Author kept promise to princess
He had access to Grace Kelly but her voice is barely heard
The Stevens School yearbook circa 1947 said Grace Kelly was most likely “to become a stage and screen star,” a statement that was both prophetic and, on a deeper level, too shallow in scope, at least according to what is revealed in High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly (Harmony, $25.99), Donald Spoto’s authorized biography of the late actress.
Based on interviews with Kelly beginning in 1975, Spoto paints a portrait of a young woman desperately searching for an identity and, more importantly, the love of a father who throughout his life remained a distant, cold figure to his daughter.
(Sun-Times files)
While the beautiful and statuesque Kelly blossomed as an actress on the stage and on television, film acting (she made 11 movies) remained for the starlet an enigma, the author asserts through interviews with her contemporaries, close friends and family. Kelly saw some of her most memorable performances as less than appealing (“I really wasn’t very good in ‘Mogambo” and “... didn’t do well” in “High Noon”). She worked early on for directors, including the great Fred Zinnemann and legendary John Ford, who simply (and sadly) did not take the time nor the interest to “direct” her, Spoto writes. Underneath it all was the unconditional love of an “older” man and the prospect of marriage and motherhood that tugged most profoundly at Grace Kelly’s heartstrings.
High Society runs the gamut of the usual Kelly lore, from her passionate pursuance of an acting career to her well-documented love affairs with older men, including Ray Milland, Gary Cooper, William Holden and Oleg Cassini, and her eventual marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Before all that, of course, there was her Philadelphia upbringing in an Irish-Catholic family, the gangly teen-turned-stunning beauty who wore glasses and spoke with nasal intonations who went on to modeling, TV commercials and eventually the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. We knew much of that prior to Spoto’s book though the author smartly manages to correct errors and confirm (or negate) rumors that plagued Kelly throughout her life. For example, many people believed that Kelly turned down Hitchcock’s offer to star in “Marnie” because of pressure from her new husband and the Monaco citizenry who thought it uncouth for their new princess to star as a compulsive thief and play love scenes opposite Sean Connery. In fact, Spoto writes that Kelly told her closest friends that her husband never raised any such objections and that the choice to withdraw from the film was hers alone.
We gain insight into the severe melancholy that settled over the newly crowned Princess Grace, who upon marrying royalty left behind her film career, family and friends, ultimately losing her identity amid the protocol and centuries-old rules governing her royal life. Her fairy tale wedding, televised across the globe, became her biggest nightmare, Spoto writes. Quoting both her daughter Caroline and Kelly herself, we learn how how neither Kelly nor Prince Ranier ever looked at any photographs from the massively public event.
Spoto promised Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco that he would wait 25 years following her death to publish her life story, including the text he gained from their interviews. The author explains in the introduction how he stayed true to that promise and began working on High Society in 2007, precisely 25 years after her untimely death in a 1982 automobile accident. By that time, several Kelly biographies, television documentaries and a made-for-TV movie had already saturated our pop culture psyche. What was left untold?
Spoto’s ace in the hole is that some of the narrative is peppered with Kelly’s own words. But those words are few and far between. Perhaps the princess had not much to say? Kelly interviews were rare during her brief life, and one can only guess what Spoto did not include in his storytelling. Those waiting to hear Grace Kelly speak will be somewhat disappointed.
Miriam Di Nunzio is editor of the Sun-Times’ Weekend section.