But Grace had reckoned without her mother. On January 15, 1956, only ten days after the official announcement of the engagement, the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
published the first of a lengthy and detailed series of articles, “My Daughter Grace Kelly: Her Life and Romances,” by Mrs. John B. Kelly—”as told to Richard Gehman.” There were ten parts to the series. It had been produced by the King Features Syndicate, and it was circulated to Hearst newspapers all over the country.
The series strung together the most astonishing and embarrassing stream of revelations. “Men began proposing to my daughter Grace,” wrote Mrs. Kelly, “when she was barely fifteen”—which made Prince Rainier, by Ma Kelly’s calculation, “at least the fiftieth” man to ask for Grace’s hand in marriage. No detail was spared, from Grace’s “nasal whine” as a gawky teenager to the fact that Ma Kelly’s pet name for her future son-in-law was “Ray”— “He did bring a ray of light into our home.” Day after day Grace’s mother plodded relentlessly through the chronology of Grace’s love affairs, from the sad story of Harper Davis—”I suppose we never knew how much it meant to her at the time”—through Don Richardson, whom she did not name, to Gene Lyons, whom she called David. “That isn’t his name, but I see no reason for making him wince at the sight of his name in this series.”
The possibility that her own daughter might find cause to wince was, to Mrs. Kelly, a matter of lesser concern. Clark Gable, Ray Milland, William Holden, Bing Crosby—all the names that Ma Kelly herself had worked so hard to keep out of the papers were now paraded and their relationships with Grace discussed. Ma Kelly revealed “these intimate stories,” she explained, “with the hope of setting straight many false rumors.” But she rehashed each rumor with such relish that it seemed she did protest too much. “Next in line was dress designer Oleg Cassini, and I don’t mind saying that this situation had us all concerned. . . . For a time we all felt that she might well go against our wishes and marry him.”
Over the years the Kelly family was frequently to complain about the way that the media treated Grace, but no journalist ever wrote anything more damning than that which the Kellys managed to produce themselves. “[It] struck Grace a terrible blow,” Prince Rainier later remembered. “She just didn’t understand how her own mother could do something like that.”
Margaret Kelly’s justification was contained at the head of each of the ten installments: “Mrs. John B. Kelly’s royalties for this series of articles are being sent in entirety to the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia, the only medical college exclusively for women in the United States.” But this cut no ice with Grace, who could remember an entire childhood of homage to the sacred cause of Women’s Med. “Why couldn’t she have baked some cookies?” she complained in cold rage to Maree Rambo, “or organize a damn benefit? I’ve worked so hard, and now my mother’s going to destroy everything overnight.”
It was the only occasion on which Judy Kanter ever heard Grace speak ill of one of her parents, or admit to any untoward wrinkles in the polished perfection of Kelly family life. Grace phoned her mother in fury when she read the articles, speaking her mind bluntly and plainly for once. She was seething—an adult for ten minutes at least—and her anger shocked her mother into offering some amends. Margaret Kelly started apologizing to friends in a halfhearted sort of way, claiming that the series had been “rushed out of her,” and that she had not had time to check it properly for mistakes.
But anyone who knew Grace’s mother and father had to conclude that both the tone and the message of the series precisely reflected the Kelly’s Victorian and egotistical style. All of their children—from Kell, the winner of the Diamond Sculls, to Grace, the princess—existed essentially to serve their parents’ purposes and for the greater glory of Jack and Margaret Kelly. The fundamental intent of “My Daughter Grace Kelly: Her Life and Romances” was to make clear that if anyone deserved the credit for Grace’s spectacular engagement, it was not Grace herself—whom the articles depicted as something of a foolish virgin—but the parents who had worked so hard to keep her out of trouble, pending the arrival of suitor no. 50. One of Jack Kelly’s little jokes at the engagement news conference summed it all up. “Well, Mother,” he said, referring to the fact that Grace was the last of his daughters to get engaged, “I guess now we’re all sold out.”
Grace understood it perfectly. “First I had to fight the studio to avoid being a commodity,” she complained to Judy Kanter. “Now my own family trades me on the open market. Doesn’t it ever end? When do I get to be just a person?”
“Never” was the short, hard answer to that. Making the particular marriage choice that she did was Grace Kelly’s definitive farewell to that most basic of human comforts—being able to mind one’s own business. It was particularly painful that her own mother should be the messenger, but it is the devil’s pact with celebrity that famous people can never hope to be “just a person” again.
That did not stop Grace from trying, however. Looking back over the extraordinary story of her extraordinary engagement, it was, in one sense, highly deceptive of her not to have given any advance hint to her friends and family of her developing relationship with her prince. The aim-for-the-top in Grace realized how discretion was a crucial passkey to the world she hoped to enter, and, as usual, that part of her got what it wanted. “I knew from the start,” said Rainier shortly after his marriage, “that I could trust the Princess. It was one of the reasons why I felt so surely that she was the person for me.”
But Grace had had another, equally powerful reason why she should want to keep even the fact of her correspondence with Rainier to herself. Though it seemed to be forgotten sometimes in the blitz of interviews and lights, there was a genuine, private reality to the engagement of the prince and the film star, and the letters that they wrote to each other had contained the real heart of that. It was not much, but it was one corner into which the world could not pry, somewhere that Grace could walk hand in hand with her prince, unwatched and undisturbed in the privacy of their secret garden.
17
TRUE LOVE
H
igh Society
was MGM’s musical adaptation of
The Philadelphia Story,
the comedy of manners that Don Richardson had chosen in 1949 as the graduation play of Grace Kelly, actress-to-be. Now, in the middle of January 1956, Grace, princess-to-be, was due to play Tracy Lord with songs by Cole Porter. It was to prove her graduation from Hollywood.
MGM had lined up a cast that glittered with singing talent— Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and the jazz musician Louis Armstrong—and since Grace had never sung before, the film’s musical co-director, Johnny Green, took it for granted that her solid but rather artless voice could not survive in such high-powered company. “I had spent a lot of time,” he told James Spada in 1986, “listening to any number of samples of Grace’s dialogue—the timbre, the quality of her voice and diction—and I listened to her sing informally in my office . . . . I decided that she was not capable of singing her own track.”
The musical director started making arrangements to find Grace a voice double, but he had not reckoned on the ambition and willpower of the actress. “She insisted on singing her own track,” he recalled, “and she came on like Refrigerator Perry.”
Grace had been taking singing lessons since the moment she was offered the part in the summer of 1955. She had one spoof song to sing off-key, and one to sing properly—”True Love,” a guileless and syrupy ballad that she was due to perform with Bing Crosby. It was a matter of pride for Grace that she should deliver her own song in her own voice, and when Green disagreed, she took her case to the very top. She went to see Dore Schary.
“I lost,” Green remembered ruefully. MGM did not hire a voice double, and Grace sang “True Love” beautifully. It was smooth and simple, and it seemed to take on extra strength from the unentangled directness of her voice. Grace was a calm, dark contralto, and her serenity turned a slightly sappy tune into a classic. “At the end,” recalled the musical director,” she and Bing sang in
harmony
yet . . . . She made a real monkey out of me, because the record didn’t just go Gold, it went Platinum!”
Grace had escaped from the reporters and photographers in New York to the comparative peace of the MGM back lot, and she tried very hard to pretend it was business as usual. Rainier was due to join her at the end of January, and the actress buckled down to work with her customary professionalism. She avoided any special fuss about her engagement and coming marriage, which was scheduled for Monaco in the second half of April. Taking her cue, her costars and the crew politely pretended they were not sharing a soundstage with the world’s most famous fiancée.
On the third day of filming, however, Grace could hold it in no longer. Several scenes in the story called for Tracy Lord to show off her engagement ring, and the studio props department had provided Grace with a ring whose centerpiece was an implausibly large, paste diamond.
“Do you think,” Grace shyly asked the director Charles Walters, “that I might wear my
own
engagement ring?”
Walters could see the joke immediately, but he pretended to be serious. It all depended, he told Grace solemnly. He would have to see the ring to make sure that it was good enough.
“Well, next day,” remembers Celeste Holm, who was one of Grace’s costars, “she came in with this diamond as big as a skating rink. It was beautiful, just beautiful! Normally I don’t care for diamonds—that terrible dead whiteness. But this one had color. It was wonderful! It made me think of the first prism I ever saw when I was a little girl in kindergarten, it was so full of life and sparkle.”
Grace’s real, emerald-cut diamond was as huge as the paste gem given her by the props department, and there was a general chorus of “oohs” and “ahs” as people saw it flashing on her finger. Grace colored modestly. “Yes, it is sweet, isn’t it?” she said— and that became the joke of the set. “We never let her forget it,” remembers Celeste Holm. “Grace’s ‘sweet’ diamond ring! We teased her about it until the last day of filming.”
John Pochna traveled out to Hollywood ahead of Rainier to find a villa that the prince could rent. The lawyer had no difficulty finding a secluded Bel Air mansion, but he did experience some trouble getting all the prince’s bills paid. After Pochna had sent out several checks bearing the prince’s signature—to the landlord and to the laundry service, among others—he discovered from the bank that the checks had not been presented.
“Did you receive our check?” he inquired of each of the payees.
“Oh, yes,” he was told. “Thank you very much. We have got it framed and hanging on the wall.”
Rainier was not treated quite so worshipfully when he went to visit MGM. Dore Schary arranged a lunch in his honor in the cramped surroundings of the executive dining room. “Grace was there,” remembers Celeste Holm, “along with the prince and his father, who was a charming elder gentleman who had flown out specially to meet Grace. He reminded me of Clifton Webb.”
Celeste Holm could see that Grace was strangely on edge. “She was white,” she remembers. “She was so nervous, and suddenly I thought, ‘I’ve got it! If the prince and his father don’t like the studio, they will never let Grace return. She won’t be able to make any more movies.’” Sitting besides Celeste Holm was Charles Walters, the director, who, Holm realized with horror, “had never been heard to issue a sentence without a four-letter word in it.”
Walters behaved himself, as it happened. It was Dore Schary who committed the faux pas. “Someone asked, ‘How big is Monaco?’” Celeste Holm remembers, “and they gave us this answer in square feet, or something which sounded quite a large number. Well, then there was a pause while everyone did quick arithmetic, and suddenly Dore Schary, who could figure faster than the rest of us, said, ‘That’s not even as big as our back lot!’ I had the feeling that a giant chandelier had suddenly crashed right in the middle of the table into a thousand pieces. There was this dead pause, and I knew there and then that Grace would never make another picture again.”
The decision, in fact, had already been made. From the moment their engagement was announced, Rainier and Grace had been repeatedly asked if Grace’s marriage meant the end of her movie career, and they had both answered vaguely—Grace because she did not know, Rainier because he did. The prince had absolutely no doubt that Grace would have to give up her acting. He had first been attracted to her because she was
not
like a film star, and he could see no way at all that it would be either practical or dignified for his wife to keep on working as a Hollywood performer.
But Rainier was not yet certain how difficult it would be for Grace to break her MGM contract, and he had been made sharply aware that, while Grace was already a princess so far as her own culture was concerned, his own approval rating was precarious. “He’s not good enough for a Kelly,” stated a Chicago paper. “She is too well-bred a girl to marry the silent partner in a gambling parlor.” Treading carefully, Rainier took advantage of the melee that followed the engagement announcement at Henry Avenue to give only vague answers to questions about Grace’s future career.
But the questions kept getting asked, and the more that reporters badgered Rainier, the more his princeliness came to the fore. His Serene Highness resented the assumption that being an American screen goddess was a more important occupation than presiding over the place that he called home. When Rainier first met Howell Conant at the beginning of January, he had extended his hand in greeting, then grasped the photographer’s hand with a curious combination of a squeeze and a twist that brought Conant to his knees. It was Rainier’s idea of a joke, and Conant accepted it as such. But the message was clear. There was a new boss in Grace’s life, and it was
not
the demands of Hollywood publicity.