CHAPTER ELEVEN
Prince Rainier had hoped to see Grace immediately upon his arrival in the United States with a visit to the set of The Swan (with Look magazine photographers dutifully in tow). When this proved impossible, plans were made for the Prince and Grace to be reunited at the Kelly home on Christmas Day; the film was running behind schedule and would not be completed until a few days before Christmas.
By this time Grace was aware of the seriousness of Rainier’s intentions; barring total disaster in Philadelphia, the Prince was going to ask for her hand in marriage. She wasn’t certain what her response would be, but she knew that she could very well say yes. She found the prospect thrilling—and frightening. The latter so much so that she almost declined to meet the Prince again. Until the last moment she wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to go through with it. “At one point,” she admitted years later, “I almost didn’t go home for Christmas, even though the Prince was to visit us. I made up my mind I wouldn’t go. And then—I can’t remember how it happened—I just went and bought a plane ticket anyway.”
The Prince was scheduled to arrive at Henry Avenue on Christmas Day night, and up to the last minute Grace was racked by misgivings. “Christmas morning,” she said, “I was sorry I’d gone home. I wished I’d remained in California.” As the Prince’s appearance drew near, Grace was rattled with anxiety. She phoned her sister Peggy and implored her to “be over here with me.”
According to Peggy, the rest of Grace’s family were not at all nervous about meeting the Prince. “We knew almost nothing about him. It wasn’t like he was well known in the United States; we weren’t reading about him in the papers every other day. So it wasn’t like Prince Charles coming to your house for dinner.”
When the Prince, Father Tucker, and Dr. Donat arrived at the Kellys’ at 7 P.M., introductions were made all around, and Peggy later said she noticed “sparks flying” between her sister and Rainier. The evening was convivial; Mrs. Kelly found the Prince more charming than she’d imagined him, and Father Tucker’s wit kept all in high spirits. Soon, as they had done in the palace gardens, Grace and Rainier became enthralled with each other and conversed together to the exclusion of the others. Peggy, sensing that the couple would be more comfortable away from her parents, suggested that “the young people” go back to her house and continue with the party. They did, and Jack Kelly drove Father Tucker to a local rectory, where he spent the night with a priest friend.
Grace, Rainier, and Dr. Donat played cards with Peggy and her husband until 3 A.M. “Grace and Rainier seemed very relaxed and comfortable with each other,” Peggy recalls. Afterward they returned to the Kelly house, and Mrs. Kelly offered the Prince and Dr. Donat the guest rooms. They happily accepted and donned Kell’s too-large pajamas for the night. As Grace prepared for bed, she went to her mother’s room. A “radiance” Mrs. Kelly had noticed in her daughter earlier was even more evident now, and— bursting with curiosity—she asked Grace what she thought of the Prince. “She hesitated,” Mrs. Kelly later wrote, “as if she didn’t want to reveal the full extent of what was going on inside her. ‘Well, I think he’s most attractive in every way.’ Then she added, ‘Yes, I think he’s very nice.’”
Fantasies aside, Grace found herself startlingly attracted to Rainier. He was a good-looking, sturdily built man, with the kind of Continental charm Grace had found so alluring in Oleg Cassini and Jean-Pierre Aumont. Although he was one of Grace’s youngest suitors, he was—as the ruler of a country—the ultimate father figure. The strong chemistry between them at their half-hour meeting in Monaco, which had led Grace to sense that she fell in love with him that day, was cemented that first night in Philadelphia, and they both knew immediately that everything was going to work out between them. The day after Christmas, Lizanne recalls, they visited the LeVines’ apartment for dinner: “Rainier was helping with the dishes and we were having a good time. Toward the end of the evening, Rainier was talking to Don, and Grace said to me, ‘How do you like him?’ I had just met him, because I wasn’t there Christmas day; I was in Pittsburgh with Don’s family. Grace said to me, ‘I’m going to get married—we’re getting engaged.’ Well, I just about fell off the couch. I said, ‘Oh my God, Grace— you don’t even know this guy!’”
But Grace was certain. “Everything was perfect,” she explained later. “When I was with him, I was happy wherever we were, and I was happy with whatever we were doing. It was a kind of happiness ... well, it wouldn’t have mattered where we were or what we were doing, but I’d have been happy being there and doing it ... I just can’t explain it.”
In Philadelphia, Grace and the Prince spent every possible moment together: they dined, strolled, visited Grace’s friends, talked about themselves, opened up their hearts and souls to each other. On the 27th, Rainier and Dr. Donat accompanied Grace to Manhattan, where she was taking singing lessons to prepare for her next film, High Society, a musical version of The Philadelphia Story. In New York, Grace and the Prince did the town, and mention of their dates was made in the newspapers, but the significance of those dates could not have occurred to the reporters. On the 29th, Grace telephoned her mother to tell her what she had already told Lizanne—that she and the Prince were very much in love and wanted to get married. Mrs. Kelly was ecstatic. “Imagine,” she told a reporter later, “here I am a bricklayer’s wife, and my daughter’s marrying a prince!”
Years later Peggy was quoted to the effect that her sister’s marriage to Prince Rainier was an “arranged” one. To most people—especially in America—this suggests a marriage of convenience, one based upon considerations other than passionate love. Certainly the second meeting of Grace and Rainier had been “arranged,” but it couldn’t have come about any other way. And while the extraordinary behind-the-scenes events that followed Grace’s “Yes” to Rainier might understandably be construed as part of an arrangement, they were dictated by the Prince’s position and should not suggest a lack of romance. There can be no doubt that Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier were dizzily infatuated with each other within hours of their reunion.
Still, Lizanne says, “I don’t think Grace was in love. She didn’t have time to really be in love. She had been more in love with other people than she was with Rainier when she first met him. But there was a great attraction between them. Other than that, I don’t know why she decided to marry him so quickly.”
A family friend, Bill Hegner, once said, “I think they bought each other out of a catalogue.” Although it’s highly cynical, Hegner’s idea isn’t that farfetched in one respect: it was necessary for Rainier to marry not only someone he loved but someone suitable. Had Grace become known to him through a dating service, she would have won the highest “match rating” possible. She was young, she was beautiful, she had been brought up with wealth, she was Catholic, she had a reputation, outside Hollywood at least, for refinement and chastity. And, equally important, she was a world-renowned celebrity, a glamorous film star whose presence as the Princess of Monaco would undoubtedly help increase its tourist trade, the major contributor to the country’s treasury.
Had the marriage of Grace and Rainier been purely a convenience of state, it would have been ideal. That the two were also mad about each other made things well-nigh perfect. The Prince found himself happily surprised, in fact, by how comfortable he felt with Grace. “As the Prince of Monaco,” he said not long after the wedding, “I quickly learned that many of those around me were trying to use me for their own purposes. I trusted nobody. I knew from the start that I could trust the Princess. It was one of the reasons that I felt so surely that she was the person for me. With her, I felt complete. I could relax and be myself.”
Before the engagement of Grace and Rainier could be announced, however, there were several important hurdles that needed to be cleared. Rainier’s taking a wife was a matter of state, and as such it carried with it certain unavoidable necessities. The first of these was medical assurance that Grace Kelly was physically able to bear an heir to the Monegasque throne. “I must get married and raise a family,” Rainier had told Collier’s. “I told my people recently that I am keenly sensitive to the political implications of my bachelorhood.” Even had Rainier been more cavalier about this very singular example of noblesse oblige, his advisers could not be. The survival of Monegasque life as they knew it hung in the balance; the fertility of a future princess would have to be all but guaranteed—or Rainier would not be allowed to marry her.
This had been made painfully apparent to Rainier in 1953. He had been in love with Gisele Pascal; she had, for several years, lived in his Beaulieu villa where he spent most of his time with her. So entrenched was she in Rainier’s life that the citizens of Monaco thought of Gisele as their “uncrowned princess.” After six years of romance, Rainier wanted to marry Gisele, and the thought of becoming the Princess of Monaco thrilled her. She refused even to discuss the romance, lest she say something wrong; “I am living in a dream and nothing must spoil it.”
Unfortunately for Gisele, something did. When Rainier told his advisers that he planned to marry her, they reminded him that it would be necessary for her to take a fertility test. Instead, Gisele presented a letter from her Paris doctors certifying that she could conceive. This was not sufficient for the Monegasque officials, who insisted that the Prince’s own doctor perform the test. When the first test came back negative, the physician took another, then a third. All indicated that Gisele was infertile. Rainier was told that he would not be allowed to marry her.
Although he seriously considered it, abdication for the woman he loved was not a solution for Rainier, since there was no one to assume the throne; such an action would have the same effect as a childless marriage: Monaco’s seven-century Grimaldi rule would end and the country would become a French protectorate. Bitterly Rainier broke off his relationship with Gisele. The Prince told Francis Tucker, “Father, if you ever hear that my subjects think I do not love them, tell them what I have done today.” (Gisele later married and had a child, and one can only imagine the Prince’s reaction to the news.)
Now Rainier was faced with the same dilemma, and it was as distasteful to him as it had been several years before. He knew it must be done, and by his own doctor. (Hence Dr. Donat’s otherwise inexplicable presence in America; the first reason proffered was that the Prince had come to have a checkup at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and wanted his own doctor along; later it was said that Rainier had brought Donat here to enroll in the school. Neither explanation makes any sense; Rainier didn’t have to travel three thousand miles for a medical checkup, and neither would the Prince of Monaco’s private physician have any compelling reason to attend an American university. But it was necessary to explain Donat’s presence thus, in order to avoid speculation about the real reason. Rainier sensed, correctly, that Americans would neither understand nor sympathize with the need for a fertility test of Grace Kelly before she could marry him.)
Rainier was loath to broach the subject to Grace. “Her family is very religious, very conservative,” the Prince told one of his advisers. “I don’t dare even suggest it to her!” But it simply had to be done. Father Tucker, who had already spent hours questioning Grace about her religious beliefs, informed her of the need for the test. Faced with the fact that without a test there was no possibility of marriage, Grace agreed.
The test—kept secret from Grace’s family—was performed at a private sanitarium on the outskirts of Philadelphia, because its director was a man Grace knew and trusted. She was terribly anxious about undergoing the examination—not only because so much depended on it, but because Prince Rainier was under the impression that she was a virgin.
During this emotionally charged period, Grace fell back on her intimacy with Don Richardson, and she telephoned him every day, confiding her innermost thoughts. He vividly recalls her telling him about the fertility test. “They had her in stirrups, taking all kinds of tests to make sure that she could produce an heir for Monaco. She was frantic about the fact that the test would reveal she wasn’t a virgin, because the Prince thought she was. She told me she explained to the doctors that her hymen had been broken when she was playing hockey in high school.”
Could Prince Rainier, a sophisticated man, have actually believed that Grace, a well-traveled movie actress of twenty-six, was a virgin? “You have to remember that this was 1955,” Richardson says, “when twenty-six-year-old virgins were a lot more common than they are today. And that was Grace’s image. People believed she was a nun. Everything about her spoke of virginity and pureness; the Prince knew she came from a ‘good Catholic family.’ When you looked into the face of Grace Kelly, you couldn’t believe she was anything but unblemished, untarnished, and virginal. It’s entirely possible that the Prince, worldly as he was, believed she was a virgin.”
Grace passed the test; she and Rainier, the doctors told him, could have as many children as they wanted. That obstacle cleared, there was next the question of a dowry, and it presented a serious problem, one that almost prevented the marriage, because her father balked. “Grace told me,” Richardson says, “that her father kept storming out of meetings with the Prince’s lawyers in a rage. She’d say, ‘Daddy’s being impossible!’ These heavy negotiations went on for days, but he finally came through and paid the dowry. The last figure Grace mentioned to me was two million dollars.”
Americans would have understood the necessity of the dowry even less than that of the fertility test, and first Mrs. Kelly, then Grace, denied that there had been one. Jack Kelly’s initial refusal was rooted in his deep-seated American aversion to such an alien tradition—and his fear that Rainier was marrying Grace because he needed money. Again it was Father Tucker whose gentle, patient explanation of the need for a dowry brought Jack Kelly around. In long conferences with the priest, Kelly bellowed, “I don’t want any damn broken-down prince who’s head of a country over there that nobody ever knew anything about to marry my daughter!”
Father Tucker explained that the presentation of a dowry was a time-honored European tradition, especially among royalty. (Rainier’s great-grandfather, Prince Albert, in fact, had received six million dollars in 1889 from his second wife, American Alice Heine, the widow of the Duke of Richelieu.) If Rainier were just after money, Tucker went on, he could have married any number of women much wealthier than Grace. The Prince loved his daughter, Tucker told Jack Kelly, so he needn’t worry on that score. And the Prince was in fact a man of considerable wealth.
Then why, Jack Kelly demanded to know, did he need a dowry? Father Tucker explained that a downturn in tourism and gambling in the Monte Carlo casinos had left Rainier and his country cash-poor. But there was fabulous wealth in the real estate and the property that made up Monaco, not least of which was the Prince’s 220-room palace. When Rainier’s “real” wealth—in the millions—was proven to Jack Kelly, the astute businessman realized that the Prince’s financial troubles at the moment were no more than a cash-flow problem. Unlike any other property holder, however, the sovereign of a country could not very well mortgage his holdings to raise money.
Still, why would Jack Kelly agree to pay a virtual stranger such a large sum of money to marry his daughter? The reasons are complex, having more to do with Kelly’s own personality than with Father Tucker’s assurances that this was what was done in Rainier’s social strata. To be sure, Kelly was under a great deal of pressure from his family not to throw any monkey wrenches into the exhilarating events that were unfolding on Henry Avenue. But he was also, despite his innate suspicion of the situation, deeply pleased by the prospect of his daughter becoming a princess. Mrs. Kelly’s exclamation about the daughter of a bricklayer marrying a prince sums up not only her own attitude but her husband’s as well. The Kellys’ most compelling drive was to be accepted in Philadelphia society, but Main Liners had for years continually snubbed the Kellys, considering them and their wealth hopelessly nouveau.
How better could Jack Kelly show up Philadelphia society than to be the father-in-law of a prince who was a member of Europe’s oldest ruling family? As Don Richardson puts it, “The Kellys were social climbers. Their plan originally was to get Grace married into Philadelphia society. Papa was very angry that he never made it into the social register, even though he’d made a lot of money.”
Oleg Cassini agrees with this assessment. “For Grace to have married a matinee idol or a clothes designer,” he says, “would have done no good at all,” in advancing the family’s social position. “Rainier brought the highest prestige that was religious as well as social and financial.”
Jack Kelly, convinced of the Prince’s bona fide position as a European monarch and a man of impressive lineage and old wealth, saw his daughter’s marriage as his family’s ultimate chance for the kind of status he had devoted his life to achieving. That money needed to be paid for the privilege was merely a business matter, a small detail in what was a priceless opportunity for a man obsessed with his family’s place in the eyes of the world.
One needs to consider too Jack Kelly’s well-developed ego. The position he himself would occupy after his daughter’s marriage to Prince Rainier was not lost on him. While being the father of a princess didn’t exactly make him a king, it would make him the closest thing to one America would ever have.11 Kelly agreed to pay the dowry.
The announcement of the betrothal of Grace Patricia Kelly of Philadelphia and His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III of Monaco was made simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. In Philadelphia, Rainier got his first taste of the American brand of journalism at a press conference in the Kelly manse. Hard-bitten reporters from New York and Philadelphia weren’t about to treat a foreigner from a country most of them had never heard of with any more respect than they would treat anyone else. Standing on the piano, pushing furniture aside, and jostling for position so violently that the pregnant Lizanne had to flee upstairs for safety, they fired questions and impudent orders in a dizzying staccato:
“Hey, Prince, give her a kiss!” “Was it love at first sight, Prince?” “Hold it, Rainier ... smile! ... That’s fine, Prince.”
Rainier became angry; at one point he growled to Father Tucker, “After all, I don’t belong to MGM.” Mrs. Kelly attempted to smooth things over by exhorting the newsmen, “Now, not too familiar with the Prince ...” The journalists then turned their attention to Grace. “Show us your engagement ring, Gracie!” “Will you give up your career?” “Was this an arranged marriage?” “How many children will you have?”
Grace blushed and squirmed, and Mrs. Kelly once again helped out by answering the last question for her daughter. “I hope they’ll have many children,” she burbled. “I like a big family.”
When the conference ended, the furor really began. The media, both in America and Europe, knew instinctively that this very well could be the wedding of the century. The story had it all: Hollywood glamour and royal mystique, fairy-tale romance, the drama of surprise, the conflict of differing cultures, a beautiful bride, and a dashing, handsome groom.
Grace and Rainier occupied the front pages of the world’s newspapers for weeks as reporters scrambled for angles, controversies, and scoops. A few days were devoted to speculation about where the nuptials would be held. The New York Daily News began its dispatch on the issue as if it were a major matter of state: “An international fog of conflicting reports yesterday surrounded the question of when and where Grace Kelly will marry Prince Rainier of Monaco ... In Philadelphia, Miss Kelly’s mother said the announcement her daughter would wed the charming prince in Monaco ‘must be a misunderstanding.’ And the prince’s personal chaplain said Rainier wants a quiet wedding in Philadelphia.”
Rainier at first agreed to hold the wedding in Philadelphia “in deference to his bride, her family, and the American people.” But once again, matters of state intervened when the Monegasques let out a collective shriek of disapproval; their prince’s wedding must be held there. And—no small matter—Monaco’s waning tourist trade and dwindling income would be helped tremendously by the presence of thousands of guests, reporters, and curiosity seekers at the wedding. Further, the focus of world attention on the beautiful little country during the nuptials would entice thousands of people to visit Monaco for years to come.
If most of the world was surprised by the unexpected announcement from Philadelphia, Grace’s acquaintances, indeed the entire Hollywood community, were shocked. Most of her friends knew only that she had met the Prince in Monaco the previous year as a publicity stunt, and she had told none but her closest intimates that he was even coming to visit her. (Her desire to avoid publicity and possible embarrassment caused her to keep the Prince’s visit secret from as close an associate as Rupert Allan; this led to the erroneous perception that Grace was unaware of the Prince’s impending visit until after she arrived home for Christmas.)
Hedda Hopper wrote in her syndicated column, “Her friends are completely baffled; half of them don’t believe she and the Prince will ever reach the altar.” The Hollywood community couldn’t understand why Grace, at the pinnacle of her career, would give everything up to marry a man she barely knew and “live in a glorified gambling casino.” Some suspected an elaborate publicity ploy arranged with the help of MGM. But the studio, informed by Grace of her intentions before the official announcement, was as dumbstruck as everyone else. James Stewart recalls, “Grace told Dory Schary, ‘Mr. Schary, I’m going to get married.’ And Schary said, ‘I think that’s wonderful, Grace—we’ll have a big reception for you upstairs here at the studio.’ And Grace said, ‘You don’t quite understand, Mr. Schary ...’”
MGM’s executives reacted to the news with mixed emotions. Although Grace was noncommittal on the subject, they sensed that after she completed High Society she would not make any more films. To lose a star of Grace’s stature was not pleasant, but at the same time the publicity value of her wedding was incalculable, and the studio did have two films of hers yet to release—in one of which she played a princess. No wonder many in Hollywood suspected that in some shadowy way MGM was behind all this. On the contrary, Grace had once again maddened her studio bosses by doing exactly what she wanted to do without any regard for her legal obligations to MGM.
The suddenness of Grace and Rainier’s decision to marry is much easier to fathom from the Prince’s standpoint than from Grace’s. For him it was necessary that a decision be made quickly. Rainier couldn’t spend months in the United States courting Grace; he had a country to attend to. She couldn’t move into the palace to make sure she was compatible with Rainier; she had a movie to make. “She would never have done anything like live with Rainier before they got married—under any circumstances,” says Judy Kanter Quine. “Things like that weren’t done in those days, and certainly wouldn’t have been by Grace.”
But why did Grace agree to marry a man she barely knew? That she wanted to be married and have children is clear; the facets of her personality that pushed her to forge a life as a career woman were embattled over another tenet that had been bred into her since girlhood: a woman’s greatest achievement is being a wife and mother. Every new artistic triumph was balanced by the knowledge that in this very simple way she was a failure, and this tormented her. Donald Sinden recalled Grace’s meeting his two-and-a-half-year-old son Jeremy: “She looked at him with absolute envy. ”
When Grace met Prince Rainier, she was ready and eager to make a drastic change in her life. She was deeply disappointed in Hollywood, wounded by the salacious publicity her romantic liaisons had engendered, and afraid that she had achieved all she could professionally, that her career could do nothing but wane. While she was making High Society, Gore Vidal asked Grace at a luncheon at composer Jule Styne’s house, “Why on earth would you want to leave Hollywood now that you’ve finally made it to the top?” Her reply is as revealing as it was droll. “She answered,” Vidal recalls, “by asking me if I knew what makeup call is. I said, ‘Of course.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you one of the reasons. When I first came to Hollywood five years ago, my makeup call was at eight in the morning. On this movie it’s been put back to seven-thirty. Every day I see Joan Crawford, who’s been in makeup since five, and Loretta Young, who’s been there since four in the morning. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to stay in a business where I have to get up earlier and earlier and it takes longer and longer for me to get in front of a camera.’”
Vidal says, “I think she saw that her career would just be more of the same and would begin to slide. There are always new girls coming up. Women’s careers are very short in this town, and always have been, unless you want to graduate to doing Bette Davis horror roles. She got out at the top.”
Don Richardson, too, thinks that Grace’s doubts about her career influenced her decision to marry the Prince. “Grace had terrors about where she would go from the point she was at. She knew that her abilities were minimal. I don’t think she had great confidence about being able to go the next step. What was she going to become? A character actress? She definitely wasn’t going to become a great theater star. I think inside she knew that her career was mostly a lot of razzmatazz and hype, and it had nowhere to go.”
On a deeper level, Grace in late 1955 was a restless, dissatisfied, and unhappy woman. Her Catholic upbringing left her guilty about her sexual dalliances and angry at her family for continually objecting to her attempts to legitimize herself in their eyes through marriage. In 1957 she said, “If I’d met the Prince two or three years earlier, perhaps I wouldn’t have married him—at least, not so soon. But we came together at the right time ... It couldn’t have been any different. It had to be that way. It seemed right, and it felt right, and that was the way I wanted it. I knew that I was going to do it, even if there was a chance that I was making a mistake. I would find out later. Right then and there, nothing mattered to me except our staying together.”
Oleg Cassini discussed her upcoming marriage with Grace: “She talked to me about Prince Rainier, and about how marrying him was the solution to her life. By marrying him she was satisfying a large group of people who had power over her—her family, church authorities ... Grace sacrificed a lot for the establishment.”
A friend added another element: “The fact is, she had no turf. Her turf wasn’t Philadelphia, it wasn’t New York, and Hollywood was just borrowed turf. Monaco would be her turf ... In Philadelphia she was a nobody. In Hollywood she became somebody. In Monaco, she would really be somebody.”
Don Richardson was upset when Grace told him she was going to marry Prince Rainier. “I raised hell with her—I said, ‘Don’t do that. Jesus, don’t do that.’ I told her it was just awful—because I knew why she was doing it. Her whole life revolved around pleasing that father of hers. The thing she wanted most in the world was to win his approval, to make him think highly of her. And, despite everything she had accomplished, she still hadn’t been able to achieve that. He was much more impressed with athletics—his son’s rowing medals were far more important to him than Grace’s acting awards.
“When I went to the Kelly house that famous weekend, Grace took me upstairs and showed me a walk-in closet in which were kept all the rowing medals of the father and brother, pictures of the mother as a model, certificates that Papa had gotten for making donations, that kind of thing. There was absolutely nothing relating to Grace in that closet—not even a snapshot of her—and she had been on the covers of magazines by then.”
All of this left Richardson with a definite conclusion about Grace’s motivations. “As far as I’m concerned, the real reason that she married the Prince was to make a bigger splash than a pair of oars.”\
11 Columnist Earl Wilson referred to Grace’s parents as “King John” and “Queen Margaret” in his wedding dispatches from Monaco.