High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (32 page)

F
OR A FEW
years, Grace was a kind of American ideal: she had the manners, dress and diction of the social élite, but there was a democratic person underneath—she had a quick sense of fun and a healthy, passionate nature. Despite her aristocratic bearing, she was “one of the girls.” In each of her films, she played characters with a touching and credible longing for socially inferior men—women whose principles were humanized by being united with feelings. Because it was her last American picture, one can only wonder how Grace might have continued as the major exponent of modern high comedy—just as she could have matured as a dramatic actress, as
The Country Girl
presaged. She was at the peak of her youthful beauty, and that is sometimes an impediment for viewers who think good looks mean less talent.

A
LTHOUGH THE
film was completed on March 3, Grace remained in Hollywood to record some radio ads for the picture, to bid farewell to a few friends and to dispatch a professional duty. The previous year, she had won the Academy Award as best actress, and now custom required her to present the Oscar for best actor. This she did on the twenty-first, handing the statuette to Ernest Borgnine for his performance in
Marty.
Grace then rushed back to New York on the morning of the twenty-second in order to attend the wedding of her good friend Rita Gam to publisher Thomas Guinzberg on the twenty-third.
That left her with no more than eleven days to shop, pack, spend the Easter weekend in Philadelphia with the family and manage countless details before she sailed from America, onboard the S.S.
Constitution
, on April 4.

Rainier had departed for Monaco on March 16, as there were countless details to supervise at the palace in preparation for the civil ceremony on April 18 and the nuptial mass the following day. During the time of their brief separation, he sent Grace notes and
billets doux
almost daily. “My darling,” he wrote one day, “This is to tell in a very mild way how terribly much I love you, miss you, need you and want you near me always. Safe trip, my love. Rest, relax and think of me, burning myself out with this terrible longing of
you, for
you! I love you so.—Rainier.”

Grace was not marrying a man who was remote and unemotional, as the pundits wrongly presumed in light of his refined public manner and infrequent, calm statements to the press; indeed, they made precisely the kind of faulty judgment so often leveled against her. Like the prince, she had, as she said, “been accused of being cold, snobbish, distant. Those who know me well know that I’m nothing of the sort—if anything, the opposite is true!”

“My real life began with my marriage,” Grace said. “Sometimes, looking back after so many years, I think I really hated Hollywood without knowing it. I had lots of acquaintances there, and people I enjoyed working with and learned a lot from. But I found a great deal of fear among people in Hollywood—fear of not succeeding, and fear of succeeding but then losing the success. I’ve often said that it was a pitiless place, full of insecure people who had crippling problems. The unhappiness out there was like the smog—it covered everything.

“And I didn’t want to have to go along with all those illusions about youth when I was older. I had to be in my makeup
chair at seven in the morning when I was twenty-six. Rita Hayworth [who was thirty-seven] told me she had to be ready at six. I heard that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis [fifty and forty-seven, respectively] had to show up at five. What did that predict for me, if I stayed in the business any longer?”

“T
HE DAY
we left New York,” Grace recalled, “our ship was surrounded in fog. And that’s the way I felt—as if I were sailing off into the unknown. The trip was just bedlam, [with] mounting hysteria everywhere from the members of the press who were on board. I had been through several unhappy romances, and although I had become a star, I was feeling lost and confused. I didn’t want to drift into my thirties without knowing where I was going in my personal life. I looked out into the fog, wondering, ‘What is going to happen to me? What will this new life be like?’ I had never met [Rainier’s] family, except for his father [who had visited her in California], and I had no idea how the rest of the family and the Court would accept me. What sort of world was waiting for me on the other side of that fog?”

For one thing, she was entering a world whose ways were completely different from everything familiar. Grace was moving to a place where a foreign language was spoken, to a royal life where strange, ancient customs not only prevailed but were held in reverence, where formalities ruled all but the most private moments and where demands were made that often outweighed the privileges. After years of effort, she later came to consider herself a working woman—someone like a public relations manager whose “boss” just happened to be her husband, the monarch of a small but self-sustaining parcel of Europe.

Those first days in April 1956 fueled the fame she had so
much distrusted in Hollywood—in fact, her marriage made her an
international
celebrity. But she took her responsibilities with the utmost gravity, finding—as Alfred Hitchcock told me with a sly grin—“the best role of her life.” Hitchcock was right, except that now there was nothing separating the role from the player. Grace had
pretended
to be Amy Kane, Lisa Fremont, Georgie Elgin, Tracy Lord and the others—but Grace
was
a princess, and princesses do not live happily ever after, except in fairy tales. “I certainly don’t think of my life as a fairy tale,” she said not long before her sudden death. “I think of myself as a modern, contemporary woman who has had to deal with all kinds of problems that many women today have to deal with. I am still trying to cope.”

The marriage of Miss Grace Patricia Kelly to His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III of Monaco was universally described as “the wedding of the century” (a phrase repeated twenty-five years later, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer). It could not be described as an intimate event, with 1,600 reporters and photographers (more than the number who covered all of World War II) flooding into Monaco, six hundred guests jammed into a small cathedral that holds only four hundred, and 1,500 guests invited to the palace reception. “Most of them,” according to Grace, “wanted extra tickets for the balls and the dinners and the two weddings. To make everything worse, the weather was just foul, and the palace wasn’t ready to be lived in yet.” In addition, there were thousands of gate-crashers everywhere, and jewel thieves invaded every Monte-Carlo hotel.

Her wedding was, Grace said, “so hectic and so quick and frantic—there was no time to think about it. Things just happened, and you reacted on the moment. It’s hard to describe the frenzy of it all—it was really kind of nightmarish. I remember
looking at those first weeks as if I was just a visitor, a guest at my own wedding—but unlike guests, I couldn’t go home when all the fuss and furor became too much.”

“They told me that they just hated their wedding day,” said their daughter, Princess Caroline, “and they never looked at any photographs of it. They had wanted a small wedding with just the families present. But they couldn’t do that, and it turned out to be a mob scene.” That was true, Grace said: “I didn’t even read a press clipping for over a year, because the whole thing was just a nightmare, really. A few private moments, of course, were marvelous. But it was a difficult time to go through, for the prince and myself.” Rainier agreed: “If it had been up to me, the wedding would have been held in the palace chapel, which seats twenty-one people.”

When the turmoil of the wedding was over, a long and difficult period of adjustment began. First, she was enormously homesick for her friends and family, and for the familiarities of the American way of life. Then there was resentment from the traditionalists, from the Court and from the palace employees, who were committed to a rigid protocol. The people of Monaco were polite but wary of an American from Hollywood, and Grace found that, for a long time, her liberty was greatly curtailed—she could not, for example, simply go out for a stroll in the village. Tourists crowded her, and in the 1960s, the worldwide epidemic of kidnappings made it impossible for her to enjoy outings with her children unless they were accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards.

Grace’s friends remained precious to her throughout her life. Judith Quine might have spoken for many when she wrote of Grace’s friendship: “No admonitions for not writing, though letters from her pals were very important to her. No questions asked. No explanations required. No judgments passed. Forthcoming
expressions of sympathy and unity when most appropriate. Instant invitations to visit when most feasible. Offers of fun and friendship when both were most needed. Though Grace’s position had become more elevated since we first met, the gifts of her friendship were no less exalted than they had always been. We did not use the expression ‘unconditional love’ in those days, but that’s what Grace was good at giving.”

“She came back from our honeymoon to what must have looked rather a grim situation,” Rainier recalled, “but she faced up to it marvelously. There was not only the challenge of turning a palace into a home, but the very big problem of becoming accepted, liked and respected by the Monégasques and other local residents. Then there was the language difficulty. And it was hard for her to be cut off from her family and friends. She was very homesick for a long time, and even now [in 1974], she still finds it difficult to make friends. Looking back, I was probably too impatient that she should fit in and feel at ease. Often I didn’t understand her outlook on things.”

“I had always lived in big cities,” Grace said. “I had also spent nearly ten years acting—so it was quite a change from an actor’s life to civilian life, so to speak. My real difficulty was to become a normal person after being an actress for so long. For me, at that time, a normal person was someone who made films!”

“We do not do it that way” was a response Grace heard repeatedly from one or another staff member when she made a decision or a suggestion about something as minor as a table setting or the arrangement of flowers. She needed several years to find her own voice, and to be able to reply gently, “Well, we will do it this way now, thank you.” Especially during the first year, when she was virtually cold-shouldered by the entire palace staff, Grace might have felt like the second Mrs. de Winter in
Rebecca
, and only after a long and awkward period was her word or request taken seriously by her staff. For a very long time she felt like a displaced person, not just an expatriate.

By palace custom—to her astonishment—no man was permitted to visit her in the private apartments. Hence, when, for example, a dress designer or perfumer arrived, the representatives had to be women. This was outrageous to her, for she felt that she was under suspicion of impropriety. No, Rainier replied, this has been a palace regulation since … forever. It took her eleven years to change that custom.

Grace’s common sense told her that many centuries-old traditions were absurd—like the requirement that every woman coming to see her had to wear a hat. “I thought it was ridiculous, that a woman would have to go out and buy a hat just to come to lunch. So I abolished that custom—and what a stir
that
caused. People were just appalled!”

But the biggest adjustment, she said, “was being married to a foreigner. There were so many changes to be made all at once, and at first I missed the easier American attitude toward things.”

Years later, Grace was forthright about the early years in Monaco. “I had to separate myself from what had been Grace Kelly, and that was very difficult for me. But I could not be two people—an American actress and the wife of the Prince of Monaco. So, during those first years, I lost my identity. My husband and his life absorbed me until the children came, and it helped when I began service work in Monaco. Then, gradually, I joined up with myself again.”

Contrary to the swirl of wild rumors during the rest of her life, the marriage was a success. “Of course there were stormy periods, as there are in any marriage,” Grace said. “But we discuss things, and neither of us broods or sulks.” Close friends like Judy Kanter recalled that “Rainier was moody and quick-tempered,
and he took some of that out on Grace, because he knew that she would still love him. He once said that a good marriage was not an eternal romantic liaison, but a long conversation.” Grace loved her prince: “I married the man, and not what he represented. I fell in love with him without giving a thought to anything else.”

“She came here with fresh ideas,” said her husband, “and these were not necessarily the views I always had. Sometimes this caused difficulties. One example: My staff had never done a buffet or a dinner with small tables as she suggested, instead of the big, formal table. I hadn’t imagined anything ever changing, but there it was. Eventually, I thought this was a good idea—but the staff, oh …!” After twenty years, Rainier thought Grace enjoyed “some parts” of being a princess, “but she also gets sick of it at times, and she admitted to me that sometimes when she’s at a meeting, listening to people talking stupidities, she feels like exploding. That is probably the hardest thing about her job—never being able to let go.”

This was not helped by the fact that their leisure time together was limited, and they were often too busy with official duties to enjoy the quiet, private hours every couple requires. Eventually they insisted on spending more time at their three-bedroom villa, Rocagel, near La Turbie, a half-hour drive just over the French border. There they shut the door on the world and rarely took servants. Grace cooked, knitted and perfected her skills at artistic arrangements of pressed dried flowers—indeed, she turned a casual hobby into a refined craft. As for Rainier, he happily tended a small farm there and indulged his hobby of fixing antique cars and doing metalwork. “I don’t know what would have happened without our country retreat,” Grace said. “Or I
do
know, but I don’t want to think about it!”