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anothergracekellyblog · 7 years

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Taken from Good Housekeeping, May 1977

A noted novelist visits Princess Grace and finds laughter and tears beneath her serene armor of “glacial perfection.”

The Other Princess Grace by Budd Schulberg

When I was invited to write the scenario for a television special on the life of Princess Grace of Monaco, my gut reaction was: What an odd bit of casting. I write about prizefighters, brawny longshoremen, the fight for survival in the inner cities. I root for underdogs.

Princess Grace wasn't exactly my idea of an underdog. Her father was rich and she is immaculately beautiful. Her career from Philadelphia to New York to Hollywood to Monaco seemed to be up, up, up to the top of the mountain. For a child of Hollywood who had been raised with - and, accordingly, took a rather dim view of - movie stars, and of establishments in general (from film moguls to European royalty), a pilgrimage to the crystal chandelier world of Princess Grace Patricia Kelly Grimaldi of Monte Carlo would not seem to be my cup of tea, or should I say, my Venetian glass of champagne.

Is that a nice way to talk about a princess? A princess, especially an American born princess, is the stuff and the fluff of fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen (with an assist from F. Scott Fitzgerald) should be writing this story instead of a follower of the fight game, a self-appointed expert on Muhammad Ali.

But it's a little late in the day for Andersen or Fitzgerald. And so...

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Irish-American girl whose grandfather had sailed as an immigrant boy in search of his fortune in the New World. If we had told John Henry Kelly as he stepped off the gangplank of a creaky old sailing ship in Boston that his granddaughter would return to the Old World and become the Princess Grace married to Rainier III and help to rule a sovereign principality from a 200-room palace that is one of the most majestic living museums in all Europe, that sturdy greenhorn would have put us in our place.

Grandfather Kelly made his way in the green world of 19th-century New England. His sons moved on to Philadelphia, where they prospered. Patrick, the oldest, made a success of the construction business and Grace's father, Jack Kelly, went to work for him as a hod-carrier and a bricklayer. A fierce second-generation competitor, Jack thrived on work. He could lay bricks fast and make money fast and row fast - somehow he found time before and after work to train for hours every day in a racing shell on the Schuylkill river and to become the national sculling champion. Wife Margaret was an ideal mate, not just a successful magazine cover girl but an athlete, too: the first co-ed physical education teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. “Way ahead of her time,” Princess Grace would reminisce, “the completely well-rounded modern woman. Now there's someone you could do a special on!”

We were sitting with her in the drawing room of the Grimaldi’s Paris townhouse in a courtyard of lovely old houses just off the Avenue Foch. When we rang the buzzer, she came to the door herself, with a warm and easy welcome to Bill Allyn, who would produce the TV special. Allyn had been a friend of hers from live television days in the early 1950's when they were both young actors scrounging around New York for work.

I was pleasantly surprised at the informality. No liveried servants, no bowing or scraping. Dressed in slacks and a light brown sweater with another shade of brown sweater over it, she might have been a suburban housewife in her late thirties, an especially pretty housewife. Marvelous eyes, marvelous nose, marvelous bones, marvelous skin. Yet neither in dress nor in manner anyone's conception of a fairy-tale princess. More like the girl next door, albeit the beautiful girl next door, 20 years later. I had pictured the cool grace of the Hitchcock movies and palace receptions. Instead, in a most friendly manner she led us into the drawing room, tastefully furnished but lived-in and warm. A big old dog called Andy bounded at her side. Chatting and reminiscing with Bill, she was shy and diffident with me, a watchful stranger. But quicker to laugh than I would have expected.

Spread on the coffee table were snapshots of a recent family trip to the Sahara. "I'm the family photographer," she said. "I really think these are pretty good, don't you?"

She picked one out, a moody sandscape relieved in the distance by what looked like an oblong glass. A mirage, she said proudly. "That's awfully hard to get. Rainier didn’t seem so impressed. But even when you can see it with the naked eye, it's tricky to pick up with a camera."

We asked about her family, the Philadelphia Kellys. Jack Kelly Sr. had been a driving spirit whose motto in life was, "I don't care what you do but whatever it is, don't just be good at it, be the best!"

He had gone to England's Henley Regatta to race in the Diamond Sculls, but had been forbidden to enter because he had the hands of a working man. "This is an event for gentlemen." A generation later, the Kelly family had gone to England to cheer Grace's brother "Kell" on as he won the cup that had been denied his father.

"There aren't any words that can do justice to my feelings." Father Kelly had said. "I feel a tremendous sense of pride for Kell. He's the one that matters, not the thwarted ambitions of an old guy who once got his fingers publicly burned over here because he was born without a silver spoon in his mouth."

"It must have been a heavy load," I said to Princess Grace, "to keep up with the Kellys, to keep up with yourself - to be the best."

She crossed her legs and thought a moment, as if there were still a challenge in the question, some lingering sense of childhood hurt. We had heard from friends that not only had she been a shy child, but rather sickly, too - unlike her outgoing, tomboyish older and younger sisters. She liked to stay in her room and read, draw, sew and dream, try to turn her introspection into poetry.

"Yes, it was - it is - a heavy load," Princess Grace said. The silence that followed seemed to hold its own inaudible sentences: Loads are to be carried. Burdens are to be borne. Challenges are to be met. And overcome. You could almost hear the convent sisters teaching her character with a stinging ruler. And the voice of Jack Kelly Sr. echoed in the room: "Be the best, Grace Patricia, be the best!"

UNCLE WON PULITZER

The mood changed suddenly when we talked of her two theatrical uncles: Walter Kelly toured the vaudeville stages of the world as "The Virginia Judge," and the famous playwright of the 1920's, George Kelly, won the Pulitzer Prize for Craig's Wife. Grace warmed to his memory. "I think Uncle George was a great American playwright, but there's a whole new generation that doesn't know him as well as I wish they did. He knew his people. Exactly how they talked and what they felt. Both The Torchbearers and The Show-Off are wonderful plays, human, funny and moving. In his preface to The Show-Off, the great humorist Heywood Broun wrote, ‘This is the best comedy yet written by an American.’”

Then it was Uncle George who influenced you to go into the theater?" She thought a moment.

"We were always doing plays. I was Cinderella in my sister Peggy's play when I was twelve, and I had a part in an Old Academy Players production in our hometown, called Don't Feed the Animals. I did Peter Pan as our graduation play at Stevens - but we were talking about Uncle George."

Clearly, of the two theatrical careers, she was much more at ease with George's than Grace's. "Uncle George was one of the most fascinating men I ever met. He could remember every poem he ever read. He loved poetry and language and the theater. He could recite favorite poems all night long. So wise, witty, human - there was simply no one like him in the whole world."

I had once been aware of, and then half-forgotten, the George Kelly-Grace Kelly family relationship. Certainly I hadn't realized until now what a driving force it has been in her life.

Then, with both of them remembering lines from another of Uncle George's plays, Behold, the Bridegroom, Bill Allyn and Grace (for she was all actress now and not at all princess) fell to reminiscing about those live shows they had done in what is now looked back on nostalgically as "the Golden Age of television": Studio One, Lights Out, Philco, The Kraft Playhouse. They were both talking at once. "Those were really insane days... absolutely hysterical... things are so much more ordered now, on film or tape, but live, going on in front of all those viewers... how did we ever get through it?"

"It was like living on the edge of a precipice!" Grace was laughing. "I'll never forget one time I was playing a scene in bed with all my clothes on under the covers so I'd be ready to run into the next scene dressed. But the camera didn't stop in time and they didn't cut away, so there I was, on the screen getting out of bed with all my clothes on!"

Now she and Bill were trading bloopers. She was up on her feet, standing in front of the mantel, trying to stop from laughing so she could demonstrate a dreadful mishap in The Cricket On The Hearth. "It was supposed to be snowing and a wonderful English character man and I were coming to bring an orphanage a hot pie for Christmas. The prop men were throwing salt down but we were told to walk close to the window under the eaves, so it wouldn't actually fall on us, because there we'd be with snow on our costumes that wouldn't melt when we got inside. We were to wave through the window, and the pie was too hot. So I set it down and the old actor stepped in it. He came limping into the place with half the pie spread over his shoe. "Look what we brought you - this nice, hot pie - Merry Christmas!"

INFECTIOUS LAUGHTER

As I listened to her laugh, I thought of all the people who had warned me about her "glacial perfection." But the laughter was infectious - from a real live girl with an appealing, self-deprecating sense of humor.

She was still getting money from home in those early theatrical days, but that streak of independence led her into modeling to pay for the acting classes. Before she was 19, she was earning enough to move out of the Barbizon Hotel for women and into her own apartment. A nesting sort of person, she enjoyed fixing up the place.

"Remember giggle belly?" Allyn said.

"Giggle belly!" Again Grace laughed as she tried to describe this silly game. A group of young actors would lie on the floor with their heads on each other's stomachs and tell funny stories that would make their heads bounce up and down as their bellies giggled. "We did a lot of silly things," they both agreed. "And we all laughed a lot. But along with the fun there was hard work... "

"Like Strindberg's The Father," we prompted.

That was Grace's Broadway debut, with her name in small print under the starred names of Raymond Massey and Mady Christians. Grace still says she only got the role because both stars were tall and her rivals for the part were all too short. "Nonsense,” says Raymond Massey. "She got the part because she showed the most promise. All through the rehearsal period we were impressed with her earnestness, her professionalism and her good manners. She was organized and dedicated. Between rehearsals she would ask Mady if she could sit in her dressing room and talk about the theater. She was a delight to have in the company. A rare kind of young person who had a hunger to learn and to improve herself."

"It ran only a short time," Grace said, "but it was wonderful experience."

Young Grace Kelly soon became a favorite cover girl, so it was inevitable that Hollywood would tap her on the shoulder - Hollywood personified in the ebullient, English-fracturing Russian director, Gregory Ratoff, who screen tested her for a somewhat less than immortal film entitled Taxi.

The Taxi story turns out to be another funny bit. I'm not studying her anymore, I'm laughing with her. It has ceased being a job and has become a vacation.

The role in Taxi, she told us, called for an Irish brogue. Although her name was Kelly, she sounded not at all like forebears from County Mayo. More like a proper Philadelphian. But, like any aspiring actress, she assured Mr. Ratoff that the brogue was no problem. Then she ran home to ask how one went about acquiring an overnight brogue.

"One of my friends had a maid just ονer from Ireland I hurried oνer to listen to her speak. But she was too shy to open her mouth. I'd ask questions to try and get her talking, and all she'd say was, ‘Yes, Mum,’ or ‘No, Mum.’ So I handed her the newspaper and asked if she'd mind reading it out loud. The poor girl finally admitted that she could hardly read. I put together what thought might pass for a brogue - and flunked the screen test."

But Grace Kelly had what Frances Fuller, head of the American Academy, described as, "A very special quality. Also the face of a Grecian goddess, but it was that extra something that is more than beauty, some special poise, an inner light."

When her New York agent, Edith Van Cleve, described that "special quality" to Jay Kanter, a youthful but influential Hollywood agent, brogue or no brogue, Kelly was movie bound.

AGAIN THE PRINCESS

"You must be getting hungry?" was Grace's answer to the first question about Hollywood. “If it's alright with you, I've made a reservation at a club nearby - the food is quite good." She rose briskly. Suddenly she seemed the princess - a gracious, down-to-earth princess, but clearly in command. Now it was difficult to imagine her ever playing "giggle belly" or impersonating an old actor with a meat pie on his shoe.

A blonde, middle-aged, bejeweled houseguest materialized. A friend from Grace's Philadelphia days. Having lived at least four different lives in four different times, places and worlds, Grace cultivates a capacity for not losing touch with anyone of them.

There was a waiting chauffeur and limousine. The princess asked us if we'd prefer to walk. The gentlest of commands. People who recognized her pretended not to, as if they understood that she preferred it that way.

We were ushered to a round table in a corner of the Club Rothschild with the most muted of fanfare. Luncheon conversation was easy but disjointed because Grace's houseguest was something of a dangling participle to a life story I was trying to piece together. It was like a flashback to Philadelphia adolescence while I waited to move forward to Hollywood early maturity. The princess was being the perfect hostess, somehow managing to talk old times with her hometown friend and films and filmmakers with us. On her way out, I noticed that fellow members of the club stepped back or moνed to one side so they could gain a clear view without being ostentatious. She pretended not to notice.

Back in the comfortable and now familiar drawing room, we were returning to the Hollywood of my youth. After an uneventual role in a forgotten movie called Fourteen Hours, Grace was on her way to the most remarkable five-year career in the history of motion pictures. A mouthful of a statement, but there it is. In 60 months, a classically photogenic face, the stamina of a marathon runner, an obsessive drive for self-improvement and a little bit of luck that was parlayed into great gobs of luck by the power of the will, swept Grace Kelly from obscure starlet to international star.

The luck began when Jay Kanter "sold" her to producer Stanley Kramer and director Fred Zinnemann for High Noon. In her big scene, she is finally driven to pick up a rifle and kill the fourth outlaw to save her husband, played by Gary Cooper, after Cooper has dispatched the other three.

A nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Mogambo didn't convince her that she was all that good in it. "I really wasn't," she said straightforwardly. "I was lucky. I was in awfully good hands. I was new in the business."

To master film technique, so different from either live television or the theater, was a challenge. "Be the best!" was echoing in the hall again. But from the outset Grace Kelly was a different cut from the lovely blonde starlets so overjoyed and overwhelmed by Hollywood. With her two sisters to keep her company, she stayed at that Sunset Boulevard relic of lost elegance, the Chateau Marmont. She would only sign her seven-year contract at MGM with the provision that she could go back to New York and the theater every other year. Remembering her as a star on the rise 25 years ago, agents, producers, directors, fellow actors and friends all draw a consistent picture of a girl with a steel trap mind who could not be dissuaded once she set that mind on what she wanted to do.

LUCK AND WILL

Now the Kelly luck embraced the Kelly will: the screen test that had failed her in her quest for a role in Taxi impressed that crustiest of critics, John Ford, who cast her in Mogambo - a remake of Red Dust, with Grace playing the Mary Astor role of the genteel but adulterous wife, Ava Gardner taking on Jean Harlow's "Honey Bear" and Clark Gable repeating the role he had created in the original. Two more disparate ladies than Ms. Kelly and Ms. Gardner could hardly be imagined, but they got on surprisingly well. Ava threw tantrums while Grace tended to her lines and her knitting. Frank Sinatra, in Africa for a visit with his unpredictable Ava, pronounced Grace Kelly the squarest of the squares. Even when columnists hinted out loud that Graces love scenes with Gable were unusually convincing. Grace never lost her Kelly cool.

Back in Hollywood for the Mogambo interiors. Grace and fellow-actress Rita Gam found an unpretentious apartment on Sweetzer Avenue. A pair of hard working bachelor girls, they were an odd couple: the cool golden girl who all ways seemed to have her emotions in check and the dark, exotic beauty whose emotions kept spilling over, "We both kept falling in love with the wrong men,” Rita remembers.

But if there were emotional frustrations and dead ends, the Kelly career kept climbing smoothly upward. The same, now-famous test that Ratoff and 20th Century-Fox had thumbed down caught the eye of another film master, Alfred Hitchcock. There was Dial M for Murder opposite Ray Milland, Rear Window opposite Jimmy Stewart and To Catch A Thief vis-a-vis Cary Grant.

With top directors Zinnemann, Ford and Hitchcock and leading men Cooper Gable and Grant, could a girl ask for anything more? If her name is Grace Kelly, the answer is yes.

We were still sitting in the Paris townhouse, but our minds were now focused on The Country Girl. The Clifford Odets Broadway hit was to be done as a film Every female star in town was after the role of the drunken actor's wife, described by Odets as "the broom behind the door." Grace knew that this was a part that could prove she wasn't just an elegant clotheshorse.

But winning that role was one of the longer shots in the Hollywood sweepstakes. In the first place, MGM, her "home studio," didn't want to loan her out. In the second place, Paramount and the producers of The Country Girl - wanted a bigger name to match the star male leads, William Holden and Bing Crosby. And, finally, even Crosby, looking for all the help he could get in playing a complex and difficult dramatic role, expressed his doubts that the elegant Kelly girl could handle a part so totally out of character for her.

The more opposition, the greater the determination. Grace told Jay Kanter and Lew Wasserman, representing the sinew and brains of the powerful agency that represented her, that they had to get Metro to release her for the role. She had to get this part. Otherwise, she was ready to go on suspension, quit Hollywood and return to New York to concentrate on the theater.

Thus are Hollywood legends born. For the screen test, Edith Head, whose mantelpiece is a parade ground for Best Costume Oscars, and who had dressed Grace in dazzling gowns for those high fashion movies, now helped Grace completely transform herself into the worn and weary country girl. And in the film, which she subsequently made, it wasn't just an outward change. She gave a performance from the inside such as she had never given before. At the end of the first week, a convinced Bing Crosby said, "I'll never open my big mouth again!"

It was Oscar time and Grace was nominated for Best Actress. But everybody agreed that Judy Garland had a lock on the little statue - the sentimental favorite making a dramatic comeback (on and of the screen) in the musical remake of A Star Is Born. But when Bill Holden opened the envelope on the stage of the Pantages Theater, we heard: "And the winner is . . . Grace Kelly!"

That same night Marlon Brando won his Oscar for On The Waterfront. While they posed together, swarming photographers shouted, "Kiss Marlon, Grace! Go ahead, kiss him!”

Suddenly Miss Kelly was from Philadelphia and the Stevens School, and her father was Jack Kelly, Sr. and her uncle was George Kelly, who had won a prize she respected perhaps even more, the Pulitzer. "Don't you think he should kiss me?” asked Grace Patricia, looking cool and elegant in aquamarine satin. On she swept to a party at Romanoff's - the girl who had everything. "Miss Perfect," people were calling her, some in awe and some inspite

"How did it feel?” I asked her in Paris.

Another long pause. "I was unhappy. Now I had fame, but you find that fame is awfully empty if you don't have someone to share it with."

As she sat there remembering that triumphant and lonely night, I found myself thinking of a note that F. Scott Fitzgerald had written to himself while preparing to write his heroine Kathleen in The Last Tycoon: "People simply do not identify with people who have all the breaks. I must endow this girl with a little misfortune.” I was beginning to find it in the girl who had everything.

Meanwhile, back at the Palace...

In 1955, the principality of Monaco was not the flourishing place it is today. The casino was run-down, the ancient palace itself in disrepair. Aristotle Onassis, George Schlee and Gardner Cowles were meeting to discuss how to save it.

Running the troubled affairs of Monaco for seven years, already in his mid-30's and still a bachelor, Prince Rainier III knew he must find a suitable wife with whom to share his life and the duties of the principality. Remembering his own unhappy childhood (a broken home at age six, lonely and disoriented at a British boarding school), Rainier insisted he would not make a marriage of convenience.

LOVE STORY OF THE CENTURY

And so the stage is set for what the press of the world called, "The love story of the century." The Prince had met Grace casually in Monaco when she attended a showing of To Catch A Thief the year before. Now he came to Hollywood on a visit less casual. Then went on to Philadelphia to meet her family.

I begin to ask direct questions and get surprisingly (although less surprised now than when I first met her) direct answers.

"Did you ask your parents for permission to marry Rainier?"

"No, I made up my own mind. I had asked them once or twice before and it hadn't worked out. This time I knew I had to make my own decision."

In fact, Father Kelly disapproved of the match. Rainier seemed like a nice fellow. But European princes are notorious playboys. And she'd be an American living far away in a foreign land.

I took a breath. “Princess Grace, do you mind if I ask you a very personal question?"

"Well, suppose not."

"I'm trying to put myself in your place. Every writer has to do that. It must have been a terribly difficult moment. You were marrying a man you barely knew… going off to a strange world… knowing as a member of your church there was no turning back. Giving up a film career on your way to becoming a superstar - you must have felt... well, how did you feel as you went up that gangplank?"

This time the pause was so long that I thought she resented my question too much to answer. She stared at the floor. When she looked up, her eyes were wet. If she had glacial perfection, the glacier was melting. She spoke quietly, with total simplicity:

"The day we left, our ship was surrounded in fog. And that's the way I felt - as if I were sailing off into the unknown. I had been through several unhappy romances. And although I had become a star, I was feeling lost and confused. I didn't want to drift into my thirties without knowing where I was going in my personal life."

As if she had been conceived by Scott Fitzgerald, here she was, endowed with a certain misfortune.

"I guess I'm a homebody at heart, she was saying. But I didn't have a home. Rainier came into my life at just the right moment. I needed someone who wouldn't be Mr. Grace Kelly. I could see that Rainier was a dedicated man. He had liberal ideas for making the principality more than a playground. While life on board ship must have seemed to the world like one continuous party, I couldn't help looking out into the fog and wondering: ‘What is going to happen to me? What will this new life be like?’ I had never met his family, except for his father, I must say he was wonderfully supportive. But I had no idea how the rest of the family, and the Court, would accept me. What sort of world was waiting for me on the other side of that fog?"

A friend said to Princess Grace, "But it was such a gorgeous wedding. The loveliest royal wedding of the century. European royalty. World celebrities. And so beautifully organized."

Now Princess Grace laughed.

WEDDING SHEER CHAOS

"Chaos! Fifteen hundred invited guests. And most of them wanting extra tickets for the balls and the dinners and the two weddings, first the civil one in the throne room of the palace, then the religious one in the cathedral. The weather was foul. And more journalists than they had covering D-Day. The language barriers! And the palace wasn't ready to be lived in yet. Sheer chaos!"

Bridesmaids, including Rita Gam, remember it as the most romantic time of their lives. But for Princess Grace the summer was long and hot. There was resentment from the traditionalists. What was an American, and from Hollywood at that, doing in their palace? Rainier understood the difficulty of the transition and was of great help to her But there were times, Grace admits, when she would stroll the palace walkway and wonder....

But time is a patient teacher. "Once Caroline was born, and then Albert, I began to feel my roots in Monaco. I was finally beginning to master the language, by osmosis. You might say I worked from the inside out. Now that I had my new family around me, I could move outside the palace into the community."

Once she got her bearings, Grace of Monaco became the most active princess the principality has ever had. Realizing that the local hospital was run down, she found ways to modernize it. She founded a daycare center and enlarged the old people's home. "She brought us heart," an old man says.

"She brought the palace back to life," says a staff member. "Inviting the children of the village into the throne room for a Christmas party. And the flowers everywhere. The Garden Club that grew into an International Flower Arranging Festival. The Children’s Village she set up through the Monegasque Red Cross to help keep together children of the same family who have lost their parents. Bazaars promoting the arts and crafts of Monaco. Using the courtyard of the palace as a natural stage for the International Arts Festival."

I was standing in the courtyard of this ancient castle, with its gracefully winding stairway. The chief of the secretariat was speaking with an enthusiasm he had drawn from Princess Grace. "She wants the palace to be used, to be alive, to help make the world more beautiful. Nureyev has danced here, and Danny Kaye has entertained, and the Paris Opera Ballet, Yehudi Menuhin, the Mexican Ballet Folklórico... She's brought a special quality to the palace that enriches the life of the principality. That's why we love to work with her. She gets up early and never stops.

"It's not just because she's our princess,” says Paul Choisit, the former consul for Monaco in New York, who now runs the secretariat, "I think she's the most unusual person I've ever known And with all the demands on her, the official duties, she still manages to save a great deal of time to share with her children. It's a known fact throughout the principality that Caroline, Albert and Stephanie are blessed with a supporting and loving mother."

I'm back at the townhouse in Paris, having returned from the old-world new-day atmosphere of the palace. We're talking of the ballet school I’ve toured (where teenage ballerinas are schooled by masters), through which Grace of Monaco hopes to restore to its former grandeur the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The phone rings and it's Arthur Rubinstein. The phone rings again. It's Moscow. The International Television Festival is coming up and her staff has been at work on it, reaching out to renowned guest artists to appear at the gala after the awards. Monaco's Festival, far purer than the now corrupted Film Festival in Cannes, gives awards for such shows as the best on protection of the environment and best children's program, as judged by children themselves.

I see that Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, daughter of self-made millionaire Jack, niece of the Fabulous Uncle George, has found her way through the fog to a creative world she has made for herself on the other side.

As Hans Christian Andersen might have said, "And so the princess lived happily - and busily - ever after."

#grace kelly #princess grace of monaco #budd schulberg #1977 #good housekeeping #sheila scan

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