High Society by Donald Spoto

Author:Donald Spoto [Spoto, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-46251-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

BEFORE REAR WINDOW was completed in January, Grace gained a new and valuable friend. She had known Rita Gam in New York when they were both working as models and acting in TV dramas, and Rita, too, had come to Hollywood. While Grace was working on Rear Window, Rita was at Universal, filming the historical epic Sign of the Pagan. They both knew the producer and former agent John Foreman, who suggested that the two young women might become friends.

“Grace had taken an apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood,” Rita recalled, “and she had shared it with her friend and secretary, Prudy Wise. When Prudy left Los Angeles, Grace rang me and invited me to come over for a cup of coffee. We clicked immediately—the friendship was virtually instantaneous—and Grace, who didn’t like living alone, invited me to share her apartment. I was lonely living at a hotel, and I accepted at once.” Like Judith Balaban Kanter, Rita was a bridesmaid at Grace’s wedding and a lifelong friend.

Grace’s rented West Hollywood apartment was a simple place in a nondescript building, but Rita remembered that Grace had made it her own. “It was feminine and sentimental, filled with snapshots, sketches and souvenirs from her films, and everywhere there were pictures of her family. As she poured the coffee at our first meeting, we compared notes about our separate African adventures—she having filmed Mogambo in central Africa, and I just back from North Africa, where I appeared in Saadia for MGM.

“She was generous, open, tolerant, fun and completely down to earth—and she was always working. She had huge ambitions to become one of the fine stage actresses in America—that’s what she wanted more than anything else. Her film work became just a detour. I think that’s why she never owned a home in Los Angeles—New York was always her home, and she was never in Hollywood with all her heart. She just saw it as a temporary opportunity, and she had other plans for her future—on the stage.”

That year, as Rita remembered, Grace “was often very tired, but she enjoyed the work. Occasionally on Sunday, she went to lunch and spent the day with her uncle George, and she always spoke about him with great warmth and affection. He was extremely important in her career, and he seemed to understand everything she resented about Hollywood—especially the whole publicity machine. There she was, the envy of every woman in Hollywood—but she disliked being turned into this great romantic image. Only her sense of humor got her through all this—her humor and the conviction that once she got too tired of it all, she would settle down and have a family.”

Grace was protective of her siblings and loyal to her parents, Rita added. “She admired her father, although she thought he was too tough on her and she knew that he didn’t approve of her acting. It was always ‘Peggy this’ and ‘Peggy that’ for her father. And her mother wasn’t a warm person at all.

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