The Girl in White Gloves

by Kerri Maher

  Grace and Gwen couldn’t speak long before they were accosted by a number of appreciative earls and dukes and Royal Shakespeare players, each one full of praise and questions and invitations to upcoming productions. At last Grace had to excuse herself to use the ladies’ room, and she found Diana standing in front of a mirror sniffling back tears as she tried to adjust the bodice of her gown with her long, soft arms.

  She looked so distressed, Grace approached her and asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Not unless you can let it out,” Diana said softly, her voice damp and blunted by her stuffy nose. “They made me wear it a size too small.”

  “Well, that’s wretched,” Grace said, putting what she hoped were comforting hands around the girl’s rib cage, and trying to gently move the fabric so that it would rest more comfortably. It was stuck tight to her clammy skin, though.

  “It’s not going to budge,” said Diana.

  “If it makes you feel any better, you look absolutely gorgeous in it. I’d never know it was too small,” said Grace. The two women were looking at each other in the mirror, rather than directly into each other’s faces, and still Diana avoided eye contact, even in this indirect medium. Grace was surprised to realize that despite the age and extra weight that were so obvious in her own appearance, she wouldn’t have traded places with this beautiful young creature for anything in the world.

  “They never listen to me,” Diana said, her voice clearing a bit, strengthening as she made this statement.

  How Grace wanted to help her! “I have always found it best not to let anyone know they’ve gotten the better of me,” Grace said, groping around for the best of a lifetime’s worth of advice and coming up short.

  Diana sighed as if Grace’s entreaty was entirely beyond her. “Does it ever get better?” she asked, finally lifting her eyes and staring straight into Grace’s. Searching, afraid, sad. This was a girl who wanted—and needed—the truth.

  Grace put her arm around Diana and laughed with as much warmth as she could muster. “Oh, my dear girl,” she said, “I’m afraid it only gets worse.”

  Diana’s chin trembled.

  “But you can get through it,” Grace said firmly. “You will be Queen Diana someday. And in the meantime, when it does get worse, I want you to call me.”

  Diana nodded, swallowed valiantly, then reached for a tissue from the box on the table in front of them. After blowing her nose and blotting under her eyes, she said to Grace, “You can count on it.”

  “My door is always open to you, if you need a place to get away.”

  Diana nodded, Grace patted her on the back, and the two of them reentered the fray, the younger woman standing just a fraction straighter than before.

  * * *

  You really won’t go?” Grace asked Rainier incredulously, holding the unassuming card on which was engraved their invitation to the wedding of Charles and Diana. “I thought it might be fun, this time, to attend the so-called wedding of the century and laugh together at the absurdity of it all.”

  Rainier shrugged, then took a handful of almonds from the dish near his elbow. He ate a few, then sipped his Scotch and soda. They were sitting on the patio of Roc Agel, a luscious sunset falling pink and orange all around them, a vase of wildflowers on the table where they would later eat dinner.

  “They didn’t come to our wedding, nor to Caroline’s,” he replied. “I see no reason to put myself out to go to this. Think of how terrible our own wedding was, Grace. This promises to be just as bad, and this time I’m not required to attend.”

  So many emotions competed for Grace’s attention—frustration at his shortsightedness, hurt that he couldn’t see the irony and potential fun in attending this wedding of all weddings with her, resentment of his usual self-centered pettiness—and combined, they felt like a hot, gassy flame in her chest. She hated feeling this way, and so she threw anger at herself on the pyre inside her. You’re being selfish. Maybe he has a point.

  And: How can he look so calm?!

  “If it means so much to you,” said Rainier, his tone so casual, so easygoing, as if they were discussing a golf tournament, “go by yourself. Or take Albie. It will be good for him to be seen at such an event.”

  “And if they ask where you are?”

  “Tell them I wasn’t feeling well.” Rainier snapped his fingers, and Grace practically saw the lightbulb go on above his head. “In fact, that’s perfect. We’ll RSVP yes for both of us, but I’ll come down with something”—he coughed for effect—“at the last minute, and you’ll have to take Albie instead.”

  “I’d much rather go with you. Dance with you,” she said, her voice cracking. She hadn’t felt like she wanted, let alone needed, Rainier at an event in years. Why now? Why this one?

  Rainier clicked his tongue. “Come now, Grace. We’re beyond this, aren’t we? You know you’ll have more fun without me anyway.”

  “That’s not true,” she protested, her throat singed by the emotion burning inside her. But wasn’t it true? She didn’t want it to be true.

  “We’ll have fun at Frank’s place next month,” he said, his voice less patronizing, a little more solicitous. Grace wondered if he could see that she really was distressed and wanted her to feel better, or if he just wanted the scene to end. Heaven knew, she wanted it to end, too. But differently.

  Rainier was glad to go to Frank and Barbara Sinatra’s because it was easy, familiar. He wouldn’t have to stick his neck out. And the event would be about him. Well, them. The twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of their wedding.

  Grace sighed. “I’ll make sure Albie’s schedule stays clear for the end of July.” And I’ll see if I can book another reading in England. This thought doused the flame inside her ever so slightly.

  Chapter 40

  Before she went on to Frank’s place in Santa Barbara to meet Rainier and her children for the big party in April, she met with the Fox board in Hollywood. She still relished these meetings—every one of them, even the contentious ones in which they discussed hiring and firing and pulling the plug on movies that weren’t going as planned. After the latest, she had lunch with Jay at Musso & Frank, which looked just as it had in 1955 when they’d opened this room adjacent to the original, which had been called Francois since 1919—in fact, Paul, the maître d’ in his red vest with the black lapels, still called it “the new room,” when he seated them. “Miss Kelly, what a pleasure to see you again. Would you like to sit in the new room?” It was all dark wood paneling with a wide strip of toile wallpaper toward the ceiling, and not a single window, giving it a nighttime feel all day long. The red leather of the booths was still slick and crackled when her weight hit it.

  Her old agent—well, Grace supposed he was still her agent, since it wasn’t as though she’d ever gotten a new one—looked fit and tan despite what appeared to be his habit of ordering martinis with lunch. Well, she corrected herself, martini lunches weren’t exactly her habit, either, but she had ordered one today because it sounded so Los Angeles “power lunch.” Wasn’t that what they called them these days? Cautiously, she took only a few sips, while Jay waited for his second. She had a moment’s fleeting sadness that Judybird wasn’t with them, as in the old days. But she was with her third husband, Don Quine, and seemed happy. Grace had seen her just a few months ago at Bemelmans Bar, after a reading in New York.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” said Jay, “but I still get calls about you. More so now that you’re doing these poetry readings.”

  “Oh, do tell,” she said, giddy with the very idea of these calls, the promise and possibility contained in that little one-syllable word. How many other calls had changed her life?

  “Most of them aren’t specific,” he said. “They’re from directors and other actors wanting to know if you’d be ready to make a comeback for the right script.”

  “And wh
at do you tell them?”

  “I say nothing is impossible. Lately, I’ve also said I’ll ask you directly the next time I see you.” Jay reached out and twirled the stem of his fresh martini glass, watching the two olives wobble in the clear, icy liquid as he waited for her reply.

  “Are they directors and actors I’d want to work with?” She was playing with a little ball of fire, and she knew it, but it was so tempting.

  Jay nodded. “I think so.”

  Grace inhaled deeply, feeling the air inflate her chest. She’d have to do something about this face of hers, but without knives. Hollywood’s default to surgery was so dishonest. She’d prefer to play a crone to a Norma Desmond.

  She began the calculation she’d found herself repeating lately, as if it might somehow change. Caroline and Albie were practically finished with school, and adults, in any case, who could fly wherever they wanted to go, and to whomever they wanted to see. They didn’t need their father’s permission to see their mother. And Stéphanie was fifteen; in three more years, she would be eighteen and beginning university. With two older siblings to help her, she would be able to make her own choices about where to be and with whom.

  It was a terrible position to put her children in. But was it better for them to have a mother who lived a life of “quiet desperation,” to borrow a phrase she’d recently read in Thoreau’s Walden, in which she’d recognized herself so strongly? If their mother was truly happy, would her children not be free to be happy as well?

  Three years. She could be free of the contract she’d signed in 1956 in three years. She’d be only fifty-four years old. Katharine Hepburn was fifty-five when she did Long Day’s Journey into Night, and older when she won her second and third Oscars for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Lion in Winter. Audrey, who was also born in 1929, still made the occasional movie, and Lauren Bacall, who’d been at the Academy just a few years before Grace, was still going strong. Ingrid Bergman, her old idol, to whom Grace had so often been compared, had done quite a lot of work through her fifties and sixties.

  Give me one more year, Jay, Grace very nearly said, though instead she sighed and the words “I suppose you never know” escaped her lips. She had time. The process of making movies had slowed considerably since Hitchcock’s heyday of shooting two, sometimes three, pictures a year. She wasn’t ready to say it out loud, but perhaps she could start quietly reading scripts in a year; it would take her a while to find the right one, then more time to agree and actually start shooting. Meanwhile, she would continue to enjoy the stage with her poetry readings, as she spoke to lawyers and prepared herself for the next phase of her life. That was one great irony of all this—she no longer had the stamina it required for a multiweek theater run. She really could only do the poetry readings or movies. One-offs.

  Jay cocked an eyebrow and echoed her words with his glass raised. “I suppose not.”

  Grace lifted her own glass and clinked it to his, feeling its musical ring reverberate through her whole body.

  * * *

  April 18, 1981, found Grace in the company of many of the friends she’d shared the same day with twenty-five years before. But even in the singer’s beloved Palm Springs, at Frank and Barbara Sinatra’s secluded compound on a slope of the San Jacinto Mountains, far from everything, the day couldn’t have felt more different from the original in Monaco, where they’d been surrounded by water, lush sprays of cut flowers, and crowds of strangers. Here were only people they’d known for years. The surroundings were dry and the vegetation scrubby, but Frank and Barbara had made sure their home was an oasis of local cacti and trees, a glittering blue swimming pool, stone patios, and enormous windows with spectacular views of the mountains and desert below.

  “Now, this is a man who knows how to get away,” Rainier said admiringly, standing on the lower deck and surveying the vast panorama, a coupe of champagne in his hand.

  “I’ve always been amazed at how huge the sky feels in California,” added Grace. “And here, I feel it even more.” Endless possibilities. As far as her eyes could see. She thought of her conversation with Jay a few days before. And with Diana not long before that. With all eyes on a new young princess and her future, who would even care if Grace and Rainier were to call it quits? Whatever that would even mean. Perhaps they would only live apart, and not divorce. How different would that be from what they were doing now? They led such separate lives as it was. Perhaps they would even celebrate fifty years in another twenty-five. It would all be up to Rainier. Her mind was made up. It was strange to be thinking of the end of her marriage on this day when she was supposedly celebrating its longevity, but the anniversary gave her an ironic sense of peace. She’d hung in there a long time. No one would be able to fault her for throwing in the towel too soon. She took real pride in that.

  Rita and Cary and Ava and Jim and Katy and Judybird all came to the party, among a hundred others. There were toasts and laughter, congratulations and exclamations of wonder—but less for the fairy tale than for the number of years that had passed. Can it really have been twenty-five years? How young we all were. . . .

  Before they were seated, someone—she never knew whom—called on her to her to recite a poem. It became a chant, “Po-em, po-em.”

  “In Clark Gable’s voice!” demanded Frank, and she had a flash of imitating Coop for Frank and Clark and Ava all those years ago.

  “Well, since you are our host,” she said, with a courtly bow and a hand on her heart. Then she raised her glass, and took a sip to thundering applause. When someone produced a step stool, she alighted, and there was complete silence. She began, hands in fists on her hips, arms akimbo, chest thrust out. Someone hooted in appreciation.

  “All the world’s”—she paused for effect—“a stage,” she began, hitting Clark’s nasal, masculine twang pretty well, she thought. Egged on by the appreciative whistles and claps of her audience, she went on with Jacques’s speech to Duke Senior from As You Like It, improvising a bit when she couldn’t remember a phrase or two:

  “And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages. At first the infant . . . / And then the lover, / Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad, / Made to his mistress’s eyebrow. . . . / And the last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” She paused again, then ad-libbed, “Except that line for which the player was bestly known, ‘Frankly Scarlet’”—she paused, cupped one hand to her ear, and used her other to conduct her audience in reciting along with her—“‘I don’t give a damn.’”

  The room exploded with applause, stomps, whistles, and shouts of “Encore!”

  No one clapped louder than Rainier. His expression was one of singular admiration and love, and—was it really?—regret. As if he knew. He knew what he had made her give up.

  And he’d done nothing.

  Hamming it up with her bow, Grace put out her hand and said, “Have to know when to exeunt,” as she stepped down from the stool, her legs shaking a bit.

  Albie was the one to steady her, letting her lean on him as he gave her a kiss on the cheek and a “That was amazing, Mom.”

  She kissed him in reply and whispered, “Thank you, darling.”

  Soon enough, the room calmed down and it was time for supper. Once everyone had dined on roasted vegetables and quail, Rainier stood up, tapping his water glass for attention. In seconds, all eyes were on him.

  After thanking everyone for coming, and thanking Frank and Barbara for their friendship and gracious hosting, he looked around and said, “On this day in nineteen fifty-six . . .” Then he stopped, shook his head, and cleared his throat. When he went on, it was clear he was struggling to keep his emotions in check. Grace put a hand automatically on his arm and smiled up at him en
couragingly. She felt fizzy and happy, and was as curious as anyone else about what Rainier was about to say; it surprised her that he was so choked up, but she attributed it less to a quarter century of love than the just dawning realization of what those years had cost.

  “On this day in nineteen fifty-six,” he said again, his voice a bit bolder, “I married Grace Kelly. All the headlines read that this talented American actress had found her prince, but no one seemed to realize that the truth was that I had found my princess. She is the one who kissed me awake.” He looked down at her with an admiring smile and put a hand on his heart as a few guests quietly blew their noses. Grace smiled up at him, surprised that his words could disarm her after all these years. But then he’d had time to plan and write this speech, as he had his letters twenty-six years ago.

  “I was not fully alive, not fully myself, until I married Grace,” he went on, looking back out at the guests in the sparkling candlelight. “For she has brought out the very best in me, and in Monaco. Our country has flourished under her radiant smile, but more importantly, our three beautiful children have her intelligence, her golden heart, her poise, and—yes, dear, I must say it—your grace. . . .” Here he paused for effect, letting their guests pshaw and chuckle appreciatively, though he didn’t look at her as he said it. He cleared his throat again and said, “Since poetry has meant so much to you in recent years, I wanted to close with a few lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Now he looked at her and recited, “‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. / I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of being and ideal grace.”

  She was amazed at how these words moved her, even the emphasis he placed on the word grace. Emotion welled up in her like the old familiar flood, filling her chest and making breath difficult to catch. When he finished, “I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death,” the flood had risen all the way to the crown of her head, and a tear leaked out. All around them were honks and sniffles into tissues, just as there had been on this day plus one twenty-five years ago.