CHAPTER NINE
After the public humiliation and the private torment of her abortive affairs with Milland and Holden, Grace vowed never again to become involved with a married man. Her next lover was indeed single, and there were no recriminations, no sniggering in the press when the relationship became public. But he was also divorced, a Continental playboy, and a Jew. But once again Grace faced the virulent opposition of her family.
Oleg Cassini, a Russian Jew raised in Florence, had by 1953 become a well-regarded fashion designer and a card-carrying member of the international jet set. Forty years old, married and divorced twice (to heiress Merry Fahrney and actress Gene Tierney), Cassini was renowned as a womanizer who charmed ladies young and old with his Continental manner and mustachioed good looks.
Cassini could have almost any woman he desired, but the only one he wanted was Grace. “I fell in love with her after I saw her in Mogambo, ” he said later. “She was all that I wanted—beautiful, clean-looking, ethereal enough, sexy enough...” Cassini told a friend who was with him in the movie house that Grace Kelly would be his new girlfriend. The friend laughed at Cassini’s chutzpah, but within a matter of minutes Oleg got his chance: as he walked into one of his favorite French restaurants in Manhattan, he spotted Grace, dining with the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, whom she had been seeing for several months. Cassini and Aumont were acquaintances, which gave Cassini a perfect opening. After an effusive greeting, Oleg left Jean-Pierre little choice but to introduce him to Grace and ask him to join their table. Aumont watched with growing irritation as Cassini showered Grace with compliments and charm. It was just the beginning of what Cassini later called “the greatest, most exhilarating campaign of my life, using every bit of fantasy and energy I had. The goal, to get this incredibly beautiful, superficially cool woman interested in me.”
Grace found herself inundated with flowers over the next few days, sent anonymously. Finally Oleg called, identified himself as “your friendly local florist,” and asked for a date. Skeptical, Grace assented to lunch—with sister Peggy along—only after Oleg assured her that she had already met him. They had a pleasant meal, but Grace did not encourage his attentions, because—as she told him then—she was leaving for the West Coast shortly and—as she told him over the telephone weeks later—she was very much in love with Ray Milland.
Cassini continued his courting via long distance, with flowers, telephone calls, and letters. Over the next few months Grace kept things with Oleg casual, seeing him only occasionally, inviting him to Hollywood and the set of The Country Girl—even as she was involved with Crosby, and then Holden. Cassini, like Don Richardson and Gene Lyons before him, was not aware of Grace’s relationships with her two costars. He told People magazine nearly thirty years later, “When she broke up with Milland she sent me a postcard asking me to come to the South of France while she filmed To Catch a Thief. ‘Those who love me follow me,’ she wrote.” While Grace was seeing Crosby and Holden, Oleg was an amusement, an ego booster, a charming companion; their relationship remained platonic. Not until those affairs ended and Grace had endured the public embarrassment and family pressure they created did she begin to see Cassini in a new light. He was charming, yes, and a more ardent paramour a young woman could not hope to enjoy. Better still, he was unmarried, and thus unlikely to cause scandal. Grace barely considered her family’s reaction to a serious affair with Cassini, but whenever she did she convinced herself it would be favorable, despite Cassini’s marital failures and his religion, because he was, at least, single.
Cassini did follow Grace to France in the summer of 1954, and their relationship flourished in the romantic atmosphere of the Riviera. Cassini was in his element, and his sophistication and savoir faire captivated Grace—she was still, despite her lofty experiences over the past year and a half, a young woman who had led a very sheltered life. As her then roommate Rita Gam later put it, “Considering that the world saw us as glamorous movie stars, we were terribly naïve ...”
Grace gradually fell in love with Cassini while she made To Catch a Thief. “We were very isolated there,” he said, “and when she finished working, we spent the evenings together.” The platonic nature of their relationship changed, Cassini says, and Grace “asked me what my intentions were. I told her I wanted to marry her ... I don’t think Grace could have had an affair with me unless she thought honestly that she was going to marry me.”
Cassini and Grace became, in his words, “secretly engaged.” Secrecy was necessary, she admitted to him (and, finally, to herself), because she anticipated some opposition from her family. “We had an understanding,” Cassini says. “We decided that when we got back to the States, Grace would win over her mother, who would then win over her father. She saw no difficulty.”
It was a foolhardy faith on Grace’s part; Cassini would soon be subjected to the same Kelly family treatment Don Richardson had been. But that was several months in the future. In the meantime there was a movie to be made.
Mid-1953: Paramount Pictures suggests to Alfred Hitchcock that he film David Dodge’s novel To Catch a Thief a property the studio owned. The story appeals to Hitchcock: John Robie, a highly successful cat burglar, retires to the French Riviera, only to discover that a series of burglaries patterned after his own are taking place around him. He meets Frances Stevens, the beautiful, witty, and sexually flirtatious daughter of an American socialite, and amid a great deal of sexual cat and mousing they discover the identity of the burglar and take suspicion off Robie.
The enticing fact that the movie would have to be made on location on the Cote d’Azur attracted Hitchcock’s interest as much as the story did. He knew immediately the actors he wanted to play John Robie and Frances Stevens: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Hitchcock had worked with Grant twice, in Suspicion and Notorious, and knew that his suave urbanity was perfect for Robie. And who better than Grace Kelly to play a cool, elegant, yet passionate blond beauty?
Hitchcock’s first feeler went out to Cary Grant. As Grant recalled, “I had left the business, or thought I had, and I was in Hong Kong when Hitch sent me a cable to call him. I did, and he told me about an idea for a script he had to be set in the South of France. Well, both of those things were very attractive—that Hitch had glommed onto a script that he enjoyed, and that we would travel to the South of France. I asked him, ‘Who do you see as the leading lady?’ and he said, ‘I have a girl I think is absolutely marvelous by the name of Grace Kelly.’”
Grant had seen Grace in both Fourteen Hours and High Noon, and he liked what he saw. “I recognized her even then as a brilliant actress. She had control, and she was obviously listening to the person she was doing the scene with. That isn’t always the case. So I said to Hitch, ‘I agree with you—I’ve had my eye on her too.’”
Grant agreed to come out of retirement to make To Catch a Thief, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1954 that filming began— after Grace had made four other films. When Hitchcock asked MGM for yet another loan-out of Grace’s services, the studio once again balked. It wanted Grace to begin making movies for MGM, not every other studio in town. Word leaked to the press about Hitchcock’s interest and MGM’s reluctance, and both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons wrote unequivocably that Grace’s bosses would not budge this time.
Grace was sure they would. She told Edith Head, “No matter what anyone says, dear, keep right on making my clothes. I’m doing the picture.” Grace had refused all the scripts MGM had offered to her, and the studio was still afraid that if it denied her something she wanted badly enough, she might well make good on her Country Girl threat and renounce Hollywood forever. Paramount helped Grace’s cause as well by telling MGM that it would be happy to honor Metro’s request for a loan-out of William Holden—who, as the 1953 Best Actor Oscar winner, was a hot property—if MGM would be good enough to return the favor by releasing Grace. That enticement, and a lot of money, led MGM to acquiese yet again, and Grace was free to make another Alfred Hitchcock film opposite another of Hollywood’s most popular matinee idols.
Grace was excited about the prospect; Stewart Granger recalled that during Green Fire filming, “Three quarters of her mind was in France ... I really think she was planning her Riviera wardrobe most of the time.” When she arrived in France, however, she had done four motion pictures in the space of little more than six months, and she was, in the words of Steven Englund, “In a state bordering on clinical exhaustion.” She asked Hitchcock to allow her “to sleep” for a few days before filming began, but location shooting is very expensive, and he couldn’t afford the delay— Grace had to report. Her enthusiasm for the project and the instant rapport that developed among herself, Grant, and Hitchcock helped to rapidly restore her strength and vitality. Grant, in fact, did not recall that Grace was anything but rested and ready to work. “If she was exhausted,” he said, “it wasn’t apparent to me. I think I would have noticed it. But it may well have been, because making a film is not an easy matter. The layperson doesn’t understand it at all. But whether she was tired when we began, I couldn’t say.”
The To Catch a Thief company was a happy one, particularly so for Grace. Hitchcock’s regard for her was something she had come to expect and look forward to. That Cary Grant shared Hitchcock’s esteem came as a happy extra. Grant and Grace became lifelong friends, an affection first engendered, he said, by his respect for her as an actress: “Most young actors are inclined to worry about how they look to the camera, and therefore their concentration isn’t totally on the conversation. You can tell they’re not really listening to what you’re saying. I’ve often tested actors by switching the dialogue, which leaves them completely up in the air because they expected a certain line, and if I change it to a line which alters the words but not the sense, you can see their hesitancy, because it doesn’t exactly fit. Grace didn’t do that.
“Grace acted the way Johnny Weissmuller swam, or Fred Astaire danced. She made it look so easy. Some people said Grace was just being herself. Well, that’s the toughest thing to do if you’re an actor, because if you’re yourself, the audience feels as though that person is living and breathing, just being natural, not ‘acting’—and that’s the hardest thing in the world to do.”
Grant enjoyed Grace’s outspokenness. Shortly after working with her he said, “She will probably go through life being completely misunderstood, since she usually says completely what she means.” Asked in 1985 about the quote, Grant said, “I’m afraid that the connotation was that she was therefore brutally frank. That wasn’t so. But if she was going to speak, she said exactly what her thoughts were.”
Grace’s “equanimity,” Grant said, surprised him. “But then again, it didn’t really surprise me, because I had seen her act.” Still, he didn’t expect her calmness in the face of often painful professional requirements: “Grace never complained about anything,” Grant said in 1956. “We had a scene where I had to grab her arms hard while she was fighting me and push her against a wall. We went through that scene eight or nine times, but Hitchcock still wanted it again. Grace went back alone behind the door where the scene started, and just by chance I happened to catch a glimpse of her massaging her wrists and grimacing in pain. But a moment later she came out and did the scene again—she never complained to me or to Hitch about how much her arms were hurting.
“She isn’t one of those girls who waste time by being angry ... if a dress didn’t fit, well it just didn’t fit, and that was that, with no hysterics. So of course they got the dress fixed for her faster than they would have for a girl who was screaming about it. No wonder she was popular with the wardrobe people, even if she didn’t go around slapping them on the back.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s vision of Grace Kelly as a beautiful iceberg covering a molten core of sensuality was never more fully realized than in To Catch a Thief. From the beginning of the picture the motif was unmistakable. As Hitchcock explained, “I deliberately photographed Grace Kelly ice-cold and I kept cutting to her profile, looking classical, beautiful, and very distant. And then, when Cary Grant accompanies her to the door of her hotel room, what does she do? She thrusts her lips right up to his mouth ... I think the most interesting women, sexually, are the English women. I feel that the English women, the Swedes, the northern Germans, and Scandinavians are a great deal more exciting than the Latin, Italian, and the French women. Sex should not be advertised. An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise, she’ll probably pull a man’s pants open.”
That Hitchcock’s intuition about the sexual chemistry between his stars was correct is never more evident than in the film’s several double entendre sequences. So potent was the charge between the two stars that once again rumors of a romance between Grace and her leading man surfaced. Grant dismissed such speculation. “Grace and I were never romantically inclined in any possible way,” he said. “We shared a professional regard and admiration for each other, and that was all.”
For Hitchcock and To Catch a Thief that was enough. Grant’s and Kelly’s reading of the script’s more provocative lines bordered at times on the lascivious, as in the following exchanges:
GRANT: What do you expect to get out of being so nice to me?
KELLY: Probably a lot more than you’re willing to offer.
GRANT: Jewelry—you never wear any.
KELLY: I don’t like cold things touching my skin.
GRANT: Why don’t you invent some hot diamonds?
KELLY: I’d rather spend my money on more tangible excitement.
GRANT: Tell me, what do you get a thrill out of most?
KELLY: I’m still looking for that one.
GRANT: What you need is something I have neither the time nor the inclination to give you—two weeks with a good man at Niagara Falls.
Later, during a picnic lunch, Kelly offers Grant a piece of chicken:
KELLY: Do you want a leg or a breast?
GRANT: You make the choice.
KELLY: Tell me, how long has it been?
GRANT: Since what?
KELLY: Since you were in America last?
A classic cinematic example of both visual and verbal double entendre takes place a few scenes later, when Frances invites Robie to her hotel room to watch a fireworks display:
KELLY: If you really want to see fireworks, it’s better with the lights off. I have a feeling that tonight you’re going to see one of the Riviera’s most fascinating sights. (She walks toward him, her gown strapless and low-cut.) I’m talking about the fireworks, of course.
GRANT: I never doubted it.
KELLY: The way you looked at my necklace, I didn’t know.
GRANT: ... I have about the same interest in jewelry that I have in politics, horse racing, modern poetry, and women who need weird excitement. None.
KELLY (As she reclines seductively on a divan): Give up—admit who you are. Even in this light I can tell where your eyes are looking. (Close up of her necklace, revealing as well her inviting decolletage) Look—hold them—diamonds! The only thing in the world you can’t resist. Then tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.
(The fireworks begin in the background. She kisses his fingers, then places his hand beneath the necklace. We cut to a close-up of the fireworks.) Ever had a better offer in your whole life? One with everything!
GRANT: I’ve never had a crazier one. (Cut again to fireworks)
KELLY: Just as long as you’re satisfied. (More fireworks)
GRANT: You know just as well as I do this necklace is imitation.
KELLY: Well, I’m not! (They kiss, and we cut to fireworks again. Back to a long passionate kiss, then a final, climactic frenzy of fireworks to end the scene.)
The filming of To Catch a Thief was one of the happiest moviemaking periods of Grace’s life. She loved the Riviera, just as she thought she would, and she went sightseeing with cast and crew members whenever fatigue didn’t completely overtake her. She and Oleg Cassini, Hitchcock and his wife, Alma, and Cary Grant and his wife, Betsy Drake, dined together most nights in the small, atmospheric restaurants that dot the hillsides of southern France. But, Grant remembered, “There wasn’t that much time to see the French Riviera; it’s a tiring day when you’re filming.” Grace did manage to visit nearby Monaco and one of its casinos in Monte Carlo; she was giddy when she won a few hundred francs at a gaming table.
One romantic scene between Grant and Kelly on the Moyenne Cornich above the Mediterranean featured, in the background, the palace of Prince Rainier Grimaldi, the absolute monarch of the tiny principality of Monaco. When Grace and several of the crew members later drove around the country, she was entranced by descriptions of a spectacular garden on a high plateau which was impossible for them to reach.
“Whose gardens are those?” she asked screenwriter John Michael Hayes.
“Prince Grimaldi’s,” Hayes replied. “I hear he’s a stuffy fellow.”
“Oh,” Grace said wistfully. “I’d like to see his flowers.”
While at work or play, there was a rare camaraderie among Grant, Grace, and Hitchcock. Even when the director was dissatisfied, the mood was jocular. “With Hitch,” Grant recalled, “one sort of set up the scene for his inspection. We knew what the scene was going to be about; he’d let us work it out between ourselves initially, because he knew that we weren’t complete idiots. Then he would watch us do it in rehearsal, and sometimes we knew as we were doing it, on our feet, that it wasn’t right. And very often he would ask, ‘Is that the way it’s gonna go, fellas?’ And we’d say, ‘All right, we’ll start again,’ and he’d give us a few thoughts and ideas, and go back to his bungalow, and we’d start to rehearse again. Hitch always made us feel that we were collaborators. Working with Hitchcock was very comfortable.”
It could also be very funny. Hitchcock was famous for his wit and his love of puns, and that was one of the reasons he admired Grace so much. “She had a marvelous sense of humor,” Grant said. “Otherwise I don’t think Hitch would have been attracted to her, because he too had a wonderful sense of humor.” Grant recalled a word game that the three of them played continuously during filming, in which everyone in the company was renamed according to his or her job: “The cameraman was Otto Focus, the script girl was Mimi O’Graph. The guy in charge of costumes was Ward Robe. Then there was Alec Trition, and you’ll never guess what the art director’s name was—Art Director! It got so that if anyone came on to the set while we were waiting for a shot to be set up, we’d ask them for some contributions, and if they came up with a good one, they could stay. But if not, they were out—out! There was May Kupp and Mike Shadow and Dolly Shot. We had a long, long list. The set builder was Bill Tit. Sometimes they got impossibly obscure; people would stand around trying to think of a new one all the time.”
The only unpleasantness for Grant during filming was during a scene in which Grace drives him through the small, winding roads in the hills above the Mediterranean. At a 1982 tribute to her in Philadelphia, Grace joked that her driving “caused Cary Grant to turn dead white under his tan.” Grant acknowledged that “I was rather anxious about it. Grace had started the scene without her glasses, and it was a continuation, so that when she offered to drive me wherever I was going, she got into the car without her glasses. Her driving was erratic, and there was other traffic around, and I must say that I was uneasy. I asked her where the hell she thought she was going, and she said, ‘Don’t be silly, I haven’t got my glasses on.’ I thought, No wonder, and I took hold of the wheel below camera range.”
As the finale of To Catch a Thief, Hitchcock designed an elaborate costume ball, the sole purpose of which, according to Donald Spoto, “was to show off his leading lady in a shimmering ball gown.” Its filming required over a week, and Hitchcock worked closely with Grace to present her in the most stunning way possible. But Cary Grant, like Jimmy Stewart, dismisses Spoto’s theory of Hitchcock’s unrequited passion for Grace: “We all were in love with Grace for goodness’ sake—we had a lovely combine. We were all in love with each other. We enjoyed each other’s talents. In fact, if Grace hadn’t married the Prince and left acting, she, Hitch, and I were going to form our own production company together and do a series of pictures, Thin Man, Mr. and Mrs. Smith kinds of things. It would have been delightful. Hitch may have been sexually attracted to Grace, but so were a lot of other people. So what’s the big deal?”
To Catch a Thief opened in August of 1955 and disappointed many Hitchcock purists with its uncharacteristic slackness and lack of strong suspense. Still, it was a beautiful, stylish, witty film, and it presented the ultimate Hitchcockian vision of Grace Kelly as the queen of “fire and ice.” Reviews were mixed, but audience reaction was similar to the London Daily Telegraph critic’s: “The mood throughout is one of cynical humor, with witty dialogue and amorous overtones. The young American beauty pursues the former jewel-thief with a Shavian frankness and zest, and their love scenes will entertain many people not ordinarily over-fond of thrillers. Mr. Grant and Miss Kelly dominate the film with easy charm ...” To Catch a Thief was a commercial success, won an Academy Award for its cinematography, and further cemented Grace’s position at the top echelon of movie stardom.
Grace had spent three months on the French Riviera, romanced on-screen by one of Hollywood’s most glamorous leading men, and wooed off-screen by a suave, sophisticated jet-setter. Back home in Philadelphia, however, she was still “our little Gracie” and under the unrelenting control of her parents. The romantic idyll shared by Grace and Oleg Cassini on the Cote d’Azur came to an abrupt end when, because she was seriously contemplating marriage, Grace felt compelled to introduce Cassini to her family.
The Kellys, of course, were aware of Grace’s relationship with Oleg, which had made the papers long before their sojourn in France and was now much discussed in gossip columns from coast to coast; Cassini was Grace Kelly’s first publicly acknowledged paramour. If Jack Kelly’s opposition to Don Richardson was intense, it tripled in ferocity against Cassini. Kell echoed his father’s feelings in Time magazine’s cover story on Grace: “I don’t approve of these oddballs she goes out with. I wish she would go out with more athletic types.” The all-American Kelly men had no time for European smoothies oozing charm. Told Cassini would be coming to meet him, Jack Kelly sneered, “Should I shake his hand or kiss it?”
Because Mrs. Kelly had expressed some admiration for Oleg, Grace felt that she could enlist her mother’s help in softening her father’s opposition to him. Margaret called one of her closest friends, Dorothea Sitley, who, as director of publicity for Gimbel’s department stores, had worked with Oleg. “I just received a letter from Grace,” Mrs. Kelly told her friend, “and she said she wants to bring Oleg Cassini down to Ocean City to stay there at the place. Jack says he’ll kill him if he walks through the door. You know Oleg. I don’t dare let Jack know I even called you. But I can tell him if what you say about Oleg is all right. Then Jack will let him come.”
Mrs. Sitley’s response was not encouraging. “Now wait a minute,” she replied. “Oleg is not for Grace. Definitely he is not for her. He’s charming, but he’s careless, just like a child wandering around.” She then told a story of Cassini forgetting his wallet when they went out for drinks, and allowing Mrs. Sitley to pay for them. This was considered a serious breach of gentlemanly etiquette.
Mrs. Kelly decided to forestall any Cassini visit and, to that end, she met with Grace and Oleg in New York. Over lunch she tried to dissuade Cassini from his marital intentions. “Oleg,” she told him, “you’re terribly charming and Continental, and I can certainly understand Grace’s wanting to date you, but as a marriage risk you’re very poor.”
Expecting Cassini to wilt, Mrs. Kelly was taken aback when he vigorously defended himself, anticipating all objections against him. Yes, he began, he’d been divorced, but he remained friendly with Gene Tierney and close to his children. His own substantial wealth should put to rest any suspicion of fortune hunting. And he was not a womanizer, he concluded, despite his reputation: “Once I am involved with a woman, as I now am, I do not date others.”
Cassini then turned the tables, suggesting that Mrs. Kelly’s religious principles, which condemned his divorces and romantic dalliances, were flexible when it came to a homosexual friend of her family’s and her husband’s well-known philanderings. Margaret Kelly was shocked, but she also admired Cassini’s spunk—a Kelly might have reacted to a prospective mother-in-law’s opposition in much the same way. She told Cassini that the family would not stand in the way of Grace’s seeing him, as long as they did not publicly announce any marriage plans for at least six months. Then, perhaps believing that the rest of the Kellys would admire Cassini’s strength of character as much as she had, Mrs. Kelly invited him to a weekend in Ocean City.
Like Richardson, Cassini dreaded the trip, but he agreed to go for Grace’s sake. As before, it was a fiasco. Oleg had a room of his own in the family’s beachfront house, but he had to walk through Mr. and Mrs. Kelly’s bedroom to get to it. “The weekend I spent in Ocean City was the worst of my life,” Cassini has said. “I ate razor blades for breakfast there ... Nobody would talk to me except Grace’s sisters. It was awful, and I suffered, was humiliated night and day. Grace’s father positively refused to talk to me. He mumbled something to the effect that there was no communication possible between us, ever.”
Also present that weekend was Lizanne’s beau, Donald LeVine, also Jewish and facing Kelly antagonism. Cassini took him aside at one point and muttered, “Don, you’re slipping in because all the attention is on me.” Cassini may have been right, because Lizanne and Don LeVine were wed shortly thereafter.
Her family’s treatment of Cassini appalled and deflated Grace. Their interference in her life was bad enough when she was an acting student having an affair with one of her instructors. Now she was almost twenty-five, an internationally famous movie star, an Oscar nominee, a woman whose portrait would in a few months appear on the cover of Time magazine—and her family was treating her like a high school girl bringing home the leader of the neighborhood motorcycle gang.
If it had not been clear to Grace before, it was now. Her life, as it differed from Kelly family strictures, was simply not her own, no matter how many leading men kissed her or how many important magazines ran profiles of her. It was a depressing realization. Her choice of a marriage partner, she feared, could not be made based upon her own needs and desires, but rather on what was best for the Kelly family, what advanced their position in the eyes of their neighbors and the world. As Cassini put it, “Her family regarded her as a prize possession, a property, like a racehorse that must be handled, above all invested, wisely—not wasted.”
Just as unsettling to Grace, her desire for the respectability of marriage had been thwarted. She felt great guilt over the her frequent affairs in Hollywood, and she was prepared to be faithful to one man for the rest of her life once she married. Cassini said, “I know for sure that she went to confession regularly—I sometimes accompanied her to the church—and I believe she was often troubled in her conscience.” Her lifelong friend Judy Kanter Quine, then married to Grace’s agent Jay Kanter, added, “If one has carefully defined values, as Grace did from the time she was very young, then breaking the rules brings very little pleasure and much remorse and guilt.”
Grace was furious with her parents, who on the one hand condemned her sexual dalliances, and on the other prevented her from “legitimizing” her affair with Cassini by marrying him. Had she been a different young woman, she might have defied her parents; she did, in fact, seriously consider that option, so great was her anger. “She kept seeing me despite her family’s opposition,” Cassini says, “even suggesting we get married right away. She told me to find a priest who would marry us.” But Grace was much more a dutiful daughter than a rebellious one, and Cassini soon discovered that “she had changed her mind. Her parents had talked her out of it.”
So much of Grace’s psychology revolved around winning her father’s approbation that she would never have risked his fury by defying his wishes in so serious a matter as marriage. “The most amazing thing about Grace,” says Don Richardson, “is that in all the years I knew her, and with all the terrible things her father did to her, she never once said a negative word to me about him. She constantly defended his actions.”
Grace continued to see Cassini for several months after the visit to Ocean City, but the affair was doomed. After Grace returned to California, she telephoned Cassini in New York and told him that Frank Sinatra had asked her out. He and Ava Gardner had been divorced, and the passionate singer wanted to renew the friendship he and Grace had developed during Mogambo filming. Grace asked Cassini if he would mind her seeing Sinatra. “Yes, I would mind!” Oleg exploded. He was, he reminded Grace, planning to be in Los Angeles the following week, which was when Sinatra wanted to see her. “How in hell do you think I’ll look in the papers if you’re photographed on Sinatra’s arm going into Chasen’s while I’m sitting in my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel? That’s all Hedda will need to write tomorrow morning—‘Cassini is out of the picture.’ So no, you do not have my permission.”
Grace went out with Sinatra anyway, and although she and Cassini continued to date, the relationship ended early in 1955. Overlooking the Sinatra incident, Cassini recalled that he reacted to the parting with magnanimity. “It was very difficult for me to go through our breakup,” he said. “Everybody had Grace Kelly on their lips. She was the number one creature of the world at that moment. And there I was, suddenly eliminated. But I think I showed the better part of me then. I was reasonable, understanding, and supportive, rather than narrow-minded, jealous, and argumentative ... it’s not that easy to be the big man. Love has a possessive quality about it. I thought she was mine. But I really supported her and never said a word about how I felt. At that moment I grew up, and I think it was my finest hour.”
Her family’s rude and heavy-handed opposition to yet another of her suitors left Grace more depressed and angry than ever. She was physically exhausted after making six major films in a year and a half, and psychologically battered by her seemingly futile efforts to impress her father. Rather than enjoy her success, she fixated on small injustices and allowed them to send her into tailspins of despondency. Academy classmate John Lupton recalls a lunch he had with Grace in Hollywood around this time. “There had been a lot of magazine coverage of Grace, which I thought would please her —she was a star, which is what she always wanted to be. But one of the pieces had called her ‘the girl with the stainless steel interior,’ and that really upset her. She said to me, ‘I don’t know why they think of me that way.’ I was astonished at how upset she was—it was like someone had kicked her in the stomach. She had put a wall of protection up around herself, and now she felt that she was defenseless. She was saddened by the outlook for her in Hollywood. It really struck me that the lady we had all put up on a pedestal at school was so hurt by what was being written about her.”
Grace needed to get away from Hollywood, and she took advantage of the contract clause that allowed her to spend a year working in New York. She returned to her apartment there as soon as she had completed the final To Catch a Thief interiors on Paramount’s lot in Hollywood.
Her sojourn in New York during the fall of 1954 and the spring of 1955 was a recuperative one. She didn’t set foot in front of a movie camera for over six months, and she enjoyed the respite immensely. Living again in her beloved Manhattan helped revive her spirits and dispel her depression. For the first time she began to put down roots somewhere other than in Philadelphia—she moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and hired the decorator George Stacey to help her furnish and decorate it exactly as she wanted.
This was a major step for Grace; it symbolized her growing independence from her family. Her apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street, in a building constructed of Kelly bricks, had been decorated, Don Richardson says, by Mr. and Mrs. Kelly: “You wouldn’t believe what this place looked like. It was all Grand Rapids furniture, right out of Zody’s.”
Grace’s own taste ran to eighteenth-century French, and she and Stacey scoured New York’s antique stores for just the right desk, chair, and chaise longue. (A year earlier, Grace had rented Lucille Ryman Carroll’s house in Hollywood. “She came to see it with Oleg Cassini,” Mrs. Carroll recalls, “and when she came upon a French desk in the bedroom, she cried out, ‘Oh, Oleg, look, it’s just like the one you have I love so much.’ That desk convinced her to rent the house. It was odd though—once she rented it she almost never stayed there.”)
In New York, Grace renewed the friendships that had lapsed in her absence. In Hollywood, she had said, she had “many acquaintances but few friends.” Here, she felt at home among people who shared her love of theater and acting for art’s sake. Friends were important to Grace; like her romantic liaisons, they provided her with some of the affection and moral support she craved from her family. To have a friend, in Grace’s mind, meant to be a friend —and her friends continually marveled that, no matter how busy she was, no matter how much the center of glamorous attention, Grace never slighted them. Judy Quine recalled this singular quality: “In the middle of the most dazzling event, which was centered and focused only on her, [she had this capacity] to do what she should do within that context and at the same time to be as sensitive to each of her friends who was there or involved in a way as though nothing was happening ...”
Although she was still gun-shy about romantic dalliances with Hollywood leading men, Grace around this time had a brief and very discreet affair with David Niven, one which never reached the point of press speculation. Grace and Niven became close and lifelong friends, and he and his wife frequently visited the palace at Monaco once Grace became a princess. On one occasion Prince Rainier asked Niven whom among his reputedly large number of Hollywood conquests had been the most satisfying. Unhesitatingly Niven replied, “Grace.” Seeing the Prince’s shocked expression, Niven added the highly unlikely clarifier, “Er, Gracie ... Gracie Fields.”
