Grace Kelly revealed as pretty hot number

Press, 13 May 1987, Page 38

Grace Kelly revealed as pretty hot number

NZPA-KRD New York

In the matter of Grace Patricia Kelly, her Serene Highness the late Princess of Monaco, we were all wrong. ■.

Those of us who came of age in the 1950 s remember the aristocratic blond beauty as a glacial goddess, Hollywood’s best attempt at cinematic royalty who became an ac-tual-princess in her own right — an ice princess, a virgin queen, the gtenteel, ultra - British - mannered lady who seemed stratospherically above reproach, despite flashes in those magnificent arctic blue-gray eyes that spoke of fire beneath the ice.

We were wrong. The flashes, it seems, were right.

In “Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess,” a new book that has the potential to be the nonfiction best-seller of the

year, a book that will steam-clean the brain of any 1950 s man who can remember the swimming pool scene in “High Society,” the biographer, James Spada, presents us with a living, breathing Grace Kelly whose real life surpassed every male fantasy imaginable — or at least every 1950 s male fantasy. As he put it in an interview recently, there were two revelations that absolutely astonished him about Princess Grace during his three years of researching the book. “The first,” he said, “was how the most sexually active woman in Hollywood was able to come across as the most chaste. The second was that Prince Rainier actually believed that she was a virgin.” What is sexually active? Spada tells us that when Grace was 18, she called upon a close friend. The

friend was away but the husband was home, and by the end of that rainy afternoon, Grace bad lost that quality her own eventual husband so cherished. After interviewing a seemingly endless parade of former lovers, coworkers, friends and relatives, Spada? concluded that, among many other interesting diversions, Grace was fond of dancing to Hawaiian music in the nude.

Although she dressed primly in outfits that often included the white gloves de rigueur in that decade, she was given to shocking her fellow residents at New York’s exceedingly proper Barbizon Hotel for young women by performing wild dances in the hallway while clad only in panties.

Her liaisons were legion. They included classmates and at least one faculty member of New York’s prestigious Ameri-

can Academy of the Dramatic Arts, where Grace went to study in the late 1940 s In a desperate but ultimately successfur attempt to break away from her fearsomely strict and demanding Ger-man-Irish American family. ‘ They included David Niven, William Holden, Ray Milland, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Oleg Cassini and other older, married men, a type some say she favoured as father substitutes. They included Prince Aly Khan, who, according to Spada, gave her an emerald bracelet as a reward for her sexual favors.

They included the maitre d’ at the Waldorf Astoria when XJrace was launching her theatrical career, a man who not so incidentally knew a great many important people who could help her career.

However, she did not

have affairs with Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in “Rear Window” and “To Catch a Thief’ and was reportedly infatuated with her. Or with the late cartoonist, Al Capp, who, she told friends, tried to rape her. Or with Clark Gable, though, according to Spada, she tried to woo him ardently while filming “Mogambo” in Africa.

Grace was so persistent that Gable finally invited her to his tent, got her so drunk she threw up and so put an end to her amorous aspirations, according to Spada. One of Spada’s principal sources was a television and stage director, Don Richardson, an early love of Grace in her student days in New York. “She (had affairs with) everybody who she came into contact with, who was able to do anything good for her at all,” he told Spada.

“Ironically, her Catholicism, which she believed in, didn’t prevent her from being promiscuous. She would jump out of bed on Sunday morning, wearing nothing but the crucifix, go to church, come back in an hour and jump into bed. What she needed, constantly, was reassurance that she existed. She was starved for affection because of the family. She was afflicted with a great sense of emptiness, terrible loneliness, and this was her way of alleviating IL” According to Spada, her childhood was an unhappy one and her family was reminiscent of the Kennedy clan. Her father was an immigrant-class IrishAmerican superachiever who withheld the affection and approval she so desperately desired for much of her life.

Grace’s marriage to the leading playboy prince of southern France can be

viewed in part as a bold gesture on her part to attain the social status her father hungered for but could never achieve. It was to some degree an arranged marriage, involving among other things a SUS2 million dowry from her father and an obligatory physical examination to determine whether she could bear children. Monaco’s independence agreement with France stipulates that the tiny principality would revert to French control in the event the Grimaldi royal line failed to produce an heir.

Judging from Spada’s book, Grace’s life as Her Serene Highness of Monaco was a mixed blessing. Prince Rainier comes across as a domineering autocrat who stubbornly refused to allow Grace to complete the last four years of her MGM movie contract after their marriage and

blocked a comeback bid by her to 1976 when she had a chance to star in what became the hit film, "The Turning Point” Spada said he was struck by the fact that Grace’s daughters, Princesses Caroline and Stephanie, were as rebellious as she was when she was young. She was to her way as strict as her own parents. She was a more loving mother, but appearances were extremely important to her. Asked how he felt about exposing so much of Princess Grace’s private life, he said he thought It worth doing because it would help put aside her one-dimehsional. image and reveal her as the vital human being she was. “She was very complex, very troubled, very passionate and very intelligent,” he said. “I. feel a great deal of compassion for her. This is not a hatchet job.”