Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (46 page)

“I’m Caroline,” she said, “Princess Caroline—and don’t you dare speak to me like that.”

Jay Kanter had never stopped sending Grace scripts and ideas for movies. He put no pressure on her—pressure was not Kanter’s style—but it was his job as her agent to make sure that Grace was aware of the opportunities that were being offered her. The princess turned down everything routinely—and, apparently, quite happily. She took it as a joke when Spyros Skouras offered her a million dollars to play the Virgin Mary in
The Greatest Story Ever Told.
“The Virgin Mary? No way,” she responded. “Now, Mary Magdalene. . . .”

The movies were behind her. They were part of another life. Princess Grace had her husband, her children, her good works, her own crowded, important,
responsible
existence. And yet, and yet . . . It struck Cary Grant when he visited Monaco in 1961 that Grace was somehow “restive.” Rita Gam came through on her way back from Berlin, proudly bearing the film festival award which she had won for her part in
No Exit.
Grace cracked open the champagne to congratulate her old friend. “But I sensed,” Rita Gam later wrote, “behind her loving and generous celebration, a tinge of actor’s envy.”

Grace was not as happy as she seemed in the early sixties. Her father’s death had hit her hard. It left her more lonely than she cared to admit. She had no real friends in Monaco. Worst of all, she had suffered two miscarriages since the birth of Albert in 1958. “I am actually just out of bed,” she wrote to Prudy after the second of her miscarriages. She had lost the baby at three months. “It was a terrible experience, and has left me shaken both mentally and physically.”

Popping out babies on a regular basis had been part of the identity that Grace foresaw for herself after her marriage, and the miscarriages came as nasty surprises that undermined her self-esteem. Here was something that she could not do as well as she had anticipated. It all contributed to a curious heavy-heartedness which left her uncharacteristically tired and apathetic. She would go to bed at odd times of day, spending long hours asleep on occasions. “The telephone can ring, the visitors can wait,” reported Madge Tivey-Faucon. “The Princess sleeps, and orders are given not to wake her.”

It was in this depressed and aimless state that Grace turned an ear to Alfred Hitchcock. The director had always refused to accept that Grace’s departure from the screen could be permanent. He took her retirement as a matter of personal desertion—he had felt similarly betrayed in 1949 when Ingrid Bergman went off with Roberto Rossellini. In Grace’s case, however, Hitch had worked very hard to stay on good terms. Monaco had been a regular stop on his gourmandizing expeditions to the south of France, and he had found a ready audience for his scabrous humor in Rainier. Both men could derive enormous enjoyment from such simple devices as whoopee cushions and plastic dog droppings. Hitchcock had promised the prince and princess that he could find the perfect role for Grace, and in the spring of 1962 he announced that he had found it. He sent Grace the script for a movie he had developed from a novel by Winston Graham. It was provisionally entitled
Marnie.

Marnie
played on all the themes of sexual complication that Hitchcock had explored in his previous movies with Grace, and the ending of the Hollywood Production Code and the atmosphere of the early sixties made it possible for him to be considerably more explicit. Marnie—the part to be played by Grace—is a beautiful but sexually benumbed young woman who expresses her frustrations by stealing things. One of the test titles for the movie was
I
Married a Frigid Female Thief.
Her boyfriend and husband— played by Sean Connery—saves her from getting arrested and leads her back to sexual flowering and self-knowledge through helping her to uncover the truth about her disturbed childhood. In the dramatic climax to the film, Marnie is induced to recall how she slept as a child in the bed of her mother—a prostitute who brought her clients back to the house.

It was a challenging and complex role for a maturing Grace Kelly—
To Catch a Thief meets The Country Girl.
Whether it was appropriate for the Princess of Monaco was quite another matter. Grace and Rainier put their trust in Hitchcock to handle the question of taste. In his last three movies—
North by Northwest, Psycho,
and
The Birds
—the director had been at his most triumphantly surefooted. It was other, quite separate issues that decided the fate of Grace’s bid to go back to the movies.

The main impulse for Grace to make
Marnie
came surprisingly from her husband. Rainier had not changed his view about the dignity he expected of his princess. He had discouraged the showing of Grace Kelly movies in Monaco at the time of his wedding, and the principality’s tourist entrepreneurs knew better than to exploit their princess’s former life with T-shirts, mugs, or postcards. Her face was on the postage stamps with Rainier’s, but apart from that, Monaco studiously avoided a Grace Kelly cult of personality.

In the course of six years of marriage, however, Rainier had become significantly less stuffed-shirt. He still had his tempers and pomposities. These would never leave him. But his neurosis to control everything had relaxed somewhat, at least when it came to Grace. The prince had learned to trust his wife—and to relax a little into the comfort of his own feelings. He felt for Grace in the sadness that followed her miscarriages.

“There have been times,” he told his official biographer, Peter Hawkins, in 1966, “when the princess has been a little melancholic—which I quite understand—about having performed a form of art very successfully, only to be cut away from it completely . . . This was not at all an individual decision of the princess to make another film. It was an idea that tickled her, and that she liked, and, quite frankly, I kind of pushed her into the solution.”

Hitchcock was planning to shoot
Marnie
in the summer of 1962 in one of the northeastern states. Rainier and Grace had already scheduled a long summer vacation in America. It would not disrupt their family arrangements, or any public duties, if Grace got up early and went off most mornings to the set. “I thought it would be great fun for all of us,” said Rainier, recalling the incident to Jeffrey Robinson twenty-five years later, “especially the kids. And I knew she wanted to make more films. It would also mean working again with Hitchcock, whom she adored.”

On March 18, 1962, a press release from the palace in Monaco announced that “Princess Grace has accepted to appear during her summer vacation in a motion picture for Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, to be made in the United States.” Trying to anticipate some of the likely reactions, the communiqué emphasized that Prince Rainier was planning to be present during a good part of the filming, and that “Her Highness will return to Monaco with her family in November.” But neither Grace, Rainier or Hitchcock were in any way prepared for the furor that followed. In March 1962, France and Monaco were just firing the first salvos in their tax and border skirmish, and this dispute was instantly read into the equation. Grace was going back to the movies, speculated newspapers from Nice to New Mexico, to snub General de Gaulle, to prove Monaco’s independence—and to raise much-needed money for her beleaguered husband. “I don’t care what Prince Rainier says,” declared Sheilah Graham in the
New York Mirror.
“The fact that [his] wife Grace Kelly is returning to her movie career—no matter what the reason—is indicative that something in some way has gone wrong with their marriage.”

MGM added to the uproar with an indignant letter to Alfred Hitchcock. “When Miss Kelly left the country to become Princess Grace,” wrote Joséph Vogel, MGM’s president, “there were four and one-half years unfulfilled on her contract. The unexpired portion of her contract represented and represents an important but unused asset of this company. . . . So long as Princess Grace remained in retirement, we felt that we had little alternative but to sit by with an unfulfilled commitment. . . . We do believe that, in all sense of fairness and equity, her return should be made with the participation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”

This had not been the idea at all. Within a matter of days an almost casual decision to take on some extra holiday work had mushroomed into an international incident with arcane business complications. Rainier kept talking in terms of summer vacation arrangements. Rupert Allan busily phoned his press contacts to insist there was absolutely nothing wrong with the marriage. The palace announced that Grace’s fee for
Marnie
(over $800,000) would be going to a special foundation for deprived children and young athletes in Monaco.

It was all in vain. The impending return of the screen goddess stirred curiosity everywhere, and the widespread suspicion that Grace had found life in a palace less than totally fulfilling was, of course, precisely correct. The prospect of the princess going back to Hollywood had the horrible fascination of a piece of cinema footage being run backwards.

When Grace first told Judy Kanter the news about
Marnie
over the phone, her voice had “bubbled like that of a teenager.” But the public hubbub and debate produced exactly the opposite effect. Suddenly a nice idea was no fun any more. Grace withdrew to her room again.

In 1956, during the wedding week, Rainier had censored the newspapers coming into the palace, so that Grace never saw the more negative reports. Now Georges Lukomski, Rainier’s personal aide and companion, was given the unpleasant task of passing on a full picture of what the outside world was saying. “The Princess is shocked beyond all measure . . .” reported Lukomski. “She has been in grave danger of breaking down.”

The citizens of Monaco were particularly vociferous in their opposition to their princess’s going back to the movies—”What about her kissing the leading man?” asked one—and it was these local sensitivities that Grace cited early in June 1962, when she bowed to the inevitable. “I am not going to make the movie after all,” she told a reporter from
Nice Matin.
No contract had been signed, and the whole project had been contingent on her approving the script in any case.

“It was heartbreaking for me to have to leave the picture,” Grace wrote to Hitchcock on June 18, 1962. “I was so excited about doing it, and particularly about working with you again. When we meet I would like to explain to you myself all of the reasons, which is difficult to do by letter or through a third party. It is unfortunate that it had to happen this way, and I am deeply sorry.”

“Dear Grace,” responded Hitchcock one week later. “Yes, it was sad, wasn’t it. . . . Without a doubt, I think you made not only the best decision, but the only decision, to put the project aside at this time. After all, it was only a movie. . . . P.S. I have enclosed a small tape recording which I have made especially for Rainier. Please ask him to play it privately. It is not for all ears.”

“It’s only a movie,” was one of Hitchcock’s favorite expressions, and he could afford to shrug his shoulders, with more than forty movies to his credit. The director shot
Marnie
in 1963, with Tippi Hedren playing the title role instead of Grace. He had not lost much time—or any money—in the imbroglio, and all the publicity did no harm at all to the profile of the latest Alfred Hitchcock production.

Grace, however, could hardly feel so cavalier, for what she lost could never be replaced. Until
Marnie,
the possibility that she might return to the screen had been a comfort that she could always fall back on, if only in her dreams. The chance of acting again had remained in the background as a promise and a consolation—so long as she did not seek to make it come true—and by trying to turn the magic key, the door of opportunity had now been permanently closed. The public reaction to
Marnie
had given shape to what even Rainier had forgotten. Princess or actress—take your choice. Grace could not be both.

She had done her job superbly as a royal person. She was very good at smiling, at being dignified and stylish. She was simply brilliant at conveying a sustained image of humanity and concern. But that, Grace now knew, was just about all that being a princess had to offer. The register of adult challenge and emotion that was involved in her public life was really very slim. It was no coincidence that the most successful royal figures are either very old or very young. Being a day-to-day princess was not enough to occupy a mature, thinking mind. It quite lacked the intensity and exhilaration of acting—the tension and creativity, the competition, the chance of failure, the danger, the gossip, the camaraderie, the adult demands of success that depended primarily on her own original efforts and talent, as judged by the real standards of the real world.