Grace

by Thilo Wydra

  Philadelphia native Clifford Odets (1906–1963), who also wrote the screenplay for the film noir classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957), published The Country Girl in 1949. The play premiered on November 10, 1950, in the Lyceum Theatre in New York. Odets himself directed the play, and the original set design was conceived by Boris Aronson. In the original cast, the actress Uta Hagen played the role of Georgie Elgin, and for her portrayal, she received a Tony Award as the Best Actress of the year. Undoubtedly Grace Kelly’s was measured against this fine performance.

  The plot is this: Bernie Dodd (William Holden) has started rehearsals for the rural musical The Land Around Us, and the main role must still be cast. His gruff producer Phil Cook (Anthony Ross) has been impatiently sitting through the rehearsals in the lobby of the Longacre Theatre, breathing down Dodd’s neck to cast the role. This makes it harder for Dodd to actually cast the actor he wants: Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby), a musical star from the past who was once an idolized singer and actor. However, years have passed since his heyday and Elgin has been forgotten; he has not stood on a stage or at a studio microphone for a long time. And he drinks. Producer Cook is more than a little skeptical, and he lets his director know this on no uncertain terms. However, Dodd stands his ground; Elgin will star in the main role, or nobody will. If the role is given to anyone else, then Dodd will resign as director. Dodd believes in Elgin, although he is pretty much alone in his support. Only Elgin’s young wife, Georgie Elgin (Grace Kelly), still believes in her much older husband. The play The Land Around Us, with its title song (lyrics for the Harold Arlen and Victor Young compositions in The Country Girl were written by Ira Gershwin) could be the chance for him. It could also be his last chance. Frank knows this, as does prudent Georgie. Thus, the success of this musical swings like an invisible sword of Damocles over Frank Elgin, who himself has the greatest doubts of all. The rehearsals become increasingly difficult, since Frank is no longer accustomed to the pressure of show business.

  However, he is actually tormented by something very different. His mind constantly returns to a moment of tragedy in his past. It was the moment in which he let his young son slip out of his sight for just a moment, causing the boy to be struck by a car and killed. It happened when a photographer wanted to take his picture outside on the sidewalk in front of the record-shaped logo for Vogue Records Studio. He had just recorded a hit for the studio, “The Search Is Through.” During this, his son sits on a chair next to his wife Georgie and gives advice to his father as well. After the photos are taken, his wife starts walking off, so that Frank can spend a little time with his son. As Georgie reaches the studio door, Frank whistles at her and says to his son that he has such an attractive mother. Georgie turns around and a delighted smile spreads across her face. With her white-gloved hands, she jokingly pulls the veil attached to her white pillbox hat across her face. Then she leaves the recording studio. This is the last time she sees her son.

  As a precautionary measure, the decision is made to hold the premiere and a short run of performances in Boston prior to the actual opening night in New York. These do not go well, and Frank Elgin again seeks to prop himself up with alcohol. He then admits to director Dodd that he lives under Georgie’s strict discipline and that years ago she was the one who drank. He turns everything, including the relationship, on its head. And Dodd believes Frank until the tense, distant relationship between him and Georgie finally results in a loud argument in the visiting room of the prison where Frank Elgin has been held through the night in a drunken stupor. In this conversation, Georgie reveals the truth. She never drank; Frank drinks. She never tried to kill herself after the death of their son, as Frank had told Dodd she had. Frank was the one who attempted suicide by slitting his wrists. Prior to this, Dodd had spoken to Elgin’s wife in an increasingly gruff and dismissive manner, since he blamed her for Frank’s weak stage performances. Now, he is ashamed. He tells Georgie he is sorry and he kisses her. His vehement rejection of her has turned into attraction. The premiere in New York is a great success. The critics are positive, the public loves it. For the first time since the death of his son, Frank Elgin finds courage again, and he becomes confident in what he does and who he is.

  During the subsequent opening party, all three of them—Georgie, Frank, and Bernie—sit in a nearby room, a library. With Grace in the middle, the relational constellation is spatially rendered. She sits in an armchair, while William Holden sits relatively close to her on the edge of the desk. When Bing Crosby enters the room and sits down in the chair across from them, the two of them do not look at each other. Grace’s face is turned toward Crosby, Holden has his back to both of them.

  “You know, there is only one thing more obvious than two people looking longingly at each other—it is two people avoiding it,” comments Frank Elgin. This hits the mark. Georgie must now decide. In the large room next door, a piano starts to play one of Frank’s songs, the thematic piece that plays throughout the film and throughout his life, “The Search Is Through.” He stands up and goes into the other room, and Georgie follows him quickly, afraid that the song and the memory of his son will again deeply affect and unbalance him. However, this time Frank does not collapse or reach for a bottle. He stands next to the piano player and listens to his song. And gets through it. Clifford Odets’s drama deals with survival and perseverance.

  It seems that Frank Elgin has overcome this painful, traumatic loss—today it would be called post-traumatic stress disorder.

  In the last scene of the film, Dodd pushes the curtains a little to the side. He looks out the window and down the empty, dark street. In the pale glare of the streetlights, he sees Georgie run after Frank. He stops walking, and they embrace. Together they walk on, in the same direction. Bernie Dodd lets the curtains fall back in place and turns to the critical reviews in a freshly delivered issue of the New York Times.

  From its very start, The Country Girl was shaped by various difficulties and complications. Originally Jennifer Jones (1919–2009) was supposed to play the part of Georgie Elgin. She was the wife of David O. Selznick (1902–1965), the powerful Hollywood producer, who was responsible for large productions such as Gone with the Wind (1939). He had also produced three of Hitchcock’s movies: Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), and The Paradine Case (1947). However, Jennifer Jones was pregnant, so the part had to be recast. There were those who still argued that Jones could still play the part, David O. Selznick being a huge proponent of her being cast regardless. Nonetheless, Grace was requested. George Seaton and producer William Perlberg, who had previously produced The Bridges at Toko-Ri, made sure that Grace secretly received a script, despite the resistance of both studios and agents. Grace read the script for The Country Girl and was immediately convinced that she needed to play Georgie. A part with high artistic demands. She recognized all of this right away.

  After MGM’s initial reluctance to again loan her to another studio, Grace was confronted with another point of resistance: her costar, Bing Crosby (1903–1977).

  Claiming his contractual right to have a say in decisions, Crosby the star announced that he did not want Grace Kelly to replace Jennifer Jones. Grace was too elegant, too glamorous—at the very least, much too beautiful. She did not have enough experience. She did not fit the part. However, it was Grace, in contrast to the rest of the cast, who knew the play from its run on Broadway. After all, she lived in New York. Over Crosby’s protests, Grace was ultimately cast. Crosby later revised his comments about the casting of the main female role, but his initial reaction seems all the more confusing since he and Grace were supposedly closer than the public ever knew. In 1952, they had most likely been involved with one another, although this liaison was never confirmed. Now, during the filming of this dark, difficult drama about life and love, Crosby especially wanted to continue and intensify their connection with each other. At this time, March 1954, he was two months away from his fiftieth birthday on May 2, making him almost twice as old as the twenty-four-year-old Gra
ce.

  On this topic, Grace’s sister Lizanne said: “Grace called me one evening and said, ‘Bing has asked me marry him.’”178 Lizanne explained, “Bing was crazy about her, really crazy—he asked her to go out all the time. But she wasn’t in love with him. She loved him but she was not in love with him.”179 And just as Bing was very much in love with her, Holden was just the same. Even on the set, everyone knew he was in love with Grace.

  Another man who had long been in love with her was, of course, Oleg Cassini. He visited Grace during the filming two or three times. As for Crosby, he was a widower; he had lost his wife Dixie Lee, whom he had married in 1930, to cancer in mid-1952. Over the previous year, he had been involved with actress Kathryn Grant. They had become engaged and set, and then canceled, several wedding dates until they actually did marry in 1957. This situation did not seem to bother Crosby during the spring of 1954. Grace did not know anything about it. They went out in the evenings, were observed in public, and were supposedly seen by eyewitnesses cuddling in restaurants. Unlike with the married Ray Milland, this time Grace did not risk putting herself into a tricky situation. The marriage between Bing and Kathryn Crosby eventually lasted twenty years, until 1977, when he died on October 14.

  Until the last minute, Crosby did not actually want to accept the role of the aging, alcoholic singer and actor Frank Elgin who is fighting for a comeback. “No! Absolutely not—I am a singer,” Crosby nervously and insecurely declared to director George Seaton.180 By the mid-1950s, Crosby had reached the final high point of his career with such movies as Little Boy Lost (1953), and Michael Curtiz’s musical White Christmas (1954), as well as his 1956 film High Society (1956) in which he again starred with Grace. He seemed to be afraid that his most glittering period would soon be over and that the public would begin to associate him too closely with the role of Frank Elgin: “I’ve got my audience to think of. I don’t want to look like an old man on the screen.”181

  Having already worked with Crosby on Little Boy Lost, George Seaton tried to allay the popular performer’s fears: “Bing, let’s be honest, you’re frightened.” Crosby seemed about to cry, and he answered: “I can’t do it.” To this, Seaton responded: “Please have faith in me, I’m frightened too, so let’s be frightened together.”182 After this conversation, they supposedly hugged each other and walked to the set. The director recognized the source of Crosby’s pronounced fear in playing this part. Usually Crosby played Crosby in his films, most of which were lighthearted musicals. On the screen, later on the television (as in the twenty-seven episodes of the Bing Crosby Show [1964–1965]), or even anywhere else, he was simply himself: Crosby. But in Seaton’s film, Frank Elgin was a multifaceted and deeply grounded character, whose life had certain darker parallels with Crosby’s own. Not an easy task. With great determination, Georg Seaton finally succeeded in convincing Crosby to portray Frank Elgin.

  The filming lasted from late February through early April 1954 and took place in Paramount Studios Hollywood. The exterior scenes were shot in New York. The first week of filming was a complete disaster. The actors were insecure. Each of them acted for him or herself, and George Seaton had a difficult time directing the actors such that the necessary mood and atmosphere could be created. Later, Grace recalled the nerves that were in the room that first week, particularly that she and Bing were both quite nervous and distracted, which hindered their attempts to work with each other.183

  In the end, Seaton decided not to use any of the materials taken that week, including all the takes and designs, and to completely start from scratch again. It was a radical, yet logical, decision that cost the production both time and money. During the filming, however, Grace proved to be highly focused, well prepared, and extremely punctual. She always knew her lines. This almost Prussian, unpretentiously correct manner of working quickly impacted her co-actors and the crew. After five taut weeks, the filming concluded. These went much better once they moved past those early difficulties.

  For the first and only time in a movie, Grace Kelly appeared in The Country Girl without any makeup for most of the scenes. According to television and film director, Ted Post, “The greatest expression of courage that Grace demonstrated was the throwing away of her mask of beauty and elegance and became somebody who was identified with being just a kind of woman that you could meet on the streets.”184 Her outer appearance stood in stark contrast to that from both of her two previous Hitchcock movies. This was clearly reflected in her clothing, which again was designed by costume designer Edith Head: the costumes were plain and unobtrusive in tone. In some scenes, Grace Kelly was hardly recognizable. As Edith Head explained, “Her figure had absolutely no resemblance to Grace Kelly’s. I put her in apron dresses and skirts and blouses that made her look dumpy.”185 In one scene, Georgie Elgin waits on her husband Frank in his dressing room, as he rehearses on stage. From time to time, he comes in to take a highly alcoholic cough medicine to combat his alleged cold. While waiting, Grace sits in an armchair and knits. She wears a pair of glasses. In real life, she sat just this way among friends, at home, or even by her parents, crocheting or knitting. Her German mother Margaret had taught this skill to her and her sisters Peggy and Lizanne at an early age in Philadelphia. Since she was nearsighted, Grace wore glasses; she often wore no makeup and dressed casually in a shirt and jeans. Not the typical Kelly Look. Much more the other Grace. The private one who also liked things simple and plain.

  In the final scenes of this romantic drama, and also at the premiere party, which was attended by both of the men who loved her, reality and fiction overlap in a delicately suggestive, nuanced way. She appears in a black evening gown with short sleeves and a wide, deep neckline. Her hair is pinned up, and a short strand of pearls encircles her neck. This is an elegant, distinct look that reminds one of her attire in Rear Window. “The end of the film rescues Grace’s character from her dull existence, giving her a renewed interest in life. So, I got to dress Grace stylishly for at least a couple scenes,” remarked Edith Head.186

  One of Grace’s most impressive scenes in this deep, dark drama takes place during the first third of The Country Girl. Frank Elgin has just fed Dodd his wife’s erroneous life story. He pauses when he sees a shadow appear at the wings of the stage. It is Georgie, who can only be seen in silhouette. A light shines out from the door behind her. Her face cannot be seen since it lies in darkness. Her sudden appearance is disquieting. At the same time, she projects something statuesque, immovable, almost threatening. As soon as he sees Grace, a single thrilling, charged sound intensifies the moment of fear: “Georgie?” the unsettled, hesitant Frank calls questioningly into the half-darkness. He slowly moves toward her. Georgie approaches him, “Just coming from a movie, passing by.” She then asks if she is disturbing anything. It is not clear how long she has been standing there listening. Then she moves forward to the front edge of the stage. As she stands on the stage, looking into the dark, empty audience, quietly contemplative, she muses: “There is nothing quite so mysterious and silent as a dark theater—a night without a star.” Framed in darkness, Grace’s face is lit by a single beam of light that seems to come from the nothingness of the deep theater space. She emphasizes the word “star,” referencing both a star in the sky and the star status that Frank Elgin once had. The effect of this intonation is deeply ambiguous. It is almost whispered, murmured.

  Grace Kelly loved the theater her whole life, ever since her Uncle George had begun telling her stories about his own plays. She owed her love and affinity for theater and acting to perhaps the only member of the Kelly family who understood, comprehended, and supported her in her endeavors. It is likely that George Seaton’s The Country Girl, and its theater-centric story would have been all the more significant and meaningful for Grace.

  At the close of the movie, Georgie Elgin undergoes a cathartic metamorphosis that is parallel to her husband’s. She matures from a brown mouse to an attractive woman who is now sure of herself. She seems newly born. A
nd this helps her understand the internal transformation Frank is experiencing. This is exactly the reason why she decides to remain with her husband, an actor who has just had his first taste of success in a decade, in spite of his notorious alcoholism and the trauma of their collective past. It is why she decides against Bernie Dodd, the successful Broadway theater director, the younger man who showed regret for his judgments and was newly in love with her.

  The final scene sequences in The Country Girl are very touching, either despite or because of the completely somber and reserved staging by George Seaton. Within Georgie’s story, Grace’s essential character can be seen. Both are women who do not give up easily, who stand up for both themselves and those they are closest to—even when the situation is hard to bear and requires personal sacrifice, discipline, composure, conscientious responsibility, feelings of duty, as well as, above all, human goodness.

  The Country Girl premiered in Los Angeles on December 11, 1954, and opened in New York on December 15. It received seven Oscar nominations. Besides Grace Kelly’s Academy Award, a second one was given to George Seaton for Best Adapted Screenplay. Although he had also been nominated as Best Director, Seaton had to be content with this one golden statuette. Bing Crosby was nominated for Best Actor, but he did not win, which was a blow to him. His director and great advocate was also disappointed for him; Crosby was a kind of proxy for Seaton himself: “My opinion was that Bing’s portrayal was outstanding—he went above and beyond everything he had ever done before.”187

  Other Oscar nominations for the team went to the camera man John F. Warren and producer William Perlberg. However, almost all the Academy Awards for that year in these categories were awarded to Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.

  —“The Award for Best Actress:

  Grace Kelly for The Country Girl”