The Girl in White Gloves

by Kerri Maher

  “If you had asked me this three years ago, or even one, I would have said no,” he went on, and her heart galloped at the hope implied by his words. “But you have been so miserable lately, so difficult to reason with, so unlike the woman I married, I began wondering if perhaps you needed to do another movie.”

  Her heart pounded faster, though less with hope than with resentment: Miserable? Difficult?

  But did it matter, if he let her do it? She remained silent, let him go on.

  “If you can figure out a way to make Monaco accept their Princess in a movie, I will support it.”

  “Isn’t that a bit chicken and egg?” she replied, as this was a problem she’d anticipated. “Monaco will be more likely to support it if you do.”

  “Have a press release drafted and let me see it.”

  “It will have to say that you are excited to see me return to the screen,” she said, suddenly feeling as she had when hammering out the terms of her contract with Jay and Dore a decade ago. Her unfulfilled contract—another complication she’d have to contend with, as Marnie was not an MGM movie. But that seemed like nothing compared to the quiet battle she was having right now, at dinner with her husband.

  “Am I excited to see you return to the screen, or am I excited to see you do one last movie?”

  This was the one question she had been hoping he would not ask. But she had prepared an answer. “There’s no reason to get ahead of ourselves,” she said sweetly. “You’re happy to see me do one more movie.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “But you can say it, if it means you will be yourself again.”

  “I really do think this is what’s been missing from my life,” she gushed, relieved if not exactly grateful for the direction the conversation had taken. “Thank you, Rainier.”

  “You’re welcome, Grace.”

  * * *

  The day she called Hitch to say yes, Grace felt euphoric. In the afternoon, she sat on the floor and built a city of wooden-block towers with Albie and Caroline, and she found joy in every clink of rectangle to rectangle, every silly design suggestion her children made, and when Albie got out a plastic truck and knocked it all down, she laughed till tears spilled from her eyes. A week ago, she’d have scolded him for wrecking all their hard work.

  Maybe she had been behaving miserably. Maybe Rainier was right. Some small voice inside her told her his assessment had been unfair, incomplete somehow, but she shushed it and tried to figure out how to thank him. They hadn’t been on a romantic getaway in ages, she realized. Perhaps that was what they needed.

  She worked with her assistant to perfect a press release, and asked Hitch to wait until she gave the go-ahead before his office made any announcements. Amazingly, everything was going according to plan. Rita, Maree, Carolyn, and Judybird were all thrilled for her when she called with the news. Peggy said she’d start packing her bag then and there. “I need a vacation,” she said. “And you and your career have always made the perfect excuse. Remember the fun we had in Jamaica?”

  Only her mother pointed to a dark cloud above. “Are you sure, Grace? You’ve worked so hard to get where you are. Why would you want to go backward?”

  “Backward?” Grace repeated with genuine surprise. She’d thought, after her father died, that she and her mother had reached a new and deeper understanding. She even relished her widowed mother’s recent visits to Monaco; it was like, without her father around, Margaret Kelly was free to please only herself, her daughter, and her grandchildren.

  “I never intended to stop acting,” added Grace.

  “Well, Rainier made it quite clear he expected you to. I’m surprised he said yes to this, unless . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Unless what, Mom?”

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  “Come on, Mom, that was not nothing.”

  “I just hope he’s not . . . setting you up.”

  You set me up. Those had been Rainier’s words in the car after Ari’s party. He’d accused her of doing it to him. She hadn’t, of course. Why on earth would he do it to her?

  “You’re being ridiculous, Mother.”

  Her mother didn’t reply right away, then said, “As long as you’re sure.” Grace thought she sounded serious, but the long-distance line was a little crackly that day, and it was hard to tell.

  “Anyway, you can come to California in the summer? Haven’t you been saying you want to take the children to Disneyland?”

  “I’m sure I can,” her mother said, and Grace could hear the hedge despite the static. I can do it alone if necessary, she told herself. It won’t be the first time.

  Chapter 34

  The release leaked before Rainier’s final approval, before they’d had a chance to discuss the inevitable questions and how they would answer them.

  “How did this happen?” Grace demanded, thumping down on her assistant’s desk three different newspapers announcing in bold print, “Grace Kelly Returns to Film”; “Grace and Hitchcock Together Again”; “The Princess Descends Her Tower.”

  Her assistant, Marta, already looked close to tears when Grace stormed into the room. Phones all over the office were ringing.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, Grace.”

  “He hates it when the papers use my maiden name,” Grace seethed, her heart beating wildly, her face hot. She could see it all play out between them: Rainier’s fury, the yelling, the blame—she hadn’t been careful enough; she’d been Princess long enough to know better; she’d obviously been appallingly careless.

  And he’d be right. She’d failed. Miserably. And she’d pay with her one shot at getting back her career—her freedom.

  Grace felt so sick, she actually heaved over the toilet for a few minutes, but there was nothing in her stomach. She hadn’t had her usual oatmeal or coffee yet, and she hadn’t eaten much the past few days anyway, so heightened was her sense of anticipation about the announcement and the very prospect of doing the film.

  Who would do this to her? Rainier’s sister, Antoinette, came to mind. She’d never liked Grace. But how would she even have known about this movie? Grace had been careful to keep the secret among a select few. On the other hand, she knew how treacherous families could be, and she wouldn’t put it past Antoinette to have planted a spy in her orbit.

  But who? Not Marta, who appeared as distraught as Grace at the news. Grace went back to her office, where Marta was adding to the growing stack of messages from journalists calling for comment.

  “One of them,” she told Grace, “said that even Hitchcock was surprised by the news. Pleased but surprised.”

  Grace groaned. Rainier would be home from Paris later that day. She’d have to make some progress on this mystery by then. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that it must have been Antoinette. “Has anyone spoken to Rainer?” Grace asked.

  Marta shook her head. “He’s been meeting with de Gaulle all morning.”

  A reprieve. “Good,” she said. “Have you spoken to Rainier’s secretary?”

  “He’s also making no comments until we get an official word from you and the Prince.”

  Grace nodded. “Does he know how it happened?”

  Marta shook her head solemnly.

  “Has anyone spoken to Antoinette’s staff?” Grace whispered.

  Marta’s eyes widened. “No,” she said, catching Grace’s drift right away.

  “Maybe you and Pierre could find a way to . . . get some information? Together?” she asked.

  Clearly thankful to have a task other than answering the phone, Marta nodded. “Right away,” she said, rising from her desk, looking down at the phone that had started ringing again.

  “Let it go,” instructed Grace.

  A few hours later, Marta reported that she and Pierre had made inquiries with Antoinette’
s staff, and no one over there knew anything about the leak, either.

  “Do you believe them?” asked Grace.

  Marta shrugged. “It’s impossible to discern.”

  Grace wondered desperately if proof was even necessary. Antoinette had made other bids to depose and destabilize her brother over the years. She planned to suggest her as the culprit to Rainier; Grace was convinced it was her, proof or not.

  After a long day of nervous pacing, thinking out loud with Marta, and finally taking a long walk on the grounds to escape the infernal phone ringing, then choking down nothing but a small portion of plain spaghetti with her children at dinner, Grace tried to watch a television show while she waited for Rainier to come home.

  When at last he did, it was dark, and their wing of the palace was quiet. He didn’t appear angry. In fact, all he looked was surprised. “I didn’t expect you to be up,” he said, crossing the room to pour himself a glass of whiskey from the crystal decanter.

  “I . . .” Her mouth was dry. “I wanted to see you before I went to sleep. Could I have one of those?” she asked, nodding at his glass.

  He poured her one with a slight smile, and said, “Tough day?” And he handed her the glass. The smoky liquid burned her tongue, throat, belly.

  “I’m sure you know why,” she said. Why isn’t he angry?

  “I read the papers,” he said; then he shrugged. “What did you expect? You must have known this would happen.”

  She was so confused; he was acting like this was all perfectly normal. “I hadn’t authorized the release yet,” she said. “You hadn’t approved it.”

  “Grace, we both know it didn’t matter what I would have said. You were determined to do this. I left it in your hands.”

  “You asked to approve the release, and I intended for you to do so,” she said, experiencing again that feeling of confusion she sometimes felt in conversations with Rainier.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  It doesn’t?

  Once upon a time, she would have been grateful for his apparent acceptance, his flexibility and forgiveness. But now she knew better; he’d expect something later. She thought back to the expert ways he’d wooed her, the way he’d made her feel accepted and loved, only to say in front of all those reporters that the Princess of Monaco would have more important duties than moviemaking. Then unilaterally banning all her movies from the principality they were supposed to rule over together.

  “How do you want to reply?” she asked, wanting to do as he said from this point on in the hopes of limiting his inevitable future anger.

  “The only thing I asked in all this is that you would be yourself again,” he said. “So far, that hasn’t happened. So far, this whole thing has turned you into a nervous wreck. You decide. Can you do the movie and find yourself again? Or will it put so much stress on you that you cannot perform any duty well? I would hate for your performance to suffer, for the reviews to be bad, as much as I would hate for Monaco to miss their Princess.”

  “I would, too,” she said quietly, wondering why his speech had pushed her under the water again. He was looking out for her. He wanted her to succeed and to protect her from failure. Why, then, did she feel that success was impossible?

  * * *

  Despite Marta’s sleuthing, Grace was never able to come up with any proof as to who had leaked the release, and as the press whirled itself into a tempest around Marnie, not a single thing she or Hitch or Rainier said satisfied anyone. Some papers went so far as to print outright lies, such as that Monaco was broke and Grace had to do the movie to make money for the principality; to this accusation, she replied that this was so untrue, she would donate her entire salary to charity to prove it. MGM quickly leapt into the fray, pointing out that while the studio was thrilled by the idea that Grace might return to the screen, they had not been asked for, nor had they given, permission for her to do a film with Hitchcock at Paramount.

  Shaky and jumpy, Grace felt queasy most of the day, and rehearsed answers and excuses rather than sleeping at night; she hadn’t lost this much weight or felt this strung out since her wedding.

  After nearly a month of it, Jay called.

  “How’re you holding up, Graciebird?”

  “Not well,” she admitted. “I can’t seem to win on this one.”

  “What does Rainier say?”

  What a good question. Nothing. Incredibly, nothing. When he wasn’t busy talking to French officials about the future of Monaco, he simply told her, “It’s your decision.”

  “He says it’s up to me,” she replied, thinking of the quote he’d approved recently saying how absurd it was in this day and age that any husband might stand in the way of his wife having a career. But you have, part of her wanted to scream, if not now, then when we got married!

  “Good man,” said Jay.

  At this compliment of her husband by her agent, something clicked into place. She didn’t have to wonder anymore what Rainier was getting out of this, because she saw exactly what he was getting: he appeared to be the supportive husband, when in fact he was letting her drown in the storm. Because how could she explain what was really happening between them? How he said she could do as she pleased, then gave her no assistance, no love or support. He was doing nothing.

  Or had he done worse than nothing? Had he, as her mother suggested, set her up to fail?

  “Yes,” Grace agreed, seeing the need to keep up appearances if she was going to get what she wanted out of this. Now that she knew what the game was, maybe she could win it. “Poor Rainier,” she cooed, “he has enough to deal with, without my silly movie needling him.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Jay, and Grace could hear the caution in his voice. “This isn’t the only opportunity that will come along, you know. And this one had needless complications. For instance, I could get you a terrific MGM script, which would eliminate the problem on their end.”

  “Jaybird, I’m not going to start reading packets of scripts again. Hitch is special. This movie is special.” It’s my only chance. If I blow it, that’s it for me and movies. She knew the truth of this in her bones, and also knew it was impossible to explain to anyone else. Especially now that the stakes were so high and so public. If she didn’t do Marnie, she’d never do another movie.

  “I disagree,” said Jay. “Think about it, Grace. This might not be the right time.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she promised. But that wasn’t what she was going to think about at all. What she planned to think about was how to turn the tide. She’d done it once before, with Howell and his Jamaica photos, when she’d stood her ground with Dore and gotten what she wanted out of MGM. She could do it again.

  But last time, she wasn’t a mother. Wasn’t a wife, didn’t have subjects, for Christ’s sake. Already, the people of Monaco were being interviewed and polled, and the overwhelming feeling in the principality was that Grace was not one of them, never had been one of them, and doing a movie all the way in California would only prove the hunch they’d always had that she would desert them one day. She was still la princesse américaine, not notre Princesse bien-aimée. Every time an idea occurred to her—and all her ideas boiled down to instructing her office to ignore the press, then doing the movie without further comment—she kept thinking of how that decision would affect her life.

  Every single time, what she came back to was the children. Leaving Rainier to do the movie—and more movies—was out of the question, for she knew exactly what was in her marriage contract about that: she would never see Caroline and Albie again. Much as she welcomed the idea of never seeing Monaco again, and even found the Shakespearian notion of being banished romantically appealing, she could not imagine never seeing her children again.

  If she did not leave him, but upset him by doing the movie against his wishes, what was to stop him from effectively taking Caroline and A
lbie away from her? He’d already done it with their son, she thought bitterly. She rarely saw Albie, except on vacations and weekends, because his schedule was so full of activities befitting a young heir to the crown. Rainier could do the same thing with Caroline.

  Grace thought back to their courtship letters, to all they had said about how they wanted to raise their children. Of all the tests to which she’d been subjected before they wed, that had been the most important, she realized now. She’d written that what she wanted more than anything was to give her children a life with the freedom he himself had described. He had been the first man to help her picture that life, to invest her in the power of the childhood neither of them had had. And now that she had two perfect children, little people who didn’t yet know the selfishness and mistreatments of the world, she believed in that vision all the more, felt inside herself the most profound desire to protect them as long as she could. To let them be children.

  Did Rainier really believe in that portrait of childhood he’d painted for her? She thought he did. That had not been a lie. Surely.

  His desire for her, his admiration for her, hadn’t all that been true, too? It must have been, for he hadn’t been trained to act as she had.

  Though he had been trained as a prince, and perhaps there was no difference.

  She’d never been one to drink away her troubles, but she’d never felt so trapped inside her own body or mind. A stiff drink was the only way she could think to escape. She mixed herself a gin and tonic and drank it quickly, feeling its effects immediately on her empty stomach.

  Whatever his real feelings for her or about fatherhood or any of it, she realized now, what had mattered most to him was that she believed those things. She’d been willing to pay money for those things, to leave her career and country for them. He’d seen that willingness in her, a kind of desperation for the life he purported to offer, and that had been important to him.