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

Jean Anouilh’s Ring Around the Moon. Following that, for the week beginning Sunday, June 24, she appeared at the Elitch Theatre, Denver, in a comedy by F. Hugh Herbert and in several other plays in repertory until the end of August.
    The Elitch family, who founded what became the oldest summer stock theatre company in America, mounted its first production in 1897, starring James (father of Eugene) O’Neill. Sarah Bernhardt was on the Elitch stage as Camille in 1906, and among its many other stars over the next seven decades were Douglas Fairbanks, José Ferrer, Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Fredric March, Antoinette Perry (for whom the Tony Awards were named), Walter Pidgeon, Vincent Price, Robert Redford, Ginger Rogers, Gloria Swanson and Shelley Winters.
    Grace consistently deflected questions about her summer in Denver. This may have been because her time offstage was spent almost exclusively with another actor in the company, Gene Lyons. Eight years her senior, he had appeared on Broadway and television and seemed poised for further success. With his angular features, seductive voice and intelligent approach to the craft of acting, he at once impressed Grace, and they began an eighteen-month romance. Alas, like Don Richardson, Lyons was married, although his annulment was being processed; he had also recently ended his affair with the actress Lee Grant. More to the inauspicious point, Lyons could not control his drinking; eventually, alcoholism destroyed his career and caused his death at the age of fifty-three.
    But that summer, Lyons captivated Grace as much as did the variety of plays and the genial atmosphere of the Elitch repertory company. Like many women in her amorous circumstances, Grace seems to have told herself that Lyons needed only true love in order to put down the bottle. In this she was very much misguided, but enlightenment took time. Inaddition, perhaps because she was only an occasional drinker and always a temperate one, she did not understand Gene’s problem.
    In addition, there was a general ignorance about heavy drinking. “In the 1950s, we would not have recognized an alcoholic unless we tripped over him for ten nights running in a Bowery doorway,” Judith Quine recalled accurately. “Alcoholics came from places we didn’t even know existed. The boys we dated or fell in love with had, at worst, ‘a little drinking problem.’ They ‘drank like a fish’ or ‘couldn’t hold their liquor.’”
    In the United States there had been a national ban against the manufacture, sale or consumption of all alcoholic beverages by the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which went into effect in January 1920 and lasted until the enactment of the Twenty-first Amendment, in December 1933. From Christmas of that year, drinking excessive amounts of alcohol crashed into vogue in American culture: it was a sign of wealth, and it was stylish and adult to drink (and to smoke); it was a mark of naïveté and inelegance not to. Drunkards of both sexes were considered hilariously funny in movies (and later on TV), and very few people seemed to know that alcoholism was a serious, potentially fatal condition. In this regard, Grace was a daughter of her time, and she apparently thought that Gene’s little problem could eventually be solved. There was, however, an interlude in this quixotic affair.
    I N J UNE , Edith Van Cleve had sent photos of Grace to the MCA talent agency, where Jay Kanter now represented Edith’s former client, Marlon Brando. Based on those prints alone, MCA offered Grace a contract whereby they would represent her exclusively for movies and TV employment. At first, Gracewould not sign it: she did not want to sabotage her hopes for a career on the stage, nor did she wish to be “owned” by any agency.
    Kanter, meanwhile, forwarded the photos of Grace to Stanley Kramer, a producer who had recently enjoyed enormous success with Champion (1949), Home of the Brave (1949) and