Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (33 page)

It was an uncanny replay of the previous summer—the Riviera romance, the unofficial engagement, the dashing and unconventional Latin lover—and when Grace arrived home, she found the reaction was very much the same. The interviewers pried, the gossip columnists speculated disapprovingly, and her studio evinced not the slightest enthusiasm for her latest romantic adventure. Most serious of all—though Grace could hardly have expected otherwise—her parents created endless difficulties.

“They raised hell,” remembers Jean-Pierre Aumont. “Both of them were very strict. She told me that about them—especially her father.”

The couple wrote letters to each other and struggled with the delays and expense of the transatlantic telephone system. It was the autumn of 1955 before Jean-Pierre was able to get to America to see Grace again, and by then it was clear that his moment had passed. The bloom was off the rose. There were too many arguments to be won—”I was Jewish, I had a little girl, I was French,” Aumont remembers. When the French film star took a hard look at the obstacles besetting marriage to Grace, he had to acknowledge, like Oleg Cassini before him, that he could not heave the stone uphill alone. Grace herself was not admitting defeat, but now she was home, she was no longer committed to him with her previous abandon. The situation seemed to demand some extra and ultimate signal of decisiveness from her that was not forthcoming.

“There were a lot of things,” says Jean-Pierre today, “that were not exactly right. . . . Anyhow, I was perfectly happy with how it all turned out, and she too. Finally”—he smiles philosophically— “the best is for the best.”

“Gracie,” asked Ma Kelly casually when she heard that Jean-Pierre would be coming to America, “shall I ask Mr. Aumont to visit us in Philadelphia?”

“Mother,” replied Grace evenly, “that’s entirely up to you.”

“I knew then,” Mrs. Kelly later related, “that she was not planning to marry him. She was still waiting for her prince.”

Mrs. Kelly was talking figuratively, of course—aided by a fair measure of hindsight. At the time that she discussed Jean-Pierre Aumont with Grace in the late summer of 1955, she knew only that her daughter had had a fleeting and formal meeting with Rainier of Monaco in the course of the Cannes Film Festival.

But unknown to her mother—or to anyone else—more had come of that brief encounter than Grace admitted at the time. In 1989, in the course of interviews with the American writer Jeffrey Robinson, Prince Rainier revealed for the first time that his rushed handshaking with Grace on the afternoon of May 6, 1955, had led to a correspondence which both of them kept secret. Being a well-brought-up girl, Grace had sent the prince a thank-you letter a few days after their meeting. Rainier had been only too happy to reply to the attractive actress whose calmness and lack of movie-star mannerisms had impressed him.

“I was pleasurably surprised,” he later explained, “because I suppose I had been influenced by what I saw on the films, and read about, and this was nothing like what I had expected.”

It was naturally polite for Grace to write back to His Highness, so by the high summer of 1955, letters were flowing steadily between the two.

Grace was a conscientious, but never a very profound, letter writer. The short, eager notes that she sprayed out to friends in her round, childish hand were testimony to genuine feeling that she could not always find the words to express. Rainier, on the other hand, was a most winning correspondent. He had a fluent command of both French and English, and while frequently cautious in his conversation, he was quite the opposite on the page— wise and quirky, with a knack for disarming honesty. Shy in real life, Rainier came alive in his private letters, which flowed long and naturally. His correspondence had the charm of making people feel that he was holding their hands as he talked to them, so it was not surprising that Grace soon came to feel that she knew her prince quite well.

The summer of 1955 was a time of personal stocktaking for Grace. Her romance with Jean-Pierre had foundered on the usual problems, while her relationship with Oleg Cassini had lost its momentum. Her Oscar had raised her professional career to a point from which it might be difficult to make much more progress— and here was a young prince come a-courting. When Judy Kanter met up with Grace that September, she was struck by her friend’s strange mixture of contentment and restlessness.

Grace had invited Judy to her Fifth Avenue apartment because she said that she needed to talk—the first time in their two-and-a-half year friendship that she had ever admitted to needing anything. Since her return from France, Grace explained, she had been trying to devote more time and energy to simple, non-career things. She was trying to focus on her family. She had helped Lizanne with her wedding. She had been enjoying long, lazy weekends down at Ocean City playing with Peggy’s two little daughters, Meg and Mary Lee, and when she was in New York, she had taken to spending time with Carolyn Scott, who was now married, with two little girls.

All this had set Grace to thinking. Sally Parrish was expecting. Bettina Thompson had a three-year-old. Maree Frisby’s daughter, Linda, was coming up to four. Her friends were passing into a new phase. As Grace did a roll call of her contemporaries, every one of them a young mother, the tears welled up in her eyes.

“I want all of that,” she said to Judy Kanter.

Then, looking hard at her friend, as if wondering if it was safe for her to reveal something that was very, very private, she added the real problem.

“But I want more,” she said.

Grace Kelly threw herself earnestly into every new part that she played. It was a sort of therapy for her. Each new character offered her wise words to say and a fresh spirit to inhabit. They were practical tryouts for a young woman who had encountered some difficulty in foreseeing the real-life implications of her dreams, and when she struck a dramatic note she liked, she would weave a strand of that character into her own personality.

It was a complex and interactive two-way process—the parts that appealed to her existing impulses, and the parts which helped her to locate something new in her still-developing self. But the film character that Grace was rehearsing in the late summer of 1955 as she took stock of her life and wrote letters to Prince Rainier was quite uncanny in the mirror that it held to real life. Grace was cast as Alexandra—the heroine of Ferenc Molnar’s drama
The Swan
—a spirited young blonde of good family who finds herself wooed by a prince, and who is compelled to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the royal life and to decide whether she really wants to marry him.

This anything-but-everyday dilemma struck a special chord in Grace.
“The Swan
was one role,” remembers Jay Kanter, “that she was desperately anxious to do. In fact, I think it was she who suggested it.”

Grace had played the part of Alexandra in her days as a television actress.
The Swan
had twice been a hit on Broadway in the 1920s, and now it provided a solution to Grace’s long-running impasse with MGM. The studio liked the idea as well. MGM’s story department and its difficult star had finally found a project upon which they could agree. Falling over himself to patch up past differences, Dore Schary said that he would take a break from his duties as studio production chief so that he could oversee the movie personally. Grace was given single top billing, the only time in her career she enjoyed that rare and exclusive eminence, and her supporting players were appropriately prestigious. Louis Jourdan was cast as Dr. Agi, the handsome but penniless tutor whose role in the plot was to offer the young Alexandra romance without wealth or status. Alec Guinness played her other suitor, the wife-seeking Prince Albert, whom Guinness embellished with all the wry touches that Grace had admired on foreign-film night back in her American Academy days.

MGM decided against building themselves a backlot palace. The American fantasy of a stately home already existed in Biltmore House, the replica of a Loire chateau constructed by George Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1890s. Much be-turreted on the outside, Biltmore House was positively monumental in its interior layout and furnishings. It laid claim to being the largest mansion in the United States, and Howell Conant went down to Asheville to shoot Grace on location there. He photographed her sitting, fresh, white, and waiflike, dwarfed by the statuary of the grand staircase. He followed her through her fencing lessons as she dueled and danced time and again with Louis Jourdan—Grace had insisted on doing all the fencing scenes herself, without a stand-in. Most strangely, Conant caught the actress beside a jumble of discarded lights and filters, cut off from the rest of the production and lost in her own thoughts as she sat alone in a chair so grand and gilded that one could easily have mistaken it for a throne. It was difficult to avoid the fancy that Grace was trying on a few things for size in the weeks that she rattled round this extravagant, robber-baron dream of how a baronial home should be.

“A little too big for me!’’ remarked Jay Kanter wryly, shaking his head, on a visit he made down to Asheville.

“I love it!” replied Grace enthusiastically.

The Swan
was not one of Grace’s more memorable movies. It suffered from too many words and too little action, and its strongest lines, which explained the tide and finally gave some meaning to Grace’s part, were not delivered until the closing scene.

“Think what it means to be a swan,” says the prince to Alexandra, “to glide like a dream on the smooth surface of the lake and never go on the shore. On dry land, where ordinary people walk, the swan is awkward, even ridiculous. When she waddles up the bank, she painfully resembles a different kind of bird.”

“A goose?” asks Alexandra/Grace wonderingly.

“I’m afraid so,” replies the prince. “So there she must stay, out on the lake, silent, white, majestic. Be a bird, but never fly. Know one song, but never sing it until the moment of her death.”

This wise but rather dispiriting analysis persuades Alexandra/ Grace that she should do her duty and get married to her prince. Offered the choice between a life of passion and a life of position, the heroine opts for status. She has been raised as a swan, and she decides that she must go on being a swan forever. “Take me in, Albert,” she says dutifully, uttering the final words of the film and putting her arm gravely through the prince’s arm—no kissing—to walk with him into the palace.

It was not an ending to send audiences floating dreamily out of the theater.
The Swan
enshrined a reality that people go to the movies to forget. But it did provide Grace with some instructive role-playing in the seriousness of life out on the lake. Professionalism, determination, composure, self-control—being a princess apparently called for qualities that were not so different from being a movie star.

Based on nothing more than one photographed handshake in
Paris Match,
European newspapers had started speculating about the possibility of a romance between Grace and the Prince of Monaco. The stories reached America, and Grace found herself having to deny them. “There is no romance,” she told Rupert Allan indignantly. “I’ve not heard one word from him—never heard one word from him, one way or the other.”

Grace’s indignation was plausible. It was, on the face of it, ludicrous to suppose that there should be any romance between herself and His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III. But the fact that she felt it necessary to lie to an old friend about the letters that

Rainier was now sending her on a regular basis showed the line that her thoughts were beginning to take. Real love with a real prince—might it actually be possible? Grace could not yet be sure where her secret correspondence with Rainier might be taking her, but she did know that premature disclosure and the risk of publicity could bring everything to a grinding halt. Grace the practical was taking good care of Grace the dreamer.

The filming of
The Swan
ended in December 1955 with some studio sequences shot in Hollywood, and a few days before Christmas Rupert Allan went round to see Grace for a seasonal glass of champagne. He found her packing furiously. She was due back in Philadelphia for the traditional Kelly Christmas party, and she had received news that Rainier was planning to drop in. The prince had arranged his first-ever visit to the United States. He was coming to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, apparently for the purpose of a medical checkup, and he had asked if he could pay a social call at Henry Avenue. It seemed a curious occurrence, right out of the blue, for the Prince of Monaco to come calling at East Falls, Philadelphia, but Grace was studiedly offhand about it.