TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82kelly

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 7.4 KB | 142 lines

                                                                                September 27, 1982 

The Princess From Hollywood 

Grace Kelly:  1927-1982

She wore white gloves and a smile of innocent wickedness as she
wheeled the little blue convertible around the cliffside curves
above Monaco. For the right man, the elegant smile hinted, she
might take the gloves off. She had been driving much too fast,
because it had been necessary to outdistance the police, and
Cary Grant, the reformed jewel thief sitting beside her, looked
ill. But he perked up when she parked at a turnoff and produced
a cold chicken picnic lunch.

"A leg or a breast?"  she asked naughtily.

"You make the choice," he replied with a faint smile...

No actress played high comedy better than Grace Kelly during the
six years (1951-56) that her film career flared so beguilingly,
and what fascinated the groundings was that she seemed to be
living the roles as well. Last week, 28 years after she met
Prince Rainier of Monaco during the filming of Alfred
Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, and 26 years after she gave up
acting to marry him and become the reigning Princess of his
467-acre tax haven and gambling oasis, she came to the poignant
and unexpected end of an astonishing script.

Apparently because she suffered a stroke, she lost control of
her car on a hairpin turn in France above Monaco. The 1972 Rover
fell 40 yds. down a steep hillside and caught fire. A resident
extinguished the fire and pulled Princess Stephanie, her
17-year-old youngest child, from the driver's-side door (leading
to speculation, eventually squelched, that the underage and
unlicensed Stephanie had been driving). Firemen extricated
Princess Grace. The first confusing bulletins from the palace
spoke only of a broken leg, but she never regained
consciousness, and a brain scan showed irreparable damage from
the stroke and her injuries. She died the next day, at 52, after
Rainier and their older children, Princess Caroline, 25, and
Prince Albert, 24, agreed to the removal of a life-support
system. At week's end Stephanie remained hospitalized with a
damaged vertebra.

To the young, of course, Grace was simply a middle-aged
celebrity, less interesting than most because better behaved.
But to those of her own generation, it was almost impossible to
think of her as a matron whose photos sometimes showed the
puffiness of weight too easily gained, and whose statements in
the press were likely to be suppressed clucks about her
daughters' unsuitable consorts. To her contemporaries, perhaps
simply because she stopped making films at 26, Grace Kelly
remained vividly what she had been, a lovely blond swirl of
shadow and substance, a white-gloved good girl who managed to
be disturbing and mysterious.

Her looks were those of a fashion model, and she might have
seemed as bloodless as a mannequin if it had not been for a
striking coolness of manner, which may have been nothing more
than the defensiveness of a young woman so myopic that she could
not read the expressions of those around her. She was rich,
however, and it showed. Her face was not closed or insolent; it
was simply the face of someone who did not need the job and did
not need to impress anyone.

She was thought to be patrician, although her parents, a former
magazine cover model and an Irish bricklayer grown wealthy as
a contractor, certainly did not qualify as aristocrats in
Philadelphia. Nor did Grace, the princess of an amusement park,
every qualify as a Main Line aristocrat there despite her
popularity in the city. But she behaved like a lady, and thus
in Hollywood she seemed not quite real, not quite an illusion.
The picnic scene with Cary Grant from To Catch a Thief worked
because this flickering imbalance of perception carried over to
the screen. It seemed deliciously shocking (but deliciously
believable) that there were breasts and legs beneath her summer
frock.

The Princess' mother Margaret, who gave up modeling (for
magazines like Country Gentleman) after commencing her not very
happy marriage to John Sr., was the unquestioned monarch of the
Kelly clan. Her iron rule was to keep up appearances. There is
no doubt that Grace learned much about the royalty trade from
Margaret. In 1954 Grace had a serious affair with Designer Oleg
Cassini, but against family wishes (he was divorced and not
Catholic). Then, over Christmas of 1955, Rainier visited the
Kelly mansion in Philadelphia. The unlikely joining of clans was
approved.

Grace retired from Hollywood after only eleven films. Her first
important role was as Gary Cooper's wife in High Noon. She
played opposite Clark Gable in Mogambo, James Stewart in Rear
Window and Frank Sinatra in High Society, and she won an Oscar
in 1955 as Bing Crosby's wife in The Country Girl.

A career of six years was over and one of 26 years began, with
utmost gaudiness, at a wedding attended by 1,100 guests, 1,600
journalists and at least two pickpockets, posing as priests,
clumsy enough to be arrested. Aristotle Onassis, who once
mistook Grace for Cary Grant's secretary when she arrived for
lunch on the shipping tycoon's yacht wearing horn-rimmed
spectacles, arranged for 15,000 carnations to be dumped on
Rainier's yacht from a plane.

Everyone lived ever after. The press called it "a storybook
romance," but it was more clearly a dynastic marriage of the
kind traditionally made for good, practical reasons by European
nobility. In Rainier's case, the practicality was not hard to
see. Rainier's Grimaldi clan dates its ascendancy in Monaco from
1297, when his ancestor Francois the Cunning sneaked into the
palace disguised as a monk. By a quirk of French law, Monaco's
citizens would lose their tax and military exemptions if Rainier
failed to produce an heir to the throne. What Grace got, in
addition to a title (Her Serene Highness), the run of a 200-room
pink palace and perks to suit, was what her mother had:  a
marriage to be seen through steadfastly, come what might.

She mothered her children, took up good works, supported a
league that promoted breast feeding and saw to the rebuilding
of the hospital in Monte Carlo that bears her name, and in which
she died. Terence Cardinal Cooke of New York called her "a
lesson in Catholic motherhood," and Brigitte Bardot called her
"l'Altesse Frigidaire"-- Her Majesty the Frigidaire. She is
widely credited with giving Monaco the dignity and luster, and
of course the splendid tax loophole, in the person now of Prince
Albert, the heir apparent, that have helped to bring the once
dilapidated old clip joint its present considerable prosperity.
She conferred honor on Graustark by allying it with Hollywood.

That honor was returned last Saturday, with affection. Among
those film celebrities, pop notables and real and Graustarkian
dignitaries who attended her funeral were Nancy Reagan, French
President Francois Mitterrand's wife Danielle, Ireland's
President Patrick Hillery, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra's wife
Barbara, Film Mogul Sam Spiegel, Racing Driver Jackie Stewart,
Diana, Princess of Wales, Prince Bertil of Sweden, Princess
Benedikta of Denmark, Don Juan de Bourbon, father of Spain's
King Juan-Carlo, Holland's Prince Bernhard. Grand Duchess
Josephine of Luxembourg, Michael, former King of Rumania,
Frederika, former Queen of Greece, and Prince Henri, pretender
to the French throne.

--By John Skow. Reported by William Blaylock/Monaco