Cinema: The Girl in White Gloves

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Bags Packed. Hollywood is now eager to adopt Actress Kelly, white gloves and all, and is trying hard, with the air of an ill-at-ease lumberjack worrying whether he is using the right spoon. But Grace shows no interest in the Hollywood way of life, or even in having the customary swimming pool ("I don't swim that much"). Thus far, she has lived with a sister or a girl friend in a furnished, two-room North Hollywood apartment, acting as" if she considered herself on location, with her bags packed ready to go back to New York.

Young men who are eager to brighten her after-hours life come away baffled. "If she doesn't think a joke is funny," one complained, "she doesn't laugh." Wolves are discouraged when Grace briskly pulls on her glasses (her lovely blue eyes are nearsighted) and assumes her Philadelphia expression. Some suspect that she is, as Oscar Wilde put it, "a sphinx without secrets." Publicity men despair of her. "A Grace Kelly anecdote?" said a friend. "I don't think Grace would allow an anecdote to happen to her."

A few of Hollywood's older, more sought-after men have concluded, from time to time, that they were just the boys destined to discover and unlock the real Grace. Each time, Grace has resisted unlocking, though whenever her father reads in a column of a new "roman tic attachment," the family gets alarmed.

"I don't like that sort of thing much," snorts father Kelly. "I'd like to see Grace married. These people in Hollywood think marriage is like a game of musical chairs." When the gossips reported that Ray Milland was leaving his wife for Grace, mother Kelly hustled out to California to set things straight. Milland insists that he only took her to dinner once; Grace says nothing. Most recently Grace's escort has been Dress Designer Oleg Cassini, one time husband of Gene Tierney and professional man-about-ladies. The Kellys deplore all such gossip-column romances.

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