CHAPTER FOUR
The myth of Grace Kelly as a paragon of virtue is matched by the legend that her professional Midas touch began in high school and never failed her, that success came to her quickly and easily. Such is rarely the case, and it certainly wasn’t with Grace. Any actor or actress with enough individuality to achieve superstardom is usually too unique to impress any but the most discerning casting directors; if a performer doesn’t fit into a “type,” too often no one knows what to make of him.
This was true of Grace. Armed with her degree from the Academy, she optimistically set out to make the “rounds” of theatrical auditions in New York. It was a discouraging and debilitating experience. Her first shock came when she discovered the catch-22 that has vexed neophytes in many fields: “Whenever they asked me what I’d done,” Grace later said, “I had to explain that I had just graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and, you know, that name was so long that sometimes I didn’t think I’d be able to get it out. Then the receptionist would be terribly condescending and tell me to come back when I had a little experience. All the kids would get together in the drugstore, and I’d be right there with them, moaning about how impossible it was to get experience if everybody kept telling you to get it first before they’d consider you for a job.”
Even worse for Grace was that she always seemed to be “too” something for the role she was seeking. She was “too tall” for most parts, “too intelligent-looking” to play an ingenue, “too chinny,” “too leggy.” It didn’t help her inferiority complex. Her height, it seemed, was the biggest “problem”: “Everybody said I was too tall. I’ve read parts in my stocking feet in the offices of every play producer in New York. I couldn’t get to first base because I was five feet six and a half.”
One of Grace’s auditions turned into a nightmare. She had heard that Al Capp, the creator of the cartoon “Li’l Abner,” had written a Broadway musical based on his Dogpatch characters and was auditioning girls for the part of Daisy Mae. Despite Don Richardson’s opinion that Grace “wasn’t exactly the Daisy Mae type,” Grace insisted on reading for the part.
“I took her to Capp’s office,” Richardson recalls, “and waited for her in a little coffee shop nearby. About a half hour later, she came back with her hair messed up, her lipstick smudged, and her dress ripped. Capp had tried to rape her. He physically attacked her. She was in tears and told me how she had had to flee his office to get away from him. Well, I was ready to kill him, but she pleaded with me not to do anything about it. ‘I’m okay,’ she said, ‘the poor man has only one leg—leave him alone.’
“Of course, Capp was arrested for that same sort of thing years later, but no one ever knew that Grace had been one of his victims.”3
Despite her experience with Capp, Grace needed to continue to audition for strangers. Finally, she got a job with the Bucks County Playhouse near New Hope, Pennsylvania. It was a prestigious assignment; Bucks had featured performances by some of the finest actors of the American stage. Grace, in fact, probably deserved the nod less than some of her Academy classmates, but the Playhouse owner was a friend of the Kelly family, and once again Grace’s family ties helped her cause. (Her program biography said more about her father, uncle, and brother than it did about her.) Regardless of the reason she was there, Grace was determined to make the most of her opportunity.
Again not likely by coincidence, Grace’s first professional performance at the Bucks County Playhouse was in her uncle George’s The Torch Bearers. In a bit of typecasting, she played an amateur actress, and she did reasonably well. What impressed her co-workers about her was her aura of experience. The play’s leading lady, Haila Stoddard, said with admiration: “Even at this early time in her acting career, she had an almost innate sense of what not to do. She effortlessly avoided the common affectations or mannerisms of young actors.”
Afterward, back in New York, Grace began anew the arduous process of asking for work, something she found “humiliating.” Her height continued to be a problem, but in the fall of 1949, she got lucky. As she cried joyously to her mother over the phone, “I’ve got a part in a Broadway play—and I’m not too tall for it because it’s with Raymond Massey!”
The play, August Strindberg’s tragedy The Father, about a Swedish calvary captain driven to madness by his evil wife’s insinuation that his daughter is not his own, featured a prominent ingenue role in the person of the daughter. Grace was convinced she had been cast in the part because both Massey and leading lady Mady Christians were tall and towered over all the other aspirants except her. Massey—who, as director as well as star, made the decision to hire Grace—has denied this. “She got the part because she showed the most promise. All through the rehearsal period we were impressed with her earnestness, her professionalism, and her good manners. She was organized and dedicated. Between rehearsals she would ask Mady if she could sit in her dressing room and talk about the theater. She was a delight to have in the company. A rare kind of young person who had a hunger to learn and to improve herself.” (Grace later told a reporter that she had learned more talking with Mady Christians in her dressing room than she had in two years of study at the Academy.)
The Father began its out-of-town tryouts in Boston, and Grace, eager for her family to see her in a Broadway-bound show, invited them to see it. After the performance Mrs. Kelly held a cast party in their hotel suite. “When Raymond Massey arrived,” Mrs. Kelly said, “he was delighted to see Jack—Massey used to row for Toronto and all old oarsmen know each other. But he didn’t understand why Jack was there. It took him several minutes to realize that he was Grace’s father, for Grace hadn’t said a word.”
The Father opened on Broadway on November 16, 1949. Carolyn Scott, who had urged Grace to try modeling partly because she doubted her potential as an actress, remembers sitting in the audience on opening night. “Though I knew how thrilled Grace was, I didn’t expect to get goose bumps myself. But when she walked out on the stage, looking so fresh and pretty and breathtaking, I burst into tears. I think it was then that I realized she was going places.”
Most of the critics agreed with Scott. Ironically, considering that Grace was in such august company, at least one critic thought she was the best thing in the show. George Jean Nathan commented, “Only the novice Grace Kelly, convincing as the daughter, relieves the stage from the air of a minor hinterland stock company on one of its off days.”
With notices like that, The Father’s days were numbered, and it closed after just sixty-nine performances. Grace returned to the search for work and once again was told she was “too” something or other. Still, this was a good period for Grace, one she would remember with great happiness. She loved being surrounded by the other young actors who had become her friends, and with them she could be herself, allowing them to see her warm, funny, silly side. Her new apartment on fashionable East Sixty-sixth Street was unpretentious and often cluttered; Mrs. Kelly recalled constantly picking up after Grace whenever she visited and telling her to become successful so she could afford a maid. Grace’s only pet was a parakeet named Henry, but she was seldom lonely: friends dropped in almost constantly to talk about acting and the theater, to commiserate about parts not won and the arbitrary nature of auditions.
They were a lively bunch, full of energy and fun. One of their favorite games was “giggle belly,” in which they all lay on the floor, their heads on one another’s stomachs. Then they’d tell funny stories, which would get them to laughing, and their heads would bounce up and down with their bellies. That would produce more laughter, until the room was full of hysterical, violently jerking people. “We did a lot of silly things,” Grace recalled, “and we all laughed a lot.”
Grace didn’t win another part on Broadway for almost two years, but she wasn’t without work. The early 1950s were the golden age of television, when live drama of the first order was presented nearly every night. It was a rich new opportunity for young actors, and a grueling testing ground. The good impression Grace had made in The Father helped her win important roles in shows like Studio One, Robert Montgomery Presents, Lights Out, Kraft Playhouse, Lux Video Theatre, The Somerset Maugham Theatre, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Philco/Goodyear Playhouse, and Playhouse 90. She even did a singing-dancing stint on The Ed Sullivan Show. It has been said that Grace’s initial entree into television, on CBS, was facilitated by the fact that CBS executive Isaac Levy was a partner with the Kellys in an Atlantic City racetrack. But as usual, Grace took her advantage and made the most of it. In all, she appeared in over sixty television shows in two years, a prodigious output, and she constantly improved her craft. Grace Kelly, in fact, was one of television’s pioneer actresses, a fact forgotten in the later glitter of her Hollywood and world fame.
Live television work was fraught with hazards, as Grace quickly learned. “How did we ever get through it?” she wondered years later. “It was like working on the edge of a precipice! I’ll never forget one time I was playing a scene in bed with all my clothes on under the covers so I’d be ready to run into the next scene dressed. But the camera didn’t stop in time, and they didn’t cut away—so there I was, on the screen getting out of bed with all my clothes on!”
Another time Grace and “a wonderful English character man” were supposed to arrive at an orphanage with a hot Christmas pie. “We were to wave through the window,” Grace recalled, “and the pie was too hot. So I set it down and the old actor stepped in it. He came limping into the place with half the pie spread over his shoe. ‘Look what we’ve brought you—this nice, hot pie—Merry Christmas!’”
Television helped Grace perfect her craft, and she was noticed. Life featured her in an article on “TV’s Leading Ladies,” looking quite sexy in fishnet stockings for a Lights Out role as a music hall singer. Most of her roles typecast her as an elegant sophisticate, usually the daughter of a wealthy man. One of her directors, Fred Coe, explained what made Grace special: “She wasn’t just another beautiful girl, she was the essence of freshness —the kind of girl every man dreams of marrying.”
Well, perhaps not every man. Grace was still encountering opposition from people who found her cold and remote. “She has no stove in her belly,” director Sidney Lumet was heard to complain. And a 20th Century-Fox talent executive, choosing not to screen-test her, explained his decision succinctly: “She’s got no sex!”
The road was not completely clear of obstacles, but Grace was making progress. Both Don Richardson and Mark Miller referred her to Edie Van Cleve, an agent with the powerful MCA agency whose clients included newcomer Marlon Brando. “Edie just flipped when she saw Grace,” Miller recalls. “She signed her up almost immediately.” Although Grace’s first love was the theater, Van Cleve was working behind the scenes to get her work in Hollywood, where the big money was. She succeeded in getting Grace a small part in director Henry Hathaway’s drama for 20th Century-Fox, Fourteen Hours, based on a real-life incident in which a young man jumped to his death from a New York hotel. Hathaway cast Grace as Mrs. Fuller, a nattily dressed young woman discussing a divorce with her lawyer when the life-and-death drama begins. This close encounter with the tenuousness of life changes the woman’s mind about the divorce.
Grace’s Hollywood debut was inauspicious (Fourteen Hours was financially disappointing), but it did bring her some industry attention, a mink coat she bought with her earnings, and her first devoted fan—a young girl in Oregon who began a “Grace Kelly Fan Club” and wrote to Grace weekly with the names of new members she’d signed up. Grace thought it very funny and cried out in triumph after receiving an update, “We’ve got a new girl in Washington! I think she’s ours, sewed up!” Silly as it may have seemed, it was a strong early indication of Grace Kelly’s potent screen appeal that a tiny role in a minor film would inspire someone to start a fan club for her.
While she was filming Fourteen Hours, Grace met Hollywood great Gary Cooper, who was impressed by her. “I thought she looked pretty and different, and that maybe she’d be somebody,” he said later. “She looked educated, and as if she came from a nice family. She was certainly a refreshing change from all these sexballs we’d been seeing so much of.” The paths of Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper would cross again.
An opportunity to play a major movie role came to Grace with a frantic phone call from 20th Century-Fox: director Gregory Ratoff wanted her to audition for a part in his new film, Taxi, and she was told to rush over to Fox’s New York offices. The urgency of it all rang false to Grace, who put so little stock in the whole thing that she simply stopped by on her way to an acting class wearing her usual “bumming around” outfit—tweed skirt, well-worn shirt, flat shoes, no makeup, and with her hair tied behind her head.
When she arrived, an MCA representative was there to greet her, and he was mortified at her appearance amid a roomful of sensational-looking girls dressed, coiffed, and made-up as though for a Vogue magazine cover sitting. But, as sometimes happens in situations like this, Grace’s appearance delighted Ratoff. He was casting for a plain Irish immigrant girl, and when he saw Grace, he proclaimed, “She’s perfect! I like the fact that she’s not pretty.” The MCA representative protested that she was so pretty, but Ratoff wasn’t dissuaded. Grace, when plain and dowdy, in fact did not have the beauty that makeup, lighting, and good photography could bring out in her. Ratoff asked Grace if she could speak in an Irish brogue, and she replied, “Of course,” explaining that she was Irish. Luckily, Ratoff took her word for it, because she spent the next two days preparing for the screen test by practicing the accent. By then, Grace badly wanted the part—it was a good one, it did not rely on her beauty so much as her talent, and it could be hers without having to sign a long-term contract with Fox, something she did not want to do.
Grace made the test and Ratoff was delighted. He wanted to hire her, but his bosses nixed her in favor of Constance Smith, an English actress already under contract to the studio. Grace was disappointed, but she soon realized that the whole episode had in fact been a lucky break: Taxi wasn’t a hit and did nothing for Constance Smith’s career, but Grace’s screen test for the part was to be instrumental in winning her two other roles which began her ascension to Hollywood stardom.
At this point Grace had received contract offers from several major studios, including MGM, and she could easily have become a part of the MGM stable of contract players, an opportunity most aspiring actors would have leaped at. But she turned the offer down, as much because of an East Coast disdain for Hollywood as because, to her, it smacked of indentured servitude. Grace sensed, too, that she would be lost amid hundreds of young players, that she didn’t have the experience to win roles larger than the one she had played in Fourteen Hours. She would rather play large parts on the stage, refine her acting abilities, and be better prepared for Hollywood stardom if the chance again presented itself.
The opportunity for Grace to gain theatrical experience and to star in her first Hollywood movie came simultaneously. She received an offer from producer Stanley Kramer and director Fred Zinnemann to star opposite Gary Cooper in a Western, High Noon. The names alone were enough to brighten any young actor’s eyes. Cooper, of course, was a Hollywood legend and Kramer and Zinnemann had already begun to establish their impressive Hollywood reputations. The men involved in the production, especially Cooper, intimidated the twenty-one-year-old Grace, Mark Miller recalls. “She said to me, ‘I don’t know if I’m ready. I’m scared.’ Now, Grace wasn’t the kind of girl to be scared of anything, but she was just starting out. I told her, ‘You have a good director. Just do what he tells you to do. You know you photograph beautifully. You’ll do fine.’”
An offer from the prestigious Elitch Gardens stock company in Denver, Colorado, took Grace off the hook temporarily. She wanted to do more stage work, she told Edie Van Cleve, and the agent agreed that it would be advantageous, but Van Cleve didn’t want to give up on having her client costar with Gary Cooper in her second movie. Fully aware that most starting dates for motion picture filming are put off several times, Edie advised Grace to go to Colorado, gambling that her client could have her theater experience and her movie too. She stalled the producers, telling them that Grace was doing theater work and that she would consider their offer when a definite start date for the film was set. The gamble paid off.
Grace’s 1951 summer at Elitch was a marvelous one for her. The work was hard—ten plays in eleven weeks—but she felt herself coming into her own as an actress. She won acclaim in such plays as The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Cocktail Party, and Ring Around the Moon, and she told a fellow actor that she would be happy to “stay here forever.” Her joy wasn’t just a result of creative fulfillment. Grace had once again fallen in love.
Gene Lyons was a fellow actor, a ruddy Irishman with intelligence, good looks, and a brooding charisma that led some observers to compare him to Brando. Most of his associates fully expected him to be a major star. Ten years older than Grace, he was, like Don Richardson, a talented theater professional and a potential mentor.
Their relationship developed to the point where Grace felt the need, once again, to inform her family of it. Mrs. Kelly recalled asking Grace how she knew she was in love with Gene. “She explained that since she had gone out on her own, she found that her Philadelphia friends who were not in the theater no longer interested her as much as they once had. Some of them told her frankly they thought she was foolish to want to be an actress. [This] young man was exactly the opposite. He not only knew how she felt, but he felt the same way. He kept telling her that they could be stars in the theater together, that they would stimulate each other to success and fame.”
Lyons had been romantically involved with actress Lee Grant, who described him as a man with “an inner fragility and loveliness that were very special and very endearing.” When Lyons met Grace, he was in the process of annulling his marriage. Like Grace, he was essentially shy and reserved—but their affection was obvious enough for a fellow company member to describe them as “besotted with each other.”
In retrospect the description appears an unfortunate choice of words, because Gene’s “fragile psyche” resulted in a drinking problem that eventually doomed his relationship with Grace. Mrs. Kelly, once again, tried to steer Grace away from thoughts of marriage. “I felt that he was not the stable sort of young man I’d hoped Gracie would marry ... and I had real reservations toward her marrying someone in her profession.”
Grace continued to see Gene, dining frequently and romantically at the Russian Tea Room in New York after the stint at Elitch Gardens. The couple did a television drama together, The Rich Boy, in which a young woman leaves her lover because of his drinking. It was a case of art imitating life; the more she saw Lyons, the more Grace realized that his psychological problems were so deep-seated that she would not be able to “reform” him. There would be no need for Lyons to go through the trial-by-fire Richardson had and meet Grace’s family because, although she continued to see Lyons for another year, she had dropped all thoughts of marriage.
(All this time, Don Richardson was under the impression that he was Grace’s only paramour. “I didn’t find out about Gene Lyons until years later,” he says. “Apparently Grace had several other lives she kept completely secret from me. The girl got around, I tell you.”)
After Grace broke off the relationship with Lyons (and as her star ascended while Gene’s career failed to ignite the way everyone had predicted), his alcoholism grew worse and worse. He hit his nadir in the mid-1950s but pulled his life together enough to appear recurringly in the TV series Ironside in the early 1970s. Once again down on his luck after that series ended, Lyons died in 1975.
While Grace was still working at Elitch Gardens, Edie Van Cleve’s hunch proved correct—filming on High Noon had been postponed, and now that things were ready to go the producers still wanted Grace. On August 10 she received a telegram: CAN YOU REPORT AUG. 28, LEAD OPPOSITE GARY COOPER, TENTATIVE TITLE “HIGH NOON.” It was an opportunity no one in his right mind would turn down, and Grace timidly asked the producers at Elitch if she could leave before the season ended. She was told that actors did it all the time, and it would be no problem. And so Grace Kelly, after five years of study and apprenticeship, was making her second movie as the “lead opposite Gary Cooper.” It was only the first in what was to be an astonishing number of professional “good breaks” for Grace.
3 Capp was arrested in April 1971 and charged with adultery, sodomy, and indecent exposure after inviting a married college student back to his room for further discussion after he had given a lecture. In February 1972, he struck a bargain that dropped two of the three charges, pleaded guilty to attempted adultery, and was fined five hundred dollars plus court costs.