Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (2 page)

Among librarians, I would like to thank Edda Tasiemka and the staff of the Hans Tasiemka Archives in London; Brigitte Kueppers and David Zeidberg, Special Collections, Library of the University of California, Los Angeles; Samuel Gill and the staff of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles; Thomas Whitehead and the staff of Special Collections, Temple University Library, Philadelphia; Geraldine Duclow and the staff of the Philadelphia Free Library Theatre Collection; the staff of the Museum of Radio and Television in New York; the staffs at the London Library and the New York Public Library; the staffs of the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington; Barbara Staubly and the staff of the West County Branch Palm Beach Public Library, as well as the librarians who supplied volumes through the interlibrary loan system.

I met Jean-Jacques Naudet, U.S. picture editor for
Paris Match,
when we happened to walk into the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles at the same minute in May 1992, each of us in search of material on Grace. From this happy coincidence has grown friendship and a professional collaboration reflected in the unique and revealing selection of photographs, which added greatly to the original 1994 edition of this book. I am grateful to Michael Rand, a colleague and friend for many years, for his design of those photo pages.

At my British publisher, Sidgwick & Jackson, it has been a pleasure to link up again with William Armstrong—I first wrote a book for him more than twenty years ago—and to benefit from the calm good taste of Sidgwick’s senior editor, Helen Gummer.

At Putnam’s in New York, I am grateful for the support of Phyllis Grann, for the intelligence and energy of Dolores McMullan, for the sensitive copyediting of Claire Winecoff, for the careful indexing by Cynthia Crippen, and for the beautiful jacket design produced for the American edition by Ann Spinelli. My greatest debt is to my editor, Andrea Chambers, who had the idea for this book and persuaded me to do it. Tireless, creative, and forever challenging, Andrea kept me to her vision—and even to the deadline.

Morton Janklow, my literary agent, has seldom been less than an inspiration. Never in the field of literary agency have so many phone calls been returned so promptly by one man—and my gratitude is extended equally to his colleagues, Bennett Ashley and Anne Sibbald, who have matched his care and attentiveness.

This is my sixth book to benefit from the painstaking research of Jacqueline Williams. I conduct all interviews myself, but Jackie is in charge of squirreling documentary material out of archives and libraries—Chapter 21 on Monaco’s war record reflects her research into the State Department papers in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. When I have completed the manuscript, she then subjects it to an intensive check against the sources cited in the reference notes—though the responsibility for errors is my own.

Reference notes do not easily translate to an e-book context, nor are they consulted by the average reader. So source notes have been omitted from this 2014 reissue of my book. But they can found in the editions of Grace published in 1994 by Putnam in New York and by Sidgwick & Jackson in London.

Lili Agee was my day-to-day assistant as I wrote this book in West Palm Beach. Every word was run through her fingers into the clunky but effective word processor. She strangled more than a few ill-chosen sentences at birth, and helped give life to many a happy phrase or concept. Making light of the practicalities of producing a 150,000-word biography, she toiled over the photocopier, fed the fax machine, and was at all times a loyal helper and friend.

This was the twelfth book I wrote while married to my first wife Sandi, and I remain deeply grateful for her support, judgment and love. Her faith and companionship helped make this our best collaboration to date—with the exception of our children. The three of them got the dedication to my previous book. So this one was, and is, for her.

ROBERT LACEY

London, May 20th, 2014

EXCERPTS:

Excerpt from “The Dreamer” reprinted from
Collected Verse of Edgar A. Guest,
© 1934. Used with permission of Contemporary Books, Inc., Chicago.

Excerpt from “Wild Peaches” by Eleanor Wylie © 1921 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., renewed 1949 by William Rose Benet. Reprinted from
Collected Poems of Eleanor Wylie
by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

To Sandi

THE ROAD FROM LA TURBIE

S
HORTLY BEFORE ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, September 13, 1982, Gendarme Frederic Mouniama was emerging from a baker’s shop in the French hillside village of La Turbie. The young policeman was fond of a croissant with his coffee, and he was heading for the police station with the pastry in his hand.

A brown Rover car was coming through the village, traveling from the direction of Roc Agel, the weekend home of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco—and as it drew to a halt to let the young gendarme cross the road, Frederic Mouniama realized that the Rover was being driven by Her Serene Highness Princess Grace herself.

She smiled at him from behind the wheel. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, was sitting beside her in the passenger seat. Princess Grace was by no means the face on the movie screen, the lithe and impish Grace Kelly who had come to Monaco nearly thirty years ago. That film star Grace had filled out significantly since then in face and body. But she still had her presence, that elegant and particular Grace Kelly glow, and as Frederic Mouniama stepped out across the road in front of this living legend, he instinctively tipped the hard brim of his kepi to her, nodding his head.

Arriving at the police station, Gendarme Mouniama was just putting his croissant down on his desk when the emergency phone rang. A car had gone off a hairpin bend on the CD 37, the road from La Turbie down toward Monaco and the sea. Mouniama must get there straight away.

It was not ten minutes since he had left the baker’s shop, and now the young gendarme was speeding down the twisting road with a colleague, the siren on their car sounding and the blue light flashing. It took the police car four or five minutes to get to the bend, and as Mouniama looked over the edge, he could see the gray and dusty belly of a car lying upside down beside a house in what seemed to be a flower garden. There were four or five people milling round the car—they must have come out of the house—and when the policeman got to the spot, he found they were comforting a dazed girl who was convulsed with sobs.
“Sauvez Maman!”
she was weeping.
“Sauvez Maman!”

Staring at the mangled wreckage, Mouniama realized it was Princess Grace’s brown Rover that he had seen no more than fifteen minutes earlier, and peering inside through the one still viable door, the gendarme took a hard look at the princess herself. She was lying flat inside, on her back, as if the upturned roof were a bed, one leg bent sharply sideways, her eyes closed, totally unconscious. There was no sign of blood. She was not dead, but there was no obvious sign of life.

For the next twenty-nine hours Frederic Mouniama, his fellow gendarmes, and the forensic experts and detectives of his gendarmerie company were to work nonstop, without breaks for food or sleep, measuring the road, interviewing witnesses, and retracing the path that the Rover took, trying to solve the mystery. How had it happened? Which princess had been driving? Had there been some sort of sabotage? And through it all Frederic Mouniama kept seeing the lady smiling, slowing her car and stopping, so that a young gendarme could cross the road with a pastry in his hand.

She had first driven in these hills when she was twenty-four, making a film for Alfred Hitchcock called
To Catch a Thief.
She had come back the following year for a film festival, and the year after that she was back again, this time to marry a prince. That was in April 1956, when Grace Kelly, movie star, was at the summit of her loveliness. She had a bounce to her walk, a sort of smile in her posture. With her blond hair and firm jawline, she had that strong, almost sterile collection of north European features that add up to what is called the classic American beauty. In the early years of the twentieth century, the noble families of Europe competed to recruit the handsome and wealthy “dollar princesses”—several hundred of them by 1915, according to a reference work of the day,
Titled Americans
:
forty-two American-born princesses, sixty-four baronesses, one hundred twenty-six countesses . . . In 1956 Grace Kelly came to Monaco in a Hollywood adaptation of that old tradition.

What distinguished Grace was her wholesomeness. She looked wholesome, she talked wholesome—she had developed her own, wholesome, rounded, theatrical accent—and, so far as most people knew, her behavior was thoroughly wholesome as well. She epitomized a highly cherished element in America’s identity, particularly in the 1950s—the years of President Eisenhower. Grace Kelly went with country clubs, malted milk, and
Reader’s Digest
— though, like
Reader’s Digest,
her formula included a healthy ration of sex. Nice sex, giggles-in-the-back-of-the-car sex, but sex which, in 1950s terms, was actually rather daring. In her great film roles Grace played the adventuress, a single woman who was experienced in some unspecified way and who carried her nightgown in her handbag. She was the sort of girl who enjoyed the sauciness of a double entendre, and who kissed Cary Grant first and passionately, rather than waiting to be kissed.

Grace knew how to do it with a smile and sleight of hand that made it all quite respectable. She managed to be naughty while appearing very nice. Alfred Hitchcock, who coaxed the finest and most tantalizing film performances out of her, liked to compare Grace Kelly to a snow-covered volcano. Working closely with her on three films, he had witnessed the eruptions of sexuality that she usually managed to conceal behind her virginal exterior. The contradiction was one of the major issues of Grace’s life. The public at large saw only the snow on the top of the mountain—perhaps that was all they wanted to see. But the truth about Grace Kelly was that she was, in some very important respects, quite the opposite of what she seemed.

Performance. Performance. Where did the acting stop and real life begin? Did Grace forsake fantasy when she said goodbye to Hollywood? Or did she sign on in Monaco for a role that was even more unreal?

She always was a dreamer, and this was, in many ways, the key. From her earliest years, Grace Kelly was marked by the curious certainty that she could make her dreams come true—as a successful model, as a television actress, as a movie star, and then finally in her princessly calling. It was Grace’s particular gift to dream and to become, and this lent her a magic that fascinated people in a nonreligious age. Through the course of her fifty-two years, she came to be a sort of talisman to her generation, a saintly figure, venerated and almost holy. Perfection may be a fantasy, but that is what Princess Grace symbolized for millions. She was an international icon, one of the untouchables. So people could not believe she was only mortal when death came to her before her time, following a car crash.