A missed turn on a mountain road, a tumbling crash down a wooded slope, an agonizing confusion of medical bulletins—and Grace Kelly was dead at 52. Sudden death put a cruel last chapter to a storybook life: a Philadelphia girl who went to Hollywood and, in just 11 films, became a star of rare beauty and elegant sexuality; then a princess, married to the head of a royal European house. At times the aura of celebrity seemed to obscure the real woman behind it, concerned with her home, her family and her chosen role.
Portrait of a Lady
Jack Kroll with Scott Sullivan in Monaco
First, there is the unspeakable sadness: the image of beautiful Grace Kelly, dead at 52 in the embrace of twisted steel. The ironies come crowding in: wasn’t it the same twisting mountain road on which she sped in To Catch a Thief, scaring Cary Grant and titillating us? The sunny, excruciating funeral: behind the white-draped coffin, anguish totally remade the face of Princess Caroline. It didn’t belong to the paparazzi now; it was the most personal face of her young life, fresh with pain. The face of her father, Prince Rainier, was a crushed blur between his silver hair and his medals. Prince Albert’s face turned grief into a shattered sweetness.
Along with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco maintained a feverish public interest longer than any celebrity of our time. Her death is perhaps the moment for an examination of that damnable, irresistible idea of the Celebrity. Grace Kelly was a movie actress for only a bit longer than five years. It was a meteoric five years—11 films, 2 Academy Award nominations, 1 Oscar. But if she had retired at 26 after her last film in 1956, perhaps marrying some nice financier, lawyer or even another star, the world would not 26 years later be ringing with thunderclap reactions to her death. It was not a career that made her such an undimming public icon, it was not even a life. It was a transfiguration, or a seeming one; the world, especially Americans, saw her as a creature whom destiny had transformed into something rich and strange.
‘Icky’: The ph rase that followed her for 26 years, since she left her career at its peak to marry Prince Rainier III, ruler of a vest-pocket principality, was “fairy tale.” The idea that the movie star’s life became a fairy tale—that idea is the real fairy tale. Princess Grace couldn’t stand the phrase and the thought, and said so time and again in no uncertain terms. “That sounds rather icky and revolting,” she said earlier this year. “I certainly don’t think of my life as a fairy tale. I think of myselfas a modern, contemporary woman who has had to deal with all kinds of problems that many women today have to deal with.” When the question of a movie comeback was raised many years ago, Gary Cooper, her costar in High Noon, said, “Why should she? She’s moved from an artificial stage to a real one.” Her life in Monaco was in its way a parody of a fairy tale. Did Cinderella marry the prince, take charge of the Red Cross, the Girl Guides, preside over local flower-arranging shows and charity affairs? That was Princess Grace’s life. Fairy tales are magic machines that dissolve reality into a dream of transcendent happiness. They are a child’s Scriptures. The real magic was in the images that Grace Kelly evoked in her short but unique film career. Those images remain.
Her basic image was the Snow Maiden concealing a potential avalanche. She was the antithesis of Marilyn Monroe in the ambiguous ’50s. As one writer phrased it: “Once upon a time the kingdom of Hollywood was ruled by two queens—Grace the Good and Marilyn the Bad.’’ With her cool, classic, gold-and-ivory beauty, Grace Kelly was the portrait of a lady. In High Noon she played the embattled sheriff’s Quaker wife whose prim bonnet belied a willpower that allowed her to pull the trigger on the bad guys. In Mogambo she matched her demure adulteress against Ava Gardner’s raunchy bimbo for the pelt of Clark Gable. In The Bridges at Toko-Ri she was the kind of military wife whom William Holden wanted to come home to. In The Country Girl she won an Oscar for her portrayal of the ravaged wife of an alcoholic actor played by Bing Crosby. But despite her Oscar, neither this performance nor the others were stunning acting. It took a master film artist, Alfred Hitchcock, to tap the electricity in Grace Kelly’s perfect cells.
Inferno: In three films Hitchcock created the Kelly woman—a creature whose impeccable exterior concealed a banked inferno of erotic and emotional drives. In Dial M for Murder, as the wife whose silky husband (Ray Milland) plots to have her murdered, Kelly’s passive vulnerability takes on a disturbing, erotic charge—innocence as spiritual masochism. Rear Window is more complex as Kelly plays a kind of superCosmopolitan girl out to get James Stewart into a marriage that he wants and fears. Kelly’s ravishing movements—turning on the lights, sitting on Stewart’s lap—become a ballet of tender entrapment. Best of all is To Catch a Thief, in which Kelly is the rich girl fascinated by Cary Grant as both man and jewel thief. Maddeningly beautiful, simmering behind dark glasses and genteel silences, the quintessential Kelly emerges in her superbly witty seduction of Grant. Turning to say good night to him at her hotel room, her expression of subtly mocking desire freezes him in a connoisseur’s amazement as she slides her white arms like Pavlova around his neck and gives him the kind of kiss that started the Trojan War.
“I didn’t discover Grace,” said Hitchcock, “but I saved her from a fate worse than death. I prevented her from being eternally cast as a cold woman.” He did more—he found what he called the ‘“mysterioso” element in Kelly that made her a figure in the ’50s pantheon along with Monroe, Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. It was this same element that made her short but explosive movie career a way station on the road to Monaco. The characters she played in Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief all seemed to express a quality deeply rooted in Grace Kelly—a determined drive for gentility stemming from her family background.
No public figure in our time has suffered more from hagiographic distortion than Princess Grace. The people who sell the fairy-tale image also bleach out her family origins to plastic pap, painting the Kellys of Philadelphia as the ultimate in wholesome, God-fearing, family-oriented, bootstrapyanking American values. The Kellys are much more complicated than that, an Irish-American tribe right out of a John O’Hara novel. Grace’s father, John B. Kelly, the son of an Irish immigrant, was a great athlete, an Olympic rower who was refused permission by the British to race in their Diamond Sculls championship because he had worked with his hands and was therefore not a gentleman sportsman. Kelly had been a hod carrier and bricklayer before becoming a millionaire contractor. Nearly 30 years later his son, Jack Kelly, Grace’s brother, won the Diamond Sculls in the process of becoming as great an athlete as his father.
Grace’s mother, the former Margaret Majer, of German descent, was also a mighty athlete (the first woman to coach a woman’s team at the University of Pennsylvania) and bequeathed her blond beauty to her three daughters. The stupendous upward mobility of this family did not suffice to get them into the Philadelphia Social Register, but father John was a power in the Democratic Party and was almost elected mayor of Philadelphia. In 1975 Jack Kelly wanted to run against incumbent Frank Rizzo but his mother prevented him, apparently because she was afraid that his playboy activities would have led to a mudslinging campaign. Grace’s Uncle George was one of America’s leading playwrights (Pulitzer Prize-winning Craig’s Wife). Uncle Walter was a famous vaudevillian.
The Kellys were a churning caldron of American energies. In this atmosphere Grace was the introvert, somewhat withdrawn, nearsighted and even sickly. Her first acting was done with her dolls, to whom she gave different voices in little plays she made up. After a private-school education in places such as Ravenhill, a strict convent, she came to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She worked as a model, did TV commercials and appeared in television shows like the TV Playhouse and other programs in the golden age of TV drama.
Gloves: Producer John Foreman, then an agent, remembers a lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York with the aspiring Grace Kelly, who showed up in gloves and a hat with a little veil. Foreman thought, “This is a strange, dead-assed girl.” But by the end of the lunch he realized that Grace had her act together. It was, Foreman told Grace’s biographer Gwen Robyns, “the act she put together for survival… Only Grace could have created Grace Kelly… No one else did. No manager, no agent, no producer, not even her family… Grace’s act, which has stood her in good stead all these years, is one of the most efficient I have ever seen… For quite a few of us, and for many years, she gave us a perfect place that one can relate to, and this is why we admire her so.”
When she took her act, her self-creation, to Hollywood, the impact was decisive. Van Johnson said, “Hollywood went for Kelly in rebellion against a broadside of broads.” Her friend, actress Rita Gam, pointed out that “Grace was a gentlewoman, something so totally new to Hollywood.” On the African location of Mogambo, while Ava Gardner was taking baths in public, Grace was busy with her knitting and speaking Swahili, which she had learned beforehand, to the natives. “She’ll always have the class you find in a great racehorse,” said James Stewart. Grace Kelly’s class meant that her many rumored romances—with Gable, Ray Milland, Bing Crosby, Oleg Cassini— never raised a ripple of scandal. By the time she met Prince Rainier at the Cannes Film Festival he may have seemed to offer her a permanent role—what a palace aide characterized as “her last and best role.”
She married, she said, on instinct. “As an actress I had searched for truth through make-believe, not as an individual in a real setting.” Monaco was an odd sort of real setting. Somerset Maugham called it “a sunny place for shady characters.” Before Princess Grace came along, the coffers in this tax haven for the international rich were so empty that the prince nearly had to sell his yacht. The moribund 19th-century resort was turning into a colony for doddering dowagers. Now it has been refurbished as a discreetly swinging colony for the super-heeled middle-aged. In the process, Monaco’s ecological balance has been devastated.
In this “Hong Kong on the Riviera” skyscrapers up to 300 feet now dominate the skyline. The principality’s footage has been increased from 375 to 464 acres by reclaiming land from the Mediterranean. Rainier wrested control of the gambling casinos from Aristotle Onassis and briefly suspended the Monaco Constitution in 1959 to show that he was still the ruler.
Rebelliousness: The image of Princess Grace helped mightily in the turnaround in Monaco’s fortunes. But unquestionably the chief reality in her “real setting” was her children. “The upbringing of the two older children,” says a close American friend, “was straight out of the Victorian era.” This may well have accounted in good part for the rebelliousness of Caroline and her shortlived marriage to French playboy Philippe Junot. More recently, Caroline, now 25, caused her parents great concern when a photographer spotted her on a Pacific island with old pal Guillermo Vilas, the tennis star. On the other hand, the 24-year-old Albert, a graduate of Amherst in Massachusetts, is a fine student and suberb athlete. He apparently is eager to take over from his father and carry on the Grimaldi family’s stewardship of Monaco, which dates back to the 13th century. As for the striking, 17-year-old Stephanie, she has profited from Caroline’s example and been given more rope by her parents. The hippest looking of the three children—with her leather jackets, Mexican boots and blue jeans—she was about to enter design school before the tragic accident.
Every person who has known Princess Grace emphasizes the all-importance of her family. But the family she created was a special one, structured around values and rules that her children apparently found anachronistic. And yet Grace was her own woman: she made a passionate defense of breast-feeding, and in an interview with Playboy she showed a startling liberality toward birth control, calling it an issue that people should “decide for themselves.” She kept in close contact with her Philadelphia family, returning there frequently, not only for splashy social occasions but also to do such things as shop with an old school friend at Woolworth’s for ant traps, hard to find in Monaco.
Princess Grace chafed when the media asked intrusive questions, especially about her children. But the paradox of celebrity is that it insists we make judgments. Grace Kelly was once an artist who gave us pleasure and the further pleasure of thinking about it. In her penultimate film, The Swan, she plays a young girl engaged to a crown prince. The producers of the film, which was a flop, complained that nobody came to see it because they saw the news reels of Grace’s real wedding with a real prince. All through her life we seem to feel this blurring of reality and nonreality.
Harmony: Who was the real Grace? In My Book of Flowers, Princess Grace de scribes the first attempts at flower arranging by herself and a group of friends:
“At first we were all nervous and felt incompetent— which of course we were—but this was only in the beginning, for it became the first step toward the awakening of many hidden talents. Through working with flowers we began to discover things about ourselves that had been dormant. We found agility not only with our fingers but with our inner eyes in searching for line, scale and harmony. In bringing out these talents within ourselves, we gained a dimension that enabled us not only to search for harmony in an arrangement, but also to discover the importance of carrying it into our lives and our homes. To create harmony in the home is the woman’s right and duty. The home must be the oasis for the family—husband, children and others close to us. It should be a place where they can find a sense of well-being and strength, replenishment and renewal.”
In this touching passage Grace Kelly and Princess Grace come together. We catch a glimpse of what she has been trying to do for 26 years—bring art and life together, the wedding of the beautiful and the good. There is something Victorian about it, but there is something timeless too. We see the connection between the little girl talking to her dolls, the beautiful young actress showing Cary Grant that gentility can blaze into ecstasy and the matron trying to orchestrate a family in the clangor of celebrity. Peace to her spirit.
A Tragic Crash, a Royal Farewell
Jerry Adler with Scott Sullivan and William Echikson in Monaco
The last journey of Princess Grace was one she had taken often in life, the 600 yards from her pink-walled palace to the great w hite Cathedral of St. Nicholas. Her wooden coffin, borne by 12 brothers of a local penitent society, was trailed by three figures in black: her elder daughter, Princess Caroline, her son, Crown Prince Albert, and her husband, Prince Rainier, who seemed to stand at the center of an implosion of grief that bent every gaze to his stricken face. The foreign notables—Nancy Reagan, the Princess of Wales, Danielle Mitterrand, Cary Grant and Eddie Fisher among them—arrived separately, almost unnoticed by the somber crowd of fewer than 1,000 who gathered at the church. Under a blazing morning sun, Grace’s coffin was borne up the flower-banked steps and into the cathedral, where the archbishop of Monaco celebrated a French and Latin mass and where she was to be entombed alongside other members of the royal family of her tiny adopted state on a promontory overlooking the blue Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean may have been the last thing that Grace saw, five days earlier. From the hairpin curves of the Moyenne Corniche, which links the Grimaldis’ summer home at Roc Agel with Monte Carlo, a half-mile below, it is almost possible to imagine sailing off into space and landing with a splash in those blue waters; but in fact the princess’s car, heading straight across the road just before a sharp right turn, tumbled into a leafy ravine and came to rest 120 feet away in the garden of a 62-year-old French farmer, Sesto Lequio. “I thought an airplane had crashed in my garden,” Lequio said. “The car was turned over on its side, with flames coming out.” Lequio doused the wreck with his fire extinguisher, yanked open the door on the driver’s side and helped Princess Stephanie to the ground—a detail that would later lead to speculation that the 17-year-old princess had been at the wheel. A truck driver who came to help, Dominique Toci, recalled Stephanie “weeping and crying hysterically for her mother. She kept saying, ‘Is she all right?’”Grace was trapped in the back seat, not moving, her hair covering her face. “I yelled, ‘Do you hear me?’ ” Toci said. “She didn’t respond.’’
By the time rescue workers cut Grace from the wreckage and brought her to Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco, she was in “a deep coma,’’ according to Dr. Jean Chatelin, the chief of surgery. “We started working on her right away, repairing her fractures [collar bone, right thigh bone and a rib] and restoring her vital functions,” Chatelin told Newsweek. He also put in an urgent call to Dr. Jean Duplay, the leading neurologist in Nice, 20 miles up the coast. What Chatelin did not do immediately is one procedure that most large American medical centers would automatically perform on an accident victim in a coma—a CAT scan of the brain. The 400-bed Princess Grace Hospital, which opened in 1958, has no CAT scanner. The only one in Monte Carlo belongs to a private physician, Dr. Michel Mourou, and it was not until evening—eight hours or so after the accident—that Grace was moved by ambulance to Mourou’s clinic, a few blocks away.
Hemorrhage: The CAT scan confirmed what doctors already suspected, that Grace was suffering a massive hemorrhage from her head injuries. But it also revealed, according to Duplay, an unrelated hemorrhage of a cerebral artery, a form of stroke that can cause sudden dizziness or loss of consciousness. Based on that, and on descriptions of the accident from Stephanie, Duplay concluded that Grace lost control of the car after suffering a relatively minor cerebral incident—one that need not have been fatal to anyone who wasn’t driving down the Moyenne Corniche at the time. Duplay’s account helped quell reports that the car had been driven by Stephanie, who was a year too young to hold a license.
None of this, however, was made public at the time. The first announcement of the accident from the palace blamed the crash on a brake failure in Grace’s 10-year-old, British-made Rover. (British Leyland immediately dispatched two mechanics to investigate, but by the weekend Monaco authorities had not allowed them to inspect the wreck.) Even more baffling was the initial report from the palace on Grace’s injuries, which mentioned only that she had suffered multiple fractures and gave her condition as “stationary.” “I was led to believe she was out of danger,” her brother, Jack, said later. Stephanie, likewise, was said to have suffered only bruises, when in fact she had sustained a serious cervical fracture that kept her from attending her mother’s funeral. The source of the misleading bulletins remained a mystery; they were disowned both by the doctors and the palace’s official spokeswoman, who was out of the country at the time. It was almost as though, in this tiny principality built on the business of wishful thinking, the authorities could bring themselves to say only what they wanted to be true.
No Chance: Grace’s condition worsened during the night, and by the following morning she was being kept alive by heart and lung machines. By midday, Chatelin knew her condition was hopeless, and that evening he called together Rainier and the two older children. Grace’s brain was dead, he told them; there was no chance of recovery. At 10 o’clock that night the family agreed to disconnect her life-support systems. “They were all so sad,” said Nadia Lacoste, Grace’s longtime friend and press secretary. “It hurt just to look at them.” The announcement of her death caught most Monacans—who had heard nothing to contradict the early, optimistic reports—by surprise, in particular, the officials and gamblers at the vast Loew’s casino. It was more than a half hour later before they thought to close the slot machines and busy tables of blackjack, craps and roulette. The craps players were allowed one last roll of the dice, and the blackjack dealers kept dealing until they reached the bottom of the deck.
Newsweek (September 27, 1982)
Grace&Family 