Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (32 page)

Allan had been coming to Cannes for several years, helping to smooth relationships between visiting Americans and the French organizers, and as an unofficial public relations advisor to Grace, he was the ideal person to approach her on the festival’s behalf. “I called her in New York,” he remembered, “to tell her that if she agreed to go to Cannes she could come back anytime. The ticket would be open-ended, and it was spring in Europe.”

The previous spring, Grace had organized herself a Riviera love affair by inviting Oleg Cassini to follow her to Cannes. That had led to a painful eleven months trying to translate her holiday adventure into real life, and her professional life remained in continuing confusion. In the aftermath of her Oscar victory, Grace was still trying to work out some modus vivendi with MGM. Love and romance were not at the forefront of her priorities.

But they came looking for her just the same. Jean-Pierre Aumont happened to be at Cannes in 1955, and when he heard that his old girlfriend was there as well, he went off immediately in search of her. “I found her at a dinner,” he remembers. “There were lots of important people. But that didn’t matter. It was like magic. She was so pleased to see me, and I felt just the same. It was as if we were meeting and falling in love with each other for the very first time.”

Grace was out on the swimming raft once again. Wet sand, red ochre dust, long lunches in vine-shaded, hillside restaurants—for the second time in a year she played out the delicious details of a Cote d’Azur romance. The pleasures of discovery were mingled with the comfort of reunion with an old acquaintance. Casual and easygoing, Jean-Pierre was tuned several notches lower than Oleg Cassini. He did not stand on his dignity. In his blue-and-white striped T-shirt and rope-soled canvas shoes, the Frenchman was very much the matelot. He and Grace were lovers,
but they were also old friends. A press photographer caught the pair of them chatting one lunchtime, heads together, ice bucket at the elbow, fingers intertwined, and they did not give a damn. “I am deeply in love with Grace Kelly,” Jean-Pierre stated confidently to the French journalist Bernard Valery, and sitting beside him, Grace smiled in happy confirmation. She decided that she would take advantage of Rupert Allan’s offer to extend her stay when the festival ended. She would go up to Paris with Jean-Pierre and meet his family. It was spring in Europe, after all.

There was just one chore in connection with her festival duties. Sharing confidences with Jean-Pierre one lunchtime, Grace let slip that she was planning to cancel a meeting she had scheduled the following afternoon with Prince Rainier of Monaco at his palace some ninety minutes along the coast. It was a photo opportunity arranged by the French magazine
Paris Match.
There were gardens to walk through and the princely hand to shake. But Grace had a festival reception back in Cannes quite early in the evening, and a hairdressing appointment before that. She could not fit everything in.

Jean-Pierre was horrified. “Grace,” he exclaimed, “you can’t possibly do that! The man is a reigning prince. He has invited, and you have accepted. You can’t just say Tm going to the hairdresser.’”

The photo opportunity was the brainchild of Pierre Galante, a
Paris Match
journalist who had hatched it with his editor as a variation on the magazine’s standard Cannes Festival cover. Galante was a dashing, John Robie-like character, who had used his job as a reporter as a cover for Resistance work during the war, helping Jews and anti-Nazis to escape from Vichy France. Galante had recently wooed and married Olivia de Havilland, whom he met at the Cannes Film Festival, and now he used his film-star wife to create the setting in which he could sell his Monaco cover story to Grace.

Galante contrived to arrange the sleeper reservations on the Blue Train down from Paris to the Cannes Film Festival so that Grace’s compartment would be in the same carriage as himself and his wife. The two women had not met before, but they had their celebrity in common. The railway follows a picturesque route along the sea as it approaches Cannes, passing through little tunnels and beside parasol-decked beaches, and it was standing in the corridor with Grace and Olivia de Havilland, looking out at the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean, that Galante proposed his idea of a photo session with the Prince of Monaco. As befitted a star, Grace was politely noncommittal. She did not say yes, and she did not say no. As befitted a journalist, Galante phoned Monaco the moment he got off the train and made a definite date with the palace.

Grace woke up late on the morning of the meeting, feeling cornered. She did not particularly want to go to Monaco, but she felt that she should be a good girl. She washed her hair and plugged in her hairdryer. Nothing happened. France’s electrical workers had called a strike the previous evening—which meant that there would be no power for the chambermaid to iron the wrinkles out of the elegant dress that Grace had mentally earmarked for her princely encounter. The one unrumpled frock in her wardrobe was a shiny black taffeta evening creation printed with large pink and green cabbage roses. Her friend Judy Kanter used to pull her leg about it, saying that the dress made Grace look like a pear. But it was hardly Oscar night. The photo session was only for a French picture magazine. “It’s not like,” Grace told her girlfriend when she got back to America, “anyone will ever see those pictures again.”

Pierre Galante thought that the frock looked just fine when Grace finally appeared in the hotel lobby, but that she needed a hat. A lady could not shake hands with the prince, he explained, without wearing something on her head. So Grace dashed back up to her room to improvise a tiara of artificial flowers woven into her simply combed and still undried hair. It was one thing to look wild and wanton for a Caribbean photo shoot. It was quite another to be throwing herself together for an occasion like this. Grace had come close to dropping the whole Monaco enterprise for the sake of a hairdressing appointment, and now here she was, rushing to meet a prince with her hair scraped back unstyled—and still soaking wet.

By the time that Grace and Galante were driving out of Cannes in a large Studebaker rented for the occasion, the timetable allowed no margin for error. They had little more than an hour to get to Monaco, and they were just getting up speed when the pursuing Peugeot that contained
Paris Match’s
photographers failed to heed the Studebaker’s brake lights. The Peugeot drove smartly into the back of the rental car, losing another ten minutes. May 6, 1955, was a day that tested the serenity and professionalism of Grace Kelly to the full.

The Principality of Monaco has a surface area of 482 acres—which is something less than one square mile. Once masters of quite a lengthy stretch of Riviera coastline, Monaco’s ruling Grimaldi princes were compelled to surrender most of their territories to France in 1861, and since then they have ruled over no more than the minicity that clusters round their picturesque harbor, with its palace on one side and the casino on the other.

Speaking French and using the French franc, Monaco has formalized its strange status under the wing of France into a complicated series of agreements and protocols with its neighbor—but on May 6, 1955, the most important aspect of that status for
Paris Match’s
speeding and dented cavalcade of cars was the absence of any border formalities that might delay their arrival for their three o’clock meeting with His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III. As they drove down toward the harbor, they could see the prince’s personal banner flying from the ramparts of his pink palace on the rock.

It was already after three, but Grace was complaining of an empty stomach. She had had no proper breakfast or lunch, and she was not so awestruck by her forthcoming encounter that she was willing to go without something to eat. So Galante headed his cars for the Hôtel de Paris, Monaco’s white, wedding-cake hotel beside the casino, and snatched a sandwich from the bar. Grace was munching hungrily on this snack, scattering crumbs over the car, as Galante drove the steep road up the rock, rehearsing his apologies for their late arrival at the palace.

He need not have bothered. The prince was still entertaining a lunch party at his Cap Ferrat villa down the coast.

“I think he’s very rude to keep us waiting like this,’’ complained Grace, worrying about her early evening reception duty back in Cannes. “Let’s get out of here.”

It was a definitely testy Miss Kelly who finally shook hands with Prince Rainier III of Monaco shortly after four o’clock on that May afternoon. The photographs show a short and portly, rather un-princely-looking prince, wearing sunglasses, a boxy blue suit with patch pockets and flaps, and a most disarming smile. His Serene Highness—age thirty-one and never married—was clearly delighted to be meeting a pretty blonde film star, and he displayed not the slightest remorse at being an hour late for his appointment.

Would Miss Kelly care to visit the state apartments? The prince was unfazed to learn that his guest had already done the tour to fill in the time spent awaiting his arrival. So he led her instead through the gardens to his private zoo, where he put his arms through the bars of one of his tiger cages and fondled the beast as if it were a tabby cat.

Talking about it afterward, Grace commented on the prince’s familiarity with his wild animals. It was an exotic, curiously princely aptitude to have. It was surprising that Rainier spoke absolutely perfect, unaccented, upper-class English—he had had an English nanny and had been to a British public school—and, all things considered, the visit had ended on a considerably more cheerful note than it started.

But Grace complained to Rupert Allan that the whole business had taken far too much time and trouble for what it was worth. If she was going to do that sort of thing again, she said, then she wanted to do it properly.

“How was it? How did you find the Prince?” Jean-Pierre Aumont inquired eagerly when the lovers were reunited that evening.

“Charming,” replied Grace. “I think he’s very charming.”

Then she fell silent. What more could you say about a photo opportunity?

15

THE SWAN

G
race Kelly and Jean-Pierre Aumont made no attempt to conceal the delight they took in love the second time around. When they went up to Paris at the conclusion of the Cannes Film Festival in the middle of May 1955, they stayed in adjoining suites in the Raphael Hotel. Hand in hand, they made a very public assault together on the sights and excitements of Paris. Jean-Pierre was on his home turf, and he took pride in introducing Grace to friends and colleagues like Jean-Louis Barrault, the Laurence Olivier of France. Impulsive, optimistic, and happily filling his mind with all sorts of ventures for the future, Jean-Pierre saw Grace as the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life.

“When a man is deeply in love with a person of Miss Kelly’s quality,” he told the press, “marriage is obviously what one would dream of.”

Grace was scarcely less exuberant. “It has been wonderful to discover Paris in Jean-Pierre’s company,” she told reporters as she flew back to America on May 18. She saw “no obstacles to marrying a Frenchman,” she said. “Love is not a question of nationality.” Noting that her boyfriend conducted his acting career on both sides of the Atlantic, she indicated that she would not be averse to doing the same herself. “I could be very happy,” she said, “dividing my time between the United States and France.”

The ingredients of a new scenario were shaping in Grace’s head. Where there was love, there had to be marriage, particularly since Jean-Pierre was conveniently single—a widower uncompromised by any divorce entanglements. During her final days in Paris, Grace met and played happily with Marie-Christine, Aumont’s nine-year-old daughter by the actress Maria Montez, who had died four years earlier. Things would certainly have been less complicated if Jean-Pierre had been Catholic rather than Jewish. “I’d rather you married a nigger than a Jew,” old man Kelly had once told his daughter. But in the last year Grace’s father had finally consented to the idea of his youngest child, Lizanne, marrying Donald LeVine, the Jewish boyfriend whom she had been dating since college days, and the wedding was scheduled for the following month. Grace was going to be one of the maids of honor, and she flew back to the United States in May 1955 with the news that Jack Kelly could look forward to the prospect of a second Jewish son-in-law.

“We got engaged,” remembers Jean-Pierre Aumont. “It was not official, but we were committed to each other. We thought we were going to get married.”