Free High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood by Donald Spoto

been raven-haired instead of platinum,” said Gant, “she could have been a gypsy.” And with that, the party guests realized that she was “cool” only in another sense of the word.
    Grace returned to New York and set about arranging her calendar for 1951, which, as it turned out, would have to be revised several times. Her first job was in a TV play called “A Kiss for Mr. Lincoln,” for which she wore magnificent (and hurriedly fitted) Civil War–era costumes. David Pressman directed this comedy of manners, and Grace played the role of Mrs. Delight Kennitt, a lively young bride determined to turn her husband’s attention from the boardroom to the bedroom. This idea, of course, was conveyed with the utmost delicacy requiredof television at the time. During the evening of the action, Delight and her husband, Henry, host a dinner party for a business associate and his wife on their way to Washington, to meet President Lincoln.
    When Delight appears wearing a shiny modern lip gloss, her husband calls her “indecorous” in front of the guests, and later she further shocks him by kissing the business associate. When they are alone, Delight tells Henry the reason for her makeup: “I love being kissed the way a man should kiss a woman—not the way a bank president kisses one of his liquid assets. I love being kissed by a man, not stroked by a beard!” In one speech, Grace’s voice rises dramatically: initially she sounds like a wounded doe, then she cries and shouts like an outraged wife; finally she defends her farewell gesture: “It was a kiss for Mr. Lincoln.”
    Henry says that he worships and reveres her, but is afraid to take her in his arms. “I don’t want reverence from you, Henry,” she says more calmly. “I want love. I don’t mind being a liquid asset, but you’re freezing me out.” In a final shot, remarkable for live TV in 1951, the couple climbs the stairs to share the same bedroom at last.
    Even at this early stage of her career, Grace’s elegance was exploited by the director to suggest that men want to worship rather than love her precisely because she seems to have the cool beauty of a marble statue or the distant bearing of a goddess. But that judgment is revealed to be a fault in perception: her good posture, marmoreal beauty and refined diction should not be equated with remoteness and inaccessibility. This idea—that Grace was one to be revered rather than loved—became a recurring motif in all her films, straight through to High Society: “I want to place you on a pedestal and adore you,” says her fiancé, played by John Lund. “I don’t want to be adored—I want to be loved,” she replies plaintively. “Thatgoes without saying,” is his response. But of course it does not, and her expression reveals her disappointment.
    A variation on the same theme occurred in her next TV assignment. Another Philadelphia native, the playwright and screenwriter John L. Balderston, had agreed to adapt his successful 1929 romantic fantasy play Berkeley Square , which was broadcast on February 13. 2*
    Based on Henry James’s unfinished tale “The Sense of the Past,” the story tells of a modern man named Peter Standish (played on TV by Richard Greene), who is the descendant of a man with the same name. Standish comes to London to marry his fiancée, Kate Pettigrew (Mary Scott), but he has read his ancestor’s diaries and correspondence and believes he could exchange places with him and go backward in time—which, miraculously, he promptly does. But things do not go so well in the eighteenth century, where he falls in love with Kate’s ancestor Helen, played by Grace.
    Her performance was ethereal without being unrealistic, her line readings poignant without sounding arch. In period costume, she again seems to glide across the rooms of the set—all the more remarkable because she had to take meticulously prearranged steps as the moving camera followed. In Berkeley Square , Grace