Grace Kelly: Born to Be Aphrodite [by Stephanie Brown]

              Born on this day in 1929, Grace Patricia Kelly, iconic American star and Princess of Monaco, remains the ne plus ultra of the beautiful woman, exuding an effortless femininity, grace, charm, and self-confidence.  With her regal mien, she became a princess in real life by marrying Prince Rainer of the Principality of Monaco in 1956.  Her stuff-of-fantasy royal wedding foreshadowed Diana Spencer’s thirty years later.

             She exited Hollywood sans scandal, married well, and seemed to make no backward glances to that career or toward her ambitious lower-upper class Irish-Norwegian-American Catholic family from Philadelphia. She devoted herself to her life in Monaco as princess, mother of three children, charity maven, and fixture in the pages of Paris Match, until her violent death in an automobile accident at age 52. 

Princess Grace left Hollywood on a high note, getting out before she had a chance to see her career falter, avoiding the clichés of grim determination seen in steely stars like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, the boring domesticity of other fifties stars such as June Allyson, or the tragic fate of a love goddess like Marilyn Monroe.  While Kelly won an Oscar for her portrayal as the wife in The Country Girl in 1954 (a controversial choice as she was up against Judy Garland for A Star is Born), her star rose higher in retrospect in tandem with Alfred Hitchcock’s.  She appeared in three of his films: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief in 1955. 

Kelly ispresumed to have been Hitch's favorite actress, the archetypal “cool blonde” of his obsession. Donald Spotto (The Dark Side of Genius) reads Vertigo as a key to both Hitchcock’s personality and his obsession with Kelly; the actresses that he employed after her, such as Kim Novak in Vertigo, were rebound-romances for Hitchcock — he replaced her with lookalikes in an attempt to replace his beloved.

Hitchcock’s genius was to reveal the shadows in the iconic images of Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Grace Kelly. (She and Grant are a match of amoral schemers in To Catch a Thief.)  Often noted is his reveal of Grace Kelly’s sexuality from under the surface of her cool, proper, glamorous, and even slightly forbidding exterior in both Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.  Yet, as noted in many Hollywood tell-all books (such as Oleg Cassini’s), Kelly was noted for being a very sexual woman, reportedly having affairs with William Holden, Oleg Cassini, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and others. 

As I recall from reading James Spada’s Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess many years ago, most of Grace Kelly's affairs were intense and often doomed for one reason or another.  Moreover, they played out as behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories; her sexual reputation was known to some in Hollywood but not to the general public. She hid in plain sight and was therefore able to meet Hollywood’s requirements of its stars—to be visible, beautiful, remote, untarnished.  These, too, were the requirements of her life in Monaco. 

With her sun sign in Scorpio, the predominant themes of her life are sex, death, and secrets, and her cool-exterior-with-sexual-undertones typifies a Scorpio personality. She has the ability to perform flawlessly as a public figure, subsuming her ego to serve her obligations to others. Her sexuality is tangible, yet discreet. Her tragic death in a car crash on the Esterel colors everything until the next time you see her in High Society cavorting with Crosby and Sinatra or in High Noon, where she is betrothd to Gary Cooper.

Kelly may have looked like a blond goddess but her personality roiled with emotions.  Kelly’s moon is in Pisces, a sign often associated with actors and other performers.  Their access to deep human emotions, intuitive natures, and essential guilelessness make Pisceans attractive to others.  The Piscean nature can also be self-destructive, with forays into addiction and other acts of emotional suffering.  Scorpion secrecy and discretion can also manifest itself as duplicity, cunning, and even con artistry; her Pisces moon would have tempered this quality while its tendency to self-destruction would have been bolstered by the Scorpion ability to look after herself. She could make shrewd decisions in her own best interest -- her decision to leave Hollywood while on top is an example. 

At her best, the theatrical, open, kind Pisces side would have been her visible face (the ascendant being the outward side of a person) with her complex Scorpio nature a facet of her personality revealed as one got to know her. With many planets in Scorpio, these characteristics would have been very prominent. With Mercury in Scorpio, her thoughts, opinions, and communications with others would have been intense, emotional, and passionate, though perhaps not easily shared. With Mars in Scorpio, her ambition and energy would also have been led by her emotions—in other words, she was not really a person of cool detachment, which is probably why she was so captivating to Hitchcock—but she kept her plans to herself.  She probably surprised people with her decisions because she would not have revealed the motivations behind them; as I recall, people were shocked by her decision to leave Hollywood and marry Prince Rainier. 

With a grand trine of water signs -- Cancer in her ninth house of higher thought, Pisces in her fifth house of creation and pleasure, and Scorpio in her first house of self -- Grace Kelly's thoughts, feelings, creative life and family life were successfully guided by the hand of deep, instinctual, complex, and compassionate feelings.  With Saturn in Sagittarius, her work and obligations in life would have been primarily made up of light pleasures, socializing, and fun, though they would have sometimes felt like burdens to her. Her Saturn indicates serious work and discipline.  Her midheaven in Leo assured her of self-confidence and a healthy ego; she liked to be admired.

However, the key to her captivating presence—she was not merely beautiful but moved, spoke, and smiled with élan and power— is indicated by the placement of Venus in Libra in her twelfth house of her fate and powerful unconscious forces.  This is an archetypal placement with the feminine planet in the sign of beauty, balance, charm, romance, marriage, negotiation, and whimsy, and adds the dimension of an eternal, fated quality of her beauty as well as to her marriage.  She not only possessed these qualities, she is the virtual definition of them:  her name, Princess Grace, is as much a description of a feminine quality as a real name. Her marriage was seen as a fairy tale ending for the life of a fairy tale princess. Her years living with protocol and obligations in a castle, high on a rock in Monaco, recall classic fairy tales of feminine fate.  As the twelfth house also rules confinement in hospitals, monasteries, institutions, jails, and any other place of confinement, it may be that her fairy tale life had some less happy elements to it—like the princesses who spin straw into gold in a castle’s locked room. Or perhaps she felt loved, safe and protected in this masculine enclosure.  The twelfth house is the place of “self-undoing” so there may have been self-created problems surrounding the obligations of her femininity.  

 It is often speculated that Rainier and Grace made a marriage of convenience; he needed an heir for his principality and she made a practical decision to marry because it was time to do so. Over the years, rumors of infidelity, loucheness, and superficiality were heard about them; they lived in a kingdom famous for its gambling, after all. It is now a cliché that a fairy tale marriage is anything but; however, I shall never forget the sight of her husband’s unabashed weeping and sorrowful face after her death.  As someone fated to exemplify beauty, and to serve as a symbol of love and marriage, this would have been her life’s most important role — more important than any role in Hollywood could have been — as well as her most important role as a public figure.  She served as an icon of marriage in a scarred, post-World War II marriage-minded world. The world accepted her gift of ceremony, elegance, and style, and hoped to hold onto some of its fleeting feminine magic, while she went to live in a pink castle by the sea.

-- Stephanie Brown

 

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Grace Kelly - so beautiful. Thanks for this post.

[clementmunns.wordpress.com]

It should be noted she was born soon after the crash
of 1929; a perfect silent generation type (Bob Dylan,
Ken Kesey, Kerouac, etc.)...she informed the Boomer
generation in a way that cannot be overstated.