Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (Hardcover)

They're almost certainly wrong: it seems pretty certain that she had affairs with Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, and William Holden, among the still famous actors of her day, as well as with other men who weren't famous then and are not famous now. But Spada is careful to emphasize that she wasn't promiscuous: she had affairs because she fell in love with the men first, and if she fell in love easily that probably had a lot to do with her love-starved childhood, in a family whose head, a self-made millionaire called Jack Kelly, never gave her the attention or the praise she longed for.

Spada reads GK's whole life as an attempt to heal the psychological wounds she suffered in her childhood: she went into films because she wanted to become a star, and she wanted to become a star to make her father proud of her. When that didn't work, she left films and married Prince Rainier of Monaco to become another kind of star, again to make her father proud of her. Again it didn't work, and Spada says that she was deeply unhappy in Monaco, where she was isolated and friendless, never comfortable speaking French, and taking a long time to win the trust and affection of her subjects.

In later years, after the death of her father, new troubles came to her from her children, who rebelled against the very care and attention she had devoted to their upbringing, and there were rumors that her marriage to Rainier had become hollow at the time of her death in what was the most famous royal death of the twentieth century, until the death of someone who had attended her funeral in 1982.

That someone was Princess Diana, of course, and the way they died is not the only link between the two women, for GK was the Diana of her day, married live on international television and afterwards pursued relentlessly by photographers and journalists to satisfy the endless, and some said, undeserved interest of newspapers and magazines all around the world. But GK, in the relatively few films she acted in before her marriage, had actually achieved greatness, and had not, like Diana, had it thrust upon her. Her later attempts to return to her career in films -- Hitchcock offered her the leading female part in Marnie, for example -- were frustrated by her husband, who wanted her to do what he had married her to do: serve as the Princess of Monaco and help fill Monaco's coffers with the dollars of the tourists who flocked to the principality in ever-increasing numbers after her wedding.

Spada suggests that the marriage was possibly a cynical one motivated more by the weakened finances of Monaco and the need for an heir than genuine attraction between Rainier and GK. I hope it wasn't so, because GK doesn't seem to have ever been very happy for very long and her life, like Diana's, was never the fairy-tale many liked to picture it as. Unless the fairy-tale had been written by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson, of course, who did not always provide a happy ending.

In the end, however, comparisons between GK and Diana fail, because GK was more beautiful, more talented, and probably more truly concerned for others. Her films stand as testament to the first two of those facts, and biographies like Spada's to the third. Read this if you're a fan who wants to know more about the lady away from the lens, but expect to be saddened by it. Grace Kelly had grace in abundance all her life, but she never achieved the happiness I and many of her other fans think she deserved.