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The Prince exits
This past week has been, among other things, a week of loss. First the Pope. Then Saul Bellow, the Nobel-prize-winning American novelist (Just this December, for the Arkansas Philological Association convention in Fayetteville, I wrote a scholarly paper on his novel The Adventures of Augie March). And, finally, Prince Rainier of Monaco. He's the one who brings back memories.
| I was slouched in my assigned seat in Bingham auditorium, waiting for evening vespers to start, when my friend Doug Mulcahy plopped down in his assigned seat beside me and delivered a crushing blow: |
| "Hey, didja hear? Grace Kelly's going to marry the Prince of Monaco. I knew you'd be happy to hear." |
Some people remember vividly where they were when they heard the news that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, when John Kennedy was killed, when the Trade Towers collapsed. I remember where I was when I heard that Grace Kelly was getting married.
Movie stars get married every day.
Some seem to get married twice or more every day.
Not Grace Kelly.
| If I were asked, I could say my first girlfriend was Janey Clark, who lived next door when I was five. (I have a photo my father took of me pushing Janey on a swing in the playground at school.) Or Marilyn Bressler, when I was in second grade. Or, most of all, Sherrie Tatham, from third grade until the two of us went off to different junior high schools in seventh grade. But all these seemed to fade into the distant background when I first saw Grace Kelly on the screen in The Bridges of Toko-Ri. Why does a ditsy over-sexed fifteen-year old boy (all fifteen-year-old boys are "oversexed"; it's all they think about) suddenly become entranced by an image he sees up there on a movie screen? "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" Oh, nonsense. There's no accounting for it. It just happens? | The year, I think, was 1956, and the blond Grace Kelly was suddenly a hot number, not a blond bombshell, exactly, but rather a sexy ice-queen. Suddenly, she was starring in To Catch a Thief, Dial M for Murder, The Country Girl (for which she won an Oscar), and The Swan (shot in the tiny principality of Monaco, where she met the Prince). News of her began appearing massively in all the movie magazines, even on the cover of LIFE. | |
| As my passion for this perfect girl grew, so did my fanciful reading of her being. I read somewhere that she was a Catholic, and I knew that Catholics were not supposed to have sex until they were safely married, so I could gather that Grace was still a virgin (waiting for me to arrive, no doubt). I'd read that her father was immensely rich, and that was a comfort to me, since I had no idea when my first novel would be published. I even knew that her brother Kel had taught Grace how to swim when she was eight. | I was so taken with her that I began tacking pictures of her onto my bedroom wall. My father must have grown concerned. "Some day I expect to come home one evening," he said one night, while reading his newspaper, "and find Grace Kelly seated at the dining room table, waiting for dinner." | Girls I'd meet at dances or at my parents' friends' houses were suddenly so plain, I must have seemed to them quite snobbish and insufferable. In retrospect, I was no longer living in the real world. |
I don't quite recall when my dream world collapsed and I turned my attention, instead, to the world of imperfect real girls. I met Ginny, we married, and soon had our own dream girl Jessica.
I lost sight of Grace Kelly until I heard she'd been a passenger in a sport car driven by one of her daughters. She'd driven off one of the dangerously winding roads in Monaco and she was dead.
Years later, between grading sets of freshman essays here at Cottey, I read a biography of Grace Kelly.
It turned out she was at an early age something of a tramp, engaging in what Bill Clinton would later swear was "not sexual intercourse." When she became a certifiable movie star, and before she married Prince Rainier, she had sexual intercourse (yep, the real kind) with Clark Gable (on the set of Mogambo), Ray Miland (on the set of Dial M for Murder), Jimmy Stewart (on the set of Rear Window), William Holden (on the set of Bridges of Toko-Ri), and the list goes on. Suddenly, my image of the virginal ice queen shattered..
It turned out that she was cruel and discourteous to her husband, too. In front of visitors, she would make faces at him and speak condescendingly, as if to a demented child.
| Didn't she love him? Why had she married him? Just to be the princess in a real-life fairy tale? And why had he married her? To have an heir to the throne of Monaco? If that was the reason, why couldn't he have gone up to one of the gaming tables he owned in the nearby casino, and asked one of the rich and tipsy American girls there? Why couldn't he have left the loveliest girl in the world to . . . me? |
It turns out that the Prince of Monaco, who died last week, had taken over a war-torn and poverty-stricken principality in 1949.
He'd built it up, and presumably Grace Kelly would, in his own mind, be part of the overall tourist attraction. He'd had to pay a price, however, married to a scold and tramp, and along the way fathering a trio of n'er-do-well children. It turns out that life in the royal family ain't what it's cracked up to be.