I do hope that Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco, nee Gracie Kelly of Philly, did manage to have some true serenity somewhere in her life.
Because she’s getting precious little of it in her grave.
It wasn’t five years after her car missed a turn on the Riviera’s treacherous Moyenne Corniche, sending Gracie to her doom at age 52, that heavy-breathing author James Spada steamed into print with “Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess.”
With all the delicacy of a rooting boar, Spada snuffled and grunted his way through Gracie’s “secret life” as a starlet and movie star from mattress to mattress, revealing her uninhibited affairs with a succession of older married men-among them Bing Crosby, William Holden, Ray Milland and Oleg Cassini-and explaining that she had a thing for such guys because as a child she had failed to get any affection whatsoever from the older, married guy who was her father, the bricklayer turned millionaire Jack Kelly.
Spada, however, didn’t delve much into Gracie’s later life-except to wallow in the gruesome details of Her Serene Highness’ fatal auto crash and to gallantly note that she eventually became something of a fat drunk. (He quoted the equally ungallant Gore Vidal as saying she became so bovine toward the end that she had to wear enormous canvas brassieres, which Vidal described as “water wings.”)
Those who might have thought this treatment of the princess’ unfortunately truncated middle age as too cursory can now rejoice. Along has come bottom-feeding biographer Robert Lacey with a new book called simply “Grace” (though it doesn’t demonstrate much). It does for her 40s and 50s what Spada did for her jeunesse amoureuse.
We learn that her husband, Rainier, prince of the Monaguesques, ceased to love her and took up with Parisian ladies who “tore the wall paper off the walls” (presumably they were in the demolition business). That her name for him was “the Dodo.” That she wanted to divorce him but wouldn’t because, under Monaco law, she’d lose her children to him. That, except for son Albert, her children were impossibly spoiled brats-especially Princess Stephanie, who apparently still is.
Lacey also informs us in loving detail that middle-aged Grace took a succession of young lovers, reversing the roles of her own youth, and consumed copious amounts of food and strong drink. He doesn’t have a lot to say about the construction of her brassieres, but does find a “friend” of hers willing to quote her as saying, “I’ve got this dreadful thing about my bosoms. They’re so big.”
It is of perhaps some use (at least for parents of daughters) to note that Grace was driven to her youthful promiscuity and stupid, daddy-impressing marriage to the puffed-up princeling of a gambling house mostly because her cold, relentlessly ambitious father was no damned good. Like another up-from-the-common-herd Irish-American money grubber on the make, Joe Kennedy, Jack Kelly was far more concerned with aping the WASPy ways of the local elite than he was in providing his daughter with the love, warmth and security she so obviously craved.
Also, the books instruct us in the imperishable truths that, if you marry some guy just because he’s got the title “prince” hanging on his name (Princess Di, please copy) you may not be getting much of a bargain, and that the glamor and facade of movie stardom are not always what they seem-though in this age of Madonna and Julia Roberts, movie stardom seems pretty much bereft of glamor and facade.
Beyond that, I don’t know what purpose either book serves except to take a big handful of pig trough slop and spatter it all over the ethereal, goddess-like image of Grace that has endured in so many memories.
As if those of us who fell in love with her because of “High Society” and “To Catch a Thief” could possibly change our minds.
There’s nothing left for the next book on Grace, of course, but her early life as a child and infant. One can only imagine the exciting revelations a Lacey or Spada might get out of that. Maybe that she used to wet her diapers and spit up her stewed carrots.
