Grace Kelly

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international herald tribune
4-20-2006

MONTE CARLO: Grace Kelly, of Hollywood and Philadelphia, and Prince Rainier III of Monaco set a religious seal on their marriage today [April 19] with a nuptial mass and holy communion before the high altar of St. Nicholas Cathedral. Then they went arm in arm aboard his yacht and on out to sea tonight for a two-month wedding trip to Naples, Capri, Rome and Spain. As the yacht, Deus Juvante (''With God's Help'') eased out of this sunlit harbor into a freshening western wind, the prince gave his wife a manly hug. She brushed his cheek with a bride's shy kiss. Crowds jamming the waterfront and watching through binoculars cheered. Sailors lining the decks of four Allied warships, including the Heermann, a destroyer of the United States 6th fleet, snapped to attention. The vessels blew their sirens in a farewell salute and the skippers of yachts tooted their horns. At the breakwater, fireworks burst over the Prince's yacht, the red and white Monacan flag and
the Stars and Stripes descended by parachute into the sea. A mosquito fleet loaded with photographers and a helicopter buzzing overhead trailed the prince and his wife to sea.
 
Washington Post

In Monaco, the Irish Library Of Princess Grace
Article from: The Washington Post Article date: January 15, 1989 Author: Sally Ogle Davis More results for: grace kelly
They're still trying to break the bank at the casino in Monte Carlo. Tax exiles still jostle each other for villa space on Monaco's hillsides. Boutiques still line the Boulevard des Moulins, spilling over with the cream of the French couture collections and jewels from Cartier. The Ho^tel de Paris, newly restored to its Belle Epoque glory, still guards one of the most prestigious and valuable cellars in Europe. Everything, in other words, is as it should be among the fleshpots of the Riviera's most sybaritic city.

On the other side of the harbor, however, in Monaco Ville, the old part of the city where the cobbled streets all lead to the palace of the ruling Prince Rainier III, and where the old language Mone'gasque is still spoken, there stands one of those anachronisms that defy all cliche's. The brass plate on the wall of No. 9, Rue Princesse Marie-de-Lorraine, reads the Princess Grace Irish Library. Inside the three-story villa, there is indeed a library, presided over by a man who is as unlikely as the collection he serves.

George Sandulescu is "Greek by origin, Romanian by birth, Swedish by nationality, British by education, Italian by profession" (he lectures in the English department of the University of Turin) "and Mone'gasque by residence."

In 1983, he was summoned to the palace and asked by Prince Rainier to take a look at a most extraordinary collection-the Irish books of the prince's late wife, formerly Grace Kelly of the Philadelphia and County Mayo Kellys. Assembled in two beautifully carved bookcases in the princess' study was an eclectic group of tomes from sheet music of popular Irish ditties to works on Yeats, Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Swift, from Irish history to politics, geography to folk tales.

The princess' interest in Irish literature was no surprise to Sandulescu. In 1982, just before her death in an automobile accident, he had helped organize a James Joyce day in Monaco and had invited her to attend.

"She came at 3 o'clock and we expected her to stay at most a couple of hours. She finally left at midnight and she'd taken part in all the literary discussions, but we didn't know that she'd been collecting Irish books."

Following her visit to Ireland in 1961, Grace had apparently developed an avid interest in her Irish roots and begun gathering the books.

The idea of creating the library as a memorial to her was spurred on by two of the princess' close friends, Monaco residents Virginia Gallico-widow of American writer Paul Gallico-who had served as Grace's lady in waiting, and novelist and critic Anthony Burgess. Exact replicas of the bookcases that had originally housed the collection in the palace were made to contain the books in the same haphazard uncatalogued way they had stood in her study.

Princess Caroline, president of the Princess Grace Foundation, officially opened the library in November 1984. It has now been enlarged by a donation from the palace's own library, including a rare 17th-century Spanish atlas of the entire Irish countryside complete with extremely detailed maps. Several hundred volumes were also donated by the Irish government, and assorted Irish exiles abroad, the most famous being Samuel Beckett, have sent their work as gifts.

The library is the site of monthly lectures on Irish literary topics-by invitation only- and an annual seminar in May.

When the library opened, Prince Rainier is said to have expressed some reservation about the serving of drinks at library receptions in what was after all a memorial to his wife. He was gently reminded that this was after all an Irish library. "Very well," the prince is reported to have replied, "then you can serve only Irish drinks."

Consequently, lecturegoers in this most European of cities are entertained liberally with whiskey and stout.

The Princess Grace Irish Library is open weekdays except in August, when it is closed. Visitors are welcome, but by appointment only. For more information: Princess Grace Irish Library, 9 Rue Princesse Marie-de-Lorraine, Monaco 98000, 011-33-93-501-225.
 
Detroit Free Press
he movie High Society is about to be reissued, and it set me thinking. Now, High Society (1956) isn't that great a picture - it's nowhere near as good as The Philadelphia Story (1940), of which it is a kind of musical remake.

Still, it has Sinatra and Crosby teasing each other; it has Louis Armstrong growling out the lyrics to "Now You Has Jazz" (dig that crazy grammar!); it has Sinatra singing "Mind If I Make Love to You"; Sinatra and Celeste Holm doing "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" - all of these songs are by Cole Porter, by the way (and more of him anon). And it has Grace Kelly in her farewell film as she prepared to trade in being Philadelphia society and Hollywood royalty for what I suppose counts as real royalty, being Princess Grace of Monaco.

So what's an egalitarian entertainment like the movies, not to mention the anti-elitist aspirations of Hollywood and America, doing with High Society? Or "High So-ci-ety" as Louis puts it in the opening number (as his band arrives in Newport, Rhode Island, on its bus). Louis jazzes the word a little to let us know he's hip to the wild idea of someone black being allowed in the front door of these grand mansions. After all, this is Newport and it's only 1956!

One of the great appeals of the movies in their beginnings was that if you couldn't read, still you could follow these stories. If you couldn't afford the theatre - or lived too far from a "the-ater" (it was a snob word) - you could see the great actors and actresses bigger than life. For just a nickel. The movies were short, fast, sensational and made for the huddled masses ushered in under the Statue of Liberty. Polite people, society people, did not go to the movies at first because the nickelodeons were reckoned unwholesome, unsafe, "flea-pits". You'd have to sit next to the unwashed, the heathen and the poor.

The people who made the movies were just as lower class: they were Charlie Chaplin out of a south London workhouse; or Shmuel Gelbfisz, from Warsaw or worse. Lazar Meier came from Russia, owned up to very little education, but dealt in scrap iron and recycled garbage. In 15 years, he became Louis B Mayer, the West Coast head of Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, the highest-paid man in America, and the friend of President Herbert Hoover. A lot of people said that Mr Mayer and Mr Goldwyn (the classy version of Gelbfisz) had no "class"; that they were notoriously rough, vulgar fellows. But that was all right, for they were merchants to and harbingers of the ultimate classless society, the United States of Ambition. Nor should we scorn their idealism. Mayer and Chaplin believed deeply in carrying pleasure to the humble masses. Still, that urge could carry them in different directions: Chaplin would be accused later of communist leanings, whereas Mr Mayer built himself
into a pillar of right-wing respectability and ... class?

You can argue that Louis B never attained "class". On the other hand, no one had more power or money in what was the most glamorous business in America, the one most revered by the masses. And as Marx ought to have said (I mean Groucho), power and money are close enough to class to smell the sweat in the cologne. As the business grew, so it built ornate palaces for movie-going - and called them "the- aters". In Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s there was a mania for nightclubs, riding stables, golf courses and country clubs (the most surreal frowned on Jewish membership); to have houses with walled estates; to hire elocution teachers, designers and decorators, psychiatrists and etiquette counsellors - anyone who could smarten up the joint. Hollywood became class-conscious. They started playing polo and croquet.

Nothing stimulated this pressure, or gave it such exposure, as the coming of sound. In the space of a few years, sound meant that slapstick, physical comedy, gave way to verbal humour, and in turn that led to social commentary. A new generation of actors, writers and voice coaches was employed. Coarse, ill-educated, foreign voices gave way to smooth "English" delivery. And, of course, the English were good at that. In the 1930s, a small army of English (or English- seeming) talent arrived (Cary Grant, David Niven, Herbert Marshall, Ray Milland, Errol Flynn, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Claude Rains, Charles Laughton and so on). Hollywood acquired a cricket club.
 
Pt 2
Detroit Free Press

It fell in love with tweed jackets and English setters. Even American actors had to be well spoken. And gradually they came to be people with aspirations to class.

Thus the class system among movie stars could say that there were self- evident Americans - like Clark Gable (from Cadiz, Ohio) and Joan Crawford (from San Antonio, Texas). Joan had been Lucille once, from nearly Mexico, my dear, and no better than she should have been. Indeed, Hollywood liked to promote Joan Crawford as the working girl striving for decency and respect. Whereas, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn had it by birth. They were from New England, good schools and the stage. They had family background; they had ladylike accents and manners. Hepburn even arrived in Hollywood wearing trousers - and she didn't give a damn in the way that only people born to a certain level of income and social authority can manage. Fred Astaire was an Austerlitz. His sister Adele married an English aristocrat. Gloria Swanson would marry a French count.

Of course, there was comedy in all this climbing. And it took people like Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges to know that penniless French counts were desperate to marry wealthy movie stars. Equally, Archie Leach never forgot that he was a poor Bristol kid acting as if he were Cary Grant, the very model of a perfect trans-Atlantic gentleman.

Best of all, that comedy got into the movies themselves.

Class means hypocrisy, disguise, masquerade and exposure; it brings into play every possible gap between innate honour or nobility and their appearance; it relishes the satirical opportunities in noticing that at San Simeon, say, William Randolph Hearst had a dining hall bought, shipped and recreated from some Italian palace of the 15th century - but with ketchup bottles on the table. From Mark Twain to Billy Wilder, America on the greedy rise has been a rich subject for comedy. And so, in the 1930s, especially, one finds entire genres - screwball comedy, above all - that are fed by that real-life incongruity. In such films as My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, Midnight, The Philadelphia Story itself, Nothing Sacred, Twentieth Century, The Lady Eve, Palm Beach Story and many others we see the young and the rich struggling to hold on to their souls and their sanity.

It seems to me that these are among the greatest American films, a term that reminds me to add this: Citizen Kane (1941) is very much about what money does to character, ambition and hope. Kane and his pal, Jed Leland, are prep-school and college boys, able to make wisecracks about class, yet victims of the great myth, too. Kane is supposedly a tragedy, yet it's full of funny lines and an ironic attitude. How easily Preston Sturges might have made a knockout comedy about a poor little rich kid who's lost his sled and calls every woman he meets "Rosebud".

The mutual fascination between Hollywood and Manhattan's cafe society peaked in 1935 when David O Selznick, the son of a Lithuanian immigrant, went into partnership with Jock Whitney, one of the richest men in America, the ultimate in East Coast class and establishment. It was Jewish chutzpah and Wasp money, but the union worked. The two men adored each other, and they made Gone with the Wind along the way. Selznick, of course, was married to one of Mr Mayer's daughters, Irene, and thus she became a model of a Jewish princess who ended her life living in a great suite at the very snob Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, with a Cezanne and a Matisse as company.

That moment and mood have gone now, I fear. America is an increasingly classified society, helplessly measured by money and power. The urge to make fun of the climb has vanished, along with screwball comedy and the kind of song that Cole Porter wrote. Porter himself was American upper class, born rich and sent to Yale, but also showbiz through and through, and in "You're the Top" a 1934 song, he was able to praise merit, excellence and class while still kidding its cult. If you don't know all the words to the song - the answers that go with the exhilarated call "You're the Top" - some of them involve the Whitney stable, Mrs Astor, Pepsodent, the National Gall'ry, Garbo's sal'ry and even cellophane (the mundane and glamour beautifully mixed) and "You're a Bendel bonnet, A Shakespeare sonnet, You're Mickey Mouse". There, for a halcyon moment, was the high society of pure fun.

`High Society' is re-released on 31 May

Hoover. A lot of people said that Mr Mayer and Mr Goldwyn (the classy version of Gelbfisz) had no "class"; that they were notoriously rough, vulgar fellows. But that was all right, for they were merchants to and harbingers of the ultimate classless society, the United States of Ambition. Nor should we scorn their idealism. Mayer and Chaplin believed deeply in carrying pleasure to the humble masses. Still, that urge could carry them in different directions: Chaplin would be accused later of communist leanings, whereas Mr Mayer built himself into a pillar of right- wing respectability and ... class?

You can argue that Louis B never attained "class". On the other hand, no one had more power or money in what was the most glamorous business in America, the one most revered by the masses. And as Marx ought to have said (I mean Groucho), power and money are close enough to class to smell the sweat in the cologne. As the business grew, so it built ornate palaces for movie-going - and called them "the- aters". In Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s there was a mania for nightclubs, riding stables, golf courses and country clubs (the most surreal frowned on Jewish membership); to have houses with walled estates; to hire elocution teachers, designers and decorators, psychiatrists and etiquette counsellors - anyone who could smarten up the joint. Hollywood became class-conscious. They started playing polo and croquet.

Nothing stimulated this pressure, or gave it such exposure, as the coming of sound. In the space of a few years, sound meant that slapstick, physical comedy, gave way to verbal humour, and in turn that led to social commentary. A new generation of actors, writers and voice coaches was employed. Coarse, ill-educated, foreign voices gave way to smooth "English" delivery. And, of course, the English were good at that. In the 1930s, a small army of English (or English- seeming) talent arrived (Cary Grant, David Niven, Herbert Marshall, Ray Milland, Errol Flynn, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Claude Rains, Charles Laughton and so on). Hollywood acquired a cricket club.

It fell in love with tweed jackets and English setters. Even American actors had to be well spoken. And gradually they came to be people with aspirations to class.

Thus the class system among movie stars could say that there were self- evident Americans - like Clark Gable (from Cadiz, Ohio) and Joan Crawford (from San Antonio, Texas). Joan had been Lucille once, from nearly Mexico, my dear, and no better than she should have been. Indeed, Hollywood liked to promote Joan Crawford as the working girl striving for decency and respect. Whereas, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn had it by birth. They were from New England, good schools and the stage. They had family background; they had ladylike accents and manners. Hepburn even arrived in Hollywood wearing trousers - and she didn't give a damn in the way that only people born to a certain level of income and social authority can manage. Fred Astaire was an Austerlitz. His sister Adele married an English aristocrat. Gloria Swanson would marry a French count.

Of course, there was comedy in all this climbing. And it took people like Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges to know that penniless French counts were desperate to marry wealthy movie stars. Equally, Archie Leach never forgot that he was a poor Bristol kid acting as if he were Cary Grant, the very model of a perfect trans-Atlantic gentleman.

Best of all, that comedy got into the movies themselves.

Class means hypocrisy, disguise, masquerade and exposure; it brings into play every possible gap between innate honour or nobility and their appearance; it relishes the satirical opportunities in noticing that at San Simeon, say, William Randolph Hearst had a dining hall bought, shipped and recreated from some Italian palace of the 15th century - but with ketchup bottles on the table. From Mark Twain to Billy Wilder, America on the greedy rise has been a rich subject for comedy. And so, in the 1930s, especially, one finds entire genres - screwball comedy, above all - that are fed by that real-life incongruity. In such films as My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, Midnight, The Philadelphia Story itself, Nothing Sacred, Twentieth Century, The Lady Eve, Palm Beach Story and many others we see the young and the rich struggling to hold on to their souls and their sanity.

It seems to me that these are among the greatest American films, a term that reminds me to add this: Citizen Kane (1941) is very much about what money does to character, ambition and hope. Kane and his pal, Jed Leland, are prep-school and college boys, able to make wisecracks about class, yet victims of the great myth, too. Kane is supposedly a tragedy, yet it's full of funny lines and an ironic attitude. How easily Preston Sturges might have made a knockout comedy about a poor little rich kid who's lost his sled and calls every woman he meets "Rosebud".

The mutual fascination between Hollywood and Manhattan's cafe society peaked in 1935 when David O Selznick, the son of a Lithuanian immigrant, went into partnership with Jock Whitney, one of the richest men in America, the ultimate in East Coast class and establishment. It was Jewish chutzpah and Wasp money, but the union worked. The two men adored each other, and they made Gone with the Wind along the way. Selznick, of course, was married to one of Mr Mayer's daughters, Irene, and thus she became a model of a Jewish princess who ended her life living in a great suite at the very snob Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, with a Cezanne and a Matisse as company.

That moment and mood have gone now, I fear. America is an increasingly classified society, helplessly measured by money and power. The urge to make fun of the climb has vanished, along with screwball comedy and the kind of song that Cole Porter wrote. Porter himself was American upper class, born rich and sent to Yale, but also showbiz through and through, and in "You're the Top" a 1934 song, he was able to praise merit, excellence and class while still kidding its cult. If you don't know all the words to the song - the answers that go with the exhilarated call "You're the Top" - some of them involve the Whitney stable, Mrs Astor, Pepsodent, the National Gall'ry, Garbo's sal'ry and even cellophane (the mundane and glamour beautifully mixed) and "You're a Bendel bonnet, A Shakespeare sonnet, You're Mickey Mouse". There, for a halcyon moment, was the high society of pure fun.
 
WWD
Add another bag to Hermes s roster of luxurious accessories: the Kelly Flat ($7,100). This modern, unconstructed version of the iconic Kelly, which was introduced in the 1930s and later named for Monaco's Princess Grace, is "based on inventiveness and reflects the total lifestyle of today's woman," says Robert Chavez, president and CEO of Hermes USA. "While it embraces elegance, history and tradition, it also celebrates mobility and flexibility." The bag is collapsible (ideal for travel) and available in a variety of colors.
 
TIME
CURRENT & CHOICE
Monday, Jun. 07, 1954
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Dial M for Murder. Ray Milland tries to murder Grace Kelly and Director Alfred Hitchcock sees to it that he gets his comeuppance (TIME, May 24).

Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe's great classic, as wonderful as ever, with Actor Dan O'Herlihy outwitting mutineers, cannibals and nature itself (TIME, May 24).

Executive Suite. Star-studded scramble for the presidency of a big corporation; with William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Shelley Winters, etc., etc. (TIME, May 10).

Beat the Devil. John Huston and Truman Capote tell a completely wacky shaggy-dog story; with Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones
 
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