Grace of Monaco

by Robinson, Jeffrey

  She wrote, “When we meet I would like to explain to you myself all of the reasons which is difficult to do by letter or through a third-party—”

  After that, she teamed up with Hitch again, for To Catch a Thief, working alongside Cary Grant, which they filmed on the French Riviera. It was on the success of that film that she returned to France the following year, to the Cannes Film Festival, which is when she met Prince Rainier.

  That was 1955.

  “When I married Prince Rainier,” she told people at the time, “I married the man and not what he represented or what he was. I fell in love with him without giving a thought to anything else.”

  But that “anything else” was something very unique and seven years later, the fairy tale that had begun with that first meeting in Monaco, was alive and well.

  She came to the office every day, but did not keep banker’s hours. Sometimes she’d come in early, sometimes she’d come in late. She’d stay as long as she had to, depending on her appointment schedule. But even when she wasn’t in the office, her days were busy because Rainier had given her a lot of responsibilities. She’d already redecorated the Palace, a huge task, airing the musty place out, repainting and redecorating, then dividing the children’s room in two, putting a partition down the middle, so that each of them would have their own space. Long before that was finished, she’d become President of the Monegasque Red Cross, President of the local Garden Club and oversaw almost all of the official cultural activities in Monaco. She also had the household to run, which meant administering a sizeable staff and also supervising the marketing. She personally planned every menu for the family, paying special attention to Rainier’s weight, and her own, and making sure that her children ate well-balanced meals.

  “You know what my husband calls me?” she would confide to friends. “He says I’m his Domestic Affairs Coordinator. Makes me sound like a member of the cabinet.”

  She was dedicated to what she was doing and wanted everything to be perfect because—as people had quickly discovered soon after she’d arrived—Grace was a perfectionist.

  Arriving as she did in Monaco, knowing no one except Rainier, being that far away from home at a time when telephones didn’t work so well, and not speaking the language, was difficult. But by now she’d grown comfortable in her role as Princess Grace.

  And the year had begin so promisingly.

  Her daughter Caroline was five and her son Albert—everyone in the family called him Albie—was four. Her husband, whom she called Ray, had just turned 39. They were a handsome, happy and healthy family. Rainier spoke French to the children and she spoke English to them, so Caroline and Albie were growing up completely bilingual. And her own French had improved so much that she happily spoke the language in public, although she never lost her American accent.

  But then she’d suffered a miscarriage.

  And there would be a second one that year.

  At the same time, France’s President Charles de Gaulle was making threatening noises, again, about tax evaders in Monaco. He was threatening Rainier that he was going to clamp down.

  De Gaulle and Rainier had been through this before. Rainier always maintained Monaco’s sovereignty from France, which had been written into official treaties. But, this time, de Gaulle wasn’t having it and, official treaty or no, he was determined to do something about it.

  Grace could see, up close, the pressure her husband was under.

  And now there was this with Hitchcock.

  The two had stayed in touch ever since she’d left Hollywood. And she never hesitated to credit him with making her a star.

  “Hitch taught me everything about the cinema,” she would say. “It’s thanks to him that I understood that murder scenes should be shot like love scenes and love scenes like murder scenes.”

  Towards the end of 1961, while working on a new picture called Marnie—which would star a handsome Scots actor named Sean Connery, who’d just broken all the box office records playing James Bond in Dr. No—Hitchcock decided Grace would be perfect for the title role.

  He often cast actors he’d worked with in previous films. He’d hired Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart four times, and Ingrid Bergman three times. Now he wanted to hire Grace for the fourth time.

  For her, it would mark a return to her film career and doing that with Alfred Hitchcock seemed to her, and to Rainier, as well, the best choice.

  Except this time different. Hitch liked her for what he called her “sexual elegance,” and wanted her to make a comeback as a sexually frustrated kleptomaniac who is raped by her controlling husband.

  No one doubted that actress Grace Kelly could do that, but could Princess Grace?

  She and Rainier had discussed it. He had some doubts and, frankly, so did she. But once she convinced herself it would be right, and once he agreed, she told Hitch yes.

  So Hitch announced in March that Grace Kelly would be returning to acting, and that’s when the furor began.

  First, MGM said she couldn’t, because she was still under contract to them.

  The way they saw it, when she walked out on Hollywood to marry Rainier and live in Monaco, the studio had suspended her without pay. They were now claiming that the suspension extended the termination date of her contract and that, therefore, it was still in force. If she were going to make a movie, she’d either have to make it with MGM, or Hitchcock would have to buy her out of the contract.

  That was only the beginning.

  While her lawyers in the States and Hitchcock’s lawyers, too, decided that MGM was blowing smoke—the studio responded that it was taking this seriously and “considering our position”—the people of Monaco had their own ideas.

  The 26-year-old who had arrived in 1956 as movie star Grace Kelly, was now a 32-year-old mother of two and First Lady of the Principality.

  Hollywood actresses made movies, Monaco’s Princess did not.

  She wrote, “It is unfortunate that it had to happen this way and I am deeply sorry—”

  By the end of her Hollywood career, she didn’t even try to hide her feelings that she was ready to leave.

  “When I first came to Hollywood five years ago,” she told a reporter during the filming of High Society, “my makeup call was at eight in the morning. On this movie, it’s been put back to seven thirty. Every day I see Joan Crawford, who’s been in makeup since five, and Loretta Young, who’s been there since four in the morning. I’ll be God-damned if I’m going to stay in a business where I have to get up earlier and earlier and it takes longer and longer for me to get in front of a camera.”

  That wasn’t her only problem with “Tinself Town.”

  At times she’d say she hated the place. “I have many acquaintances there, but few friends.” Other times, she’d call it, “A town without pity. I know of no other place in the world where so many people suffer from nervous breakdowns, where there are so many alcoholics, neurotics, and so much unhappiness.”

  Then again, there were times when Hollywood amused her. “It’s holier than thou for the public and unholier-than-the devil in ­reality.”

  No one who knew her doubted that somewhere, in the back of her mind, she’d always hoped, one day, she could return to acting.

  But now that she had the chance . . .

  She wrote, “Thank you dear Hitch for being so understanding and helpful—I hate disappointing you—”

  It was well known around Hollywood that Hitch thought of actors as “cattle.”

  So now she added, “I also hate the fact that there are probably many other “cattle” who could play the part equally as well—Despite that I hope to remain one of your “sacred cows—”

  She stopped there to re-read the letter.

  Then she wrote, “With deep affection—” underlines the word “deep,” and signs it, “Grace.”

  And with that, her career as Grace Kelly was, undeniably, over.

  Chapter 1

  Becoming Grace

  There was n
ever any mistaking them.

  Not those two.

  No matter how hard they tried to remain anonymous, there was always someone who’d spot them, who’d know their names.

  One night in London, after dining at a Japanese restaurant with friends, Grace asked the waiter to get a taxi. When it arrived, she and Rainier and another couple piled in. But as soon as they did, the driver started laughing. He chuckled all the way to Connaught Hotel where Grace and Rainier got out. And he kept on chuckling all the way to the other couple’s flat in Chelsea.

  Finally the other couple simply had to know, “What’s so funny?”

  “It was the little Japanese fellow who hailed me,” the driver said. “I couldn’t figure out what he wanted. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about because he kept saying over and over again, ‘Glazed cherries, glazed cherries.’ So who gets into my cab? Grace Kelly.”

  GqH

  John Brendon Kelly, the ninth in a family of ten children, was a tough, two-fisted, hard-drinking man with an eye for the ladies who, like so many sons of immigrants to the United States, battled his way from poverty to riches to live the American dream.

  His parents came from County Mayo, Ireland, to the New World with nothing more in their pockets than a thick brogue and a lot of hope. John B., who was usually referred to as Jack, was born in 1890 in East Falls, one of Philadelphia’s Irish working-class neighborhoods. From the age of nine, to help support his family, he worked after school in the local carpet mills. He quit school three years later for full-time employment as a hod carrier and apprentice brick-layer with one of his older brothers who had, by then, started his own construction firm.

  But Jack was destined for better things. He had the drive to succeed and somehow discovered he also had a talent for rowing. With his back and arms strengthened by construction work, he took to sculling on the nearby Schulkill River and quickly developed into a champion oarsman.

  Returning from the Army after World War I in 1918, he and his Vesper Boat Club teammates spent the next two years preparing to race, first at England’s world-famous Henley Regatta, then at the Olympics in Antwerp. But two days before Kelly planned to leave Philadelphia for Europe, a telegram arrived from the Henley organizers saying, “Entry rejected.”

  The official explanation has always been that Kelly was banned because the Vesper Club had violated their “amateur” status in 1905 when they solicited donations to cover the costs of going to Henley. And the ban on Vesper was still in effect in 1920.

  But Kelly saw it differently.

  He took the ban personally, maintaining throughout his life that his entry was refused because he’d once been a common laborer and therefore not welcome to compete with “gentlemen” at class-­conscious Henley.

  The revenge he took on them has become the stuff of American sports mythology.

  Not only did Jack go on to defeat the best of the British a couple of months later in the Olympics—he came home with two gold medals—he then spent several years training his son John Jr. who, in 1947 and again in 1949, reminded the British of the earlier insult and twice took Henley’s first prize.

  Once described by his chum Franklin Roosevelt as, “the handsomest man I’ve ever seen,” Jack Kelly was heavy on charm and humor, graced till the day he died with an athletic physique, driven by a fearless enthusiasm to get what he wanted, predisposed to womanizing and consumed by a passion for politics.

  In 1919 he borrowed $2,500 from two of his brothers to start a company called Kelly For Brickwork, which, by 1935, had become so successful that he used it as a springboard to run for mayor. Although he was defeated and never put his name on another ballot, he flirted briefly with the idea of running for the US Senate in 1936, was head of the Philadelphia Democratic Committee until 1940 and remained, for the rest of his life, a dominant backroom force in Philadelphia politics.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, as Kelly was so well connected in the City of Brotherly Love, not one single building was erected in Center City between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s without Kelly For Brickwork getting the contract.

  In 1924 Jack married Margaret Majer, a woman he’d known for nearly nine years. The daughter of German immigrants, she’d been raised a Lutheran in the Strawberry Mansion area of Philadelphia.

  She grew up speaking German at home and stressed with her children the same strong sense of Prussian discipline that had been such an important part of her own youth. Everyone obeyed her. Not even Jack dared go up against her.

  Although when she insisted her children learn to speak fluent German, they hid the grammar books because they hated the ­language and feared that, late in the 1930s, speaking German was an unpatriotic thing for Americans to do.

  A former magazine cover girl, she studied at Temple University for two years to get herself an Associate’s Degree in Physical Education. That quickly led her to a job as the first woman to teach P.E. at the University of Pennsylvania.

  She converted to Catholicism to marry Jack and their first child, Peggy, was born within a year. John Jr.—always known as Kell—followed two years later in 1927. Grace was born two years after that, on November 12, 1929. Their fourth and last child, Lizanne, was born in 1933.

  Being a stickler for routine, Ma Kelly programmed every part of the day to a tight schedule. There was just so much time for breakfast, just so much time for listening to the radio, a specific time for piano lessons, a specific time for bed. She ran her household with an iron hand and, when she laid down the law, that’s the way it was.

  Years later, Caroline, Albert, and Stephanie would get to see Ma Kelly at her best when they spent summers with her at the Kelly family beach house, at 26th and Wesley Avenues, in Ocean City, New Jersey.

  Grace and Rainier would bring the kids to visit their grandmother and their American cousins. At dinner time, it was Ma Kelly who sat at the head of the table. On more than one occasion, when she spotted Rainier leaning comfortably forward, she’d grab her fork and jab him with it, shrieking, “elbows,” until he took them off her table.

  As a family, the Kellys lived in a 15-room house built with Kelly bricks at 3901 Henry Avenue in the then upwardly mobile part of Philadelphia called Germantown.

  Grace was born there.

  Her mother described her as a happy child, even though she was asthmatic and suffered ear and throat infections throughout childhood. As those bouts with illnesses often kept her home in bed, Grace discovered the joys of reading. And reading remained one of her great pleasures throughout life.

  For Jack and Ma, athletics came a close third behind religion and schoolwork. Kell, very much his father’s son, was not only victorious at Henley, he also took a bronze medal in sculling at the 1956 Olympics. Peggy, her father’s favorite, was a competitive swimmer. Lizanne, the baby of the family who could usually get away with anything, was clearly the most athletic of the three girls and a champion swimmer. Grace played tennis, was captain of her school field hockey team, swam and could dive, but she was never the athlete her brother and sisters were. She wasn’t as pretty as Peggy and Lizanne, nor as extroverted as her brother. Very much a middle child, she tended to retreat into her protective shell.

  But she was “Fordie’s” favorite and years later she’d say memories of her friendship with him were among her fondest of childhood.

  Godfrey Ford worked for the Kellys as a general handyman and all-round “Mr. Fixit.” A kind and gentle black man from North Philadelphia, he spent his life with the Kellys, was totally dedicated to them, and watched the children grow up as they watched him grow old. Grace loved to tell stories about him, like how when the family moved to Ocean City for the summer all the other kids would have to ride with their parents except her. She got to ride in the old pick-up truck with Fordie. Ma Kelly worried they’d never arrive safely but that didn’t stop Grace from piling into the front seat next to Fordie, with their luggage and some of the family furniture pouring off the back, taking twice as long to get to the beach as an
yone else, making up stories, singing and laughing all the way.

  Though Ma Kelly never knew it, sometimes Fordie would even let Grace steer the truck.

  Fordie might have been the first person in Grace’s life to say it didn’t really matter if she wasn’t the athlete her brother and sisters were.

  Because Ma Kelly was such a disciplinarian, Grace was enrolled at the Ravenhill Academy in East Falls, a parochial school run by nuns who rigorously stressed discipline and correct manners. But by the time she was 12, Grace had convinced her mother that the less severe Stevens School would be better for her and she was allowed to transfer there.

  It was at about that time she started wishing she’d been a boy.

  As she later explained, her father’s influence on her had been formidable. He used to lecture all of his children, “Nothing is given for nothing,” so Grace grew up believing that everything worth having had to be earned and the way you earned anything was through hard work.

  The problem with being a teenage girl in the 1940s was that real opportunities were reserved for boys.

  “My father was a leader of men,” she said. “Whatever the cost, one had to follow him. And to follow in his footsteps it was easier to be a boy than a girl.” Still, she added, “An enthusiastic father is a marvelous start in life.”

  Having inherited some of her dad’s enthusiasm, after seeing a performance of the Ballet Russes, she took to studying ballet and classical piano. There was even a time when she thought she might like to become a professional dancer.

  Then she discovered the dramatic stage.

  She was 12 when she made her debut with the East Falls’ Old Academy Players in a production called Don’t Feed the Animals. She next appeared in a production of Cry Havoc and, much to her delight, was cast by the group in their version of The Torch Bearers, a play written by her father’s brother, George.

  She graduated from Stevens in June 1947 and applied to Bennington College in Vermont. But she’d never been too keen on math and science and didn’t have the academic qualifications they wanted. Bennington turned her down.