling, as she saw it, was that modeling wasn’t acting and she wanted to be an actress.

  So now she made the rounds of Broadway casting calls. Time and time again she was told, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” She was subjected to the humiliation that all actors and actresses suffer when they’re first starting out: of standing around for hours in long lines, being asked to read a dozen lines but getting stopped after just one or two by a voice at the rear of the darkened theatre saying, “Thank you, next please.”

  Being George Kelly’s niece did not save her from paying her dues, from learning the hard way about rejection. No matter what her last name was, at nearly 5' 7" she was too tall to play the innocent little girl that her pretty face and bright blue eyes suggested. Still, she stuck it out and persevered until Uncle George stepped in and helped her land her first professional acting job.

  It was 1949, at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, for their summer-stock production of The Torch Bearers.

  He’d put her name forward for the part, but insisted that she shouldn’t get it just because she was his niece. Later, he always claimed that she got hired because the director believed she’d be “okay.” And while she might not have been particularly remarkable in the role, she worked hard and was good enough to be invited back for their second production of the summer, The Heiress.

  And this time she was very good.

  Flattering notices at Bucks County led to a screen test.

  It was 1950 and director Gregory Ratoff was making a film called Taxi. He thought she might be right to play the young Irish immigrant. So she took that screen test in New York but failed to get the role.

  Little did she know, then, how that screen test would change her life.

  Undaunted by the rejection, she continued auditioning until she won the part of Raymond Massey’s daughter in a Broadway revival of August Strindberg’s The Father.

  He was a majestically tall actor so this time the problem wasn’t her height.

  It was the New York Times.

  They gave her a passable review—noting that her performance was charming and pliable, but panned him. The power of the Times being what it was on Broadway in those days, the show closed in nine weeks.

  Grace spent the rest of that winter and spring on the audition circuit, modeling to earn money but, as an actress, otherwise out of work.

  Of course, timing and luck are important in all careers and Grace’s timing, combined with her Kelly-green Irish luck, was near perfect. She was in the right place at the right time because New York in the early 1950s was where television was happening and television in the early 1950s was fast becoming America’s most important arena for aspiring actors and actresses.

  Unable to land another role on Broadway, she plugged herself into the weekly television drama circuit. She started appearing regularly in dramas presented on the Philco-Goodyear Playhouse. That led to appearances in all the other major “playhouse” productions, such as the Kraft Television Theatre, the Nash Airflyte Theatre, and the Prudential Family Playhouse.

  Over the course of 30 months, Grace worked in no less than 60 live television productions.

  Then in 1951, just as she was starting to make a name for herself in television, she was offered her first movie, a minor part in a film called Fourteen Hours.

  Based on a true incident, it’s the story of a man standing on the ledge of a building for 14 hours, threatening to jump. It featured Richard Basehart, Barbara Bel Geddes, Paul Douglas, Debra Paget, Agnes Moorehead, Jeffrey Hunter, and Howard Da Silva. The film was not a success at the box office and didn’t do much for Grace’s career.

  Enter again, Uncle George.

  The summer she’d appeared at the Bucks County Playhouse, George had phoned his friend, producer Gant Gaither, suggesting that he see her work. And while Gaither liked what he saw—at least he thought she was okay—he also knew he’d be doing George a favor if he hired her. So he gave her a job in an out-of-town preview of a play called Alexander. Her role was sexy and
, even though the Albany, New York, critics wrote, “Grace Kelly was too cool to be sexy,” it was that very quality which would one day make her a major movie star.

  Recognizing her promise, while they were still in Albany, Gaither told her, “You’ve got the part when we come to New York.”

  Years later he recalled affectionately, “She was a lovely young girl who became a magnificent woman. The thing that amazed me most about her was that her judgment was always so good. She had such wonderful common sense. Long before she got married, if I was working on a show that needed help, I’d ask her to come see it. If she was critical of something she’d offer something else in its place. She had a wonderful sense of construction.”

  Just before Gaither’s play traveled down the Hudson to Broadway, Grace received a phone call out of the blue saying that Hollywood producer Stanley Kramer wanted her for a Western called High Noon, to be directed by Fred Zinnemann.

  It was Zinnemann who’d seen that 1950 screen test. She auditioned, won the part, spent much of the summer of 1951 doing stock in Colorado, and made High Noon that autumn.

  Despite the film’s classic big-movie reputation these days, her portrayal of Amy Kane opposite Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning tin-star sheriff did not make her a movie star. When she was finished, Hollywood merely said thank you and handed her a ticket back to New York.

  Grace returned to the apartment she now called home at 200 East 66th Street, worked some more in television, and kept pounding the pavement looking for a part on Broadway.

  Then, again, seemingly out of the blue, a call came from producer Sam Zimbalist and director John Ford. They wanted her for the ­second female lead in a picture they were going to shoot in Africa called Mogambo.

  She assumed at the time it was her work on High Noon that had earned her the call. It wasn’t. Quite by chance Zimbalist and Ford had also seen her 1950 screen test and hired her on the strength of that.

  Grace wanted to do the picture and years later, explained why. “Three things that interested me. John Ford, Clark Gable and a trip to Africa with expenses paid. If Mogambo had been made in Arizona, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  The only stumbling block was the contract that MGM demanded she sign.

  Once that was done, she offed to Kenya with Clark Gable who was re-creating the white hunter role he’d first played in Red Dust, and with Ava Gardner, who was the female lead.

  Grace’s performance as the ice-cool “other woman” earned her an Oscar nomination that year as Best Supporting Actress.

  With her characteristic charm, she always credited Ford for her success in that picture and, also, with having taught her a lot about acting on screen. She used to say that he knew just how far he could push his actors without forcing them to overstep the limits of their potential.

  And though she lost the Oscar to Donna Reed, now when Grace Kelly’s name was mentioned, so were the words “movie star.”

  Except she wasn’t yet a big enough movie star to carry a picture on her own.

  Enter here, Alfred Hitchcock.

  Although he’d found her “mousy” in High Noon, he remembered her screen test and he could see her “potential for restraint.” So he hired her to play opposite Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder.

  It was the beginning of her most successful working partnership because Hitchcock understood how to direct her better than anyone else.

  It was also the beginning of a love affair with Milland, which hit the headlines and nearly saw him walk away from his wife for her.

  Hitchcock immediately cast her a second time, putting her opposite Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

  She followed that with The Country Girl, starring alongside Bing Crosby and William Holden.

  Ironically, a few years before, the producer who brought The Country Girl to Broadway had turned Grace down for the same role for which she now won the Oscar as Best Actress.

  Just a few short years away from selling bug spray and toothpaste, Grace Kelly had become a household name in America.

  She was the role model for half a generation of young American girls in the mid-1950s. They dressed like her and wore their hair like her and tried to speak like her. If you were a young girl growing up in America in those days and you were beautiful, what you wanted to hear most was someone saying, “You’re as pretty as Grace Kelly.”

  To the utter delight of MGM, who’d locked her into that contract for Mogambo, Grace Kelly was suddenly worth a fortune. They used her in Green Fire with Stewart Granger, but once that was done they realized they could keep their books in the black by renting her out to other studios.

  They loaned her out to Paramount for The Bridges at Toko-Ri with Bill Holden and Fredric March and, for the third time, to Alfred Hitchcock for To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant.

  After filming that in the south of France—where she could see Monaco far below as she and Grant drove in that famous scene along the Grande Corniche—MGM announced that she was going to do a picture called The Adventures of Quentin Outward with Robert Taylor.

  But when Grace read the script, she hated it.

  As far as she was concerned the role the studio had in mind for her gave her nothing more to do than walk around wearing a tall hat and watch Robert Taylor joust.

  She told MGM she wouldn’t make the picture.

  They said she had to do it and reminded her that she was under contract.

  She stood her ground and refused.

  So MGM put her on suspension.

  If she wouldn’t work for them, MGM was going to teach her a lesson—now she wouldn’t work for anybody.

  Her career had run headfirst into a “Kelly brick” wall.

  Chapter 2

  A Shy Man

  For a period of about ten years, from the end of the war until the end of 1955, Prince Rainier III of Monaco was considered the world’s most eligible bachelor.

  Everybody could see he was handsome. Everybody knew he owned a country. And everybody also reckoned he must therefore be very rich. The woman he would eventually choose to marry would become a princess. Not surprisingly, he was forever being invited to dinner parties only to find that an extra lady had been seated beside him.

  By his own admission, it wasn’t too long before he stopped going to dinner parties.

  After having fallen out with his grandfather at the end of World War II, Rainier purchased a small villa in St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat, on the side of the peninsula facing Villefranche. It had been going for a good price because it was on an inside cove and, although it didn’t have a large garden, he could swim in the cove off a little dock.

  He lived there as a bachelor, although once he ascended the throne he tended to spend the week at the Palace and go to the villa for weekends.

  The villa was all the more special because he lived there for nearly six years with his friend, Gisele Pascal.

  The two met when he was a student at Montpellier. She was an actress who’d come down from Paris to do a play there. They were the same age. She was born in Cannes, so they also had the Mediterranean in common. They sailed together in the summer and skied together in the winter, and, as time wore on, speculation mounted that they would soon marry.

  When it didn’t happen, the press decided the two couldn’t marry because the Monegasques would never stand for their prince wedding an actress.

  Next came the story that the National Council wouldn’t allow the Prince to marry because Mlle. Pascal was the daughter of a florist and therefore a commoner.

  That had no bearing on anything, either. Neither did the report that Grace Kelly was the daughter of a bricklayer.

  Finally the story ran that Rainier and Gisele had been forbidden to marry because she couldn’t have children.

  Rumor had it that the National Council badgered Rainier, fearing that unless he produced an heir the principality would revert to France.

  That, too, was nonsense.

  “There was no reason for us to get married,” Rainier admitted many year
s later. “We were together six years and it was fine while it lasted but I think we both felt it was long enough. It was a love affair that had come to its own end. I don’t think there was any real intention on either side to get married. As long as things were good they were fine just as they were. Then it simply ended.”

  Both of them were obviously affected by the breakup. Years later, Gisele would marry and have a child, scotching the gossip that her inability to bear children kept her from becoming Monaco’s Princess.

  But for now, needing time to be by himself, and to get away from Monaco for a while, Rainier climbed on board his boat and set sail for Conakry, in what was then French Guinea, on the west coast of Africa.

  “I had a little Citroen 2CV that I tied down to the deck,” he said, “so that when we docked I could take a long drive inside the country. My manservant in those days, Coki, was from a village called Kankan, about 350 or 400 miles due east of the coast. One of our objectives was to get him home to buy a wife. He didn’t have enough money so I staked him. I bought half his wife. Well, we got there and he chose the woman he wanted. He gave her parents enough goats, sheep and beads and made arrangements for her to arrive in Monaco around Christmas. When she didn’t show up we both got anxious about it. A few months later we learned that her mother had sold her to somebody else. Someone made a better offer and we got cut out of the deal. He and I were both very sad.”

  Rainier spent several months in Africa—he referred to it the way the French do as, “a change of air”—and when he was ready to come home, he played Noah and filled his ark. “I bought a couple of ostriches and three chimps, a few baboons and some crocodiles which we packed in crates but had to water every day in order to keep their skin from cracking. I had my chaps build a shack on the aft of the boat and we kept the animals there. I was happy to feed them every day but none of the crew would clean [it] out, so for the whole trip back, a friend and I did that every day, too.”