CHAPTER SIX
In the fall of 1953, the director Alfred Hitchcock sat in a studio screening room and viewed the test Grace had done for Gregory Ratoff’s Taxi. The world-famous “master of suspense”, who had produced a string of hits over the previous twenty years and substantially advanced the art of cinema in the process, had seen Grace in High Noon and a rough cut of Mogambo and was not impressed. But as he sat watching her test for Ratoff, something about her moved him profoundly. He himself may not have understood the full import of his feelings at the time, but as his career intertwined with Grace’s over the next four years he would find himself making a considerable emotional investment in the young girl then before him on the screen.
Grace’s dichotomy fascinated Hitchcock. She was in manner and bearing every inch a lady. She was also a vibrant, sensual, sexually arousing young woman. Her sex appeal wrapped as it was in decorum became all the more potent. For many men, Grace solved the whore/madonna dilemma: she possessed elements of both. And for Hitchcock, this combination promised a great deal of vibrancy on celluloid. “An actress like Grace, who’s also a lady,” he said, “gives a director certain advantages. He can afford to be more colorful with a love scene played by a lady than with one played by a hussy. With a hussy such a scene can be vulgar, but if you put a lady in the same circumstances, she’s exciting and glamorous.”
Hitchcock was the first director to utilize these warring elements of Grace’s personality, and although he wouldn’t fully exploit them until his next film with her, Rear Window, the role he wanted Grace to play in Dial M for Murder was a departure for her: an unfaithful wife whose husband tries to murder her.
The plot was a typically stylish Hitchcock suspense yarn. Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) discovers that his wealthy young wife, Margot, has taken a lover (Robert Cummings). Fearful that she will divorce him and he will be left without money, Tony hires a former school chum to murder her.
They act out an elaborate scenario: Tony calls Margot while he is out with friends (to establish an alibi) and distracts her while the killer sneaks up from behind and strangles her. Tony listens impassively to the struggle, then is shocked when Margot returns to the phone and sobs that she has stabbed her attacker with a pair of scissors.
Tony then calls the police and tells them that his wife has killed her lover after a violent quarrel. Margot is arrested, and Tony’s scheme seems to have worked until a suspicious police inspector turns up an incriminating duplicate key to the apartment. He then exposes the truth.
The first meeting between Grace and Alfred Hitchcock was an awkward one. She was tongue-tied with nervousness (“In a horrible way it was funny to have my brain turn to stone,” she said later), and Hitchcock’s only comment after the interview was that he would “have to do something about her voice,” which was still too high and thin. Nonetheless, he wanted her to play Margot.
Warner Brothers approached MGM about “lending” it Grace to do Hitchcock’s picture, and the studio’s executives readily agreed. They had nothing else lined up for her, and by charging Warner twenty thousand dollars, MGM would clear fourteen thousand after paying Grace one thousand a week for the six weeks of shooting.
When filming began in the fall of 1953, Hitchcock worked hard to make Grace comfortable and at home on the set. Assistant director Melvin Dellar remembers that “Hitch made her very much at ease, and she in turn made everyone comfortable.”
The most important reason for Grace’s ease and openness on the Dial M set was the fact that Hitchcock worked with her more closely than any movie director had before him. Grace was used to being virtually ignored by Zinnemann and Ford, and the very personal attention showered upon her by a man of Hitchcock’s brilliance and stature came as a gratifying surprise. Ironically, the director who once said that “all actors are cattle” was teaching Grace what twenty years as a filmmaker had taught him. “Working with Hitchcock was a tremendous experience and a very enriching one,” Grace later said. “As an actor, I learned a tremendous amount about motion picture making. He gave me a great deal of confidence in myself.”
She offered a specific example shortly after the filming. “Every good dramatic coach and every good director would like you to think of the story as a whole, and not just your part in it. But Hitchcock was the first one to show me why, and then teach me how. In the telephone scene I used all the tricks to show horror that I had ever learned in school or in television, and thought I had done particularly well with my eyes. But all he used in that scene were my hands on the telephone. I was hurt, but he flattered me by telling me my hands were good actors, too. What he meant was that acting was more than a trick of waving your eyelashes, and that to be a success, you had to learn to act with your whole body. I worked so hard after that.”
Grace, Hitchcock, and his wife, Alma, soon became close friends; she frequently dined at their house. “I have such affection for him and his wife,” Grace said, “that he can do no wrong.” There were many light moments between them on the set; Hitch’s love of word games and puns tickled Grace, and she held her own in coming up with new examples of his latest game. Ever since meeting Lizabeth Scott, Hitch had amused himself by imagining other famous names minus their initial letter: Rank Sinatra, Ickey Rooney, Reer Garson, Scar Hammerstein, Orgie Raft, Lark Gable, Ugh Marlowe—the list was endless, and every time Hitch or Grace would come up with a new one, they’d giggle like schoolchildren.
Hitchcock’s humor had its wry side as well, and sometimes that was aimed at Grace. He loved to tell off-color stories in her presence, all the time checking to see whether she looked shocked. At one point, disappointed by Grace’s apparent indifference, Hitchcock turned and asked her, “Aren’t you shocked. Miss Kelly?” She gave a reply that absolutely delighted him: “No. I went to a girls’ convent school, Mr. Hitchcock. I heard all those things when I was thirteen.”
Although Hitchcock was a director who knew exactly what he wanted—he once said that filming was anticlimactic for him because he’d already worked the entire movie out in his mind—he listened to Grace’s suggestions, and in at least one instance deferred to her. Every visual aspect of a scene was important to Hitchcock, and for the key moment when Margot Wendice gets up out of bed to answer the phone call from her husband, Hitch wanted Grace to put on a richly red velvet robe to contrast with her blond hair and create a visual tension on the night-dark screen.
Grace, working from her understanding of her character, told Hitchcock that a woman alone, roused from sleep, would not bother to put on her robe: “I’d just get up and go to the phone in my nightgown.” Hitchcock agreed to try it, and he quickly saw that Grace was right; he was also happily surprised to discover that the nightgown added a sexiness to the murder attempt that was perfectly in keeping with his skewed sensibilities.
So taken was Hitchcock, in fact, with the dance of death he had choreographed between Margot and her would-be killer that he spent nearly a week filming it. Although it lasts just a few moments on-screen, it is one of the director’s most heart-stopping scenes.
As filming progressed, Hitchcock became increasingly enamored of Grace’s charms. Mel Dellar recalls that “Hitchcock was fascinated by the way she looked, the way she walked, the way she moved.” Donald Spoto, in his Hitchcock biography, The Dark Side of Genius, presents a convincing case that Alfred Hitchcock was in love with Grace and tortured by her lack of reciprocation. If he couldn’t have her personally, though, he’d have her professionally. Said John Michael Hayes, who wrote the screenplay for Grace’s next Hitchcock film, Rear Window, “[He] would have used Grace in the next ten pictures he made. I would say that all the actresses he cast subsequently were attempts to retrieve the image and feeling that Hitch carried around so reverentially about Grace.”
Hitchcock never made any overt attempts to woo Grace, and by the time Rear Window filming began she may have been aware only of a “sweet” affection for her on Hitchcock’s part. By the early 1960s, however, Hitchcock’s interest in Tippi Hedren, the lovely blonde he cast in Marnie when Grace turned down a return to the screen, would result in clumsy sexual propositions which greatly disturbed Hedren.
Grace soon found herself enmeshed in a sexual imbroglio, but it had nothing to do with Hitchcock. Her forty-nine-year-old co-star Ray Milland was another highly attractive leading man, an Oscar winner in 1945 for The Lost Weekend, and powerful and well liked in Hollywood. The fact that he was married did little to dampen twenty-three-year-old Grace’s ardent interest.
Milland had married the former Murial Weber in 1932, and they had a son, Daniel, born 1940, and a daughter, Victoria, adopted in 1949. Like Gary Cooper, however, Milland appreciated women other than his wife, and he often succumbed to temptation. He was particularly susceptible to Grace’s considerable charms, and he fell hard. So did Grace. “It was very serious between Ray and Grace,” Lizanne recalls. They began to see each other, making little effort to conceal their romance. “I was aware of it,” Mel Dellar says. “My wife and I saw them out having dinner a couple of times, and late in the evening, after we finished filming, they’d go to some little place and have a few drinks.”
Milland surprised Lizanne one day by confiding the depth of his feelings for Grace to her. “I flew back from Hollywood on the same plane with him,” she recalls, “and we had a long talk. He told me he really was very much in love with her.”
Gossip in Hollywood spreads faster than Southern California fires whipped by hot Santa Ana winds, and Milland’s wife, known to her friends as Mal, soon heard talk about her husband and this beautiful newcomer. She feared it was true, but there was no proof. Several weeks after her suspicions were first aroused, her fears were confirmed. A close friend of the Millands, who requested anonymity, recalls: “Jack—his friends call Milland ‘Jack’— was going on a trip, and he had just left the house. Mal’s sister Harriet was there, and Mal poured her heart out to her about her suspicions. Harriet got in her car, followed Jack to the airport, and sure enough, there was Jack with Grace, going off on a tryst somewhere.”
The Millands separated; Grace and Ray discussed marriage. He took an apartment in Hollywood and Grace spent a great deal of time there. Teet Carle, a publicist at Paramount at the time, says, “I don’t know if they were living together, but the story got back to me that someone from the studio went over to Ray’s apartment and Grace answered the door.”
Grace’s indiscretion soon became common knowledge in Hollywood, and she was unprepared for the animosity directed toward her. Mal Milland was extremely well liked in this company town; she and Ray had a family, and none of their many friends wanted to see the marriage destroyed. A tearful late-night telephone call from Mrs. Milland to Louella Parsons about “this young girl who’s trying to steal my husband” did little to help Grace’s cause.
It wasn’t the publicity, which the veteran Milland was more used to and less affected by than Grace was, but rather his realization of the impracticality of his divorcing Mal that caused Milland to reconsider. Studio publicist Andy Hervey recalls that Mrs. Milland had an ace up her sleeve: “Mal told Ray, ‘You go ahead and get a divorce and marry Grace Kelly. That’s okay with me, because all the property is in my name.’ Needless to say, it wasn’t long before the marriage plans were off.”
The previously quoted friend of the Millands adds, “Jack finally came to his senses and realized that he had a wonderful woman in Mal—and of course, they’re still together to this day.6 Mal still refers to the Grace Kelly period as ‘those agonizing days.’”
Not only was Milland being pressured to break off the romance, so was Grace by her family. After the Cooper and Gable “situations,” Jack Kelly had asked publicist Scoop Conlan, a family friend, to “keep an eye on Grace,” and Conlan reported back to him about his daughter’s latest potentially embarrassing liaison. The Kellys were very displeased. “My father was concerned about Ray Milland,” Kell said later. “He didn’t like what he had heard about him.” Jack Kelly himself huffed to a reporter a short time later, “I don’t like that sort of thing much. I’d like to see Grace married. These people in Hollywood think marriage is like a game of musical chairs.”
Lizanne recalls, “In our family at that point divorce was not the thing to do, and going out with a married man or a divorced man was a no-no. If Milland had been single, things might have been different.” Once again, Mrs. Kelly flew to Hollywood to make sure her daughter kept her head. Jack Kelly later said, “She and Scoop sat down and talked things over with Grace. They found her willing to listen.”
“My mother and father were very strong-willed people,” Lizanne says, and they convinced Grace that she simply had to drop Ray Milland. “Grace came to realize that Ray hadn’t quite gotten over his wife, and that it was wrong for her to be the cause of his divorce. That was the main reason Ray and Grace never pursued it.”
The gossip in Hollywood about Grace and Milland was so fierce—and the reaction so virulent—that both Grace’s own studio and Warner Brothers feared a tidal wave of bad publicity that could harm her very promising career. Robert Slatzer recalls, “In those days the studios would routinely pay off reporters to keep unsavory things out of the newspapers. In Grace’s case, it got to be very expensive because the studios were always buying off journalists in order to keep her image pure.”
A few gossip column items did appear, but it was always possible to dismiss these as exaggerations of a few innocent dates. One publication that couldn’t be bought off, however, was Confidential, the Enquirer of its day, and before long the magazine blew the whistle on the Kelly/Milland liaison in a salacious account that caused Grace deep consternation and public humiliation. In its colorful style, the magazine detailed Ray’s infatuation with Grace and the domestic discord it caused: “After one look at Gracie he went into a tailspin that reverberated from Perino’s to Ciro’s. The whole town soon hee-hawed over the news that suave Milland, who had a wife and family at home, was ga-ga over Grace. Ray pursued her ardently and Hollywood cackled. Then mama Milland found out. She lowered the boom on Ramblin’ Ray and there followed one of the loudest, most tearful fights their Beverly Hills neighbors can remember.”
Grace was shaken. She had never experienced the glare of the spotlight in quite this way before. Perhaps Confidential could be dismissed as a rag, but disapproving tidbits soon began turning up in respectable newspapers as well. “I felt like a streetwalker,” she told an interviewer later.
A good deal of the resentment against Grace in Hollywood stemmed from what many saw as the hypocrisy of her Goody Two-shoes image in light of her healthy sexual appetite. Mrs. Henry Hathaway, the widow of Grace’s first motion picture director, feels bitter toward Grace to this day. “I have nothing good to say about Grace,” she says. “She had an affair with my best friend’s husband, Ray Milland. And all the time wearing those white gloves!” Asked whom else in Hollywood Grace may have had affairs with, Mrs. Hathaway replies, “You name it. Everybody. She wore those white gloves, but she was no saint.”
Many in Hollywood shared Mrs. Hathaway’s feelings. They mocked Grace as “Little Miss Prim and Proper.” Columnist Kendis Rochlen cackled in the Los Angeles Mirror-News, “She’s supposed to be so terribly proper, but then look at all those whispers about her and Ray Milland.”
Hollywood’s reaction to Grace’s behavior upset her deeply. She never looked upon her frequent sexual dalliances as promiscuous—and they were not, in the true sense of the word. They were neither indiscriminate nor casual. When Grace gave herself to a man, it was, as Don Richardson has said, because of a deep-seated desire for affection and acceptance from father substitutes, much more than the physical delights of sex. And, more often than not, she felt herself truly in love before she would have sex with a man. She wanted to marry Ray Milland, and the fact that her conviction that he would leave his wife and marry her was rooted more in naivete than reality does not make it any less genuine.
Still, before long Grace developed an underground reputation in Hollywood, as Don Richardson put it, as “an easy lay.”7 Some observers cluck-clucked while others saw opportunity. “Word got around Hollywood that you could lay Grace Kelly,” Richardson says, “and so everybody in town started asking her out on dates.”
Robert Slatzer was introduced to Grace by Gary Cooper and took her out several times. “She was a very ‘touchy’ kind of girl,” Slatzer says. “She thought nothing of touching you, putting her hand on your thigh, that sort of thing. She had a very strong aura of availability, and she was very sexy.”
Why then did Grace Kelly win—and maintain, despite future indiscretions—a public reputation as, in Don Richardson’s words, “a nun”? The answer lies with those people who knew and loved her. Everyone close to her was extremely fond of her. Arthur Jacobsen, who later co-produced two of Grace’s films, recalls, “You couldn’t work with Grace without falling in love with her. I certainly did. She was a marvelous, marvelous girl and everyone adored her.” It is a sentiment echoed by many other of her friends, and they banded together to protect her against those people who were out to “get” her in Hollywood.
Grace’s intimates knew of her peccadilloes, but they were also aware that she was a sweet, sensitive young woman. The fact that she was acting upon her sexual needs did not make her a hypocrite; and her friends knew as well that Grace’s dalliances were never the result purely of lust. As her roommate Rita Gam said, “Grace was used by some of these men. For them, it was not serious. For her, it was. They could not have suffered as desperately, or as silently, as she did.”
Her protective allies helped create the first great Grace Kelly myth: that she was a young woman who, simply by being, aroused uncontrollable, intemperate desire in otherwise sophisticated men and made them act like smitten schoolboys. Despite their fool-hardy pursuits, the story went, Grace kept them all at bay. Occasionally she might agree to accompany them to dinner, but purely out of affection or professional regard.
Grace made sure this public reputation took hold by having a chaperone along whenever she went out after the Milland affair. Scoop Conlan explained to a reporter at the time, “She’s very cagey about doing anything the gossip columns can hop on. Put yourself in her shoes. If, to use an old-fashioned expression, you felt you had been put upon by the tiger cat gossip columnists and rumormongers, you’d watch your conduct in public extra carefully too, wouldn’t you?”
Grace faced the inevitable breakup with Milland with great sorrow. Her realization that now, even apart from her family, her life was truly not her own left her shaken. The success she had longed for was close at hand, and yet it had already extracted a toll. If she were not a rising Hollywood star, and subject to public scrutiny, could she and Milland have been successful at a relationship? She couldn’t help but wonder.
Grace’s “desperate and silent” suffering soon turned to anger against Hollywood. “Sometimes I think I actually hate Hollywood,” she said shortly after the Milland affair. She fled to New York. “For some personal reasons,” she explained later, “I really wanted to stay in New York.” In the cloak of anonymity that city offered she could try to put Milland out of her mind and escape the harsh and judgmental spotlight that had begun to follow her.
Her sojourn in New York, however, was a mercilessly short one. Soon after she arrived at her apartment, Hitchcock phoned to offer her a costarring role opposite James Stewart in Rear Window, the story of a photographer, wheelchair-bound after breaking a leg, who spies on his neighbors through his telephoto lens and comes to believe that one of them has murdered his wife. Grace would play Lisa, his sophisticated, wealthy girlfriend, a woman of wit and sexual playfulness. The role appealed to her, and she wanted to work with Hitchcock again—so, despite the fact that she wanted a respite on the East Coast, she accepted the assignment. MGM once again agreed to lend her services to a competing studio, this time Paramount—for a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars. MGM’s profit on this latest Kelly deal would be fifteen thousand.
Again there was potential for attraction between Grace and her leading man, but Stewart had just recently married and he did not succumb to Grace’s charms. There wasn’t a breath of scandal surrounding Grace and Stewart, but in the great tradition of “I’m married but I’m not dead,” Stewart admitted that he appreciated Grace’s attributes. Scoffing at suggestions that she was aloof, he said, “Grace, cold? Why Grace is anything but cold. She has those big warm eyes—and, well, if you ever have played a love scene with her, you’d know she’s not cold ... besides, Grace has that twinkle and a touch of larceny in her eye.”
Stewart told this author in 1986 that from the beginning he was pleased about the prospect of working with Grace. “This was her fifth picture, and I’d seen the other pictures, and I was very impressed with her and I was looking forward to working with her. She really made an impression on everybody out here in the short time it took her to go to the top.
“A lot of things impressed me about her. She seemed to have a complete understanding of the way motion picture acting is carried out. And she was so pleasant on the set; she was completely cooperative. She was really in a class by herself as far as cooperation and friendliness are concerned.”
By now Alfred Hitchcock was determined to create as strong a Grace Kelly on-screen image as possible. Rear Window scenarist John Michael Hayes recalled that Hitchcock asked him to spend a few days with Grace to “see what you can do with her dramatically.” The director didn’t want Grace to play Lisa as written, rather he wanted Lisa written to accentuate Grace’s more compelling characteristics. Hayes recalled that he himself was fascinated by Grace: “I was entranced by her ... I couldn’t get over the difference between her personal animation and, if I may say so, her sexuality. ... There was an alive, vital girl underneath that demure, quiet facade; she had an inner life aching to be expressed. ...”
Hayes’s script drew on the polarity of Grace’s personality; Lisa was elegant and controlled, but quick to tease her crippled (and therefore sexually limited) fiance: wearing a flimsy negligee, she notices his appreciation and says coyly, “Preview of coming attractions.” The promise of sexual delights from a seemingly elegant and unattainable object of desire titillated audiences and brought into sharp focus all the elements of Grace’s appeal—exactly the result Hitchcock wanted.
Grace was willing to put herself entirely in Hitchcock’s hands. Stewart recalls, “She was completely cooperative. There was no selfishness connected with her. She was there to do a job, and she depended on her director as much as she depended on her own ability, which she didn’t force on her director or on the other players. I think she was, in that respect, an ideal actress.”
The highly personal concern for Grace’s performance and appearance Hitchcock had shown while filming Dial M for Murder bordered on the obsessive on Rear Window. Costume designer Edith Head recalled Hitchcock’s intense interest in Grace’s clothes: “There was a reason for every color, every style, and he was absolutely certain about everything he settled on. For one scene he saw her in pale green, for another in white chiffon, for another in gold. He was really putting a dream together in the studio ... Hitch wanted her to appear like a piece of Dresden china, something slightly untouchable.”
That Hitchcock also wanted Grace to look as sexually inviting as possible is clear from another story, told by Grace. When she first appeared wearing her negligee, Hitchcock looked her over and, with a frown on his face, called Edith Head to his side. “The bosom isn’t right,” he said tactfully, then made clearer what he meant. “We’re going to have to put something in there.” Head went with Grace back to her dressing room and suggested falsies. Grace protested that they’d be obvious—and besides, she didn’t want to wear them. Instead, Grace recalled, “We quickly took it up here and made some adjustments there and I just did what I could and stood as straight as possible—without falsies. When I walked out onto the set Hitchcock looked at me and at Edith and said, ‘See what a difference they make?’”
Despite Hitchcock’s consuming interest in Grace, James Stewart doesn’t subscribe to Donald Spoto’s theory that he was tortured by unrequited love. “I think it’s all ridiculous,” he says. “Why anybody would think that, I have no idea. I don’t think there was a dark side to Alfred Hitchcock. He was a genius, certainly, in the brightest light that could possibly be.”
Grace’s working habits quickly gained her a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most conscientious, considerate actresses. Jimmy Stewart praised her concentration. “She’s easy to play to,” he said. “You can see her thinking the way she’s supposed to think in the role. You know she’s listening, and not just for cues. Some actresses don’t think and don’t listen. You can tell they’re just counting the words.”
Grace was well liked too by the film’s crew. (This was true on all her films.) Herbert Coleman, Hitchcock’s assistant director, recalled that Grace “wasn’t the slightest bit temperamental. She came to work, knew her dialogue, knew what she was going to do. You’d call her on the set and she’d be right there, ready to work, all the time. I’d place her right alongside Barbara Stanwyck in that respect.”
Stewart agrees. “She came out here, completely out of the blue, and after five pictures she was in demand all over town. And she took this in such a pleasant, ladylike way, without going out and blowing her own horn and being starlike about it. She didn’t do that at all. And aside from being a very admirable thing, I think that helped to make her a hit not only with the audiences but with her fellow workers out here in Hollywood.”
Herbert Coleman was surprised to discover another aspect of Grace’s personality. “Grace was kind of a tomboy,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone write about that particular facet of her life. She loved to joke and have fun. She had a tendency to kid around and play like a girl much younger than she actually was.”
Coleman continued, “I never saw her have problems with anyone. People just loved her. You couldn’t help but be fond of Grace. She was not cold or distant at all. She was very warm and very, very friendly to the people she liked and worked with. In my opinion that ‘aloof’ stuff was built up by publicity people. That was part of the image they wanted to present to the public. And of course Hitch presented that kind of image of her. He did that with all the blond women he worked with. He tried to present them as cold and distant and aloof. And none of them were like that at all.” James Stewart became a lifelong friend of Grace’s, and he recalls with great affection that “her humor was very quiet, it wasn’t a joke-type humor, but she looked at the bright and the amusing side of life. It was a very delicate type of humor. It’s so important, especially in the acting profession. That kind of humor is a wonderful, gemlike thing to have. She was a genuine, kind, humorous, caring, wonderful person.”
The very special regard for her that Stewart and Hitchcock both had made the filming of Rear Window, completed early in 1954, an extremely pleasant experience for Grace. Moreover, there hadn’t been a hint of scandal. The release of the film in August 1954 created a Grace Kelly sensation, and by the end of the year she was the biggest star in Hollywood, next to Marilyn Monroe. By that time as well, a new scandal would take place, and its ramifications would send Grace into a tailspin so severe she sought psychiatric help.
