Searching for Grace Kelly at the Michener Museum

Greeting visitors is a giant print of the picture from the famous 1955 Life cover, Kelly’s body angled inside the exquisite aqua dress, one slender arm across her chest. And beside the 1954 Oscar for her role in The Country Girl, the dress itself (behind a protective case) provides a real-life close-up of the faded silken sweep of its bodice, bustle and train.

This exhibit, which claims to go “beyond the icon,” features an array of Kelly’s dresses, from movie costumes to her trousseau to her extravagant Monte Carlo costume gowns, plus a few personal items and accessories. The latter include the brown leather Hermès bag that was eventually named for her, and her gilt-edged Catholic “Bride’s Manual” prayer book, which she carried on her wedding day after the MGM studio wardrobe department doused it in silk, lace and seed pearls to match her gown.

Princess Di checks in

The astonishingly beautiful blonde herself (whose “figure and features exemplified a feminine ideal of the 1950s”) sparkles in photos and footage on every wall, wearing the stunning outfits now on display.

The show also includes a small collection of original letters from 20th-Century luminaries like Princess Diana and Clementine Churchill, as well as a love-struck telegram from her husband-to-be, Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Queen Elizabeth also weighs in with this contribution from 1980: “Thank you so much for the charming pictures of your sweet children.”

Those who worship Grace Kelly’s fairy-tale image will no doubt revel in this rosy extravaganza. But an exhibit that promises to reveal the real Grace Kelly does little more than cater to her gorgeous myth.

‘Real life’ begins

After several rooms of dreamy inscriptions about Kelly’s “meteoric” Hollywood rise under the tutelage of Alfred Hitchcock, her eternally perfect poise, her captivating beauty and kindness, her royal wedding, her philanthropy and her perfect devotion as a wife and mother, it’s impossible not to wonder whether a real person breathed beneath these heaps of projected feminine ideals. No life lived in such a relentless global spotlight far from home could have been as perfect as it looked.

The exhibit quotes Kelly herself as saying, “My real life began with my marriage.” But a show that displays an X-ray of Kelly’s wedding shoes, to reveal the penny hidden in the sole for good luck, says precious little about the husband and the marriage whose trappings consumed Kelly at age 26.

We learn when and how the actress met Rainier, that they exchanged letters in the year before they were married, and that Kelly rode in state to meet him in Monaco on an eight-day transatlantic voyage with an entourage of 80 people, not including journalists. But we learn much more about Kelly’s trousseau (she purchased 40 outfits and 30 pairs of shoes in 11 days before sailing for Europe) than we do about what she saw in the prince.

Philandering husband

Other sources imply trouble in paradise. A biography.com take on Kelly’s life casually notes that Rainier banned all of her films in Monaco. According to the tabloid Daily Mail, a coming biopic starring Nicole Kidman (over heated objections by Monaco’s royal family) portrays the prince as a philandering verbal abuser who made Kelly desperate to escape back to the States and the career she had loved but kept her in the palace by threatening her with the loss of her children. The film’s producers claim this portrayal of the marriage is supported by reams of firsthand interviews with palace eyewitnesses; the Michener exhibit’s relative silence on Rainier makes me wonder.

The exhibit also implies that it was love at first sight, neglecting to mention that Rainier needed a wife in a hurry because, without a legitimate heir, Monaco would have lost its independence. Kelly obligingly became pregnant on the honeymoon.

Even Kelly’s devoted groupies may notice the strains in the museum’s sunny narrative. The show segues from paeans to Kelly’s acting career and her work ethic to applauding her for rejecting it to become a princess. “Her desire to find love and start a family was strong enough to entice her away from the short-lived glories of stardom,” gushes a placard.

But a wedding isn’t a marriage, and a wardrobe isn’t a woman. Was it the woman who made the clothes? Or did the clothes make the woman? Did this woman of such luminous talent and class ever long to return to her career or yearn for a respite from her ceremonial role on her prince’s arm? This sanitized version of Grace Kelly’s life, told through her designer shells, yields no clue.