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She was thought to be patrician, although her parents, a former magazine cover model and an Irish bricklayer grown wealthy as a contractor, certainly did not qualify as aristocrats in Philadelphia. Nor did Grace, the princess of an amusement park, ever qualify as a Main Line aristocrat there despite her popularity in the city. But she behaved like a lady, and thus in Holl wood she seemed not quite real, not quite an illusion. The picnic scene with Gary Grant from To Catch a Thief-worked because this flickering imbalance of perception carried over to the screen. It seemed deliciously shocking (but deliciously believable) that there were breasts and legs beneath her summer frock.
The Princess' mother Margaret, who gave up modeling (for magazines like Country Gentleman) after commencing her not very happy marriage to John Sr., was the unquestioned monarch of the Kelly clan. Her iron rule was to keep up appearances. There is no doubt that Grace learned much about the royalty trade from Margaret. In 1954 Grace had a serious affair with Designer Oleg Cassini, but against family wishes (he was divorced and not Catholic). Then, over Christmas of 1955, Rainier visited the Kelly mansion in Philadelphia. The unlikely joining of clans was approved.
Grace retired from Hollywood after only eleven films. Her first important role was as Gary Cooper's wife in High Noon. She played opposite Clark Gable in Mogambo, James Stewart in Rear Window and Frank Sinatra in High Society, and she won an Oscar in 1955 as Bing Crosby's wife in The Country Girl.
A career of six years was over and one of 26 years began, with utmost gaudiness, at a wedding attended by 1,100 guests, 1,600 journalists and at least two pickpockets, posing as priests, clumsy enough to be arrested. Aristotle Onassis, who once mistook Grace for Gary Grant's secretary when she arrived for lunch on the shipping tycoon's yacht wearing hornrimmed spectacles, arranged for 15,000 carnations to be dumped on Rainier's yacht from a plane.
Everyone lived ever after. The press called it "a storybook romance," but it was more clearly a dynastic marriage of the kind traditionally made for good, practical reasons by European nobility. In Rainier's case, the practicality was not hard to see. Rainier's Grimaldi clan dates its ascendancy in Monaco from 1297, when his ancestor François the Cunning sneaked into the palace disguised as a monk. By a quirk of French law, Monaco's citizens would lose their tax and military exemptions if Rainier failed to produce an heir to the throne. What Grace got, in addition to a title (Her Serene Highness), the run of a 200-room pink palace and perks to suit, was what her mother had: a marriage to be seen through steadfastly, come what might.