The Girl in White Gloves

by Kerri Maher

  She was relieved when she and Ava and Frank sat down to a plate of fried chicken, and Ava said, “Congrats, Gracie. Poor Judy, eh?” She was the first to mention Garland all night, and Grace was so relieved.

  “I know!” she exclaimed. “I feel terrible for her.”

  “Don’t do that,” said Frank. “You dames always do that. You won fair and square, Grace. Don’t let anyone tell you you weren’t as good as Judy.”

  “He would know,” said Ava, and Grace couldn’t quite tell if she was being sarcastic or not about Frank’s Supporting Actor win from a year before, for From Here to Eternity.

  “I would know. Thank you very much,” Frank said with an edge to his voice; Grace decided it was wise to leave that subject alone.

  “Well, I’m glad at least you said something,” said Grace to Ava. “Everyone else is studiously avoiding the entire subject of Judy Garland.”

  “Well, enjoy it now,” said Frank, “’cause the papers tomorrow sure as hell won’t ignore her.”

  Ava waved off her husband’s doom and gloom, and focused her heavily kohled eyes on Grace. “So, doll, what’s next for this Oscar-winning actress?”

  “Nothing, unless MGM takes me off suspension,” said Grace. “They wouldn’t even get me a new dress for tonight, which shows how much confidence they have in me.”

  Frank smiled, and it was a little evil. “Now you can tell them what to do with their contract.”

  “We’ll see,” said Grace, who had a feeling her best hope with Schary was probably Bing. Man to man and all that rubbish.

  But as it turned out, Dore Schary sent Grace a lovely arrangement of flowers the next morning with a note saying, “Congratulations. Let’s talk soon.”

  Grace floated around on a cloud of congratulations, with invitations from directors and producers and other actors pouring in like never before—in both Los Angeles and New York, though it was all for film work. It appeared her Broadway dreams were as out of reach as ever. She’d once thought that Hollywood could help her get roles on the stage, that Broadway was a higher peak on the same mountain. Now she saw that theater was a separate range altogether, and it was shrouded in fog, harder than ever to see. But the view from where she was standing at the moment looked pretty spectacular, she had to admit.

  She should have known it wouldn’t last. Just a day or two later, while waiting for a dental appointment, Grace flipped through a recent issue of McCall’s, stopping to skim an article about the Oscar contenders. Of all people, her father had been quoted: “I always thought it would be Peggy whose name would be up in lights one day.”

  She wanted to crawl under the covers of her large new bed in her perfectly appointed Fifth Avenue apartment—a bed and apartment she’d always assumed she’d be sharing with Oleg, whom she suddenly missed as wretchedly as she had in those first days after their breakup.

  Grace wondered if her mother knew her husband had said this so publicly—it was one thing for it to be a family joke that her father preferred Peggy, and another for him to say it to a national magazine. Grace had spoken to her mother several times since winning the Oscar, and she was never anything less than effusively proud: “Your performance really was superior to Garland’s, dear”; “The ladies at the club are planning a luncheon in your honor, so be sure to reserve Memorial Day Sunday”; “I always knew those years at the Academy would pay off, and look!”; “What’s next, darling? The sky’s the limit now!” Even her father had said to her face, or at least into her ear down the long-distance phone line, “Congratulations, Gracie. I’m impressed.” The two-faced . . . bastard.

  Inevitably, a few reporters called Grace to ask what she thought about her father’s comment in McCall’s, and she’d never been more glad of her training so she could pull off an elegant laugh and an “Oh, that’s just Daddy” without so much as a crack in her voice.

  And as Frank Sinatra had predicted, she eventually had to contend with a deluge of reporting and opinion pieces voicing outrage that Judy Garland hadn’t won instead. Judy herself graciously sent an arrangement of pink peonies as a token of her own congratulations. Grace had immediately sent a handwritten note of thanks along with the finest baby blanket she could purchase. She tried to shut out the chatter surrounding her, but it was hard—she’d never thought she’d win, hadn’t even prepared to win. The widespread critical opinion that she shouldn’t have won—maybe they, too, thought it should have been Peggy if not Judy, Grace reflected bitterly—conspired to make her feel lower than she had in years. Even Hitch’s very kind note—“Don’t let the naysayers get to you. You’re my most sacred cow”—only made her feel better for about an hour. Why, then, was he working with Doris bloody Day on his next picture?

  Worst of all was putting on a cheerful face to help Lizanne plan her June wedding while Oleg was photographed all over Manhattan with a different beauty every night. Her younger sister was getting married while her father still preferred her older sister. And Kell was as ever the untouchable golden boy.

  Only her old friend Maree saw the chinks in her armor that spring. She and Grace stood in the large church garden in East Falls as scores of children in pastel clothes scampered about finding Easter eggs. “It’s not as picture-perfect as it might seem,” Maree said, her tone dry. “In about two minutes there will be tears about which siblings have the most eggs, and in two hours, every single one of them will be beside themselves when the sugar wears off, and the mothers will have to do the thing we all swore we’d never do, and let the television be the nanny while we take naps because we were up too late hiding eggs around the house. And the husbands will have left to play golf.”

  Grace laughed. “You always did know just what I needed to hear.”

  “Oh, and did I mention the ham that’ll be getting ever drier in the oven, waiting for said husbands to return, smelling of whiskey and cigars?” Maree added.

  Grace laughed harder.

  “But of course the daddies will be the children’s heroes, because they will return from the golf course with more chocolate to ruin their appetites for the ham,” said Maree.

  “Sounds lovely,” said Grace, wiping a tear of laughter from her cheek.

  “Dreamy,” deadpanned Maree, and for just a moment, Grace felt grateful for the trials of her own life, which she had a feeling Maree would have accepted in a heartbeat if Grace offered to trade.

  * * *

  Grace hadn’t planned to go back to the south of France just a year after filming To Catch a Thief, especially as she knew memories of the best of her romance with Oleg would be lurking in every bottle of wine, every sidewalk bistro and cobblestone street, but the first of May found her in a first-class seat flying over the Atlantic as the sun descended in an obscenely pink-and-orange sky. She was heading to the Cannes Film Festival, where The Country Girl would be prominently featured.

  In the weeks since Easter, however, her life had begun to feel a little less shaky, with her MGM contract back in place so she could star in The Swan, the Molnár play she’d done on television years ago that was being made into a movie and produced by Dore Schary himself. And there was the musical version of Philadelphia Story that Bing had mentioned that was being scripted and set to music as she sat on the plane, as well as the promise of playing Maggie in a film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, just as soon as it was done with its Broadway run. Grace felt she was getting a kind of satisfying revenge on Broadway in becoming a sought-after actress for movie versions of great stage plays. The Country Girl had been the beginning, and with Swan and Cat lined up next, who knew what else was possible?

  And the mending of her heart had been unexpectedly sped up by the secret but extremely satisfying attention of darkly handsome Jean-Pierre Aumont, who would also be in Cannes. He’d phoned her out of the blue to congratulate her on her Oscar, and they’d fallen into a comfortable, often laugh-out-loud-funny conversation that continued over dinne
r and drinks about poodles and pastries and the television work they’d done together years ago and lately given up for the bigger screen. “Let’s keep this on the q.t.,” Grace had said in his rumpled bed the morning before they left for France in separate airplanes. He’d agreed. Grace had the sense that both she and Jean-Pierre knew and accepted the temporary nature of their affair. He was the first man she’d made love to without a care for a future, and she found surprising freedom and satisfaction in this kind of affection. It was something to enjoy in passing, like a sandcastle before the tide carried it away.

  On the train from Paris to Cannes, imagining her private liaison with Jean-Pierre that night, Grace hoped no one would notice how flushed with desire she felt as she knitted an afghan for Lizanne as a bridal shower gift. She imagined her little sister and her new husband sharing it on cold nights before a fire as they read or watched a favorite television program. But her mind kept wandering over to the much more risqué evening she and Jean-Pierre had planned.

  Grace was startled out of her reverie when Gladys, the Baroness de Segonzac, whom Grace had met on the set of To Catch a Thief, suggested they have lunch in the dining car. Suddenly ravenous at the suggestion of food, Grace agreed and set aside her knitting. The dining car was a clinking, buzzing hive of actors and studio personnel heading to the festival, and she and Gladys joined Olivia de Havilland and her husband, Pierre Galante, an editor at Paris Match magazine. They began with crunchy carrot-and-radish salads and conversation about what movies they were most excited to see, and gossip about slighted couturiers and illicit dalliances. To Grace’s relief, no one looked at her askance or asked any sort of leading question, and she felt safe in thinking that her affair with Aumont was as confidential as they both wanted.

  When their main courses arrived and Gladys and Olivia began chatting about an upcoming project, Pierre turned to Grace and said, “I’m glad I ran into you, as it saves me trying to track you down on the infernal phone lines that will be tied up all week.”

  “Oh?” Grace said warily. She could tell he wanted something, and her schedule was already jammed with promotional interviews and photographs and dinners. She wanted to preserve the precious few hours she had to herself, especially to share a few of them with Jean-Pierre.

  “I know, I know,” Pierre said, as if reading her mind. “You don’t have time for anything else. I respect that. But this isn’t just any old idea. Have you heard of Monaco?”

  Grace nodded. “I have. In fact,” she said, “I just read an interview with its crown prince in Collier’s. Prince Raynor? Am I remembering that correctly?”

  “Prince Rainier,” Pierre corrected her lightly. “He’s a young man, very witty, and the most eligible bachelor in Europe, as you can imagine.”

  Grace laughed. “I can only imagine the duchesses who beset him with their aristocratic daughters.”

  Pierre chuckled. “Indeed. Well, our French readership is quite taken with him, and we’ve been searching for a way to make this film festival more accessible to those same readers. And I thought what better way than to have Hollywood royalty meet local royalty?”

  Grace found this flattery so hilarious, she nearly spit out her mouthful of steak tartare. “You must be joking,” she said when she recovered her composure. “Hollywood royalty, as you call it, is a lot of bricklayers’ children and former circus performers. What would a genuine prince want with one of us? And furthermore, if you were going to pick a grande dame of Hollywood, you’d be better off asking your wife to talk to her Gone with the Wind costar. Vivien won her second Oscar three years ago.”

  Undeterred, a look of open amusement and determination on his face, Pierre replied, “Miss Leigh is a wonder, it’s true. But she’d be the expected choice. You are the woman of the hour, the most recent winner of the statue, and—forgive me for being so crass as to point this out—you are the one most often described as a princess.”

  “An ice princess, you mean.” Grace frowned.

  “No,” said Pierre firmly. “That went away with Country Girl. People see you differently now.”

  Grace was aware that Pierre was using flattery to get what he wanted, and at the moment, she wasn’t sure if she cared. He also seemed to understand how she wished to be portrayed to the public, which was an appealing notion since he was the editor of a large magazine. And the idea of stepping off the usual junket was pretty enticing as well.

  “I’m not saying yes,” Grace warned, “but tell me more about what you’re thinking.”

  Chapter 22

  Prince Rainier was close to an hour late. And she was wearing everyone’s least favorite dress—a floral taffeta number that Judybird had said made her look like a pear—since the beautiful rose-colored ensemble she’d planned to wear was a rumpled mess that couldn’t be ironed because the electrical workers were on strike that day, which meant no electricity to press dresses or fix hair. Gladys told her not to worry. “It’s one article in a gossip magazine no one reads outside France,” she reasoned. “It will be off the shelves and a distant memory by July.”

  But Grace was worried now, having already toured the gardens of the palace with Prince Rainier’s assistant and a flock of photographers, because everything seemed to be going wrong. She’d practically lost her breakfast on the hairpin turns to the palace. It had been so harrowing, she hadn’t been able to enjoy the stunning coastal beauty of the little country—Excusez-moi, principauté! At first, she’d actually been glad the Prince was late, as it gave her a chance to steady herself.

  Then, as time ticked by, only one person had apologized for the Prince’s incredible tardiness. Grace couldn’t see why his lunch in Cap Ferrat couldn’t have been as properly scheduled as her own crowded agenda. She hadn’t been late. Well, she had a dinner to get to, and she wouldn’t be late for that, either, even if it meant leaving Monaco before the Prince arrived.

  Anyway, she thought irritably, the palace wasn’t even that grand. Compared to Buckingham Palace or Versailles, it was a positive cottage. The best thing about it was the setting—atop a steep wall of rock jutting straight up from the Mediterranean, the stone fortress was imposing enough to have given pirates pause in the eighteenth century. But the rooms inside were dreary and small. The dark Throne Room, where she sat now, hardly lived up to its name.

  Just as she was consulting her watch for the umpteenth time, about to say she’d had enough, Prince Rainier was walking briskly toward her, hand outstretched, a look of genuine embarrassment and apology on his face. When they shook hands, he gushed, “I am terribly sorry, Miss Kelly. I have been trying to break away for an hour, but . . .” He shook his head. “I won’t bore you with the details, especially as you have so little time left here. Please, accept my deepest apologies and allow me to escort you.”

  His unaffected, apologetic demeanor was so unexpected, it caught Grace by surprise. And his voice was so musical, layered like a finely played cello, complemented by a British-leaning accent—which was also unexpected, as she’d assumed he would sound French. Disarmed, and suddenly finding herself a touch off-balance, Grace replied, “Thank you, Your Serene Highness,” as she’d been coached to address the Prince, dropping her head and bending her knees in a curtsy the nuns from her childhood would have approved of. She heard the cameras snapping all around them. “I’d be delighted.”

  “I am relieved and grateful, Miss Kelly. And please, call me Rainier.”

  “Please call me Grace.” How odd. I’m on a first-name basis with a prince.

  He nodded with a smile and offered her his elbow. As she threaded her arm through his, Grace realized that she was slightly taller than he was in her pumps—or maybe, at best, the same height. Someone should have told her to wear flats! This day had been a sartorial disaster. Not for the Prince, however—in his dark suit, pastel tie, and sunglasses, he looked uncreased and fresh. Clearly no one was on strike in Monaco! She only wished he didn’t have that s
lim mustache above his lips, as it reminded her too much of Oleg.

  “Your gardens are just marvelous,” Grace said, hoping a compliment would assure the Prince there were no hard feelings.

  “I’m glad you like them,” he said, and she detected a nervous eagerness in his voice. “Have you been on the wall? There are some lovely flowers there as well.”

  Grace shook her head, and he immediately steered her out of the gloomy Throne Room and into the colorfully frescoed Hercule Gallery, which was rather lovely, she thought on second glance. They descended the grand horseshoe staircase and went into the internal courtyard. “I must confess,” he said in her ear, “I don’t love the palace itself. It’s so dark, and not full of the best memories for me. I do love the grounds, however. Monaco’s sunshine is its greatest asset, and I like to enjoy it as much as I can.”

  She agreed, but she was startled by his readiness to critique his own palace and confess such a personal detail about his memories of it. “I quite agree about the sunshine,” Grace replied, “which I first enjoyed last year when I filmed a movie not far from here—”

  “To Catch a Thief,” said Rainier. “I’ve seen it. You were a pleasure to watch, if I may say so. The scene of your picnic with Cary Grant isn’t far from here, you know. Less than half an hour’s drive.”

  “Is it?!” Grace liked knowing this; it instantly made her feel more at ease, even at home, in this strange stone palace.

  “And I live in a villa much more like John Robie’s,” said the Prince. “I wish I could have met you there. But even though I think it would have made much prettier pictures, the magazine wanted us to meet at the palace.”

  “You don’t live here?” Grace asked in surprise.

  “No, no,” he said. “This is my office.”