by Donald Spoto
On January 6, the day after the announcement of her engagement, the long leading story on page one of the New York Times began the media frenzy: “Prince of Monaco to Wed Grace Kelly” ran the headline—with the subtitle “Movie Star Will Live in Principality—No Date Is Set.” The story ran to several columns. Following that account, four months of stories began to flood the American press. Tidbits ran daily in newspapers from coast to coast. There were feature stories in weekly and monthly magazines. Interviews were conducted with anyone who, it seemed, had even a remote connection or had sold her a newspaper on a street corner. Everyone had something to say.
On January 16, Time magazine, usually far cooler about such things, published a long story (“The Philadelphia Princess”) and then somehow managed to justify another feature or at least an item about Grace every week during the first seven months of the year. On April 9, Life put her on its cover, in costume for The Swan (“Grace Kelly—Education of a Princess, for a Movie and for Real”) and ran a seven-page photo essay about the preparations for her departure.
Perhaps it was inevitable, therefore, that, before the year ended, a Broadway musical—Happy Hunting, starring Ethel Merman—satirized the royal wedding: “We’re up to here with the wedding of the year,” belted the chorus in gleeful disdain. The show was set in Monaco, described in one song as a “pintsized, pinpoint, pre-shrunk, postage-stamp principality,” to which an earthy Philadelphia matron (Merman) comes in search of a princely groom for her daughter. With a group of classmates from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I went to a performance during Christmas week 1956. Like most reviewers, we were not amused, but perhaps we had to go on believing that the wedding was too sacred for ridicule—even if, by then, Grace had left the country.
The public was insatiable for any and every detail, and decades later, those particulars seem more amusing than significant:
JANUARY 8: “Miss Kelly left New York at 5.30 p.m. yesterday aboard the Commodore Vanderbilt [train] for Hollywood. The Prince of Monaco will drive to Wilmington. He will attend Mass there tomorrow.”
JANUARY 9: “Whether Miss Kelly will be permitted to bring her dog aboard an airplane or a steamship has not been confirmed….”
JANUARY 10: “The Prince of Monaco hopes to marry Grace Kelly in the United States, in deference to his bride, her family and the American people. Meanwhile, the prince left Wilmington by automobile for Palm Beach, Florida.”
JANUARY 11: “Grace Kelly on Coast—She Says Plans for Marriage to Prince Are Still not Set … but her father indicated he would like to have the wedding in the bride’s home parish, which is the custom. Mrs. Kelly was neutral.”
JANUARY 15: “Rainier Going West—Prince Plans a Trip Across U.S. Before Wedding…. The Prince told a reporter that he planned a leisurely motor trip across the United States to Hollywood when he leaves Palm Beach in about a week. Miss Kelly is in Hollywood. ‘I want to see this country, and I especially want to see Arizona,’ he said. He did not elaborate on his interest in Arizona.”
JANUARY 16: “The Cabinet chief of Prince Rainier III today settled a dispute: the civil and religious ceremonies of the marriage will be in Monte-Carlo, not in the United States.” [The reporter made a common error: the rituals were not scheduled to be held in Monte-Carlo, but in the palace and in the cathedral, both in Monaco-Ville.]
JANUARY 17 [The story in its entirety]: “Rainier Wedding Date Not Set.” Mrs. John B. Kelly, mother of Grace Kelly, said today that the time and place of her daughter’s marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco had not been decided.”
Things were becoming ridiculous.
FEBRUARY 2: [The story in its entirety]: Headline—“Prince Rainier in Auto Mishap…. While driving to see Grace Kelly in Hollywood last night, Prince Rainier’s car lightly tapped the car in front.”
Should anyone have doubted it, the daily reports demonstrated that deeply buried in the American psyche was an atavistic reverence for kings and queens, princes and princesses, who seemed more fascinating to those living in a republic than to those in a constitutional monarchy. After all, women movie stars were called “movie queens”; Clark Gable was known as “the king”; and John Wayne was hailed as “the duke.” It was common in America to hear a doting father call his little daughter “princess,” although for some reason, even the dearest little boys were not called “princes.”
What of the pageants past counting, with girls “crowned” as “queens” of a football season as they pinned plastic tiaras in their hair? And how else to explain Queen for a Day, the radio and TV quiz show that had a run of twenty-five years and featured women from deprived or downright destitute circumstances who were hauled up onto a stage, draped in a red velvet robe, presented with a shimmering crown and long-stemmed roses and given vacations and nights on the town with their husbands or escorts? “Make every woman a queen, for every single day!” cried the host, and the crowd went wild.
ON THE EVENING of January 6, hours after news of the engagement had broken, Grace and Rainier attended an “Imperial Ball” at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the ballroom had been quickly redecorated to suggest the prince’s palace in Monaco. The event, already planned as a fundraiser for the Veterans Administration hospitals, became the first great social occasion of the year. A fashion show that evening was followed by a ballet performance, and then the prince and his fiancée descended from an elaborately furnished box to the stage, where they cranked a revolving container filled with hundreds of ticket stubs. Grace drew out the name of the lucky winner—none other than Senator John F. Kennedy, who gave the prize (a diamond and sapphire ring) to his wife.
GRACE WAS back in Culver City before the end of January, coping with a tornado of activities: makeup and wardrobe tests for High Society; voice lessons before she and Bing Crosby recorded Cole Porter’s “True Love” for the movie; requests for interviews; intensive French lessons; meetings about palace protocol with consular representatives from Monaco; and appointments with a platoon of designers, artists, musicians, chefs and hair stylists. Rainier was with her in Los Angeles for almost the entire shooting time of High Society, which wrapped on March 3.
The Philadelphia Story, on which High Society was based, had been a Broadway hit with Katharine Hepburn, who also appeared in the 1940 movie version. Screenwriter John Patrick made very few changes to Philip Barry’s original text and Donald Ogden Stewart’s first screenplay, and the result—with songs by Cole Porter—was a literate, sharp and clever musical that eventually became Metro’s biggest hit of 1956.
The story is well known. Tracy Lord (Grace) has divorced popular singer and composer C. K. Dexter-Haven (Crosby) and is about to marry a handsome, social-climbing, monumentally self-righteous bore named George Kittredge (John Lund). At the same time, Tracy’s relationship with her father (Sidney Blackmer) is threatened by his philandering—conduct so blatant that a scandal magazine called Spy has threatened to publish a story about his antics. This can be prevented only if Tracy allows a photographer and a reporter from Spy (Celeste Holm and Frank Sinatra, as Liz Imbrie and Mike Connor) to document her wedding. She agrees reluctantly in order to save her mother (Margalo Gillmore) from embarrassment.
The heart of the story concerns the maturing of Tracy Lord. She finally realizes that her unpretentious ex-husband, who is still in love with her, is far preferable to her fatuous and moralistic fiancé. Contrary to a customary pattern in comedy, Dexter—a man from the upper classes who is patient, gallant and compassionate—is more desirable than George, a hardworking man risen from the ranks, who is a prig. At a formal party the night before her wedding, Tracy drinks too much champagne and thinks that she might really be in love with Mike (Sinatra). In the woozy light of dawn, however, when George wrongly accuses her of a sexual escapade, she sees that George is not right for her, and Dexter replaces George at the altar.
Unlike most movie musicals, High Society relies on character, situation and dialogue—not on absurdly splashy numbers with
singers and dancers cavorting on a great sound stage or in the water. On the contrary, it has a literate sense of high comedy, without any facile sermons about the idle rich. The major point of both The Philadelphia Story and High Society is that Tracy learns to harmonize her social poise with a maturing humanity, and to soften her uncompromising attitudes to her father and her ex-husband by confronting her own frailties. These points are made clear in two strong—indeed, almost cruel—speeches by Dexter and her father, in which they accuse her of moral inflexibility and a frightful lack of feeling.
In the tradition of high comedy, High Society exploits the glamorous but fading wealth of Newport, Rhode Island, and outfits the characters in glamorous finery precisely in order to puncture Tracy’s social pretenses. In this regard, her mother is remarkably free of affectation and makes no moral judgments on anyone, while her father comes to his senses and returns home. And Tracy’s young sister, Caroline (Lydia Reed)—a sassy but adorable kid—represents the bright, unstuffy new generation.
High comedy relies not on physical stunts but on verbal wit for its satire. It characterizes the plays of Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), Noël Coward (Private Lives), S. N. Behrman (No Time for Comedy), Samuel Taylor (Sabrina Fair) and Philip Barry. Their subjects are often the pretensions of the upper social classes, and they often exploit the comic tradition of mistaken identities and the revelations of double lives—elements as old as ancient Greek comedy and adaptable to later circumstances.
As the actress Maria Aitken has written, high comedy “uses society’s most sophisticated accomplishment—intellect and wit—to mock society itself; the glitter reveals the grubbiness.” In this regard, High Society is not a languorous, effete, verbose exercise in social theses. Its themes are sex, money and social status, and, in the best tradition of high comedy, it reveals something truthful yet suspect in human nature. All this is presented as an entertainment, for high comedy requires special talents and makes heavy demands on actors, who must perform without pretense or mannerisms and find the right alchemy of elegance and vocal nuance.
Director Charles Walters enlisted a number of veterans to ensure the success of High Society’s tone. Margalo Gillmore, as Grace’s mother, had decades of theatrical experience behind her (notably, in 1929, as Helen Pettigrew, the role Grace later assumed in the TV version of Berkeley Square). Louis Calhern, as lecherous Uncle Willie, added subtle touches of humor to a role that could have been frankly distasteful. Bing Crosby had demonstrated surprising depths as the self-destructive alcoholic in The Country Girl; here, he pitched comic dialogue the way he sang—naturally and without apparent calculation. Early in the picture, Frank Sinatra seems uncomfortable, and his drunk scene is embarrassingly unbelievable. He was saved from sheer buffoonery only by Grace’s depiction of a woman unaccustomed to champagne. From the dance-floor sequence to her damp return from a moonlight swim, her acting was infused with hilariously understated inflections. “She was,” said costar Celeste Holm, “the least self-conscious actress I ever met.”
For its success, High Society depends entirely on an audience’s acceptance of Tracy Lord as a reserved, demanding socialite whose coolness (like that of Princess Alexandra in The Swan, also high comedy) is warmed by another’s patient love.
“It was one of my most enjoyable experiences,” Grace recalled. “I was in love, I was engaged, I was singing a song called ‘True Love’—it was all wonderful, and I remember the cast as a group of amiable professionals. We had such fun making that picture. At last, I thought maybe I could put it all together acting Tracy Lord. I was never happy with my singing—it seemed awfully tentative to me when I heard our playback of ‘True Love’—but our director left us alone in all the long scenes of dialogue. Maybe because I was about to leave Hollywood, I felt relaxed and could just let the character have her way—I didn’t impose myself on her. You know, the original story was set in Philadelphia. Well, I knew all about those Main Line snobs, but you couldn’t look down on them or condemn them, or else the character [of Tracy] would have become insufferably arrogant. I tried to find the point where her haughtiness was a cover for insecurity, and for the pain she felt over her father’s thoughtless behavior.”
Grace was, as usual, hypercritical about her singing: a trained vocalist would have turned the song into an implausible movie cliché. But her singing with Crosby had the kind of charming apprehension that later characterized Audrey Hepburn’s rendition of “Moon River,” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Grace sang with touching wistfulness—not in a full-throated, overconfident mezzo. The record of “True Love” sold a million copies.
But in one respect, she was on the mark: she did “let the character have her way.” When Tracy emerges, hung over and shielding her eyes from the sunlight, Grace finds the right variations in tone to make a few simple words supremely amusing: “Isn’t it a fine day?” she asks bravely, even though the day is not fine for her at all. “Is everybody fine?” she continues at once, although she can scarcely think of anything but her headache. “That’s fine!” And then: “Do you like my dress? It’s so heavy.” The dress is multilayered chiffon, as light as air, but (as the later cliché runs) we feel her pain. Put together with only the millisecond of a pause between each remark, the lines emerge as genuinely droll:
“Isn’t it a fine day? Is everybody fine? That’s fine … My dress—it’s so heavy.”
This sort of comedy is unlikely to appeal to moviegoers who prefer slapstick, burlesque, diversions laced with crude double entendres, sexual slang, stinging sarcasm, cruel invective, noisy commotion and pratfalls. All these are absent from high comedy. Audiences in 1956 loved the movie, although American critics then and later wrote off Grace’s performance, missing the delicacy of her portrayal as Tracy and the nuance with which she conveyed a character by raising an eyebrow or a hand, ever so slightly bending her head and listening, with comic restraint, to the commands she will soon counter. When George Kittredge says that he worships and adores her, that he wants to put her on a pedestal and keep her there, the director kept his camera on Grace’s confused, then sad, features. Without breaking her eye contact with him, she gently pleads, “I don’t want to be worshiped—I want to be loved!” And we believe her.
FOR 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.
ALTHOUGH 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 al
most 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?”
“THE 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?”