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Vanity Fair's Women on Women

Page 37

by Radhika Jones


  “Though Grace can be very inviting,” says Janie Bryant, “and her voice has a warmth to it, there’s also an austerity to her. It’s about the façade.”

  “I think Grace Kelly was someone that came along at the right time,” says fashion historian June Weir. “If she had come along in the 60s, or in the 40s, I don’t think it would have worked. She was the perfect 1950s beauty. Pastel colors, beautiful luxury fabrics, and very pretty necklines.”

  “High Society,” says Robert Lacey, “just the whole confection of that. It was just the most extraordinary way to fly out on a new cloud. Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Grace—they were all absolute archetypes of particular sorts of beauty. They’re the end of the star system and, to my mind, more beautiful than any stars of the earlier years, and more beautiful than anything since. With the newer generations we subconsciously know there’s artifice involved. And we don’t quite believe what we see. But we did believe what we saw with Grace.”

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  If we only had the woman Grace Kelly was in her films—the golden girl in the shirtwaist dress, the classical creature in white chiffon—it would be enough to place her in the pantheon. But with the biographies published after her untimely death, at 52, in 1982—when she was driving with her younger daughter, Stephanie, and their car flew off the road and down a mountainside—her symbology became more complicated, and certainly more fascinating. We learned that the volcano under the snowcap was surprisingly active and full of fire. Grace Kelly, the swan princess in white gloves, was neither a virgin when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco, in 1956 (she’d lost it at 17, just before she left home for New York City), nor virginal in the way she had conducted her love life up until then. As the truth came out about Grace’s sex life as a single girl, in books ever more salacious in their details, it was a shock, sharply at odds with her pristine screen persona. Some make it sound as if she slept with every man who crossed her path. She did not. “We were together a lot,” says Maree Rambo, “and that was just not her style.” And while one biographer claims Grace had affairs with almost every one of her co-stars—Cooper, Gable, Milland, Holden, Crosby, Grant, Sinatra—others believe it was only Holden for sure, probably Milland, and maybe Gable. Grace was romantic and passionate. She followed her heart, which might or might not lead to bed. All her biographers agree that she never used sex to win roles. Judged in retrospect, not by 50s standards but by feminist ones, she was as self-possessed about her sexuality as she was about her work.

  “Grace was in many ways ahead of her time,” says the writer Donald Spoto, whose biography High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly was published in November. “Her Catholic upbringing and the force of her parents’ arguments and insistence on these codes of conduct were attended to but not heeded. She had an independent conscience from her earliest years. Grace said to me, ‘I was constantly falling in love, and it never occurred to me that this was wrong or bad.’ And when social or religious issues said otherwise, my impression is that she heard it, and then said, ‘Well, thank you for your input. If you’ll excuse me, I have a date.’”

  “If the testimony of her succession of boyfriends is to be believed,” says biographer Robert Lacey, “she was very modern and cool and relaxed and wasted no time. I think it was her rebellion against her father. In every other way she was such a good girl, and did what Daddy wanted, and of course brilliantly achieved in her field, just as Daddy brilliantly achieved in his. I’m sure she was devout, an absolutely sincere Catholic, but taking full advantage of the Catholic mechanisms for private misdemeanors.”

  “Grace was the daughter of a very liberated woman,” says Wendy Leigh, the author of True Grace: The Life and Times of an American Princess. “Margaret was a healthy German blonde with no shame about her body. And then Grace’s father was a great philanderer, so that she had the measure very early on about male animal instinct. And rather than walk away from it, Grace basically embraced it.”

  “She was shy. But physically, she was not shy,” the actor Alexandre D’Arcy, who had a monthlong romance with Grace in 1948, told Robert Lacey. “She was . . . very warm indeed as far as sex was concerned. You would touch her once and she would go through the ceiling.”

  Gwen Robyns, who published Princess Grace in 1976 and then became a close friend to Grace, puts it simply: “She just adored sex. She made no bones about it. We were lying on the bed one day, and I said something about sex, and she said, ‘It’s heaven.’”

  Grace was not unlike the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, another midcentury artist who was cherished for her aura of chastity and purity, a fairy-tale femininity girded for greater things. Fonteyn, it was later revealed, was accomplished in bed and often in bed. There is a connection between art and sex, with arousal in one realm speaking to arousal in another. Performers, like gods and goddesses, must assert themselves in space, which takes all kinds of energy pulled from all kinds of sources. While no one had a problem with this when it came to men and their muses, women of that era had to be quieter. Grace and Margot, who knew each other, were both quiet. But sex, Don Richardson remembers Grace saying, “put lights” in her eyes.

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  If Grace did not feel a societal pressure to bridle her passions, she did feel the clock ticking regarding marriage and children, for which she longed. On January 6, 1956, page one of The New York Times read, PRINCE OF MONACO TO WED GRACE KELLY. Unbeknownst to those who knew her, Grace, during the filming of MGM’s The Swan, had glided into love with Rainier Grimaldi, whom she’d met in 1955 and had been exchanging letters with ever since. “She was playing in The Swan and she was playing a princess,” says Robyns. “Along comes this prince, and, being Grace, she was carried away by dreams and things.” Grace had also made it clear that she didn’t want to be an aging beauty in Hollywood.

  “The Wedding of the Century,” as it was referred to at the time (Grace called it “the Carnival of the Century”), was arguably the first multi-media press event on a modern scale. There was a slew of reporters and photographers on the ship that took Grace and her entourage of 66 to Monaco; nearly 2,000 reporters crowded the cathedral ceremony, “more press there than guests,” remembers Maree Rambo, who was a bridesmaid; and the wedding itself was filmed by MGM and broadcast live to more than 30 million viewers in Europe. It was a marriage that seemed to embody the wedding-cake ideal of postwar, 50s culture, with its emphasis on fairy-tale fertility and prosperity. The little principality of Monaco was stepped like a wedding cake, and its palace was as pink as a petit four. Even bartenders toasted the event, serving a new drink called the Princesse Cocktail: equal parts bourbon, grenadine, and fresh cream. Grace became pregnant with that precious first child (Caroline)—the offspring who would secure the Grimaldi succession in Monaco, and hence its independence from France—on her honeymoon.

  It was during that first pregnancy that Grace turned an accessory by Hermès into a much-coveted cult item. Out in public, she shielded her belly with a large square handbag made of brown pigskin, the Hermès sac à dépêches pour dames. The descendant of a 1930s Hermès saddlebag, it was simple, sensible, and superbly made, yet another example of “always.” Grace was carrying the principality’s future, and she protected it with something proven from the past. In her honor, Hermès christened this bag “the Kelly.” Where the Hermès Birkin bag, named for the actress Jane Birkin, has something more of bling about it, the Kelly remains the icon of impeccable breeding and quiet good taste.

  With the same discipline, culture, and kindness that she had brought to her career as an actress, Grace fulfilled her duties as a princess. She had hoped that now and then she could return to Hollywood to make movies, because she loved and missed acting. This hope was dashed. Rainier was ambivalent, the roles on offer were problematic, and her schedule as a wife, mother, and royal was consuming. Hers turned out to be not a fairy-tale marriage but the kind of marriage anyone has, with
ups and downs, joys and disappointments, and patches of marital discord. Did Rainier step out on her? Did Grace, finally, step out on him? Some of her biographers say yes and yes. Others are not so sure—as Donald Spoto cautions, “Nobody held the lamp.” Her oldest friend, Maree Rambo, says today, “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”

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  As the years pulled on, Grace began to see that “disarray,” the word that didn’t apply to her, had a place in life. And “always”—so allied with perfection, and classicism, and her—was a kind of trap. It was with tears in her eyes that she said to her friend producer John Foreman, “I know where I am going to be every single day for the rest of my life.” And sometime later, when she learned that one of her six bridesmaids had been living in a shelter, she told Judith Balaban Quine that she was strangely envious. “I know it might sound awful and insensitive,” Quine remembers Grace saying, “but the thought of just getting up every day and doing what that day brings you sounds wonderful to me in certain ways.”

  In tiny Monaco, half the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, it was as if Grace were locked back into that cupboard, but without her dolls to play with. Her life was laid out along narrow corridors, much like the corniche on which she took her last drive—rock on one side, open air on the other. It was a slim road full of hairpin turns that connected the family getaway, Roc Agel, to the pink palace where protocol reigned. “Strung like a slender thread across the clouds” is how Quine described one of these upper corniches. On that fateful day of September 13, 1982, Grace didn’t let the chauffeur drive, because the car was too full. She and Stephanie were up in the front, and across the backseat she’d placed dresses that needed altering for the coming season; she didn’t want them wrinkled. She was excited about new projects that were blossoming, and by all accounts she and Rainier were enjoying a renewed closeness. The best medical guess is that Grace suffered a small “warning” stroke while driving that treacherous road, which caused her to lose control of the car. A few seconds of blurred consciousness, like the kiss in Rear Window, and the clouds reclaimed their own.

  NICOLE KIDMAN

  NICOLE’S NEW LIGHT

  By Ingrid Sischy | December 2002

  My life collapsed,” Nicole Kidman recalled recently. “People ran from me because suddenly it was ‘Oh, my God! It’s over for her now!’” Kidman’s leper moment came last year, when her former husband, Tom Cruise, fired her as his wife—that, at least, is how the split came across to the public. But on the day this past summer when she was reliving that moment of reckoning, it all seemed like centuries ago, not only because so much has happened in her life since then, but also because we were sitting in a trailer just outside of Poiana Braşov, Romania, a spot as physically and psychologically removed from Hollywood as it gets.

  Romania is where Kidman will be through the end of this year, at work on Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation of Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier’s rather turgid best-seller about the Civil War. Although some scenes have been filmed in Charleston, South Carolina, the bulk of this epic is being shot in Poiana Braşov and nearby spots in northern Romania. One quickly understands why: these are places that epitomize the phrase “going back in time.” I had arrived in Poiana Braşov a day earlier, in the dead of night. After a hairy mountain ride to my hotel behind an endless stream of horse-pulled carts, and a sleepless night spent listening to wild dogs howl, I was glad to see the morning sun. So was everyone else on the set. It was the first beautiful day after weeks of relentless rain. Suddenly I heard the clippety-clop of horses’ hooves, and somebody said, “Here comes Nicole.” I spied the actress way up the road in costume as Ada, the book’s heroine, all decked out in her corsets and petticoated skirt. She looked the height of refinement, but when she spotted me she let out a hearty laugh. “You made it,” she said in her unmistakable Australian accent.

  Before Cold Mountain is done shooting, Kidman, who stars in the film with Jude Law, will be on movie screens back home breaking audiences’ hearts with her mesmerizing performance as Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s feminist novel, The Hours. That movie, which also features Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and Ed Harris, and which doesn’t betray the profound sense of aloneness that makes Cunningham’s novel so moving, is scheduled to be released later this month. And just like last year—when Kidman surprised and won over moviegoers with the one-two punch of her swooningly gorgeous performance as a doomed dance-hall star in Moulin Rouge and her portrayal of a mother on the edge of madness in The Others—the studios’ release schedules have decreed that she will shortly follow up The Hours with yet another adaptation, this time of The Human Stain, the tough Philip Roth novel, which has been turned into a movie gem by the director Robert Benton and which will be in theaters next year. Benton’s casting of Kidman as the novel’s take-no-crap, been-to-hell-and-back female janitor, opposite Anthony Hopkins, is right on the money.

  And that’s not all. On the heels of her breakup, Kidman spent last winter in Sweden, shooting Lars von Trier’s film Dogville, which is scheduled for release sometime next spring. Von Trier, the director most recently of Dancer in the Dark, wrote this latest film for Kidman, which serves to underscore what has been happening to her career over the last few years. While the world has remained obsessed with “The Tom and Nicole Story,” with what their marriage was really like—and especially with what went on between the sheets and with what truly caused the relationship to combust—Kidman has done something more useful: she has shown herself to be a major talent, a remarkable actress who can get in there with the best of them, go toe-to-toe, and come out with her credibility intact. What’s more, she’s proved herself to be a star with a capital S, the one-in-a-generation kind who, like Elizabeth Taylor, is bigger than the Hollywood system, and is also unafraid to be human and real, which only makes her more popular.

  Offscreen, Kidman, like Taylor, has a love of life, a strong sense of loyalty, and a madcap sense of humor, and she seems to really know how to be a friend. (Her old buddy Naomi Watts, whose career has only recently taken off, told me, “Nicole was always there with her door open, her arms open, her ears open—just what you need.”) Kidman and Taylor know how to live it up, too, and while Kidman may not share Taylor’s predilection for carrying really large rocks on her mitts, she’s got the rags—closets full of the hippest fashion and vintage clothes. Put this pair in a room and you’ll hear two dames who really know how to laugh. In terms of their careers and their craft, there’s more than coincidence in the fact that, while Taylor showed the world what she was made of when she walked the razor’s edge in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Kidman is doing the same thing playing Woolf herself.

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  I’ve gotten to know Kidman over these last couple of years, right as her life was falling apart, in my capacity as editor of Interview magazine. What struck me initially is that she’s a person who doesn’t let others down. In one way or another, I have seen her stand by her word and be thoughtful in situations that would likely bring out the worst in other stars. The more one knows her, the less “actressy” she seems. She hasn’t undergone the kind of narcissistic transformation that can turn extremely famous people into absolute bores or unbearable phonies. She has gotten used to the attention that comes with being a star, but Kidman is not one of those types whom everybody else has to pamper and flatter; instead, she seems to be driven by a feeling that she has so much to learn, and so much to see. She’s still curious, still hungry, and will still almost kill herself playing a part. It’s like she goes into a trance on set—broken ribs and bloody knees (such as she incurred on Moulin Rouge) or grossly swollen ankles (Cold Mountain) be damned.

  Nicole’s childhood doesn’t sound that unusual, but there are a few kinks and clues to suggest that this was a kid with big ambitions. Born in Hawaii in 1967 to Australian parents, Antony and Janelle, sh
e grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Sydney, in a family that was close then and remains close today. Both parents worked, her mother as a nurse, her father as a psychologist, and it appears they passed on a strong sense of ethics and social conscience to their two daughters, Nicole and Antonia. As Nicole, the elder, remembers, “My mother would treat us as little adults. We would discuss things. I was raised to think and to question. She wanted girls who were educated, aware of everything, and opinionated. So did my father. They wanted us to be sure of being able to speak out. That’s gotten me into trouble at times.”

  The outside world was less of an oasis, and at times Nicole felt like a bit of an oddball. She says, “My mother was a feminist in a conservative neighborhood, and my father was left-wing. I was Catholic, and most of the kids were Protestant. I looked very different from most of the other people. I was very, very tall”—she topped off at five feet ten inches—“with wild, wild curly hair, which I now try to tame. I couldn’t go to the beach, because I was so fair-skinned. One of my most vivid memories is of being a child, sitting in my bedroom, and hearing the laughter from the next-door neighbors. They had a pool and you’d hear them laughing, playing. I remember feeling not included in that, just sitting in my bedroom. . . . I had a huge desire to be somebody else. I would think, I’m not living the life I want to live. I would try to come up with images before I went to sleep, to then try and live the life I wanted to live in my dreams. And I was deeply romantic.”

 

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