The Bridesmaid's Daughter

returned to New York from her triumph in Hollywood, she no longer pulled up in her cab at East Sixty-sixth Street and the Manhattan House. Two months earlier, she had moved out of the building and into the new apartment she’d purchased for herself, in a grand old building on Fifth Avenue at Eightieth Street. Grace was a wealthy movie star now, and she needed a home that was more in keeping with the woman she had become. Unlike the Manhattan House, with its low ceilings and modest-sized rooms, the apartment on Fifth Avenue was vast and ostentatious, spanning the entire seventh floor of the building. The ceilings soared; the living room boasted wide views across the park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Grace was now mistress of a domain that included four bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, and a library. Although her mother had chosen the drab furnishings at her Manhattan House apartment, Grace declined Mrs. Kelly’s help this time. Instead, she hired the society decorator George Stacey, and with Stacey’s help, she outfitted her new home with soft silk rugs and French antique furniture in shades of sky blue, ivory, and gold.

For the first time since Carolyn and Grace moved to New York in 1947, they were no longer neighbors. Grace had only moved a mile away, but to Carolyn, the new apartment on Fifth Avenue seemed a universe away from their familiar corner of the Upper East Side in the Sixties. Since leaving the Barbizon, Carolyn had always followed in Grace’s footsteps, to Manhattan House, to premieres and parties, but now she recognized that her friend had crossed an invisible barrier beyond which Carolyn couldn’t trespass. Grace was famous, but Carolyn would never be. Carolyn’s face might appear in magazines, but no one knew her name. She didn’t have any lines or awards. She was a mute, a mannequin, a coat hanger, only a little more animated than the life-sized dolls that stood in the windows of the department stores.

She knew her place.

That January, Carolyn appeared in a Viceroy cigarette ad, and for the rest of 1955, her modeling jobs arrived steadily. It was no longer the rush of work she’d experienced during her early years, but she was back in the pages of Seventeen, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Charm, and Modern Bride. Malcolm was also faring better. He had recovered from his illness, and he had been offered a new job as associate director of marketing at the McCann Erickson advertising agency. The new job made Malcolm happy—and although Carolyn was relieved that the burden of supporting the family no longer fell exclusively to her, it was hard not to miss him when, in the evenings, she found herself alone at the Manhattan House, the children sleeping quietly in their rooms, waiting for her husband to come home from long evenings entertaining his clients.

Twenty blocks north, Grace also found herself waiting—but for whom, she didn’t yet know. At the age of twenty-five, she was still single. The relationship with Oleg Cassini had stalled after her parents had intervened (Cassini, like Don Richardson before him, was a divorcé, and therefore considered unsuitable by Mr. and Mrs. Kelly). While Grace had been away making movies, it seemed, every one of her closest friends had gotten married and was having children. A woman of her times, she knew that she was in danger of being left on the shelf. Even the triumph of her Oscar win had been tempered by the knowledge that her time was running out. The night of the Academy Awards, Grace arrived back at her suite at the Bel-Air Hotel and lay down on her bed, her golden statuette beside her.

“There we were,” she later recalled, “just the two of us. It was terrible. It was the loneliest moment of my life.”

*   *   *

IT WAS A few days after Christmas 1955, the same year as Grace’s Oscar win, when the telephone rang at Carolyn’s Manhattan House apartment.

“I have something to tell you,” Grace said. “Meet me tomorrow.”

Carolyn could tell right away that something had happened. Grace sounded jubilant and Carolyn immediately assumed that she had met someone. But nothing could have prepared Carolyn for what Grace told her the next day over lunch at her apartment on Fifth Avenue.

“I’m marrying Prince Rainier!” Grace blurted.

Carolyn had had no idea that her friend even had a new love interest; Grace had kept the entire romance a secret, even from her closest friends.

Now Grace told Carolyn the full story. She had met the prince earlier in the year, while she was in Europe at the Cannes festival. Paris Match magazine had arranged a photo shoot with Rainier at his palace in Monaco, just along the coast. That day, the prince gave Grace a tour of the palace gardens. The two exchanged pleasantries, photographs were taken, and then Grace returned to Cannes and the prince to his duties. But the visit had marked the beginning of a secret correspondence between them that would last for the rest of the year. Grace returned to New York and went on with her life, preparing for her upcoming roles and publicizing those films she had already made. Each day, however, she checked the mailbox at her apartment on Fifth Avenue, to see if one of the prince’s letters might be waiting, unmistakably stamped with the official red-and-gold seal of the House of Monaco.

As they wrote, Grace and her prince revealed more and more about each other, until it became clear they were in love. Although they had met in person on only a single occasion, Grace took Rainier to meet her parents in Philadelphia for Christmas. Here Rainier asked Jack Kelly for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Jack gave his consent. At last, Grace had found a man her parents couldn’t reject.

If the engagement seemed at all hurried or impulsive, Carolyn felt she wasn’t one to judge. She had met and married Malcolm within six months of their first date; she understood Grace’s