Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (15 page)

Philippe of the Waldorf was the kind of man for whom Grace so often fell—mature and experienced, with a pronouncedly flamboyant streak. He offered the dictatorial control and guidance to which her childhood had addicted her, blended with a sense of fantasy and ambition that was curiously similar to her own. Brought up in London by French parents, Philippe had devised a way of talking to match the pseudo, self-bestowed title in which he gloried. “His accent was most indicative of the man,” remembers George Lang, no mean showman himself, and one of the several successful restaurateurs who served their apprenticeship under Philippe. “There were French overtones and English overtones, with American bits and pieces, all blended together by his artifice to form a basic sauce.”

Philippe introduced Grace to the world of fine food and finer wines, a continuation of her delicate lunches with Uncle George. Ma Kelly’s Henry Avenue cuisine had been hearty and simple, with something of a German farmhouse touch. Blood sausage with fried apples had been one of Grace’s childhood favorites. Now she learned about pate and fine claret. Along with the champagne, Martin Riskin reverently bore to Manhattan House bottles of Château Margaux and other
premiers crus
that he himself could only dream of tasting.

Don Richardson picked up hints of his girlfriend’s crash course in high living from her sudden familiarity with smart names and with the price of things. He found it unattractive, and he sneered dismissively at “Grace’s maître d’.” He could not believe that her relationship with Philippe could amount to anything serious. But up in the banqueting office at the Waldorf, over the late-evening suppers, Charles Ohrel was telling it differently. “He’s truly in love,” he told Martin Riskin. “They want to get married.”

Philippe was on the rebound. He had just broken up with his second wife, the food writer Poppy Cannon, while Grace, for her part, was suddenly less enamored of the idea of a theatrical partnership in Philadelphia. Marriage to Philippe promised an enticing role as a social queen of New York, sharing confidences and the society columns with her new friend Elsa Maxwell, entertaining the likes of Cole Porter and the members of Philippe’s elite Lucullus Circle, the private dining club that he organized for the occupants of the Waldorf Towers. It was no bad thing for an actress to have a polished and metropolitan social dimension.

But Grace’s father would have none of it. “It’s the old man,” reported Charles Ohrel in one of his late-evening briefings. “He just won’t allow it. He’s giving poor Philippe a terrible time.” It was quite out of the question for Jack Kelly to surrender his daughter to a twice-divorced man who was a banqueting manager. He angrily refused to countenance any notion of marriage—as George Lang heard it, Jack Kelly went “absolutely bonkers” when he was told of the idea—and that was the end of Grace becoming Mrs. Claudius Charles Philippe, though she did go on seeing Philippe, following the pattern in which she continued to date Don Richardson, hoping for the best and trying not to lose a friend. Congenitally nonconfrontational in her personal relationships, Grace always found it difficult to end her romances, preferring her lover—or, more usually, her father—to make the decisive move.

George Kelly’s play
The Fatal Weakness
was the story of a woman who could not resist going to weddings, and there must have been moments when Jack Kelly wondered whether his daughter Grace did not suffer from a variety of the same affliction. It was not just that Grace seemed to fall for men so readily. It was the fact that she wanted to marry them—and that the men themselves were so obviously not husband material. By his own admission, Don Richardson was anything but the setting kind, while Claude Philippe’s reckless and hard-driving ways were to propel him rapidly through two more marriages (bringing his total to four), a number of notably unsuccessful business ventures, and a conviction for tax fraud that prompted his ignominious departure from the Waldorf in 1959. It is difficult to see how marriage between Grace and the banqueting manager could have ended in anything except disaster, and in the light of Philippe’s subsequent misadventures, Jack Kelly’s refusal to let go of his daughter could very reasonably be seen not as meddling but as prudent and very necessary parenting—protecting his naive and impulsive daughter from herself.

But what was a pretty girl to do in New York? In the winter of 1949, the dashing young Shah of Iran arrived in America on an official visit, met Grace Kelly, and fell instantly in love with her. Thirty-years-old, slim, dark, and single, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi had ruled Iran since 1941, in name at least, and he had come to the U.S. to cultivate the ties that were to help him to absolute power in 1953. After talks in Washington with President Truman, the Shah had come up to New York and was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, as did most official visitors to the city. Grace was introduced to him at the opening reception arranged by Claude Philippe, and the young prince wasted no time. He invited Grace out, and she was delighted to accept. “They went out together six nights in a row,” remembers Grace’s friend, Maree Frisby Rambo.

The Shah gave Grace the definitive tour of Manhattan’s smartest clubs—the Stork and El Morocco—and every ballroom in the Waldorf in a dizzying succession of receptions and dinners. The reporters covering his visit were amazed by his capacity to stay out nightclubbing until two-thirty every morning, then to reappear at eight, fresh and rested, ready for another full day of official engagements. The secret servicemen assigned to the Iranian party begged for mercy. “Miss Kelly,” one of them pleaded with Grace one day, “could you please stay home tonight?” One evening Grace accompanied the Shah to the opera and encountered the heady experience of a packed auditorium rising to its feet, fifteen hundred faces turned upward in homage. “It was her first taste of it,” remarked one of Grace’s friends to Sarah Bradford.

The relationship between the blonde actress and the handsome Shah was hard for the gossip columnists to miss, and one newspaper noted that the visiting ruler had presented Grace with some expensive items of jewelry. New York news was Philadelphia news, and the moment Jack and Margaret Kelly found out about the jewelry it was action stations again at Henry Avenue. A handsome young head of state represented a definite improvement on a penniless drama director or a hotel banqueting manager, but the Shah’s expensive gifts were simply not respectable. Ma Kelly got on the first train from Philadelphia and by ten-thirty a.m. she was in New York, knocking on the door of her friend, Marie Magee. “That jewelry—did you see about that jewelry?” she exclaimed to Marie. “Get her on the telephone! Tell her I want to see her right away.”

Marie Magee described the episode more than thirty years later to Sarah Bradford. “Gracie! Where are those jewels?” Ma Kelly demanded as soon as her daughter arrived.

Grace tried to play for time. “They’re three pieces of jewelry.”

“You mean you took pieces of jewelry!” Ma Kelly’s indignation knew no bounds. A bunch of flowers, a book, or a box of candy— that sort of gift was respectable. But jewelry was something else entirely. “You go get them,” she instructed her daughter.

“Oh mother . . .” said Grace, balking.

“I said, go get them,” repeated Mrs. Kelly, “and I am sitting right here till you return. Get in a cab and come back and bring them. I want to see them. Your father says they have to go back.”

So Grace took a taxi back to her apartment and soon returned with her presents from the Shah—three extravagantly bejeweled confections whose every detail was etched into the memory of Marie Magee: a solid gold vanity case about eight inches long, with thirty-two large diamonds in the clasp; a gold bracelet watch, whose face was covered with a dome of pearls and diamonds; and a gold pin in the form of a birdcage, with a delicate barred door that opened and closed on a minuscule hinge; inside the cage, on a swing, sat a diamond bird with pavéed wings and eyes made of bright-blue sapphires. The gifts were worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Ma Kelly needed only one look. “You’ve got to give them back,” she said.

“Mother,” Grace replied, “I can’t give those back.”

“Well, you’ve got to,” repeated Mrs. Kelly. “I’m going to sit here till those jewels go back to that Shah. Your father says they’ve got to go back. I say they’ve got to go back.”

“Mother,” Grace replied, “one does not refuse a king . . .”

Grace did not tell her mother that there was one offering from the Shah which she had refused. The young prince was on the lookout for a bride. He had recently divorced his beautiful first wife, Fawzia, King Farouk’s sister, and in the course of his six nights on the town he had invited Grace to take her place. The three items of jewelry were tokens of infinite treasures to come.

Grace confided this extraordinary news to her student boyfriend, Mark “Herbie” Miller, on the telephone one day. Grace and Herbie had ended their romantic relationship by mutual consent when they came to the end of their time at the Academy, but they had kept in touch as old friends. “He’s asked me to marry him!” Grace told Herbie in astonishment, recounting the upshot of her action-packed week.

For Grace the prospect of becoming Empress of Iran was something of a joke. Her heart might be hasty, but it was not that easily captivated. Her cool head could tell the difference between a week of fun and a lifetime of commitment, and whatever her social-climbing fantasies, Grace was far from abandoning her dreams of acting glory. She did not love the Shah, and she told him so politely.

But that did not stop her hanging on to his jewels. Grace kept the three exotic pieces in the top drawer of her dressing table, showing them off delightedly to her girlfriends, and joking that the gems were only rhinestones. Then, on the eve of her marriage to Prince Rainier in 1956, she handed them out as gifts to her bridesmaids. Judy Kanter, the daughter of the president of Paramount Pictures, was amazed to be offered the sapphire-eyed bird in the delicate gold cage, still in its original Van Cleef &
Arpels container, and she told Grace that she could not possibly accept so rich a present. Grace must keep it for herself, she insisted.

“I can’t,” Grace replied without elaboration. And on that particular subject, the normally talkative bride-to-be had no more to say.

One day in the early 1950s, Richard Waterman, a young Philadelphia businessman, found himself seated at a table next to Grace Kelly. They were both guests at the marriage of Anne Levy to Herbie Siegel, two old friends and neighbors of the Kelly family on Henry Avenue. Anne Levy had been a student at the Stevens School with Grace.

The Levys were mega-rich and extraordinarily well connected. In partnership with William Paley—to whom they were related— Ike and Leon Levy had built up CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System. Show-business people were forever passing through the Levys’ Henry Avenue home. “It was the sort of place,” remembers Richard Waterman, “where you would ring the bell, and Van Johnson would answer the door.” For the marriage of Anne Levy, the entertainment was by Frank Sinatra.

Grace Kelly was quite a minor figure in this company. She was only just starting to make a name for herself, and Richard Waterman did not find her looks particularly appealing. “She was a thin and bony creature,” he remembers. But it was Grace’s manner which Waterman found still less attractive: “She was so aloof and remote. She scarcely spoke a word to anyone at the table, and all through the wedding she had her eyes fixed on this one man, Manie Sacks. He was old enough to be her father.”

Emanuel “Manie” Sacks was an old friend of both the Kellys and the Levys. As head of Columbia Records (then part of CBS), he had advanced Frank Sinatra the money he needed to buy out his contract with the Tommy Dorsey band. Manie Sacks was always there when people needed him. “He met me at the dock when I came back from winning the Olympic championship,” Jack Kelly said of his friend. “He sat beside me when I was licked for Mayor and consoled me.”

Manie Sacks had helped Grace secure some of her earliest modeling assignments through his rag-trade contacts in New York. With strong, chiseled features and curly black hair, he was a well liked and very attractive man. But Grace’s interest in Manie Sacks struck Waterman as excessive: “She did not take her eyes off him. She followed him everywhere he went. She craned her neck. She seemed oblivious to anything else. I don’t know if she was having an affair with him, if she wanted to have an affair with him, or whether she was just obsessed with a powerful man in her business. I have no way of judging. But it was quite extraordinary. She had no time for anyone else. ‘Now,
that’s
a cold drink of water,’ I thought.”