Grace Read online

  Publisher’s Note: This text was translated from the German edition, Grace. Every effort was made to maintain the original content and tone of the text. To this end, quotes and excerpts from other titles referenced within the text are also translated directly from the German edition. To see a list of English editions available, refer to page 366.

  Copyright © 2014 by Thilo Wydra

  Thilo Wydra: GRACE. Die Biographie © Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin 2012

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Laura Shaw

  Cover photo credit AP Images

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-541-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-967-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my parents—in memoriam

  Ursel Wydra & Siegfried Wydra

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword Reflections: The Two Lives of Grace Kelly

  — LIFE AND WORK

  1870 A German-Irish (Pre-)History

  — I. THE EARLY YEARS

  1929–1947 The Years at Home: Childhood and Youth in Philadelphia

  1947–1951 New York—Freedom: Theater, Television, and Fashion

  1951–1956 Hitchcock and Hollywood: The Eleven Films of Grace Kelly

  Fourteen Hours (1951)

  High Noon (1952)

  Mogambo (1953)

  —Alfred Hitchcock: “A lot of people think I’m a monster.”

  Dial M for Murder (1954)

  Rear Window (1954)

  The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954)

  The Country Girl (1954)

  —“The Award for Best Actress: Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl”

  Green Fire (1954)

  To Catch a Thief (1955)

  — The First Meeting: Friday, May 6, 4:00 p.m.

  — Famous, Blonde, American: Marilyn or Grace?

  The Swan (1956)

  High Society (1956)

  — II. THE LATER YEARS

  1956–1976 Monaco: A Prince, Three Children, and a Completely Different Life

  1962 The Case of Marnie—and a Crisis of State

  1976–1982 The Final Years: Future Plans

  1979 An Attempted Comeback: Rearranged (1982)

  1980 The Master Departs: Farewell to Hitch

  — Faith, Love, Hope: Catholicism, Astrology, Scorpio Parties

  1982 Annus horribilis

  Afterword Conversation with Prince Albert II of Monaco

  — APPENDIX

  Endnotes

  Chronology

  Filmography

  Bibliography

  Discography

  Index of Personal Names

  Acknowledgments

  Fairy tales tell imaginary stories.

  Me, I’m a living person. I exist.

  If the story of my life as a real woman were

  to be told one day, people would at last discover

  the real being that I am.

  —Grace Kelly1

  Only Grace Kelly could have created Grace Kelly.

  It must have been a concept in her head.

  —John Foreman2

  Her very name—Grace—could not have been

  more fitting.

  —Louis Jourdan3

  — FOREWORD

  Reflections:

  The Two Lives of Grace Kelly

  Grace Kelly’s apparent frigidity was like a mountain covered with snow, but that mountain was a volcano.

  —Alfred Hitchcock4

  The last thing that she may have ever seen was the view from her car of Monaco. Of her principality. Of the azure sea. Of its shimmering, bright light.

  Then all must have suddenly gone dark around her.

  It is the morning of September 13, 1982, shortly after 9:30 a.m. It is a Monday, a glorious late summer day on the French Riviera. The sun beams. A new week is beginning.

  As he follows behind the brown Rover 3500 on the small serpentine road that leads from La Turbie, high in the French highlands, down to Monaco, the truck driver Yves Raimondo notices at some point that he can no longer see the brake lights of the car in front of him.5 At this speed and incline, the red brake lights should have been burning for a while already. Suddenly the car begins to skid and skirts along the rock wall. Observing all of this, Raimondo honks repeatedly. For a moment, the car seems to right itself. It accelerates down the hill, and the next sharp, hairpin turn is already in sight. There is still no indication that the driver of the Rover 3500 is slowing down to brake. Then, Yves Raimondo witnesses how the Rover, at full speed, races out over the curve. The car plunges off the steep, 130-foot cliff and comes to rest in a clump of trees and bushes in a private garden. A pile of steel. A wreck. Grace Kelly is in this brown Rover.

  Alongside her sits her 17-year-old daughter, Princess Stéphanie, who survives the fall, crawls out of the left side of the car, and implores the passing motorists for help: Maman, her mother, lays in the car. Maman—the Princess of Monaco.

  First, cars stop above. People scurry around. One farmer calls for two rescue vehicles, which soon arrive at the scene. Grace Kelly lies across the interior of the car, her head toward the rear, her legs near the front. One of them seems twisted. Her eyes are glassy, she is nonresponsive and clearly unconscious. On her forehead is a gaping wound. The emergency personnel must pull her through the bushes, and she is immediately placed into one of the ambulances and transported to her namesake hospital, Hôpital Princesse Grace. Her daughter lies in the other ambulance. At the hospital, Grace Kelly is examined and undergoes a four-hour emergency surgery. She urgently needs a CT scan of her head. However, the only CT machine in the principality is not located in this hospital, high on a craggy hill, but is instead in the office of Dr. Mourou, at the Winter Palace on the central boulevard of Moulins 4, at the opposite end of the district. Thus, the gravely injured woman is transported there. However, when the stretcher does not fit horizontally into the narrow elevator, it is carried up the stairs to the third floor. Valuable time is lost. At this point, thirteen hours have lapsed since the accident.

  The night between September 13 and 14 is a night of uncertainty, a night of trepidation and hope for one husband, Prince Rainier III, and his two children, son Albert and daughter Caroline. The third and youngest child, Stéphanie, is completely unaware of this. She is in the hospital, suffering from a serious vertebrae injury and concussion, and Rainier wishes to spare her the shock. It is several days later when she first learns the full measure of the tragedy. Only after the burial, in the company of her family, will she be taken to the grave of her mother in St. Nicholas Cathedral.

  On the next day, neither the Monegasque people, nor the world at large, know exactly what has happened to the princess.

  Now the doctors finally share with Prince Rainier how things truly stand with his wife. They had operated on her the day before, opening her chest cavity as well as the abdominal wall. The bleedi
ng from her head wound is very heavy. Her brain damage is serious and permanent. She lies in a coma from which she will never awake. Since 6:00 a.m., she has been, for all intents and purposes, clinically dead. There is no hope.

  The family comes to bid farewell. After son Albert and daughter Caroline have said their good-byes, Rainier stays behind, alone with his wife. They had spent 26 years together. At noon, Rainier gives the doctors permission to turn off the life support machines, which have until now kept his wife’s body functioning. It is a difficult decision in a lonely hour.

  On September 14, 1982, at 10:35 p.m., the actress Grace Kelly, the Princess of Monaco, Gracia Patricia, dies. At the age of 52, she is much too young.

  Only at this point does the world learn of what has occurred.

  A legend is born.

  In the chapel of the Prince’s Palace, high on a rocky point, Gracia Patricia’s open coffin is visited by countless people who wish to have one last look at her. They have come to say farewell to their princess, the mother of their country. It is also a farewell to a legendary actress and beauty icon. Three days later, she is buried. On September 18, the coffin is ceremoniously carried several hundred yards to the Notre-Dame-Immaculée Cathedral, Saint Nicholas, and at regular intervals, a bell sounds a single tone. This solemn sound echoes through the streets, landing heavily upon the slow, advancing funeral procession.

  About 100 million people worldwide sit in front of their televisions. In terms of viewers, this media coverage is unparalleled.

  Among the 800 funeral guests are dignitaries from around the world, old friends, and relatives from Philadelphia. Princess Gracia Patricia of Monaco is finally laid to rest in the choir of the cathedral. It is the same cathedral in which Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III had married 26 years ago on April 19, 1956.

  The Monegasque people are in a state of shock, and the small principality sinks into mourning. The world reacts in empathy, a phenomenal wave of mourning, comparable only to that which followed the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 or the tragic car accident in Paris that killed Lady Diana in August 1997. And just as Kennedy and Diana were icons of the modern age, so were James Dean and Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Romy Schneider, and later: Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and Whitney Houston. For them, death came all too soon. Their legendary status, their iconization, is solely due to the fact that they never grew old, that they were in the prime of life when it abruptly ended. A singularity distinguishes all of them, separating them from others of their generation; their lives are exceptions. Such is the case with Grace Kelly.

  For the millions of sympathetic people, Grace Kelly was, like few others, “a perfect canvas for everyone to paint a dream on,” as noted by her old friend Don Richardson.6

  The world press outlets tried to outdo each other in their coverage of her death, reporting facts both actual and unsubstantiated. How could the princess lose her life in a simple car accident? This seemingly banal, dark end did not adequately fit her ostensibly bright, glamorous life—not to mention the irony that she had been killed on that same serpentine route she had once taken, at the age of 24, with Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955). Even then she had driven that road at an excessive speed.

  Before the actual cause of death emerged, there was much speculation over the details of the crash. One rumor claimed that 17-year-old Stéphanie had sat at the wheel. Other rumors presumed that Grace and her rebellious daughter had been arguing heatedly with one another, a typical occurrence at the time, during the drive. Even following the royal family’s release of the official cause of death—a stroke (a nonlife-threatening stroke that under other circumstances would have only caused dizziness but, in this case, had caused her to lose control of the car)—speculation swirled to suggest suicide, an intentional swerve around the hair-pin curve. Additional rumors attributed her death to political intrigue—an assassination attempt, perhaps. Others whispered that, from the very beginning, the doctors had not treated her properly, and that with the right medical care she could have survived. Regardless of all these sensational theories, the only person who can actually speak to their truth or falsehood is Princess Stéphanie herself.

  A myth was born with the death of Grace Kelly, the myth of a woman who held various roles and who lived various lives. Her life, which can be divided into two halves, each exactly 26 years long, was dominated by an involuntary discrepancy between appearance and reality—a dualism that caused her great suffering.

  Despite being surrounded by the facade of beauty, she strove for an authentic reality. Within herself, she carried a core that ultimately did not correspond with the artificiality and pretension of Hollywood.

  Above all, Grace Kelly was a woman whose complex personality was colored by a pronounced ambivalence. The characteristics that Grace Kelly embodied—an unwavering pose and a flawless, almost cold facade on one hand, and a tender emotionality and warmth on the other—function, even today, as a surface against which millions of people create identities. It is not inconsequential that contemporary luxury brands continue to use her image to advertise their watches, jewelry, and high-end fountain pens.

  The so-called Kelly Bag is among the most famous of these accessories. Its name originated on a day in 1956, when Grace used “le petit sac haut á courrouies” (the little bag with straps)—a leather handbag by Hermés, one of her favorite designers—to conceal her first pregnancy from the paparazzi. The photograph that captured this moment was widely publicized in Life magazine, and with the permission of the royal family, the Kelly Bag from Hermés has borne her name ever since. The Kelly Bag combines elements of simplicity and nobility, just like its namesake.

  Grace Kelly—the fragile girl from Philadelphia who worshiped her all-powerful father, the ethereal actress from Hollywood, the classic fashion and style icon from New York and Paris, the benevolent Princess of Monaco—spent her entire life preserving her legendary poise, both inside and out. She did this to keep from losing herself, and to keep from burdening others. Perhaps also, to sometimes be someone else.

  After her death, her image became timeless—a stylish woman who functioned as a role model for others. A woman who was shaped by inner and outer class. Despite her inner fractures.

  She had that inner strength, that ability to stand on her own and to stand by her convictions, but yet she was incredibly sensitive to the world around her, to other people, to other people’s unhappiness or stress. She tried to help other people in a very genuine way. But also to other friends of hers, if they had problems in their lives. She had that great sensibility, this loving nature.

  —Prince Albert II of Monaco on his mother 7

  — LIFE AND WORK

  1870

  A German-Irish (Pre-)History

  We were German girls.

  —Peggy, Grace Kelly’s older sister8

  The ancestral history of the woman, who became one of the most admired actresses of the 1950s and 1960s and who was ultimately named the Princess of Monaco, reaches far back into the past. It is not only the story of the seemingly fragile, blonde girl from Philadelphia who came to marry the Prince of Monaco. Neither is it merely a realization of the American Dream. In its origins, it is also a German-Irish story.

  In the second half of the seventeenth century, the surname Berg was first chronicled in the Oden Forest of southern Hesse. The first Berg seems to have been Johann Berg, who was born in the 1650s and who died in 1731. Descending from him, numerous Bergs lived in this area through to the turn of the twentieth century. Among these were two women named Margaretha, one born in 1688 and the other born in 1742, and two men named Johann Georg, who, from time to time, were called Johann Georg I and Johann Georg II. This family line can be traced from the 1650s to the late 1800s, the time in which the roots of this particular story begin.9

  The Bergs lived in the small villages in the vicinity of the Oden Forest—in Heppenheim, Sonderbach, Wald-Erlenbach, and Erbach. One half of Grace Kelly’s Ge
rman ancestry is directly tied to the Hessian village Heppenheim, located on the Bergstrasse.

  At the time that Grace Kelly’s German grandmother, Margaretha Berg, lived there, Heppenheim was a small, perhaps somewhat dreary locale. The village was primarily shaped by agriculture and manufacturing. Additional industries included a stone quarry, a clay manufacturer, and several cigar factories supplied by the local tobacco farmers. However, above all, Heppenheim’s most valuable asset was its mountainside location. Though a lovely site, it was never possible for the town to become wealthy from farming. Residents mainly pursued careers in old industries that had been established in the 1800s, as opposed to the newer, more modern ones which were coming of age in the 1900s. In and around Heppenheim, no smoking chimneys could be seen; however, the town did try to attract the attention of those with wealth.

  Even though Heppenheim has 25,000 residents today, and is the last town and county seat on the border of the states of Hesse and Baden-Wuerttemberg, back in the early 1900s, the town was little more than a kind of southern Hessian annex to the grand duchy. Shaped by Catholicism, this area primarily belonged to the greater Mainz region. With the influx of Protestants of higher social standing, the natives felt “occupied,” a sentiment that remained in place for a relatively long time.10

  For this reason, a tension existed between the established local residents and the newcomers of higher status, who largely settled in the villa neighborhoods on Maiberg Hill. These people were neighbors, but they did not mingle with each other. Most of the native townspeople were Catholic, and were predominantly employed in the long-established local professions and industries. Meanwhile, the Protestants (many of whom came from the Protestant city of Darmstadt, which was then ten times bigger than Heppenheim) were engaged in the administrative offices for the local schools and other institutions. A stratified social system emerged from this reality, and the members of the upper classes gathered regularly in the most prominent building on the market square, named “Zum Halben Mond” (“At the Half Moon”). Those residents who had carried out their small livelihoods in this town for many generations were not welcome there.11