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Evolution of Grace

William Ogden Haynes

A beauty, gone too soon.
On September 14, 1982, Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, was taking
her seventeen-year-old daughter Stephanie to the train station. They had
tickets to Paris where Stephanie would go to school. That day, she told
the chauffeur that she would drive, since the car, an eleven-year-old Rover,
only had room for two people and their luggage. At one horrific point
on that mountainous drive, Grace screamed that the brakes didn’t work,
and the car swerved, plummeting 120 feet over a cliff. Stephanie had
only minor injuries, but Grace died in the hospital.

Grace, my perfect love.
I’ve always been in love with Grace Kelly. She only made eleven films,
and those were in the prudish years between 1951 and 1956. Yet with every
movie I watched, I fell more deeply in love. In spite of making so few movies,
she is still regarded as one of the most enduring Hollywood stars. She exuded
elegance, poise and exceptional beauty, almost perfection. She was to be
admired from afar, but was unattainable, especially to someone like me.

Disillusionment
Grace had a standoffish demeanor on screen that gave her the nickname
“Ice Queen.” It’s rumored that she spent her life trying to win her father’s
approval, and that may be why she had affairs with older men. Her father
referred to her acting work as only “A slim cut above being a streetwalker.”
She had affairs with many of her co-stars like Gary Cooper, Clark Gable,
Cary Grant, Ray Milland, and Bing Crosby. Some of these men were more
than twenty-years her senior and most were married. She also had trysts
with Aly Kahn, Oleg Cassini, the Shah of Iran and Marlon Brando. Finally,
Grace went on to marry Prince Rainier of the Monaco royal family, who
was six years older than her. Of Kelly, Gary Cooper said, “She looked like
a cold dish with a man, until you got her pants down, then she’d explode.”
Perhaps it was predictable that when the ice queen became a princess,
most of the talk about her infidelities disappeared.

Reconcilement
How do I reconcile perfection with promiscuity? I’ve come to believe
that since no one is perfect, the Grace Kelly I fell in love with, never
existed except in my mind. Of course, promiscuity also exists in my
mind, and when I think about it now, I’d much rather love the Grace
who was troubled, looking for a father figure. And let me say, that I
would have been available to fill that role for Grace, any day of the week.

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