MONACO: Moon Over Monte Carlo

• Share

The Grace Kelly Story, as Hollywood might have called it, was the stuff that celluloid dreams are made of, but the reality kept threatening to get in the way of the romance. With lovely Grace herself to play the part of the screen-star daughter of an American bricklayer turned millionaire, and Monaco's own Serene Highness, Prince Rainier III. as her handsome betrothed, the plot was the kind that producers understand and fans love. But Hollywood, Philadelphia and Ruritania are far easier to mix on film than they are in fact: so pat a plot raised the question whether two hearts were meeting or merely two dazzling luminaries being drawn to each other. The gala celebrations at Monaco last week began to sound like a Graustark script cynically brought up to date by Ben Hecht. Or so it seemed in the beginning.

The Crowd Descends. Prince Rainier's tiny, near-bankrupt gambling principality was suddenly swelled by an invasion of wildly ill-assorted guests, invited and uninvited: friends and members of the bride's and groom's own families, the Kellys from Philadelphia, the Grimaldis and Polignacs from divers corners of Europe, a kaleidoscopic assortment of celebrities from both sides of the Atlantic, ballet troupes from London and Paris, sailors from visiting warships, a scattering of second-class princelings, an unidentified covey of international thieves (who got away with a whopping $150,000 during the festivities), and some 1,600 accredited representatives of the world's press, mostly self-centered and angry.

Fighting bravely to retain their franchise, the moviemakers—in the person of a top M-G-M costume designer—had provided suitable wedding costumes, but everywhere the actors in the play were forgetting their lines and ad-libbing with dire results. Europe's reigning royalty, to a man, refused to show up at all. Hordes of jostled press photographers, miffed at having to wait for hours in the rain while luckier invited guests danced away the night at the famed International Sporting Club, openly booed and hissed the bridal pair when they at last appeared.

Somewhere in the ruckus. Britain's Randolph Churchill picked a fight with his wealthy countrywoman, Lady Docker, and screamed aloud: "I didn't come here to meet vulgar people like the Kellys." A learned representative of the French Academy, Europe's high temple of culture, launched a formal complaint when Monaco's Prince refused to permit the reading of an ode especially written for the occasion by Academician Jean Cocteau, on the grounds that it was too effusive. Highballing away the nights and days in their hotel suites just as though they were in the good old Bellevue-Stratford, Jack Kelly's pals from Philly sent him practical jokes in the form of telegrams. "Report back to the Palace, Kelly," said one. "Your furlough is up." President Eisenhower's personal representative, Hotelman Conrad Hilton, on arrival brushed aside the suggestion that he might want to build a Monaco Hilton: "We never build in resorts or small towns."