CHAPTER FIVE

High Noon was the first of a series of film offers that gave Grace the opportunity to work with the finest actors, directors, and screenwriters of her time. It is difficult to call to mind another Hollywood newcomer so consistently surrounded by top-echelon talent without prior stardom in another medium. Grace, who had begun a lifelong fascination with astrology, did indeed seem to have a fateful run of professional luck in Hollywood.

Producer Stanley Kramer had scored successes with Home of the Brave, The Men (Marlon Brando’s screen debut), and Cyrano de Bergerac and would go on to produce and direct such classics as Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Director Fred Zinnemann had scored as well with The Men, and his nine previous films, although not classics, had evidenced the talent that would result in From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma!, A Man for All Seasons, and Julia.

Screenwriter Carl Foreman (Home of the Brave and The Men) had fashioned a spare Western, based on John Cunningham’s story “The Tin Star,” around the saga of Will Kane, an aging sheriff who has rid a frontier town of lawlessness, taken a young Quaker bride, and is preparing to hang up his guns. Word gets to him, however, that an outlaw he put behind bars five years earlier is free again and is gunning after him. Kane returns to face the killer, despite the pleas of his violence-abhorring bride. In a climactic showdown in the town’s main street, Amy Kane’s love for her husband overcomes her pacifist upbringing and she shoots one of his adversaries, saving Kane’s life.

High Noon was to be a relatively low-budget “art” picture, and one of the considerations in casting Grace was that, as a neophyte, she would be available at a considerably lower fee than a more established star. More than that, however, Grace seemed perfectly suited to play Amy Kane; the Quaker bride was written as a young, beautiful, innocent, refined, even repressed woman.

“[MCA agent] Jay Kantor brought Grace to my attention,” Stanley Kramer recalls. “I saw her in a show off Broadway. She was very pretty and very refined, and I took it upon myself to hire her. I suppose that required a certain arrogance, but I was convinced that she was right for the part.” Director Zinnemann was shown Grace’s photograph, and he too was impressed by her beauty and her “look”: “She was a new face,” Zinnemann explained, “and had the kind of quality from the photograph that I thought was important ... with a kind of inhibition about it, very straitlaced and very virginal.”

Grace was called in to meet Zinnemann and she didn’t disappoint him. She wore the white gloves that before long would become a Kelly trademark. “It wasn’t so much the gloves,” Zinnemann said later, explaining the impression Grace made on him, “as that she had the personality and manner to go with them. Most actresses are more ... uninhibited. ” It was a quality Zinnemann particularly liked in Grace, for Amy Kane was nothing if not inhibited.

Grace was so shy, in fact, that she responded to Zinnemann’s questions with little more than yes or no answers. It got so bad that Zinnemann told her: “You ought to learn how to speak to people and what to say to them when you meet them.” It was odd advice from Zinnemann, who himself was often at a loss for words, and the interview did not breeze along. But Grace’s reserve worked for the part she was seeking, and all concerned agreed with Kramer that Grace should play Amy.

There was some concern about casting Grace as the wife of a man Cooper’s age (he was twenty-eight years Grace’s senior). Kramer particularly thought Grace might be miscast, and he remembers that Cooper himself was concerned about how audiences would react to the age difference: “Coop muttered a few times under his breath, ‘What’s an old goat like me doing playing opposite such a young girl?’”

There was nothing to be done, however; a commitment had been made to Grace’s agents and there wasn’t time to look for another actress. And, no small matter, everyone concerned wanted Grace to play the role: “She was just too special, her face too attractive and photographically interesting,” Zinnemann said. “So we stuck with her.” The age issue soon faded; Hollywood, after all, had a long tradition (continued to this day, usually by older men in charge of casting) of hiring young actresses as the love interests of older men (almost never is the opposite true). In fact, Grace may be the Hollywood champion in that respect: the average age of her eleven leading men was forty-six; the only Kelly costar less than eleven years older than she was Louis Jourdan. With her penchant for older men, Grace very likely didn’t complain about the situation.

Indeed, Gary Cooper soon became the first in a series of these much older leading men with whom Grace conducted affairs of varying seriousness during her Hollywood career. Impressionable, star-struck, drawn to men of maturity and achievement, Grace found herself romantically helpless among the sophisticated, attractive, celebrated, and accomplished men with whom she was surrounded in Hollywood. “I prefer older men,” she said. “They’re more interesting. I like people who know more than I do. I always have preferred older people.” Lizanne adds, “Grace fell in love very easily; too easily, really. Every time I turned around, it seemed she was talking about some other man, saying, ‘Isn’t he divine?’”

Gary Cooper, handsome, rugged, as much a man’s man as he was a ladies’ man, the celebrated star of classics like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The General Died at Dawn, and Beau Geste, and an Oscar winner for Sergeant York, was exactly the kind of man to make Grace Kelly smitten. And she was. “Grace was infatuated with Gary Cooper.” Lizanne says. “She was in awe of him, very star-struck.”

The sentiment was returned; as Stanley Kramer discreetly puts it, “Coop felt warmly toward Grace.” Separated from his wife4 and winding up a tempestuous affair with the beautiful young actress Patricia Neal, Cooper was vulnerable to the charms of this warmly attentive, gorgeous young newcomer. Robert Slatzer, who worked on the Paramount lot as a publicity and rewrite man in the early 1950s, befriended Gary Cooper, among many other Hollywood celebrities, and frequently went hunting and fishing with him. “Coop was the kind of guy who could sit down and talk to you about anything and was never evasive. He was quite a ladies’ man, and he told me that he and Grace were having an affair. I was on the set a couple of times, and, when Grace would come up to him, just the way she looked at him you could tell she was melting. She’d embarrass him, sometimes, by coming over and putting her arms around him and being obvious in front of other people.”

Before long, Grace and Cooper were linked in gossip columns, and whispers began of a romance between the two. Word got back to Philadelphia, and Grace’s parents were concerned; Cooper was clearly too old for Grace, even if she didn’t think so. First Lizanne, then Mrs. Kelly flew out to California to “chaperone” Grace and Cooper on several dates near the location in California’s Sonoma Mountains. It was a scenario that would occur again and again during Grace’s career as word of her dalliances got back to Philadelphia, because her parents were very concerned about her interest in men they found too old, too worldly, and, in several cases, too married for Grace. In Cooper’s case, the affair was short-lived.

Publicly, Cooper simply expressed admiration for Grace’s artistic potential: “She was very serious about her work. ... She was trying to learn, you could see that. You can tell if a person really wants to be an actress. She was one of those people you could get that feeling about.”

Cooper, Grace has said, worked with her to improve her performance. “He’s the one who taught me to relax during a scene and let the camera do some of the work. On the stage you have to emote not only for the front rows, but for the balcony too, and I’m afraid I overdid it. He taught me that the camera is always in the front row, and how to take it easy.”

From all reports, director Zinnemann had a curiously ambivalent attitude toward Grace during filming. He found her visually delightful—asked years later why he had cast her, his response was “She was a very pretty girl”—and he consequently gave her an inordinate amount of camera attention. His loving close-ups, in fact, disturbed not only Grace’s female costar, the fiery Katy Jurado, who accused Zinnemann of being “half in love” with Grace, but producer Kramer as well. Part of Zinnemann’s reason for so emphasizing Grace was to keep her screen impact on an even keel with Cooper’s and Jurado’s. Grace expressed appreciation of him: “I’ll never be able to thank Fred Zinnemann for what he did for me. He and Mr. Kramer were the ones who proved to me that moviemaking is as great a creative art as the stage, and that those on the stage who talk down the movies just haven’t seen or been in the right pictures.”

On the other hand, Zinnemann’s major preoccupation as director was with Cooper’s performance, and Grace, as a screen neophyte, suffered from the lack of strong guidance from her director. Her performance inspired such critical adjectives as “bloodless and flat,” “mousy,” and “wooden,” and when she saw the rushes she was mortified. “Everything is so clear working with Gary Cooper,” she explained later. “When I look into his face, I can see everything he is thinking. But when I look into my own face, I see absolutely nothing. I know what I’m thinking, but it just doesn’t show. For the first time I suddenly thought, ‘Perhaps I’m not going to be a great star; perhaps I’m not any good after all.’”

What Grace didn’t know was that, to Zinnemann at least, her performance was exactly right. Her awkwardness and acting reticence was, he thought, perfectly suited to the Quaker bride. “She was very, very wooden ... which fitted perfectly, and her lack of experience and sort of gauche behavior was to me very touching,” he commented. “To see this prim Easterner in the wilds of the Burbank Columbia back lot—it worked very well.”

Zinnemann left Grace to her own limited devices because he felt that to direct her would be to risk eliciting an “actorish” performance from her, and that was the last thing he wanted—“I wanted the whole thing to look like a newsreel.” One of Grace’s biographers, Steven Englund, noted, “An experienced, older professional actress would have had to possess very considerable acting talent indeed to do what Grace did (and somewhat rued) naturally.”

High Noon was an artistic and commercial success. “It cost five hundred thousand dollars and grossed eighteen million. That’s very good,” Kramer says. Reviews, including most of Grace’s notices, were excellent, although few spent more than a line or two discussing her performance. The film was a triumph for Gary Cooper, winning him an Academy Award and reviving his career. The film is, in fact, one of Grace’s best movies. “It was a wonderful picture,” Grace commented. “I loved every minute of it, except when the wife was on the screen. I just wasn’t in the same class with the rest. Oh, they were nice to me, and they told me I had done a fine job, but I knew better. I left Hollywood as fast as I could, and I told myself I wouldn’t go back until I could carry my own weight in a picture.”

Grace’s fear that she was “not going to be a great star” was reinforced when she returned to New York. She resumed her acting lessons and attempted to get back into television. This brought her a rude surprise: “I discovered that in television they forget quickly. I’d been doing leads before I left, and although I was in California just five months, when I got back I could hardly get bit parts. That was when I had to face up to the possibility that I might not be a great actress. And I knew I had to come to a decision in my own mind. Would I be happy if all I could ever be was a character actress, playing subordinate roles? I thought about it a lot, and my final answer was yes, I could be happy if that was how it had to be.”

No sooner had Grace made this important decision than it became moot. After just a few months in New York she received an offer that would change her life: legendary director John Ford wanted her to costar with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in Mogambo, a remake of the 1932 Clark Gable-Jean Harlow vehicle, Red Dust. Grace would play Linda Nordley, a proper young Englishwoman, the wife of an engineer, who becomes involved in a romantic triangle with a white hunter (Gable) and a sexy show girl (Gardner). It was another astonishing opportunity, particularly in light of the deflating reaction she’d gotten from television executives. So much so that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer managed to wrangle Grace’s signature onto a seven-year contract, something she had steadfastly avoided for three years.

John Ford had been unmoved by Grace’s performance in High Noon. “All she did,” he said, “was shoot a guy in the back. Cooper should have given her a boot in the pants and sent her back East.” When he saw her Taxi test, though, he was more intrigued and told Metro executive Dore Schary, “Darryl [Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox] miscast her in that test—but this dame has breeding, quality, class. I want to make a test of her—in color. I’ll bet she’ll knock us on our asses.”

Schary recalled, “He made the test. It and Grace Kelly were stunning. We signed her to a long-term contract. John Ford enabled me to even the score with Darryl Zanuck. He got Monroe, we got Grace Kelly.”

Ironically, Schary has said that signing Grace at the time he did was somewhat unique, because long-term contracts were becoming passé. But Grace was given an ultimatum: sign a six-month contract with options every six months extending to seven years, or you don’t do Mogambo. Grace wasn’t prepared to lose such an important role; after some soul-searching, she agreed to the contract—but only when MGM acquiesced to some of her terms. She would make just three pictures a year (in those days, even major stars might make four or five); she wanted one year off every three, and she wanted to be able to make her home in New York rather than having to live in Hollywood (as some actors had been constrained to do so that the studio might “keep an eye on” them).

Lucille Ryman Carroll, wife of actor John Carroll, was head of talent at MGM in the fall of 1952 when Grace Kelly was signed, and she remembers Grace sitting in her office to discuss the contract. Contrary to what has been reported, Mrs. Carroll says, MGM had few problems with Grace’s demands. “We certainly didn’t object to her wanting to take time off for stage work, because our belief was that doing a Broadway show could only enhance the popularity and reputation of our actors, making them more valuable commodities for us.”

MGM wouldn’t budge on one of Grace’s demands, however. “She told me that it was very important for her to choose her own roles,” Mrs. Carroll recalls. “I told her that we never allowed that, that we always chose roles for our contract players, and that these roles were designed to make them top-notch stars. She said to me, ‘But I’m afraid that you might put me into something that doesn’t suit me.’ I told her, ‘Don’t worry about that, my dear, we can be trusted to put you in roles that will enhance your career.’”

Mrs. Carroll recalls being impressed by the “self-confidence” Grace showed during the interview, but she didn’t feel that MGM had latched onto a sure thing. “I was puzzled, for one thing, over the fact that she’d been sent to see me rather than Mr. Mayer [Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM], which was the usual procedure. And I had heard that she wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. No one else seemed to want her, really, and the word on her performance in High Noon—some of our people had seen a rough cut— wasn’t ecstatic. So I felt that I could get her for a good price, and I offered her seven hundred and fifty dollars a week to start—fifteen hundred was more common in those days. She accepted.”

Grace might have held out for more money—she could make more a week modeling full-time—but she sensed, as Dore Schary later said, that “nobody in the picture business was that impressed with her,” and she did, after all, want to go to Africa and make Mogambo. As she said later, speaking of the contract, “If Mogambo had been made in Arizona, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Its contract with Grace allowed MGM to pick up (or drop) her option every six months; at the end of seven years, she would be making between four and five thousand dollars a week. It also guaranteed her twenty-three thousand dollars a year in bonus money and allowed for all of her requirements except one: MGM, not Grace, would choose her roles. It was a point that would create much contention between Grace and her studio over the next three years, Mrs. Carroll’s assurances notwithstanding.

By signing the MGM contract, Grace paved the way for a momentous career move. That, however, wasn’t uppermost in her mind. What was important to her can be surmised by the telephone call she made to her mother: “Guess what I’m going to do next?” she gushed into the phone. “I’m going to Africa ... with Clark Gable!”

Gable, of course, had been known as the King of Hollywood— and the quintessential cinema heartthrob-—ever since Gone with the Wind fourteen years earlier. Although he was now fifty-one, age had stolen little of the dashing sex appeal that had made him a star, and he had been idealized as a sophisticated older man who knew how to keep a woman satisfied. His 1939 marriage to blond comedienne Carole Lombard—a match that set millions of movie fans’ hearts a-flutter—was no less romantic for the fact that Lombard, seven years younger than Gable, called her husband “Pa.”

Gable’s reputation as a gentleman of warmth and sensitivity was matched by his fame as a hard-living, hard-drinking womanizer. Devastated by Lombard’s death in a 1942 plane crash, Gable took to bouts of drink, during which his personality could turn ugly and unpredictable. He had just come out of a much-publicized, brief marriage to a woman close to his own age, the wealthy English aristocrat Lady Sylvia Ashley,5 and Mrs. Kelly was worried about her daughter going so far away in the company of such a volatile man. After the Cooper affair, she worried too that Grace might be vulnerable to Gable’s charms. “Clark Gable?” Mrs. Kelly responded to her daughter’s announcement. “All the way to Africa with him? ... How can I allow you to go over there all by yourself? What will people say? Do you think it’s proper?”

“Oh, Mother,” Grace replied, “you’ve got such old-fashioned ideas.”

Mrs. Kelly allowed Grace to go to Africa, but her fears turned out to be well-founded: Grace did indeed fall hard for Gable. “Grace was mad for Clark,” Lizanne confirms. Gable himself, returned from filming, told Louella Parsons, “She should never have been allowed to go all that distance without a chaperone.” From the outset of filming Grace was constantly at Gable’s side; she became known among the company as “the girl with Gable.” She went so far as to accompany him on early-morning safaris with famed white hunter Bunny Allen. This puzzled even Gable. “What is there about this that you like?” he once asked her. She replied, “It’s the strangeness and the excitement of it all. I want to be able to tell my grandchildren about it some day.” What she didn’t add was that it also afforded her the opportunity to be with Gable as often as possible.

That Grace Kelly and Clark Gable were taken with each other cannot be denied. But exactly what form their affection took may never be known. There are those who claim there was a physical affair, among them Don Richardson and an anonymous Gable friend who said, ungallantly, “Grace was just a one-night stand for Clark.” Others insist it was merely a platonic, although quite special, father/daughter closeness. According to Gore Vidal, who was writing screenplays at MGM at the time, Grace had a strong sexual interest in Gable which he did not return. “Grace almost always laid the leading man,” Vidal says. “She was famous for that in this town. One of the few she failed to was Clark Gable. Alogambo’s producer, Sam Zimbalist, with whom I’ve made several pictures, was wildly funny about how they got on during the location shooting in Africa. Gable liked older women, preferably society ladies, and by that time was more into the bottle than into sex anyway. But Grace set her eye on Gable, who complained to Sam, saying, ‘What am I going to do about this girl? She keeps staring at me and she wants moonlit dinners in my tent,’ and so on. And Sam said, ‘Well, that’s your problem.’ So Gable invited her to a candlelit dinner alone in his tent and got her dead drunk, which didn’t take much with Grace, and she threw up. So that was the end of that romance, Gable’s body was saved yet again, and she never went back.”

Despite Gable’s apparent lack of interest in Grace’s romantic overtures, a tender friendship nonetheless developed between them. She admired Gable’s fearlessness, and he was surprised and impressed by hers. Once, told that Grace was reading down by the ocean, Gable became concerned, principally because the Mau Mau uprisings in that part of Africa presented a threat to everyone. He went to look for her and found her with a book in her lap, crying. He asked her why. “It’s the most beautiful thing,” she explained softly. “I’m reading The Snows of Kilimanjaro, about the leopard in the snow, and I looked up and I saw a lion walking along the seashore.”

He was astonished: “She saw a lion walking along the shore and she wasn’t frightened!” Gable liked nothing better than a girl with spunk, and he and Grace grew closer and closer. Bunny Allen recalled that Grace at first seemed terribly prim and proper, but after a while she’d “pass the bottle around with the rest of us.” That, too, was a quality Gable liked in Grace. And she was impressed by macho man Gable’s sensitive side: more than once he was seen reading poetry to her while they sat on the banks of the wild Kagera river.

Inevitably word leaked out about the special closeness of Kelly and Gable, and rumors began to circulate of a romance. Before long, a London newspaper columnist sent Gable a telegram: RUMORS SWEEPING ENGLAND ABOUT YOUR ROMANCE WITH GRACE KELLY. PLEASE CABLE CONFIRMATION OR DENIAL. According to Grace, Gable laughed when he read it and said, “That’s the greatest compliment I’ve ever had. I’m old enough to be your father.”

Gable was likely unaware that it was that very fact that made him so attractive to Grace. She called him “Ba,” the Swahili word for father, and it often sounded to Gable like Carole Lombard’s “Pa,” summoning up complicated emotions within him. But with all that, Lombard was just seven years younger than Gable, not, as with Grace, nearly thirty. He held back, not unattracted but unwilling to become involved with so emotional a young girl. (Gable’s unwillingness to become physically intimate with Grace led her into fits of uncontrollable sobbing.) Once filming ended and Grace was saying goodbye to Gable at the London airport, she broke down again. The crying jag, witnessed by reporters, was cited as proof that Grace and Gable had had an affair and now it was over—against Grace’s wishes. Rather, it was Grace’s realization that her desire for Gable, with shooting at an end and everyone saying goodbye, then had no possibility of developing into a real relationship.

Asked about her tears, Grace replied in the flip, coy manner of someone skirting the truth: “If I cried, and I don’t remember doing so, it was probably over the fact that I had to leave all that beautiful Georgian silver behind in customs.” But later, in a more serious vein, she revealed as much as she ever would: “I was very fond of Clark Gable ... Perhaps, if there wasn’t so much of an age discrepancy, it might have been different.”

It might well have, because by the end of filming Gable had become very fond of Grace. A friend of his revealed that when Clark returned from Africa he talked incessantly about her: “It was almost as if he were talking about Carole ...” Despite his special feelings for Grace, however, Gable chose to stick with his decision not to pursue a relationship with her.

With the exception of her unconsummated relationship with Gable, Grace’s experiences in Africa were all she’d hoped they would be. She read dozens of books about the continent and its natives, and she remarked, “I’ve always been fascinated by Africa, and believe me, I wasn’t disappointed.” The film crew traveled over ten thousand miles of the continent, reaching into primitive areas never before photographed. Grace was mesmerized by it all—the strange plant life, the seemingly docile elephants and rhinoceroses that might attack at any moment, the Watusi natives— even the danger. An enraged rhinoceros rammed a Jeep carrying Clark, Grace, and Ava, almost turning it over before the beast was shot. A tribe of warlike Samburus, after completing an ancient courage ceremony for the cameras, frightened everyone when they, as if in a trance, began a weird war dance, jumped in the air and waved their spears threateningly at the film crew. Another time three crew members were killed when their Jeeps overturned in the thick jungle overgrowth. Dozens more were injured in various ways, and the crew suffered generally from the intense heat, the maddening mosquitoes, and persistent tropical infections.

Grace took it all in stride. She wrote home about how beautiful Africa was, recounting the time she looked out of her mosquito-netted tent to see a moon so enormous she felt she could reach out and touch it. Reading about the country and accompanying Gable on safari weren’t the only ways Grace tried to get the most she could out of Africa. She also endeavored to learn Swahili, and she was the only member of the crew to do so. If nothing else it resulted in an amusing anecdote, told by Donald Sinden, the English actor who portrayed Grace’s husband. The first night in Nairobi, Sinden, Clark, and Grace dined together at the New Stanley Hotel. “Our waiter was a Kikuyu,” Sinden related, “and Grace proceeded to astonish Clark and me by ordering the entire meal for the three of us in Swahili ... Having served the coffee, the waiter was just moving away when Grace called after him, ‘Lete, ndizi, tafadhali.’ By then we had learned that lete meant ‘bring’ and tafadbali meant ‘please,’ but Clark, with some incredulousness, asked her, ‘What’s an ndizi?’

“Before she could reply, the waiter had turned and in a bored American accent answered, ‘It’s a banana,’ and wearily made his way.”

As the company prepared to move to a new location in Uganda, Clark decided that he would take Grace, Ava, Ava’s husband Frank Sinatra, and a few others on a sightseeing trip along the Indian Ocean. The only transportation available for such a trip was a decrepit old plane that the pilot insisted was safe, but that Clark thought must have been “held together with chicken wire.” Everyone piled in, and their marvel at the breathtaking sights was matched only by their nervousness in the rickety aircraft. MGM executives, considering the value of the cargo, would have had a collective heart attack had they known of Gable’s adventure.

Grace and Ava Gardner became friends during the filming, and both she and Frank Sinatra remained close to Grace throughout her life. Ava seemed an odd choice by Grace for a friend; their public images could not have been less alike. But Gardner’s personality appealed to the earthy, sexy, private Grace; she enjoyed Ava’s ribald sense of humor, admired her open sexuality and frank, often profane, outspokenness—something Grace’s sense of propriety did not allow her. Even so, Ava’s lasciviousness did sometimes shock Grace, and Gore Vidal offers an illustrative anecdote, told to him by Sam Zimbalist: “The location was full of these tall Watusis, beautiful warriors who had been hired as extras, wearing their breechclouts. The girls were walking along, and Ava said to Grace, I wonder if their cocks are as big as people say? Have you ever seen a black cock?’ Grace turned purple, of course, and said, ‘Stop that, don’t talk like that!’ Ava said, ‘That’s funny ... neither have I’—and with that she reached over and pulled up the breechclout of one of the Watusis, who gave a big grin as this huge cock flopped out. By then Grace had turned absolutely blue. Ava let go of the breechclout, turned to Grace, and said, ‘Frank’s bigger than that.’”

Robert Surtees, cinematographer of Mogambo, tells another Ava Gardner anecdote, one also revealing of Grace: Ava, during a trip to Rome with Surtees and Grace after filming was completed, told him “as a joke that she wanted to see every whorehouse in the city in one night. I had worked there on Quo Vadis for over a year so I knew where all the brothels were. She knew I’d know. Grace Kelly was staying, like Ava, at the Hotel Excelsior. I went over and picked the two of them up, as that cool, dignified Grace also wanted to go on the tour. Well, at one dive we got to a guy who became attracted to Grace and got in the backseat to neck with her as we drove along. Ava laughed till I thought she’d burst.”

The least enjoyable aspect of the Mogambo filming for Grace was working with John Ford. A “man’s director,” renowned for his Westerns, Ford had little affinity for directing women under the best of circumstances. With the exigencies of filming on an African location and his deteriorating health, Ford had little time to help a newcomer like Grace, and he left her to her own devices. At least once this resulted in a Ford blowup—when Grace took a position indicated in the script. “Kelly, what the hell are you doing?” Ford bellowed. “Well,” Grace stammered, “in my script it says she walks over here ...”

Ford turned livid. “We are shooting a movie, not the script!” Despite such unreasonable anger and Ford’s lack of sensitivity to her, Grace turned in a much better performance in Mogambo than she had in High Noon. Typecast as a prim, frigid wife, Grace brought the proper mixture of refinement and repressed passion to Linda Nordley. Her finest moments on-screen delineate her growing love for Gable. Grace’s role was a difficult one, but reviewers thought she handled it admirably; Newsweek’s critic provided one of the first perceptive analyses of Grace’s screen appeal: “Grace Kelly makes one of the loveliest patricians to appear on the screen in a long time. Her particular quality is the suggestion that she is well born without being arrogant, cultivated without being stuffy, and highly-charged without being blatant.”

By the time Mogambo was released in October 1953, Grace Kelly was fast becoming a media celebrity, and it was this hoopla, as well as her performance, that won her Look magazine’s designation as the Best Actress of 1953 and an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She lost the Oscar to Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity, but it hardly mattered: by the end of 1954, Grace Patricia Kelly, the bricklayer’s daughter from Philadelphia, had become a Hollywood phenomenon—and, with several indiscretions which soon became embarrassingly public, something of a scandal as well.

CLICK FOR CHAPTER 5 ENDNOTES

4 Cooper had married Veronica “Rocky” Balfe, an actress known professionally as Sandra Shaw, in 1933. In 1938 they had a daughter, Maria. Through frequent separations, and Cooper’s romantic dalliances, they remained married until his death in 1961.

5 Gable’s first marriage, in 1924, was to Broadway actress and teacher Josephine Dillon, seventeen years his senior. It ended in divorce in 1930. His second wife was Houston socialite Ria Langham, also seventeen years older than he. They were wed in 1930 and divorced in 1939. His fifth marriage, to eighteen-years-younger Kay Williams Spreckels in 1955, lasted until his death in 1960. On March 20, 1961, Kay gave birth to Clark Gable’s only child, John Clark Gable.