Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (35 page)

Pochna knew that Rainier’s first-ever trip to America had something to do with the search for a mate. It was hardly a secret. One of the conditions for Monaco’s strange survival into the twentieth century as a French protectorate was that the French government should approve any marriage that affected the Monégasque succession, and early in November 1955, Rainier had formally notified Paris that he would be looking for a bride in America. If things went well, he might be making a proposal.

Pochna saw the list of possible candidates drawn up by Father Tucker. Grace’s name was on it, and also that of a Catholic Dupont who lived in Delaware. The prince and his priest were traveling by liner to New York, and were then planning to head south by car and train. Philadelphia would be their first stop. Father Tucker was taking a side trip to Wilmington, where he had started his career as a priest. He would be celebrating fifty years in his order, and if the Delaware inspection seemed appropriate, it could be fitted into the timetable at this point. Then the itinerary moved on southward, via Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, to finish in Florida with a scout around the wife potential of Palm Beach.

Rainier was due to embark for New York from Le Havre on December 8, 1955, and he spent the previous night in Paris. The French press had got wind of his voyage and what it might entail. A popular legend maintained that Monaco would revert to France in the event of the prince not producing an heir. In fact, the Franco-Monégasque treaty of 1918 clearly guaranteed that, in the event of the Crown falling vacant, Monaco would maintain its existing, protectorate status as “an autonomous state.” But Rainier’s daring mission for love and dynastic survival was exactly the sort of melodrama that republican France expected of its pet principality to the south, and reporters and photographers had dogged the prince most of the day.

In search of peace and quiet, Rainier took refuge in John Pochna’s modest Paris apartment, a former chauffeur’s quarters over a garage. The two men chatted and had a drink together, discussing the details of the coming trip. Then, as Pochna watched from an upper window, Rainier finally set out for his own lodgings, peering cautiously up and down the street to see if the coast was clear. The prince was evidently very anxious to make sure he was not observed, and when he was quite certain he was alone, he made a beeline for the nearest tree. “He took his pecker out,” remembered Pochna, “and he peed against the tree.”

Rainier of Monaco appeared at that moment, to John Pochna, to be a very happy prince indeed—rather like an ordinary man, in fact. The lawyer had just said a temporary farewell, since he was flying on ahead to New York to complete some other business. He would be waiting for the Monaco party when they disembarked. It was going to be quite an adventure. As Rainier zipped up his fly and stepped off into the December night, he seemed positively jaunty.

16

“I HAVE MADE MY DESTINY”

W
hen Grace arrived in New York from Los Angeles on the evening of Friday, December 23, 1955, she dashed straight to Fifth Avenue, dropped her luggage with the doorman of her apartment building, then carried on out into the night. Her agent Jay Kanter was giving a Christmas party at his home in Sutton Place, and some of Grace’s closest friends would be there. She was looking forward to seeing John Foreman, and also Rita Gam, who had a new boyfriend to show off.

Grace was on her most sparkling form. She chattered happily about
The Swan,
whose filming she had just finished. She talked of the Henry Avenue Christmas gathering to which she was traveling next day. Anything but jet-lagged, the actress was bubbling with energy and fun. “I
shall
return!” she giggled to Judy Kanter as she made her way to the elevator, laughing and delivering a mock salute in imitation of General Douglas MacArthur. Yet in the course of a long and convivial evening with some of her most trusted confidants, Grace Kelly gave not a hint that she had a date in Philadelphia the day after tomorrow with His Serene Highness Prince Rainier of Monaco.

The prince himself had reached New York a few days previously, complete with priest and doctor—the quicksilver Father Tucker and Dr. Robert Donat, a young surgeon from Nice. Donat had been in charge of the prince’s appendix operation earlier that year, and now he was traveling to Johns Hopkins in Rainier’s company. They made a modest entourage at their welcoming reception. “Where’s the nigger prince?” inquired Frank Cresci, the bodyguard assigned to Rainier by the New York Police Department. Like many another American, Cresci was somewhat shaky on the distinction between Monaco and Morocco. John Pochna stayed for a few drinks, then slipped off to his own family for a week. Christmas was coming, and nothing of importance could possibly occur until the new year was under way.

It was late on Christmas Day 1955 when Prince Rainier arrived at 3901 Henry Avenue in the company of his father confessor and his personal physician. The trio had had Christmas lunch with Uncle Russ and Aunt Edie, and it was getting dark as the Austins proudly escorted their unusual guests to East Falls for their long-awaited evening with the Kellys. Jack Kelly and the prince’s chaplain Father Tucker hit it off at once. “My father knew an Irish priest if ever he saw one,” remembered Peggy. “‘Father Tucker,’ he said, ‘sit down and I’ll give you a cigar.’”

Grace was trying very hard to be casual. She looked so cool and collected she seemed ready to deliver the “frosty cold-shoulder bit” that Aunt Edie had feared. But her mother knew the signs. It was Grace’s defense mechanism. As Ma Kelly looked at her middle daughter she could tell that Grace, in reality, was “delightfully on edge.”

That was a considerable understatement. For the last six months Grace had been talking through her letters to this wry and often diffident man, and she had very much liked what she read. Rainier had come to occupy a special place in her own private realm of hope and imagination. But would he now stand the test of real life? Grace was a bundle of nerves. “Christmas morning,” she later remembered, “I was sorry I’d gone home.” Things would have been much less fraught and complicated, she reflected in a panic, if she had stayed in California. She telephoned her sister Peggy round the corner, begging her to get herself organized and to hurry to “be over here with me.”

Rainier, for his part, had to try to forget that, personal feelings aside, he was dealing with a serious matter of state. He had given notice to the French government. He had crossed the Atlantic. As ruler of Monaco, he now had to close the deal. But if he was nervous, he managed to hide his feelings as skillfully as Grace.

“He all but monopolized her!” recalled Mrs. Kelly, wondering at the charm and lightness of touch that the thirty-two-year-old prince displayed. As soon as he arrived, he jumped straight into conversation with Grace. Rainier behaved exactly as a debonair prince might be expected to conduct himself, talking and smiling and focusing all his attention upon his lady—to instant and remarkable effect. “I’ve never seen Grace,” commented Bill Godfrey, “show so much interest in any young man.”

The evening went fast. It was ten o’clock in no time, and Father Tucker had to take his train for Wilmington. But his two young companions seemed to be dragging their feet. Rainier, clearly, did not yet feel ready to say his farewells, and Dr. Donat was taking his lead from his prince.

Ma Kelly came to the rescue. Would the prince and Dr. Donat like to spend the night at Henry Avenue, she suggested? There were a couple of beds in the guest room, and the prince and the doctor could rejoin Father Tucker in Wilmington next day. Rainier leapt at the idea so readily that Ma Kelly knew, “then and there, that his intentions were not just those of a smitten young man. There was purpose,” she remembered, “in his every word and movement.”

“Peggy,” said Ma Kelly, realizing that it was time for the grownups to be removed from the scene, “you must take these young people back to your place.”

So Peggy took the visitors, with Grace, round the corner to the house that her father had built for her nearby.

“We sat and played cards,” Grace’s elder sister later remembered. “Well, I ended up playing with the doctor, while Grace and Rainier were playing cards in the other room.”

It was more than cards that occupied Grace and Rainier’s attention. When the pair finally emerged from the other room, sometime after two o’clock in the morning, they were happy and smiling—and the prince had black dog hairs all over his suit.

Peggy lent Rainier some Scotch tape to take off the hairs, and went off into her bedroom for a whispered conference with Grace.

“I think he’s very,
very
fascinating,” said Grace, who seemed to be glowing with a double wattage.

“Well, I think he is too,” said her elder sister, with thorough approval. And that, as Peggy subsequently remembered it, was just about that.

Next morning Grace and Rainier drove out into the country together for lunch, and later that day Grace made her way excitedly up to her mother’s bedroom. “She held my hand,” Ma Kelly remembered, “as she had when she was a little girl.” Out it all poured—the nerves, the joy, the whole tumbling complex of emotions that Grace had been experiencing in the twenty-four hours since she had renewed her acquaintance with the prince. “It was then that I knew,” said Mrs. Kelly, “that she was going to accept if he asked her.”

Grace’s father already knew more than that. Jack Kelly had driven Father Tucker to the station the previous night, and as they drove, the ever-busy priest had confided in Jack the intentions of his “Lord Prince.” This was one romance that Jack Kelly could have done very little to stop. There was such a head of steam building already. But it was shrewd of Father Tucker to invite Jack in on the game—and it was particularly clever of him to broach it as a man-to-man thing. If Jack Kelly knew his Irish priests, Father Tucker knew his Irish-American patriarchs. The young couple could count on the Kelly’s blessing, declared Jack Kelly stoutly— providing, of course, that it turned out to be what Grace herself really wanted. The priest had his permission to tell the prince as much.

That left little more than the formalities to conclude. It had all come about in the blinking of an eye, but no one who had been there while it happened seemed greatly surprised. Grace and Rainier displayed their infatuation with such openness that everyone felt sprinkled by the stardust. Peggy was driving the couple through the night streets of Germantown the following evening, when she glanced in her rearview mirror. It seemed perfectly natural to see her sister with this virtual stranger, locked in a passionate embrace.

On Wednesday, December 28, the prince and Dr. Donat drove Grace the one hundred miles from Philadelphia to New York. Grace had some singing lessons to attend in preparation for
High Society,
the new film project on which she was due to start work in a few weeks time. More urgently, she had a thrilling item of news to share with her friends. Between backseat embraces, long, loving walks, and endless, exploratory conversations, Prince Rainier had asked if she would consent to be his princess, and she had not hesitated to say yes. She had got what her married girlfriends had got—and she had got more.

“Gracie’s home!” Jay Kanter told his wife Judy when they spoke on the telephone that evening. “Call her immediately. She’s waiting to hear from you.” Kanter and John Foreman had just received a pair of curious phone calls from Grace. “We each have to promise to meet her tomorrow morning, separately,” said Kanter, mystified. “We don’t know what’s going on.”

It turned out that Grace wanted to meet Judy as well—for lunch. “It’s vital,” she said, giggling happily, “absolutely vital.” When her old friend told her that she already had other plans, Grace was beside herself. “You must come,” she begged. “I’m pleading with you.”

Judy Kanter did not, in fact, have any plans for lunch next day. Pretending to be busy was her ploy to coax at least a little information out of her friend, and she partially succeeded. “I’ll tell you one thing and one thing only,” said Grace. “After I’ve told you the one thing, I’m going to hang up. If you call back, I won’t speak to you.” She paused and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m engaged to be married.” Then Judy Kanter heard the phone go click.

Over dinner that night, the Kanters and John Foreman got out paper and pencil to try to divine who Grace’s fiancé might be. Oleg Cassini had to be top of the list. Grace had not been seeing much of him lately—Oleg had not been amused by Grace’s springtime fling in Europe with Jean-Pierre Aumont. But the designer remained her most serious long-term suitor, and he had come closer than anyone to getting Grace to defy her parents and to live her own life. Jean-Pierre himself was a distant second.

Looking at more obscure candidates, it seemed clear that something had happened in Philadelphia in the five brief days since Grace had done her General MacArthur imitation in Sutton Place. The Kanters knew that when Grace went home she would step out occasionally with a local date, Bill Clothier, the scion of a prominent Main Line family. Bill Clothier was handsome and athletic, and he had been wholeheartedly endorsed by Jack Kelly as ideal husband material. Was it possible that Grace had surrendered, that she had finally given Daddy the solid and respectable Philadelphia alliance that he had been hoping for all these years?

Judy Kanter found out at twelve-thirty the next day, in the dining room of Grace’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Two green salads and some dainty chicken sandwiches sat on the table. “I am so very much in love with the most wonderful man,” said Grace. “. . . I am going to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco.”