The Girl in White Gloves

by Kerri Maher

  With a hand on her heart, Grace stood and kissed Rainier, and their own tears mingled where their lips met, sealing or melting promises. She could no longer honestly say she knew the difference.

  Epilogue

  SEPTEMBER 13, 1982

  She hadn’t felt this good in ages. True, the busy weekend with visiting friends at Roc Agel had had its tensions, what with Stéphanie declaring she wanted to give up fashion-design school for race-car driving with her boyfriend, Paul Belmondo, but Tuesday dawned quiet and bright at their cottage on the hill. Everyone else having left, at last it was just Grace and Rainier, Stéphie, and Albie. She and Rainier stood in the kitchen and drank coffee together, and she said to him as he stewed about Stéphanie again, “We’ve been here before, darling.” Putting a hand on his arm, she assured him, “We’ll get through it again.” And she believed it. He was the same man he’d always been, but she felt different. This time, this crisis, would be different.

  Life seemed miraculously full of possibilities that morning. Once Rainier left for the palace and a full day of meetings, the house was silent except for the chirps and trills of a few birds outside. With her second cup of coffee warming her hands, Grace padded barefoot onto the patio and breathed in the scent of rosemary and lavender, felt the gritty stones beneath her toes, and let her eyes rest on the wildflowers dappled by the morning light. I caught this morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon . . . Grace often found herself reciting this opening to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem when she caught the serene, spectacular beauty of morning here, her favorite spot on earth. For it truly was her favorite, and it gave her pause about her plans. Roc Agel, its flowers and its peace, had been her escape for more than two decades.

  But there could—would—be other gardens, other places where the sun filtered through the trees just so. She recalled the immensity of the California sky, and her breath caught.

  She showered, then dressed. She was starting to reconcile herself to her fuller face, and she was looking forward to giving another poetry reading at Windsor Castle later in the week, and seeing Gwen and Diana again; she thought she also might join Caroline at the spa where she was relaxing in the English countryside.

  Jaybird had even called her with news of a promising script; she’d read a few he’d sent in the past year, but none of them had felt worth the fallout. But she had a feeling about this next one—there was just something about the way Jay talked about it. She could wait, though. If she’d learned that much in twenty-six years of marriage, it was how to wait. She had plenty of time, after all. She was only, nearly, fifty-three.

  Grace loaded the backseat of their Rover with dresses and boxes of hats, most of them new and needing adjusting in Paris. By the time she was finished and Stéphie was groggily ready, there was room for only the two of them in the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Albie was still asleep, bless him.

  “I’ll drive to the palace,” she told the chauffeur.

  “I cannot let you do that, Madam,” he replied.

  “You can and you will,” she said as kindly and firmly as she could, knowing that had this been Fordie, she’d have figured out a way to make room. She wanted to be with only family that day, and the full backseat was a convenient excuse to drive with just Stéphanie, to whom she wanted to speak privately so she could better understand why her daughter wanted to give up something for which she had such gifts—fashion—for something so reckless. She knew a thing or two about shortsighted decisions.

  “Are you sure you want to drive, Mom?” Stéphanie asked, blowing on her mug of fresh coffee as she settled into the seat next to Grace.

  “Of course,” said Grace, counseling herself not to tell Stéphie to be careful with the mug of hot liquid. She’s not a child anymore, Grace reflected, admiring her daughter’s fine features and tanned skin. “I don’t get a chance to spend time with you alone often enough.”

  Her daughter, understandably reticent after a weekend of being regaled by one parent with all the reasons why race-car driving was inappropriate for a girl and a princess, only sighed.

  Grace turned the key in the ignition and slowly drove onto the road. The views on the way back to Monaco were spectacular, with glimpses of the Trophée des Alpes in La Turbie and the Mediterranean coastline with its dramatic slopes and medieval towns, but Grace kept her eyes fastened to the asphalt. Even after twenty-six years, Rainier’s prediction that she’d be comfortable driving this road had never quite come true. The hairpin turns were just a little too steep for her to ever completely relax. Still, she’d driven the route countless times, and she felt confident enough.

  “It hardly seems like back-to-school time, does it?” said Grace, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “You always say that, Mom,” her younger daughter teased, and Grace stole a sideways glance to see she was smiling. Then, imitating her mother with perfect pitch, Stéphie went on. “Oh, in Philadelphia, the leaves will just be starting to change color, and the scent of sharp pencils would be in the air.” She laughed, then said in her own voice, “I should think you’d be used to the heat here by now!”

  “You would think that, wouldn’t you?” Grace said, relieved that the two of them were settling into the drive so quickly. This had been the right decision. “But the sunlight here has always been a bit much for me, to be honest,” Grace told her daughter.

  Stéphanie shook her head and giggled, and Grace remained silent. Maybe she wouldn’t bring up Paul or racing after all. She asked about her plans for her school week in Paris instead.

  As her daughter talked, Grace began to feel strange. She’d been having headaches lately, but this was different. Her pulse quickened, almost as though she was nervous about something, but she wasn’t that concerned about the drive. And everything with Stéphie was fine at the moment—they weren’t anywhere near a fight.

  Then she began to feel hot. Damn menopause, she cursed to herself. Soon, she could hardly focus on what Stéphanie was saying; it was as though she’d entered a kind of echo chamber, and her daughter was in another one far away.

  When her vision began to blur despite the fact that she was wearing her glasses, Grace began to panic. “Mom! Slow down!” she heard Stéphanie shout.

  “I . . . I can’t,” she replied, hearing her voice full of fear and confusion, again from far away. Her foot was on the brake. Wasn’t it? But they seemed only to be going faster.

  “Mom!”

  Her daughter’s scream was the last thing she heard, her daughter’s fingers brushing hers on the steering wheel was the last human contact she felt, as the car lurched off the road. The clear blue sky—it’s been just as vast here, too, all along—seemed to engulf them.

  Like a bird, Grace’s body flew free, losing all contact with the seat just before everything slammed down with a force and a sound she’d thought only movies could make.

  And then, all was dark.

  Author’s Note

  I was lucky enough to get to travel to Monaco while I was researching and writing this novel, and one of the most important and entirely unexpected moments came at the very end, in the cab ride from my hotel in the Larvotto to the airport in Nice. I got to chatting with the driver, a native Monégasque, and when he asked what had brought me to Monaco, I told him about this book.

  “Oh,” he sighed, clearly under the weight of some heavy memories, “the day she died was terrible for Monaco.”

  I asked him to explain, and he went on to tell the story of how he had been a young chauffeur in his late teens the day it happened, and how sad her death had made him. “We loved her,” he said, speaking for his principality.

  I ventured to ask if that had always been true, for I knew of her struggle to fit the role she had married into.

  With a pooh-pooh frown and a casual wave of the hand that only Europeans seem to be able to carry off, he said, “But of course
in the beginning, we did not know what to think of her. But once we knew her, we could not help but love her.”

  We could not help but love her. His breathless, heartfelt statement stuck with me through the next drafts of this book, as I explored the many ways in which Grace loved and was loved in return.

  I like to think there is a continuum in the genre of historical fiction, and on one end are the works of pure fiction (with made-up characters and the made-up events of their lives) set against the backdrop of real-life settings and locations, often with magical elements (think Outlander). On the other end are novels that stay so close to the real events of real people’s lives, the books are often mistaken for biographies even though plenty of imagination went into the emotions, actions, and reactions of the characters, who happen to have names everyone recognizes (think The Paris Wife or even my last book, The Kennedy Debutante).

  Though The Girl in White Gloves stars such a real-life person, and delves into the well-known events of her much-documented life, I can assure you that this novel falls much closer to the middle of the continuum than the near-biography end—despite the first of the two suggestive epigraphs that open the book, which I accepted as a kind of dare.

  I took many liberties in the writing of this novel, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, since I was writing scenes from thirty-three years of Grace’s life, I needed to implement some dramatic compression strategies, which meant making manageable the truly staggering cast of characters who were her friends, colleagues, and employees. To this end, I created composite characters with fictional names like her assistant Marta, and even her childhood friend Maree Frisby, who was one of her bridesmaids and a real person, but who in this book is a combination of other bridesmaids and childhood friends I discovered in my research.

  I also—ahem—adjusted the time line in a few instances to suit my dramatic needs. For instance, Albie started Amherst in 1977, not 1976, but I couldn’t resist the (entirely made-up) conversation he had with his mother about Star Wars that could only have taken place in seventy-six; in that same fateful year, I had Caroline meet Philippe Junot a bit earlier than she actually did. And Grace likely started on the board of Fox before she took the stage in the Edinburgh Festival, but it made more sense for me to reverse them. Similarly, I took liberties with her extremely busy comings and goings—for instance, sometimes she didn’t go back to New York City between movies in 1954, but to keep the pace of the novel going, I needed her to be with Oleg and other characters at certain intervals. In my defense, I’ll say that exact dates were hard to come by in any case since she didn’t leave behind a diary I could check.

  Nor was I able to lay my hands on many letters to or from her—and yes, that means that the letters between her and Rainier are all fictionalized. They did court each other in letters for the second half of 1955, but those letters appear to be lost, so I wasn’t able to read any. Despite writing to numerous historical societies, museums, biographers, and relations, I wasn’t able to find many letters at all in her own hand. The best of the bunch were in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. However, thanks to the work of biographers who interviewed her directly, knew her personally, and/or gained access to correspondence no longer in the public domain, I was able to piece together a coherent picture of Grace and cut through the tremendous amount of speculation about her life. To that end, the most essential biographies I read—and would recommend to anyone looking for more information about Grace—were J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Once Upon a Time: Behind the Fairy Tale of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, Donald Spoto’s High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly, and Judith Balaban Quine’s The Bridesmaids.

  Since I suspect many readers are wondering about the romantic relationships from before her marriage, I want to say that like everything else in this book, I very much had to choose which relationships to portray and how to portray them. There weren’t any flies on the walls during her dates, and the etiquette of her time kept her from divulging too much to even her closest friends (a difference between her life and those of modern city girls like Carrie Bradshaw that I have to thank Judith Quine for illuminating in her book). So I admit to a certain amount of speculation, and picking and choosing which partners to explore in the interest of a coherent and suspenseful narrative arc.

  I suspect some modern readers raised an eyebrow at Grace’s relationship with Fordie, the Kelly family chauffeur—a real person whom Grace loved and respected. I thought a great deal about whether, then how, to portray their friendship, which was imbalanced in all the ways that make twenty-first-century readers uncomfortable (including me!). I was determined not to be anachronistic, however, and I wanted to include Fordie because he was an essential person in her life, and I wanted to do it in a way that felt true to the times and to Grace’s character. History isn’t always a comfortable place to be, and I hope this relationship, and any other behaviors and attitudes of these mid-twentieth-century characters that might cause us discomfort, will spark productive discussion.

  Perhaps the most illustrative fictional moment is the final one, in which Grace has a medical event that experts describe as something like a stroke and drives off the road. No one can truly know what she thought, or noticed, in those horrible final seconds of consciousness. But sometimes a writer gets to give her character a gift, and mine to Grace is a final sensation of freedom and theatricality, a dramatization of Georgie Elgin’s words that became for me a guiding light in this novel, that “There’s nothing quite so mysterious and silent as a dark theater, a night without a star.”

  Acknowledgments

  Mom and Dad, it was such fun touring Monaco and sharing the first drafts of this novel with you—I feel lucky that you get as excited about my subjects as I do, and want to be in on the adventure. Here’s to many more! And, Elena, thank you for your energy and endless inspiration, and for the huge compliment of wanting to write a book with your mom.

  Thanks to my many incredible friends on whom I leaned for moral support during the writing of this book, which also happened to be a tumultuous time in my life. To those friends who also read drafts, often more than one, and sometimes on a tight deadline, I’m deeply grateful for the insights and long conversations that arose from the time you took to read Grace’s story: Danielle Fodor, Lori Hess, Elise Hooper, Diana Renn, Laura White, and Kip Wilson. I’d like to give a special shout-out to Alyson Muzilla as well as Ellen, Tony, and Derek Spaldo, who are not only amazing readers but actors who reality checked my theater scenes. And Mike Harvkey—I owe much of my knowledge of classic Hollywood to you and your suggestions for where to take myself for drinks. And thanks once again to Margaret O’Connor (and your cat Grace Kelly!), for helping to make this dream come true.

  For their assistance in helping me locate—or sometimes confirm the absence of—Grace Kelly’s letters and other written materials, thank you to Mark Vieira; Louise Hilton of the Margaret Herrick Library; Thomas Fouillerion of the Archives of the Palace of Monaco; Cady Miriam at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives; Alex Bartlett at the Chestnut Hill Conservancy; the East Falls Historical Society; and the Ocean City Historical Museum.

  Kate Seaver, my wonderful editor, thank you for your thoughtful suggestions, which vastly improved the book; I so enjoy our conversations about Grace, summer vacations, and conference fun. I look forward to our next books together! Dasia Payne: this book owes a debt of gratitude to your keen eyes and incisive feedback at a critical juncture. And Kevan Lyon, wow do I feel lucky to find myself on your agency’s crew, and thank you for reading this book and providing feedback and guidance.

  To my amazing team at Berkley—Diana Franco, Danielle Kier, Sarah Blumenstock, Fareeda Bullert, and Mary Geren—thank you so much for helping me build a readership, and for patiently answering my many, many questions about the publication process. Craig Burke, Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Jin Yu, Ivan Held, Claire Zion,
and Christine Ball—I still have to pinch myself to remind myself that this is really happening, that I really am on your team. Vikki Chu, your cover design is beyond my wildest dreams, and seeing it for the first time was the most fun thing that happened to me at Disneyland. Heartfelt thanks to Frank Walgren, Lynsey Griswold, and Kayley Hoffman for setting my mind at ease with thorough edits.

  And to all of you who are holding this book in your hands, THANK YOU. If you’re also blogging, tweeting, bookstagramming, reviewing, and/or telling your friends about The Girl in White Gloves (and/or if you did it for The Kennedy Debutante), I’m more grateful than I can possibly express in words. You’re the reason I get to do this amazing work, the reason any writer can see their name in print. So, seriously, thank you for reading and for spreading the book love far and wide.

  Readers Guide

  The Girl in White Gloves

  Kerri Maher

  Interview with Kerri Maher

  1. What was different about writing this book compared to writing your debut, The Kennedy Debutante?

  Well, to start with, Grace Kelly didn’t leave behind diaries like Kick Kennedy did! In fact, there was much less primary source material overall for Grace than for Kick. As a result, I had to closely read many biographies in a comparative way, to help me see the patterns and sort out what seemed like the facts from the vast amount of tabloid fodder and speculation about her life.

  The other major difference was that I wanted to write about a much longer period of time, to cover all of Grace Kelly’s adult life, from 1949–1982, whereas in The Kennedy Debutante, I only wrote about a six-year period. I also took a dual-timeline approach to Grace’s story, which enables readers to see an older Grace Kelly from the very beginning of the book, while Kick’s story is told in five chronologically unfolding parts. The dual timeline presented some structural challenges that were well worth it in the end, because I always envisioned older and younger Grace in a kind of dialogue with each other throughout the book—as it is in real life, I think. We’re all working through certain events and wounds of our past in our later years, and one of the challenges of the novelist is to show a character doing that kind of reckoning over the course of a life.