Some of Grace Kelly's mischievous romps:
In her second screen appearance, Kelly co-starred in the 1952 classic western, High Noon. She had been performing in Colorado’s Elitch Gardens when she received a telegram from Hollywood producer Stanley Kramer, offering her the role of Gary Cooper’s Quaker wife. According to biographer Wendy Leigh, at age 22 Kelly had an off-set romance with both Cooper and director Fred Zinnemann.
Grace fell hard for Coop on the film . Although Cooper was married, he was separated from his wife Rocky and in the middle of a tempestuous relationship with actress Patricia Neal . Coop was the start of a string of romances with much older men . In Grace’s case her passionate nature went against the Fifties notion that good girls didn’t until they got married. Grace, however, did and often. It was this contrast that fascinated filmmakers including Hitchcock. By this time Kelly was clearly far from innocent.
In late 1948, she fell in love with Don Richardson, one of her teachers at the Academy. The liaison lasted two years in the face of tremendous pressure from her family to end it. When she took him home to meet her parents, her mother went through Richardson’s personal effects and found not only his divorce papers but also a packet of condoms .
In spite of parental disapproval, Kelly continued to see Richardson, along with a host of others including the Shah of Iran . While working , Grace met actor Gene Lyons. Like Richardson, Gene was married, although he was in the process of getting an annulment. An Irish Catholic, Lyons might have met with her parents’ approval if it hadn’t been for the fact that he was an alcoholic.
Given her extraordinary beauty , she was rarely without suitors. Quite how far she indulged might never be known, though there is ample evidence to suggest that Spoto is being economical with the truth.
While shooting Mogambo in 1953, a drama set in the Kenyan jungle which centres on the love triangle portrayed by Kelly, Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, she had an affair with Gable and commented: “What else is there to do if you’re alone in a tent in Africa with Clark Gable?”
The next relationship almost ruined her career. She met Ray Milland while working on Dial M For Murder. Milland fell head over heels in love with Kelly . When Milland’s wife Muriel found out, she threw him out of the house. Kelly found herself written up in the tabloids as a home wrecker. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper spread rumours that the actress was a nymphomaniac. The relationship finally ended when Milland realised how much it would cost him in a divorce.
Kelly herself was always discreet, remarking simply in her defence: “As an unmarried woman, I was thought to be a danger.” It appears that Kelly didn’t learn her lesson from the relationship with Milland. She next embarked on a torrid affair with William Holden who played her husband in The Bridges At Tokyo-Ri. Holden was willing to divorce his wife Brenda Marshall but the relationship ended when Holden admitted he’d had a vasectomy .
Kelly’s next conquest was Bing Crosby, her co-star in The Country Wife, who was recently widowed. Ironically Bing Crosby hadn’t wanted Kelly for the role of his wife Georgie Elgin, considering her too beautiful . Kelly proved her worth by winning a Best Actress Oscar for the role, just beating Judy Garland.
Her next relationship did little to reassure her parents . Designer Oleg Cassini had been smitten with Kelly ever since he had seen Mogambo. After being introduced in a Manhattan restaurant, Cassini pursued Kelly relentlessly.
When she flew to the South of France for To Catch A Thief, she sent Cassini a postcard inviting him to follow her. While Kelly wanted to marry Cassini , she still craved her parents’ approval. Her mother was the first to meet Cassini and was not impressed. Although the designer came from an aristocratic Russian family and had grown up in Florence, he was also twice divorced with two children .
Y ears later, it was rumoured that she was pregnant with Cassini’s child and had an abortion. Cassini was not the only man she was seeing; she also spent time with French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. When pictures of the two appeared in the tabloids , Kelly suspected that Aumont had tipped off photographers.
On a visit to the Cannes Film Festival in 1955, Kelly was persuaded to visit Monaco by Olivia de Havilland’s husband Pierre Galante. An audience was arranged with Prince Rainier to be photographed by Paris Match. After more than an hour, the Prince appeared just as Kelly was about to give up and leave. The rest is history.
Ever since her death at the age of 52, Grace Kelly has led a post-mortem double life that continues to fascinate and tantalise. Perhaps the funniest anecdote concerning her liaisons is the one recalled by David Niven on television to Michael Parkinson. Remembering an awkward conversation with Prince Rainier in which the latter asked him who had been his most exciting lover, Niven began to say “Grace Kelly.” He caught himself in time and changed his answer to “Gracie Fields.” Fortunately Rainier had never heard of Fields and thus didn’t realise the unlikelihood of such an encounter.
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