Vestry set for The Pleasure of His Company

Family Plot

Even if you have not yet visited Grace Cathedral in person, you may already have visited on screen, or in a novel. The Cathedral and its close, or grounds, have been the setting for several movies, and have also been featured in a few novels. Key plot portions of the movies The Pleasure of His Company (1961), Family Plot (1976), and Bicentennial Man (1999) were filmed in the Cathedral, and on exterior stairways. A scene in The Pleasure of His Company, starring Fred Astaire, shows Garry Merrill and Lilli Palmer squabbling over their daughter's wedding, seated in pews now the site of the cathedral sanctuary. "Uncle" Charlie Ruggles adds wry comments. In a later exterior scene, mother and daughter (Debby Reynolds) flee the Cathedral. Family Plot was Alfred Hitchcock's last film. Its cathedral scene features Bruce Dern climbing the old front steps and asking to see the bishop of "Saint Anselm's Cathedral", as a disguised couple (William Devane and Karen Black) drug and abduct the bishop (William Prince) before an astonished congregation! Cathedral lay staff enjoyed serving as vested extras. The wedding and reconciliation scenes in Bicentennial Man, starring Robin Williams and Embeth Davidtz, were filmed in Grace Cathedral, Davitz playing mother and daughter. The latter scene, set two centuries in the future, shows cathedral interior restoration underway, as humanized robot Williams wins the heart of restorer Davidtz. The scene is preceded by an exterior view of the Cathedral surrounded by sleek Nob Hill skyscrapers of circa 2200!

Bishop extras for Family Plot

Barnard Hughes as the golfing bishop in Maxie

A large portion of the film Maxie (1985), about a flapper who possesses the body of a bishop's secretary, is set in the former Cathedral House, now the site of the cathedral's front stairway. Glenn Close plays the secretary/flapper with Mandy Patinkin as her husband. At one point, the golf-loving bishop (Barnard Hughes) hits a ball from his office, the former Cathedral House dining room, to adjacent Huntington Park. A short scene of the famous Steve McQueen film Bullitt (1968), filmed on the former front stairway and plaza, shows congressman Robert Vaughn serving a writ to a police captain (Simon Oakland) attending a Sunday service with his family. Grace Cathedral has made cameo appearances in several other films, including Dark Passage (1947), D.O.A. (1949), Vertigo (1958), Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1969), Time After Time (1979- deleted scene), The Woman in Red (1984), Innerspace (1987), Metro (1997), A Smile Like Yours (1997), The Demon Within (1999) and The Wedding Planner (2000). The final footage in How the West Was Won (1962) is a spectacular aerial view of San Francisco that passes directly over the unfinished Cathedral and close. Scenes for the movie Milk, a biography of gay politician Harvey Milk, were filmed at Grace Cathedral in 2008. Television has also discovered Grace Cathedral, and scenes in More Tales of the City (see below) and the Nash Bridges series have been filmed on the front stairs.

Grace Cathedral and the future Nob Hill? (Bicentennial Man)

In addition to movie roles, Grace Cathedral has personal associations with several movie and television actors. Basil Rathbone once gave a talk at the Cathedral, and the visiting David Langdon (Upstairs Downstairs), was fascinated with the organ. Actress Carol Channing lived nearby as a child, watched the first part of the Cathedral being built, and chatting with the workers. The 1951 Grace Cathedral funeral of William Randolph Hearst, friend of many Hollywood stars, was attended by Louis B. Mayer, and Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons. Hearst's life was the inspiration for Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane (1941). Television actor Bill Bixby was a onetime cathedral chorister, and Barbara Eden was married here. Between filming episodes of Streets of San Francisco, Karl Malden often liked to come into the Cathedral and sit in a quiet pew, or attend a service. Sting (Gordon Sumner) has visited the Cathedral and walked the labyrinth. The 1999 wedding of Courteney Cox to David Arquette at Grace Cathedral drew many stars, including the cast of Friends, the Arquette family, Richard Benjamin, Nicholas Cage, Jon Lovitz, Liam Neeson, Brad Pitt, Paula Prentiss, and Paul Reubens. Two women actors have closer cathedral ties. Frances Rich, daughter of Irene Rich (star of silents and early talkies and onetime cathedral neighbor), created the Chapel of the Nativity crucifix. Carol Veazie, noted character actor of film and television, was a co-donor of the cathedral courtyard south of the school, in memory of her husband, Rev. Henry Veazie. A cathedral window memorializes Hollywood producer/actor/manager Harry Crocker, cousin of the cathedral site donor, who worked with Charles Chaplin, helped write the City Lights screenplay, and acted in several films.

Glenn Close, the director, and Barnard Hughes in Maxie

Robert Vaugh in Bullitt

Grace Cathedral's less prominent literary role has included cameo appearances in Flint (Charles Norris, 1944), California Street (Niven Busch, 1959), Special Circumstances (Sheldon Siegel, 2000) and The Monk Downstairs (Tim Farrington, 2002). California Street features Bishop Karl Morgan Block as himself. More than twenty additional novels mention Grace Cathedral. Playwright Eugene O'Neill, staying at the nearby Huntington Apartments (now Hotel) in 1944, found the then-unfinished Cathedral depressing, and envisioned it as the ghost of a windjammer. He was seriously ill, and had a recurring dream of being crushed by a seventh wave that turned into the Cathedral. Joan Didion writes about the building of the Cathedral and Bishop Pike in her acclaimed essay collection The White Album (1979). In More Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin, 1980), later televised, the recognition of the "sacred rose" window leads to the discovery of a cannibal cult in the cathedral catwalks, high above the vaulting. Excepting the catwalk scene, interior scenes for the television version were filmed at a Montreal church.

Like its distant cousin, Notre Dame Cathedral, Grace Cathedral stands amid the fast paced life of a great city. Inevitably, like its Parisian counterpart, the Cathedral is involved in that life, becoming a unique sacred site through which the winds of history, and the images and words of imagination, have begun to swirl; a windjammer of the spirit, where the often heedless human drama is explored in a setting of direction and meaning. Perhaps a future Victor Hugo or George Lucas will, one day, weave the Cathedral into an immortal work that will further explore the heights and depths of the human soul.

The drugging and abduction of the Bishop in Family Plot

Alfred Hitchcock directing his last movie Family Plot

 
More Tales from the Crypt