Free High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood by Donald Spoto Page A

portrayed Helen as a kind of chaste Diana, the Roman goddess—ever desired yet ever remote, revered and unloved.
    E ARLY THAT SPRING , Grace demonstrated that in real life she was not at all ethereal or detached from everyday reality. The African-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker had returnedto the United States after years of European triumph, and she promptly became involved in the struggle for desegregation and the fight against racism in America, which was typified by the refusal of Washington’s National Theatre to sell tickets to nonwhites until that year. During her American tour, Baker refused to play to segregated audiences or to register at segregated hotels. She successfully made a citizen’s arrest of a racist in Los Angeles, and her nationwide fight against prejudice earned her a citation as Outstanding Woman of the Year by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
    Josephine Baker then came to New York and took some friends to dine at the famous Stork Club, where they were denied a table. Grace was at the club that same evening, and she was so outraged by this rank display of racism that she rushed over to Baker—whom she had never met—took her by the arm and stormed out with her own entire group of friends, telling the press she would never return to the Stork Club; she never did. Grace Kelly and Josephine Baker became friends on the spot.
    From her earliest days, Grace had never understood prejudice. She and her siblings had grown up with and remained grateful for the devotion of Fordie, and during her entire life, Grace always remained color-blind. She was also completely indifferent to the sexual orientation of friends and colleagues, many of whom (like Uncle George) were gay and, at that time, constantly risked ridicule and ostracism.
    Years later, an American television crew came to document scenes of palace life in Monaco. While filming a sequence of the staff’s children in the royal playground, the director noticed three nonwhite children in the group, and he approached Princess Grace. “The film is to be shown in the American South,” he said, “and it won’t do to see black children playingwith white children. At least while we’re filming, we don’t want them here.”
    “Oh, but we do,” Grace replied with a smile.
    The incident at the Stork Club earned her some unpleasant epithets then widely used in America for those who befriended nonwhite people. But Grace proudly accompanied Josephine Baker on her return to Europe that season, stopping in London on the way home to see the opening-night performance of N. C. Hunter’s comedy Waters of the Moon at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on April 19. She kept the printed playbill and never forgot the legendary performances by two great ladies of the English stage, Edith Evans and Wendy Hiller, whose talents confirmed Grace’s desire for a serious career in the theatre.
    B ACK HOME , there was a letter waiting from Edith Van Cleve, reporting that Grace was being considered for the role of a scheming playgirl in a Joan Crawford film, Sudden Fear , scheduled to begin production in San Francisco and Hollywood early in 1952. Grace rang Edith to say that she would leap at the chance to undertake something so utterly different, but Edith had disappointing news. Gloria Grahame, already cornering the market as Hollywood’s conniving bad girl, had won the part. Anyone familiar with Sudden Fear— a crisp thriller that won Crawford her third Oscar nomination—may be tempted to imagine Grace in the role of the murderous Irene Neves. At this stage of her career, she would perhaps have been either memorably terrific or embarrassingly terrible. A deeply evil character, which she never played, may have been beyond her capacity.
    But Grace was kept busy with other good projects on offer that spring and summer of 1951. In late May she went to Michigan, where she played Isabelle in the Ann Arbor DramaFestival’s production of