Grace by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey [Lacey, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Apostrophe Books Ltd
Published: 2014-06-09T23:00:00+00:00

Grace Kelly threw herself earnestly into every new part that she played. It was a sort of therapy for her. Each new character offered her wise words to say and a fresh spirit to inhabit. They were practical tryouts for a young woman who had encountered some difficulty in foreseeing the real-life implications of her dreams, and when she struck a dramatic note she liked, she would weave a strand of that character into her own personality.

It was a complex and interactive two-way process—the parts that appealed to her existing impulses, and the parts which helped her to locate something new in her still-developing self. But the film character that Grace was rehearsing in the late summer of 1955 as she took stock of her life and wrote letters to Prince Rainier was quite uncanny in the mirror that it held to real life. Grace was cast as Alexandra—the heroine of Ferenc Molnar’s drama The Swan—a spirited young blonde of good family who finds herself wooed by a prince, and who is compelled to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the royal life and to decide whether she really wants to marry him.

This anything-but-everyday dilemma struck a special chord in Grace.

“The Swan was one role,” remembers Jay Kanter, “that she was desperately anxious to do. In fact, I think it was she who suggested it.”

Grace had played the part of Alexandra in her days as a television actress.

The Swan had twice been a hit on Broadway in the 1920s, and now it provided a solution to Grace’s long-running impasse with MGM. The studio liked the idea as well. MGM’s story department and its difficult star had finally found a project upon which they could agree. Falling over himself to patch up past differences, Dore Schary said that he would take a break from his duties as studio production chief so that he could oversee the movie personally. Grace was given single top billing, the only time in her career she enjoyed that rare and exclusive eminence, and her supporting players were appropriately prestigious. Louis Jourdan was cast as Dr. Agi, the handsome but penniless tutor whose role in the plot was to offer the young Alexandra romance without wealth or status. Alec Guinness played her other suitor, the wife-seeking Prince Albert, whom Guinness embellished with all the wry touches that Grace had admired on foreign-film night back in her American Academy days.

MGM decided against building themselves a backlot palace. The American fantasy of a stately home already existed in Biltmore House, the replica of a Loire chateau constructed by George Vanderbilt near Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1890s. Much be-turreted on the outside, Biltmore House was positively monumental in its interior layout and furnishings. It laid claim to being the largest mansion in the United States, and Howell Conant went down to Asheville to shoot Grace on location there. He photographed her sitting, fresh, white, and waiflike, dwarfed by the statuary of the grand staircase. He followed her through her

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