BOOK OF THE DAY: STEPHEN DIXONreviews High Society: Grace Kelly and HollywoodBy Donald Spoto Hutchinson, 236pp, £18.99
DURING SEVERAL interviews in the mid-1970s, Princess Grace of Monaco told Donald Spoto of certain events from her Hollywood career and asked him to keep the information under wraps until 25 years after her death. In view of allegations that have long circulated about her unbridled sexual appetites and the vast list of stars she was said to have bedded, some might gleefully suppose that her conversations with Spoto ran along the lines of: “Actually, it’s all true.”
Not so. The princess, who died in 1982, has been grossly maligned by less scrupulous and trustworthy biographers, huffs Spoto, and her love life was unexceptional for a healthy, beautiful young woman in the 1950s. What a relief. Detailing the sexual activities of long-departed celebrities has some morbid fascination, naturally, but the rattle of copulating skeletons can become wearisome.
One wonders why she asked for the 25-year embargo, since what she told Spoto was mostly social chit-chat and some mundane comments about her attitudes to Hollywood and stardom.
Spoto’s reverent approach to the memory of Grace Kelly is understandable when you know the story behind it. A Catholic theologian, former monk and world-class gossip, he is the highly successful biographer of Audrey Hepburn, St Francis of Assisi, Ingrid Bergman, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, Jesus, Laurence Olivier and many others. He has written several bestselling books on Alfred Hitchcock, and is not usually known for a reluctance to dish the dirt.
But Kelly helped kickstart his career when he was an obscure would-be author in 1975, trying to research his first book on Hitchcock. He asked to see her, expecting a polite brush-off, as she spoke to few journalists. To his amazement she not only invited him to Monaco but offered to write the foreword. Her participation was a big factor in the success of The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, and Spoto and Kelly remained friends until she died.
The debt of gratitude he must feel soaked into every page of this book, and the story he tells of her Hollywood years, familiar as it is, still has something of the magic of a fairytale to it.
Born into a wealthy Irish- American family in Philadelphia, Kelly became a top New York model before venturing into television as an actor.
Hollywood soon came sniffing. Her first substantial role, as the pacifist wife of Gary Cooper in Fred Zinnemann's 1952 western, High Noon, shot her to stardom. This was consolidated when she played opposite Clark Gable the following year in Mogambo.
Both leading men were much older, and this was echoed in her private life. Kelly tended towards older partners, sometimes married or emerging from messy divorces. But there were nowhere near as many of them as legend would have it, Spoto insists.
Her main fame – apart from her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956 – lies in the three films she made for Hitchcock: Dial M for Murderand Rear Window, both 1953, and To Catch a Thiefin 1955. Hitchcock was obsessed by her and spent the rest of his career trying, and failing, to find another Grace Kelly.
An indifferent actor but an enchanting screen presence, Kelly made just 11 films, yet she is ranked as the 13th greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute. While Spoto adds hardly anything new, his book is an agreeable nod to a gracious old friend who once did him a big favour.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist