Grace badly wanted to latch onto some favorable publicity again. Throughout her engagement to Rainier she’d had her own publicity agent to advise her. Rupert Allen, who had taste plus tact, had done the same job for her while she was at MGM. He left the studio for the engagement, sailed with her when she went to Monaco, and stayed on at the palace. Last spring her purpose, which may have stuck in the back of her mind all along, showed itself: She signed to work for Alfred Hitchcock, then canceled out because the people of Monaco didn’t like the idea. I guess when you’ve been a queen, if only in Hollywood, you find it hard to believe it’s promotion to play a princess, even in Monaco.
Thanks to her own shrewd sense, or to sound advice from outside, Grace’s timing was good. The people who go to movies still wanted to see her. So on top of satisfying her own ego, she could command so much money from Hitchcock that she finally couldn’t turn him down. She has inherited some of her father’s respect for a dollar.
I believe Grace caught the movie-making bug again after Jacqueline Kennedy went off without John F. on her triumphant trip to India and Pakistan. After all, if a great lady who can’t match Grace for beauty can score a hit, why shouldn’t Grace get back into the limelight? I’d bet that if Jackie had the chance to star in a picture, she’d take it. Wouldn’t you if you were in her shoes?
With one possible exception, there’s been a streak of exhibitionism a mile wide in every actress I’ve known, starting with Ethel Barrymore, who set my soul and ambition on fire when I saw her play in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. The possible exception is Garbo, who laid down an iron rule that she would work only on a closely screened set, and she’d freeze in her tracks the moment her privacy was invaded, especially if her boss at MGM, Louis B. Mayer, dared intrude with bankers or visitors from New York.
A movie queen has to be a born show-off before she wants to act, and when she finds she can get paid for it too, her joy is unconfined. Most of the breed don’t hesitate for a second if today’s producers of soiled sex on celluloid call on them to do a Bardot, without benefit of bath towel. I’m sure Liz enjoyed doing her bathe-in-the-nude sequence for Cleopatra. Jean Simmons didn’t object to playing stripped to the waist in one Spartacus scene that Kirk Douglas ordered to be shot in a spiced-up version for European distribution. And those calendar poses didn’t bother Marilyn Monroe. “I was hungry,” she explained, wide-eyed, when I asked her once why she’d sat for them.
Even Garbo had some odd quirks when the cameras stopped rolling. She used to go regularly to the house of some friends who had a big, secluded pool. Before she arrived, all the servants would be dismissed, and her host and hostess would take themselves off for an hour or so, too. Then Garbo undressed and, naked as a jay bird except for a floppy hat, swam gravely round and round in the water. Katharine Hepburn is another home nudist, presumably finding it better than air conditioning for keeping cool in summer. After all, it’s nature’s way. Didn’t we all come into the world stripped to the pelt?
Under stress, the deep-down desire to show themselves to an audience can take strange turns. Once in front of the crowded long bar of the Knickerbocker Hotel, an actress whose career had run into trouble—she was happily remarried in 1958—began to strip. This was Hollywood, remember, so hot-eyed stares were the only help she got from anybody in the room. When she was down to her shoes and stockings, and the rest of her clothes lay discarded on the barroom floor, she gave a shriek and ran down the front steps out onto Ivar Avenue. Then at last somebody remembered to telephone the police.
More recently an agent from one of the big television studios called at the hotel apartment of a much-married woman whose name still spells glamour to any serviceman of World War II. His mission was to sound her out about doing a TV show. She greeted him in a bathrobe and asked him to run the hot water for her before they talked business. She locked the outside door behind him. The following morning his conscience began to stir. “I’d better leave now,” he said. “The office will think I died.”
“You can’t go,” she cried. “I’m so lonely.” She kept him there three days.
The town has always been full of lonely, frustrated women who have let their few years of basking in the sun as movie queens blind them to reality forever. You can start with Mary Pickford, who used to talk a blue streak about a wonderful girl protégé whom she said she was going to make over into a movie sensation. I had to try to disillusion her. “You’re fooling yourself, Mary. What you should do is hire a press agent. All you really want is to keep your name alive.”