Cinema: The Girl in White Gloves

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Almost every morning, a slim figure in a polo coat, leading a small black poodle on a leash, emerges from one of Manhattan’s cliff houses on East 66th Street. The doorman gives her a cheery “Good Morning, Miss Kelly.” But outside, no head turns. For in her low-heeled shoes and horn-rimmed spectacles, Actress Grace Kelly is all but indistinguishable from any other well-scrubbed young woman of the station-wagon set, armored in good manners, a cool expression, and the secure knowledge that whatever happens, Daddy can pay.

A few blocks away, Grace Kelly’s name is emblazoned on two first-run Broadway houses, and the same face, without spectacles, makes husbands sigh and wives think enviously that they might look that way too, if only they could afford a really good hairdo. In Hollywood, producers fight over her, directors beg for her, writers compose special scripts for her. In an industry where the girls can be roughly divided into young beauties and aging actresses, Grace Kelly is something special: a young (25) beauty who can act.

A year ago, Grace Patricia Kelly was only a promising newcomer (generally thought to be English), who lost Clark Gable to Ava Gardner in Mogambo. Currently she is the acknowledged “hottest property” in Hollywood. In Manhattan this year, the New York Film Critics pronounced her acting in The Country Girl “the outstanding performance of 1954.”

Can’t Touch Her. Grace Kelly, with the lovely blonde hair, chiseled features, blue eyes and an accent that is obviously refined, is a startling change from the run of smoky film sirens and bumptious cuties. Said one Hollywood observer: “Most of these dames just suggest Kinsey statistics. But if a guy in a movie theater starts mooning about Grace, there could be nothing squalid about it; his wife would have to be made to understand that it was something fine—and bigger than all of them. Her peculiar talent, you might say, is that she inspires licit passion.” From the day in 1951 when she walked into Director Fred Zinnemann’s office wearing prim white gloves (“Nobody came to see me before wearing white gloves”), the well-bred Miss Grace Kelly of Philadelphia has baffled Hollywood. She is a rich girl who has struck it rich. She was not discovered behind a soda fountain or at a drive-in. She is a star who was never a starlet, who never worked up from B pictures, never posed for cheesecake, was never elected, with a pressagent’s help, Miss Antiaircraft Battery C. She did not gush or twitter or desperately pull wires for a chance to get in the movies. Twice she turned down good Hollywood contracts. When she finally signed on the line, she forced mighty M-G-M itself to grant her special terms.

Beamed a New York friend: “Here, for the first time in history, is a babe that Hollywood can’t get to. Can’t touch her with money, can’t touch her with big names. Only thing they can offer her is good parts.” Steel Insides. She has managed to get the parts. In the short space of 18 months she has been paired with six of Hollywood’s biggest box office male stars—Clark Gable, Ray Milland, James Stewart, William Holden, Bing Crosby, Gary Grant. These seasoned veterans have learned to view with a jaundiced eye the pretty young newcomers assigned to play opposite them. Grace, as usual, was different. Says Holden, one of Hollywood’s ablest pros: “With some actresses, you have to keep snapping them to attention like a puppy. Grace is always concentrating. In fact, she sometimes keeps me on the track.” Says Jimmy Stewart: “She’s easy to play to. 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.”

Outside the studio, Grace continued to disregard the Hollywood rules. She was friendly, but she refused to court the important columnists. Interviewers who tried to get her to open up came away swearing that they would rather tackle a train window any time. One producer grumbled that she had “stainless steel in-sides.” She flatly refused to divulge even the standard data (bust, waist, hips). One columnist asked routinely whether she wore nightgowns. “I think it’s nobody’s business what I wear to bed,” she said coolly. “A person has to keep something to herself, or your life is just a layout in a magazine.”

In the end, publicists had to content themselves with tagging Miss Kelly as “a Main Line debutante.” She is neither Main Line nor a debutante, but she is the next thing to both.

The Beautiful People. In Philadelphia, the Kellys are about as conspicuous as the 30th Street Station, which, like many of the city’s major structures, bears the credit: Brickwork by Kelly. Handsome, athletic John B. Kelly, Grace’s father, the son of a farm boy from County Mayo, began business life as a bricklayer. Eventually he parlayed a borrowed $7,000 into the nation’s biggest brickwork construction company. One of his brothers was George Kelly, Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright (Craig’s Wife); another was Walter Kelly, the famed “Virginia Judge” of the vaudeville circuits.

All the Kellys, says a friend, are “beautiful, physical people.” Father Jack was a champion sculler; Grace’s mother (who is of German descent) was a model, later the first woman physical education instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. Father Jack, who still takes his athletics seriously, went to England in 1920 to compete at Henley. But the Henley committee ruled that he could not compete because he had once “worked with his hands” and was therefore not a “gentleman.” He went on to the Olympics, where he soundly thrashed the Henley winner, and triumphantly sent his sweaty green rowing cap to King George V of England with his compliments. The moment his son John B. Jr. (“Kell”) was born in 1927, Jack resolved that he would win at Henley; he began training the boy personally at the age of seven. In 1947 Kell righted an old wrong done his family by going to Henley in the colors of the University of Pennsylvania and scoring an impressive victory for Penn and Pop.

Church & Athletics. Of the three Kelly daughters, Peggy was the oldest and a cutup, Lizanne the youngest and an extrovert. Grace, the middle one, born Nov. 12, 1929, was shy, quiet, and for years snuffled with a chronic cold. The big, 15-room house in plain East Falls, across the Schuylkill River from the Main Line, was the meeting place for the whole neighborhood. “There was a lawn out back with swings and a sandbox, a tennis court and the usual things like that,” says Grace. Summers, the Kelly family had a house on the Jersey shore at Ocean City. As regularly as she marched the children to St. Bridget’s Roman Catholic Church every Sunday, Mrs. Kelly marched them off to the Penn Athletic Club for workouts. “There’s a certain discipline in athletic work,” says Mrs. Kelly. “That’s why Grace can accustom herself to routine and responsibility.” Sister Peg organized home theatricals.

“Somebody else always got the lead,” Grace recalls, without rancor. Even then remote and selfabsorbed, Grace used to write poetry, some serious, some “little gooney ones” that showed a neat turn of phrase. Sample, written when she was 14: I hate to see the sun godown And squeeze itself into the ground, Since some warm night it might get stuck And in the morning not get up.

Little Grace went to the local Ravenhill convent school, then to Stevens School in Germantown. By the time she was eleven, she was appearing in a local amateur dramatic company. Turned down by Bennington (she flunked math), Grace got herself into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. From the first, her family was dubious about an acting career. “We’d hoped she would give it up,” says her mother. Snorts Father Kelly: “Those movie people lead pretty shallow lives.” The “Clean” Way. But Grace knew what she wanted. To assure her independence, she got a job modeling, was soon making $400 a week posing for Ipana, beer ads, Old Golds. Photographer Ruzzie Green describes her as “what we call ‘nice clean stuff’ in our business. She’s not a top model and never will be. She’s the girl next door. No glamour, no oomph, no cheesecake. She has lovely shoulders but no chest. Grace is like Bergman in the ‘clean’ way. She can do that smush stuff in movies like—remember all those little kisses in Rear Window?—and get away with it.” A friend remembers her at this period as “terribly sedate, always wore tweed suits and a hat-with-a-veil kind of thing. She had any number of sensible shoes, even some with those awful flaps on front.” She did TV commercials (“I was terrible—honestly, anyone watching me give the pitch for Old Golds would have switched to Camels”), doggedly made the rounds of summer stock (New Hope and Denver) and casting offices. “I’ve read for almost everything that’s been cast. I even read for the ingenue part in The Country Girl on Broadway (left out in the movie). The producer told me I really wasn’t the ingenue type, that I was too intelligent looking.” Then she read for the daughter’s part in Strindberg’s grim The Father. She got the part and won good notices, but the play lasted only two months. Grace went back to TV (“summer stock in an iron lung”) to play in such varied offerings as Studio One, Treasury Men in Action, Philco Playhouse and Lights Out.

First Fan. Once before and once shortly after she left dramatic school, Grace turned down $250-a-week movie contracts: “I didn’t want to be just another starlet.” Now Hollywood reached for her again but failed to get a firm grip.

Director Henry Hathaway gave her a bit part as the lady negotiating a divorce across the street from the man on the ledge in Fourteen Hours. But she refused a contract; she did not feel ready yet.

She did accept a one-shot offer from Producer Stanley Kramer for the part of Gary Cooper’s young wife in High Noon.

Fourteen Hours produced her first fan, a high-school girl in Oregon who started a fan club and kept Grace posted on new members. Grace thought it a hilarious joke. “We’ve got a new girl in Washington,” she would cry in triumph. “I think she’s ours, sewed up.” In High Noon, her finishing-school accent sat awkwardly amongst the western drawls, and her beauty made little impact. What was more, from High Noon determined Grace Kelly got her first real self-doubts about her planned progress. Says she: “With Gary Cooper, everything is so clear. You look into his face, and see everything he is thinking. I looked into my own face, and saw nothing. I knew what I was thinking, but it didn’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.’ ” Grace hustled back to New York to learn how to make it show.

The “Too” Category. She was still learning (with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse) when 20th Century-Fox called her to test for a role in a film called Taxi. Dressed in an old skirt and a man’s shirt on her way to class, “I walked into Gregory Ratoff’s office, and he threw up his arms and screamed, ‘She’s perfect.’ In all my life, no one has ever said, ‘You are perfect.’ People have been confused about my type, but they agreed on one thing: I was in the “too” category—too tall, too leggy, too chinny. And Ratoff kept yelling around, ‘What I love about this girl, she’s not pretty.’ ” But the producer did not like her, and another girl got the role.

Director John Ford saw the test, however, and wanted her for Mogambo. Even then, Grace did not come running. When M-G-M offered her a seven-year contract starting at $750 a week, she demanded a year off every two years for a play, and permission to go back to New York, instead of hanging around Hollywood, whenever she finished a picture. She was only 22, and all but unknown. But M-G-M agreed to her terms. Says Grace: “I wanted Mogambo for three things: John Ford, Clark Gable, and a free trip to Africa.” In Africa, Grace picked up a lot of film technique from Ford and developed a hero worship for Gable. Ford was soon predicting that she would be a star. For her performance as the cool English wife stirred to sudden and thwarted passion for White Hunter Gable, Grace won a “best supporting role” nomination for the Academy Award.

Restraint & Control. M-G-M still seemed uncertain about what to do with her. But Alfred Hitchcock, also impressed by the Taxi test, snapped her up for Dial M for Murder, then for Rear Window.

Says Hitchcock: “From the Taxi test, you could see Grace’s potential for restraint.

I always tell actors don’t use the face for nothing. Don’t start scribbling over the sheet of paper until we have something to write. We may need it later. Grace has this control. It’s a rare thing for a girl at such an age.” Director George Seaton adds: “Grace doesn’t throw everything at you in the first five seconds. Some girls give you everything they’ve got at once, and there it is—there is no more. But Grace is like a kaleidoscope: one twist, and you get a whole new facet.” Under Hitchcock’s expert direction, Grace bloomed in Rear Window. As a sleek young career girl, she distilled a tingling essence of what Hitchcock has called “sexual elegance.” She was learning her trade. The way she walked, spoke and combed her hair had a sureness that gives moviegoers a comfortable feeling: she would never make them wince with some awkwardness of misplaced gaucherie. Exhibitors, who know a good thing when they see the turnstiles click, began dropping Hitchcock and Stewart from their marquees and advertised simply: “Grace Kelly in Rear Window.” In Hollywood, the stampede was on.

More Than Beautiful. When the stampede started, Grace was in a bathing suit dutifully splashing around a Japanese bathhouse as Navy Pilot Bill Holden’s wife in The Bridges at Toko-Ri (a movie that does little for Grace except establish the fact that she has a better figure than normally meets the eye). At about the same time, Paramount’s producer-director team of William Perlberg and George Seaton got word that Jennifer Jones, scheduled to play the title role in their next picture, The Country Girl, had become pregnant. They asked M-G-M to lend them Grace. This time M-G-M said no. Grace still gets angry when she thinks about it. She went to her agent, says Perlberg, and told him: “If I can’t do this picture, I’ll get on the train and never come back. I’ll quit the picture business. I’ll never make another film.” Actress Kelly had her way. M-G-M lent her out to Paramount again, but this time jumped the price from the $20,000 charged for Toko-Ri to $50,000, and demanded that she give M-G-M an extra picture (her contract calls for only three a year).

The Country Girl was final proof that she is more than merely beautiful. The well-bred girl from Philadelphia is completely convincing as the slatternly, embittered wife of aging, alcoholic Matinee Idol Bing Crosby. She slouches around with her glowing hair gone dull, her glasses stuck on top of her head, her underlip sullen, resentment in the very sag of her shoulders and the dangle of her arms. She looks dreadful. Said Seaton: “You know that old cardigan sweater she wears? Well, a lot of actresses would say, ‘Well, why don’t we just put a few rhinestones here? I want to look dowdy, of course, but this woman has taste . . .’ and before you know it, she’d look like a million dollars. But not Grace. Grace wanted to be authentic.”

Bing Crosby, a little nervous himself at undertaking so exacting a dramatic role, was dubious about his untried costar, and said so. But before the shooting was over, Crosby was telling Seaton, “Never let me open my big mouth again,” and talking of taking Grace out dancing.

Bags Packed. Hollywood is now eager to adopt Actress Kelly, white gloves and all, and is trying hard, with the air of an ill-at-ease lumberjack worrying whether he is using the right spoon. But Grace shows no interest in the Hollywood way of life, or even in having the customary swimming pool (“I don’t swim that much”). Thus far, she has lived with a sister or a girl friend in a furnished, two-room North Hollywood apartment, acting as” if she considered herself on location, with her bags packed ready to go back to New York.

Young men who are eager to brighten her after-hours life come away baffled. “If she doesn’t think a joke is funny,” one complained, “she doesn’t laugh.” Wolves are discouraged when Grace briskly pulls on her glasses (her lovely blue eyes are nearsighted) and assumes her Philadelphia expression. Some suspect that she is, as Oscar Wilde put it, “a sphinx without secrets.” Publicity men despair of her. “A Grace Kelly anecdote?” said a friend. “I don’t think Grace would allow an anecdote to happen to her.”

A few of Hollywood’s older, more sought-after men have concluded, from time to time, that they were just the boys destined to discover and unlock the real Grace. Each time, Grace has resisted unlocking, though whenever her father reads in a column of a new “roman tic attachment,” the family gets alarmed.

“I don’t like that sort of thing much,” snorts father Kelly. “I’d like to see Grace married. These people in Hollywood think marriage is like a game of musical chairs.” When the gossips reported that Ray Milland was leaving his wife for Grace, mother Kelly hustled out to California to set things straight. Milland insists that he only took her to dinner once; Grace says nothing. Most recently Grace’s escort has been Dress Designer Oleg Cassini, one time husband of Gene Tierney and professional man-about-ladies. The Kellys deplore all such gossip-column romances.

“I don’t generally approve of these odd balls she goes out with,” grumps brother Kell, who is still national sculling champion and works for his father’s company between workouts on the Schuylkill. “I wish she would go out with the more athletic type. But she doesn’t listen to me anymore.” Some of Grace’s admirers fear that M-G-M may do to her what the studio did to Deborah Kerr—lash her down to “lady” roles and keep her there. Even after The Country Girl, the best M-G-M could think of was to assign Grace to Green Fire (which she did as her part of the bargain on Country Girl} and then offer her Quentin Durward. Grace, who sees the satin-lined trap as clearly as anyone, refused the Durward part after reading the script. “All the men can duel and fight, but all I’d do would be to wear 35 different costumes, look pretty and frightened. There are eight people chasing me: the old man, robbers, the head gypsy and Durward. The stage directions on every Daie of the script say: ‘She clutches her jewel box and flees.’ I just thought I’d be so bored. . . .” Reluctant Scenery. While waiting for M-G-M to think again, Grace retired to her three-room apartment in a huge, modern building in Manhattan (masonry by Kelly). where she lives alone with her poodle puppy Oliver. Her amusements range from photography (she develops her own negatives, sloshing around her bathroom in the dark) to word games. A favorite game is one devised by Alfred Hitchcock when he met Lizabeth Scott and got to wondering what would happen if other people dropped the first letter of their names: Rank Sinatra, Scar Hammerstein, Reer Garson. Orgie Raft, Ickey Rooney.

Four times a week she puts her hair up into a pony tail, dons a leotard, and goes off to classes in modern dancing and ballet. Wandering near Broadway, she avoided the Broadway theater where M-G-M publicized Green Fire with a huge poster of a bosomy girl in sexy green drapery with Grace’s head but another girl’s body. “It makes me so mad,” says Grace. “And the dress isn’t even in the picture.” Last week MGM’s Production Boss Dore Schary summoned Grace to Hollywood to propose a new picture—a western with Spencer Tracy scheduled to costar. After two days’ of talk, Grace was still noncommittal; she would wait, she said coolly, until she had seen the completed script.

It is possible that Grace might yet win an Oscar for her Country Girl performance, and even M-G-M would have a hard time turning an Oscar-winning actress into a road-company Greer Garson.

Furthermore, Actress Kelly is determined that that will not happen to her. Says she, setting her beautiful chin: “I don’t want to dress up a picture with just my face. If anybody starts using me as scenery, I’ll do something about it.” If all else fails, Grace could conceivably break her contract and return to television. Or she could try the stage, where acting talent counts for more, and the competition is tougher. She could always give up the whole thing for the role of wealthy young socialite. But if her studio mentors are wise, and if Grace is as wary as she has so far proved to be, the young beauty from Philadelphia may yet become an authentic jewel in Hollywood’s tinsel crown.