This Day in Theater History (Odets Makes Last Broadway Splash in ‘The Country Girl’)

Nov. 10, 1950—Playwright Clifford Odets—onetime hope of the American theater, more recently scorned as a Hollywood sellout—landed his last Broadway success with The Country Girl, which premiered at the Lyceum Theatre.

Though the play ran for 235 performances—which, according to the economics for non-musicals of the time, was enough to secure a profit—it has not been revived as often as other works by major American playwrights, such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee.

Most Americans, if they are aware at all of this drama of an alcoholic has-been reaching again for Broadway stardom, recognize it from the 1954 film starring Bing Crosby, William Holden, and, in her Oscar-winning role, Grace Kelly.

The original play, staged by Odets himself, possessed nothing like the box-office draws of the Paramount movie, though one principal had known renown, and two others would experience it.

*Holden’s role, as hotshot young director Bernie Dodd (with elements of Odets’ friend Elia Kazan), was played by Steven Hill, better known to posterity as the original team leader in the Mission: Impossible TV series and as D.A. Adam Schiff on the long-running Law and Order.

*Georgie Elgin, the alcoholic’s beleaguered wife played by Kelly, was originally performed by Uta Hagen, who won the Tony Award for the role—and would win another, a dozen years later, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while earning additional recognition as an influential acting teacher.

*The principal actor that I knew the least about was Paul Kelly (no relation to Grace), who may have felt the greatest affinity with his character. Over two decades before, he had served 25 months for manslaughter for killing in a drunken fistfight the husband of his lover (and eventual wife). He had painstakingly rebuilt his career since then, but surely experienced the same regret as Frank Elgin’s over alcohol’s role in derailing his career.

The Country Girl was Odets’ second attempt in as many years to return to the heights of the New York theater scene he had occupied in the mid-to-late 1930s, as a founding member and most significant playwright associated with The Group Theatre.

When he came back to the Great White Way after a financially rewarding but creatively unsatisfactory stint as Hollywood screenwriter and director, he no longer exhibited the concerns with the working classes that animated him previously. But he continued to write about what he knew: in this case, actors.

In The Big Knife (1949), he had implicitly indicted himself for yielding to compromise and temptation—and explicitly assailed the studio system for blackmail and other thuggish methods for keeping stars in line. But even the presence of a real-life Hollywood star (and Odets friend) John Garfield hadn’t been enough to keep the production going beyond three months.

The Country Girl was different, depicting a struggle in which the pressures from without were nothing like the pressures from within faced by

The George Seaton screenplay departed somewhat from the play by making its fragile leading man into a musical-comedy star, making the part more comfortable for recording artist Crosby. But those encountering the drama after seeing the film may be surprised by other changes, both in casting and dialogue.

For one thing, Frank and Georgie have been married about 10 years before the play begins, and the drab existence resulting from his drinking has robbed her of vibrancy and youth. At 31 years old, Hagen would have been closer to the age that Odets had in mind than Grace Kelly, who sought to downplay her glamour and youth by wearing glasses, brown wool, shapeless dresses, and cardigan dresses.

In the years since, actresses who played Georgie have been considerably older than Grace Kelly or even Hagen, including, in TV productions, Shirley Knight (38) and Faye Dunaway (40), and, onstage, Jennifer Jones and Maureen Stapleton (both 47), Christine Lahti (34), and Frances McDormand (51).

Additionally, for whatever reason, Seaton chose not to use as much of what F. W. Dupee called Odets’ “sad and seedy poetry”—idiomatic speech like “tense as a bug in June,” or  “an ulcerated sponge for a brain.” And these days, some ethnic references (for instance, to Chinese laundry workers) are likely to be deleted for stage shows because of political incorrectness.

Odets would likely have responded with dismay to at least some of these changes. Producer Dwight Deere Wiman had postponed the play’s opening for the 1949-50 season to allow the playwright more time to tinker with the dialogue.

For all the time and energy Odets devoted to getting the play right, he still marred it with unnecessary touches—chiefly the complications arising from the Georgie-Dodd relationship, at first a clash of adversaries before becoming a love affair that takes them by surprise.

An anonymous reviewer from Time Magazine adeptly identified the “austere telling without a false word or a florid gesture” that would have sustained Odets’ “compact little tragedy of misunderstanding” between Georgie and Dodd over who was really responsible for Frank’s skittishness, depression and breakdown.

Even so, the drama represented more than what Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune called “a fiercely affectionate anecdote about backstage doings."

There are reasons why, despite critics’ predictable carping that this and other Odets plays are “dated,” directors, dramaturges and actors have not utterly forgotten this drama.

Odets might not be writing anymore about the proletariat he sprang from, and the mechanics of staging a show may have changed (near-endless small “workshopping” instead of short, nerve-racking out-of-town tryouts). 

But theater professionals still know how well he showed the tension inherent in bringing an untried play to the stage, as well as the raging, crippling insecurity that so often dogs actors who depend on the public for approval that can never be enough.

Although the history of the American theater is filled with alcoholics, Odets may have been inspired by a relatively recent example: actress Laurette Taylor, who, after years on the bottle, pulled herself together long enough in 1944 by offering a career-defining performance in The Glass Menagerie. 

Outside of Eugene O’Neill, it’s hard to think of another play that limns so thoroughly the self-deception of alcoholics and the vortex into which they pull those closest to them.

In the remaining dozen years of Odets’ life, he would never repeat even the moderate success he enjoyed with The Country Wife, let alone enjoy the acclaim and hope generated by the half-dozen 1930s plays running from Awake and Sing to Golden Boy.

Long under FBI surveillance for his relatively brief Communist party membership in the 1930s, he was hauled in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

 Responsible for raising two children (including a daughter with severe developmental disabilities) after the death of his estranged wife, he named names, albeit none that hadn’t been provided previously to the committee.

He took one more shot at Broadway with his retelling of Noah and the Flood, Flowering Peach.  But his relationship with producer Robert Whitehead was rockier than the one he had enjoyed with his friend Wiman, and any hope for greater attention to the play vanished when the advisory board for the Pulitzer overruled the jury’s selection of his drama and rewarded it instead to Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Back in Hollywood, he masterfully rewrote Ernest Lehman’s initial screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success, but the film’s cult classic status did not come till after his death. 

In the hospital with fatal stomach cancer, he was serving as script supervisor for the short-lived (and even less remembered) anthology series, The Richard Boone Show, a vehicle unworthy of his talent.

But long before, he had already recognized the thin line between success and oblivion in The Country Girl.

This Day in Theater History (George Kelly Reaches Career Peak With ‘Craig’s Wife')

Oct. 12, 1925—After years of developing his craft from vaudeville skits to full-length comedies, playwright-director George Kelly triumphed in the next stage of his evolution as a playwright-director with Craig’s Wife.

The drama opened at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre in the first of 360 performances, staged by Kelly himself. And, in what many observers believed was a consolation prize for being bypassed the prior year, Columbia University awarded him the highest prize in American theater, the Pulitzer Prize, midway through its run.

Coming on the heels of his prior Broadway success, the comedy The Show-Off, Kelly should have been able to look forward to additional adoring audiences. But, at age 38, he would never create another hit. When he died 50 years later, he was all but forgotten—a fate that largely continues to this day. (Many familiar with the life story of Grace Kelly know that she made her professional acting debut at age 19 in her uncle's satire, The Torch-Bearers.)

In a post from last spring, I wrote about the 1936 film adaptation of this domestic drama, starring Rosalind Russell. I intend to write yet another post, on the 1950 remake starring Joan Crawford, later this year.

But the play itself is little seen these days. Even a couple of other plays by Kelly, Philip Goes Forth and The Fatal Weakness, have been mounted in the late dozen years by the estimable Off-Broadway troupe The Mint Theater.

Why did Kelly fall off his high place in American theater?

*Audiences rejected his continued turn toward drama. Kelly’s next three plays, Daisy Mayme, Behold the Bridegroom, and Maggie the Magnificent, flopped. Even before the Great Depression ensued, audiences preferred his comedies.

*Changing times brought changing audience and critical tastes. Once Kelly returned to comedy in 1931 with Philip Goes Forth, theatergoers were more open to plays by the likes of Clifford Odets that addressed the multiple crises affecting the nation. Kelly decamped for remunerative but unsatisfying work in Hollywood as a screenwriter. When he returned to Broadway later in the Thirties and Forties, he continued to work in the vein of the character-driven, “well-made play” tradition, at a time when younger playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were experimenting with different stage forms.

*His economic and social conservatism left him out of sync with the times. Kelly despised the New Deal and regarded the politically progressive Group Theater as faddish. A deeply religious Roman Catholic, he was similarly dismissive of psychology and the greater sexual frankness associated with Williams and William Inge.

*He had rigid views of how his plays should be staged. Kelly insisted not only that he direct his own plays but that actors interpret his lines exactly as he dictated them. This did not allow for much in the way of innovation or in allowing the introduction of collaborators who could approach his work with a fresh eye.

*In particular, “Craig’s Wife” is often regarded as misogynistic. The title character of Kelly’s most honored work made a fetish of her home, to such an extent that it destroyed her marriage and left her isolated at the play’s end. The 1936 film version introduced elements that would motivate her unrelenting materialism, but these are largely absent from the play itself.

*He had no interest whatsoever in promoting himself. It wasn’t only that Kelly felt that his work should speak for itself, but he desired to maintain his private life. Not only would there be no interviews during his career, but, with the destruction of nearly all his personal papers a few years before his death, no opportunity for a posthumous biography that might intrigue readers with previously guarded secrets. In the years since Kelly’s death in 1974, it has become increasingly believed that those “secrets” related to his sexual orientation. A lifelong bachelor, Kelly introduced William Eldon Weagley as his “valet,” even to his Philadelphia-based siblings, but their 55-year relationship strongly suggests that the playwright was gay.

This Day in Theater History (Kelly Dramedy ‘The Show-Off’ Premieres)

February 5, 1924—At the height of a decade when a President of the United States said “the business of America is business,” George Kelly (pictured) satirized the empty clichés behind the monied class—and puffed-up aspirants to it—with The Show-Off, which premiered at Broadway’s Playhouse Theatre on this date. 

Hailed by critics as perhaps the finest comedy of its age, it was selected by a panel of judges for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But Columbia University, as it would occasionally do over the years, overruled the panel’s recommendation—in this case, awarding the prize to a member of its own faculty—proving once more that in academe, charity begins at home.

Perhaps out of a sense of guilt—in much the same way, in that decade, that the Pulitzer for fiction was awarded to Sinclair Lewis for Arrowsmith, after he had been snubbed on earlier occasions—Kelly did receive the award for his next work, Craig’s Wife. 

In the 1930s, as one production of his after another flopped on Broadway, he turned briefly to Hollywood. He came back to Broadway in the 1940s, but the glow from two decades before had worn off, and thereafter, if he was known at all, it was as the beloved uncle of Grace Kelly.

There are signs, however, that interest in him might be reviving. Last year, the Mint Theater dusted off one of Kelly’s ‘30s failures, Philip Goes Forth, and proved that contemporary critics underestimated it. (My review is here.) Earlier in the year, Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse mounted an acclaimed production of The Show-Off, awakening a new generation to the fine dialogue and subtle characterization of this long-neglected playwright.

The title character of The Show-Off is Aubrey Piper, who so ardently courts young Amy Fisher that she disregards the scornful warnings of her family that her new beau is just a humble clerk, not the railroad department head he claims to be. 

As Amy finds out after their marriage, he is really a junior-league Babbitt, a backslapper who turns people off with his spendthrift ways and the sanctimonious nonsense he’s picked up from books. At the same time, he is a lost soul, and, privately, admits it.

A son and brother of Irish-Americans who made it big in Philadelphia, Kelly has often been deemed a snob, even by later critics who otherwise praised his stage craftsmanship. To be sure, he did not trumpet sympathy with the proletariat the way, for instance, that Clifford Odets (whom he despised) did. 

But The Show-Off, despite being a comedy, retains much of its original power because of his harrowing, if unsentimental, treatment of a North Philadelphia rowhouse family on the financial edge. 

For years, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, their son Joe and daughter Clara have striven to stay afloat. The entrance into the family of the Micawberish Aubrey is resented so fiercely because his problems threaten to capsize everyone.

The Show-Off enjoyed a very healthy 571-performance original run. The Pulitzer panel recommended it as an “extremely good and original American play.” 

Yet for some reason, a docent of the administrator of the prize, Columbia University, wrote a letter to the school’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, protesting against presenting the prize to Kelly. 

That individual, though neither a member of the panel of judges nor of the award’s advisory board, had enough sway to tilt the prize in favor of Hell-Bent fer Heaven, by Hatcher Hughes.

Ever hear of that play? That playwright? I haven’t, and I have a sneaking suspicion that you haven’t, either, Faithful Reader. Kelly might be a neglected playwright, but Hughes seems, nearly seven decades after his death, to have utterly fallen off the theater landscape.

I mentioned that The Show-Off had a well-received revival in Connecticut recently. But there’s a good possibility that it has been viewed more widely (albeit in different form) on Turner Classic Movies.

Two years after the start of its Broadway run, it was turned into a silent film, with future siren Louise Brooks as one of the Fisher daughters. With the coming of talkies, it was transformed into the 1930 film, Men Are Like That, and, under its original name, with Red Skelton in 1946.

But the most intriguing—and most important—version might have been in 1934, in what might be termed “A Tale of Two Tracys.” 

MGM had intended to turn Kelly’s play into a vehicle for Lee Tracy, a member of the original cast. But that actor lost his shot at the role—and his job at the studio—because of his misbehavior during location shooting of Viva Villa in Mexico. (At very least, he insulted a Mexican cadet during a Revolutionary Day parade; but the most notorious rumor is that, after one of his legendary drunken binges, he urinated off a hotel balcony.) 

He was replaced by Spencer Tracy, who, only a few days before, had received a favorable notice for his work in a Hollywood trade publication.

On loan from Twentieth-Century Fox to make the film, Spencer Tracy made the most of what turned out, in effect, to be an audition for MGM, the studio that liked to brag that it had “more stars than there are in the heavens.” The film succeeded with critics and, even more important, audiences. 

The actor was promptly signed by MGM, where he ended up making the lion’s share of the nine movies that won him Oscar nominations, including the two for which he won Best Actor (Captains Courageous and Boys Town).

A final note on the play. As I have read it, I couldn’t help but agree with the assessment of the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who called it “a comic masterpiece, an airtight manipulation of domestic values and the outside world’s economic success. And just like any comic masterpiece there is something hauntingly sad about it.”

Theater Review: George Kelly’s ‘Philip Goes Forth,’ at the Mint Theater

The Show-Off might have been the title of one of the comedies that put George Kelly atop Broadway for a time in the 1920s, but it certainly did not describe either his writing style or his approach to media. That might account at this point for why he is not as well-known as two other Irish-American dramatists who started around the same time, Eugene O’Neill and Philip Barry.

Today, because he brooked neither outside interference in producing his work nor outside intrusion into his complicated personal life, he is all but forgotten to the general public. If recalled at all, it is because perhaps his greatest success, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Craig’s Wife, was adapted into the 1950 Joan Crawford film, Harriet Craig (he abominated both the star and the production), and because you might have heard of a niece who credited him with encouraging her to pursue an acting career: Grace Kelly.

What to make of this enigma? I found answers, at both professional and personal levels, at a matinee performance in September of his 1931 dramedy Philip Goes Forth, which closed last weekend at the Off-Broadway Mint Theater. I figured that if any theater troupe could re-awaken interest in his work, it was the Mint: A few years ago, they had turned in sterling work on another play by another largely forgotten figure, the Anglo-Irish playwright Lennox Robinson, in the comedy Is Life Worth Living? (See my 2009 review of the latter.)

Philip Goes Forth is infinitely trickier stuff, part of the reason why it flopped on Broadway at its premiere in 1931. The critical reaction was so discouraging that Kelly swore off the Great White Way and decamped for Tinseltown for several years.

The action of the title—“going forth”—occurs after recent college grad Philip argues with his father on his writing ambitions, and leaves for New York in a huff, choosing the Joycean course of trying himself “against the powers of the world.” In vain does his kindly Aunt Marion (played marvelously by Cynthia Toy Johnson), concerned that he hasn’t even written anything yet, warn about the chance of “wasted years.”

It soon becomes apparent that Philip has far more affinity for the business world he flees than for the artistic world he hopes to join. He collaborates with a poseur with the Dickensian surname Shronk on a “Chinese fantasy”—Kelly’s satiric vision of avant-garde. All of this is happening at a time when the stakes couldn’t be higher: Philip’s father has warned him not to come crawling back to his old job, and the worsening Great Depression is reducing many to despair (including a musician in Philip’s boardinghouse). The play’s swipes at artists manque flooding New York did not sit well with critics, but Kelly did not care: Playwriting, like the other arts, was almost a kind of priesthood, he felt, requiring not just commitment but talent, and anyone without these should find other callings immediately.

The Mint production was the first time that Philip Goes Forth was mounted in New York since its original Broadway run, but adept direction by Jerry Ruiz, with the help of an uncommonly well-cast troupe of actors, will go a long way towards assuring that this and other Kelly plays will receive serious consideration in the future. In addition to Ms. Johnson, particularly noteworthy were Jennifer Harmon as Philip’s kindly but realistic landlady, Cliff Bemis as his father, and Natalie Kuhn as his love interest.

In a fascinating post-show “Talk Back” discussion with the audience, Professor Fulton Hirsch of Brooklyn College spoke of his visit in the early 1970s to the 84-year-old Kelly, in what might have been the last interview given by the long-retired playwright. The interview, though long (four hours) and civil enough, was also a mite peculiar: not once did Kelly offer the young academic even a glass of water! In fact, Hirsch came away with the impression that he had inadvertently invaded Kelly’s space

What has become increasingly apparent over time is that Kelly loathed publicity because he wanted to avoid questions about his personal life. His valet-companion of more than 50 years, William E. Weagly, was, in all likelihood, his lover. Kelly’s family (brother John was an Olympic sculling champion and Philadelphia construction magnate) made Weagly eat in the servants’ quarters when they visited, and they did not invite him to George’s funeral in 1974.

Hirsch acknowledged Kelly’s extreme reticence about his private life, his quirkiness as a theater professional (directing his own work, he used a metronome to make actors time words to each second), his snobbery, even his rumored anti-Semitism. Yet Hirsch also agreed with Mary McCarthy’s assessment: "It is difficult to describe a George Kelly play...simply because it is not like anything else while on the surface it resembles every play one has ever been to."

Kelly’s astringent moral sense, let alone his snobbery, may be difficult for a more libertarian age to accept. But his abundant wit and his abiding concern for dramatic structure (a counterpart to his early training as a draftsman) offer distinct possibilities for posthumous rediscovery, a process surely hastened by this fine Mint Theater revival.

This Day in Film History (Grace Kelly, Star-Turned-Royal, Dies)

September 14, 1982—Nearly three decades after a film scene in which her character gave Cary Grant the willies with her hairpin turns in Monte Carlo, Princess Grace of Monaco—a.k.a. Grace Kelly—died at age 52 in an auto accident on a similar hilly road in the place where she turned from Hollywood royalty to actual royalty. Death brought a dramatic end to a life that had become boring, anti-climactic—anything but the fairy tale she had seemed to live, of the beautiful young woman who had married a prince.

Like those of Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood, Kelly’s death became unmistakably engraved on the consciousness of film fans. Her hold on the public was all the more extraordinary because her film career was only half the length of Monroe’s and only one-sixth of Wood’s.

Several years ago at a wake, someone asked a priest of my acquaintance if he had noticed a couple of rows up a striking young Irish-American woman whom he had baptized years before. He corrected the name used by the questioner: “You mean Grace Kelly,” he joked.

The producers of the award-winning cable TV series Mad Men had to be aware of that icon of beauty and style when they cast January Jones as the young suburban wife Betty Draper.  That same blond elegance and sense of cool remove were so noticeable that the editors at Oprah Magazine created a fashion spread in which the star of today emulated the looks of the Fifties actress.

To other characters who encounter Betty Draper in her role as helpmate to her husband, Madison Avenue prince Don Draper, she seems a thousand times blessed: handsome spouse, cute kids, wonderful house, and, of course, her own looks. Longtime viewers know that, like much else on that show, it’s a carefully manufactured illusion. Betty lives in a gilded cage, committed to a husband who disappoints her, suffocated by her own nagging sense of unfulfillment.

So, sadly, did Princess Grace feel in her final years. After fulfilling the duty of perpetuating the royal line of Monaco, she began to chafe at her stultifying life. Prince Rainier would openly yawn when observing his wife’s creative floral displays, and is said to have rejected any notion of her returning to the silver screen, in the 1977 ballet film Turning Point and, more intriguingly, in Marnie, where she would have collaborated with the director who most appreciated her allure (and, indeed, who might be said to have obsessed about it), Alfred Hitchcock. 

The odyssey of Betty Draper, fans might recall, begins with her auto accident, a signal to a select but largely uncomprehending few that all is not well with her world. In contrast, the odyssey of Grace Kelly ended with an accident.

Betty’s accident caused consternation because children were in the car when she crashed. Kelly’s crash took on a murkiness of its own, involving one of her children. An autopsy concluded that she had had a massive brain hemorrhage just before the accident. That would have accounted for how she lost control of the car.

But for nearly two decades after the tragic day, tabloid speculation swirled, first claiming that it was Princess Stephanie, not her mother, who had been driving—then, when that became harder to prove, that the 17-year-old wild child of the Grimaldi royal family had been arguing with Princess Grace.

It might be more correct to see Betty Draper as a Grace Kelly counterfeit than as a counterpart. Betty’s lack of fulfillment can only be partly ascribed to dismay with her marriage to the philandering, deceitful Don. She is one of the most abusive mothers in the history of television, and it seems to come from a spot in her psyche beyond accountable experience. While Grace Kelly adopted some of the methods of her own strict mother, abuse was not the default option for her. (The writer for the blog Mad for Monaco has an interesting piece on the princess’ supportive, complex, and completely individual relationships with her three children.)

No, I think we’ll have to look to other woman for parallels to Kelly, somehow who, in fact, was her exact contemporary: Jacqueline Kennedy.

One incident did, in fact, unite them briefly: After her husband, then a Senator, had painful back surgery, Jackie smuggled into his hospital room the movie star, dressed in this case as a nurse. Few people would have been more appreciative of the prank than JFK.

Jackie Kennedy and Grace Kelly were born in the same year. While Kelly married into royalty, Jackie helped to create her own legend of royalty, relating, in a famous interview with Theodore H. White, how her late husband had loved Camelot. Each woman was, if you will, a Catholic American Princess.

Each woman also had, for want of a better phrase, father issues. Though their fathers' personalities were diferent, their clear failings affected how their daughters approached life. John Bouvier earned his nickname “Black Jack” for his dark tan and playboy image. It is hard not to see Jacqueline finding in the rising politico from Massachusetts someone who reminded her more than a little of her father. John Kelly, a hugely popular Olympic oars champion, had gone on to earn a fortune as a Philadelphia contractor. But his opinion of his famous daughter was blunt and off-putting. After Grace won the Best Actress Oscar for The Country Girl, he told reporters that she was the last of his daughters he would have expected to win such an award.

Each woman, after marriage, bore three children (the Kennedys’ third, Patrick, was stillborn in 1963). Each, after entering her high position, threw herself into causes (Jackie, the arts and beautification of the White House; Kelly, also a patroness of the arts, as well as the Red Cross and numerous other charities).

Each woman became an icon of beauty and fashion, but they were also distinctive for their voices. In a thousand days in the White House—particularly in the televised tour of the President’s house—Jackie’s breathy voice left a lasting impression on Americans. Kelly’s was one the actress had to work at. In acting school, she listened to thousands of recordings and practiced for hours dropping her voice, until the cool, cultured tones made her a kind of American aristocrat.

Above all, Kelly had more in common with Jackie Kennedy than with Betty Draper because of her strong will and sense of self-possession. She was talented, intelligent, and ambitious. Her fate—confinement to her gilded cage at Monaco—might not have been the happiest, but it was, indisputably, hers, one she had chosen, like a Hollywood version of Henry James' Isabel Archer, encountering her destiny in an environment and with a husband she knew all too little about beforehand. 

And, like Kennedy, she exerts a continuing fascination because she was content to let others gossip about her life--not condescending to feed the media or even acknowledge its existence. (After her death, a number of members of the Hollywood community opened up--one might say opened fire--about her string of affairs with older and/or married co-stars, including Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland, and Bing Crosby. According to Peter Bogdanovich's Who the Hell Is in It, one of these alleged conquests, Jimmy Stewart, acknowledged his feelings about kissing her in Rear Window: "Waall, I'm married, but I'm not dead!") She kept something in the deepest part of herself that remained not only private, but inviolate.

You can find a fine career retrospective on Grace Kelly in this post by the Austin, Texas freelance writer Leah Churner on the blog BAM 150. 

(The photo of Kelly accompanying this post was part of a publicity release for Rear Window in 1954.)