Grace Kelly: 1929-1982
She wore white gloves and a smile of innocent wickedness as she wheeled the little blue convertible around the cliffside curves above Monaco. For the right man, the elegant smile hinted, she might take the gloves off. She had been driving much too fast, because it had been necessary to outdistance the police, and Gary Grant, the reformed jewel thief sitting beside her, looked ill. But he perked up when she parked at a turnoff and produced a cold chicken picnic lunch.
"A leg or a breast?" she asked naughtily.
"You make the choice, "he replied with a faint smile. . .
No actress played high comedy better than Grace Kelly during the six years (1951-56) that her film career flared so beguilingly, and what fascinated the groundlings was that she seemed to be living the roles as well. Last week, 28 years after she met Prince Rainier of Monaco during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, and 26 years after she gave up acting to marry him and become the reigning Princess of his 467-acre tax haven and gambling oasis, she came to the poignant and unexpected end of an astonishing script.
Apparently because she suffered a stroke, she lost control of her car on a hairpin turn in France above Monaco. The 1972 Rover fell 40 yds. down a steep hillside and caught fire. A resident extinguished the fire and pulled Princess Stéphanie, her 17-year-old youngest child, from the driver's-side door (leading to speculation, eventually squelched, that the underage and unlicensed Stéphanie had been driving). Firemen extricated Princess Grace. The first confusing bulletins from the palace spoke only of a broken leg, but she never regained consciousness, and a brain scan showed irreparable damage from the stroke and her injuries. She died the next day, at 52, after Rainier and their older children, Princess Caroline, 25, and Prince Albert, 24, agreed to the removal of a life-support system. At week's end Stéphanie remained hospitalized with a damaged vertebra.
To the young, of course, Grace was simply a middle-aged celebrity, less interesting than most because better behaved. But to those of her own generation, it was almost impossible to think of her as a matron whose photos sometimes showed the puffiness of weight too easily gained, and whose statements in the press were likely to be suppressed clucks about her daughters' unsuitable consorts. To her contemporaries, perhaps simply because she stopped making films at 26, Grace Kelly remained vividly what she had been, a lovely blond swirl of shadow and substance, a white-gloved good girl who managed to be disturbing and mysterious.
Her looks were those of a fashion model, and she might have seemed as bloodless as a mannequin if it had not been for a striking coolness of manner, which may have been nothing more than the defensiveness of a young woman so myopic that she could not read the expressions of those around her. She was rich, however, and it showed. Her face was not closed or insolent; it was simply the face of someone who did not need the job and did not need to impress anyone.