The Princess From Hollywood

By John Skow

Grace Kelly: 1929-1982

She wore white gloves and a smile of innocent wickedness as she wheeled the little blue convertible around the cliffside curves above Monaco. For the right man, the elegant smile hinted, she might take the gloves off. She had been driving much too fast, because it had been necessary to outdistance the police, and Gary Grant, the reformed jewel thief sitting beside her, looked ill. But he perked up when she parked at a turnoff and produced a cold chicken picnic lunch.

"A leg or a breast?" she asked naughtily.

"You make the choice, "he replied with a faint smile. . .

No actress played high comedy better than Grace Kelly during the six years (1951-56) that her film career flared so beguilingly, and what fascinated the groundlings was that she seemed to be living the roles as well. Last week, 28 years after she met Prince Rainier of Monaco during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, and 26 years after she gave up acting to marry him and become the reigning Princess of his 467-acre tax haven and gambling oasis, she came to the poignant and unexpected end of an astonishing script.

Apparently because she suffered a stroke, she lost control of her car on a hairpin turn in France above Monaco. The 1972 Rover fell 40 yds. down a steep hillside and caught fire. A resident extinguished the fire and pulled Princess Stephanie, her 17-year-old youngest child, from the driver's-side door (leading to speculation, eventually squelched, that the underage and unlicensed Stephanie had been driving). Firemen extricated Princess Grace. The first confusing bulletins from the palace spoke only of a broken leg, but she never regained consciousness, and a brain scan showed irreparable damage from the stroke and her injuries. She died the next day, at 52, after Rainier and their older children, Princess Caroline, 25, and Prince Albert, 24, agreed to the removal of a life-support system. At week's end Stephanie remained hospitalized with a damaged vertebra.

To the young, of course, Grace was simply a middle-aged celebrity, less interesting than most because better behaved. But to those of her own generation, it was almost impossible to think of her as a matron whose photos sometimes showed the puffiness of weight too easily gained, and whose statements in the press were likely to be suppressed clucks about her daughters' unsuitable consorts. To her contemporaries, perhaps simply because she stopped making films at 26, Grace Kelly remained vividly what she had been, a lovely blond swirl of shadow and substance, a white-gloved good girl who managed to be disturbing and mysterious.

Her looks were those of a fashion model, and she might have seemed as bloodless as a mannequin if it had not been for a striking coolness of manner, which may have been nothing more than the defensiveness of a young woman so myopic that she could not read the expressions of those around her. She was rich, however, and it showed. Her face was not closed or insolent; it was simply the face of someone who did not need the job and did not need to impress anyone.

She was thought to be patrician, although her parents, a former magazine cover model and an Irish bricklayer grown wealthy as a contractor, certainly did not qualify as aristocrats in Philadelphia. Nor did Grace, the princess of an amusement park, ever qualify as a Main Line aristocrat there despite her popularity in the city. But she behaved like a lady, and thus in Holl wood she seemed not quite real, not quite an illusion. The picnic scene with Gary Grant from To Catch a Thief-worked because this flickering imbalance of perception carried over to the screen. It seemed deliciously shocking (but deliciously believable) that there were breasts and legs beneath her summer frock.

The Princess' mother Margaret, who gave up modeling (for magazines like Country Gentleman) after commencing her not very happy marriage to John Sr., was the unquestioned monarch of the Kelly clan. Her iron rule was to keep up appearances. There is no doubt that Grace learned much about the royalty trade from Margaret. In 1954 Grace had a serious affair with Designer Oleg Cassini, but against family wishes (he was divorced and not Catholic). Then, over Christmas of 1955, Rainier visited the Kelly mansion in Philadelphia. The unlikely joining of clans was approved.

Grace retired from Hollywood after only eleven films. Her first important role was as Gary Cooper's wife in High Noon. She played opposite Clark Gable in Mogambo, James Stewart in Rear Window and Frank Sinatra in High Society, and she won an Oscar in 1955 as Bing Crosby's wife in The Country Girl.

A career of six years was over and one of 26 years began, with utmost gaudiness, at a wedding attended by 1,100 guests, 1,600 journalists and at least two pickpockets, posing as priests, clumsy enough to be arrested. Aristotle Onassis, who once mistook Grace for Gary Grant's secretary when she arrived for lunch on the shipping tycoon's yacht wearing hornrimmed spectacles, arranged for 15,000 carnations to be dumped on Rainier's yacht from a plane.

Everyone lived ever after. The press called it "a storybook romance," but it was more clearly a dynastic marriage of the kind traditionally made for good, practical reasons by European nobility. In Rainier's case, the practicality was not hard to see. Rainier's Grimaldi clan dates its ascendancy in Monaco from 1297, when his ancestor Franc,ois the Cunning sneaked into the palace disguised as a monk. By a quirk of French law, Monaco's citizens would lose their tax and military exemptions if Rainier failed to produce an heir to the throne. What Grace got, in addition to a title (Her Serene Highness), the run of a 200-room pink palace and perks to suit, was what her mother had: a marriage to be seen through steadfastly, come what might.

She mothered her children, took up good works, supported a league that promoted breast feeding and saw to the rebuilding of the hospital in Monte Carlo that bears her name, and in which she died. Terence Cardinal Cooke of New York called her "a lesson in Catholic motherhood," and Brigitte Bardot called her "l'Altesse Frigidaire"--Her Majesty the Frigidaire. She is widely credited with giving Monaco the dignity and luster, and of course the splendid tax loophole, in the person now of Prince Albert, the heir apparent, that have helped to bring the once dilapidated old clip joint its present considerable prosperity. She conferred honor on Graustark by allying it with Hollywood.

That honor was returned last Saturday, with affection. Among those film celebrities, pop notables and real and Graustarkian dignitaries who attended her funeral were Nancy Reagan, French President Franc,ois Mitterrand's wife Danielle, Ireland's President Patrick Hillery, Gary Grant, Frank Sinatra's wife Barbara, Film Mogul Sam Spiegel, Racing Driver Jackie Stewart, Diana, Princess of Wales, Prince Bertil of Sweden, Princess Benedikta of Denmark, Don Juan de Bourbon, father of Spain's King Juan-Carlos, Holland's Prince Bernhard, Grand Duchess Josephine of Luxembourg, Michael, former King of Rumania, Frederika, former Queen of Greece, and Prince Henri, pretender to the French throne. --ByJohnSkow.

Reported by William Blaylock/Monaco

With reporting by William Blaylock/Monaco

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