From Publishers Weekly
Proper, demure and wholesomely beautiful, Grace Kelly was quite the opposite of what she seemed, according to this seductive biography. Lacey (The Kingdom) writes of "the eruptions of sexuality that she usually managed to conceal behind her virginal exterior." The book is likely to be much discussed, less for the story of Kelly's family background, film career and marriage to Monaco's Prince Rainier than for its startling details of sexual promiscuity before and after her marriage. Lacey captures the pageantry of the 1956 marriage, then focuses on the somewhat sleazy reality behind Monaco's charming facade and its easily bored, practical-joking ruler. The author's description of Princess Grace's passivity before her unappreciative husband and spoiled daughters will also surprise readers. "When fairy tales do not finish happily," he writes, "their ending often tends to be cruel." In his examination of the road accident that led to the princess's death in 1982 at age 51, he turns up some unpleasant possibilities. Photos. 100,000 first printing; major ad/promo; first serial to Vanity Fair; Literary Guild main selection.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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A very respectable, responsible biography of Grace Kelly by an equally honorable British biographer, author of, most notably,
Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor (1977) and
Ford: The Men and the Machine (1987). Kelly was a living legend, but Lacey makes her real without really diminishing her effect and effectiveness. The facts have been presented many times before, including those about her childhood in a very competitive family from suburban Philadelphia, her early entry into acting, her relatively fluid transition into television and movies, her immediate stardom, and of course, her headline-making marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. But Lacey does far more than recite known facts. He digs deeper, and his picture is one far more realistic than the impossibly wholesome depiction that Hollywood and the princely court of Monaco wanted us to accept. As an actress, Kelly "conducted her private life with extraordinary recklessness." Her marriage to the prince was far from idyllic (and her original reasons for marrying him were fairly complicated). She was a distinguished individual who contributed not only to the history of cinema, but also to the fortunes of tiny Monaco; however, she was no fairy-tale princess--thank goodness!
Brad Hooper
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