John Walsh writes a hymn to Hollywood's eternal goddess
It started in 1966. It was a moonlit night somewhere in the sultry Mediterranean, and Grace Kelly and I were snuggled together at the end of our little yacht.
She was wearing a pink cashmere sweater (a bit posh, I thought, for crewing a small boat, but she was like
that) and I had brought my squeezebox along.
She lay with her head in my lap as I played Cole Porter's True Love on the old melodeon, and we sang the last bit as a duet, three tones apart.
She sang like a little girl, but I had no idea she could sing at all, so I was entranced. And she did something during the song that was very characteristic.
She reached up and drew her finger up my cheek and down my nose and over my lower lip as if to mess up the singing of True Love, as if it was too perfect. But nothing could mess up the moment with the moonlit yacht, the squeezebox, Grace in her pink cashmere and me. It was perfect.
It was one of the great dreams of my unconscious life. I'd watched High Society on TV the night before - a Sunday, I remember - and all the following day at school, aged 12, I couldn't get her face out of my head, nor the lyrics of the song out of my heart:
"For you and I have a guardian angel/On high, with nothing to do/But to give to you, as you give to me/Love forever true."
High Society was, to be cruelly objective, a stilted and inferior musical remake of The Philadelphia Story.
It suffered from one major flaw, which was to cast Bing Crosby as CK Dexter Haven, the raffish, sardonic ex-husband of the society beauty Tracey Lord. In the original, he was played by Cary Grant.
In my man-of-the-world view at 12, Bing Crosby was obviously wrong - hopelessly, absurdly wrong for the part - too old, too puckish, too saurian, too charmless. Nothing like me.
Grace would never have married him, not in a million years. Which is why, in my dreams, I had no trouble booting him off the yacht called True Love and substituting myself. There I remained, in a little dream of romance with the divine Ms Kelly all through my teens and well beyond.
And that moment when her finger traced a line over my/Crosby's face never went away.
She has never gone far from public consciousness, although she starred in only 11 films in a brief career lasting six years. It abruptly ceased in 1956 when she married Prince Rainier III and became Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco.
After their wedding, the prince banned any screenings of her films in Monaco, and vetoed any future offers of roles - even from Hitchcock (who wanted her for the lead in Marnie).
She became a semi-willing prisoner of a rich principality, confining her energies to garden clubs, charitable works, poetry readings and narrations of inoffensive, child-friendly documentaries.
After her tragic death in 1982, biographers luxuriated in the rumours of sexual impropriety that had surrounded Grace Kelly from her early 20s.
She was said to have gone to bed with the leading man in every one of her movies: Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Ray Milland, James Stewart, Bing Crosby, William Holden ...
As time went on, the line-up of supposed lovers varied (Grant and Stewart were, in fact, never more than friends to her) but others were added - such as Fred Zinnemann, her first director, in High Noon.
When her affair with the married Milland became public, she was denounced as "a nymphomaniac" by the gossip writer Hedda Hopper.
And just before her wedding in 1956, her own mother, Margaret Kelly, obligingly blabbed to the press about her daughter's celebrity conquests.
Last year, a new biography by Donald Spoto, High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood, attempted to whitewash Grace's reputation and deny most of the rumours of off-screen rampancy.
It was roundly mocked by The New Yorker's film critic, Anthony Lane.
"If this trend continues," he observed, "we can look forward to the life of, say, Lady Gaga, expressed in the form of a two-volume memoir, compiled by a loyal friend, in which a discreet narrative is linked by her personal correspondence."
Saint or compulsive shagger, she unquestionably remains a star.
Alongside the books and exhibitions, the internet is crammed with personal tributes, edited by doting fans, to appropriate soundtracks (She, Amazing Grace).
If anything, her fresh-faced beauty and elegance seems bang up to date in the Tens. What was it about her that turned us on and still does?
Well, she was, without question, the most beautiful actress of Hollywood's golden age.
Who would disagree with that? Marilyn, Liz, Vivien, Ava, Rita, Lauren and Lana all had their good sides, their electric scenes and blow-up-your-skirt moments; but nobody shone like Grace Kelly.
She looked best with all her hair brushed back from her wide Teutono-Celtic face - one set of grandparents was German, the other Irish - to reveal those proudly matchless features.
She could never look ordinary: as her head turned during the action on screen, every frame looked like a perfect still. She moved across the floor like a dancer. But she still looked human.
No major-league sex symbol had such a cheery smile as Grace, or such imminent tearfulness in her eyes.
Nobody possessed the same combination of dazzle and self-effacement, confidence and hunger, class and trashiness.
In her first decent role, in Mogambo (1953), all these elements were on display.
John Ford's steamy African jungle romance, in which Grace and Ava Gardner vie for the attentions of Clark Gable's great white hunter, is a vastly silly film (check out the terrifying Battle of the Gorillas, in which our gun-toting heroes bravely advance upon back-projected footage of screeching silverbacks) but Kelly's emotional development is riveting.
British, prim as a governess and formal as a three-tier cake-stand, she's a bit of an unexplored territory, emotionally speaking.
Alfred Hitchcock spotted her dual quality when he saw her screen test for a film she never made, Taxi, and promptly cast her in Dial M for Murder.
In an early love scene, she wears an amazing strapless couture gown, her blonde hair is fixed in a complex Gordian knot, and her blue eyes sparkle; she looks unassailably perfect, even when passionately entwined with her lover.
Once assailed by the murderer, her body squirming and flailing in her diaphanous nightgown, her hair tousled and unkempt, she looks, I'm shocked to reveal, even more beautiful.
It's one of Hitchcock's flattest and least inspired works, but how we yearn to comfort the dazed, bewildered Margot Wendice and save her from the electric chair.
Hitchcock never roughed her up again; he seemed content just to gaze at her perfection.
The defining moment of directorial admiration comes in Rear Window, when we first meet Kelly's character, society flit-about Lisa Fremont.
As the camera tracks across the apartment where James Stewart sits dozing in a wheelchair after breaking his leg on a journalistic assignment, we see a shadow steal across his face.
He wakes, smiles helplessly and we see the object of his attention as Grace Kelly's face moves in on his. Hitchcock photographs the kiss sideways-on, to catch her immaculate profile, and slows the camera down as though in abject, gob-smacked worship.
I'm not aware of the director using such deliberate slow-mo in any other movie. It really is homage to a goddess.
She was a terrific kisser. She kissed like she really meant it. In Mogambo, she snogs Clark Gable so enthusiastically that he looks positively alarmed.
In The Bridges at Toko-Ri, she kisses her doomed husband (William Holden) goodbye with such ferocity you'd swear they were having a real-life affair (indeed they were).
The best kiss, because so tantalisingly deferred, comes in To Catch a Thief, the last film she made with Hitchcock.
Kelly plays Frances, the virginal-but-sassy spoilt daughter of the jewel-wearing millionairess Jessie Stephens (Jessie Royce Landis).
They meet Cary Grant (playing jewel thief John Robie) for drinks one evening with their insurance assessor.
Throughout their exchanges, he never once looks at Grace, who maintains a reserved, glacial silence.
When her mother demands to know why he hasn't made a pass at her daughter, Grant says, guardedly: "Very pretty ... Quietly attractive."
Later, he sees mother and daughter to their hotel rooms.
The mother says good night.
Grace opens her own room door, enters, turns - then glides forward and kisses Grant firmly on the lips, as her arm encircles his neck and her hand kneads his shoulder.
Then she withdraws and coolly closes the door.
It is, I fear, a filmic moment that, for some foolishly impressionable men, rendered real life oddly disappointing thereafter.
What was the thing she had about fingers? For a woman who spent much of her public life in white gloves, Grace Kelly was very tactile in the digit department.
Her fingers are always stroking, caressing, kneading.
Crosby's lip, Grant's shoulder, Gable's balcony ... In the famous seduction scene in To Catch a Thief, against a cascade of night-time fireworks, Grace tries to make Grant talk about his passion for diamonds, although both of them are evidently thinking about something else.
There's a disturbingly sexy moment when she kisses his fingers in turn, then folds them under her necklace in a frank invitation to take her, ahem, jewels right now.
We never, thank goodness, saw her do more than kiss her on-screen lovers.
It wouldn't have been relevant in male fantasy-land.
Because the idea of actually having sex with Grace Kelly was almost unimaginable: it would spoil the bliss of simply gazing at her face and her long, slender frame, watching her glide about the room and listening to her well-bred, liquid, cooing, slightly over-deliberate voice.
But what sustains down the years since her brief, flaming film career is a quality beyond physical appeal. It was her evident love of life. She glowed with joie de vivre.
James Stewart, in her funeral eulogy, said: "Grace brought into my life, as she brought into yours, a soft, warm light every time I saw her, and every time I saw her was a holiday of its own."
One of her timeless attractions is that she clearly loved the company of men, liked to be charmed and touched, and people whom she met understood her pleasure, and they all wanted to do things for her.
If that made us all courtiers to a resplendent queen, that's fine with us, who fell in love with her at 12 or 13 and never quite got over it - who can always feel Grace's finger tracing a tender line down our cheeks as we gaze into her peerless blue eyes.
- INDEPENDENT
GRACE KELLY'S ROAD TO ROYALTY
Grace Kelly was 26 when she married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956.
She had met the prince the year before at the Cannes Film Festival, when the actress headed the US delegation.
Back in America, Kelly began work on The Swan, in which she played a princess and privately began writing to Rainier.
In December 1955, Rainier toured the US. Asked if he was pursuing a wife, he answered: "No."
Asked "If you were pursuing a wife, what kind would you like?" Rainier answered, "I don't know - the best".
The press hailed the nuptials: "The Wedding of the Century."
Alfred Hitchcock remarked he was "very happy that Grace has found herself such a good part".
Next month, a show Grace Kelly: Style Icon opens at London's Victoria & Albert Museum. It runs until 26 September.