by Kerri Maher
2. What inspired you to write about Grace Kelly? What most surprised you about her life?
I was very lucky to have a mother who loved Hitchcock movies, as well as other terrific midcentury films and stars, like West Side Story, Audrey Hepburn, and—yes!—Grace Kelly. So when I finished The Kennedy Debutante and started thinking about other complicated, intriguing American women from the middle of the twentieth century, Grace Kelly came to my mind very quickly.
As soon as I started digging into the details of her life, I knew she had to be my next subject, especially because so many things about her life are not commonly known—like the fact that her father and brother were Olympic rowers, or that her Academy Award was not for a Hitchcock movie, or that she was nearly engaged to fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Her life was really crying out for a novelization, and one of the other major surprises of my research was to discover that no one else had tried to write about her in this way yet. Lucky me!
3. A lot of the book takes place in the 1950s. What did you find intriguing about that time period?
Well, who doesn’t love a gorgeous fifties dress, worn on a glam night out on the town?
But seriously . . . I was intrigued by the paradoxes between Grace Kelly’s real life during the 1950s and the social mores of the time. She was quite a progressive young woman, living a far more independent life than I ever would have predicted before I started researching her. Even her dating experiences felt familiar to me, and I was the same age she was in New York City in the early 2000s! Similarly, her struggles to define herself as an artist in the theater world of the 1950s felt close to those I had as a writer fifty years later. So I suppose part of what I found intriguing were the ways in which the experiences of a young woman in the 1950s were similar to today.
4. Did you watch all of Grace Kelly’s movies as part of your research? Do you have a favorite Grace Kelly movie?
Oh yes, I did! In fact, it was the first thing I did. I knew I’d be writing about Grace in the summer of 2017, and I sat down and streamed High Society on my laptop while my daughter was at camp. I had to keep reminding myself that it was work.
I’d already seen Rear Window and To Catch a Thief years ago, and more than once, but I watched them again, of course—they are so glamorous and fun—and I enjoyed them even more for knowing something about their fabulous female star. I had also seen Dial M for Murder, but I didn’t remember it well, and so seeing that one felt like the first time. What a tense and thrilling movie, and Grace is the epitome of elegance and strength.
The Country Girl was the biggest surprise for me. If you’d asked me before I started researching this book which movie Grace Kelly had won an Oscar for, I would have guessed Rear Window, her best-known film, in which she really is fantastic as Lisa Fremont. But seeing her play against type as long-suffering, dowdy Georgie Elgin was a revelation (and for what it’s worth, I have a few friends who always thought Judy Garland should have gotten the Oscar for A Star is Born, all of whom had doubts after actually seeing Grace in The Country Girl). I saw her as an actress with depth and range, and was truly sorry her career hadn’t gone on longer to give her the opportunity to take more roles like Georgie Elgin. Grace was similarly complex and surprising as Amy Kane in High Noon.
So I don’t have just one favorite Grace Kelly movie. I prefer to consider her whole oeuvre, which is remarkably diverse, especially considering how small it is. But look how long-lasting her movies have been!
5. Was it daunting to get into the head of such an icon?
For sure. But since my first historical novel was about a Kennedy, I’d had some practice in the art of getting over this particular fear. As two good friends of mine pointed out when I started writing The Kennedy Debutante, the novel is my novel. Yes, it’s about a real person, but writers of fiction are allowed to use their imaginations to fill in the gaps and go places that biographies can’t.
6. Did you do any on-site research?
I was so lucky that I got to travel to Monaco while I was writing, and I had a wonderful time there with my parents and an old college friend. As the anecdote in my Author’s Note points out, I had a very revealing conversation about Grace with a cab driver that fundamentally shaped the novel. I was surprised by other things during my visit—the velvety feel of the air, the blinding quality of the light, the staggering coastal beauty, and the amazing town of La Turbie, just half an hour outside of Monaco. I never could have written the scene of Grace and Rainier before their wedding at the Trophy of Augustus if I hadn’t gone to the place and seen it myself; it never would have occurred to me, in fact. I think that’s the best thing about on-site research: the surprises you encounter on the trip that find their way into the book in the form of important scenes and authentic settings.
7. Did you encounter any stumbling blocks or other surprises in your writing about Grace Kelly?
I think the biggest stumbling block was the research, which I referenced above. It’s so wonderful to be able to read letters or diary entries in a research subject’s own hand, because even when those pages don’t reveal any particularly interesting information, they allow a writer to hear the subject’s authentic voice. Although I wrote to numerous museums and historical societies, I wasn’t able to uncover many documents that Grace herself had written.
Fortunately, there were just enough letters, and enough interviews, and quotes from biographies and the like, that I was able to piece together a coherent sense of the way Grace thought and talked. This yielded a surprise: Grace Kelly, the picture of prim fifties femininity, could get good and angry when a situation called for it, and she wasn’t afraid to swear! She was also a master of impressions, and kept her friends entertained with her mimicry for years, which I found so revealing and charming, I had no trouble using it in scenes in the book.
8. Were there any Starbucks cups in your writing and editing about the middle of the twentieth century?
The phenomenon of the paper coffee cup that was accidentally caught on film during the final scenes of Game of Thrones is one of my favorites (though it turned out not to have been from Starbucks, funnily enough, even though the meme has become “Starbucks cup”), because it shows how easy it is for world builders of any kind (historical, fantasy, science fiction) to slip up with an anachronistic word or scene, an incorrect date, a misspelled name. Historical writers live in fear of making mistakes like this, and yet . . . if David Benioff and D. B. Weiss could make this kind of error, the rest of us can breathe a little easier!
I hope all of my cups have been thrown out by the time the book goes to print, but I can reveal a few that I managed to catch myself. In Chapter 2, I originally had Grace recording her voice on a tape recorder, and in my final draft for my editor, I wondered: is this really possible? And lo and behold, it wasn’t, as personal tape recorders weren’t in common use in 1949. I also had the date of Josephine Baker’s death wrong, and I had a written a scene in which she performed at a Red Cross Gala two years after she was already gone from the world. So, you know, that had to be fixed.
And it would turn out that I had an actual coffee cup problem, too! Those of you who have been to New York City or watched any television drama set there have no doubt seen the famous coffee that comes in blue and white paper cups, procured from carts selling coffee and pastry all over the city. They are so much a part of the city, I assumed they’d been there forever. But it turned out those carts and their cups didn’t become ubiquitous until twenty years later, so I had to alter a few scenes in which Grace drinks coffee from a blue paper cup. Instead, I put bagels or Chock full o’Nuts in her hands—which probably wouldn’t have worked for Sansa Stark but worked like a charm for a struggling actress in 1950.
Questions for Discussion
1. The Girl in White Gloves alternates between the point of view of a young Grace and an older Grace. Why do you think the author decided to tell the story this way?
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sp; 2. Grace and Kell had a lot in common in terms of the way they both strove to win the admiration of their complicated parents. Why do you think Kell fell apart so publicly, while Grace did not?
3. How do you think Grace’s family life affected her romantic choices, and vice versa?
4. What was the role of fashion in Grace Kelly’s life, and what was her attitude toward it? How did fashion help shape her internal character and public persona?
5. What do you think Grace loved so much about acting, on the stage and on-screen?
6. How many Grace Kelly movies have you seen? What is your favorite, and why?
7. Would you have made the same choices as Grace in 1956 when she married Prince Rainier, and again in 1962 when she stayed in the marriage after the Marnie disappointment?
8. If Grace had lived to an older age (she would be ninety-one in 2020), what do you think her life might have looked like?
9. If Grace had been born twenty or forty years later (she was born in 1929, so that means 1949 and 1969), how different do you think her life and choices might have been? Do you think today’s women are empowered to make different choices than the ones Grace made?
10. What struggles does Prince Rainier appear to be wrestling with that impact his relationship with Grace?
11. Before reading The Girl in White Gloves, if you knew anything about Grace from biographies or articles you’ve read, how did reading this fictional account of her interior life change or validate what you thought you knew about her? What surprised you about her life in this novel?
12. Many people look at movie stars and other celebrities as untouchables whose lives are virtually unrelatable; but as the epigraph suggests, Grace Kelly was very much a real woman, and wanted to be seen as such. Grace struggled with this paradox her whole life. What do you and the Grace Kelly portrayed in this novel have in common?
13. In many ways, Grace Kelly and the characters she played on-screen helped define midcentury American femininity. In what ways did her real life fulfill those norms, and in what ways did it defy them?
About the Author
KERRI MAHER is the author of The Kennedy Debutante, which People magazine described as “a riveting reimagining of a true tale of forbidden love,” and This Is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World under the name Kerri Majors. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded YARN, an award-winning literary journal of short-form YA writing. A writing professor for many years, she now writes full-time and lives with her daughter and dog in a leafy suburb west of Boston, Massachusetts.
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