At the Cannes Film Festival last May, an executive of Paris Match, France's top picture magazine, dreamed up a new angle for photographing Prince Rainier Ill's palace at Monaco: he asked visiting Grace Kelly to provide the foreground. She agreed, if he could arrange an audience with the Prince. Out of that unwitting stroke of Matchmaking grew a huge cornycopia, and the U.S. and European press filled it to overflowing last week with gags, gush and gabble.
In the aftermath of Grace's engagement to the Prince (TIME, Jan. 16), the week's actual events were sparse. Grace went back to Hollywood to finish The Swan, a movie about a girl who marries a prince. The Prince went to Florida to take a rest. Shipping Tycoon Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the man who owns the bank at Monte Carlo and who will be spared the fate of French taxes if the Prince sires an heir, announced, "I am mad with joy," and celebrated the engagement by giving 1,000,000 francs to the Monaco Red Cross.
But little Monaco was dwarfed by the acres of newsprint over which the press spread the contents of family albums, newsless interviews with Grace, reconstructions of the proposal scene (RAINIER
SEALED IT OVER PHEASANT, NATCH New
York's Daily News), analyses of Grace's wardrobe, even recipes for Monegasque specialties. Date, site and other arrangements for the marriage were not even settled, but the bride's mother, Mrs. John
B. Kelly, began receiving—in the columns of papers serviced by Hearst's King Features Syndicate. In ten "intimate," as-told-to installments, titled "My Daughter Grace Kelly, Her Life and Romances," Mrs. Kelly counted aloud: "Men began proposing to my daughter Grace when she was barely 15 ... Prince Rainier III . . . was at least the 50th man." Father Francis J. Tucker, the Prince's American chaplain, topped Mrs. Kelly by putting his by-line on two series about the Prince, one for I.N.S., the other in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
An American Base? The U.P. proudly reported how one of its men was allowed to walk Grace's poodle between trains in Chicago. The Los Angeles Herald & Express scooped the town by getting a man aboard Grace's train before it arrived; his interview clearly nailed down the fact that she is a blonde cinemactress. Then, respectfully removing its hat from the back of its head, the Herex editorialized: "This country has many allies, bound to us by various ties, but we sometimes wonder about the strength of the bindings. But not so in the forthcoming alliance between the United States of America and the principality of Monaco. There is a real alliance." International implications also weighed hard on a French reader of Le Monde who wrote: "Is Monaco about to become an American base?"
What Match had joined together, the Chicago Tribune desired to put asunder.