Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (38 page)

Rainier had also discovered, through conversations with John Pochna and others, that there was not much MGM could do, in practical terms, if Grace never made another movie again. A studio might sue a contract player who tried to work for a rival, but dragging a princess out of self-imposed retirement was not a feasible prospect. So when Rainier was asked, on his arrival in Los Angeles at the end of January 1956, whether his wife-to-be would be making any more movies, he no longer bothered to pretend. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Grace herself could neither think nor talk with such brutal clarity. She was hoping, as usual, for the best of all possible worlds. In an interview that appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
on January 22, 1956, just three days before her fiancé’s blunt announcement, she had talked as if she was contemplating the prospect of a long vacation from acting, followed by occasional work on really plum roles. But Grace was not inclined to argue with Rainier. She was rather pleased to have a man who took such firm charge of her life. She had been searching for such a father figure for years, and now she had got one in spades. Rainier’s moods with the press did not trouble her. What was the point of marrying a prince if he did not act in a princely fashion?

By the age of twenty-six, in any case, Grace very much wanted to become a wife and mother. She had always said that she doubted whether it was possible to combine either of these responsibilities with the life of a working actress, and there was also that part of her which had never liked Hollywood—the inconstant, gypsy life, the days living out of a trailer, the combination of tension and tedium, with dozens of people all standing around and only two or three of them doing any obvious work. Legend had it that Marilyn Monroe’s engagement congratulations to Grace ran: “So glad you’ve found a way out of this business.”

Grace was ready to move on, and it was not as though her new life would fail to satisfy her need for public acclaim. Becoming a princess, indeed, would lift her to a new and permanent level of performance. As Alfred Hitchcock slyly put it, “I am very happy that Grace has found herself such a good part.” Grace remained politely noncommittal in her public utterances. “Right now,” she would tell journalists, “I am more interested in my marriage career and too excited about it to think about any other.” But Rainier’s wish was her wish. There would be no more movie-making.

MGM did not like it. Though Grace was well liked as a person, the studio had the lingering unhappiness that it had not got its money’s worth from her as a company asset. At the first news of her engagement, studio spokesmen made halfhearted attempts to point out that Grace still had several years left on her contract, but by the end of January 1956, they had come to realize how counterproductive it would be to play the dog in the manger. In a storm of news reports and magazine cover stories, their actress had already been crowned and married in the popular imagination. The best that MGM could hope for was to jump aboard for the ride. So in true studio tradition, they bid to stage-manage the event, announcing that they would provide their star’s wedding dress— $7,266.68 in materials and manufacture, plus the services of the designer, Helen Rose—and would release Grace’s favorite studio hair stylist, Virginia Darcy (at $300 per week, plus all travel expenses),
to accompany Grace to the wedding. As their contribution to her trousseau, MGM made Grace a present of all the costumes she had worn in
High Society
—and they also paid her a salary bonus of $65,166.66 ($352,000 in 1990s values), on top of her $1,500 a week retainer.

All that the studio received in concrete terms for this generous package of benefits was the exclusive right to film (though not to televise) the story of the wedding in Monaco. After mutterings that Grace might take on one more assignment after
High Society,
it was tacitly agreed that she would do no more work for MGM. Her contract was allowed to lapse. But in 1983, the year after Grace’s death, Steven Englund was going through the Grace Kelly file in the then-accessible MGM archives, when he came across a strange document described as a “layoff sheet.” For some 520 weeks after her marriage—way beyond the expiry of Grace’s original contract—an unknown MGM functionary had methodically kept Grace’s name on the studio roster, painstakingly entering “Grace Kelly” in some weeks and “Princess Rainier” in others, as if the actress had been present all that time, hiding in some obscure commissary. In the heart of the dream factory it was evidently difficult to accept that Grace Kelly would never make another movie.

So
High Society
was her swan song, and it turned out a frothy and entertaining MGM musical in the finest tradition. Striding boldly into the character that Katharine Hepburn had shaped so firmly in the nonmusical original, Grace created a Tracy Lord of her own. If her “True Love” was a triumph, she did even better with her off-key, drunken version of “You’re Sensational”—”I don’t care if I am called the Fair Miss Fridgidaire,” she slurred as she staggered around the ballroom. At the very last moment, Hollywood discovered that the Ice Maiden could laugh at herself.

Grace played a girl falling off her pedestal and enjoying every minute of it. Though her Tracy Lord was a divorcee who, according to the bald facts of the plot, gets so drunk she imagines next morning she has been to bed with a stranger, Grace managed to float above such sordid details with the cheeriness and uplift of a Sunday school teacher. It was a final twirl of the paradoxical Grace Kelly magic. Grace was light and witty and scintillating, and her most moving accomplishment—in her acting, as well as in her brief bursting into song—was to depict the state of being in love in all its mad sentiment and folly, while also transmitting the deeper sense of destiny and purpose that is the eternal but elusive promise of true love.

On April 4, 1956, it seemed as if half of New York had clustered onto Pier 84 on the Hudson River to wave goodbye to the USS
Constitution.
The liner was bearing Grace, most of her family, three of her bridesmaids, over fifty friends, a varied assortment of journalists, and a black, wiry-haired poodle, Oliver—a present to Grace from Mr. and Mrs. Cary Grant—across the Atlantic to Monaco. Confetti fluttered, sirens sounded, and cameras flashed. The waterfront had not seen excitement like it since the boys set out to rescue Europe in World War II. According to Edmond Duffy, the dean of New York’s shipping news reporters, it was the harbor’s biggest shipside news conference in thirty years. When the time came for the
Constitution
to sail, there were so many extra well-wishers to be cleared from the ship that the departure was delayed by forty-five minutes.

The filming
of High Society
had ended on March 6, giving Grace slightly less than a month to organize her trousseau, say goodbye to her friends, deal with countless press requests, and supervise such details as the bridesmaids’ dresses and the socks to be worn by the flower girls. (The dresses were a present from Neiman-Marcus; Grace paid for the socks at J. C. Penney.) On top of all this, she had to pack for the new life that she would be starting on the other side of the world. When Rupert Allan arrived at her apartment for their now-familiar ritual of champagne and packing, he was amazed to see, set out beside the cocktail dresses and ball gowns, more than a dozen pairs of old jeans, along with piles of faded shirts and blouses.

“For heaven’s sake, Grace,” he said, “you’re not taking those with you, are you? You’ll never wear them.”

“Oh yes, I will,” she replied. “Most of the time.”

Monaco’s need to see its prince married on his home territory had relieved the Kelly family of both the duty and the pleasure of organizing their daughter’s wedding, but they more than made up for it in their eight days on board the USS
Constitution.
Every dinner was a special occasion, with champagne, toasts, and speeches. There were organized party games, charades, canasta contests, shuffleboard contests, bingo contests, pioneer sing-songs, walks around the deck with Oliver, farewell-to-America parties, welcome-to-Europe parties. The entire voyage, recalled Judy Kanter fondly, resembled nothing so much as “a floating summer camp.”

For Judy Kanter and the five other girlfriends whom Grace had chosen to be her bridesmaids, April 1956 was a high spot that gave six ordinary American girls the chance to share in the scarcely credible fantasy their famous friend was living through. Judy Kanter kept meticulous notes on the experience, and later wrote a 498-page book on the subject. [
The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and Six Intimate Friends,
by Judith Balaban Quine, 1989.]

Maree Frisby was Grace’s oldest and closest intimate, going back to Stevens School days. Bettina Thompson had been her first roommate at the Barbizon. Carolyn Scott had helped Grace get started in modeling and was another Barbizon girl. Sally Parrish had been Grace’s roommate in Manhattan House, Rita Gam her roommate in Hollywood on Sweetzer Avenue.

None of the bridesmaids was Catholic, two of them were Jewish, and two of them were already divorced. Maree Frisby, one of the divorcées, had brought her new boyfriend along for the trip. The French press had some difficulty understanding how this assorted group of ladies fitted into the symbolism of the solemn church ceremony, since the French term
demoiselle d’honneur
implies a state of maidenhood which all six had, clearly, left far behind. But the choice showed the priority that Grace set on friendship. She was a loyal soul. Who else should she choose as her bridesmaids but her oldest chums and confidantes, and who could provide better support and fellowship as she sailed into the unknown? As Grace reminisced with Maree and Judy and Bettina on board the
Constitution,
the old friends laughed and gossiped and shed tears. They were reliving fond memories, and they were also savoring the anticipation of what lay ahead. It scared them slightly, but they also felt sure that it would be both wondrous and unique.

This feeling transfused the whole ship. Jack Seabrook, one of the sixty-six-strong Kelly party on board the
Constitution,
knew a bit about transatlantic crossings, but he had never received so many presents before he sailed. Sending wine to an ocean traveler was the accepted way of wishing them luck on the voyage—and also of getting invited to the sailing party. “There must have been forty cases of wine stacked in the passageway outside my stateroom by the time I got on board,” remembers Seabrook. “There was champagne in magnums, burgundies—everything.”

Seabrook worked valiantly to drink and distribute all the wine before he disembarked in Monaco—with happy results when he sent a bottle of champagne across the dining room to a table of attractive lady journalists. One of them was the UPI representative Elizabeth Toomey, who, within six months, became Mrs. Jack Seabrook. When he got back to America, Seabrook found he had been summoned to a black-tie dinner meeting of the board of directors of AT&T. Seabroook was a director of New Jersey Bell, so he swotted up desperately on local business conditions, to discover, when he arrived at the dinner, that he had been invited to entertain the board of one of America’s most massive corporations with a firsthand account of Grace Kelly’s wedding.

The whole country was mesmerized. On Broadway, Ethel Merman ran for months in
Happy Hunting,
the hastily thrown together tale of a rich Philadelphia girl who is snubbed by Main Line society but finds herself happily wooed and won by a Mediterranean nobleman. Fashion magazines tried to analyze the “Grace Kelly look.” Shops tried to sell it. NBC added Monaco time to the clocks in its Radio City headquarters, and ran a two-week series of radio and TV briefings on the history and culture of the principality. Grace Kelly had made herself America’s clean and sparky girl next door, and it was only natural that the neighbors should want to join in the celebration. Grace, Ma Kelly had written in the final installment of her ten-part series, was a “shining example of what we in this country are, and what we believe. In a way, her story is an affirmation of the American dream. If Gracie can marry a Prince, every American girl can!”

Given the number of American girls who were nubile and single in January 1956, and the available pool of marriageable princes, this statement did not make statistical sense. Grace Kelly had, in fact, snapped up one of the few bachelor princes in the mid 1950s with any worthwhile realm to his name. But the spirit of Ma Kelly’s thought flew with real wings. There is a moment in every romance when Prince Charming takes the hand of Cinderella, and this was the moment to which Grace had given tangible form. Myths are anything but false if they embody values that ring true to their believers, and Cold War America was only too happy to forget about fallout shelters and UN bloc votes to celebrate such basic human truths as hope, commitment, and tenderness.