“I never saw her idle,” Nadia Lacoste said. “If we had tea in the afternoon, she’d be sitting there knitting or doing needlepoint. If she had some free time, she’d go walking. She adored that. She used to take the small path that follows the sea and walk along the coast. Or she’d walk up the mountain at Roc Agel. She was interested in flowers so she used to carry scissors and a small pouch with her on those walks and stop to cut flowers or pick leaves. When she got home she’d press the leaves and flowers into a book. I don’t think you could have pulled a single book off her shelf without flowers and leaves falling out.”
GqH
As the years passed and her family grew up, Grace found herself at times longing for some of the creature comforts she’d known in America. She never hid the fact that she was American and for a long time she and all three of her children held American passports. Eventually they let them go for tax reasons. Still, she missed certain things about the States and tried her best to re-create them in Monaco.
She brought American furniture with her when she moved to Monaco, used an American interior decorator to help her re-do the family apartments and fitted an American kitchen and American bathrooms. She subscribed to the American Book of the Month Club, and was always receiving a lot of books—especially history books—through the mail. She also subscribed to Architectural Digest and the International Herald Tribune.
But, most of all, she was especially fond of New Yorker cartoons.
Believing there was always a cartoon that was just right for someone she knew, every week, as soon as the magazine arrived, she’d flip through it from cover to cover searching for appropriate cartoons. She’d sit at her desk, grinning from ear to ear, with the magazine and a pair of scissors. Whenever she found one that suited her purpose, she’d cut it out, put it into an envelope and, with great glee, mail it, usually anonymously, to whomever it fit.
GqH
The story persisted for years that the Prince had banned her films from being shown in Monaco.
“Not true,” Rainier said. “Grace’s films were shown here. They’ve been in the local cinemas and on television. We’ve also shown them in the Palace. Grace got a hold of some 16mm copies from MGM.”
She only managed it, however, after a lot of effort.
Rainier continued, “It wasn’t very nice on MGM’s part because they were so difficult when she asked for them. They could have been a little more cooperative. They could easily have made a collection of her films available to her but when she asked if she could get copies of her own films all they did was tell us how many problems she was causing by asking. In the end, they said we could have some but we had to sign a paper promising that we’d never show them in public. That discouraged her a bit and I don’t think we have all of them.”
The moment their engagement was announced, one of the first questions anyone put to Rainier was, will Grace Kelly still make movies? His answer was no. Rainier told reporters months before their wedding, “Grace and I have agreed that she must give up her career. She could not possibly combine her royal duties with those of an acting career.”
Right after her marriage, she was approached by Dore Schary to star in Designing Woman. She was interested in the film but never contemplated doing it.
“My film career is over,” she’d tell anyone who asked, but only occasionally confessed that she was saying it because she wanted to avoid any confrontation about that with her husband.
It was a touchy subject because, at least in the beginning, she really missed everything she’d given up back in the States, including her career. And even years later, she was always glad to spend time talking about Hollywood with anyone from the business who happened to be passing through Monaco.
She also regaled her children with stories from Tinsel Town.
“It was great having an actress mother,” her youngest daughter Stephanie felt, “because instead of growing up with stupid bedtime stories, my mom would tell me what was going on in the studios and all the latest Hollywood gossip. She’d sing and tap dance and tell me all about her movies.”
Chapter 17
From Princess
to Performer
“There’s no way I can win,” Grace told friends. “Whenever I put on a couple of pounds, everybody thinks I’m having a baby. Whenever I manage to lose a few pounds, everybody thinks I’m finally planning to make another movie. If I go three days in a row to visit a friend in the hospital, right away the newspapers write that I’m suffering from some incurable disease. If I stay in Paris for a few weeks so that I can be with my daughter while she’s at school, it gets around that my marriage is collapsing, that we’re going to separate. As adults we end up taking all that with a shrug. But the often malicious interest shown in my children is very difficult to accept.”
For most of her adult life, Grace ranked high on the list of the most written about, most photographed people in the world. Yet with her hair wrapped in a scarf and sunglasses hiding her eyes, Grace was not always recognized.
Walking with a friend one day across the large, open square in front of the Palace, she was approached by a couple of American tourists carrying a camera.
They said, “Hi.”
Grace and the woman with her said, “Hi.”
The tourists said, “Where are you from?”
Grace answered, “America.”
The tourists said, “Us, too,” then thrust their camera towards Grace. “Would you please take our picture?”
She said sure.
The tourists found just the right spot with the Palace was framed in the background and Grace snapped their photo.
The tourists said, “Thanks,” reclaimed their camera, waved, “Have a nice day,” and walked away.
They never knew.
“When Ava Gardner gets in a taxi,” she liked to say, “the driver knows she’s Ava Gardner. It’s the same for Lana Turner, or Elizabeth Taylor. But not for me. I’m never Grace Kelly. I’m always someone who looks like Grace Kelly.”
She swore that happened to her all the time, like in New York when she found the cabbie staring at her through the rear view mirror.
“You know what,” he called back to her through the meshed grill that separated his seat from hers. “You look like Grace Kelly.”
She said, “I do?”
“Yeah,” he said, “you do. Except I think she’s a little prettier than you are.”
GqH
For most of her Hollywood career, Grace managed to avoid the scandal press. Not only, perhaps, because she spent as little time as possible in California, which must have helped, but also because she was very discreet about her private life.
She did not, however, escape completely unscathed.
When she made The Country Girl, gossip columnists linked her to her leading man and the photo that proved it showed Grace with Bing Crosby sharing a very romantic dinner. Except, it was tête-à-tête only as far as the picture editor was concerned. He’d cropped the photo tightly enough to eliminate any sight of Grace’s sister Peggy, who was sitting on the other side of Crosby.
Not long after that, one of the Hollywood gossip sheets staked out Grace’s flat and wrote that William Holden’s car was frequently parked outside at night. What they failed to say was that Holden had loaned the car to one of Grace’s friends.
The person who gave Grace the roughest time of all during her Hollywood days was columnist Hedda Hopper. For whatever reason, just before Grace started work on A Country Girl, the vitriolic Hopper phoned Crosby to warn him that his co-star was “a man-eater.”
As soon as Grace and Rainier announced their engagement, Hopper wrote, “Half their friends are betting they never make it to the altar.”
Since Grace’s death a great deal has been written about her love affairs. All too often the sources quoted are dead and the stories, salaciously embroidered, are accepted as the truth merely because they are now in print and frequently repeated.
That she might have been
in love with Ray Milland or Oleg Cassini or Jean Pierre Aumont or anyone else, for that matter, doesn’t change the woman she became. When she got engaged to Rainier she told a reporter, “I’ve been in love before but never in love like this.”
That a healthy, grown-up, single, working woman in her mid-20s had normal human feelings and desires hardly seems like much of a revelation today.
GqH
When Alfred Hitchcock sent her the screenplay of Marnie, saying that he wanted to cast her opposite Sean Connery, she liked the script and wanted to do it. She and Rainier had now been married seven years and, she sensed that he was starting to mellow about her career, becoming less dogmatic about her retirement. Still, there could be no question of making another film unless he approved.
“She and I talked about it,” Rainier said. And contrary to many stories that have come out about this since Grace’s death, Rainier maintained that he was not against the idea. “We also talked to Hitchcock about it. She was very anxious to get back into the swing of things. By that point I didn’t see anything wrong with it. So I suggested we combine her work on the film with a family vacation. They were supposed to shoot somewhere in New England over the summer. I proposed that we rent a house nearby and go with the children. She said, ‘If that’s your idea of a vacation fine, except working on a film is not what I’d call vacation.’”
So Hitch announced that she was coming back, and before long, rumblings of discontent reached the Prince’s ears.
“The appeal of Marnie was Hitchcock,” Rainier continued. “He was, I think, very fond of both of us and we both trusted him. Grace would never have considered a film with just anybody. But this was Hitchcock. He was totally in charge and I can’t imagine that he would have ever done anything or allowed anything to happen that might have in any way belittled the principality or Grace’s position as Princess.”
Well that might have been, but then the question of her fee hit the papers and rumors spread through Europe that Grace was only returning to films because the family was broke and needed the money.
In response, Grace announced that her entire fee would be put into a trust to help needy children.
That’s when MGM added their two-cents worth by claiming that she was still under contract to them.
After that, the French newspapers criticized her for concocting the whole thing just to annoy Charles de Gaulle—remember, this was 1962 and Rainier was locked in a battle with de Gaulle over taxes—and the press was suggesting that Grace was returning to films simply to emphasize to de Gaulle that Monaco would do whatever it pleased.
That was followed by a letter from Pope John XXIII personally asking Grace, as a Catholic Princess, not make the film.
Finally, the Monegasques banded together and petitioned their prince to put an end to this.
Nadia Lacoste quickly found herself knee-deep in press criticism of the plan. “The Prince couldn’t see why there was such a public reaction against Grace making film. I told him that to be an actress was a trade, a profession, and that maybe being Princess of Monaco was also a profession, but a completely different kind of profession. I asked him how he’d see the posters for the film. I wondered if he thought they’d bill her as Grace Kelly or Princess Grace or even Grace Grimaldi? I had the feeling that he hadn’t thought about that before.”
Lacoste felt she needed to make him understand that the answer to how they would bill her was, obviously, as Princess Grace. “The Prince looked at me and said, ‘You’re so old fashioned.’ He pointed out that King Albert of Belgium used to climb mountains. I said, ‘But climbing mountains is a sport, making movies is a business.’ I just don’t think he realized the implications until he thought about what the posters would say.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Rainier was convinced that Grace’s billing would not have been a problem. “How would they have publicized the film, starring Princess Grace or starring Grace Kelly? It would have been as Grace Kelly because that’s the name she worked under.”
In the end, the question was moot. Public opinion won out and Grace decided that she would not do the film.
“I must say,” Rainier went on, “that she made her decision without any influence from me. I thought it would be great fun for all of us, especially the kids. And I knew she wanted to make more films. It would also mean working again with Hitchcock, whom she adored. Oh well.”
He said that she accepted defeat reluctantly. “Yes, she missed performing. Very much so. But mostly she missed the stage, not the movies. That’s why she did the poetry readings. She could do it without attracting much criticism. Although people are sometimes such idiots that they even criticized her for reading poetry in public. With some people you can never do anything right.”
Sometime after the Marnie incident, Grace and Rainier found themselves in Hollywood. The entire family visited a film set, after which she told friends that she’d pretty much given up any ambition of ever making another film.
“It’s all changed so much,” she said. “I couldn’t work like this.”
Two years later, however, Rainier encouraged her to appear in a documentary about drug addiction for UNICEF.
Then, in 1970, she stepped in at the last minute for an ailing Noel Coward as host of a major charity gala at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
She followed that in 1973 with a British television appearance in a show called The Glories of Christmas.
All of this was fun for her and didn’t raise too many eyebrows in Monaco. But deep down, she knew it wasn’t really show business. That’s one of the reasons why, in July 1976, she accepted a seat on the board of Twentieth Century Fox.
By then, Grace was living most of the year in Paris to be near Stephanie who went to school there. Paris had rekindled her need for the cultural bounties of a world-class city, although she did tell certain friends that she was getting anxious for Stephanie to finish school so that she could move back to Monaco. “I’m not as fond of Paris as I used to be. I’m lonesome here. I guess I’m just a small town girl at heart.”
Not surprisingly, there were other film offers.
Because a Grace Kelly comeback could have been the biggest box office draw of the decade, she could have commanded an enormous fee. But Marnie had shut the door to any lingering hopes she might have had.
It was a time of genuine conflict for her.
“Acting in a film again might have been in the back of her mind,” remarked Lacoste, “but she had a lot of other priorities. Don’t forget, she came along before the women’s movement, before women wanted to prove they could do anything men could do. In her mind she was the Princess of Monaco and the mother of three children and her job was to deal with that. I once asked her if it had been very difficult to give up Hollywood. After all, she quit at the top. But she said no. She answered very clearly, ‘To me, marriage has always been more important than my career.’ Of course, there were times when she thought about the old days and maybe even missed making movies. She loved to talk about movies, about who could play this part or another part. But to say she was sorry she wasn’t still in the movies, no, I never heard that. I never felt that.”
Gradually Grace’s thinking began to change. Motion pictures were one thing. Performing on stage might be something else. It was less visible. It was also more in keeping with the serious tradition of the legitimate actor.
Rainier was supportive of her and agreed that, if she could find something suitable, she’d be welcome to do it. However, anything she wanted to do would have to be carefully judged and presented in such a way as to be compatible with her image as the Princess of Monaco.
The American Bicentennial of 1976 came to her rescue.
Celebrations commemorating the Declaration of Independence took various forms throughout the world. Even in the United Kingdom. Among them was a special series of American music and drama performances at the highly acclaimed Edinburgh Festival.
In keeping with the theme, John Carroll, who had for ye
ars devised special poetry programs for the Festival, scripted a selection of poems under the theme of “An American Heritage” but felt that the best way to present the poems was with American voices. An old friend suggested that Princess Grace might like to do it.
Carroll met her for the first time in Paris. “I went to have lunch with her and we clicked. She loved the idea, although she did say she’d have to discuss it with the Prince. Ten days later she rang to tell me it would be okay.”
The poems he chose for her included works by Longfellow, Whitman, Frost, Thoreau, Dickinson, and one by Eleanor Wylie called “Wild Peaches.”
Grace arrived in Edinburgh three days before the first performance so that she could rehearse. “I’ll probably be a bag of nerves,” she told Carroll.
He confided, “I was a bit worried about how she’d take direction. But she was a lamb. When I selected ‘Wild Peaches’ for her I felt it should be done with Southern accent. I just wasn’t sure I could ask Grace to do it that way. Well, after we rehearsed it the first time she turned to me and wondered, ‘Shouldn’t I do this with a Southern accent?’ That’s how good she was.”
Grace’s notices were ecstatic.
Carroll next suggested she should appear in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the 1977 summer Shakespeare Festival.
She agreed, and he put together a program called, “A Remembrance of Shakespeare.”
Carroll staged it at Trinity Church where the Bard is thought to be buried.
“We needed to do a full rehearsal,” Carroll said, “so the church was closed on the evening before the performance. Grace arrived that night carrying a beautiful, long-stemmed rose. A typical Grace gesture. She brought it to put on Shakespeare’s tomb.”
The enormous publicity generated by that appearance was followed by an offer to narrate a film called The Children of Theatre, a documentary about the Kirov Ballet School in Leningrad. Grace not only accepted to do the voice-over, she also attended the premieres in aid of ballet charities in New York, Lausanne, and Paris.
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