Other film stars had become tinpot marquises or married dubious princes; Grace Kelly grabbed a real one, or at least as real a version as could have at the time been imagined marrying a film star (it was, after all, an era that could simply not have conceived that the Queen of Spain might someday be a divorced former newsreader, granddaughter of a taxi driver). It's startling to realize that she gave up the life she had made for herself at only 26, her films - just shy of a dozen - made over just five years.
She certainly kept up her part of the deal, flawlessly enacting the part of a devoted, gracious, beloved Princess Consort for some 26 years. And if at all ended messily, and suddenly, and sadly, here in 1966 - just ten years into her life in the South of France - she has no idea.
Today she would have been 85.
I often wondered whether she was at all prepared for the institutionalized infidelities that left her alone in that pile in the square mile principality - alone with the children, the servants, and her thoughts. From fairytale to reality can be a very long road indeed. But she held up her end of the bargain, it seemed, beautiful and gracious to the end.
ReplyDeleteWell, the Kellys were hardly the Cleavers, if anything I ever heard in my Philadelphia days is true, but still there's no question the Grimaldis - Europe's louchest princely family at the time and since - outpaced them in their little bizarreries.
DeleteOne wonders what kind of work she'd have been doing by the mid-sixties or later - they weren't really making her kinds of picture much, and maybe it was better to be staring out to sea in Monte Carlo than trying to nab a second lead in an Avco-Embassy "all star" production...