The Girl in White Gloves Read online

  TITLES BY KERRI MAHER

  The Kennedy Debutante

  The Girl in White Gloves

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Kerri Maher

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Maher, Kerri, author.

  Title: The girl in white gloves: a novel of Grace Kelly / Kerri Maher.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019030409 (print) | LCCN 2019030410 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451492074 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451492098 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Grace, Princess of Monaco, 1929-1982—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A349295 G57 2020 (print) | LCC PS3613.A349295 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030409

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030410

  First Edition: February 2020

  Jacket art: photo of woman by colaimages/Alamy Stock Photo; balcony by Michael Trevillion/Trevillion Images; seashore by Cultura Exclusive/Russ Rohde/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Vikki Chu

  This is a work of fiction. Apart from the well-known historical figures and actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all other characters are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are not intended to change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

  btb_ppg_c0_r1

  This one’s for you, Dad—for always believing.

  Contents

  Titles by Kerri Maher

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  Fairy tales tell imaginary stories. Me, I’m a living person. I exist. If the story of my life as a real woman were to be told one day, people would at last discover the real being that I am.

  —GRACE DE MONACO

  If Gracie can marry a Prince, every American girl can. . . . I am sure we will truthfully say some day—“and they were married and lived happily ever after.”

  —MARGARET MAJER KELLY

  Prologue

  MARCH 1955

  Remind me again why we’re here?” Peggy asked Grace, shielding her pale eyes with her hand flat like a table over her sunglasses. Though it was only spring, the sun in Jamaica was already intense, more like the iris-searing heat that beat down on the Hollywood hills in July.

  “Sister, darling, we’re in paradise. It seems pointless to ask why. Just enjoy,” Grace laughed, and picked up the creamy white telephone to call for a pitcher of pineapple juice. She’d been about to ask for daiquiris made with the local rum, but then remembered that Peggy had been talking lately about wanting to dry out a bit, and Grace herself had to keep in mind the arrival of Howell Conant and his cameras later in the day, and of the Oscars later in the month. It was impossible she’d actually win, of course, not when it was so clear to everyone that Judy Garland would take home the coveted statue for A Star Is Born.

  But the nomination was quite a compliment, and one that Dore Schary, head of MGM, couldn’t ignore for long—even if The Country Girl hadn’t come out of his studio or fulfilled part of her precious contract with him. If he wanted her in his stable, Schary would have to make a few sacrifices. Even he had to see she’d lose all her star power if he kept putting her in rubbish like Green Fire just because it was an MGM film. By the same token, if Oleg Cassini wanted to be with her, wanted to spend his life with her as he claimed, he’d have to curb that intolerable jealous streak of his. She’d worked far too hard to take any of that lying down. This was her life, and her career. She needed to make Schary and Oleg see she was to be taken seriously. After seven years of standing before the camera’s eye, she knew a thing or two about its power, and Howell Conant was the perfect instrument with which to wield it.

  Peggy padded into their cabana, leaving Grace alone on the stone patio that opened onto the expansive white beach—sand for miles that curved around the gently lapping blue water in an embrace. She could feel the grit of the sand beneath her bare feet, and she wiggled her unvarnished toes. Hands on her hips, she squinted out into the white noonday light and inhaled deeply, feeling her shoulders rise effortlessly as her lungs filled with hot, salty air. This was what freedom felt like.

  A memory of walking the Ocean City boardwalk floated to her mind—the sand between her toes, the rush of the Atlantic on the beach, seagulls squawking overhead. She’d felt free there, too, in that narrow New Jersey town where her family had spent every summer of her life. As long as she was outside, supposedly exerting herself on bicycles or in the surf, not inside the cool stucco walls of their Spanish-style house staging one of her plays with dolls or reading a novel, her parents left her alone. Unattended, she spent long hours playing mermaids and pirates with other like-minded children, and as she got older, she learned to stuff a book under the towel in her bag, then pedal far enough down Bay Avenue that her siblings wouldn’t spy on her so she could read in peace under an umbrella.

  This beach holiday, though, was entirely her own. No one to fool, and no one to please but herself. She had every intention of enjoying it with her older sister, who could use a break. Clappi
ng her hands and shouting, “Peggy! Let’s have a swim in that divine water!” Grace headed into the cabana.

  It was a marvelous week. The waves were warm, the local people friendlier than anyone she’d met in Los Angeles or New York in an absolute age, and everywhere she looked there were sprays of tropical flowers in all shades of orange, red, and pink. Heaping piles of fruit abounded. At every market, she ate a mango or an orange on a stick, each peeled and cut to perfection.

  Even Peggy, who’d been increasingly depressed back at home, was having a ball. Grace was happy to see that her sister didn’t even bother ordering a beer or a glass of rum at their favorite restaurant, the one that served the astonishing jerk chicken dish they couldn’t get enough of. It was something of a dive, little more than a dirt floor with plastic tables and chairs under banana leaves woven into a tight fabric, but Howell convinced them to try it. “A journalist friend of mine said it’s the best on the island,” he’d promised. Grace was rather proud of herself for giving it a go the first time, and wrote a letter to Hitch the following morning laughing about how her prim character from Rear Window, Lisa Fremont, could certainly tend to globe-trotting photographer Jeff Jefferies as he took pictures around the world if Grace and Margaret Kelly of Philadelphia could eat spicy chicken with their fingers in Jamaica.

  Howell captured it all—swimming, lazing, eating, laughing, the water a constant rippling backdrop. “The real Grace Kelly,” he kept saying, shaking his head in appreciative disbelief. “At home in her own skin. No one’s ever seen a star this genuine before, this honest.” She couldn’t wait to see the shots when he developed them.

  Close to the end of the week, she was sitting with Howell and Peggy on the patio at sunset, having just enjoyed a meal of perfectly grilled hamburgers, which were still her favorite, no matter how delicious any other dish might be.

  “I want to thank you,” said Howell, raising his cup of rum to her glass of water. “I thought it was something of a risk, having me do this shoot with you on vacation. Never been done before. But when people see these shots, I have a feeling it’ll be the start of a trend.”

  “I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone,” Grace said. She felt full and content, languid in the damp night air that made her hair stick to the back of her neck.

  “What two birds are those?” Peggy asked, seeming to suddenly remember the question she’d asked at the start of the week, then promptly forgotten in the lull of island life. Remind me again why we’re here?

  “Well, relaxing and getting away from the Hollywood scene,” Grace replied, “and also giving Howell here the cover for Collier’s he’s been asking for. I just didn’t know when else I’d fit it in, and look how well it’s turned out having you here with us. We’d never have eaten that chicken without you—”

  “Or found that amazing beach on the other side of the island,” Peggy agreed.

  “And if we teach Schary a thing or two in the process, all the better,” said Howell, with a knowingly raised eyebrow.

  “Now, Howell, you think me so Machiavellian?” Grace asked, innocently tilting her head as she’d done so successfully before so many cameras. Ingénue. How she detested that word, which had come to be synonymous with her name. But at least she’d learned how to use that girl’s manner to her advantage.

  Howell laughed and knocked back the rest of his rum. “Oh, Grace, woe betide the man you marry. He won’t stand a chance.”

  “Don’t you worry about her husband, Howell,” said Peggy sleepily. “The Kelly women have always been pliable where the men are concerned. Daddy made sure of that.” Grace winced inside. Jack Kelly was the last man she wanted to be reminded of at that moment. He wouldn’t be impressed by this photo shoot; he wasn’t impressed by anything.

  She didn’t sleep well that night, and when Howell photographed her swimming the next day, she felt off, her arms and legs gelatinous. So much of the strength she’d been feeling throughout the week seemed to have drained out of her.

  As she lifted her head out of the water, Howell knelt in the waves and tilted his whole body left, his face hidden behind his thirty-five-millimeter. He said, “You look gorgeous, Grace. And you’re smarter and more talented than anyone gives you credit for. Think of the look on Schary’s face when he sees you win that Oscar.” And just for the smallest of moments, the time it took for his camera to open and close its aperture, she curled her lip in the faintest of smiles and believed the impossible was hers.

  Chapter 1

  1969

  Forty. She’d never felt tempted to run and hide on a birthday until this one. It was still months away, and Rainier and the children and the staff of the palace wanted to know how Her Serene Highness would like to celebrate.

  “I wouldn’t,” she told Rainier in the chauffeured black Mercedes on the way to another official dinner. Small enclosed spaces, shuttling between events—these seemed to be the only circumstances under which they saw each other these days.

  “Come now, Grace, that’s not like you,” said Rainier, putting his hand on hers. She withdrew it and set it on her lap, which was cocooned in peach silk shantung. The dress would be featured in all the columns the next morning—columns that would focus on the fine stitching and embroidery of her ensemble and say little or nothing about the books she’d read to sick children at the hospital that morning, or the many hours she was spending on the upcoming Red Cross Gala, practicing the art of tedious diplomacy to ensure no donor’s toes were stepped on, and everyone important was appropriately flattered.

  “Forgive me, Rainier,” Grace said, employing her most dulcet tones. “I’m just . . . not myself, I suppose.” Vagueness was her best strategy with her husband. He wasn’t interested in depth of feeling or her thoughts. For so long, this had eaten at her, this sense that he misunderstood her and wasn’t even interested in understanding her. Recently, though, she’d come to realize how much easier his limitations made her life in Monaco. If he didn’t ask, she didn’t have to explain herself; that way, she could preserve her strength for the times when they did disagree.

  “Could you try to be back to yourself by November the twelfth?” he asked. “Because our subjects would very much like to pay tribute to their Princess on her special day. I fear they won’t understand if there is no celebration.” His tone was patient enough, but she knew it would not be in another week if she didn’t relent. For now he knitted together his dark brows and pursed his full lips in a pouty smile meant to suggest that of course he knew why she was feeling impatient with having to share a private moment with a principality, but they both knew what was best, what must be done.

  Still, Grace felt the irony of her own birthday so strongly: if Rainier made too big a fuss, she would be perceived as self-aggrandizing and even less recognized for her hard work in the principality. A veritable Marie Antoinette with an Hermès bag and diamond tiara. But if she were to do nothing for her birthday, and simply go out for burgers with her family dressed in her favorite jeans and sweater, which her old friend and favorite costume stylist, Edith Head, referred to as dumpy Debbies, she wouldn’t be doing credit to her chic principality—the subjects of which expected her to look like a fashion plate at all times.

  She found it amazing and depressing that after thirteen years of marriage and sovereignty she was still dealing with this catch-22. Just last week, she had gone to the hospital, which she’d renovated and modernized with the same care and attention most women applied to the building of their own homes, transforming Monaco’s medical establishment from ill equipped to enviably advanced. Knowing she’d be photographed as she visited patients on the cancer ward, she had dressed in a tidy summer skirt suit, along with her chambray Keds—her “ugly” sneakers as twelve-year-old but still fashion-conscious Caroline insisted on calling them. She asked the photographers not to capture her feet, explaining that she’d worn the sneakers instead of heels so that she could visit as many patie
nts as possible without landing herself in the orthopedic ward!

  She’d thought the joke would lighten the mood, but she noticed several attending nurses frowning, and one shaking her head so that Grace could see her disapproval. That nurse had been very old, the lines from many summers spent on the beach carving deep grooves into her tanned face. Grace stifled a sigh at this common and often conflicted reaction to her presence—reverence for her motherhood but judgment of her educational choices; gratitude for her charity but resentment of her wardrobe; and most of all, pleasure in her beauty but animosity that it hailed from a country across the ocean, a nation they resented as imperial and in cahoots with France, which sought to keep Monaco under its thumb.

  The mixed reactions these days were, she supposed, better than the outright hostility that Rainier had sensed early in their marriage, and used as a reason to ban all her movies in the principality. But Grace despaired that the Monégasques would ever truly embrace her as one of them, no matter what she did as their Princess; they had proved much tougher to impress than the moviegoers she’d longed to captivate as an actress.

  But then one of the youngest nurses, who spoke French with a strong accent, chuckled and pointed to her own large white shoes, saying, “You’re not alone, Serene Highness.”

  Grace replied with as warm a smile as she could conjure, and said, “Thank you for understanding.” Perhaps this younger generation would be the one to make her feel at home.

  “Do what you think is best, Rainier,” said Grace with a light sigh, knowing it was pointless to delay her acquiescence. Something else she’d learned: give in when she could, and as soon as possible. Doing so made everything move more smoothly, made for fewer uncomfortable discussions. “I’m sure that between them, Marta and Meredith,” she said, referring to both their secretaries, “will throw a lovely party.”

  “Is there anything special you’d like?” he asked, approval making his voice warm and suggestive. She recoiled inside—it was a good thing he’d be too exhausted for anything more than sleep after this dinner.