On Wednesday, September 14, 2005 at 2:59:53 PM UTC-7, Bill Schenley wrote:
> Princess Grace Is Dead After Riviera Car Crash
> Photo: http://www.divasthesite.com/images/Grace_Kelly_intro.jpg
> FROM: The New York Times (September 15th 1982) ~
> By Clyde Haberman
> Princess Grace of Monaco, whose stately beauty and reserve gave her
> enduring Hollywood stardom even long after she ended her film career,
> died yesterday in Monte Carlo of injuries suffered when her car
> plunged off a mountain road Monday. She was 52 years old.
> The Princess, the former Grace Kelly, died of a cerebral hemorrhage, a
> palace spokesman said in Monaco. Princess Grace wa driving her British
> Rover 3500 on a snaking road at Cap-d'Ail in the Cote d'Azur region
> when she lost control and plunged down a 45-foot embankment. The car
> burst into flames, and the Princess suffered multiple fractures,
> including a broken thighbone, collarbone and ribs.
> Initial reports gave no sense that her life was in jeopardy. But a
> Monaco Government announcement yesterday said that her health had
> ''deteriorated during the night.''
> ''At the end of the day all therapeutic possibilities had been
> exceeded,'' the announcement said. With her in the car was Stephanie,
> 17, her youngest child by Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Stephanie was
> under observation at a hospital where she had been treated for shock
> and bruises.
> Reagan Praises 'Gentle Lady'
> Princess Grace's death brought expressions of grief from former
> Hollywood colleagues and from residents of her hometown, Philadelphia.
> President Reagan called her ''a compassionate and gentle lady.'' In
> Philadelphia, a spokesman for John Cardinal Krol said the Cardinal,
> who was a close friend, would offer a memorial mass for her at noon
> Friday.
> Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Grace Kelly in three films and was
> certainly in a position to judge, once said she had ''sexual
> elegance.'' And it was that very elegance that probably made its most
> lasting impression on movie audiences of the 1950's.
> Whether playing the heiress in ''To Catch a Thief'' or the Quaker
> pacifist in ''High Noon'' or the amusedly detached career girl - a
> term still in vogue when ''Rear Window'' was made - Grace Kelly
> carried herself with straight back and clipped-voice self-assurance.
> Yet just beneath the frosty exterior lay a sensuality and warmth that
> cracked the formidable reserve.
> It was this delicate balance of contrasts that helped give her
> legendary status - a remarkable achievement for an actress whose
> career encompassed only 11 films. She made more of that small
> portfolio than actors who lasted in Hollywood many more decades. Twice
> she was nominated for an Academy Award, and once she won it, for her
> 1954 performance in ''The Country Girl.'' There was a certain irony in
> the fact that the Oscar came, not for her portrayal of yet another
> detached beauty but of a frumpy harridan, desperate in her unhappy
> marriage.
> By then the range of her talent was obvious, and Miss Kelly was
> constantly in demand for a variety of screen roles. But just as
> swiftly as her film career blossomed, it came to an abrupt end in 1956
> when she married Prince Rainier of Monaco, the tiny principality on
> the French Riviera.
> The year before she was in Cannes filming ''To Catch a Thief'' with
> Cary Grant and it was at the film festival there that she met the
> Prince, a member of the Grimaldis, Europe's oldest royal family. At
> first, their friendship seemed little more than a good story for the
> gossip columns - Hollywood star meets royalty and both drive off into
> a gold and purple Mediterranean sunset.
> But before long it became clear that there was more than that to this
> relationship. He went to Philadelphia to spend a Christmas holiday
> with her family. She went to Monte Carlo to visit him in his 200-room
> pink palazzo.
> Couple Marry in Cathedral
> On April 18, 1956, shortly after she completed the movie ''High
> Society,'' they were married in the Cathedral of St. Nicholas in
> Monaco. It was a media event of such staggering proportion that Miss
> Kelly, now Princess Grace, later suggested that she and the Prince
> should have been awarded battle ribbons for all the fighting that was
> required for them to push through the crowds.
> pick up first add
> With marriage, she abandoned acting. The effect, as time passed, was
> to burnish her film career in public memory. Early on in her marriage
> she received many offers of movie roles but she kept turning them
> down. Some of her former colleagues in Hollywood could not understand
> why, but Gary Cooper, her co-star in ''High Noon,'' shrugged off the
> idea of a Kelly comeback.
> ''Why should she?'' he said. ''She's moved from an artificial stage to
> a real one.''
> Her Duties Predominate
> Periodically, there would be reports that she was indeed about to
> resume her career but nothing ever came of them. ''Here I have my
> obligations and duties as a princess and mother,'' she said. ''One
> cannot do everything.''
> Her life as Princess of Monaco was obviously enhanced by privilege but
> also circumscribed by duty. She became a supporter of charities and
> cultural events. Much of her time was devoted to her three children,
> the oldest of whom, Princess Caroline, was born in 1957. In recent
> years, Princess Caroline outranked her mother as a source of
> fascination for curiosity-seekers, mostly as a result of her marriage
> to and then divorce from Phillipe Junot, a French businessman whom
> some people liked to describe as ''the playboy next door.''
> In recent years Princess Grace made occasional forays into show
> business, never for very long and usually to read prose or poetry for
> one benefit or another. She did make one movie, sort of, five years
> ago - a delicate documentary about the Kirov Ballet school in
> Leningrad called ''The Children of Theater Street.'' The Princess
> narrated the film and appeared on screen briefly. But when,
> inevitably, the question arose whether she would plunge fully into
> work once again, she smiled at her interviewer and said, ''Oh, no, not
> again.''
> ''I'm getting older, too, dear,'' she added. ''The only one who isn't
> is Cary Grant.''
> Safely Short of Iciness
> A lot of people would have said the same thing about her. Always, she
> had a beauty that came perilously close to iciness but managed to stop
> safely short. Scratch that coating of ice - and most of her directors
> did - and exposed just beneath the surface was, variously, warmth,
> intelligence and sexuality. She could even be whimsical, in a detached
> fashion, a quality that she showed to advantage in ''Rear Window,'' in
> which she was the girlfriend of James Stewart, a photographer with a
> broken leg who witnesses a murder across the courtyard from his
> apartment.
> Perhaps no one caught the inherent sensuality more than Hitchcock, who
> said in later interviews that this was no mean trick, given Miss
> Kelly's reserve. A good example of the passion was a love scene with
> Cary Grant in ''To Catch a Thief.'' These days, a younger generation
> might regard the scene as coy, but the sight of Grant and Kelly
> embracing while fireworks exploded at a Cannes carnival in the
> background was enough to send the blood of more than a few moviegoers
> racing.
> For herself, Miss Kelly was never comfortable with her popular image
> as an ice queen. ''I'm not an extrovert - but I'm not unfriendly
> either,'' she told an interviewer early in 1955. ''I'm not the
> exuberant type, but I don't like to read that I'm cold and distant. I
> don't think I am.''
> The patrician manner, suggesting English roots, did not accurately
> reflect her Philadelphia background.
> Father Acquires Riches
> Princess Grace was born Nov. 12, 1929, into a family that in later
> years would be compared frequently to the Kennedys - rich, attractive
> and Irish-Catholic. The difference, however, was that the Kennedys
> were from Boston, a kind of Irish-Catholic citadel; the Kellys were
> from Philadelphia, a city in which few Irish had become prominent.
> John Brendan Kelly, Princess Grace's father, was one of the first.
> Mr. Kelly, the son of an immigrant, worked as a bricklayer. He was
> also a local sculls champion. His 1920 entry into the English Diamond
> Sculls at the Henley Regatta was refused, however, because he ''worked
> with his hands'' -a manual laborer. Supposedly, he immediately sent
> his sweaty rowing cap to the King of England as a souvenir.
> The incident made Mr. Kelly a Philadelphia celebrity. He left
> bricklaying and became a contractor, made money, and raised his family
> in the comfortable suburb of Germantown. His wife, Margaret, was a
> celebrated beauty, who, before her marriage, worked as a
> photographer's model.
> Princess Grace was the third of their four children. There was an
> older sister, Margaret, and an older brother, John B. Kelly Jr., who,
> in 1947 and 1949, would win the Henley sculls championship that had
> been denied his father. The victories, of course, added immeasurably
> to the family mystique.
> In later years, most stories about Princess Grace described her as a
> shy, withdrawn child, despite her family's luster. Besides her
> successful father, there were her successful uncles: George Kelly, a
> Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Walter C. Kelly, a famous
> vaudevillian.
> 'Inner Tranquility' Noted
> ''She was a shy child, but there was a kind of inner tranquility and
> quiet resourcefulness,'' Mrs. Kelly said about her daughter years
> later. ''She never minded being kept in bed and would sit there with
> her dolls for hours on end making up little plays. Grace would change
> her voice for each doll, giving it a different character.''
> Meanwhile, the Kellys continued to prosper. Mr. Kelly, who lost an
> election for Mayor of Philadelphia in 1935, reportedly had entered the
> contracting business with a loan of $7,000; by the mid-1950's, when
> his daughter was already famous as an actress, his wealth was
> estimated at $18 million.
> As a child, Grace attended the Ravenhill Academy, a convent school,
> and then the Stevens School, where she was graduated in 1947. She
> applied to Bennington College in Vermont because of its drama
> department, but was denied admission, apparently because she lacked
> sufficient academic credits. As an alternative, she applied to, and
> was accepted by, the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. She
> left Germantown forever, and moved into the Barbizon Hotel for Women.
> Last April she returned to Philadelphia to be honored in ceremonies
> that were part of the city's celebration of its 300th anniversary.
> That the city still regarded her as one of its own was apparent in
> remarks made by Mayor William Green upon the news of her death. ''She
> was, and is, Philadelphia's once-and-always first lady,'' Mr. Green
> said.
> After leaving Germantown Miss Kelly studied acting, and, as had her
> mother before her, she became a photographer's model. In July 1949 she
> made her professional debut at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope,
> Pa., in a revival of George Kelly's comedy ''The Torch Bearers.'' On
> Nov. 16, 1949, she made her Broadway debut as the Captain's daughter
> in Strindberg's ''The Father'' at the Cort Theater.
> By then, Miss Kelly was developing the coolness and beauty that would
> make her famous. ''We noticed that her voice was beginning to
> change,'' her mother said. ''Instead of her old nasal whine, she was
> speaking in a lower, gentler register. Her sisters would make fun of
> her, but she would say, 'I must talk this way - for my work.' They saw
> that she was serious and stopped joking.''
> Frequent Television Appearances
> Meanwhile, Miss Kelly began appearing frequently on television,
> usually in dramatic series: ''The Philco Television Television
> Playhouse,'' ''Studio One,'' ''The Hallmark Hall of Fame,'' ''The
> Somerset Maugham Theater,'' ''The Lux Video Theater,'' ''Robert
> Montgomery Presents'' and ''The Armstrong Circle Theater.''
> Miss Kelly made her movie debut in 1951, with a small part in a film
> called ''Fourteen Hours.'' That summer she also joined the Elitch
> Gardens Theater in Denver, appearing in a number of plays. She was
> also cast in what was to be her first major success: the movie ''High
> Noon.''
> ''High Noon'' marked Miss Kelly's emergence as a star. The Western,
> which was directed by Fred Zinnemann, was a vehicle for Gary Cooper,
> although in the small but important role of Mr. Cooper's Quaker wife
> Miss Kelly was praised. But she confessed to doubts. ''I suddenly
> thought, 'Perhaps I'm not going to be a great star,' '' she told an
> interviewer, ''Perhaps I'm not any good after all.'' So she went back
> to New York to brush up on her skills at Sanford Meisner's
> Neighborhood Playhouse. Briefly, she returned to Broadway, in ''To Be
> Continued.'' But on its demise, M-G-M signed her to a seven-year
> contract and, at first, $750 a week.
> Her first M-G-M assignment was ''Mogambo.'' It was directed by John
> Ford, and it turned her from budding to full-fledged star. In this
> 1953 movie, filmed in Africa, Miss Kelly developed what would become
> her quintessential movie persona. She was a patrician beauty who fell
> in love with a white hunter, in this case Clark Gable. The part
> brought Miss Kelly an Academy Award nomination as best actress.
> Inevitably, there was talk that she was romantically involved with Mr.
> Gable - the sort of speculation that would arise later in regard to
> other co-stars, including Ray Milland, who appeared with her in her
> next film, ''Dial M for Murder.'' Consistently, Miss Kelly declined to
> discuss the rumors.
> Her biggest screen triumph was in the film that brought her the Oscar,
> ''The Country Girl,'' in which she played opposite William Holden and
> Bing Crosby. Initially, it was not to be her role. Jennifer Jones was
> up for the part, but she became pregnant, eliminating her from
> consideration.
> Significance Played Down
> Characteristically, after the movie was a success and she walked off
> with the Academy Award, Miss Kelly played down the significance.
> ''Next year, it will be somebody else,'' she said, but added, ''I'm
> delighted it's me right now.''
> In interviews, Miss Kelly displayed much of the reserve she brought to
> her roles and it was often difficult for interviewers to extract
> self-analysis. That difficulty bordered on impossibility at times
> after she married Prince Rainier. Until recent years, she preferred a
> relatively cloistered life. Not that she did not make her share of
> public appearances; it was just that when she did emerge she chose to
> say little.
> For several years after her wedding, Hollywood held little appeal. But
> in 1962 there was a brief announcement from the palace in Monaco that
> she would return to motion pictures to star in the Hitchcock film
> ''Marnie.'' Friends were quoted as having said that she had agreed to
> the comeback out of friendship for the director and that she had no
> intention of allowing this to become a habit.
> In fact, she wound up not doing ''Marnie'' at all. She changed her
> mind, she said, explaining that she had received unfavorable reaction
> from the people of Monaco. More important, she added, was that she did
> not want to be separated for any great length of time from her
> children - Princesses Caroline and Stephanie and Crown Prince Albert.
> (Her part in the movie went to Tippi Hedren, yet another of the many
> regal blondes whom Hitchcock favored.)
> Life in a picture-book castle on a cliff above the Mediterranean was
> no doubt rewarding for the former Miss Kelly, but she felt it also
> forced her to be diligent.
> One obvious difficulty was a tendency among some people to make jokes
> about Monaco, assuming they thought about it at all. This was, after
> all, a principality with many times more croupiers than soldiers.
> Duties Taken Seriously
> And so, as a serious person, the Princess took her royal duties
> seriously, presiding at countless benefits and galas and
> presentations. She once described a typical day as beginning at 7:15
> A.M., with her then spending several hours at her desk and then
> receiving visitors to the palace, with much of the remaining time
> taken up with appearances at various projects and charities.
> There was discomfort for the royal family when Princess Caroline
> became romantically involved with Phillipe Junot and then married him
> in 1978. It was difficult to pass a newsstand without seeing the young
> Princess or her beau, or both, peering from the cover of at least one
> gossip magazine. The barrage of publicity was an embarrassment to
> Prince Rainier and his wife, especially when it grew fierce upon the
> breakup of the young couple.
> When she herself had wed, ''I told the Prince that we're not impressed
> by royalty,'' Princess Grace said, referring to her and her father.
> ''We're impressed by the man. Marriage is not a game of musical chairs
> with us. We play for keeps.''
> Still, she was not believed to be distraught when Caroline's marriage
> ended two years ago. In the the last few years, Princess Grace
> rekindled curiosity about whether she might be leaning toward a
> comeback. There was the ''Theater Street'' documentary and scattered
> appearances, such as one last March, when she read prose and poetry
> from the stage of the Chichester Festival Theater in England.
> Once again, the Princess dismissed such talk. ''It's most unlikely
> I'll ever go back to films,'' she said. ''I haven't made one for 20
> years.''
> ---
> Photo:
> http://www.dragonden.net/assets/images/gallery/GraceKelly_Colored.jpg
> ---
> FROM: Newsweek (September 27th 1982) ~
> By Jack Kroll and Scott Sullivan (in Monaco)
> First, there is the unspeakable sadness: the image of beautiful Grace
> Kelly, dead at 52 in the embrace of twisted steel. The ironies come
> crowding in: wasn't it the same twisting mountain road on which she
> sped in "To Catch a Thief," scaring Cary Grant and titillating us? The
> sunny, excruciating funeral: behind the white-draped coffin, anguish
> totally remade the face of Princess Caroline. lt didn't belong to the
> paparazzi now; it was the most personal face of her young life, fresh
> with pain. The face of her father, Prince Rainier, was a crushed blur
> between his silver hair and his medals. Prince Albert's face turned
> grief into a shattered sweetness.
> Along with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Her Serene Highness Princess
> Grace of Monaco maintained a feverish public interest longer than any
> celebrity of our time. Her death is perhaps the moment for an
> examination of that damnable, irresistible idea of the celebrity.
> Grace Kelly was a movie actress for only a bit longer than five years.
> It was a meteoric five years -- 11 films, 2 Academy Award nominations,
> 1 Oscar. But if she had retired at 26 after her last film in 1956,
> perhaps marrying some nice financier, lawyer or even another star, the
> world would not 26 years later be ringing with thunderclap reactions
> to her death. It was not a career that made her such an undimming
> public icon, it was not even a life. lt was a transfiguration, or a
> seeming one; the world, especially Americans, saw her as a creature
> whom destiny had transformed into something rich and strange.
> 'Icky':
> The phrase that followed her for 26 years, since she left her
> career at its peak to marry Prince Rainier III, ruler of a vestpocket
> principality, was "fairy tale." The idea that the movie star's life
> became a fairy tale -- -that idea is the real fairy tale. Princess
> Grace couldn't stand the phrase and the thought, and said so time and
> again in no uncertain terms. "That sounds rather icky and revolting,"
> she said earlier this year. "I certainly don't think ofmy life as a
> fairy tale. I think of myselfas a modern, contemporary woman who has
> had to deal with all kinds of problems that many women today have to
> deal with." When the question of a movie comeback was raised many
> years ago, Gary Cooper, her costar in "High Noon," said, "Why should
> she? She's moved from an artificial stage to a real one."
> Her life in Monaco was in its way a parody of a fairy tale. Did
> Cinderella marry the prince, take charge of the Red Cross, the Girl
> Guides, preside over local flower-arranging shows and charity affairs?
> That was Princess Grace's life. Fairy tales are magic machines that
> dissolve
> reality into a dream of transcendent happiness. They are a child's
> Scriptures. The real magic was in the images that Grace Kelly evoked
> in her short but unique film career. Those images remain.
> Her basic image was the Snow Maiden concealing a potential avalanche.
> She was the antithesis of Marilyn Monroe in the ambiguous '50s. As one
> writer phrased it:
> "Once upon a time the kingdom of Hollywood was ruled by two queens --
> Grace the Good and Marilyn the Bad." With her cool, classic,
> gold-and-ivory beauty, Grace Kelly was the portrait of a lady. In
> "High Noon" she played the embattled sheriff's Quaker wife whose prim
> bonnet belied a willpower that allowed her to pull the trigger on the
> bad guys. In "Mogambo" she matched her demure adulteress against Ava
> Gardner's raunchy bimbo for the pelt of Clark Gable. In "The Bridges
> at Toko-Ri" she was the kind ofmilitary wife whom William Holden
> wanted to come home to. In "The Country Girl" she won an Oscar for her
> portrayal of the ravaged wife ofan alcoholic actor played by Bing
> Crosby. But despite her Oscar, neither this performance nor the others
> were stunning acting. It took a master film artist, Alfred Hitchcock,
> to tap the electricity in Grace Kelly's perfect cells.
> Inferno:
> In three films Hitchcock created the Kelly woman -- a
> creature whose impeccable exterior concealed a banked inferno of
> erotic and emotional drives. In "Dial M for Murder," as the wife whose
> silky husband (Ray Milland) plots to have her murdered, Kelly's
> passive vulnerability takes on a disturbing, erotic charge --
> innocence as spiritual masochism. "Rear Window" is more complex as
> Kelly plays a kind of superCosmopolitan girl out to get James Stewart
> into a marriage that he wants and fears. Kelly's ravishing movements
> -- turning on the lights, sitting on Stewart's lap -- become a ballet
> of tender entrapment. Best of all is "To Catch a Thief," in which
> Kelly is the rich girl fascinated by Cary Grant as both man and jewel
> thief. Maddeningly beautiful, simmering behind dark glasses and
> genteel silences, the quintessential Kelly emerges in her superbly
> witty seduction of Grant. Turning to say good night to him at her
> hotel room, her expression of subtly mocking desire freezes him in a
> connoisseur's amazement as she slides her white arms like Pavlova
> around his neck and gives him the kind of kiss that started the Trojan
> War.
> "I didn't discover Grace," said Hitchcock, "but I saved her from a
> fate worse than death. I prevented her from being eternally cast as a
> cold woman." He did more -- he found what he called the "mysterioso"
> element in Kelly that made her a figure in the '50s pantheon along
> with Monroe, Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. It was this
> same element that made her short but explosive movie career a way
> station on the road to Monaco. The characters she played in "Dial M
> for Murder," "Rear Window" and "To Catch a Thief" all seemed to
> express a quality deeply rooted in Grace Kelly -- a determined drive
> for gentility stemming from her family background.
> No public figure in our time has suffered more from hagiographic
> distortion than Princess Grace. The people who sell the fairy-tale
> image also bleach out her family origins to plastic pap, painting the
> Kellys of Philadelphia as the ultimate in wholesome, God-fearing,
> family-oriented, bootstrap-yanking American values. The Kellys are
> much more complicated than that, an Irish-American tribe right out of
> a John O'Hara novel. Grace's father, John B. Kelly, the son of an
> Irish immigrant, was a great athlete, an Olympic rower who was refused
> permission by the British to race in their Diamond Sculls championship
> because he had worked with his hands and was therefore not a gentleman
> sportsman. Kelly had been a hod carrier and bricklayer before becoming
> a millionaire contractor. Nearly 30 years later his son, Jack Kelly,
> Grace's brother, won the Diamond Sculls in the process of becoming as
> great an athlete as his father.
> Grace's mother, the former Margaret Majer, of German descent, was also
> a mighty athlete (the first woman to coach a woman's team at the
> University of Pennsylvania) and bequeathed her blond beauty to her
> three daughters. The stupendous upward mobility of this family did not
> suffice to get them into the Philadelphia Social Register, but father
> John was a power in the Democratic Party and was almost elected mayor
> of Philadelphia. In 1975 Jack Kelly wanted to run against incumbent
> Frank Rizzo but his mother prevented him, apparently because she was
> afraid that his playboy activities would have led to a mudslinging
> campaign. Grace's Uncle George was one of America's leading
> playwrights (Pulitzer Prize-winning "Craig's Wife"). Uncle Walter was
> a famous vaudevillian.
> The Kellys were a churning caldron of American energies. In this
> atmosphere Grace was the introvert, somewhat withdrawn, nearsighted
> and even sickly. Her first acting was done with her dolls, to whom she
> gave different voices in little plays she made up. After a
> private-school education in places such as Ravenhill, a strict
> convent, she came to New York to study at the American Academy of
> Dramatic Arts. She worked as a model, did TV commercials and appeared
> in television shows like the "TV Playhouse" and other programs in the
> golden age of TV drama.
> Gloves:
> Producer John Foreman, then an agent, remembers a lunch at the
> Plaza Hotel in New York with the aspiring Grace Kelly, who showed up
> in gloves and a hat with a little veil. Foreman thought, "This is a
> strange, dead-assed girl." But by the end of the lunch he realized
> that Grace had her act together. It was, Foreman told Grace's
> biographer Gwen Robyns, "the act she put together for survival. . . .
> Only Grace could have created Grace Kelly. . . . No one else did. No
> manager, no agent, no producer, not even her family. . . . Grace's
> act, which has stood her in good stead all these years, is one ofthe
> most efficient 1 have ever seen. . .. For quite a few of us, and for
> many years, she gave us a perfect place that one can relate to, and
> this is why we admire her so."
> When she took her act, her self-creation, to Hollywood, the impact was
> decisive. Van Johnson said, "Hollywood went for Kelly in rebellion
> against a broadside of broads." Her friend, actress Rita Gam, pointed
> out that "Grace was a gentlewoman, something so totally new to
> Hollywood." On the African location of "Mogambo," while Ava Gardner
> was taking baths in public, Grace was busy with her knitting and
> speaking Swahili, which she had learned beforehand, to the natives.
> "She'll always have the class you find in a great racehorse," said
> James Stewart. Grace Kelly's class meant that her many rumored
> romances -- with Gable, Ray Milland, Bing Crosby, Oleg Cassini --
> never raised a ripple of scandal. By the time she met Prince Rainier
> at the Cannes Film Festival he may have seemed to offer her a
> permanent role -- what a palace aide characterized as "her last and
> best role."
> She married, she said, on instinct. "As an actress I had searched for
> truth through make-believe, not as an individual in a real setting."
> Monaco was an odd sort of real setting. Somerset Maugham called it "a
> sunny place for shady characters." Before Princess Grace came along,
> the coffers in this tax haven for the international rich were so empty
> that the prince nearly had to sell his yacht. The moribund
> 19th-century resort was turning into a colony for doddering dowagers.
> Now it has been refurbished as a discreetly swinging colony for the
> super-heeled middle-aged. In the process, Monaco's ecological balance
> has been devastated. In this "Hong Kong on the Riviera" skyscrapers up
> to 300 feet now dominate the skyline. The principality's footage has
> been increased from 375 to 464 acres by reclaiming land from the
> Mediterranean. Rainier wrested control of the gambling casinos from
> Aristotle Onassis and briefly suspended the Monaco Constitution in
> 1959 to show that he was still the ruler.
> Rebelliousness:
> The image of Princess Grace helped mightily in the
> turnaround in Monaco's fortunes. But unquestionably the chief reality
> in her "real setting" was her children. "The upbringing of the two
> older children," says a close American friend, "was straight out of
> the Victorian era." This may well have accounted in good part for the
> rebelliousness of Caroline and her shortlived marriage to French
> playboy Philippe Junot. More recently, Caroline, now 25, caused her
> parents great concern when a photographer spotted her on a Pacific
> island with old pal Guillermo Vilas, the tennis star. On the other
> hand, the 24-year-old Albert, a graduate of Amherst in Massachusetts,
> is a fine student and suberb athlete. He apparently is eager to take
> over from his father and carry on the Grimaldi family's stewardship of
> Monaco, which dates back to the 13th century. As for the striking,
> 17-year-old Stephanie, she has profited from Caroline's example and
> been given more rope by her parents. The hippest looking of the three
> children -- with her leather jackets, Mexican boots and blue jeans --
> she was about to enter design school before the tragic accident.
> Every person who has known Princess Grace emphasizes the
> all-importance of her family. But the family she created was a special
> one, structured around values and rules that her children apparently
> found anachronistic. And yet Grace was her own woman: she made a
> passionate defense of breast-feeding, and in an interview with Playboy
> she showed a startling liberality toward birth control, calling it an
> issue that people should "decide for themselves." She kept in close
> contact with her Philadelphia family, returning there frequently, not
> only for splashy social occasions but also to do such things as shop
> with an old school friend at Woolworth's for ant traps, hard to find
> in Monaco.
> Princess Grace chafed when the media asked intrusive questions,
> especially about her children. But the paradox of celebrity is that it
> insists we make judgments. Grace Kelly was once an artist who gave us
> pleasure and the further pleasure of thinking about it. In her
> penultimate film, "The Swan," she plays a young girl engaged to a
> crown prince. The producers of the film, which was a flop, complained
> that nobody came to see it because they saw the newsreels of Grace's
> real wedding with a real prince. All through her life we seem to feel
> this blurring of reality and nonreality.
> 'Harmony':
> Who was the real Grace? In "My Book of Flowers," Princess
> Grace describes the first attempts at flower arranging by herselfand a
> group offriends: "At first we were all nervous and felt incompetent --
> which of course we were -- but this was only in the beginning, for it
> became the first step toward the awakening of many hidden talents.
> Through working with flowers we began to discover things about
> ourselves that had been dormant. We found agility not only with our
> fingers but with ourinner eyes in searching for line, scale and
> harmony. In bringing out these talents within ourselves, we gained a
> dimension that enabled us not only to search for harmony in an
> arrangement, but also to discover the importance of carrying it into
> our lives and our homes. To create harmony in the home is the woman's
> right and duty. The home must be the oasis for the family -- husband,
> children and others close to us. It should be a place where they can
> find a sense of well-being and strength, replenishment and renewal."
> In this touching passage Grace Kelly and Princess Grace come together.
> We catch a glimpse of what she has been trying to do for 26 years --
> bring art and life together, the wedding of the beautiful and the
> good. There is something Victorian about it, but there is something
> timeless too. We see the connection between the little girl talking to
> her dolls, the beautiful young actress showing Cary Grant that
> gentility can blaze into ecstasy and the matron trying to orchestrate
> a family in the clangor of celebrity. Peace to her spirit.
> ---
> Photos:
> http://www.all-pictures-photos.com/images/grace-kelly/grace-kelly-005-img.jpg
> http://photos1.blogger.com/img/92/1672/640/Grace%20Kelly%201.jpg
> http://www.patgiuliano.com.au/bridal/Grace_Kelly/grace_kelly03.jpg
> Grace Kelly in art:
> http://www.artstamps.dk/images/Warhol-Grace-Kelly.jpg
> http://www.adclassix.com/images/55timegracekelly.jpg
> (Time Magazine, January 1955)

In article <2e20e13f-8380-41f8-9e60-5047c9430245n@googlegroups.com>,
Topic Cop <Beaver_Fever@live.com> wrote:

> I thought she was decapitated or was that someone else?

You're probably thinking of Jayne Mansfield.