The official engagement announcement appeared in the newspapers on January 5, 1956, and a lavish engagement party was held at the Waldorf Astoria later in the month. From the moment of the announcement, the American press wouldn’t leave Grace alone. She could no longer walk out of her apartment building without being mobbed by the crowds of photographers and reporters waiting outside. Every newspaper and magazine in the country ran daily updates about Grace, Hollywood’s princess, and her wedding plans. Cary Grant had given her a little black poodle, Oliver, as an engagement gift, but as she couldn’t walk the dog for fear of being hounded by reporters, Grace loaned him to Carolyn’s daughters, Jill and Robin—now four and two. Each morning, the girls went out, in their matching navy-blue coats with silver buttons, to walk Oliver in Central Park with their nanny.
Before the end of January, Grace called Carolyn again, this time from Los Angeles, where she was shooting High Society, her final film before the wedding. She had more news. She wanted Carolyn to serve as one of her bridesmaids. Carolyn hadn’t wanted to assume that Grace would even be able to invite her to the wedding, let alone include her in the party, but on February 20, when the official announcement of the bridesmaids’ names was released to the press, Carolyn’s name was among them. Grace’s sister and four other friends, including Sally Parrish—now married and called Richardson—would make up the rest of the wedding party.
From the moment of the bridesmaids’ announcement in February until early April, when it was time to leave for Monaco, Carolyn was so busy preparing for Grace’s wedding that she barely had time for a single modeling job. There were multiple dress fittings for the bridesmaids’ gowns, and hats and gloves to collect, wedding and shower gifts to buy, and press interviews and photo shoots to attend.
Then there was the bridal shower to arrange, a task that fell to Carolyn and Sally Richardson. The date for the shower was set for the last weekend in March, just a few days before Grace’s departure for Monaco. The Saturday of the party, Grace arrived at Sally’s apartment on the Upper East Side swathed in a giant mink coat, wearing a pink pillbox hat decorated with drooping pink silk roses. Photographers were waiting, and Grace duly turned to the cameras, waved, and smiled before entering the building. The fifteen guests that afternoon included Grace’s mother, her sisters, and her sister-in-law, as well as her bridesmaids and Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville. Carolyn and Sally served champagne and slices of a cake decorated with tiny umbrellas. Later, Grace opened her gifts, which were piled below a large parasol that Sally and Carolyn had pinned with fresh flowers. Inside the boxes—with their elaborate wrappings and ribbons—were fine French lingerie sets, a pair of the softest white kid gloves, a large beach hat for afternoons on the French Riviera, white leather address books, a fancy belt, and a jeweled box for keeping tissues inside. Hitchcock himself had jokingly sent Grace the gift of a floral shower cap. “Something for your shower,” he wrote on the gift tag.
Later that week, Carolyn visited Grace at the apartment on Fifth Avenue, where she was preparing to leave for Monaco. Strewn all around were clothes, shoes, purses, hats and gloves, books and letters, her Oscar statuette, seven years’ worth of accumulated possessions. Carolyn did her best to persuade Grace that now that she was going to be a princess, she probably wouldn’t need her sensible schoolmarm shoes and tweed skirts from her Barbizon days. But Grace was sentimental about clothing. Even if she was going to start a new life in Monaco, she wanted to keep something of the girl she’d been, a reminder of the past, to take with her into her glowing future.
It was all happening at whirlwind speed. The following week, barely three months after her engagement, Grace left on the ship the SS Constitution, bound for Monaco and her prince. Carolyn would join her in Monte Carlo via airplane a week later, Malcolm at her side, the bridesmaid’s dress wrapped in layers of tissue paper in her luggage. More than anything Carolyn had wanted to go with Grace on the ship, but Malcolm had put his foot down. Between his job, their two children, and the cost, they couldn’t afford to be gone that long. Instead, he arranged for Carolyn to be interviewed about the wedding after she returned from Monaco on NBC’s Home TV show. In return NBC would pay for the airplane tickets. Fearfully, Carolyn had asked Grace if she minded. Now more than ever, Grace was nervous about her privacy and anxious about any betrayal on the part of her friends. Begrudgingly, Grace agreed to the interview, as long as Carolyn didn’t wear her bridesmaid’s dress. But Carolyn was still terrified that Malcolm had put her in a situation where she had displeased her friend.
Sally Richardson and her husband, John, were also flying to France, and so the two couples flew together, with a connecting flight from Amsterdam. They arrived a little less than a week before the wedding. From the airport, they took the coastal road to Monaco, climbing through the steep and narrow streets of the town, stores shuttered in the afternoon sun, every building festooned with red and white banners emblazoned with the initials R and G—for Rainier and Grace. Then the car turned into Casino Square, where crowds of gray-hatted reporters and photographers were waiting.
Carolyn had been to Europe only once, for a photoshoot for Mademoiselle in Paris, but even so, she had never seen anything quite as glamorous as Casino Square, its matching