High Society

by Donald Spoto

  Metro, meanwhile, was casting a film version of Tennessee Williams’s controversial, prize-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, still running in New York. On July 9, the studio announced that it had bought the rights specifically for Grace to play the leading role of the sex-starved Maggie, but the movie could not be made until the Broadway run had ended. That did not occur until November 1956, after Grace had quit Hollywood, had married and was expecting her first child. The role of Maggie, perhaps more suitably, went to Elizabeth Taylor.

  1* After a visit to Washington on May 24, 1961, the Prince and Princess of Monaco sent First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy a personal gift of a platinum and diamond necklace with matching earrings, which Mrs. Kennedy wore in private life and to various state dinners at the White House in 1962 and 1963.

  2* The apartment changed hands several times after Grace’s departure. The building had been a cooperative for many years when the seventh-floor unit was sold, in 2006, for over $24 million.

  3* That season, Grace was finding her own voice in all departments of her life. Her agents had capitalized on her fame in a deal whereby Grace’s picture was used in ads for Lux soap, the reason for her “movie star complexion.” But to a Chicago Sun-Times journalist, Grace confided the real secret of her beauty: “Soap never touches my face!” She relied on plain cool water.

  4* It has been repeatedly and wrongly claimed that Metro had the idea to produce The Swan after (and because of) the announcement of Grace’s engagement to Prince Rainier. But this project was suggested by George Kelly, and his niece had brought it to Metro in January 1955—four months before her introduction to Rainier. Grace signed the contract to perform in the film three weeks before she first heard Rainier’s name and was dragooned into meeting him for publicity purposes.

  NINE

  Playing the Princess

  I want to be a queen.

  —GRACE (AS PRINCESS ALEXANDRA) IN THE SWAN

  THEIR FIRST EXCHANGE OF LETTERS CROSSED IN THE international mails.

  After returning to America, Grace wrote a formal note of appreciation to Prince Rainier III, thanking him for the welcome he had extended to her. At precisely the same time, Rainier wrote Miss Grace Kelly a formal note of thanks for interrupting her busy professional schedule to visit him. So began a lively and frequent correspondence—an epistolary courtship instead of one conducted in person. According to Rainier, he and Grace “revealed more and more with each letter.” They wrote about the world and they wrote about life, about themselves, their feelings and their histories. It had been easy for him to find lovers, Rainier admitted (as it had been for her)—“but my greatest difficulty was knowing a girl long enough and intimately enough to find out if we [were] really soul mates as well as lovers.” In their letters over seven months, they had time to become pen pals and then friends, “long before they ever held hands,” as he added.

  In the letters, as Rainier recalled, they gradually came to see the similarities in their different backgrounds. They were both public figures uncomfortable with their status as celebrities. They were both serious Catholics with more than a mere Sunday sense of religion: they made no public displays, but faith was more than an inherited tradition—it was at the core of their lives. Their friends knew that religious practices were not burdensome obligations for these two; they were free and purposeful expressions of a deep if mysterious commitment. And they both had enough experience to distinguish mere infatuation from love. Rainier found Grace gentle, poised and unaffected, and he shared her sense of irony, her fey (and occasionally risqué) humor. She found him warm and unpretentious, and he had the kind of European charm and sophistication she found irresistible in men—and of course, even during their brief introduction, there had been an immediate and intense mutual attraction. They came to believe that they were destined to be a couple.

  “I didn’t save them,” Rainier said about the letters Grace sent before their marriage. “Maybe I should have, but that’s not the way I am. I don’t keep things like that.” As for the letters he sent to her, he remained uncertain if she kept them—and if she did, he had no idea of their location, even when he and the children sorted through her personal effects after her death. “Even if I could find the letters,” he said in 1987, “I simply couldn’t let anyone trespass.” In any case, what happened at the second encounter of Grace and Rainier indicates that by the end of the year—lacking any meeting beyond the afternoon of May 6—they had become sufficiently acquainted in writing to give more than whimsical consideration to the prospect of marriage.

  Grace never discussed this early correspondence, but she did say, “I was especially impressed with Rainier’s long view of things—he saw the large picture, the context. He didn’t look only to the moment, but to the meaning and the effects of relationships. We found we had a lot in common, and we had the same needs and hopes for our future, too. I was dissatisfied with my life, and he with his.”

  The prince, who marked his thirty-second birthday on May 31, 1955, had governed Monaco’s half square mile and four hundred acres—half the size of New York’s Central Park—since 1949. To readers of international glossy magazines, he was unfairly portrayed as a bland, sporting bachelor prince, the claimant to one of Europe’s oldest thrones, occupied uninterruptedly for seven centuries by the Grimaldi family. Contrary to the superficial and misleading description of him merely as a leisure-time sailor and racing-car enthusiast, he was in fact an educated, intelligent man with a highly enlightened business sense and solid modern ideas about the financial and social development of Monaco. But he was also surrounded by counselors dedicated to the conservative status quo and to their own comfortable employment. Hence (like Grace) he had to exercise a certain caution in the choice of friends and confidants.

  Since the end of his six-year romantic affair with the French actress Giselle Pascal in 1953, Rainier had been living (in his words) “a lonely, empty bachelor’s life…. I cannot go out without being followed, watched and gossiped about. Every time I am seen with a girl, someone starts a rumor about a love affair.” That May of 1955, as he told a visiting American journalist, “I met your lovely American actress, Miss Grace Kelly. Next day, I read in the press that I was going to marry her. That sort of thing embarrasses both of us. It is very difficult to be natural and at ease when you are secretly wondering whether something will come of the friendship, and when the whole world is openly speculating about marriage!”

  Misperceptions, rumors and frank inaccuracies were the bases of Rainier’s unfortunate image outside Monaco, which is usually considered to be synonymous with Monte-Carlo. But they are not identical places, nor is Monte-Carlo (“Mount Charles,” named for Rainier’s ancestor Charles III) the location of the royal palace.1* Monte-Carlo (the new town) is rather one of Monaco’s several administrative areas; the others are Le Larvotto (the beach), La Condamine (the harbor), Fontvieille (the industrial sector) and Monaco-Ville (the old town), where the palace had been built as a fortification, jutting nine hundred yards out over the Mediterranean. Known for its gambling casino, luxurious hotels and expensive shops, Monte-Carlo, on the other hand, for centuries attracted Europe’s royals and aristocrats, as well as the merely wealthy and a disturbing complement of disreputable characters; it was for a very long time, as Somerset Maugham famously said, “a sunny place for shady people.”

  Rainier was dutifully trying to change that reputation in the 1950s. He contrived, for example, to break the vast financial power held in Monte-Carlo by Aristotle Onassis. The Greek shipbuilding magnate controlled the major shares of the Société des Bains de Mer, the corporation owning the legendary casino of Monte-Carlo as well as Monaco’s most lucrative hotels and real estate parcels. “We can’t go on catering only to the super-super rich,” Rainier said. Unlike the seasonal visitors, the population (about 20,000 citizens) was middle class, and most citizens were employed within Monaco or nearby, in France or Italy, on whose borders the tiny principality had nestled since the thirteenth century.


  The citizens were a diverse lot, but they were united by one concern: according to a treaty with France signed in 1861, Monaco would fall under French rule as a protectorate if the princely monarch died without a male heir. That would make the Monégasques liable to French taxes (Monaco has no sales tax, inheritance tax or income tax) and to French military conscription (Monaco has no standing army). In 1955, only the good health of thirty-two-year-old Rainier stood between the people of Monaco and French control—and he had neither an heir nor a prospective bride on the horizon.2*

  “I must get married and raise a family,” the prince said that year, evidently without a candidate in mind. “I told my people that I was keenly sensitive to the political implications of my bachelorhood—but I told them not to overlook the human factor, the duty of a man to fulfill himself as a human being by taking a wife he loves. I will not marry except for love. I will not agree to a loveless marriage of convenience.” He wanted, Rainier said with admirable frankness, a wife who would be a soul mate as well as a lover, and he detailed the obstacles in reaching that goal. “My life is public and regulated. I must attend many formal receptions, and the palace protocol is quite severe”—as, he said, his wife would immediately discover. There was also the issue of his extraordinary wealth, which made it difficult to know whether anyone loved or even liked him for his own sake or for the material benefits attending their association with him. 3*

  Despite an unhappy background, Rainier had matured without emotional or psychological disabilities. He had spent an unstable, deeply troubled childhood as the son of the French count Pierre de Polignac and Princess Charlotte of Monaco, the illegitimate daughter of Prince Louis II. When Rainier was seven years old, Charlotte ran off with an Italian doctor, abandoning both Rainier and his older sister, Princess Antoinette. Charlotte was divorced from Pierre in 1933 and yielded her right of succession—which had, despite her illegitimacy, been granted to her by the government in 1919. Thus the throne would pass to her ten-year-old son, Rainier—not to the older Antoinette, for the Monégasque constitution favored a male over a female heir.

  In his mother’s absence, Rainier became a withdrawn, sullen boy with an eating disorder that led to severe obesity. At the age of eight, he was shipped off to a British boarding school, where he mastered perfect, unaccented English and learned to cope with crushing loneliness. A passion for sports resolved the eating disorder and its unfortunate consequences, and Rainier went on to secondary school in Switzerland, then to the University of Montpellier (France), and finally to the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. During World War II, Rainier served as an artillery officer in the French army, displaying such courage during the battle for Alsace that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and was made a chevalier in the Legion of Honor.

  Deprived of familial affection or even transient attention, young Rainier engaged in a series of wild love affairs and dangerous sports—until the spring of 1955, when a thirty-minute rendezvous with an American actress touched something in him. For the first time in his life (so he told the palace chaplain, an American Catholic priest named Francis Tucker), he felt he had really met the right woman. Whatever inchoate feelings Grace harbored were not confided to anyone—not to her sisters or her mother, not even to close friends. In the absence of any expressed sentiments about the prince of Monaco between May and December, it is impossible to know or to presume what Grace’s feelings may have been.

  Rainier’s sister Antoinette did not take her disenfranchisement graciously. After divorcing her first husband and taking up with a jewel thief, she concocted a scheme to depose her brother and declare herself regent, on the basis that she had a son to inherit the throne, whereas her brother Rainier was unmarried. Apparently mad for power, she simultaneously circulated the rumor that Giselle Pascal was sterile, and this perfidy effectively forced Rainier to end his relationship with the French actress, to whom he was about to propose marriage. Pascal then married in 1955 and bore a healthy daughter. Antoinette, for whom eccentricity is too mild a description, was later banished from Monaco.

  IN SEPTEMBER, Grace returned from New York to Hollywood, where she began work on The Swan. On the fifteenth and sixteenth of that month, she had hair and makeup tests, and then there was a week of long hours at the studio, for her wardrobe fittings with Helen Rose, head of the costume department. “I’ve always been interested in fashion and textile design,” Grace said, “and Helen was a diplomat. She knew how to steer actresses away from a favorite color or line if it did not suit them or the role. I also observed her tactfully get a producer or director, who was fixed on a certain idea, to change his mind if that particular thing was unflattering for the star. I knew very little of the period [of The Swan], so I did some research in New York before going out to California for my fittings. The Empire look had come back into fashion for just a few years leading up to the 1914 war, and it was an enchanting look. I was thrilled when I saw Helen’s sketches and some of the exquisite fabrics she had selected.”

  “There were costumes in every conceivable situation,” Helen Rose recalled about the film, set in 1910 in a mythical European kingdom. “There was a riding habit, and a fencing costume, negligees, afternoon frocks and ball gowns. I used beautiful fabrics on all the costumes, the finest I could find. I never saw a star as thrilled as Grace the day we fitted the white chiffon ball gown. She stood before the mirror, gently touching the embroidered camellias and saying, ‘How simply marvelous, Helen—what talented people you have here at MGM!’ For weeks, several skilled women had sat at embroidery frames, carefully working by hand each petal of every flower. The ball gown was indeed fit for a princess.”

  After preparations in Culver City, the production, under the Hungarian-born director Charles Vidor, moved to the Biltmore House, near Asheville, North Carolina, for three weeks of exterior filming at the largest private home ever built in the United States. Begun in 1889 and completed seven years later, George Vanderbilt’s residential extravaganza had been designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt in imitation of three Loire Valley châteaux. When finished, Biltmore House featured four acres of floor space and 250 rooms, including thirty-four bedrooms, forty-three bathrooms and sixty-five fireplaces. The swimming pool, gymnasium, bowling alley, servants’ quarters and kitchens were located below ground level, while Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of New York’s Central Park, designed 125,000 acres of gardens and parklands. No one could have chosen a lovelier setting for the European palace of The Swan.

  John Dighton’s screenplay follows very closely the text of Molnár’s play. Princess Alexandra (Grace), her mother, Princess Beatrice (Jessie Royce Landis), her great-aunt Symphorosa (Estelle Winwood) and her younger brothers (Van Dyke Parks and Christopher Cook) live in the castle of a country that lost its status as a kingdom at the time of Napoleon. Beatrice is eager to make a match between Alexandra and a distant cousin, Prince Albert (Alec Guinness), who will one day inherit a throne as king of a neighboring country. The marriage of Albert and Alexandra will effect the fulfillment of Beatrice’s long-cherished dream—the family will at last have “a throne of their own” again, and her beloved daughter will be a queen. Nor is Alexandra apathetic to this idea: she, too, likes the idea of becoming the wife of a future king, although she has not yet met Albert and fears that her shyness will be unappealing to him.

  When the prince arrives for a four-day visit with Beatrice and her family, he prefers sports and shooting activities to time with Alexandra. Albert is a wise, kind and unpretentious royal bachelor, refined and aware of his royal destiny but without any desire to manipulate or exploit others. His apparent indifference to Alexandra seems to augur poorly for an engagement, and so Beatrice takes a desperate measure, hatching a scheme to make Albert jealous. She forces Alexandra to ask the family’s tutor, handsome young Nicholas Agi (Louis Jourdan), to come to the ball in Albert’s honor. Alexandra will feign romantic interest in the teacher, thus arousing Albert’s interest. Albert will then see Alexandr
a’s beauty and charm, Nicholas will be duly returned to his servant status and Beatrice’s hope will be fulfilled as Alexandra becomes engaged to a future king.

  But there are complications. From the time of his arrival at the castle some time earlier, Nicholas has been secretly in love with Alexandra, and after expressing his devotion to her, he is deeply hurt and offended to learn that he has been used as a device to propel her into another’s arms. Alexandra, who regrets her complicity, is moved to discover that intelligent, attractive Nicholas has harbored an ardent passion. This is her first experience of love, and she is ecstatic—and far too naïve in her belief that she can abandon her quest for a throne by yielding to this romance with an employee. At the bittersweet, completely realistic conclusion, Nicholas leaves the castle and Alexandra accepts that it is only with Albert that her own aspirations and her family’s future destiny can be realized.

  The film of The Swan, like the Molnár play, is far more emotionally complex and more mature in its stance toward love than can be conveyed in a summary. Ostensibly a romantic fable, it is actually high comedy, puncturing social pretenses and exaggerated expectations of life gently and without bombast or cruelty. The Swan is also a remarkably earnest depiction of the shallow, fading monarchical pretensions of minor European royalty. Written in 1914, as the fires of the Great War were being stoked in Molnár’s native Hungary and were soon to engulf all of Europe, the play presents Beatrice as hopelessly self-absorbed, but not wicked. Her treatment of Nicholas is inexcusable, as Albert and his comical but endearing mother the queen (Agnes Moorehead) make clear. But in his departure, Nicholas is clearly moving on to brighter fields.