Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (36 page)

For several long moments Judy Kanter did not know what to say. She shook her head to and fro in disbelief, then blurted out the only words that seemed appropriate. “No shit, Grace!” she exclaimed. The two women looked at each other, saying nothing, then dissolved into paroxysms of helpless laughter, doubling up with such hysteria that they had to push their salads aside. They risked banging their heads on their plates.

Judy Kanter’s irreverent joy summed up the reaction of many of Grace’s friends in the days ahead. They were delighted for Grace and they wished her every happiness. But since no one knew anything about Rainier’s letters and Grace’s months of secret anticipation, they could but speculate on her motives. On the evidence at hand, she had either succumbed to a rush of foolish and impetuous passion—which was certainly consistent with her previous romances—or else she was guilty of some very cold-blooded calculation indeed. Trying to sort it all out for Judy Kanter, Grace cheerfully admitted to both.

“I love his eyes,” she gushed. “I could look into them for hours. He has a beautiful voice. . . . He is everything I’ve ever loved.”

More practically, however, she explained, “I don’t want to be married to someone who feels belittled by my success. . . . I couldn’t bear walking into a restaurant and hearing the maître d’ refer to my husband as Mr. Kelly.”

For someone who liked to act carefree, Grace Kelly worried a lot. She worried about the “Mr. Kelly” problem. She worried about getting old as an actress, and finding it hard to get parts. She worried about how she could remain in the movie business and still have babies, raise a family, and lead her old-fashioned idea of a proper married life. She worried, above all, about how she could please her demanding mother and father while also gaining independence for herself with the man of her dreams— and His Serene Highness Prince Rainier of Monaco provided a single, simple, and spectacular solution to all of the above. To be a princess. To be married with a bishop’s blessing. To live in a castle in the south of France. To turn real life into a movie, and to live it, securely, forever. All this, plus the love of a witty, red-blooded man with dark brown eyes into which she felt able to gaze for hours. It was far better than
The Swan
—better, even, than a medal on display in the Kellys’ black velvet trophy room.

“I acted more on instinct,” Grace later said. “But then I always have. . . .
We happened to meet each other at a time when each of us was ready for marriage. There comes a time in life when you have to choose.”

If it took Grace Kelly only a day or so to fall in love with the idea of becoming a princess, it seemed clear that the rest of America would make up its mind even quicker than that. “Prince to wed movie star!’’ The press would go wild. It was a mingling of so many cherished fantasies, picking up where the dreams of Hollywood left off and giving them an extra twist. How to break the news to the world was the immediate question, and on Friday, December 30, Grace organized a dinner in her Fifth Avenue apartment so that Rainier could meet some of her New York friends and talk about what came next.

Father Tucker eased the formality of the introductions with one of his famous jokes, and the prince told Grace’s friends to forget his tides and call him “Rainier.” It was a relaxed and jovial evening—until the moment when Father Tucker presented his schedule for announcing the engagement of his Lord Prince. Monseigneur (Rainier’s official style of address) would return with Grace to the Kelly home in Philadelphia, the priest explained, whence the official announcement would be released. A private photographer, hired for the occasion, would record the event, and his pictures would be passed on to the newspapers. Father Tucker proposed two decorous poses—one of the happy couple on their own, and another of them circled by the smiling Kellys.

The chaplain’s proposal revealed a charming but abysmal ignorance of the appetites of the American press. There was no way that America’s news organizations would be satisfied without their own pictures of the couple and a chance to ask each of them some questions. But as Jay Kanter—along with John Foreman and Grace’s New York lawyer, Henry Jaffe—gently tried to explain the problem, they encountered an unmistakable stiffening on the part of the prince. Rainier wanted to keep his private day private, and as the Americans tried to explain the impracticality of his wish, the atmosphere cooled perceptibly. Voices became tight. The prince became princely—and there were no more jokes from Father Tucker. Grace sat back in her seat, Judy Kanter remembered, “as though wishing she could disappear into the sofa pillows.”

It was Jack Kelly who resolved the impasse a few days later. “Daddy was always understanding with the press,” remembered Peggy. “‘Look, Gracie,’ he said, ‘this is going to be a big thing.’ He knew you have to give them their story.” Jack explained to his future son-in-law that there was no way around it. Stupid questions would have to be answered and the same picture posed for again and again. So on Thursday, January 5,1956, the full cast of characters assembled in Henry Avenue. Reporters and cameramen crowded into the Kelly mansion. “Was it love at first sight, Prince? “ “ How many children will you have?’’ The photographers climbed over Ma Kelly’s armchairs and stood on her piano. The pregnant Lizanne had to be escorted upstairs, out of harm’s way. Rainier kept his temper to start with, and demonstrated a rather attractive concern to protect his fiancée. But well before the end he was heard to be muttering, “
I
don’t belong to MGM.”

The following evening, the couple went through a similar performance in New York. It was a charity ball for which the organizers had hastily constructed a “Royal Box” topped off with a paper crown. “It looked particularly silly,” remembers Elliott Erwitt, one of the several dozen photographers who were desperately scrabbling for a different angle on Grace in her white Dior satin gown.

On only his second exposure to a mass photo call, Prince Rainier was showing the strain. His Serene Highness was not accustomed to being on display except on his own terms, and having put on a reasonable show at Henry Avenue, he had now stuffed his royal charm firmly back in his pocket. Conspicuously unhelpful to the photographers that he and his fiancée had summoned there, the prince struck Elliott Erwitt as “a pudgy and rather unpleasant person.” But the evening improved when the party moved on from the ball to the Harwyn Club. Grace squeezed Rainier fondly and nibbled at his ear. As Jack Kelly’s daughter, she knew how to correct an attack of the sulks. She giggled and joked, and the couple danced happily together until four in the morning.

Grace was floating on a cloud. Her engagement had unraveled so many knots, making her life suddenly simpler and lighter. But while she was pleased to be rid of her complications, she did not discard them with nonchalance. Ever the considerate one, she had sat down and written long letters to Gene Lyons and to Jean-Pierre Aumont so that they should hear of her engagement in her own words before they read about it in the newspapers.

Oleg Cassini, she decided, was entitled to a personal meeting, and she selected the Staten Island ferry as the forlorn but sentimental setting for their farewell. “I have made my destiny,” she told Oleg, as the cold wind whipped off the gray Atlantic. With sirens sounding in the harbor and the Statue of Liberty slipping by, the only touch needed was background music for the credits to roll—an apt and somehow caring conclusion to a love affair that had always hovered on the edge of make-believe.

Grace’s airy and exhilarating new world of dreams-come-true, however, was not without its complications. “Daddy’s making so much fuss about the dowry!” she exclaimed one day in anguish over the phone to Don Richardson. “He’s going to ruin everything!” Grace had been phoning Richardson from time to time in the previous year. She seemed to use him as a sounding board for issues that troubled her, and the practicalities of her engagement produced several of those.

Monaco operates under the principles of French law—the
Code Napoléon
—and the formalities of any French marriage customarily include a property contract. Like most old and monied families, the Grimaldis married under an arrangement known as the
Séparation des biens,
whereby everything that a spouse brings to a marriage remains strictly his or her own property, and this made perfect sense to Jack Kelly. He was planning to give Grace a major shareholding in Kelly for Brickwork on her wedding day, as he had done with his other two daughters, and if things went wrong with the marriage, he did not want his affairs getting tangled up with an ex-son-in-law on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

But when Father Tucker also broached the ancient aristocratic tradition of the dowry—the idea that the father of the bride should pay for the favor of having his daughter taken into a noble family—the Irish Democrat rebelled. “I certainly told that Father Tucker,” he reported to his wife and Aunt Marie Magee. “I told him off. . . . I didn’t want it, and I didn’t intend to get involved.”

“Kelly reckoned his daughter was dowry enough for any goddamn suitor,” remembers John Pochna, who had heard about the engagement on the radio and had driven straight to Philadelphia to try to get back into the game. Was Monaco doing Grace a favor, or vice versa? Rainier might be “My Lord Prince” to Father Tucker, but in the eyes of a right-thinking American he was just “any damn broken-down prince who was head of a country over there that nobody knew anything about.”

“Oh!” Aunt Marie remembered. “He did really carry on.”

Not until Father Tucker produced documentation which gave credible evidence that Rainier had adequate resources of his own, did Jack Kelly relent and agree to pay the dowry. How much he handed over is unknown, but it was not the only price that the bride and her family were required to pay. In the event of a divorce, Grace was informed, any children of the marriage would have to remain strictly in their father’s custody. For dynastic reasons it was impossible for potential heirs to be surrendered to the care of a separated wife. There were no buts or maybes. It was Grimaldi family law—an absolute condition of a marriage affecting the succession of a semi-sovereign state.

Grace herself found this condition rather less horrifying than did most of her girlfriends when she told them about it. The question for Grace was quite academic, since she simply did not contemplate the possibility of divorce. As Judy Kanter put it: “If Grace worked at it, it would work. She had controlled her adult life, and, so far, had made it a series of ‘hits.’” Her marriage would be just the same. For all her insecurities, there was a part of Grace’s spirit that was borne along by the most immense self-confidence. The Patton tank in her blithely eliminated even the imagining that her marriage might fail. What agitated Grace far more was the test she knew that she would have to pass before she could get to the stage of having children—Dr. Donat’s medical examination to make sure that she could bear heirs for Rainier.

“They’ll find out I’m not a virgin,’’ she worried to Don Richardson on the phone.

“Tell them you broke it,” Richardson suggested, “while you were playing sports in high school.”

Asked about this test in 1988, Prince Rainier denied that it ever took place. Yet the Grimaldis have a long history of denying embarrassing facts that later turn out to be true. The existence of a dowry payment was denied for many years, until the prince himself produced the contract. From his notifying of the French government to the hard-bargained details of the marriage contract, Rainier’s courtship of Grace was hedged about by a whole catalogue of unsentimental—and perfectly practical—conditions and precautions. It would hardly make sense to negotiate the custody of children without making sure that children could be produced in the first place.

Prince Rainier has always maintained that Dr. Donat accompanied him to America in December 1955 in a purely casual and friendly capacity—to keep him company while he went through his own medical tests at Johns Hopkins. But this is not what Don Richardson recalls Grace telling him. “She said the priest came to deal with the religious side of it, and that the doctor was there to make sure she was fertile,” he remembers. “She said she would have to get up in the stirrups to get poked and prodded. Her worry was not the fertility, but the virginity. Who knows what the doctor was actually looking for, but that was her anxiety.”

The anxiety was understandable. Grace’s ability to play the good girl lay at the heart of her appeal as a film star, and purity was even more crucial to her image as a princess. It was unthinkable in 1956 that a princess should not be a virgin when she married. It was part of the fantasy, the still potent idea that one purpose of celebrity was to set a moral example to the rest of the world. People did not expect quite so much of film stars and entertainers, but virtue was a sine qua non of being royal or princely—and this was the new, grander category of distinction to which Grace hoped to graduate.

“They believed me!” Grace reported in relief and delight to Don Richardson a few days later. It was a major obstacle overcome. The contradiction between the reality of Grace’s sexual appetite and the chastity of her public image had always been a source of strain and potential danger. The actress had had to live constantly with the risk of being uncovered, and now she could hope to resolve the problem. She was totally in love with her husband-to-be. She had been trying for years, in her own impulsive yet essentially moral fashion, to bring inclination and duty together, and with her engagement she seemed to have pulled the trick off. She was finally getting married. Grace, the princess, would no longer have to pretend, and she could reasonably expect that the embarrassing romantic mishaps of Grace, the film star, would fade into decent obscurity.