"High Society"

Clockwise (from left): In her office at the palace, Monaco. Prince’s Palace Archives, Monaco; Departing from New York for Los Angeles, autumn 1955; As Nancy Brubaker in The Bridges at Toko-Ri (with director Mark Robson), January 1954


“I never really liked Hollywood,” Grace Kelly told author Donald Spoto, the author of her new biography, High Society (Harmony Books). “Oh, I liked some of the people I worked with and some friends I made there, and I was thankful for the chance to do some good work. But I found it unreal—unreal and full of men and women whose lives were confused and full of pain. To outsiders, it looked like a glamorous life, but it really was not.”

Kelly epitomized high glamour even before she married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, winning the hearts of legions of Americans as the star of 11 Hollywood films between 1950 and her marriage (including Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief ). But Kelly chafed at the image that MGM and the media ensnared her in. She was more interested in perfecting her craft and had her sights set more on Broadway than Tinseltown.

Granting Spoto hours upon hours of interviews and access to her personal life, she held Spoto to one condition: that he not publish any biography of her until 25 years after her death. Tragically, that anniversary was to come all to soon, as she died at 52 in an automobile accident in 1982. In this long-awaited portrait of a princess, Spoto portrays her life with discreet honesty and bits of humor, offering an intimate and detailed account of Kelly’s journey from Philadelphia’s Main Line to her early modeling days (where she was the face of Max Factor lipstick, Colgate, and Lucky Strikes and was a cover girl for both Cosmopolitan and Redbook), to her career in the theater and on TV sound stages, to Academy Award–winning screen actor.

Though Kelly described the day of her wedding, which was filmed by MGM in its entirety to release her from an unfulfilled contractual commitment, as “nightmarish,” Spoto writes, she believed her “real life” began the day she left the “unhappiness” of Hollywood and became Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace Of Monaco at age 26. When asked if she’d ever perform again, Grace explained that she still had her original makeup kit from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and that perhaps she’d take it out one day. In 1982, Kelly was working on a new project after 25 years away from the silver screen, titled Rearranged, in which she played herself in a comedy of manners and social mix-ups that Spoto sheds new and detailed light on. The film was not to be, as only about an hour of it had been shot when Kelly plunged off a highway in southern France on the way home to Monaco.

To outsiders, Grace Kelly’s life looked perfectly enchanting, but as Spoto writes simply, “Grace was a princess, and princesses do not live happily ever after, except in fairytales.”

(Elle)

I's going to add this to my list of must-reads......she was a wonderful actress as well as the epitome of class and elegance.